48 Fun Facts About Bethlehem

Bethlehem lies about ten kilometres south of which city?

Jerusalem is so close that the two were long treated as sister cities; today the eight-metre West Bank barrier runs between them, and Bethlehem's residents need a permit to cross.

In Hebrew, the name Bethlehem is traditionally understood to mean what?

House of bread is how the Hebrew reads, but in Arabic the same name means 'house of meat', and some scholars think it began as the house, or temple, of an older god called Lahmu.

A possible first mention of Bethlehem, as Bit-Lahmi, comes in which find of the 14th century BC?

The Amarna letters: on one clay tablet a local ruler begs Pharaoh for archers after a nearby town goes over to his enemies; some scholars read its name as Bit-Lahmi, though the reading is disputed.

According to the Hebrew Bible, which matriarch died and was buried on the road to Bethlehem?

Rachel died giving birth to Benjamin on the road, and Jacob set a pillar over her grave; the tomb shown as hers, holy to three faiths, now sits behind the West Bank barrier.

Which Israelite king grew up in Bethlehem as the youngest son of Jesse?

David was out minding the sheep when the prophet Samuel came to Bethlehem to anoint a king; Jesse paraded his older sons first, and every one was turned down.

In the Book of Ruth, whom does the Moabite Ruth marry in Bethlehem?

Boaz first noticed Ruth gathering leftover grain behind his harvesters; the son they had in Bethlehem became the grandfather of Israel's most celebrated king.

Isaiah is the prophet of the virgin birth; which prophet named Bethlehem as the Messiah's birthplace?

Micah wrote of a ruler to come from Bethlehem, 'small among the clans of Judah'; in the Gospel story the chief priests quote the line to King Herod, which is how he learns where to look.

Which two Gospels contain accounts of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem?

Matthew and Luke: the other two Gospels have no birth story at all, and Mark, the earliest of the four, introduces Jesus as a grown man arriving from Galilee.

The Bible never says how many Magi visited Bethlehem; where does the traditional three come from?

Their three gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh are all the text counts, and Syriac Christians long pictured twelve wise men instead.

Kepler tied the Star of Bethlehem to a triple conjunction in 7 BC of which two planets?

Jupiter and Saturn met three times in 7 BC, Kepler worked out in 1614; when the same pair drew closer than they had in almost 400 years, in December 2020, it was nicknamed the Christmas Star.

The bones of the Magi are traditionally said to rest in a shrine in which cathedral?

Cologne: Frederick Barbarossa took the relics from Milan in 1164 and gave them to his archbishop there, and the city planned its vast Gothic cathedral to house their golden shrine.

In the Massacre of the Innocents, Herod ordered the killing of all boys in Bethlehem up to what age?

Two years old and under: later tradition counted the victims in thousands, but Bethlehem was so small that scholars who accept the story put the toll at perhaps a dozen or two children.

After the Bar Kokhba revolt, which Roman emperor reputedly turned the Nativity grotto into a shrine to Adonis?

Hadrian: a church father living in Bethlehem some 250 years later wrote that in the cave where the infant Christ once cried, people had gone on to mourn Adonis, the lover of Venus.

Which emperor commissioned the Church of the Nativity around 327, after his mother's Holy Land pilgrimage?

Constantine the Great ordered it after his mother Helena toured the Holy Land marking the sites of Jesus's life; the basilica over the cave was dedicated in 339, by which time both of them were dead.

After the first Church of the Nativity was destroyed in the sixth century, which Byzantine emperor rebuilt it?

Justinian I replaced it with a much larger basilica, and that sixth-century building is essentially the one pilgrims still enter today, some 1,500 years on.

Legend says invading Persians spared the Church of the Nativity because of what?

A mosaic of the Magi in Persian dress: the story goes that in 614 the commander Shahrbaraz saw wise men robed like his own priests above the door and ordered the building left alone.

Which caliph promised after the 637 conquest that the Church of the Nativity would remain Christian?

Umar ibn al-Khattab is said to have prayed close by; the Mosque of Omar that recalls his promise today was built in 1860 on land donated by the Greek Orthodox Church.

Which Crusader was crowned king in Bethlehem on Christmas Day 1100?

Baldwin of Boulogne accepted the royal title his brother Godfrey had been reluctant to take the year before, and the patriarch anointed and crowned him in the Church of the Nativity.

What is the 'Door of Humility' at the Church of the Nativity?

A tiny entrance you must stoop through: the grand doorway was walled down to stop people riding or driving animals and carts into the church, so even the grandest visitor has to dismount and bow.

The star marking Jesus's birthplace in the Nativity Grotto carries an inscription in which language?

Latin: the fourteen-pointed silver star reads 'Here Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary', and as a Catholic mark in a shrine shared with the Greek Orthodox, it was prised up and stolen in 1847.

The 1847 theft of the Grotto's silver star is cited as a factor in which war?

The Crimean War: France spoke for the Catholics and Russia for the Orthodox in the quarrel over Bethlehem's shrine, and the missing star became one of the pretexts for a war between empires.

What is the 1852 arrangement governing the rival churches' rights in the Church of the Nativity called?

The Status Quo froze every right as it stood, so nothing may change unless all sides agree, and clergy in the basilica have come to blows over which stretch of floor each may clean.

In 2012 the Church of the Nativity became the first site inscribed by UNESCO under which state party?

Palestine had been admitted to UNESCO only months earlier; the church went straight onto the List of World Heritage in Danger because of its leaking roof, and came off it in 2019 after repairs.

What happened at the Church of the Nativity in April 2002?

A month-long siege by Israeli forces: gunmen and civilians sheltered inside with the resident monks for 39 days, until a deal sent thirteen of the wanted men into exile in Europe.

The Christmas story has Joseph and Mary travel to Bethlehem for a census ordered by which Roman emperor?

Augustus: the story ties the journey to a census under the governor Quirinius, which historians date to AD 6, about a decade after King Herod's death, a gap scholars still argue over.

Which scholar spent some thirty years in a cave beside the Church of the Nativity translating the Bible?

Jerome was supported there by the wealthy Roman widow Paula and was buried in the cave; his version, the Vulgate, remained the Western church's standard Bible until the Reformation.

Pilgrims take home powder scraped from the white rock of a Bethlehem grotto in the hope of what?

Conceiving a child: at the Milk Grotto, legend says, a drop of Mary's milk fell as she nursed Jesus and turned the rock white, and nursing women take the powder too, hoping for more milk of their own.

Warned in a dream that Herod meant to kill the child, Joseph fled from Bethlehem with his family to which country?

Egypt: the family stays until Herod is dead, and the Gospel presents the detour as making a line of the prophet Hosea come true: 'Out of Egypt I called my son.'

What is the name of the central plaza in front of the Church of the Nativity?

The Old City's eight quarters are laid out around it.

Bethlehem's traditional religious handicrafts are made chiefly from olive wood and what?

Mother-of-pearl carving is said to have been taught by friars from Italy in the fifteenth century; the steady stream of pilgrims wanting keepsakes turned it into a town industry.

Which poet imagined a 'rough beast' that 'slouches towards Bethlehem to be born'?

W. B. Yeats closed The Second Coming, written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War, with the image; Joan Didion borrowed it in 1968 for her essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Which English word for noisy chaos comes from a London asylum named after Bethlehem?

Bedlam was Londoners' clipped way of saying Bethlehem: the Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem began in 1247 as a priory, was housing the insane by 1402, and lent its nickname to any uproar.

Christians were about 85% of Bethlehem's people in 1948; which community is the large majority today?

Muslims: refugees from the 1948 war settled in and around the town and tipped the balance, and Christians have emigrated at a higher rate ever since.

Which country annexed Bethlehem along with the rest of the West Bank after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War?

Jordan held Bethlehem for nineteen years, and the name 'West Bank' dates from then, coined to tell the annexed land from the kingdom's territory east of the river; Israel captured the city in 1967.

Which peace agreements led Israeli troops to leave Bethlehem in December 1995?

Oslo Accords: the handover came that week, just before Christmas, so the Midnight Mass of 1995 was the first in Bethlehem since 1967 that was not held under Israeli military rule.

Which street artist financed the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem in 2017, next to the separation barrier?

Banksy opened it a century after British rule over the Holy Land began, and boasted that it had 'the worst view of any hotel in the world': the bedrooms look straight onto the concrete wall.

From which town in Galilee does the Christmas story have Joseph and Mary set out for Bethlehem?

Nazareth: the couple travel south to register in a Roman census, and after the birth and a spell abroad the family settles back in Nazareth, which is why Jesus was called the Nazarene.

What long-sought discovery did Herodium, the fortified palace-hill southeast of Bethlehem, yield in 2007?

The tomb of its royal builder: Ehud Netzer had dug at Herodium since 1972 in search of Herod the Great's grave and found it on the northern slope; three years later he died after a fall at the same site.

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was christened on Christmas Eve 1741 by a bishop of which denomination?

Moravian: Count Zinzendorf, then banished from his native Saxony, named the church's new settlement during a Christmas Eve visit, only eight months after the Moravians had been deeded the land.

Britons sing 'O Little Town of Bethlehem' to Forest Green, a folk tune collected by which composer?

Ralph Vaughan Williams took it down in 1903 from Henry Garman, a villager of Forest Green in Surrey, who sang it as a ballad called The Ploughboy's Dream.

Which saint is credited with the Christmas nativity scene tradition, staging one at Greccio in 1223?

Francis of Assisi first went to Rome to win Pope Honorius III's approval for the idea, then staged the scene at Greccio that Christmas so that villagers could see the birth for themselves.

The newborn Jesus was laid in a manger, a word often taken to mean the stable; what is a manger?

A feeding trough: the word comes from the French for 'to eat', and since the second century Christians have placed the birth, trough and all, in a cave now beneath Bethlehem's basilica.

In the Book of Ruth, which widow comes home to Bethlehem from Moab with her daughter-in-law?

Naomi had left in a famine with a husband and two sons and buried all three abroad; back home she told the women to call her Mara, 'bitter', because she went out full and came back empty.

Which British Jewish philanthropist had a biblical matriarch's tomb outside Bethlehem enlarged in 1841?

Sir Moses Montefiore obtained the keys of the shrine for the Jewish community, and in enlarging it added an antechamber with a mihrab, so that the tomb's other worshippers could pray there too.

The caliph who ordered the Nativity church demolished in 1009 destroyed which great church that year?

The Holy Sepulchre was razed on al-Hakim's orders, but in Bethlehem the decree was never carried out: townspeople of the caliph's own faith, who had a place to pray in the south transept, stood in its way.

Which church's faithful celebrate Christmas in Bethlehem last of all, on January 19?

Armenian Orthodox: the Armenians of the Holy Land keep the old Julian calendar and the ancient custom of marking Christ's birth and baptism on one day, so Bethlehem has three Christmases each winter.

Who does the Christmas story say first heard of Jesus's birth, told by an angel at night?

Shepherds: Beit Sahour, the town just east of Bethlehem, has rival Shepherds' Fields, a Greek Orthodox one and a Catholic one among them, each said to be the true spot.

How did the emperor Frederick II regain Bethlehem for the Crusaders in 1229?

By treaty: the sultan al-Kamil gave up Bethlehem and other holy places in return for a ten-year truce, and once the truce lapsed the town was soon lost again, retaken in 1244.