On 2006-09-05 13:49, Andy B wrote:
Bethlehem reflection by Nicholas Blincoe

As a child, studying O' level geography, I was given a list of every conceivable city-type: the fortress, the port, the market town and so on. I remembered the list when I first visited Bethlehem, my wife's home town.

Many of the cities of the Levant claim to be the oldest continually-settled sites in the world: among them, Jericho and Nablus in Palestine, and Beirut in Lebanon. Bethlehem is somewhere in that ballpark, between four and six thousand years old. It began as a Bronze Age settlement named after the fertility god Lacham, a kind of Middle Eastern Green Man whose garden temples served as camp-sites for visiting strangers. It is plausible to imagine the Holy Family staying in the one-time garden of Lacham on their visit to Bethlehem, just as Christ stayed in the garden of Gethsemane on his visit to Jerusalem. The site of Christ's birth, marked by a bronze star in a cave within the Church of the Nativity might once have been Lacham's garden temple.

I suggest this, not because I want to resurrect a pagan god, but because until very recently Bethlehem was a green and fertile city. When my wife was a child in the 1970s, her whole family would decamp to their orchards in the hills at harvest time, to sleep beneath their trees. This local tradition is echoed in the Jewish Festival of the Booths, when Jews are required to eat a meal beneath a canopy of leaves. Today, my wife's orchards have been stolen by Israel and nationalised by the Jewish Land Agency. The fertile hills have been built-over by the settlements of Gush Etzion and Gilo, and though the Jews who live there no doubt continue to celebrate the Festival of the Booths, the age-old traditions they mimic have been destroyed.

More: http://www.indcatholicnews.com/blincoe217.html