In the Levant / Twenty Fifth Impression

by Charles Dudley Warner

The more active mourners formed a ring in a clear spot. Some thirty women standing with their faces toward the centre, their hands on each other's shoulders, circled round with unrhythmic steps, crying and singing, and occasionally jumping up and down with all their energy, like the dancers of Horace, “striking the ground with equal feet,” coming down upon the earth with a heavy thud, at the same time slapping their faces with their hands; then circling around again with faster steps, and shriller cries, and more prolonged ululations, and anon pausing to jump and beat the ground with a violence sufficient to shatter their frames. The loose flowing robes, the clinking of the silver ornaments, the wild gleam of their eyes, the Bacchantic madness of their saltations, the shrill shrieking and wailing, conspired to give their demonstration an indescribable barbarity. This scene has recurred every Thursday for, I suppose, hundreds of years, within a mile of the birthplace of Jesus.

Bethlehem at a little distance presents an appearance that its interior does not maintain; but it is so much better than most Syrian villages of its size (it has a population of about three thousand), and is so much cleaner than Jerusalem, that we are content with its ancient though commonplace aspect. But the atmosphere of the town is thoroughly commercial, or perhaps I should say industrial; you do not find in it that rural and reposeful air which you associate with the birthplace of our Lord. The people are sharp, to a woman, and have a keen eye for the purse of the stranger. Every other house is a shop for the manufacture or sale of some of the Bethlehem specialties,—carvings in olive-wood and ivory and mother-of-pearl, crosses and crucifixes, and models of the Holy Sepulchre, and every sort of sacred trinket, and beads in endless variety; a little is done also in silver-work, especially in rings. One may chance upon a Mecca ring there; but the ring peculiar to Bethlehem is a silver wedding-ring; it is a broad and singular band of silver with pendants, and is worn upon the thumb. As soon as we come into the town, we are beset with sellers of various wares, and we never escape them except when we are in the convent.

The Latin convent opens its doors to tourists; it is a hospitable house, and the monks are very civil; they let us sit in a salle-à-manger, while waiting for dinner, that was as damp and chill as a dungeon, and they gave us a well-intended but uneatable meal, and the most peculiar wine, all at a good price. The wine, white and red, was made by the monks, they said with some pride; we tried both kinds, and I can recommend it to the American Temperance Union: if it can be introduced to the public, the public will embrace total abstinence with enthusiasm.

While we were waiting for the proper hour to visit the crypt of the Nativity, we went out upon the esplanade before the convent, and looked down into the terraced ravines which are endeared to us by so many associations. Somewhere down there is the patch of ground that the mighty man of wealth, Boaz, owned, in which sweet Ruth went gleaning in the barley-harvest. What a picture of a primitive time it is,—the noonday meal of Boaz and his handmaidens, Ruth invited to join them, and dip her morsel in the vinegar with the rest, and the hospitable Boaz handing her parched corn. We can understand why Ruth had good gleaning over this stony ground, after the rakes of the handmaidens. We know that her dress did not differ from that worn by Oriental women now; for her “veil,” which Boaz filled with six measures of barley, was the head-shawl still almost universally worn,—though not by the Bethlehemite women. Their head-dress is peculiar; there seems to be on top of the head a square frame, and over this is thrown and folded a piece of white doth. The women are thus in a manner crowned, and the dress is as becoming as the somewhat similar head-covering of the Roman peasants. We learn also in the story of Ruth that the mother-in-law in her day was as wise in the ways of men as she is now. “Sit still, my daughter,” she counselled her after she returned with the veil full of barley, “until thou know how the matter will fall, for the man will not be in rest until he have finished the thing this day.”

Down there, somewhere in that wilderness of ravines, David, the great-grandson of Ruth, kept his father's sheep before he went to the combat with Goliath. It was there—the grotto is shown a little more than a mile from this convent—that the shepherds watched their flocks by night when the angel appeared and announced the birth of the Messiah, the Son of David. We have here within the grasp of the eye almost the beginning and the end of the old dispensation, from the burial of Rachel to the birth of our Lord, from the passing of the wandering sheykh, Jacob, with his family, to the end put to the exclusive pretensions of his descendants by the coming of a Saviour to all the world.

The cave called the Grotto of the Nativity has great antiquity. The hand-book says it had this repute as early as the second century. In the year 327 the mother of Constantine built a church over it, and this basilica still stands, and is the oldest specimen of Christian architecture in existence, except perhaps the lower church of St. Clement at Rome. It is the oldest basilica above ground retaining its perfect ancient form. The main part of the church consists of a nave and four aisles, separated by four rows of Corinthian marble columns, tradition says, taken from the temple of Solomon. The walls were once adorned with mosaics, but only fragments of them remain; the roof is decayed and leaky, the pavement is broken. This part of the church is wholly neglected, because it belongs to the several sects in common, and is merely the arena for an occasional fight. The choir is separated from the nave by a wall, and is divided into two chapels, one of the Greeks, the other of the Armenians. The Grotto of the Nativity is underneath these chapels, and each sect has a separate staircase of descent to it. The Latin chapel is on the north side of this choir, and it also has a stairway to the subterranean apartments.

Making an effort to believe that the stable of the inn in which Christ was born was a small subterranean cave cut in the solid rock, we descended a winding flight of stairs from the Latin chapel, with a monk for our guide, and entered a labyrinth from which we did not emerge until we reached the place of the nativity, and ascended into the Greek chapel above it. We walked between glistening walls of rock, illuminated by oil-lamps here and there, and in our exploration of the gloomy passages and chambers, encountered shrines, pictures, and tombs of the sainted. We saw, or were told that we saw, the spot to which St. Joseph retired at the moment of the nativity, and also the place where the twenty thousand children who were murdered by the order of Herod—a ghastly subject so well improved by the painters of the Renaissance—are buried. But there was one chamber, or rather vault, that we entered with genuine emotion. This was the cell of Jerome, hermit and scholar, whose writings have gained him the title of Father of the Church.

At the close of the fourth century Bethlehem was chiefly famous as the retreat of this holy student, and the fame of his learning and sanctity drew to it from distant lands many faithful women, who renounced the world and its pleasures, and were content to sit at his feet and learn the way of life. Among those who resigned, and, for his sake and the cross, despised, the allurements and honors of the Roman world, was the devout Paula, a Roman matron who traced her origin from Agamemnon, and numbered the Scipios and Gracchi among her ancestors, while her husband, Joxotius, deduced a no less royal lineage from Æneas. Her wealth was sufficient to support the dignity of such a descent; among her possessions, an item in her rent-roll, was the city of Nicopolis, which Augustus built as a monument of the victory of Actium. By the advice and in the company of Jerome, her spiritual guide, she abandoned Rome and all her vast estates, and even her infant son, and retired to the holy village of Bethlehem. The great Jerome, who wrote her biography, and transmitted the story of her virtues to the most distant ages, bestowed upon her the singular title of the Mother-in-law of God! She was buried here, and we look upon her tomb with scarcely less interest than that of Jerome himself, who also rests in this thrice holy ground. At the beginning of the fifth century, when the Goths sacked Rome, a crowd of the noble and the rich, escaping with nothing saved from the wreck but life and honor, attracted also by the reputation of Jerome, appeared as beggars in the streets of this humble village. No doubt they thronged to the cell of the venerable father.

There is, I suppose, no doubt that this is the study in which he composed many of his more important treatises. It is a vaulted chamber, about twenty feet square by nine feet high. There is in Venice a picture of the study of Jerome, painted by Carpaccio, which represents a delightful apartment; the saint is seen in his study, in a rich négligé robe; at the side of his desk are musical instruments, music-stands, and sheets of music, as if he were accustomed to give soirées; on the chimney-piece are Greek vases and other objects of virtu, and in the middle of the room is a poodle-dog of the most worldly and useless of the canine breed. The artist should have seen the real study of the hermit,—a grim, unornamented vault, in which he passed his days in mortifications of the body, hearing always ringing in his ears, in his disordered mental and physical condition, the last trump of judgment.

We passed, groping our way along in this religious cellar, through a winding, narrow passage in the rock, some twenty-five feet long, and came into the place of places, the very Chapel of the Nativity. In this low vault, thirty-eight feet long and eleven feet wide, hewn in the rock, is an altar at one end. Before this altar—and we can see everything with distinctness, for sixteen silver lamps are burning about it—there is a marble slab in the pavement into which is let a silver star, with this sentence round it: Hic de Virgine Maria Jesus Christus natus est. The guardian of this sacred spot was a Turkish soldier, who stood there with his gun and fixed bayonet, an attitude which experience has taught him is necessary to keep the peace among the Christians who meet here. The altar is without furniture, and is draped by each sect which uses it in turn. Near by is the chapel of the “manger,” but the manger in which Christ was laid is in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.