At the head of the long line of herds and pack-animals and armed retainers walks the chief, Jacob ben-Isaac. A generation before, he had passed along this same ancient caravan route going northward; but no one would recognize that frightened, homesick fugitive in the grave, self-confident leader who travels southward to-day. For now he is Sheikh Jacob, full of years and riches and wisdom; Jacob the strong man, the successful man and, in his own rude way, the good man.
An hour’s journey beyond Jerusalem there appear shining on a hilltop to the left the white stone houses of Bethlehem, at the sight of which the tired herdsmen grow more cheerful and the slow-moving caravan quickens somewhat its pace; for close under those protecting walls the tribe of B’nai Jacob will shelter its flocks for the night, safe alike from wolves and from marauding Arab bands.
But just as they reach the spot where the road to Bethlehem branches off to the left from the main caravan route, there is a sudden change of plan. The hope of camping at the town is abandoned, and one of the low, black, goat-hair tents is hastily set up right by the roadside. Then there is an excited bustling among the household servants, and a time of anxious waiting for Sheikh Jacob, until Bilhah, the handmaid, puts into the old man’s arms his son Benjamin, his youngest boy, who is long to be the comfort of the father’s declining years.
THE TOMB OF RACHEL
In the background the town of Beit Jala
Soon, however, the cries of rejoicing are hushed. From the women’s quarters comes a loud, shrill wail of grief. And before the B’nai Jacob break camp again the leader raises a heap of stones over the grave of Rachel—his Rachel—a gray-haired woman now and bent with toil, but still to him the beautiful girl whom he loved and for whom he labored and sinned those twice seven long years in the strength of his young manhood.
Many years afterward, when Benjamin was a grown man and Jacob lay dying in the distant land of Egypt, the thoughts of the homesick old sheikh dwelt on the lonely grave by the roadside.
“I buried her there on the way to Bethlehem,” he said.
Her tombstone remains “unto this day,” the Hebrew narrator adds. Indeed, even to our own day, a spot by the Bethlehem road, about a mile from the town, is pointed out as the burial place of Rachel. Probably no site in Palestine is attested by the witness of so continuous a line of historians and travelers. For many centuries the grave was marked by a pyramid of stones. The present structure, with its white dome, is only about four hundred years old. But there it stands “unto this day,” revered by Christians, Jews and Moslems, and the wandering Arabs bring their dead to be buried in its holy shadow.
Such is the first Biblical reference to Bethlehem. A son was born there! More significant still, there was a vicarious sacrifice—a laying down of one life for another.