Beit Lechem (Bethlehem)

בית לחם


Genesis 35:19 and Genesis 48:7) say that it was properly called Beit Lechem Ephratah (בית לחם אפרתה), and that Rachel died there. Translators have made much nonsense of this, claiming that Ephratah was a tribe from Beit Lechem, or that it derived from the name of the tribe of Ephrayim, but ultimately finding no explanation. In fact it is obvious. Ephrat (אפרת) is the Aramaic spelling (the prefictual Aleph - א - giving it away) of what is normally rendered in Yehudit as Perat (פרת) - the river Euphrates. As Osher (Osiris) is identified with the Nile, so is Tammuz with the Euphrates, on whose shores all the ancient Babylonian city-shrines (Erech, Ur, Bav-El etc) were built, with their accompanying ziggurats. Thus Beit Lechem Ephratah means "the house (temple/shrine) of the bread (corn-god) of the Euphrates", which is to say Tammuz - and the life-stories of the town's most famous sons, David and Jesus, bear this out to the smallest of detail, for it is really his life that they are repeating.

Judges 17:5 ff has a rather strange story about a man named Miychah and his Levite visitor named Gershom from Beit Lechem in Yehudah, which is probably the same town. Miychah had "a house of gods, an ephod" - the priestly breastplate - "graven and molten images, teraphim..." - in other words, he was a "pagan" priest; his "home" was on Mount Ephrayim, which was a "pagan" holy place. Miychah appointed Gershom as a priest at the shrine. This has obviously been much bowdlerised and little remains either of a meaningful story as it stands, or a meaningful story as it might once have been, that can now be reconstructed. Clearly Mount Ephrayim perpetuates the erroneous reading of Ephratah. His bowdlerised name - he should properly be called Mi-Cha-Yahu - מי-כ-יהו- , "who is like Yahu?", as with the prophet Miychah - gives us the goddess Yah, or possibly her later masculinisation into Yahu, with whom we are now familiar. Given the link with Rachel, do we now know what were, and what happened to, the teraphim that she stole from Lavan when she fled Padan Aram?

Continuing the tales of the corn-god, Ruth 1:1 tells us that Eli-Melech from Beit Lechem in Yehudah moved to Mo-Av with his wife Na'ami (Naomi) and two sons; one unnamed son married Rut (Ruth), the ancestress of King David through her second husband, Bo'az, who she met while gleaning in his corn-field.

Micah 5:2 (some Yehudit versions have this as 5:1) prophecies that a MOSHEL (מוֹשֵׁ֖ל), which is to say a secular ruler of Yisra-El, will come from Beit Lechem in Yehudah, a prophecy that will be fulfilled through King David. Most Christian translations render MOSHEL as "Messiah", and thereby can "confirm" the location of Jesus' birth here; though there are other texts from which they do the same

1 Samuel 16:1 ff has Yishai (Jesse), King David's father, living in Beit Lechem Ephratah. Yishai is the correct Yehudit pronunciation of Jesus.

I have glossed over the question: are there two towns named Beit Lechem, one in Yehudah and one in wherever Ephratah might have been if it was not the Euphrates? Joshua 19:15 has a Beit Lechem in the tribe of Zevulon; so is this yet a third? In a world economically dependent on the annual wheat and corn harvests, shrines to the corn-god were likely to have been erected in numerous places, so it should not surprise us to find at least three, and theoretically dozens. Amongst the northern tribes (Naphtali, Asher, Zevulun, Yisaschar) he would have been known as Adonis not Tammuz, from which the name Adonai (אדוני) = "Lord", and the pronunciation of YHVH (יהוה) as Adonai derives; elsewhere in Kena'an he would have been known as Ba'al, which also means "lord", or among the Egyptians Osher (Osiris). In Britain he became the god Bran, and his death-hymn is still sung in folk clubs, and known as "John Barleycorn".

In most of Kena'an the corn-god was known as Tammuz (the Pelishtim on the Mediterranean coast knew him as Dagon), and the hottest month of the summer, in which the corn ripened to the bright yellow of the sun, is still known as Tammuz today (click here). Tammuz was both a corn-god and the sun-god. His mother was Ishtar, his father Marduk, and Ezekiel 8:14 tells us that the women wailed for Tammuz at the north gate of the Temple in Yeru-Shala'im, not surprisingly, since King David purchased the threshing-floor of Ornah,or Araunah (i.e. the ancient shrine to the corn-god) as the site of the Temple.

Why? Because the threshing-floor was used to separate the husks from the chaff - in the Old English song John Barleycorn, the same tale is told, of how they made poor John suffer the most terrible martyrdom, tearing his body into a thousand pieces, just so the corn could be turned into bread and the fermented parts used to make good beer (an odd sideline, the tale begins with three men coming from the West, where the Gospels have them following a star in the East, which actually means they came from the West too, but that tends to go unnoticed).

Given that 1st century Jesus was clearly being worshipped as a resurrected Tammuz, it is logical that he should have been born on the threshing floor ("manger") at Beit Lechem, and killed on the hill adjacent to the threshing-floor of Araunah. Whilst the New Testament versions say he was born in a manger, other gospel accounts claim that it was either a cave or a threshing-floor in Beit Lechem. Indeed, it may well be that the original Greek term - φατνη (phatnē) -for "manger" was the nearest that language could find to render "threshing-floor", and given the ancientness of the cult (see below) a cave-temple like that at Machpelah or Adul-Am is not implausible.

The Davidic link is important, but it can only be understood through the story of Rut (Ruth), which is likewise a tale of the corn-god - though in this case heavily bowdlerised by the Rabbis. In that story, Rut is seen gleaning in the corners of the corn-field of Bo'az, who shortly afterwards becomes her husband. Bo'az, and his brother Yachin, later became the two central pillars of the Temple in Yeru-Shala'im, which is not an honour generally given to mortal men. Whether the Rut-David link is genuine or fanciful it is impossible to say. David made attempts to "marry" with every existing cult in Yisra-El, in order to establish an empire, and a claim of nativity in Beit Lechem, coupled with an ancestral link backwards to the corn-goddess, and forwards to her reborn son, may simply have been a necessary part of the kingly rites rather than a genuine family assertion.

The Rachel link is even more interesting. Quite probably the eponymous ancestress did not die there, but like Bin-Yamin's birth was transferred there to give historical validation. What is certain is that Rachel's skull was believed to be buried there - it is still visited to this day, by barren women, seeking advice on fertility. The place is officially named Tseltsach, from Tsel = "shadow", though most people know it more straightforwardly as Kever Rachel, "the Tomb of Rachel". Was the skull brought there for oracular purposes? What is Bilhah's role in all this - the term "handmaiden" does not infer some kind of Biblical au-pair, but was a very specific role within the cult? 

In the end all we can say is that the worship of the corn-and-sun god Tammuz became, and remains, rooted in the shepherdess cult of Rachel quite as much as it was in that of Rut. The name Rachel, incidentlally, means "a young ewe", and all the Ya'akov stories that relate to her are shepherd stories, as are those of David; and indeed, to some extent, those of Jesus too. The cultic centre was originally at Beit Lechem Ephratah in Yehudah, before King David sought to re-establish it in what was anyway an equivalent shrine in Yeru-Shala'im, as part of his campaign to centralise all cults upon that city - a process Shelomoh (Solomon) would continue, and which would eventually lead to monotheism itself. How Rachel and Bilhah are linked to the shrine at Charan is more fully explained in my notes to Rachel.

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