We marched for close to an hour before Publius brought our column to a halt just outside a small village. As soon as we stopped, the Romans launched into a well-drilled routine. Two lookouts scrambled up the nearest hill, about twenty yards away, where they stood with their backs to each other, each scanning a semicircle for potential threats.
Two unlucky squads — the Roman term was contuburnia, Lavon explained — remained on guard while the others dropped their heavy burdens and quickly found shade underneath nearby olive trees, though an additional group of soldiers did not begin their break until they had erected an improvised cover to shield the wounded men in the wagon from the sun.
As the soldiers rested, four servants who had accompanied them carried jugs of water and ladled refreshment out to each man before scurrying back to the center of the village to fill their containers from a crudely dug well.
Like the soldiers, Bryson and Markowitz headed for some large rocks underneath a shade tree. By contrast, Lavon and Bergfeld ran straight up a small hill to the edge of a three-foot stone wall that enclosed a flat, hard-packed surface about twenty-five feet in diameter. I decided to join them.
Sharon trained her sight on what looked like a sled leaning against the opposite side. Pieces of it were flaking away at the edges, and compounding its bedraggled appearance, dozens of rock fragments were embedded into the wood on one side. To me, it belonged either in a landfill or as decor in a cheap, all-you-can-eat steak house.
“Wow, check that out!” she said.
Lavon seemed equally excited. I followed them around the wall’s perimeter but finally had to ask.
“What’s so interesting about that piece of junk?”
The subject of their enthusiasm turned out to be a threshing floor, and what I took for a sled was actually the threshing machine. Local farmers would pile their sheaves of grain on the hard surface and hook up the sled behind a donkey or an ox, fragment side down.
Then, they’d pile stones on top of the sled for extra weight, and the animal would drag the thing back and forth, shredding the sheaves and separating the grain from the straw. The whole process sounded terribly inefficient.
“I thought they just threw it up in the air and let the wind blow away the chaff,” I said.
“That was the next step,” Bergfeld replied.
I was right about the inefficiency, though. Lavon explained that anyone who could afford to mounted iron blades on the underside of the sled. This thing was better than nothing, but just barely.
“These people are really poor,” he said.
I glanced around at the surrounding structures and could not argue. Only in the loosest definition of the term could they be called buildings. The best of them consisted of rough, unfinished stone, held together by an altogether inadequate amount of mortar. Most didn’t even have roofs. Instead, they were covered by a thick black fabric.
“It’s goat hair,” said Lavon. “It works better than you’d think. The hair expands as it gets wet, so it does a reasonably good job of keeping out the rain; and when it dries, the small open spaces allow for some air circulation.”
I mumbled something about preferring shingles, but they paid me no mind and went charging ahead. I followed along and stood behind them as they poked their noses into the next house. Inside this one, a crude, unfinished table rested in the center, while two equally rudimentary benches sat to either side. One had toppled backwards.
The occupants had mounted a rough-hewn wooden shelf on the back wall, but it held nothing; and the only other object in sight was a broken pot on the floor.
“Someone left in a hurry,” I said.
“I think they all did,” said Lavon. “They probably heard the soldiers coming and decided not to stick around. I’m sure word of the skirmish this morning has already gone ahead.”
That jolted me into glancing back toward the road. Given the side we had chosen — or rather had chosen for us — I didn’t want to be too far from the Romans if any of the village’s residents decided to come back early.
My companions, though, had other things on their minds. By the time I caught up to them at the top of the next hill, they were chattering excitedly; this time over a house on the other side — built atop what looked like a cave.
“It’s nice to know modern archaeology got something right,” said Lavon. “This is exactly what I’ve always pictured a first century Judean house looking like.”
“The family stays upstairs,” said Bergfeld. “When the weather is nice, as it often is around here, they’ll sleep under the stars on the flat roof.”
“Who lives on the lower level? Livestock?”
“Yes,” said Lavon, “along with household servants, if they have any. It’s quite a clever setup. They take full advantage of the terrain in an environment where construction lumber is prohibitively expensive.”
I glanced back around. “Clever” wasn’t the first word that occurred to me.
Taken as a whole, the ramshackle village reminded me of a more primitive version of a third world shantytown, though I suppose as in those places, these people did the best with what they had, which wasn’t much.
“Jesus would have been born in something like this,” said Lavon.
“This?” I asked.
“Not this particular town, of course, but it was this kind of house, we think. The upstairs part was full, so Mary and Joseph had to go to the lower level. It wasn’t quite as bad as the modern English version of the Christmas story makes it out to be. The mean old innkeeper wasn’t exiling them to the barn.”
“Childbirth without anesthetics — that would have been the bad part,” said Bergfeld.
I had never thought of it that way, nor had most men I was sure.
“How many people would you estimate live here?” I asked.
Lavon studied the village for a moment. “I’d guess about a hundred, more or less,” he said. “Bethlehem was probably about the same size,” he added.
“It’s an area the church’s critics get wrong,” said Bergfeld. “Some of them say that Herod’s slaughter of the infants never took place, since no source outside the Bible mentions it.”
“What they don’t understand,” said Lavon, “is that in the scheme of things in the ancient world, such an event — though tragic to the families involved — would have barely registered a blip.”
This day was turning out to be full of surprises, and we had barely begun. I had always pictured Bethlehem as a small but thriving town. Growing up, the priests had made Herod’s actions sound like the massacre of a large American grade school. I told them so.
This was not unusual.
“I grew up with the same impression,” said Lavon. “But a town of this size wouldn’t have held more than a handful of boys of the requisite age. Plus, they were peasants. No one else really cared.”
I was about to ask another question when we heard a trumpet blow, so we turned to head back. We walked toward the east, making a circle along the back side of the village.
As we neared the road, we encountered the only local residents who had remained behind. One miserable old woman kneaded dough, while her equally wretched companion placed it onto hot rocks, which she then covered with a flat clay pan.
A thin, faded tan-colored shawl covered each of their heads, while the rest of their clothing consisted of little more than rags. Neither woman even bothered to look up.
“They’re so pitiful,” said Bergfeld. “I wonder why they didn’t run like the others?”
I guessed it was because they had nothing left to lose.
Finally, one of them glanced at us, and Lavon reached under his tunic and pulled out two denarii — Roman coins worth about a day’s wage for an unskilled laborer. He tossed one to each woman.
Feeling a bit ashamed, I reached into my money pouch and did the same.
The trumpet blew again before we had time to do more, so we hustled back to the wagon. Decius watched us approach and greeted Lavon with a broad smile.
“Ah, Lavonius, you’re back,” he said. “You can tell your companions that they will no longer need to see Egypt. After such a wonder as this, they will undoubtedly find the Alexandria Lighthouse disappointing.”
The nearby Romans burst out laughing, as did we after Lavon translated. We all stood there for a minute or two while the soldiers talked amongst themselves; then Sharon interrupted with a question.
“Do you know the name of this village?”
None of them did, so Decius dispatched an Aramaic-speaking legionnaire to ask the two women. Moments later, the young man came trotting back.
“Emmaus,” he said.
Bergfeld and Lavon stared at each other for a brief instant before quickly turning away and staring at the ground.
“I’ll be damned,” I heard him mutter.
Decius eyed them curiously, as did I. I had heard the name before, but couldn’t for the life of me think of where. But that wasn’t my real concern. I could see the obvious question running through the Roman’s mind: how would travelers from the edge of the world have heard of such a pathetic little place?
I went back to the wagon to check on the wounded soldier I had treated and told Sharon to follow with some water. I made sure Decius saw it, too, better to reinforce the notion that we were useful people, worth keeping alive.