Strata Answers

082

Answer: At least five days

The Bible tells us very little about Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem just before Jesus’ birth. The only account comes from the Gospel of Luke: “All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child” (Luke 2:3–5). We hear nothing of the path they took or the duration of their trip.

By examining ancient roads and travel habits, however, scholars have narrowed it down to two possible routes. From the Galilean village of Nazareth in the north, Mary and Joseph could have gone directly south through Samaria into Judea, past Jerusalem to Bethlehem. This is the more direct route, but the hilly terrain makes for a very difficult journey, and they may have avoided Samaria because of the bad relations between the Jews and the Samaritans at that time. The other possible route—and the one that seems more likely—would have taken them southeast from Nazareth to the Jordan Valley, then south to Jericho before turning west into the Judean hills toward Bethlehem.

Both of the above routes are approximately 100 miles. Assuming a normal walking pace of 3 miles per hour, a person (or a donkey) can cover about 17 to 20 miles a day. Of course we can’t know for sure how long the trip actually took; they may have stopped along the way to visit relatives or perhaps for the pregnant Mary to rest.^a But under normal circumstances, a person could probably complete the journey in five or six days.

To be sure, Mary and Joseph’s journey from Nazareth was long and dangerous. Today the trip is still a difficult one, albeit for very different reasons, but it can be accomplished in the matter of a few hours by car.

Answer: D. Bone box, or ossuary

In 1958 a rock-cut burial cave was discovered in Azor, south of Tel Aviv. From it, archaeologists recovered about 120 Chalcolithic ossuaries dating to the second half of the fourth millennium B.C.E.

The discovery of similar collections of ossuaries indicate that the practice of secondary burial—collecting the bones of the deceased into an ossuary after the flesh had decomposed—was relatively short-lived but fairly widespread in the Chalcolithic period, with the highest concentration of examples coming from the coastal plain of Israel. Only much later—in the Herodian period—did Jews once again adopt the practice of secondary burial.

The imagery and iconography of the Chalcolithic ossuaries—most of which are made of pottery—are not well understood, but they have many recurring features. Most are rectangular, or “house”-shaped, while a few are zoomorphic forms or round jar-shaped containers. Although no two are identical, many of the ossuaries were painted with floral or geometric patterns, have a rectangular window cut into the façade, and include a prominent nose, and sometimes eyes, on the front.

On this example from Azor, the stylized nose is located at the very top center of the façade. It also features three pairs of knobs, two tall columns, as well as some kind of tool-like object at upper left.