"Yeah, this is about what I would expect," he said to himself.
People made fun of Nazarenes, for lack of culture and rude dialect. "It's not that there is no room at the inn," he said to himself. "It's that they don't want to make room at the Inn for a Nazarene."
It's 73 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem, as the crow flies. He was no crow, nor was his wife. It was over a hundred miles to walk, and not an easy walk at that. Nathaniel of Cana was but speaking a common opinion when he said: "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"
"Nothing good every came from a census," Joseph said. Caesar wants to know how many men he can conscript for his armies, and how much he can raise in taxes.
He wasn't likely to get many jews to enlist voluntarily. They were still feeling the bur under the saddle, of having been conquered. Jews thought they should be governed by the priests at the temple, and since Caesar had put his governor in charge, the priests in charge of the temple had been replaced with priests far more willing to cooperate with Rome. It led to a dispute that would culminate in outright revolution in 70 AD.
Nazareth lies in a basin, about 1500 feet above sea level. If you climb a 500-foot hill just outside of town, you can see the snow-covered mountains of Lebanon to the north, the blue waters of the Mediterranean to the west. You could see Mount Carmel. To the south, you can see Megiddo, where the battle of Ar-Megiddo may someday be fought. To the east likes the Sea of Galilee.
That pear-shaped basin was in limestone mountains, and the town of Nazareth was built of white stone blocks, with very little growing. Thus, in the Rodney Dangerfeld of communities, Joseph had the Rodney Dangerfeld of occupations. Herod was building the city of Sepphoris at the time, and Joseph had to commute to work, on foot.
The way out of the basin was to climb those mountains, and if you were headed to Bethlehem, you climbed the stem of the pear.
Joseph saw the flocks on the mountainside, and said to himself, "That's the life." It was cold, despite being summer, from being so high up, and Joseph knew that in winter, the life of a shepherd would be unpleasant, but he looked at his hands. Nicks, cuts, cracks. His arthritis was bothering him in the cold. Wool is full of lanolin, he thought, and a shepherd's hands are soft and they don't hurt.
And shepherds have to walk, but I have to walk to Sepporis, he thought. I can't even make it home nightly. Not that it matters. His wife was pregnant, and he had nothing to do with it. "That's the definition of a lazy man," he said out loud. Mary heard him. "What was that?" she asked. "Oh, nothing," Joseph answered.
Mary knew that Joseph was skeptical. He'd come a long way down, from a respectable family in a respectable town. I suppose he imagines that he can't compete if his wife has had a god for a lover. Dare he even touch her, or would a jealous god strike him dead?
There are times in the month when a man is not permitted to hold his wife's hand. She's not even permitted to pass a basket of rolls to him at the dinner table: she has to put down the basket within his reach, first, and then he may pick it up after she has released his grasp. Later, after she has taken a ritual purification bath, it's his duty to respond to her demand for marital rights.
But Joseph was not a young man. There were no little blue pills. And a threat from God can make it difficult to respond. Joseph felt further shame.
But mostly, he felt arthritic. As difficult as climbing is, it's much more demanding on the joints to walk downhill. And as poor as he was, he had no ass to haul his burden. One doesn't begin a journey of two weeks with bare hands, and with no beast of burden... "I'm an ass," Joseph said to himself, and while he was talking about the load on his back, that wasn't all he was talking about.
Mary was in her third trimester, only the trimester is a myth. Even today, OB-GYNs talk about a standard 280-day gestation as lasting not nine calendar months, but ten lunar months. After all, the woman's reproductive cycle repeats once per lunar month - and ten months doesn't evenly divide by three.
Mary had dropped. She was constantly complaining about her lower back pain, not necessarily with words, but when she kept rubbing her back, Joseph felt like he was being criticized. Elizabeth hadn't had to make such a long trip when she was pregnant with John, six months earlier.
This whole thing was kinda hinky, anyway. How do I know that was an angel? What does an angel look like, anyway? Maybe Mary and Elizabeth are witches, and they've divined this whole thing up, giving me a hallucination.
John the Baptist had been born six months earlier. Today, they celebrate John the Baptist's birthday on September 8, but they didn't take much notice of birth dates back them. It seems like early March would be quite early for the shepherds to have their flocks out. Today, we think that John was born in mid-winter, and Jesus was born the following mid-summer. Or not. We don't really know.
Elizabeth was married to an elderly priest, Zechariah. He, too, was lacking in little blue pills. Marrying a priest would have been a good move. The temple was the largest slaughterhouse in the world, and the priests and their families ate well.
"Travel broadens one," Joseph said, and Mary nodded. That's not precisely what he was thinking, though. He was thinking that walking for two weeks gives you too much time to think, too much time to wonder about whether your wife and her cousin had hatched some sort of plot.
Women die in childbirth, Joseph knew. He'd worried about this trip. "If you think I want to climb up and down mountains with a baby in my arms, you dumb carpenter, you've another think coming," she'd said. "I'm not about to die in childbirth." Joseph worried of his wife falling, and the child dying of the injuries. He worried of his wife and child dying in childbirth. He thought of his wife dying in childbirth, leaving him with a child to raise on his own. That scared him most of all.
But they had come to lower altitudes, and the air was warmer. The wan look on Mary's face was gone, as circulation returned.
And the stable was warm. The livestock gave off body heat. An ass gave off as much heat as a 150-watt bulb, not the Joseph would have known what a light bulb was, and although an ass doesn't smell particularly good, a milk cow does. The air was moist from the livestock exhaling, and moist air is uncommon in a desert land. And then Mary's water burst, and it was coming. Joseph ran to the inn, and asked if there was a midwife nearby. There would have been. Could you send for her? I need to get back to the stable.
But there surely was no hurry. A women who's never given birth before takes her good old time delivering. She would have laid there in the straw - it's less prickly than hay - for hours, until the midwife cotched the baby.
It's a boy, the midwife would have said. Looks just like the father!
Joseph would have thought to himself, so that is what god looks like - all red and wrinkled, with a misshapen, and covered with greenish-black meconium. The midwife would have cleaned the baby up, and then wrapped him with a long cloth, wrapped snugly, so that the baby would feel the comfortable pressure that he was used to, and put the baby to Mary's breast.
"Dumb kid," Joseph would have said. "Doesn't even know to suck teat." Not a problem, the midwife would have said. It often takes 2, 3, 4 hours before the baby starts to suckle, she explained.
Days later, the wise men would arrive. "You followed a star to get here?"
One of them nodded. "And you knew this to be the place, because the star was directly overhead?" Again, the man nodded.
"I hate to point this out, since you are supposed to be wise men, but all stars rise in the east and set in the west, just like the sun. So even if you divined that this was directly under the star at some given moment, it'd be in the wrong location an hour earlier or an hour later."
The wise man nodded again. "So are you going to drawing circles, and tell me how I can get rich selling Amway to my friends and neighbors?"
But the baby had learned to suckle by this time, and the wise men thought the baby was rather attractive, and so was the mother's breast. "Looks just like the father," one of the wise men said.
"Don't give me none of that crap," Joseph replied. Poor fella, Joseph thought. There will be statues to his mother, but none of me, and the statues of Jesus will show him being tortured to death. Too bad the baby hadn't been a girl.