Strange Story: The Birth of Jesus Part 19 Take Flight!

That very night the wisemen were all given the same dream and “Up” was given his own angelic messenger in his own dream. In each case the message was similar, “Flee!”

The wise men were told to head home by a different route and not return to the king as he had asked them to. The urgency of the message implied that they should start out right away, which they did.

How did they get all those gifts to Egypt?

They didn’t.

The Biblical record is clear that the angel told “Up” to “flee”, meaning to get out of there as fast as he could, only taking what was necessary or easy to carry.

Fleeing as a fugitive was something they knew about from their history; it was common in ancient times.

They couldn’t leave anything with relatives in “The House of Bread” because none of their relatives wanted anything to do with them.

He couldn’t hide all that stuff in caves; there was no time for that, and the likelihood of it being found was high anyway.

Joseph did not want to attract attention to himself by having a caravan of loaded camels. Herod knew the Wisemen had come with lots of camels, so his soldiers would carefully scrutinize a caravan of camels traveling with only one man, a woman and a baby, no camel drivers, cooks or body guards. Besides that, he would not have been able to control lots of camels by himself. “Up” wanted to look like an average family traveling to “The Land that Is Bound by Sin”; he did not want to stand out. He did not have time to load all those camels anyway.

It was obvious to him that they had to abandon most of that stuff; the focus was on staying alive.

“Up” quickly considered his options for how to travel. He may have had a donkey available, he still had his hand cart, and he had some camels. By now he had sold a few of the camels because he thought he would not need all of them. The ones he kept were the most docile ones. Camels would handle the trek across the desert better than anything else. Camels can run fast but it is jarring for anyone riding the camel. When camels walk, they are not any faster than a man, so all three of these options were slow, which made him uneasy. The primary advantage of camels was that he was confident a camel or two could make the trip. “Up” decided they would take two camels, the most docile one for the three of them to ride on, and one for supplies. This would not be conspicuous. It was the most logical way to travel to Egypt, so they would not stand out.

His next set of decisions pertained to what things he should take and how much. First, he put all the food and fresh water they had available in a pile in front of the “house”. He added to the pile any necessary personal items and the essential oils that would be most helpful if they had wounds or other health problems. Taking some gold was also obvious, but how much? Traveling with lots of gold was dangerous. Having zero money was also dangerous. He brought out a few arm loads of gold and laid them on the ground outside the house next to the other stuff.

Then he put the saddles on the camels and proceeded to pack all these things on the two camels starting with the gold. The quantity of gold he took was determined by how much he could pack on the camels in ways that would be hard to find if searched, and a little more on his person to make normal transactions without diving into a special hiding place.

After he had packed their supplies on the two camels, he hurriedly untied all the other camels and chased them away so they would not be present when the Romans arrived. The last thing he did was to put out both fires, the one inside and the cooking fire outside. He did not want to leave any clues that would tell the Roman soldiers how much of a head-start he had on them.

As he was packing, “Up” was considering which route to take. A main road went from Jerusalem, through Bethlehem, and then on down to Beersheba in the Negev. From their one could go West and connect to the Via Maris, the way of the sea, which was the primary route to Egypt. His other option was to cut across open country heading West, connect with a wadi which would connect with another stream and then follow the valley of that wadi toward the Mediterranean sea, until he came to the Via Maris.

The wadi was the route he chose because it was the less-travelled route and it would get him onto the Via Maris more quickly.

Once on the Via Maris, the young couple would easily blend in with all the other people traveling that route.

From the message he received in a dream, “Up” knew that Herod would try to kill the child. But he did not know when Herod would take action; in his mind his lead on the soldiers may only be the distance they had gained during the night. He had to trust God that it would be enough or that God would protect them in some other way.

The “self-proclaimed Hero” waited for the return of the wisemen until noon, then he got anxious and sent some soldiers on fast horses to check out the situation in Bethlehem. At the caravanserai of Bethlehem, they learned that the wisemen had risen long before dawn and left in a bit of a hurry. They did not look any further but returned quickly to tell the king what they had learned. It was late afternoon when the soldiers made their way toward Bethlehem a second time.

This gave the wisemen and the young couple about 16 hours to put some distance between themselves and Bethlehem, although they did not know this.

The “Self-proclaimed Hero” decided he would not have his men pursue the wisemen. Killing them would not accomplish anything except making people in other parts of the Roman Empire very angry.

He was more interested in the child; he wanted it dead.

As they fled, the wise men to the Northeast, and the young family to the Southwest, they were unaware of the carnage that “The Self-proclaimed Hero” ordered against the small town that was usually thought of as the place where God provided for their needs. In those days the town was inhabited by about 300 people,

so the number of baby boys would not have been great. Nonetheless, the entire town felt the losses heavily. It was a heinous act. It was not only baby boys who died that day, but also those who tried to protect them. The town was ravaged, the people were enraged and broken, and the king was hated more than ever.

In the process of checking every residence for a baby boy, two years old or less, the soldiers did not ask the age of the child; they guessed. If there was any doubt in their minds, they killed it. They did not want to incur the ire of Herod by not fulfilling their orders correctly.

When some of the soldiers came to the cave-house that “Up” had built, they did not see anything out of the ordinary until they got inside. Although they found no people inside, they saw a curious collection of many articles taking up most of the available space. However, it was well organized. They talked among themselves and decided, based on the smell of camel urine outside the cave-house and the wide variety of items from foreign lands inside the “house”, that the man of the house must be a merchant who had good contacts in foreign lands, but had not been doing that kind of work long enough to become wealthy. Their conclusion was reasonable to them, so they did not tell their superiors about it and the word never got to Herod.

“Up” was told specifically to go to “The Land Bound by Sin.” One would think that God would not want his followers, much less His Son, to go to that evil place but now they were being told to go there for a time. It occurred to “Up” that upon their return from that place, the Scripture would be fulfilled that says, “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea 11:1). For some reason God wanted His son to share with mankind the experience of being surrounded by sin.

To navigate to Part 18 of this story click on The Birth of Jesus Part 18 Measured by Their Names.

Footnotes

1

The first wadi mentioned above is called Nahal Refa’im and runs between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. It feeds into Nahal Sorek which starts in Jerusalem and flows all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, crossing the Via Maris in the process.

2

No one knows which route he chose, so this is an educated guess on my part.

3

We cannot be sure that the part of the “East” that the Wisemen came from was under Roman control, but there is a relatively high probability that it was. The borders of the Roman empire continued to fluctuate, but they did control most of the area close to the Euphrates River, along which most of the population centers were located.

4

This according to Ray Vander Laan in the video series That the World May Know.

5

The Biblical text reads as though Herod assumed that his actions had eliminated the threat this child posed, so we can assume he never heard about the large collection of items from the far east that were found by the soldiers in a poor man’s “house”.