Ancient History of Bethlehem

 Nadene Goldfoot                                          

The land of Canaan that Abraham and Sarah moved to was today's Syria in the 15th to 13th centuries BCE. Before the Exodus of the Israelites with Moses, Canaan was divided into small city-states. Each city had its own king.  They were not a united people but fought each other a great deal.   The Israelites called the land, Eretz Yisrael, The Land of Israel.  They called the northern part, Aram which we call Syria.  

Abraham and Sarah had come from Ur of the Chaldees, a large city on the Euphrates River that was far eastward.  They had gone West, following the sun. It was a long trek to a land devoid of any large city like what they had left, or Babylon, that was even larger.    

When the land of Canaan came to be called Palestine after 135 CE, Canaan meant the land along the coast.  

The Canaanites, inhabitants of the land of Canaan, traditionally descended  from Canaan, son of Ham, one of Noah's sons.  Ham had a bad reputation of having unseemly behavior toward his father, Noah.  For that, his descendants, the Canaanites, were cursed and condemned to servitude (Gen. 9:20).  Ham was also the father of Cush (Nubia and Ethiopia, Put (Libya and Morocco), Mitzraim (Egypt), and Canaan (Syria and Palestine).  The languages of Africa South of Egypt which are related to Semitic languages are called Hamitic languages.  

The earliest known mention of Bethlehem was in the Amarna correspondence of 1350–1330 BCE when the town was inhabited by the Canaanites. The Amarna letters are an archive, written on clay tablets, primarily consisting of diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru, or neighboring kingdom leaders, during the New Kingdom, spanning a period of no more than thirty years between c. 1360–1332 BCE.

Canaanites appeared to have been a mixture of Horites, Hittites and Hebrews, dating back to the Hyksos period of the 17th century BCE.  They were almost entirely obliterated or assimilated by the Israelites of the 13th century, and also the Philistines along the coast of the 12th century, and the Arameans in the North of the 11th century.  The Canaanites remaining were subjected by David and Solomon and absorbed into the Israelite population.  Later, the name, Canaanites, was preserved only among the Sidonians and Phoenicians.                     

David had succeeded in defeating Aram (Syria), annexing large tracts of territory, including Damascus, as far as the Euphrates River, where Abraham and Sarah had come from.  

The Hebrew Bible, which says that the city of Bethlehem was built up as a fortified city by Rehoboam, son of Solomon and  his Ammonite wife, Naamah,  and King of Israel from 933 to 

917 BCE. The Bible identifies it as... the city that David was from and where he was anointed as the king of Israel. 

The important holy site of Rachel's Tomb is at the northern entrance of Bethlehem, though not freely accessible to the city's own inhabitants and in general Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank due to the Israeli West Bank barrier

This is a Jewish site as Rachel was the wife of Jacob. Rachel is one of the four matriarchs of the Jewish people.    She died in childbirth of her 2nd son, Benjamin.  Rachel was the daughter of Laban and lived at Haran in Aram-Naharaim.  Jacob wanted to marry her but was tricked into marriage with her older sister, Leah.   In return for 7 more years of service to Laban, Jacob earned the right to marry Rachel.  Her first son was Joseph who wound up in Egypt through deceit of his brothers, and held a very high office there. 

According to Gen 35:19,, Rachel died and was buried on the way to Ephrath, which is another name for Bethlehem.  From the Byzantine Period onward, her tomb was  5 miles South of Jerusalem.  An 18th century domed building stands on the traditional site where Jews used to pray, especially in the month of Elul.  Another tradition found in Sam.10:2,Jer. 31:15, places the tomb at Ramah, North of Jerusalem.  

Jacob chose to bury his wife in Bethlehem rather than at the Patriarchs Tomb in Hebron because he foresaw that his descendants would pass this site during their exile into Babylon and that Rachel would pray for their safety and ultimate return. For millennia, Jews have made pilgrimages to Rachel’s Tomb, considered the third holiest shrine in the Land of Israel. For the past 3,000 years, Jews have prayed at Rachel’s Tomb whenever the Jewish people faced sorrows due to the belief that her prayers to G-d have special powers.

Until 1948, the domed structure near Jerusalem was the only recognized Holy Place in Jewish hands to which it returned after the Six-Day War in 1967.  

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethlehem