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Last week I gave the rundown on the political and economic situation in the 1st century BCE in Palestine. I also gave the rundown on whether the four gospels can be used as a historical source and the answer was sort of and some of the time. If you have any questions or complaints about that just listen/read to that episode because I’m not going to repeat it all today. Instead, I’m going to be telling you what we know about being a girl from Galilee, with a brief foray into the only potentially datable event in Mary’s life. I will skip over events like the Annunciation because a private, spiritual experience is difficult to handle historically, even if we had perfect sources, which we don’t.

Home Life in Ancient Palestine

The Gospels are quite clear that Mary was from Nazareth, which was a blink-and-you’ll-miss it kind of place of about 500 people. Homes in Nazareth were stone structures held together with mud mortar and coated with clay. Tile roofs were possible but expensive, so the more common option was a wood lattice with palm fronds interwoven and covered with more mud.

Life was hard and independence didn’t pay, so the home was likely built with others around a central courtyard. Mary’s extended family would have lived in those other houses. That way they could share resources and protect each other. Each house probably only had one or two rooms, but if a growing family needed more space, they could always add on a second story.

As a child, Mary would have received the education necessary for the world she lived in. That means that around age six or seven she would have learned child care by caring for any children in the compound younger than herself. She would have learned to feed and take care of the livestock, which almost certainly meant sheep and goats, if the family was lucky.

She may have risen early in the morning to walk with the other women of her household to fetch the day’s water from the well. At some point, those same women would have taught her to make the main staple of a peasant’s diet: bread. The compound’s central courtyard would have held a lidded jar to hold the grain stores, either wheat or barley. Next to the grain jar was the grain mill. Technology had progressed from the days when women knelt for hours to rub the grain kernels between stones by hand. A grain mill had two round slabs anchored with a central wooden rod with a handle. Grain could be poured in from the top, the handle turned, and flour would come out the bottom.

Once the flour was ground, Mary would have added salt, olive oil, water, a yeast to make dough. Ancient yeast was not the miracle product you buy in the stores today. Rising took a lot longer. So, the women rolled the dough into thin cakes because thin cakes rise and bake more quickly.

Morning baking meant firing up the oven in the central courtyard of the compound with kindling, branches, and dung. Yes, dung. My bread making process looks more miraculous with every passing word here.

When the bread was ready, the family could be called for daily bread before getting started on all the other work for the day.

For the men of Nazareth, that generally meant heading to the fields. And it is possible that it meant that for Mary too. Galilee had good farmland. Wheat and barley were sown in October or November. Barley could be harvested in April. Wheat was ready in May. Many farmers also grew grapes and olives and women certainly helped tend the trees and vines, propping up branches and pruning the dead wood. The vineyards would be ready to harvest in early summer.

And of course after the harvest, the fruit had to be processed: the olives squeezed for oil, the grapes fermented into wine. If they were lucky enough to have a surplus, Mary might have been sent to sell it as well.

And the work was not done there either because women had primary responsibility for clothing too. Washing, obviously. But also sewing. And they didn’t have a neighborhood fabric store. So Mary would have learned to spin wool and flax and then to weave those threads together. Mary almost certainly used a warp-weighted loom. Far from the complex and baffling piece of machinery you may have seen at 18th or 19th century living history sites, the warp weighted loom was quite simple in theory. Here’s how you do it: Find a convenient pole or horizontal tree branch. Tie a lot (and I do mean a lot) of threads onto it at even intervals. Place a second, lower down horizontal pole just a little closer to you, so that the threads are pulled slightly forward and then hang down loose over that second pole. You need them to hang straight, so you weight them down by tying a rock on the bottom of every last one of those threads. That is your warp. You create your weft by pushing other threads horizontally over, under the warp threads. Jam those weft threads tight up to the top and repeat. And repeat. And repeat again.

With such a laborious process you will not be surprised to hear that Mary’s wardrobe was probably somewhat limited. She would have had a simple shift that functioned as an underdress by day and a pajamas by night. During the day, she would have had a fringed mantle tightened around the waist and and blue. I admit that I initially thought that was my source author getting fanciful. How on earth would we know the color? But it turns out that we know it because it was Jewish law for it to be at least partially blue. In the Book of Numbers, chapter 15, verse 38 it says:

Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them throughout their generations fringes in the corners of their garments, and that they put with the fringe of each corner a thread of blue.

Biblical blue (or tekhelet) is something of a mystery in and of itself. It’s mentioned 49ish times in the Bible, and though ancient Jews wore it every day (apparently), the secret of how to make that dye was lost not long after the time period we’re talking about here, when the Romans decided to smash the Jewish state once and for all. Afterwards, Jews typically wore only a white fringe. The debate about the exact shade and source of this special blue dye continues to this day. One prime contender is the secretions of the Murex trunculus, a marine gastropod, which if we take out all the jargon means snail snot. Turns out this particular snail snot does create a nice bluish-purple dye. We even have a scrap of 2000 year old fabric made with it, which is a real find, as clothing almost never lasts so long.

As a child, Mary likely went barefoot, but as she grew older she would likely have worn sandals of palm bark and covered her head with a white cloth that doubled as sun protection and modesty.

Education for a Girl

Amid all of this learning to bake and farm and clean and weave and sew, the thing Mary probably did not learn is how to read and write. 97% of the Jewish peasantry could not. One of my sources uses this to say that the accounts of Jesus reading from the scriptures are in his words “not remotely credible” which seems to me to betray a misunderstanding of statistics. 97% illiterate means 3% were literate.  There is that small possibility that Mary fell into that group, and that it was she who taught her son (Aslan, 53). Not very likely, but 3% means it is possible.

Even if Mary or Jesus or both were illiterate, that does not mean they wouldn’t have known the scriptures. Possibly well enough to recite long passages and debate them. Societies that are primarily oral do have people with amazing memories. Most modern people haven’t honed that skill because we haven’t needed to. We can always write things down. They could not.

The scriptures were in Hebrew, but Mary’s primary language was Aramaic, which is related, but not the same. The scriptures had been translated into Aramaic, and it is likely that Mary heard both Hebrew and Aramaic when she went to synagogue, giving her at least some knowledge of both. Going to synagogue meant a variety of things. In larger towns and cities, the synagogue might be a grand structure. But Nazareth was too tiny for that. It certainly didn’t have a building called the synagogue. So going to synagogue meant gathering together outside or perhaps in a larger home for the religious services.

Mary may also have known some Greek, which was the lingua franca of the Roman world at the time. Latin was not much used in the Empire.

Engagement, Marriage, and Pregnancy

So this was the life of a girl from Galilee. And I do mean girl, not woman, because the Biblical story begins with her engagement and our estimate on Mary’s age for that is roughly 14 years old. Life was short and maximizing a woman’s childbearing years meant marriage shortly after the onset of menstruation.

It is unlikely that Mary had much choice in her engagement. Marriages were negotiated between families and meant that the families found each other worthy of trust. Not that the spouses found each other in any way attractive. To seal the deal, the bride’s family may have offered a parcel of land, and for that reason the groom was often chosen among the-extended family anyway so as to keep the land as close as possible. Families that couldn’t afford land (of which there were many), would still offer a dowry of jewelry, clothes, sheep, goats, or birds. And richer families would add gold silver, or slaves to the dowry. Mary’s family was probably not one of these.

The groom’s family was not entirely off the hook. A brideprice was offered by them, the purpose of which was to provide for the wife if the husband died. Later sources suggest that a common amount was 100 denaris. A denari was a silver coin worth a day’s wages for a serf or a soldier.

Since the current method of reckoning the years was not in place then, since the whole concept behind our reckoning system is to date it from Jesus’s birth, so you might think that this marriage was planned for the year 0. But you would be wrong multiple times over if you did.

For starters, the Gregorian calendar which we all know and maybe love doesn’t have a year 0. It goes straight from 1 BCE to 1 CE.

Secondly, that dating system was first devised in 525 CE, and there’s reason to expect that the Scythian monk who dreamed it up wasn’t exactly right about the year any of this happened.

Since nobody printed a birth certificate for Jesus, we can only use internal clues from the Gospels to date it. The Book of Matthew clearly states that Herod was king of the Jews when Jesus was born. Herod, the villain of last weeks’ episode, died in 4 BCE, so that pushes Christ’s birth back a bit.

Matthew also says that there was a star that led the three wise men to him, so many have looked into the astronomical record for an explanation of that, and there are several contenders. Unfortunately, there is no way to distinguish between them. I’ll mention only two of them here: one is that there was a supernova in 5 BCE, visible from earth and confirmed by Chinese astronomers. Another option is Halley’s comet which passed by the earth in 12 BCE. A comet would have moved, so could conceivably have indicated a direction. Either of those explanations would have been during Herod’s reign, so that checks out. Herod’s massacre of the children is not found in any record outside of the New Testament, which is somewhat concerning for a historical narrative, but the idea does fit very well with Herod’s other actions. He was increasingly paranoid in his later years and basically ran a police state.

What doesn’t fit very well is Luke’s account. Luke also mentions Herod as king. So far so good. He also says that Caesar Augustus commanded all the world to be taxed. Also all good. Like every empire in history, the Romans enjoyed taxing their conquered subjects. Luke also says that this taxing was first done when Cyrenius was governor of Syria. That’s okay too, because a certain Gaius Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, friend of Julius Caesar, supporter of Octavian who became Caesar Augustus, was appointed governor of Syria and his first action was to take a census so he would know how much tax revenue he could expect. Sounds good, except that Quirinius wasn’t appointed until 6 CE when Jesus would have been at least 10 years old if he was born during the reign of King Herod. And before you ask no, there wasn’t a king Herod the Second solve our problem. After Herod’s death, his sons fought each other and Rome refused to name any of them king.

Most scholars have chosen to accept the King Herod bit, placing Jesus’s death a few years before the turn of the millennium and making Luke simply wrong. But like everything else about Jesus’s death, you can find an alternate opinion. Or even 10, 20, or 30 alternate opinions.

So we can’t quite pin down the year for the birth of Mary’s son, but we are quite certain that the day was not Dec 25th. That day was not chosen until 336 CE, and it bore a suspicious identity with the Roman celebration of the Unconquered Sun (Sol Invictus) and the birthday of Mithras, the soldier’s God. January 6th was a popular date to celebrate as well, but neither date comes from any source close to the time of the events. Various people have tried to calculate the season at least by thinking about when would shepherds be watching over the flocks by night. But basically, we just don’t have the sources we need to pinpoint dates.

At least as difficult as the question of when is the question of where. According to Luke, Joseph and Mary had to travel to Bethlehem to do the tax thing because that is where Joseph was from. This is again troubling historically: the Romans could not have cared less where you were born. The point was where do you live and pay taxes now. Bethlehem is not in Galilee. It is south of Jerusalem, a distance of almost 100 miles from Nazareth. So not impossible, but also not trivial. There are again multiple ways to solve this conundrum. One is the fact that there is a tiny hamlet called Bethlehem-in-Galilee. It is not the Bethlehem that has been heralded as the birthplace of Christ for the past 2,000 years, but maybe. It was certainly a lot closer. Another possibility is even easier: If you were able to put out of your mind every Christmas play and nativity you’ve ever seen in your life, including the Charlie Brown one, and you read the Book of Matthew’s account of the nativity, you’d definitely get the impression that Joseph and Mary lived in Bethlehem. No journey, no inn, no need to travel to pay taxes. Just pay them where you live, which is what we would expect from other Roman sources.

Motherhood and Sacrifice

Whenever and wherever it happened, Mary gave birth to a boy. According to Jewish law (Leviticus 12: 2), that made her ritually impure for 7 days. If she’d had a girl, it would have been 14 days. On the eighth day, a baby boy was circumcised and named. In this case, as Jesus. For 33 more days, Mary was purifying, according to the laws in Leviticus. What exactly that meant in practical terms is not clear, but some scholars think it meant the village women would take care of the new mother and her family and her house. For Mary’s sake I hope those scholars are right.

When the time of recuperation was up, it was time to offer a sacrifice and to restore purity. According to Leviticus, a new mother should offer a first-year lamb, which many, many people could not possibly afford. Fortunately Leviticus has another option: two pigeons can make her clean as well. Luke records that Mary brought the pigeons, which means she was poor.

This sacrifice was made in Jerusalem at the temple. And so long as we are talking about sacrifice, it does seem like a big one to ask a woman who gave birth just over a month ago to travel anywhere in the days before smooth asphalt roads and mechanized vehicles.

But if Mary did make it to Jerusalem, the temple she was visiting was the one Herod had built which I talked about last week. She would have passed through the Temple’s great doors and into the Court of Gentiles. If you know your stories of Jesus, this is where 30ish years later Jesus would drive out the money changers and those who sold the pigeons and lambs. So Mary may have purchased her pigeons there. But some scholars think the financial transactions that angered Jesus were a recent change, and if they are correct, then Mary, coming 30ish years earlier, would have procured her pigeons farther away, outside the temple walls (2030, 2317).

As a Jew, Mary would have been allowed to pass through the big open Court of the Gentiles and up fifteen steps to the Court of Women. Here she would have seen the chests that held the Temple Treasury, where the faithful could offer their donations to be used for various, but specified purposes. This was where Jesus would later set the story of the widow’s mite. Beyond that, Mary would not have been allowed to go. Only men were permitted into the inner temple where the sacrifice was actually made. The sacrifice was for her purification, but she’d have to stay in the Court of Women and pray while it was made.

Regardless of exactly when, where, or why, the Gospels are in agreement that the Family ended up in Nazareth. As a married woman, Mary would have continued with much the same round of baking, cooking, farming, and textile working she had learned as a child. Catholic tradition says that Mary remained a Virgin and therefore had no other children. That would have been unusual, and in fact the gospels reference several brothers and sisters of Jesus. It is possible to explain that away as a generic term for relatives, but a simpler explanation would be that it means exactly what it says and Mary bore many children.

In one way though, her life may not have been just like the farmer household I described earlier because Joseph is not described as a farmer, but as a carpenter. In English this is a bit of a puzzler because we have a clear image of what a carpenter is, and Galilee has very little workable wood. Hardly any, really. Fortunately the original Greek helps us out here. The word tekton, which was translated into English as carpenter, meant a skilled worker or craftsman, maybe of wood, but possibly also of stone or metal, which opens up the possibilities considerably. Even so, it is hard to understand how a skilled worker of any medium could make a living in a tiny town like Nazareth. And history provides a possibility there too. Nazareth was insignificant to the point of invisibility, but it was a few miles from the much larger Sepphoris. King Herod’s son Herod Antipas did not succeed in convincing Rome to name him king of the Jews, but he still held high office, and he had a massive rebuilding project there. He conscripted labor from the surrounding area. So it is more than possible that Joseph was a skilled worker in Sepphoris, and possibly Jesus was too as he grew old enough. If so then Mary may have been running her house and raising her small children on her own for much of the time, possibly seeing her husband and oldest only on the Sabbath. Such a scenario makes sense in another way too. As I discussed last week Herod had squeezed the Galileean peasantry to the breaking point. Unable to both feed themselves and pay their taxes, many farmers had ended in debt, and lost their small farms to large-landed estates. It may be that Joseph was a craftsman because farming was no longer an option.

Widowhood

There is one other change in Mary’s life to discuss. Any woman who survived her encounters with childbirth was likely to become a widow at some point. And Mary was no exception. We have no record of Joseph’s death. He merely drops out of the story, while references to Mary continue throughout the gospels and in the book of Acts. This is the origin of the tradition that Joseph was an old man when he took a young wife. This is certainly possible, but there’s nothing in the record that says that. He could have been as young as 18 at the time of the marriage. Mortality rates being what they were, he might still have died leaving Mary as a young widow.

Jesus’s teachings and stories are full of admonitions to be kind to the widows, and that is because to be a widow was a terrifying prospect. Galileean peasants were on the brink of starvation already, and Mary could not get a job as a tekton. It is unlikely that Joseph left much property, but even if he had, it would not have gone to her. Unless circumstances were very unusual, it would have found its way to a male relative. The brideprice provided by the groom’s family was supposed to help, but 100 denaris wasn’t going to keep you for more than 100 days and fewer if you had children or debts. A widow was generally dependent on her male relatives, and how well that worked depended on how many she had, how much money they had, how generous they were with it, and how many small children she still had to support. It was an extremely helpless position to be in, and it is not surprising that remarriage rates were high. It was often the only security a woman could find. The silver lining, if you want to call it that, is that there is some evidence that women had more choice about their 2nd or 3rd husband. As in, he wasn’t chosen strictly by her parents. I’m not sure that marriage by necessity is much better, but maybe it was for some women.

Mary does not seem to have remarried. Or if she did, she was widowed again by the time of the crucifixion, thus prompting Jesus to ask John to treat her as his mother. By this point, Mary would have been in her 50s. Many women never made it so far. Fifty was old. We have no record of her death. Both Catholic and Orthodox tradition hold that she did not really die. Rather, she was taken directly up into heaven.

And the tale only grows from there. For a girl of obscure Jewish peasant origins, it is truly incredible the dimensions she has taken on. In part this works precisely because so few concrete facts are known about her. One professor at Vanderbilt has said “You can project on her whatever cultural values you have. She can be the grieving mother, the young virgin, the goddess figure. Just as Jesus is the ideal man. Mary is the ideal woman.” It makes you wonder just how surprised the girl from Galilee would have been to find out her legacy.

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Selected Sources

In the Footsteps of Jesus by Jean-Pierre Isbouts is a beautiful book with background, social details, and many gorgeous photographs about the time and place of Jesus. It does focus on Jesus, so a great deal of it was not about Mary, but it was a major source for this episode. I also referenced Reza Aslan’s book ZEALOT: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. There is an interesting NBC news article on tekhelet blue. The quote about Mary as the ideal woman is from Amy-Jill Levine, quoted in “The Virgin Mary” in National Geographic, Dec 2015, p. 37.

The feature image is by Jo-B from Pixabay.