frightens men. Under Jewish law, they were ritually polluted. The woolens will be burned as ritually unclean. The women will have to undergo a ritual bath after the business is done. Ana and the child will be ritually unclean for two weeks. Heli can’t hold his new daughter till then or risk being ritually unclean himself. And Ana should make a cleansing offering in the Jerusalem temple, an expensive journey, but one demanded by the law. I suspect that she and many poor women merely took a ritual bath and left the trip to Jerusalem for another time when they could afford it.
The midwife comes out to Heli. “You have a daughter, Heli. She is healthy.”
Lusty wailing from inside the house confirms the midwife’s account. Heli rushes in to meet his newest daughter. We are never told whether or not Mary had siblings. The fantastic tales make Ana barren except for Mary. It is possible that she was an only child. But the odds are that she had siblings, just because women became pregnant so often. It was considered their duty to do so. So it is very possible several brothers and sisters crowded into the space around their father to meet their new sister. Or perhaps she was the first-born. Her fiery confidence later in life makes me suspect that she was a first-born.
“What will we call her?” he asks.
“I will name her for the sister of Moses, Miriam,” Ana replies. And so it is. Ana is illiterate and has never read the Torah and the story of Moses. But it is read every Shabat in the synagogue, and she knows it by heart. But the old stories are in Hebrew, a language they know vaguely, and Heli and his family speak the language of the ancient conquerors, Aramaic. We cannot know what vowels they pronounced. Aramaic is still a living language, but languages change over two-thousand years. We don’t know what the name the family called her sounded like. The question of how Mary spelled her name is irrelevant. The answer is that she grew up illiterate and never once spelled it. The New Testament gives it as Maryam, and sometimes Maria, the Latin variation. I doubt there was much difference in pronouncing Maryam and Miriam.
As Maryam grows up, she begins to know the world. Since in a world of no birth control and the need for children to work a farm is the most likely scenario, I will go with my assumption that she is the eldest. Heli and Ana need sons to help work the farm and provide for their old age, presuming they live long enough to have one. Around her second and fourth years, two brothers are born and of course, her status as eldest is now irrelevant, because she is a girl. Let us call them Jacob and Jeremiah. For though she is older, they are boys, helping their father in the fields, while Maryam aids her mother in the home. But farm life is too tough for a strict definition of male and female work to hold forever. There are times when Jacob and Jeremiah are with Heli in the fields and Mary rakes out the stalls for the goats and sheep, or the cattle. Work is work and has to be done.
Given the odds, it’s quite possible that the birth of the second son was more than Ana could survive. A difficult birth, or perhaps an infection, or even both, claim her life at the birth of Jeremiah. I picture Maryam, now lady of the house at age seven, while her brothers and father labor in the fields. Heli is alone without Ana, and too poor to consider attracting another wife. Plus, another tragedy has befallen Heli. But more on that in a bit. First, let’s look outside in the farmyard and see if we can find Maryam. When she’s not working the kitchen fire or cleaning, she’s herding the goats, sheep, and any cattle. Her aunt Rachel, her mother’s sister, and her cousin Dvorah come over frequently and help her with the baking and sweeping. Rachel teaches her carding and weaving of wool, and soon she is making the family’s clothes in addition to feeding them and cleaning the home. As Maryam grows in ability, Aunt Rachel comes over less and then not at all. By age nine, Maryam manages the house for her father and brothers all on her own, leaving her little time to be a child.
From Scott Korb’s excellent book, Life in Year One, we learn that Herod Antipas, effectively the Roman-backed king of Galilee, instituted a program in the first century where his wealthy friends bought up farm lands and pushed sustenance farmers like Heli off their lands. Using something akin to eminent domain, farmers were forced to sell out to King Herod’s cronies, and then be hired for small wages as tenant farmers to work what had once been theirs. It was a clear moving of wealth in vast amounts into the hands of a few of Herod’s wealthy friends, who now became great land-owners, and farming became what we now call agribusiness. Talk about plans to create economic inequality and the rule of the 1%. Nazareth was but three miles from Herod’s Romanized capital at Sepphoris. There’s no way that Nazareth would be spared the new land policies, being so close. The record shows that Herod Antipas expropriated all but three percent of Galilean farm land this way. And that means, unless Heli was an artisan/mason/carpenter like his future son-in-law, Joseph, there’s a 97% chance he got caught up in the land-grab.8
I can see Mary standing hurt and bewildered in the courtyard of her father’s house, her brothers silently standing next to her, as the agent of the king, one Lucius, in fine clothes, backed by two heavily-armed soldiers to make sure everything goes smoothly, shoves a small bag of coins into Heli’s hand, explaining that Heli is now his employee and tenant. Mary’s family goes from growing their own food to having to live by a handful of coins from month to month, risking hunger even as the fields around their house are bursting with plenty. And then I think of the words:
He has shown strength with his arm
He has scattered the proud in their vanity
He has put down the mighty from their thrones
And exalted those of low degree.
He has filled the hungry with good things
And the rich he has sent empty away.
If we believe that these are, more or less, Mary’s words, they are bold words to be spoken in Roman-dominated Judea and Galilee. Is she thinking of the men that took her family’s livelihood to make themselves obscenely rich while driving her father into poverty?
Such an economic turn would drive young men out of farming, as only so many tenant farmers would be needed. Mary’s oldest brother Jacob will take his father’s place working the farm which they tenant; Jeremiah will follow the men that head up the road early most mornings to work in Sepphoris. The construction of the splendid, Roman-style city of Sepphoris, built to glorify Herod and Caesar, would probably draw off the few young men not needed for farming to be tektons, which the Gospels translate as “carpenters.” But tektons would work with everything, from carvings, to stone work as well as wood work. The Christmas cards show Joseph working in a carpentry shop. But it’s just as likely to see him setting stones in place up a scaffold in the Roman-style city under construction.
But Joseph is hardly in the picture yet. Mary has seen him around the village, with the other young men and her brother Jeremiah, heading up on foot in the first morning light, carrying large and small hammers, saws, large chisels, and pry bars, the tools of their trade, on their way to construct the glory of Rome and the glory of King Herod in Sepphoris. She thinks him handsome, with his new beard and the long curls dangling from his sideburns in front of his ears. She notices that he watches her back. She remembers five years ago when he stood up in the synagogue and read out a blessing before the reading of the Torah, thus entering his manhood. They have never really spoken. And like all women, she keeps her plain, brown, woolen veil over her head when she goes into the village. (Sorry, no blue. Dye is for rich people, not poor girls like Mary.) It is easy to glance at the handsome young men and then hide your eyes behind your woolen veil. Though Mary is a little alarmed and curious that on two occasions, she has taken a second glance and found Joseph looking at her.
At this point, I can’t say whether the Joseph Mary sees is not only older, but already married and widowed, being the father of James, Joses, Jude, and Simon, as well as three daughters, or whether she sees Joseph as an eligible young man in her village.9 The older widower is the way Catholics and the Orthodox would have it. Protestants prefer to believe that Jacob, Josef, Judah, and Shimon (their real names without Hellenizing them) are yet-to-be-born future sons of Mary herself.
For the purposes of this meditation I’m going to go with the second option. I realize this puts me on the Protestant side of the issue, but I am willing to stand corrected on this matter should better evidence arise. And I really, really, really don’t know. Currently, the evidence is all over