Biblion Bible Commentary
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No Room for Them
Luke 2:1-7
1 Now in those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. · WEB
An emperor's paperwork moves a pregnant girl eighty miles, and the child is born where the animals are fed.
Now in those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled Luke 2:1.
The chapter opens in Rome. The most powerful man alive signs an order about tax registration, and the effect of it, as far as this book is concerned, is to move one couple from a northern village to a southern one at the worst possible time.
That is the shape of the whole passage. Augustus is doing what emperors do, and he is unknowingly delivering a prophecy: the ruler was to come out of Bethlehem Micah 5:2, and the family lived in Galilee. What moved them was a tax form.
Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to David's city, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David Luke 2:4. Bethlehem is called David's city twice in eight verses, and the reason given is descent. A man walking to his ancestral town to be counted by a foreign power is the heir of the throne that town produced.
To enroll himself with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him as wife, being pregnant Luke 2:5. Still pledged, still not brought home. The account has not stopped saying it.
While they were there, the day had come for her to give birth Luke 2:6. Nothing about the timing is dramatized. They had been there some while, and the day came.
She gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him in bands of cloth and laid him in a feeding trough, because there was no room for them in the inn Luke 2:7.
The scene is usually pictured as a rejection at a commercial inn, and the wording will not quite carry it. The word here is not the one used of the roadside inn where the Samaritan pays for a bed Luke 10:34; it is the word used later for the upper room where the Passover is eaten Luke 22:11 — a guest space in a house. Village houses of that country commonly kept animals under the same roof, on a lower level, with a manger cut where the two met. What the sentence describes is most likely a crowded family home with no space in the guest quarters, so the birth happened in the part of the house where the household lived and the animals were kept.
That is less cruel than the usual picture and more ordinary, which is the point. Nobody turned them away. There was simply no room, in a town full of people obeying an emperor.
The details Luke keeps are the ones the shepherds will be given as a sign: wrapped in cloth, lying in a feeding trough. He is wrapped exactly as any newborn was wrapped, and put down where the food goes.
settled What this mark means