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How Far to Bethlehem?
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How Far to Bethlehem?
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How Far to Bethlehem - common read Dec 2012
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Peggy
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Nov 30, 2012 04:28AM
This is to start our December group read.
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Has anyone found a *legal* ebook version to download?
Something interesting to watch out for as we go through might be places where later gospel stories are foreshadowed. For example, the story of Michal, the 'loose woman' who has to go to the well on her own because the other women will have nothing to do with her, foreshadows the story of the Samarian woman (with 5 ex-husbands and the one she has now not her own) that Jesus meets alone at the well.
Excellent point about the foreshadowing, Jenny. I finished the first chapter today--where is everyone else? How many are reading this for the first time?I've noticed several references to hawthorn trees in this chapter--we've observed in other threads that NL seems to have an affinity for hawthorn trees.
I've read it before, lots of times, but I'll read it again to refresh my memory.
I'm on pg 76 - an old, brittle-paged paperback.
I've read it many times too, but am always enchanted by it. I love Balthazaar, he becomes totally real to me for some reason. Actually all of the Magi do, even though their personae owe so much to NL's wonderful imagination.
This book is truly a masterpiece. Even though we are taken to such a variety of backgrounds to introduce the different characters, NL manages to keep the story flowing seamlessly and each character is memorable. When Mary comes home after talking to Joseph, I love the reality of the scene described where her no-nonsense mother Anne and her crusty father Joachim are working on preparing the eggs to take to market. Certainly not the moment for Mary to share her glorious news so she wisely decides to wait and goes to bed.
And there is another touch of foreshadowing, when Mary is walking home from her meeting with Joseph knowing that he didn't believe her news; she sends a cry winging through the night - My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? This makes Mary very real to me.
I don't have my copy with me, but I've read it more than once and used parts of it as meditations at an evening service during Advent, and all of you are refreshing my memory as we go along. So here's my contribution to the oreshadowing Jenny mentioned in message 4: after Mary leaves Joseph's house in a bit of a huff, he ponders what she has told him and decides that he needs a drink--which he draws from a big jar of wine that had been given to him as partial payment for a house he built in Cana.In that same passage, I love the fact that NL has him make the decision to marry Mary anyway BEFORE the angel appears to him in his dream. Although that's not the way it happens in the Gospel, that's often the pattern in other incidents: one makes the act of faithe first and then receives the sign.
I'm appreciating all of the insightful comments being shared above! This is one of my favorites among the Lofts novels that I've read (and I've read several, though not nearly as many as most members of this group have).
Yes, Mary, another good example and we learn so much about Joseph's character in just a few pages.I've read this book many times but this is the first time I noticed that Melchior's family is from China. Reference is made to his family coming to Korea with Wiman. I googled Wiman and there was a fascinating small bit in Wikipedia about:
"Wiman (or Wei Man) of Gojoseon who was a refugee from the Han Dynasty state of Yan who established a kingdom in north-western Korea in the 2nd century BC. Wiman's capital of Gojoseon was Wanggeom-seong, generally identified as Pyongyang."
Werner, I was just about to write the very same thing !! I can't believe I never noticed before that Melchior's antecedents were Chinese. His grandfather certainly , no mention is made of his grandfather's wife so she may also have been Chinese. Or Korean . His mother too may have been either. And Senya is presumably Korean, one of the enslaved conquered.To follow on the foreshadowing aspects from Mary et al above :- Mary ( the Nazareth one that is) is struck/pierced in her side by the donkey boy's goad and bleeds. She also feels the thorns prick her head and face as she passes through the hedge to go home.
And of course the sack of nails and the donkey.
I always have trouble getting through the early chapters as I get so so upset by the abused donkey(s) and the doomed, desperate little pig . Maybe that's why I missed things !
Barbara, just to clarify --and make sure credit goes where it's due!-- you did know that Peggy was the one who first posted about Melchoir's Chinese connection (message 12), right?
I am really enjoying re-reading this story. A question for those familiar with scripture--what happened to Mary's mother? How long did she live?
Eliza, the Scripture doesn't say anything about Mary's mother. (The names Joachim and Anna for her parents come from tradition, but how old a tradition it is and how much basis it has in fact is open to question.)
Eliza wrote: "I am really enjoying re-reading this story. A question for those familiar with scripture--what happened to Mary's mother? How long did she live?"Yes, it was Peggy, not I, who began the foreshadowing theme. As for the names of THE mary's parents, I think they're in one of the Apocryphal Gospels--which I own but don't have access to right now.
Werner wrote: "Barbara, just to clarify --and make sure credit goes where it's due!-- you did know that Peggy was the one who first posted about Melchoir's Chinese connection (message 12), right?"Oh yes right ,sorry Pegs.
No need to apologize, Barbara, I thought you were agreeing with Werner that you were enjoying the posts and actually Jenny made the first foreshadowing comment. Even though it's a brief episode in the book, I really like the story of Elizabeth and Zacharias. Elizabeth building her garden out of a wasteland is one of my favorite parts and another example of how beautifully NL describes nature. When Mary goes to visit and approaches Elizabeth's house, it is described as a place of "color and perfume" which sounds so delightful to me and a way that I would love to have my home described!
Melchior taking leave of Senya brings a lump to my throat, every time ...
I do love Anne as a character, don't you? A wonderful contrast of bullying and control with care and nurturing, isn't she? You can see why Mary couldn't possibly have told her.
I think Melchior's Chinese ancestry is probably a way of giving him a language he can share with Gaspar, whose ancestors 'came out of Mongolia'. But I don't think it's terribly plausible, is it?
Melchior is represented as a scholar who knows several languages, one of which proves to be enough related to Gaspar's that the latter can understand it with difficulty. (It's probably not Chinese.) There were trading relations between East Asia and Central Asia in this period, via the Silk Road; so it's not beyond the realm of plausibility that a Korean scholar could know a Central Asian dialect or two, IMO.
Werner wrote: "Melchior is represented as a scholar who knows several languages, one of which proves to be enough related to Gaspar's that the latter can understand it with difficulty. You're right, I'd forgotten that Melchior knew a lot of languages.
Somehow, I had thought that Gaspar was an Indo-European. Wasn't he relatively fair and even blue-eyed? I supposed that, since NL made one of her Wise Men Chinese or Korean and one Ethiopian, she was following the "three races of man" tradition and meant the third one to be a bit more like most of us. :) As a scholar, Melchior could have known at least one IE language, and then Gaspar probably spoke both his mother tongue and that of the people he had conquered. As I've probably said before, I haven't have access to most of my books for a while, so maybe what I think I'm conjecturing is explicitly stated in HFtB. Are we actually told that his people are a remnant of Alexander's army 300+ years later, or is that something we can infer?
Gaspar had red hair and blue eyes, like all of the "Five Hundred" (his army). Kind of an amazing thought of that many redheads. And bow-legged to ride horses well. Remember when one of his soldiers wanted to marry a Jexalian princess and Gaspar was horrified that the children "could have black eyes and straight legs."
Mary, the book doesn't state that Gaspar's people are descended from Alexander's soldiers. My impression is that they're a Central Asian barbarian tribe of Indo-European cattle nomads, like the Celts and German-Scandinavians, and like the Aryans and Iranians who had earlier conquered the territory of modern-day India and Persia. All of these peoples originated in the western parts of Central Asia, and are of related ethnic, linguistic and cultural stock. Unlike the Mongolian horse nomad tribes of the steppes further east, these tribes were Caucasian, and would have had the kind of coloring that NL describes.
There is quite an extensive discussion on this ( ie Gaspar's antecedents ) in the original HFTB thread , here's the link. http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/4...
In fact there are two threads but the older of the two is not extensive so I've closed it off for additions to avoid confusion.
Jenny, I do so agree with you and the Melchior /Senya leavetaking,so very poignant. One of the many moments. I notice in HFTB that NL often ends a chapter this way. Once such is when Mary "turned upon them the smile that was to embrace the world " and when Gaspar and Melchior see Balthazaar for the first time and "they looked at him with blank , uncomprehending faces. And of all the bad moments in his life that was quite the worst....."
Glad you posted the link, Barbara, I had read over it myself last night because I remembered so many good posts had been made about Gaspar.
I'm so glad we are reading this.It makes me feel like Christmas is not far away. I agree that there are several connections with the Bible and in the past I have spent many hours ferreting away on the computer to find out about Dorcas, Susannah etc. because I know I have read about them either in the gospels, Acts or the epistles. Anne is known as St Anne and there is some information about her on wikipedia but it is mainly legend.This book is so well researched. I have just started re reading it and am always struck by the wealth of detail it gives about life in those times. Does anyone have thoughts about Mary's 'trances' they set her apart from the other girls right at the start of the book.
The Dorcas and Susannah in this novel aren't the same ones who appear elsewhere in the Bible: Dorcas is a Christian lady who appears in the Acts of the Apostles and Susannah is a figure from the old Testament, where her virtue is vindicated by Daniel when she is falsely accused by two men whose advances she rejected. I suppose NL is just re-using the names.
Anne isn't in the canonical Bible at all, only in apocryphal gospels and legend.
The gay motif already noted in other books appears again in this one, twice: the slave boy whose fortune Senya so disastrously tells and Vatinius the centurion's former friend Quintilius. In both cases in this book, it's almost a form of prostitution, with both characters hoping for material gain from their 'gentleman friend'; a bit like Dorcas, in fact.
NL is always both sophisticated and sensitive about same-sex love I think. It's as Jenny says , really a motif in many books ,but never vulgar or detailed or prurient.
What I notice everytime I re-read this book is the perfection of Lofts' technique...her re-telling of the story is so human, and, at the same time, the brevity and richness of the details she adds have a sort of "icy" light that illuminates the chapters about Mary, almost like the famous star.When she takes her leave of Elizabeth, " she turned upon them the smile that was to embrace the world "So many littl details make a shiver go through you!
It is also lovely that the "donkey" thread runs through it, foreshadowing Jesus' entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.Mary's compassion and suffering when she sees the way donkeys are treated ( it is very funny that, when Mary chooses the Micah's old donkey to travel to Bethlehem, Anne tells her angrily that, in that case, she'll be travelling with two donkeys, then!). Very touching also is the way Mary tries to "filter" her knowledge, not only that her son will be the Son of God, but also her knowledge of the manner of his early death, by thinking of her child as HER son...she reasons that, as he will also be human, he will understand the suffering of donkeys and, if she asks him, as his mother, to help "humble, helpless things", He will.
I think she had a sympathy for donkeys herself, don't you? Think of the poor old donkey in The Devil in Clevely who drops dead when Damask's mother is borrowing him, and the one Madselin borrows from the priest to fetch Eitel's body (doesn't he drop dead, too?)
I had forgotten about the donkey or donkeys that dropped dead, but the mention of them makes me think of Gone With the Wind (the movie this time, which adds a little chill that the book didn't have), when Scarlett is on her journey home with Melanie, Prissy, Wade, and Melanie's newborn baby, in a horse-drawn wagon that Rhett procured for her during the burning of Atlanta. Remember how, as the moon comes out and she sees that Tara is still standing, she lashes the horse forward one more time, and it falls dead? (In the book it's merely found dead in its stall the next day.)But more important, others here may also know the legend that the donkey that carried Mary to Bethlehem and then to Egypt was the same one that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. It seemed a bit improbable to me at first, but then I reread Animal Farm, in which Benjamin says to the other animals, "Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey."
On Mary's trances, there was a detail in the book that her friends remembered that Mary's grandmother had been a woman of the desert and that they were known for their mystic trances. Weren't there instances of saints who had mystic trances, Joan of Arc seems to come to mind.
I'm not sure that Mary has trances as such. Her friends know she has periods of mental absence from them, but when we see this in action, it's just because she's thinking so hard about something else that she becomes oblivious to her surroundings. She's not seeing visions the way Joan of Arc did, or anything mystical, in fact - not until her annunciation experience.
Mary wrote: "...the legend that the donkey that carried Mary to Bethlehem and then to Egypt was the same one that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. "That surely can't be right - Mark and Luke describe it as 'a colt on which no-one has ever ridden', John as 'a young donkey', and Matthew as 'a donkey with her foal' (surely unlikely at over 30 years old).
None of the gospels mention any donkey in connection with Jesus's birth.
Jenny wrote: "I think she had a sympathy for donkeys herself, don't you? Think of the poor old donkey in The Devil in Clevely who drops dead when Damask's mother is borrowing him, and the one Madeselin borrows f..."I think the Madselin one is a mule . Called Martin (secretly by the priest) and cherished by him, thankfully. I don't remember him dying. I do hope he didn't .
Tom(?) Shadbolt in Devil in Clevely echoes the Animal Farm Benjamin when he says to Damask's mother that you never see a dead donkey ,and then "picks up the little body and puts it in the cart it had pulled for so long " ... oh I can't bear it .
Barbara wrote: "I think the Madselin one is a mule . Called Martin (secretly by the priest) and cherished by him, thankfully. I don't remember him dying. I do hope he didn't ."Oh yes, looking back, you're right, Martin is a mule. Half-donkey, then.
And I'm sorry to have to tell you, but he did die. After Madselin went to bed after her journey back to Bradwald:
"The wind veered; the snow became rain. Eitel lay in his shallow makeshift grave. The old mule lay down and died."
But it was nearly a thousand years ago ... he would have been dead by now anyway
Another foreshadowing comes in the chapter about Josodad, when the behaviour of the hireling shepherds is contrasted with that of Josodad, the 'good shepherd', which Jesus later makes a parable of.
Jenny wrote: "Another foreshadowing comes in the chapter about Josodad, when the behaviour of the hireling shepherds is contrasted with that of Josodad, the 'good shepherd', which Jesus later makes a parable of."I never spotted that one! you are right.
Jenny wrote: "Mary wrote: "...the legend that the donkey that carried Mary to Bethlehem and then to Egypt was the same one that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. "That surely can't be right - Mark and ..."
Well, Jenny, I *said* it was a *legend*.
Oh dear, Jenny, so Martin died .... And speaking of forebodings, Josodad's beloved son Nathan was crucified. His other children were Martha, Mary and Lazarus. Nice touch, that.
Re the thread on The Journey. I've always thought Jexal was Babylon (fictionally speaking ) . The geography fits,as does Persopolis , but Persoplis was in ruins by then.
Ephorus is robbed, stripped and left for dead, but taken to an inn by a kindly traveller, as in Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan.
Isn't there a girl with red hair and blue eyes among the virgins chosen for Ahasuerus in Esther? She's from a barbarian tribe, isn't she? Do you think there's a link with Gaspar's tribe?
You know, I love, love, love the tie-in to Mary, Martha and Lazarus and their father being one of the shepherds that sees the angels. And I love the tie-in of the little robber boy, Barabbas, and the story of the innkeeper and his wife, who basically are covered in one line in the Gospels. And when Josodad sees his beloved son's face in the heavenly choir and it restores his faith--Lofts uses the theme of restored faith quite a bit but I never get tired of it!
I can't help wondering about Martha & Mary's marriage prospects, though. Their mother worries about them because Josodad impoverishes himself, and Josodad justifies his suicide plans by thinking they'll all be better off relying on their uncle rather than him.Yet he doesn't do it, and when next we hear of the family, in the gospels, they all seem to be living together with no spouses for any of them.
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