Bethlehem is a city in the central West Bank, Palestine, about 10 km south of Jerusalem. Its population is approximately 25,000, and it is the capital of the Bethlehem Governorate. Bethlehem came under Jordanian rule during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and was later captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. It has a Muslim majority, but is still home to a significant Palestinian Christian community. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke identify Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus.
About Bethlehem in brief
Bethlehem is a city in the central West Bank, Palestine, about 10 km south of Jerusalem. Its population is approximately 25,000, and it is the capital of the Bethlehem Governorate. The economy is primarily tourist-driven, peaking during the Christmas season, when Christians make pilgrimage to the Church of the Nativity. 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 Occupied West Bank due to the Israeli West Bank barrier. The earliest known mention of Bethlehem was in the Amarna correspondence of 1350–1330 BCE when the town was inhabited by the Canaanites. Bethlehem came under Jordanian rule during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and was later captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. Since the 1995 Oslo Accords, Bethlehem has been administered by the Palestinian Authority. It has a Muslim majority, but is still home to a significant Palestinian Christian community. It is now encircled and encroached upon by dozens of Israeli settlements and the IsraeliWest Bank barrier, which separates both Muslim and Christian communities from their land and livelihoods. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke identify Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus. A burial ground discovered in spring 2013 by a joint Italian-Palestinian team covered 3 hectares and originally contained more than 100 tombs in use between roughly 2200 and 650 B. C. Archaeological confirmation of Bethlehem as a city was uncovered in 2012 at the archaeological dig at the City of David in the form of a bulla in the ancient Hebrew script that reads: ‘From the town of Bethlehem to the King of the King, Bethlehem, in the name of David,’ in Hebrew.
The city was built up as a fortified city by Rehoboam, identifies it as the city David was from and where he was crowned as the king of Israel. It became part of Jund Filastin following the Muslim conquest in 637. Muslim rule continued in Bethlehem until its conquest in 1099 by a crusading army, who replaced the town’s Greek Orthodox clergy with a Latin one. In the mid-13th century, the Mamluks demolished the city’s walls, which were subsequently rebuilt under the Ottomans in the early 16th century. The Philistines later established a garrison there. Some time in the third millennium BCE, Canaanites erected a temple on the hill now known as the Hill of theNativity, probably dedicated to Lehem. The temple, and subsequently the town that formed around it, would then have been known as Beyt Leḥem, ‘House of Lehem’ in Arabic. It was thought that the similarity of this name to its modern forms indicates that it was originally a settlement of Canaanites who shared a Semitic cultural and linguistic heritage with the later arrivals. In one of his six letters to Pharaoh, Abdi-Heba, the Egyptian-appointed governor of Jerusalem, appeals for aid in retaking Bit-Laḫmi in the wake of disturbances by Apiru mercenaries. Let the king hear the words of your servant Abdi, and send archers to restore the imperial lands of the king!
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This page is based on the article Bethlehem published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
