Where Mary And The Innkeeper Act

And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

So Mary the wife of Joseph had the birth of her first-born son Jesus be a successful one. I imagine painful (Caesarean sections as my own children were delivered hardly having trickled down to the poor citizens of a Roman-occupied country) but nonetheless delivered and, as far as Luke chapter two verse seven tells us, without a midwife or anything close to an obstetrician on hand. But Judean (Jewish) women had been handy with newborns for thousands of years -- check out the story of the Hebrew midwives in the first chapter of Exodus, where they are "credited" by no less a then-authority as the Egyptians as being unneeded because, according to verse nineteen, the Hebrew women have already given birth before the midwives got there!

The "swaddling clothes" that Mary wrapped Jesus in were essentially loose, clean wrappings -- think Egyptian mummy, except not quite so tight -- that would enable His bones to grow straight. In that culture, to not swaddle your baby was counted as abuse, along with other things documented in Ezekiel chapter sixteen verse four (not cutting the umbilical cord, which you would think would be a physical necessity, but often it was cut haphazardly, a big no-no; that, and the standard cleaning of any newborn) and certainly God would not want His Son (Jesus is God's Son, remember, and Joseph is Mary's husband who married her after being told that Jesus was God's Son) dead before He could accomplish anything, would He?

It's logical that where there was an inn for Joseph and Mary (and now Jesus), there was also an innkeeper (who is not mentioned), but whenever you hear the story of Jesus' birth elaborated on, you often hear the innkeeper slammed. Exactly WHAT was the innkeeper supposed to do, throw someone out so Joseph and Mary (and now Jesus) could have a room? No, the innkeeper was able to do what he (or she) was able to do -- did not have room in the inn itself, already packed like all the other establishments in Beth-lehem, but did have room in the stable, which allowed Jesus to be born the way all the Nativity scenes you see portray Him, in a manger or feeding trough for animals but without the haloes around the heads of the family members.