Free Yesterday, Today, and Forever by Maria Von Trapp Page B

head again as she had done when the great angel appeared in Nazareth, when Elizabeth had said such outstanding things, and when Simeon’s message tore her heart. In no time she had wrapped up the little boy tenderly and taken the few things she would need, for poverty doesn’t take long to pack. The only really valuable things they owned were the gifts of the kings. Joseph must have wrapped them carefully. Maybe in less than ten minutes they had quietly left the house. The donkey they came on from Nazareth must still have been around. And Joseph lifted Mary with the sleeping child in her arms onto its back.
    We feel it now as a great privilege to have been refugees once, to know what anxiety means. The clatter of the donkey’s hooves on the cobblestones of Bethlehem, for instance: wouldn’t that wake up somebody who might report them later? That’s why they hurried down the slope into the vineyards and fields to get away as fast as possible. Every sound arouses ones fears. “Maybe they have found out and are on our heels” — that’s the constant fear. When the sky grew light, the first cocks began to crow, and the horrid battalion entered the small town, perhaps Mary and Joseph, who were slow travelers, might still have heard the shrieks which rent the air and sent cold chills down their backs. They were still very close to Herod’s power. They were still in the neighborhood where they might have been known and identified. ...
    Oh, it is so wrong to picture the flight into Egypt as a nice, smooth hike with angels on all sides ministering to them. The angels certainly were there admiring, adoring, almost unbelieving that the Lord would not have protected His only-begotten Son by means less troublesome than this pitiful flight. Where was the Angel of Death who slew the Egyptians? Where was the angel with the fiery sword at the gates of paradise? But it was obviously the will of the Most High that the child and His mother be saved not by supernatural interference, but by the natural means of a tedious flight. We people living many centuries later understand perhaps a little better why: He really has become “like one of us,” and we can go to Him also during a flight or a persecution, saying full of confidence, “You know how it is.”
    The books say that there were two main routes going from Judea into Egypt. It is interesting now to look them up on the map. The more popular route was “by way of the land of the Philistines” (Exod. 13:17), via Ascalon and Gaza and then along the shore of the Mediterranean toward the delta of the Nile. The other way led through Hebron and Beersheba to the land on the Nile. Every refugee will tell you that if one wants to get away from feared territory as quickly and safely as possible, one uses the less-traveled routes. That’s why they must have gone south to Hebron about 15 miles. It has been ascertained that “the ordinary rate for a long journey on foot was about 17 Roman miles per day,” 1 so the holy family could have reached Hebron that first day. Every refugee will also tell you that you don’t stay overnight in a town, even if it should be dear to you, because it contains the tomb of your own ancestors (like Hebron, where Father Abraham had buried his beloved wife, Sarah); so they hurried on.
    Farther south about 20 miles was an oasis, the famous Beersheba, the southernmost settlement in Judea. Did Mary and Joseph talk about the fact that from here Father Abraham had set out to sacrifice his only son, that here also he had pushed Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness? Here, Joseph must have filled their water bags, because now they were setting out into the barren desert. Beyond Beersheba they could afford to breathe a little more freely because they were out of Herod’s immediate jurisdiction, but they were still in the Roman Province of Syria. You never could tell whether Herod had perhaps gotten the Romans to lend him a hand. Therefore, Mary and Joseph would keep