This series of Advent studies takes readers to the Bethlehem of Scripture, and also to Bethlehem today, exploring the connections between people of antiquity and the challenges confronting Christians in the reality of Bethlehem today. The chapters focus on biblical characters connected with Bethlehem: Rachel, Ruth, David, Elijah, Jesus. Biblical, and later Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions concerning these figures, and the sites associated with them, are linked with the lived experience of the people of Bethlehem today.

This book may be used to accompany private Advent devotions, but can also provide a basis for reflection, exploration, and prayer in church and other Christian fellowship groups.

Readers are invited to delve beneath the sentimentality and commercialism of secular festivities, which frequently overwhelm Advent as well as Christmas. As they discover and appreciate something of the lives and struggles of real people, living and historical, Scripture may be opened to them in new ways. The occupation, ever-threatening dispossession, and arbitrary violence of today illuminate the Nativity story and the lives of people of biblical antiquity. They call Christians to share in the prophetic vocation of the Church and to bear witness to Christ’s Incarnation in the world today.