The Truth About Shepherds
"And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night" Luke 2:8
What do you picture when you read this familiar verse? The squeaky-clean children of a hundred Sunday school Christmas pageants, self-conscious in bath-robes with towels draped around their heads. Cute, perhaps, but not accurate. Let's try another version.
"And there were in the same country street people, huddled over a heating grate by night, passing around cheap wine in a paper sack"...
Closer to it! The shepherds belonged to one of the "despised trades" of Jesus' day - folks that proper people scorned and avoided. Why? Well, dirt, for one thing. I remember the time I helped sheep-ranching friends pack fleeces after shearing. A fleece is the sheep's wooly coat freshly clipped off his body - sticky with lanolin, smelly, loaded with dirt. To pack it for shipping, you gather it in your arms and throw it into a tall burlap wool bag supported on a stanchion.
Because of their size, my youngest son and our friend's daughter had the dubious honor of standing in the bottom of the bags and stomping the fleeces down tight, one by one - the dirtiest job of all.
By the end of that hot afternoon, we all wanted nothing so much as a bath. Packing fleeces is such a messy job that most ranchers have machines do it.
The shepherds outside
Because they moved their flocks from place to place, they often used other people's land without permission. And most certainly they were not above appropriating sheep from other flocks if they thought they could get away with it.
Yet God passed by all the upright, faithful Temple-goers who had arrived in
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