s always been very different from Western ideas. As in all
thinly-settled countries, private hospitality, in early times, supplied
the want of inns, but it was the peculiarity of the East that this
friendly custom continued through a long series of ages. On the great
roads through barren or uninhabited parts, the need of shelter led, very
early, to the erection of rude and simple buildings, of varying size,
known as khans, which offered the wayfarer the protection of walls and a
roof, and water, but little more. The smaller structures consisted of
sometimes only a single empty room, on the floor of which the traveler
might spread his carpet for sleep; the larger ones, always built in a
hollow square, enclosing a court for the beasts, with water in it for
them and their masters. From immemorial antiquity it has been a favorite
mode of benevolence to raise such places of shelter, as we see so far
back as the times of David, when Chimham built a great khan near
Bethlehem, on the caravan road to Egypt."

Canon Farrar (_Life of Christ_, chap, 1) accepts the traditional belief
that the shelter within which Jesus was born was that of one of the
numerous limestone caves which abound in the region, and which are still
used by travelers as resting places. He says: "In Palestine it not
infrequently happens that the entire khan, or at any rate the portion of
it in which the animals are housed, is one of those innumerable caves
which abound in the limestone rocks of its central hills. Such seems to
have been in the case at the little town of Bethlehem-Ephratah, in the
land of Judah. Justin Martyr, the Apologist, who, from his birth at
Shechem, was familiar with Palestine, and who lived less than a century
after the time of our Lord, places the scene of the nativity in a cave.
This is, indeed, the ancient and constant tradition both of the Eastern
and the Western Churches, and it is one of the few to which, though
unrecorded in the Gospel history, we may attach a reasonable
probability."

3. Herod the Great.--The history of Herod I, otherwise known as Herod
the Great, must be sought in special works, in which the subject is
treated at length. Some of the principal facts should be considered in
our present study, and for the assistance of the student a few extracts
from works regarded as reliable are presented herewith.

Condensed from part of article in the _Standard Bible Dictionary_,
edited by Jacobus, Nourse, and Zenos; publishe