MANEH.
MANES (Μάνης, AV Eanes, due to a misprint *Havys for Μάνης in the Aldine ed.), 1 Es 97..—One of those who agreed to put away their ‘strange’ wives. RVm identifies the name with Harim in Ezr 10}; more probably, perhaps, it takes the place of the two names Maaseiah, Elijah.
See WEIGHTS AND MEASURES.
MANGER.—The NT tr. of φάτνη in three places out of the four where the word occurs (Lk 27: !* 18), and in RVm of the fourth (Lk 13", where ‘ stall’ is inthe text). The chief OT Eng. equivalent is ‘ crib,’ Heb. ‘ebvis (fattening - place), ΓΧΧ always φάτνη (Job 399, Pr 144, Is 18); while φάτνη is also the LXX rendering (once in each case) of ’urwah (‘ collecting-place’ or ‘collected herd’), AV and RV ‘stall,’ 2 Ch 32%; of repheth (not occurring except at Hab 3, but probably=Arabie raffat, ‘herd’ or ‘stall’), AV and RV ‘stall’; and, vossibly, of bélil (‘food’), AV and RV ‘ fodder,’ ab 6°, if the Heb. be not represented rather by the otherwise superfluous βρώματα. It seems clear (from such a parallelism as in 2 Ch 32% ‘stalls for all manner of beasts and folds (lit. treasure-houses) for flocks,’ and likewise from such companionship as in Pr 14* ‘where no oxen are, the cri is clean’), that, like the Latin presepe and our crib, φάτνη in the LXX signified not only, as in classical Greek, a manger, but also, metonymically, the stall containing the manger; an extension due immediately, perhaps, to some of its Heb. originals.
This ambiguity in the meaning of φάτνη would be of small moment but that it affects the story of the Nativity. Did the mother of our Lord lay her babe in a manger or ina stall? And is the very early tradition that the birth took place in a cave inconsistent with the NT narrative? These ques- tions cannot be decisively answered either (as has been shown) from the word itself, or from the con- text, or from our knowledge of the customs of the time. There is an ambiguity about κατάλυμα, ‘the inn’ (AV and RY), as well as about φάτνη. This was not an inn in the modern sense of the term, nor apparent!y even such an approximation to it
as the more regularly organized παρδοχεῖον of Lk
10“, with its πανδοχεύς, host or managing xuttendant, who provided necessaries and was paid for them. All that we can be sure of as to κατάλυμα is that it was a resting-place where animals were relieved of their packs (καταλύω, ‘I let down’), and where travellers ungirded their garments. But Lk 22", Mk 14" (cf. Swete), bring the word before us in another sense—that of a guest-room (‘ My xard\uua,’ said Jesas, according to Mk), one of the rooms com- monly and hospitably lent, perhaps, for the occa- sion, to parties of strangers visiting Jerusalem for the passover. For this the ‘master of the house’ seems to have substituted, in the case of Jesus and His disciples, the more private and fully furnished ἀνάγαιον, upper chamber (Lk 22"), When, there- fore, it is said (Lk 2”), [56] laid [the babe] in a φάτνη, because there was no room for them in the κατάλυμα,᾽ our ignorance of the exact mean- ing of κατάλυμα deprives us of its guidance to the exact meaning of the alternative φάτνη ; while the absence (according to the best documents) of the article with φάτνη leaves us at liberty to believe that the φάτνη was not connected with the xard- λυμα. At first sight the antithesis seems to require that the φάτνη should be a kind of room corresponding to the superior κατάλυμα, though of course the sentence may be elliptical and the manger may be fase out as the special feature in the corresponding room not itself mentioned.
But, if the κατάλυμα was anything like the modern khan, it was a rest-house like those exist- ing in the East, outside towns, as unfurnished pines of gratuitous lodgment during the night or strangers, and containing (as to the ruder sort) two contiguous portions not very distinetly divided —the one for the travellers, and the other for their animals; and (as to the better sort) a central (usually roofless) court, with cells for travellers opening out upon it, and, beyond these, just within the outside wall, stalled places for the beasts of burden. If this be so, then Joseph and Mary, finding the travellers’ portion full, probably abode in one of these stalled places, and the babe was laid either in the stall or in the manger be- longing to the stall. Or, as Tristram suggests (Land of Israel, p. 73), they took refuge in some oor cottage close by, similar to one wherein he fimself had seen a community of shelter for man and beast, the dwelling portion (to which, for one reason or another, Joseph and Mary were not invited) being an upper platform ascended by a few steps; and the lower portion being half granar half stable, and containing a long earthen trough which served for a manger. ‘Tristram’s sugges- tion has this additional element of probability, that, if the rest-house was full, the stalled places ἡ attached to it were likely to be full also.
The tradition that Jesus was born in a cave near Bethlehem is at least as early as the first decade of the 2nd cent., and is found in Justin (Trypho, 78), in the Arabie Gospel of the Infancy (c. 2, p. 181, Tisch.), in Origen (c. Ceds. i. 51),— who says that the cave and the manger were shown in his day,—in Epiphanius (Her. li. 9) and in Eusebius (Vita Constant. iii. 48, Dem. Ev. vii. 2). The cave as the place of birth is mentioned also in the Protevangel of James (c. 18), but in ὁ. 22 the swaddling and the ‘crib for oxen’ are referred to the time of the massacre of the Innocents, ard the crib (the Babe’s hiding-place) is not connected in any way with the cave, while neither here nor in the Gospel of the Infancy is the cave connected with an ‘inn.’ Eus. ii Epiphan. (see Nestle, Vite Prophetarum, p: 8) both affirm that the cave story appears in Luke, while Anastasius of Sinai (Vie dux, ec. 1, p. 6) assigns it to ‘unwritten tradition. Resch (Zexte, x. 3) sees in the nna