Who Were the Nativity Shepherds? Told by an Angel Near Bethlehem

The shepherds were men who kept sheep in the fields around Bethlehem, and on the night Jesus was born an angel of the Lord came to them with the news. Luke gives no names and no number, only “shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2:8). They were the first to be told.

God gave the news of his Son first to men at work through the night, before any king or ruler had heard it. King Herod learned of the child only later, from wise men who came to Jerusalem from the east (Matthew 2:1–3). The fields were in David’s own town, where David had kept his father’s sheep before he was king, and how that shepherd king’s story runs on to Christmas is told in why Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

Who told the shepherds that Jesus was born?

An angel told them, and then a multitude of angels praised God before them. “And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid” (Luke 2:9). Luke does not hide their fear, and the angel’s first words answer it before anything else: “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.”

Then comes the news itself, spoken to men in a field and meant for the whole world: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). The angel gives them something to look for, a newborn “wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger” (Luke 2:12). What that strange sign meant is told in why Jesus was born in a manger. And then the angel is not alone: “suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (Luke 2:13–14).

Luke never gives this angel’s name, though he has already named Gabriel twice, sent to the priest Zacharias in the Temple and to Mary in Nazareth (Luke 1:19, 26). In the field there is only “the angel of the Lord”, and then more angels than Luke numbers. A priest in the Temple and a virgin in Nazareth had each been visited by an angel with a name. Working men minding sheep heard from one without a name, and then from a whole host of them at once.

Who were shepherds in the time of Jesus?

Shepherds were ordinary working men, and Bethlehem was a village of farmers and shepherds in the hills south of Jerusalem, as how big Bethlehem was describes. Flocks grazed the slopes, and someone had to walk with them by day and stay with them by night. Moses had done that work, when he “kept the flock of Jethro his father in law” in the desert (Exodus 3:1), and David had done it in these same hills. When Jesus wanted his hearers to picture God’s love, he told them about a shepherd: “What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?” (Luke 15:4). Every man listening could see it.

Were shepherds looked down on?

Some Jewish teachers of the following centuries thought poorly of the trade. In the Mishnah, the collection of Jewish law that Rabbi Judah the Prince finished editing around the year 200, a teacher named Abba Gurion warns fathers: “One should not teach his son [to be] an ass-driver, camel-driver, waggoner, sailor, shepherd, or shopkeeper, because their profession is the profession of robbers” (Kiddushin 4:14). Those are hard words to hear about the work your father did, and the men in Bethlehem’s fields did that work every night.

The Babylonian Talmud keeps a teaching from the rabbis of that same early period, introduced with the words “A Tanna taught”: “They further added to the list, herdsmen, tax collectors and publicans” (Sanhedrin 25b). The list is of men who could not be witnesses in a court, and herdsmen were put on it because they let their animals graze on other people’s land. Even the rabbis who kept the rule drew its edges with care: the note in the Soncino translation says it “applies only to graziers of their own cattle, but not to hired herdsmen”, and the later rabbi Raba is remembered limiting it to shepherds in the land of Israel.

These words were written down two centuries and more after the birth of Jesus, and we cannot know how the people of Bethlehem thought of their own shepherds. Luke says nothing about their standing at all. What he does show is where God sent the news first, to a field at night and to the men keeping watch in it. Whatever anyone thought of the trade, heaven sang its first Christmas song to shepherds.

Were the shepherds of Bethlehem keeping the Temple’s lambs?

Perhaps, but no one can be sure, and the idea comes from a place name. When Rachel died on the road to Bethlehem, Jacob buried her there and moved on: “And Israel journeyed, and spread his tent beyond the tower of Edar” (Genesis 35:19–21). In Hebrew the name is Migdal Eder, “tower of the flock”, and the prophet Micah later used the same name: “And thou, O tower of the flock, the strong hold of the daughter of Zion, unto thee shall it come, even the first dominion” (Micah 4:8).

Christians came to link that tower with the shepherds of Luke. Writing in 404 of his friend Paula’s pilgrimage to Bethlehem, Jerome says she “went a short distance down the hill to the tower of Edar, that is ‘of the flock,’ near which Jacob fed his flocks, and where the shepherds keeping watch by night were privileged to hear the words” of the angels’ song. Then he adds: “While they were keeping their sheep they found the Lamb of God.”

In 1883 the scholar Alfred Edersheim offered a further idea. He read a ruling in the Mishnah, that animals found between Jerusalem and Migdal Eder were to be treated as sacrifices (Shekalim 7:4), and concluded that “the flocks, which pastured there, were destined for Temple-sacrifices.” It is his inference. The Mishnah does not say who owned the flocks, and Luke does not mention the Temple at all. If Edersheim was right, the men who raised lambs for the altar were the first to meet the Lamb who would take away the sins of the world.

What did the shepherds do after the angels left?

They went at once: as soon as the angels had gone back into heaven, “the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us” (Luke 2:15). “They came with haste,” Luke says, and they found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger (Luke 2:16).

Once they had seen him, they told everyone who would listen. “When they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds” (Luke 2:17–18). These men were the first to spread the news that Christ was born. Mary listened in a different way: she “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19).

And then the shepherds went back to work. Luke ends their part with a single sentence: “the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them” (Luke 2:20). They returned to the same fields and the same sheep. What had changed was the praise in their mouths.

How many shepherds were there, and were they out in winter?

Luke writes “shepherds”, more than one, and stops there, so a nativity scene may show two shepherds or twenty and be faithful to him either way. People often ask whether the men were out in the cold, and Luke leaves that open too, because he names no month. Some readers argue from the flocks in the field that Jesus was born in spring or summer, when sheep would be out at night, and Edersheim argued the other way, that the flocks near Migdal Eder lay out all year round. Whatever that night was like, someone had to sit up through it with the sheep, and that is where the angel found them.

Why did God tell the shepherds first?

Luke never says why, but the prophets had long spoken of the Lord himself as a shepherd, and Isaiah drew the gentlest picture of all: “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom” (Isaiah 40:11).

So when the promised Shepherd was born, it was fitting that the first to come to his manger were shepherds too. They knew what that word meant, and the angel sent them to a child who would say, “I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep” (John 10:11).

Their flocks are long gone, and the Shepherd they found is still with us. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,” the psalm sings (Psalm 23:1), and we pray it in the same fields of ordinary life where the news first came: at our work, through our nights, in the places no one else thinks important. He still comes looking for us there. Peter wrote it to Christians who had never seen Bethlehem: “For ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls” (1 Peter 2:25).

Related reading

• Where is the Christmas story in the Bible?
• Why was Jesus born in Bethlehem?
• Why was Jesus born in a manger?
• How big was Bethlehem when Jesus was born?
• The shepherd in the Bible
• Psalm 23