Beit Sahour, Palestine: The Shepherds' Fields and a Living West Bank Town

Beit Sahour, Palestine (بيت ساحور) sits on a limestone ridge immediately east of Bethlehem, and its name is built from the Arabic for house and sahour, the hour of keeping watch through the night. Shepherds keeping exactly that watch over their flocks are, by a tradition already old when the first churches rose here in the fourth century, the ones Christian scripture says heard the news of a birth in the neighboring town. It is one of the oldest watched places in Palestine, and it still belongs to the people who have kept it, the same roots carried in FALASTIN's Palestinian Clothing collection.

Origins and the Name Beit Sahour

Beit Sahour lies about 2 km east of Bethlehem's center and roughly 9 km southeast of Jerusalem's Old City, close enough that the two towns have effectively grown into each other. Archaeological traces in the surrounding hills go back to antiquity, though, as with much of this stretch of the West Bank, no single excavation has pinned down exactly when the settlement itself began.

What the name has always pinned down is the place's purpose. Writers have rendered it as "House of the Night Watch" or "House of Vigilance," a description of shepherds out on the slopes after dark rather than a reference to any building. The hills below the town are still called the Shepherds' Fields for the same reason.

The Shepherds' Field: Two Rival Sites

Christian tradition holds that it was on these slopes that shepherds, watching their flocks at night, were the first to hear that a child had been born in nearby Bethlehem. Two separate sites on the edge of town compete for the honor of marking the exact spot, and both have been treated as sacred ground since the earliest centuries of the Church.

The Catholic site, run by the Franciscans, sits at a ruin called in Arabic Khirbet Siyar al-Ghanam, the "Ruins of the Sheepfold." The Franciscans bought the land in the years 1889 to 1906 under Ottoman rule, and later excavations by the archaeologist Virgilio Corbo uncovered caves showing habitation from the Herodian and Roman periods, ancient oil presses, and the remains of a monastery first noted in an 1858 survey. The chapel standing there today, designed by the architect Antonio Barluzzi and completed in 1953, is built with five apses shaped to echo a nomad's tent rather than a conventional church nave.

A short walk away stands the second site, the Greek Orthodox Monastery of the Shepherds, known in Arabic as Deir el-Rawat, marking the same tradition for the Orthodox community. Neither site has ever displaced the other. Pilgrims visit both, and the town has simply carried two parallel claims to the same story for longer than either denomination's current building has stood.

Why Did Beit Sahour, Palestine, Refuse to Pay Taxes?

The quietest-looking town in the Bethlehem area produced one of the most organized acts of civil resistance of the First Intifada. By 1989, nearly every resident of Beit Sahour had stopped paying income tax and VAT to the Israeli Civil Administration, under the plain slogan "no taxation without representation."

Israel's response was total. On 20 September 1989, the army declared Beit Sahour a closed military zone, cut its telephone lines, and placed the town under curfew. Soldiers went door to door with tax collectors and removal vans, seizing more than a million and a half dollars worth of furniture, machinery, appliances, vehicles, clothing and toys in place of unpaid bills, and roughly 40 local merchants were arrested.

A delegation of Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian bishops trying to bring food into the besieged town was turned away at the roadblocks. The blockade held for 42 days before it was lifted on 31 October 1989, by which point the maxim Beit Sahour had chosen for itself had already spread through the rest of the West Bank as shorthand for what a town could refuse, even unarmed, the same spirit of holding on carried today in the Palestinian key, a symbol of home, resistance and return.

A Living West Bank Town Today

Beit Sahour counted 13,281 residents in the 2017 census, roughly 80% Christian, most of them Greek Orthodox, and 20% Muslim, making it one of the largest Christian communities left in the Palestinian Territories alongside Bethlehem and Beit Jala. It is governed as a Municipality Type B under the Palestinian National Authority.

Much of the town's livelihood still runs through the pilgrim trade that grew up around its two Shepherds' Field sites: guesthouses, tour groups, and the olive wood workshops that have carved rosaries, nativity scenes and crosses here for generations, a craft covered in full in FALASTIN's piece on Bethlehem and Beit Sahour's olive wood carving tradition. Agriculture and work across the nearby boundary with Israel fill in the rest.

Lesser-Known Facts About Beit Sahour

• The name Beit Sahour comes from the Arabic for "house" and sahour, the hour of keeping watch through the night, a description of the shepherds the town's own fields are named for.
• Two separate pilgrimage sites, one Catholic at Khirbet Siyar al-Ghanam and one Greek Orthodox at Deir el-Rawat, both mark the same Shepherds' Field tradition within walking distance of each other.
• Excavations at the Catholic site found caves inhabited during the Herodian and Roman periods, centuries before the fourth-century monastery whose remains were first surveyed in 1858.
• The 1989 tax strike held for 42 days under full military blockade, and the military seized more than a million and a half dollars worth of property from a town that never took up arms.
• At roughly 80% Christian, Beit Sahour is one of the largest Christian towns remaining in the Palestinian Territories, alongside Bethlehem and neighboring Beit Jala.

A Place That Kept Watching

Beit Sahour's whole history is a variation on its own name: a place that watches and keeps watching, whether over a flock on a hillside two thousand years ago or over its own households during a 42-day siege in 1989. Both stories are still standing within a few minutes' walk of each other, in the stone chapels on the edge of town and in the quarters mapped street by street in 1944.

The same pattern of a small Palestinian town holding its ground shows up a short distance away in Al-Eizariya, the biblical village of Bethany, where a different scripture story has anchored a Palestinian community to the same hills for just as long.

At FALASTIN, we aim to keep that heritage alive through our Palestinian Clothing collection.

100% of profits from FALASTIN are donated to the United Palestinian Appeal.

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