Some scholars believe that Amos's message was recorded after he delivered it to the Northern Kingdom, upon returning to his southern homeland of Tekoa, a town eight kilometres south of Bethlehem.

The Hebrew Bible identifies Bethlehem as the city David was from and the location where he was crowned as the king of Israel.

The city was sacked by the Samaritans in 529, but rebuilt by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I. Bethlehem was conquered by the Arab Caliphate of ' Umar ibn al-Khattāb in 637, who guaranteed safety for the city's religious shrines.

Archaeological confirmation of Bethlehem as an Israelite city was uncovered in 2012 at the archaeological dig at the City of David in the form of a bulla ( seal impression in dried clay ) in ancient Hebrew script that reads " From the town of Bethlehem to the King ," indicating that it was used to seal the string closing a shipment of grain, wine, or other goods sent as a tax payment in the 8th or 7th century BCE.

Biblical tradition holds that Bethlehem is the birthplace of David, the second king of Israel, and the place where he was anointed king by Samuel.

It was from the well of Bethlehem that three of his warriors brought him water when he was hiding in the cave of Adullam.

A church was erected in 326, when Helena, the mother of the first Byzantine emperor, Constantine, visited Bethlehem.

During the Samaritan revolt of 529, Bethlehem was sacked and its walls and the Church of the Nativity destroyed, but they were rebuilt on the orders of the Emperor Justinian I.

In 1099, Bethlehem was captured by the Crusaders, who fortified it and built a new monastery and cloister on the north side of the Church of the Nativity.

On Christmas Day 1100, Baldwin I, first king of the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem, was crowned in Bethlehem, and that year a Latin episcopate was also established in the town.

However, Bethlehem suffered from the loss of the pilgrim trade, as there was a sharp decrease of European pilgrims.

Bethlehem — along with Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Sidon — was briefly ceded to the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem by a treaty between Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and Ayyubid Sultan al-Kamil in 1229, in return for a ten-year truce between the Ayyubids and the Crusaders.

The treaty expired in 1239, and Bethlehem was recaptured by the Muslims in 1244.

By the end of the 16th century, Bethlehem had become one of the largest villages in the District of Jerusalem, and was subdivided into seven quarters.

In the United Nations General Assembly's 1947 resolution to partition Palestine, Bethlehem was included in the special international enclave of Jerusalem to be administered by the United Nations.

Jordan retained control of the city until the Six-Day War in 1967, when Bethlehem was occupied by Israel, along with the rest of the West Bank.

During the time of the Judges when there was a famine, an Israelite family from Bethlehem — Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their sons Mahlon and Chilion — emigrate to the nearby country of Moab.

Bethlehem expanded during World War II as a result of the Emergency Shipbuilding program administered under the United States Maritime Commission.

Since 1995, Bethlehem has been governed by the Palestinian National Authority.

In 614, the Persian Sassanid Empire, supported by Jewish rebels, invaded Palestina Prima and captured Bethlehem.

Many refugees from areas captured by Israeli forces in 1947 – 48 fled to the Bethlehem area, primarily settling in the what became the official refugee camps of ' Azza ( Beit Jibrin ) and ' Aida in the north and Dheisheh in the south.

However, Bethlehem is affected also by annual waves of hot, dry, sandy and dust Khamaseen winds from the Arabian Desert, during April, May and mid-June.

Though Naomi was a destitute widow at the time she re-entered Bethlehem, yet by the end of the narrative, we see her embracing her grandson as her foster-child.

Socrates Scholasticus ( born c. 380 ), in his Ecclesiastical History, gives a full description of the discovery ( that was repeated later by Sozomen and by Theodoret ) which emphasizes the role played in the excavations and construction by Helena ; just as the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem ( also founded by Constantine and Helena ) commemorated the birth of Jesus, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre would commemorate his death and resurrection.

" The early Church believed that " the life of David the life of Christ ; Bethlehem is the birthplace of both ; the shepherd life of David points out Christ, the Good Shepherd ; the five stones chosen to slay Goliath are typical of the five wounds ; the betrayal by his trusted counsellor, Achitophel, and the passage over the Cedron remind us of Christ's Sacred Passion.

Officials on the third day of the Fatah convention in Bethlehem unanimously accepted the proposal put forth by the chairman of the Araft Institute stating that Israel had been behind the " assassination " of the late Palestinian Authority Chairman and affirmed Fatah's request for international aid to probe the issue.

The pilgrims, joined by Bishop Paulinus of Antioch, visited Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and the holy places of Galilee, and then went to Egypt, the home of the great heroes of the ascetic life.

Late in the summer of 388 he was back in Israel, and spent the remainder of his life in a hermit's cell near Bethlehem, surrounded by a few friends, both men and women ( including Paula and Eustochium ), to whom he acted as priestly guide and teacher.

Daimbert compromised by crowning Baldwin in Bethlehem rather than Jerusalem, but the path for a secular state had been laid.

" For instance, Jesus ' escape from the slaughter by Herod in Bethlehem is compared to Moses ' escape from Pharaoh's designs to kill Hebrew infants.

The British authorities sent them to Sarona, Bethlehem ( Galilee ), Waldheim ( today's Allonei Abba ) and Wilhelma.

With no fresh creative inspiration, he worked in the British Museum on transcriptions of music by the English composer Cipriani Potter, and made a solo version of " Bethlehem Down " with organ accompaniment.

The British General bands format is also used by the Liberty High School Grenadier Band in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania since 1967, adapted and made suitable for the American high school marching bands with the addition of Sousaphones, Mellophones, Baritone horns and fewer trumpets.

It suggested the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with the British mandate governing over Nazareth, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem along with a corridor from Jerusalem to the coast.

In the 1920s Granqvist arrived at the village of Artas, just outside Bethlehem in the then British Mandate of Palestine as part of her research on the women of the Old Testament.

In 1948, the Arab Legion, trained and led by British officers, conquered the Old City of Jerusalem and took control of territory on the western side of the Jordan River, including the cities of Jericho, Bethlehem, Hebron and Nablus.

The Alameda yard was closed by Bethlehem Steel in the early 1970s, while the San Francisco facility was sold to British Aerospace in the mid 1990s and survives as BAE Systems San Francisco Ship Repair.

" At the start of World War II colonists with German citizenship were rounded up by the British and sent, together with Italian and Hungarian enemy aliens, to internment camps in Waldheim and Bethlehem of Galilee.

Today, the majority of Palestinian Christians live outside of the former Mandate Palestine because of emigration in response to the 1948 War, and the Six-Day War in 1967, occupation by Jordan, Egypt, and most recently Israel, with 78 % of Christians blaming the ongoing exodus of Christians from Bethlehem on the Israeli occupation and travel restrictions on the area ..

In 1187, Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt and Syria who led the Muslim Ayyubids, captured Bethlehem from the Crusaders.

The Ottoman tax record and census from 1596 indicates that Bethlehem had a population of 1, 435, making it the 13th largest village in Palestine at the time.

A majority of the forty-odd Israeli settlements surrounding Bethlehem is built on land confiscated from Christian, not Muslim, Palestinians.

On December 21, 1995, Israeli troops withdrew from Bethlehem, and three days later the city came under the complete administration and military control of the Palestinian National Authority in conformance with the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1995.

* The promised ruler from Bethlehem ( 5: 1 – 14 ): This passage is usually dated to the exile.

Although chapters 4: 9-10 have said that there is " no king in Zion ", these chapters predict a new military ruler will emerge from Bethlehem, the traditional home of the Davidic monarchy, to restore the security of Israel.

File: Lovers 9000BC british museum. jpg | Room 2-Ain Sakhri lovers, from the cave of Ain Sakhri, near Bethlehem, 11, 000 years old ( oldest known representation of two people engaged in sexual intercourse )

An angel or star may be placed at the top of the tree, to represent the host of angels or the Star of Bethlehem from the Nativity.

The prophet Samuel seeks a new king from the sons of Jesse of Bethlehem:

The Sixth General Assembly of the Fatah Movement, nearly 16 years after the Oslo Conference and 20 years since the last Fatah convention began on 4 August 2009, in Bethlehem, West Bank after being repeatedly postponed over conflicts ranging from who would be represented, to what venue would be acceptable.

Some 400 Fatah members from the Gaza Strip were unable to attend the conference in Bethlehem after Hamas barred them from traveling to the West Bank.

* 1229 – The Sixth Crusade: Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor signs a ten-year truce with al-Kamil, regaining Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem with neither military engagements nor support from the papacy.

Important also is De viris illustribus, written at Bethlehem in 392, the title and arrangement of which are borrowed from Suetonius.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Joseph and Mary resettled in Nazareth after returning from the flight from Bethlehem to Egypt.