Flooding certain portions of my social media right now is a text post about the "real" story behind the swaddling cloths Jesus was wrapped in after birth. Ignoring the linking to specific scripture, the copypasta reads:
In the Middle East, people traveling long distances were often met with many hardships and trials on their journeys. In the event of a death in travel, the body could not continue to be transported for many days. For that reason, travelers wrapped a thin, gauzelike cloth around their waist many times. If someone died on the journey, the others would use this cloth, referred to as "swaddling clothes" to wrap the body in before burying them.
Originally I thought this just another inspirational 100% BS chain email type of thing, but some bored Googling revealed it comes word for word from A Theological Study of The Book of Romans by Arch Bishop D.A. Miller. Which sounds somewhat official until you realize there are no citations, no references, and he seems to be the founder of his own ministry where he assigns these books.
I'm not really interested in the religious gloss, but I am curious as to whether there is any truth to the above quote. Was there a history of wearing thin fabric when traveling in case of death? Is this something travelers to Bethlehem ~2000 years ago would have done?
I can’t directly answer your question about whether Ancient Near-Easterns wore ‘thin gauze like fabric’, but I will answer a tangential question, and that is whether such cloths are in view in Luke 2:7 where it refers to the infant Jesus being ‘wrapped in cloths’. The verb here is ἐσπαργάνωσεν which is a verbal form derived from a noun, σπαργανον, which refers to bands used to wrap up children. The usage in non-biblical literature generally refers to children, not to adults. So, whatever anyone digs up about your mysterious meme, the cloths in view in the biblical account of Jesus’ infancy are not idiosyncratic, but refer to the commonplace wrapping up of a child in bands or cloths.
It is highly unlikely that travellers wore "just in case" shrouds around their waist. They did quite likely wear a length of fabric as a loincloth, but I don't think that that is what the poster was going for.
The practice of "swaddling clothes," or using bands of fabric to restrict an infant's movement is found across multiple cultures, and persisted beyond the ancient middle east. We have evidence of swaddling in pre-roman times, like this Etruscan votive sculpture. Swaddling practice was also found in Jewish culture long before Jesus, and is mentioned in the Old Testament (Ezekial 16, Lamentations 22).
I have no evidence and have never seen a reference to this shroud-belt practice in any costume text. There is, perhaps, a certain irony in that both infants and corpses were wound in linen, but I'm pretty sure this is hokum.
"Originally I thought this just another inspirational 100% BS chain email type of thing, but some bored Googling revealed it comes word for word from A Theological Study of The Book of Romans by Arch Bishop D.A. Miller. Which sounds somewhat official until you realize there are no citations, no references, and he seems to be the founder of his own ministry where he assigns these books."
i died
Anyhow, I heard a similar theory concerning the large turbans of the Ottoman Sultans, which was said to be the wrap for their body at death. By wearing it, the Sultan was to be reminded that death could come at any time, and thus be dutiful to God and affairs of state. So we are both looking for answers on this Middle Eastern phenomenon :D