Friendly Beasts, The

DESCRIPTION: English translation: "Jesus our brother kind and good Was humbly born in a stable rude, And the friendly beasts around him stood." Each beast and bird recalls how it cared for Jesus at the time of his birth
AUTHOR: English translation by Robert Davis (source: hymnary.org)
EARLIEST DATE: before 1930 (date of translation; the date of the Latin/French original is uncertain)
KEYWORDS: animal Jesus religious
FOUND IN:
RECORDINGS:
Megan MacArthur, Daniel MacArthur, "The Friendly Beasts" (Piotr-Archive #760, recorded 12/19/2023)
NOTES [339 words]: Almost all sources call this "traditional," but it is assuredly not traditional in English unless recent recordings have made it so. Robert Davis is responsible for putting it into English, from an old French text; the melody is Latin, "Orientis Partibus."
The claim that it is based on the Gospels accounts is also exaggerated at best. Luke 2:7, 2:12, 2:16 say that Jesus was laid in a manger after he was born, and 2:7 says there was no room for Mary and Joseph at the inn of Bethlehem.
(At least, the English versions call it an inn; but "inn" is a mistranslation -- so much so that Fitzmyer, p. 408, renders "lodge." The Greek word in Luke 2;7 is καταλυματα, kataluma, which occurs in the New Testament only in Mark 14:14, Luke 2:7, 22:11. The uses in Mark 14:14 and Luke 22:11 both refer to the room in which the Last Supper took place, and bear the sense "guest room" or perhaps "dining room." There is a different Greek word which was properly used for an "inn.")
The tradition that this manger was in a stable, and that there were animals there, obviously makes sense, but the account in Luke does not mention animals, or even a stable (and the account in the Gospel of Matthew has none of this, and indeed strongly contradicts it, because it makes Joseph a native of Bethlehem, not Nazareth). Luke's account never mentions ox or ass, the animals most typically said to have been present at the manger. Indeed, Langland's Piers Plowman denied that Jesus was born in a stable, placing it instead in the best private home in Bethlehem. ("...in a burgeis place, of Bethlem the best, B text, Passus XII, line 147; Langland/Schmidt, p. 196).
Pretty as the folklore about the animals is, it is not Biblical.
The best guess is that the ox and the ass are from Isaiah 1:3 (Fitzmyer, p. 408), which the King James Bible translates, "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider." Plus Saint Francis of Assisi did a lot to promote the idea of animals at the nativity. - RBW
Bibliography Last updated in version 7.2
File: DPio760

Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List

Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography

The Ballad Index Copyright 2026 by Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle.