Swaddling Clothes

Occurrences in Scripture

The Korean term gangbo is a Sino-Korean word for the cloth or wrap used to bundle a newborn infant. In the New Korean Revised Version, the word appears in the following passages:

• Luke 2:7: Mary gives birth to her firstborn son and "wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger." The verse adds that there was no room for them in the inn.
• Luke 2:12: An angel tells the shepherds in the fields near Bethlehem, "And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger."
• Ezekiel 16:4: God likens Jerusalem to an abandoned newborn and lists what was not done for it: its navel cord was not cut, it was not washed in water, it was not salted, and it was not swaddled.
• Job 38:9: Describing the creation of the sea, God speaks of the time "when I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddlingband for it."

Some other translations, such as the New Korean Standard Version, render the same passages with podaegi, the everyday Korean word for a baby wrap.

Background

In Luke the underlying Greek is the verb sparganoō, meaning "to wrap in cloths." Ezekiel 16:4 likewise uses a Hebrew verb meaning "to wrap." Korean translations render these verbs as "to wrap in gangbo." In the ancient Near East, it is believed to have been common practice to bind newborns snugly in long strips of cloth.

In Ezekiel 16:4, swaddling appears alongside washing and salting as part of the basic care a newborn was expected to receive; an infant who had not been swaddled was an abandoned child. In the Old Testament Apocrypha, Wisdom of Solomon 7 contains a passage in which Solomon says that he too was nursed in swaddling clothes, conveying that king and commoner alike begin life in the same way.

Significance in the Broader Biblical Context

In Luke, the swaddling clothes show that the birth of Jesus was no different from the birth of any ordinary person. Like any other infant, Jesus was born into the care of his parents. Christian tradition has read this scene as a concrete expression of the Incarnation, in which the Son of God became truly human.

The sign the angel announced was not the swaddling clothes alone but the combination of a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. Swaddling an infant was commonplace, but laying that infant in a feeding trough for livestock was unusual. Through this contrast, Luke shows that the Messiah was born in lowly and poor circumstances.

Interpretations and Debates

• Some interpreters have long connected the swaddling clothes at Jesus' birth with the linen in which his body was wrapped for burial (Luke 23:53), reading the birth as already foreshadowing his death. The text itself does not explicitly link the two.
• Sermons occasionally repeat stories that the swaddling clothes were cloths the shepherds of Bethlehem used to wrap lambs destined for sacrifice, or that Mary made them by tearing her own garments. These details do not appear in the biblical text and should be recognized as extrabiblical embellishments.

In the Korean Church

In Christmas sermons, the swaddling clothes and the manger are frequently cited to illustrate the Lord's humbling of himself. Sunday school Christmas pageants also commonly reenact the scene by laying a cloth-wrapped doll in a manger.