The astrologer-priests who came from the east looking for a newborn king. The Magi proper were a hereditary PRIESTLY CASTE of the Medes and Persians — keepers of ritual, interpreters of dreams, readers of the sky; Herodotus describes them. The Greek translations of Daniel use the same word for one of the classes of Babylonian diviners a king summons, the guild over which Daniel was set as 'chief prefect over all the wise men of Babylon' (Daniel 2:48) — which is one sober reason a messianic expectation might have been known that far east at all. ⚠ Matthew says remarkably little about them: not how many, not their names, not that they were kings, not that they rode camels. THREE GIFTS became three givers; Psalm 72:10-11 and Isaiah 60:3-6, where kings bring gold and frankincense, turned the givers into kings; and the names Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar first surface in a Latin list of about the sixth century. What the text does say is that they were foreigners practising a trade Israel's law forbade (Deuteronomy 18:10-14), that they asked the right question, and that they were the only people in Jerusalem who acted on the answer.