'And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord
appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young
child and His mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until
I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy
Him. 14. When he arose, he took the young child and His mother by
night, and departed into Egypt; 15. And was there until the death
of Herod; that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord
by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called My son. 16. Then
Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was
exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that
were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years
old and under, according to the time which he had diligently
enquired of the wise men. 17. Then was fulfilled that which was
spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying, 18. In Rama was there a voice
heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping
for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.
19. But when Herod was dead, behold, an angel of the Lord appeareth
to a dream to Joseph in Egypt, 20. Saying, Arise, and take the
young child and His mother, and go into the land of Israel; for
they are dead which sought the young child's life. 21. And he
arose, and took the young child and His mother, and came into the
land of Israel. 22. But when he heard that Archelaus did reign in
Judæa in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither;
notwithstanding, being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside
into the parts of Galilee: 23. And he came and dwelt in a city
called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the
prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.'--MATT. ii. 13-23.
Delitzsch, in his _New Investigations into the Origin and Plan of the
Canonical Gospels_, tries to show that Matthew is constructed on the
plan of the Pentateuch. The analogy is somewhat strained, but there are
some striking points of correspondence. He regards Matthew i. to ii. 15
as answering to Genesis. It begins with the 'genesis of Jesus,' and, as
the Old Testament book ends with the migration of Israel to Egypt, so
this section of the Gospel ends with the flight of the Holy Family to
the same land. The section from ii. 15 to the end of the Sermon on the
Mount answers to Exodus, and here the parallels are striking. The murder
of the innocents at Bethlehem by Herod answers to Pharaoh's slaughter of
Hebrew children; the Exodus, to the return to Nazareth; the call of
Moses at the bush, to the baptism of Jesus; the forty years in the
wilderness, to the forty days' desert hunger and temptation; and the
giving of the law from Sinai, to the Sermon on the Mount, which contains
the new law for the kingdom of God. Without supposing that the
evangelist moulded his Gospel on the plan of the Pentateuch, we cannot
but see that there is a real parallel between the beginnings of the
national life of Israel and the commencement of the life of Christ. Our
present text brings this parallel into great prominence. It is divided
into three sections, each of which has for its centre an Old Testament
prophecy.
I. We have first the flight into Egypt and the prophecy fulfilled
therein. The appearance of the angel seems to have followed immediately
on the departure of the Magi. They were succeeded by a loftier visitor
from a more distant land, coming to lay richer gifts and a more absolute
homage at the infant's feet. The angel of the Lord, who had already
eased Joseph's honest and troubled heart by disclosing the secret of
Mary's child, comes again. To Mary he had appeared waking; her meek eyes
could look on him, and her obedient ears hear his voice. But Joseph, who
stood on a lower spiritual level, needed the lower form of revelation by
dream, which betokens less susceptibility in the recipient and less
importance in the communication. It is the only form appropriate to his
power of receiving, and four times it is mentioned as granted to him.
The warning to the wise men was also conveyed in a dream. We can
scarcely help recalling the similar prominence of dreams in the history
of the earlier Joseph, whose life was moulded in order to bring Israel
into Egypt.
The angel speaks of 'the young child and His mother,' reversing the
order of nature, as if he bowed before the infant, 'Lord of men as well
as angels,' and would deepen the lesson which so many signs gathering
round the cradle were teaching the silent Joseph,--that Mary and he were
but humble ministers of the child's. The partial instruction given, and
the darkness left lying over the future, are in accordance with the
methods of God's leading, which always gives light enough for the next
duty, and never for the one after that. The prompt and precise obedience
of Joseph to the heavenly vision is emphatically expressed by the verbal
repetition of the command in the account of its fulfilment. There was no
hesitation, no reluctance, no delay. On the very night, as it appears,
of the dream, he rose up; the simple preparations were quickly made; the
wise men's gifts would help to sustain their modest wants, and before
the day broke they were on their road. How strangely blended in our
Lord's life, from the very dawning, are dignity and lowliness, glory and
reproach! How soon His brows are crowned with thorns! The adoration of
the Magi witnesses to Him as the King of Israel and the hope of the
world. The flight of which that adoration was the direct cause witnesses
no less clearly to Him as despised and rejected, tasting sorrow in His
earliest food, and not having where to lay His head.
But the most important part of the story is the connection which Matthew
discerns between it and Hosea's words. In their original place they are
not a prophecy at all, but simply a part of a tender historical _résumé_
of God's dealings with Israel, by which the prophet would touch his
contemporaries' hearts into penitence and trust. How, then, is the
evangelist justified in regarding them as prophetic, and in looking on
Christ's flight as their fulfilment? The answer is to be found in that
analogy between the national and the personal Israel which runs through
all the Old Testament, and reaches its greatest clearness in the second
part of Isaiah's prophecies. Jesus Christ was what Israel was destined
and failed to be, the true Servant of God, His Anointed, His Son, the
medium of conveying His name to the world. The ideal of the nation was
realised in Him. His brief stay in Egypt served the very same purpose in
His life which their four hundred years there did in theirs,--it
sheltered Him from enemies, and gave Him room to grow. Just as the
infant nation was unawares fostered in the very lap of the country which
was the symbol of the world hostile to God, so the infant Christ was
guarded and grew there. The prophecy is a prophecy just because it is
history; for the history was all a shadow of the future, and He is the
true Israel and the Son of God. It would have been fulfilled quite as
really, that is to say, the parallel between Christ and the nation would
have been as fully carried out, if His place of refuge had been in some
other land; but the precise outward identity helps to point the parallel
to unobservant eyes. The great truth taught by it of the typical
relation between the nation and the Person is the key to large regions
of Old Testament history and prophecy. Rightly, therefore, does Matthew
call our attention to this pregnant fact, and bid us see in the divine
selection of the place where the young life of God manifest in the flesh
was sheltered, a fulfilment of prophecy. Egypt was the natural asylum of
every fugitive from Palestine, but a deeper reason bent the steps of the
Holy Family to the shelter of its palms and temples.
II. The slaughter of the innocents, and the prophecy fulfilled
therein.--Herod's fierce rage, enflamed by the dim suspicion that these
wily Easterns have gone away laughing in their sleeves at having tricked
him, and by the dread that they may be stirring up armed defenders of
the infant King, is in full accord with all that we know of him. The
critics who find the story of the massacre 'unhistorical,' because
Josephus does not mention it, must surely be very anxious to discredit
the evangelist, and very hard pressed for grounds to do so, or they
would not commit themselves to the extraordinary assumption that nothing
is to be believed outside of the pages of Josephus. A splash or two of
'blood of poor innocents,' more or less, found on the Idumean tyrant's
bloody skirts, could be of little consequence in the eyes of those who
knew what a long saturnalia of horrors his reign had been; and the
number of the infants under two years old in such a tiny place as
Bethlehem would be small, so that their feeble wail might well fail to
reach the ears even of contemporaries. But there is no reason for
questioning the simple truth of a story so like the frantic cruelty and
sleepless suspicion of the grey-headed tyrant, who was stirred to more
ferocity as the shades of death gathered about him, and power slipped
from his rotting hands. Of all the tragic pictures which Scripture gives
of a godless old age, burning with unquenchable hatred to goodness and
condemned to failure in all its antagonism, none is touched with more
lurid hues than this. What a contrast between the king _de jure_, the
cradled infant; and the king _de facto_, going down to his loathsome
death, which all but he longed for! He may well stand as a symbol of the
futility of all opposition to Christ the King.
The fate of these few infants is a strange one. In their brief lives
they have won immortal fame. They died for the Christ whom they never
knew. These lambs were slain for the sake of the Lamb who lived while
'Little flowers of martyrdom,
Roses by the whirlwind shorn,'
That quotation, from Jeremiah xxxi. 16, requires a brief consideration.
The original is still less a prophecy than was the passage in Hosea. It
is a highly imaginative and grandly weird personification of the mighty
mother of three of the tribes, stirring in her tomb, and lifting up the
shrill lamentation of Eastern grief over her children carried away to
captivity. That hopeless wail from the grave by Bethlehem is heard as
far north as Ramah, beyond Jerusalem. Once again, says Matthew, the
same grief might have been imaginatively heard from the long-silent tomb
so near the scene of this pitiful tragedy. And the second ancestral
weeping was fuller of woe than the bitterness of that first lament; for
this bewailed the actual slaughter of innocents, and wept the miseries
that so soon gathered round the coming of the King, so long waited for.
Seeing that the prophet's words do not describe a fact, but are a
poetical personification to convey simply the idea of calamity, which
might make the dead mother weep, the word 'fulfilled' can obviously be
applied to them only in a modified and somewhat elastic sense, and is
sufficiently defended if we recognise in the slaughter of these children
a woe which, though small in itself, yet, when considered in reference
to its inflicter, a usurping king of the Jews, and in reference to its
occasion, the desire to slay the God-sent King, and in reference to its
innocent victims, and in reference to its place as first of the tragic
series of martyrdoms for Messiah, was heavy with a sorer burden of
national disaster, when seen by eyes made wise by death, than even the
captivity which seemed to falsify the promises of God and the hopes of a
thousand years.
III. The return to Nazareth, and the prophecy fulfilled therein.--They
who patiently wait for guidance, and move not till the cloud moves, are
never disappointed, nor left undirected. Joseph is a pattern of
self-abnegating submission, and an example of its rewards. The angel
ever comes again to those who have once obeyed him and continue to wait.
This third appearance is described in the same words as the former. His
coming was the appearance of a familiar presence His command begins by a
verbal repetition of the former summons, 'Arise and take the young
child and His mother, and go,' and then passes to a singular allusion to
that command to Moses which was the first step towards the former
calling of God's son--the nation--out of Egypt. 'All the men are dead
which sought thy life,' was the encouragement to Moses to go back. 'They
are dead that sought the young child's life,' is the encouragement to
Joseph. It sums up in one sentence the failure of the first attempt, and
is like an epitaph cut on a tombstone for a man yet living,--a prophecy
of the end of all succeeding efforts to crush Christ and thwart His
work. 'The dreaded infant's hand' is mightier than all mailed fists, or
fingers that hold a pen. Christ lives and grows; Herod rots and dies.
Apparently Joseph's intention was to return to Bethlehem. He may have
thought that Nazareth would scarcely satisfy the angel's injunction to
go to the 'Land of Israel,' or that David's city was the right home for
David's heir. At all events, his perplexity appeals to Heaven for
direction; and, for the fourth time, his course is marked for him by a
dream, whether through the instrumentality of the angel who knew the way
to his couch so well, we are not told, Archelaus, Herod's son, who had
received Judæa on the partition at his father's death, was a smaller
Herod, as cruel and less able. There was more security in the obscurity
of Nazareth, under the less sanguinary sway of Antipas, whose share of
his father's vices was his lust, rather than his ferocity. So, after so
many wanderings, and with such strange new experience and thoughts, the
silent, steadfast Joseph and the meek mother bring back their mysterious
charge and secret to the humble old home. Matthew does not seem to have
known that it had formerly been their home, but his account is no
contradiction of Luke's.
Again he is reminded of a prophecy, or perhaps, rather, of many
prophecies, for he uses the plural 'prophets,' as if he were summing up
the tenor of more than one utterance. The words which he gives are not
found in any prophet. But we know that to call a man 'a Nazarene' was
the same thing as to call him lowly and despised. The scoff of the
Pharisee to Nicodemus's timid appeal on Christ's behalf, and the
guileless Nathaniel's quest ion, show that. The fact that Christ by His
residence in Nazareth became known as the 'Nazarene,' and so shared in
the contempt attaching to all Galileans, and especially to the
inhabitants of that village, is a kind of concentration of all the
obscurity and ignominy of His lot. The name was nailed over His head on
the cross as a scornful _reductio ad absurdum_ of His claims to be King
of Israel This explanation of the evangelist's meaning does not exclude
a reference in his mind to the prophecy in Isaiah xi. 1, where Messiah
is called 'a branch' or more properly, 'a shoot' for which the Hebrew
word is _netzer_. The name Nazareth is probably etymologically connected
with that word, and may have been given to the little village
contemptuously to express its insignificance. The meaning of the
prophecy is that the offspring of David, who should come when the
Davidic house was in the lowest depths of obscurity, like a tree of
which only the stump is left, should not appear in royal pomp, or in a
lofty condition, but as insignificant, feeble, and of no account. Such
prophecy was fulfilled in the very fact that He was all His life known
as 'of Nazareth' and the verbal assonance between that name, 'the shoot'
and the word 'Nazarene' is a finger-post pointing to the meaning of the
place of abode chosen for Him. The mere fact of residence there, and the
consequent contempt, do not exhaust the prophecies to which reference is
made. These might have been fulfilled without such a literal and
external fulfilment. But it serves, like the literal riding upon an ass,
and many other instances in Christ's life, to lead dull apprehensions to
perceive more plainly that He is the theme of all prophecy, and that in
His life the trivial is significant and nothing is accidental.