Man, Men and Massacre

Massacre of the Innocents
The Massacre of the Innocents
is an episode of infanticide by the King of Judea,
Herod the Great, that appears in the Gospel of Matthew 2:16-18.
The author,
traditionally Matthew the Evangelist,
reports that Herod ordered the execution of all young male children in the village of Bethlehem,
so as to avoid the loss of his throne to a newborn King of the Jews whose birth had been announced to him by the Magi.
In typically Matthean style the incident is seen as the fulfillment of passages in the Old Testament read as prophecies.
The infants, known in the Church as the Holy Innocents, have been claimed as the
first Christian martyrs.
Estimates put their number in the low dozens.
There is dispute over whether the story is historical.
In Matthew's account, magi from the east follow a star to Judea in search of the newborn king of the Jews.
They are directed to Bethlehem, and Herod asks them to let him know who this king is when they find him.
They find Jesus and honor him, but an angel tells them not to alert Herod, and they return home by another way.
The Massacre of the Innocents is at Matthew 2:16-18, although the preceding verses form the context:
When [the Magi] had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.
Get up,
he said, take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt.
Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.
So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod.
And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet:
"Out of Egypt I called my son."
When Herod realised that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.
Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
"A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more."
Matthew presents the Massacre of the Innocents as the fulfillment of a passage in Jeremiah.
Raymond Brown sees the story as patterned on the Exodus story of the killing of the
Hebrew firstborn
by
Pharaoh and the birth of Moses.