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Jer 31:15 15 Thus saith the LORD; A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not. (KJV)
Matt 2:17-18 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. (KJV)
Answer for yourself: Is the Jer. 31:15 passage really a "Messianic prophecy" and was it fulfilled by Jesus?
Another supposedly New Testament fulfillment of a prophecy is the horrible story of Herod's murder of the little boys in Bethlehem. But we need not mourn these deaths. You will quickly see that the whole story, like that of the three wise men from the East, is just a fairy tale, and it takes place only because of a prophecy. Matthew writes: "Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: 'A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they were no more'" (Matt. 2:17-18; Jer. 31:15).
Answer for yourself: Is this truthfully a “fulfillment” of a prophecy of Jeremiah? No it is not a fulfillment for several reasons. Let us see why!
This is a prime example of a verse being taken out of context. The Story of Rachel weeping has to do wit the captive children of the tribes of the Jewish people in exile. It has nothing to do with Herod's supposed slaying of children. If we just read the next two verses look at what we find:
Thus said the Lord; Refrain thy voice from weeping...they shall come again from the land of the enemy...thy children shall come again to their own border."
Rachel is weeping for the missing Jewish children who had not returned from exile. G-d promised they would all return.
Also, if this were about Bethlehem, it should have been Leah who was weeping, not Rachel. For this region was occupied by the tribe of Judah, and Leah was the foremost female ancestor of note here. Rachel was a primary ancestor of Ephraim's tribe. The name Ephraim often was used as the collective name of the Jewish people. So, this fits the Jewish understanding completely.
We run into the story of the slaughter of the Innocents at other times and in different places. It contains a widespread motif of fairy tales and legends. Matthew borrows the essential features of the story from Exodus 1:15-16. fixed. In so doing, he uses the form that this tale about Moses acquired in later Jewish culture, as told, for example, by Josephus:
One of the sacred scribes—persons with considerable skill in accurately predicting the future—announced to the king that there would be born to the Israelites at that time one who would abase the sovereignty of the Egyptians and exalt the Israelites, were he reared to manhood.... Alarmed thereat, the king, on this sage's advice, ordered that every male child born to the Israelites should be destroyed by being cast into the river. (JA, trans. H. St. J. Thackeray [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press (LCL), 1991], II, ix, 2; 253)
This persecution of the children of Israel by Pharaoh supplies the pattern for Herod's persecution of the children of Bethlehem.
Answer for yourself: Why was Herod's terrible deed of mass murder of infants NEVER reported other than in the New Testament? Information of this magnitude and importance certainly should have gotten into Josephus' writings, as he was a major historian who was writing about this area in those days. But there is not one, not one word about this account of Herod's slaying of the Bethlehem's infants outside of the New Testament concerning this terrible deed. This leaves a cloud of doubt about it having happened at all. The event as misquoted on purpose in the New Testament is just another example of the writer of the Gospel of Matthew trying to make-up "fulfilled scripture" to make it look as if the prophecies had been fulfilled in Jesus. Certainly a Jew would know the Old Testament and the context of the passages better than that and surely be in the fear of G-d to not "take away" from the meaning of the Words of G-d. Now for a Gentile writer unfamiliar with the Jewish Bible it was an easy thing to "proof-text" the Old Testament and try to make fulfillments out of non-Messianic passages.
Matthew enriches his fairy tale of the slaughtered innocents with a few other quotations from the Old Testament that refer to a later stage in the life of the grown-up Moses. These things did not occur to Moses, the deliverer when he was a child but as an adult. We need to keep this in perspective when understanding if or not a prophecy was fulfilled or not. Dual fulfillment needs to be fulfilled in all areas and not just one part if it truly is a double fulfillment. Moses has to flee from Pharaoh because he has killed an Egyptian (Exod. 2:l2ff.) and stays away until G-d informs him that he can return without danger: "For all the men who were seeking your life are dead" (Exod. 4:19). Those who were seeking the life of Moses were seeking him for murder as an adult; they were not seeking an infant who is innocent. The New Testament draws the parallel, which is in reality not a parallel by saying: "For those who sought the child's life are dead" (Matt. 2:20). "So Moses took his wife and his sons and set them on an ass, and went back to the land of Egypt" (Exod. 4:20). "And he [Joseph] rose and took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel" (Matt. 2:21). Thus Matthew fits together the events in Exod. 1:15f., in the embellished form available in his own day, as well as the sentence from Exod. 4:19-20, and makes them over into a new event.
But such proof that a Gospel story has been borrowed from elsewhere is not enough to embarrass the theologians. Hermann Schelke, for instance, writes: "The tradition of Moses' miraculous childhood has evidently influenced the account of Yeshua's childhood (Notice he said the truth here, but wait). But these findings from history have a theological content. This is a way (drawing parallel events together in spite of the lack of truth surrounding one of them) of expressing the idea that Yeshua is a new Moses" ("Die Kindheitsgeschichten Jesu," p. 17). Under this motto of "theological content" one may transcribe many things from many sources and turn Yeshua into a copy of any number of possible predecessors. In this case, however, the comparison of Yeshua to Moses already limps because, unlike Moses, Yeshua has not killed anyone.
We're aware of many foul crimes committed by Herod, but the slaughter of the Innocents isn't one of them. Outside the New Testament there is not credible reference to this event as ever happening. Conspicuously absent from all the documents chronicling the murderous reign of Herod, compiled by those wishing to detail all his atrocities, is the account of his killing the infants in the days of Yeshua! Besides this being a Christian slander, it is the attempt of the writer to connect Yeshua with Moses and show parallels that would go a long way in proving one greater than Moses has come. Besides, this massacre wasn't even needed as a practical measure, because, after all, everyone in Bethlehem must have known to which house with which little boy (of the, say, twenty to thirty such infants in town) the star and the caravan had made their way.
But even if we take the slaughter of the innocents at face value, we have to ask some very disturbing questions:
Answer for yourself: Why, although G-d saved his own son by sending an angel to warn Joseph in a dream, he left the sons of other fathers and mothers to die?
But perhaps that's an unchristian question. Pope Leo I, the Great (d. 461), in any case takes a positive view of the matter: G-d had already given the dead infants "the dignity of martyrdom" (Sermon XXXI). This surely sounds like something a loving G-d would do or does it?
Answer for yourself: Why didn’t Mary and Joseph themselves, after the warning dream, warn the parents of other children? Did they lack compassion for others? Perhaps they thought as positively as Pope Leo the Great would later do that G-d had predisposed these infants to martyrdom and slaughter.
Although the slaughter of the innocents ascribed to Herod is a fairy tale, in a sense we can still label him a child murderer, because he had three of his own children executed under accusation of conspiring against their father: in 7 B.C., his sons Alexander and Aristoboulos by his second wife, Mariamne (whom he had killed in 29 B.C. for adultery); and, five days before his own death in 4 B.C., his oldest son, Antipater, by his first wife, Doris. Herod had been married to a total of ten wives. His murderous behavior is said to have made Augustus remark that he would rather be Herod's pig than his son. The point of the joke is that in Greek, which cultivated Romans spoke at the time, the words for pig (hys) and son (hyios) sound alike. As a Jew, Herod didn't eat pork, but he did murder his sons.
Bennoah1@verizon.net