¹⁶When Herod saw that the wise men had tricked him, he was furious. So he gave an order to kill all the baby boys in Bethlehem and in the surrounding area who were two years old or younger. This was in keeping with the time he learned from the wise men. ¹⁷So what God had said through the prophet Jeremiah came true:

¹⁸“A voice was heard in Ramah

of painful crying and deep sadness:

Rachel crying for her children.

She refused to be comforted,

because her children are dead.”

Joseph and Mary Return

¹⁹After Herod died, an angel of the Lord spoke to Joseph in a dream while he was in Egypt. ²⁰The angel said, “Get up! Take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, because the people who were trying to kill the child are now dead.”

²¹So Joseph took the child and his mother and went to Israel. ²²But he heard that Archelaus was now king in Judea since his father Herod had died. So Joseph was afraid to go there. After being warned in a dream, he went to the area of Galilee, ²³to a town called Nazareth, and lived there. And so what God had said through the prophets came true: “He will be called a Nazarene.” ⁿ

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Footnotes

nNazarene A person from the town of Nazareth. Matthew may be referring to Isaiah 11:1, where the Hebrew word translated “branch” sounds like “Nazarene.”