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Herod
● Matt 2:7-8 . .Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the
exact time the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, "Go and
make a careful search for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I
too may go and worship him.
Well; the visitors might've returned had not God intervened.
● Matt 2:11-12 . . And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod,
they returned to their country by another route.
That was a safety measure to prevent Herod from knowing where to find the lad
because rulers in that day were typically Machiavellian, tyrannical, and despotic--
they didn't just crush potential threats to their power; they utterly annihilated it;
and as subsequent events demonstrate, ol' Herod had neither conscience nor
concern for child welfare.
* Saddam Hussein's first order of business upon taking control of Iraq was to order
the executions of some of his closest supporters because they weren't totally
onboard with his ideals. Kim Jong-Un is suspected of ordering the murder of his
uncle for similar reasons.
● Matt 2:16a . .Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men,
was exceeding wroth
There's really nothing in the story to even remotely suggest that the wise men
made a fool out of Herod and/or jeered him. They simply failed to comply with his
wishes; which in his mind wasn't merely refusal of his request, but a failure to take
him seriously.
* The book of Genesis tells of "mighty men: men of old, men of renown". The
Hebrew word describes bullies, i.e. men whose ambition is not only to rule people,
but to quite dominate them and own their souls. For bullies like that, people aren't
fellow human beings; instead they're assets and commodities.
● Matt 2:16b . . He 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 inquired of the wise men.
The Greek word for "coasts" is a mite ambiguous. It technically indicates borders,
but can also indicate regions and/or environs and surrounding areas.
That verse is commonly appropriated to calculate Jesus' age relative to when the
wise men visited him and his mother. But the verse merely indicates the passage of
time since Herod interviewed the men; which is quite useless for calculating Jesus'
age seeing as how he was already born before the men even left their country--
how long before they left their country, nobody knows for sure.
● Matt 2:17-18 . .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." (Jer 31:15)
Ramah was roughly six miles north of Jerusalem, while Bethlehem is roughly the
same distance south in the opposite direction.
Ramah was settled by the people of Rachel's biological son Benjamin, so that any
weeping done by the mothers in that area would be reckoned, by heritage, to be
Rachel's weeping.
Anyway; what this suggests to me is that the slaughter of the innocents extended
beyond the community of Bethlehem. Were we to set a draftsman's compass to a
radius equal to the distance between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and scribe a circle
with Jerusalem at the center, it would yield a pretty good idea of the area covered
by Herod's death squads-- roughly 113 square miles.
But Herod's efforts were futile. Jesus wasn't even in the country; Joseph had moved
the child and his mother down into Egypt before all the killing began (Matt 2:13)
and in time, Herod died and his danger to Jesus' survival died with him. (Matt 2:19-
-23)
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