Why such a short passage? Once again, the background story is huge. To make full sense of what Matthew is telling us, we need to be aware of at least some of what was common knowledge in the time this passage covers.
Do you remember the Maccabees? That’s the Jewish family that revolted against the remnants of Alexander’s empire — in this case, the Seleucid rulers around 167 BC. The Seleucids were trying to force the Jews to ditch their religion by ramming pagan Hellenism down their throats. A family later called the Maccabees led the revolt. One of the Maccabean sons was John Hyrcanus, and he reigned as High Priest. By his time the Edomites had migrated into what we think of as southern Judah, and one of his conquests was the Edomite kingdom in 150 BC. John forced them all to convert, and they were absorbed into Judea.
King Herod was an Edomite noble with a particularly bogus claim to being Jewish. Things under the Maccabeans were chaotic for another century before Herod came along and earned the support of Rome by running the Parthians out of Palestine (43 BC). Rome made him king over the lands of his own Edom (Latin Idumea). Caesar added Judah, Samaria, Galilee, and some of the small kingdoms surrounding all of that. Some time later, Herod made sure to slaughter all the Hasmoneans he could find (the native Judean dynasty arising from the Maccabean Revolt) to ensure there was no one with a claim against his throne.
His reign was marked by an odd mixture of sometimes being quite solicitous of Jewish Law, and at other times remarkably insensitive to Jewish sentiments. He was notorious for his hedonism and bad temper. As he aged and approached death in 4 BC, his physical ailments mounted up to torment him sorely, making his bad temper even worse. It was in this awful state that he ordered the slaughter of the infants around Bethlehem. While Jesus and His family waited in Egypt, Herod could not die without a significant amount of drama.
King Herod was perhaps more vicious with his own sons. Part of his claim to the Judean throne was marrying a Hasmonean, Mariamne. Herod had her executed along with the rest of the Hasmoneans. The elder of her two sons was highly favored by the Jewish leadership, but with all the bad blood, Herod eventually trumped up charges against the two brothers such that Rome approved their execution in 7 BC.
At some point, Herod decided to honor Rome by having a golden eagle mounted near the main gate into the Temple. This served only to increase the hatred of the people against him, as it represented an egregiously blasphemous provocation. A couple of famous rabbis at the time stirred up quite a group of young adult men to take action. In broad daylight, they engaged in some acrobatics to get themselves on top of this thing and chop it down. Of course, they were rounded up and brought to Herod. Professing that death in defense of their faith was better than life under such an evil king, the young men were publicly burned alive, along with the two rabbis. This set in motion cascading tensions with the Jewish leadership.
As part of his attempts to find relief for his maladies, Herod in his 70s went down to a winter palace in Jericho. His heir, Antipater, had managed to provoke tensions with him some months before. But this time, it was a Roman official that arrested Herod’s son and tried him. It took a while for Caesar to approve, but the execution was a done deal. This left Herod with one less heir while he was staying in Jericho. Thus, he changed his will officially, granting his son Archelaus his title as king, but with two other sons sharing some small pieces of his kingdom as tetrarchs.
Within a week Herod died horribly. While Archelaus was waiting for Rome to confirm his father’s will, he tried to establish working relations with the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem. During his first day on the job, he did make some effort to appease them, but asked for a reduction in public protests in return. The deal failed, as there were way too many people still furious over the immolation of the young men and their rabbis who cut down the gold eagle in the Temple grounds. They wanted Herodian blood for that.
Things got out of control that night, as a crowd met in the Temple for a very contentious sacrifice ceremony. Archelaus sent officials and a few troops. The crowd around the altar turned and killed them, then calmly went on with their ritual. Archelaus sent his entire army into the Temple and slaughtered roughly 3000 people.
By the time Joseph and his family could get themselves ready to go at the word of the angel, this was the news of the day they encountered heading back to Bethlehem. It’s only reasonable that Joseph was afraid. We could rightly imagine they were stopped on the road somewhere short of Archelaus’s jurisdiction, praying and trying to decide what to do.
Right about this time there was a fresh uprising in Archelaus’s domain. A family of shepherds, famous for being very large and physically powerful, gathered an army and managed to take down a lot of both Judean and Roman troops. A major point of their revolt was that Archelaus was not their king, so one of the five brothers declared himself the rightful king of Judea. We don’t know if they had any connection with the shepherds who saw the angelic choir and came to celebrate Jesus’ birth, but it’s hard to imagine people didn’t know the story about those shepherds and their strange experiences in connection to an alleged Messiah and Herod’s slaughter in Bethlehem. It would take a while before Archelaus and Rome could capture these rebels.
Meanwhile, during this revolt, Herod’s other sons ruled in their own jurisdictions with a great deal more peace. Herod Antipas held Galilee, and the angel told Joseph this was a safer place. The only reasonable choice, then, was to return to Nazareth, whence Mary came. Hebrew people always sought out the closest relatives they could when moving to another town. Now, there had been a recent revolt nearby when someone sacked the city of Sepphoris, but that revolt was quickly put down by Roman troops. So this allowed Herod Antipas to play peacemaker by having the city rebuilt, and it’s almost guaranteed that such a large project employed Joseph.
Matthew ends the chapter by engaging in a Hebraic pun, but using Greek language. Westerners aren’t used to the idea of God having a sense of humor, but this kind of thing shows up all over the Bible. Matthew quotes Isaiah 11:1. Isaiah uses the Hebrew word for “branch” (netser), which became an established Messianic title. The name of the town Nazareth never shows up in the Old Testament, but it’s a typical Hebrew play on words to associate “Nazarene” (Grk. Nazoraios) with the Hebrew term netser.
If nothing else, you should notice the oddness of Jesus being born in Bethlehem, but very few people knowing that. Everyone assumed He was born in Nazareth. Thus, Matthew is tweaking all the Pharisees who complained that Jesus could not be fulfilling any Messianic prophesies, since He was born in a town never even mentioned in the Old Testament Scripture. Matthew is poking fun at their closed minded obtuseness; this is no different from their goofball semantic games recorded in the Talmud. They had made up all kinds of ridiculous associations simply because one word in spoken Hebrew sounded a little bit like another word.
Imagine a senior man gravely nodding his head: “Why, yes, Isaiah prophesied that the Messiah would be a Netser … aios.”
In elementary school, our vice principal, Mrs Smith would teach the class one afternoon a week. Mrs Smith was tough and helped us perfect the basic three R’s and things like letter writing and penmanship (you don’t find that anymore). If we did well, Mrs Smith would stop early and tell us Bible stories. She made the stories come alive and introduced me to the wonder of Scripture and created a seeker. Ed your expositions, bring out that same delight and wonder that I got when I was twelve. That, my brother, is the most supreme compliment I can give because Mrs Smith and her close friend, my 5th grade teacher Mrs Frew, were true Christians ladies with love for the kids in their charge. That was in the 70’s and in 2021, teachers unafraid to share their faith are like hen’s teeth.
Thanks, Bro. Making the story come to life is precisely what I’m trying to do. What people do with the story after that is between them and God.
I, for one, know all about Bethlehem as Jesus’ birthplace because of all the yearly nativity stories, growing up Catholic.
With the netser/Nazareth issue: was it that Talmudic Jews of the time were expecting Him from Nazareth, because they interpreted the Isaiah 11:1 verse as such…even though Matthew didn’t take that verse as an allusion to a literal town name?
Not at all; they said something like, “No prophet ever came from Galilee.” It’s that Matthew was poking fun at Talmudic reasoning. In other places, rabbis have twisted the meaning of passages based on some of the silliest uses of Hebrew language and mixing strict grammar in one place (when the author clearly didn’t mean it that way), or alternatively, they would read meanings into a passage because one Hebrew phrase sounds like some peculiar name. Thus, Matthew did take Isaiah 11:1 as an allusion to the literal town name, but only as sarcasm.