Tool Beta
The Ancient World Behind the Text
Pick a passage anywhere in the New Testament. See the customs and ideas a first reader knew without being told.
Matthew 2:13-23, Refugees in Egypt, home to Nazareth
Joseph takes the family to Egypt by night. Herod kills the boys of Bethlehem, and after his death the family settles in Nazareth to stay clear of his son Archelaus.
Matthew 2:13-23, in every translation this tool compares.
Warned in a dream, Joseph flees with Mary and the child to Egypt. Herod, tricked by the magi, orders every boy two and under in and around Bethlehem killed, and Matthew hears Rachel weeping for her children. After Herod dies, Joseph is afraid of Archelaus, now ruling Judea, and takes the family to Nazareth in Galilee.
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- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/judeans-and-galileans\/","n":"Galilee and the Galileans","s":"Small farming and fishing villages, ringed by Greek cities, with two new royal towns that the Gospels never say Jesus entered. Most of Jesus' story happens in places of a few hundred to a few thousand people.","r":""}
Egypt held a large Jewish community; perhaps a third of Alexandria was Jewish (Keener). Bethlehem was small, and estimates of the boys killed run from about 20 (Keener's notes) to between 10 and 30 (the ESV Study Bible). Josephus reports that Archelaus' horsemen killed about three thousand people at the Passover just after Herod's death, and that Caesar later banished him to Gaul. Wright sums up the child's position: "he was a homeless refugee with a price on his head." The saying that he would be called a Nazarene has no single source text; most sources read a play on the Hebrew netser, branch (Isaiah 11:1), and some mention the Nazirites, a link the ESV Study Bible rejects. Nazareth is not mentioned in the Old Testament, the Talmud or Josephus (the Zondervan Bible Dictionary). The plural of 2:20, those who sought the child's life, may mean Herod and his son Antipater, executed five days before him (the Zondervan archaeology handbook).
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, on Matthew 2:13-14, 2:16, 2:22 and 2:23
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, notes on Matthew 2:13, 2:16 and 2:23
- ESV Study Bible, study notes on Matthew 2:16 and 2:23
- Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 17.9.3 and 17.13.2, trans. William Whiston
- N. T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part One, comment on Matthew 2:13-23
- J. D. Douglas and Merrill C. Tenney, Zondervan Illustrated Bible Dictionary, entry Nazareth
- J. Randall Price and H. Wayne House, Zondervan Handbook of Biblical Archaeology, Matthew 2:19-20 Herod's Tomb
