Herod, Simeon and Anna: The Brutal Frame (4 of 4)

The killing of the children in Bethlehem is never in the Christmas pageant and is rarely read on Christmas Eve.

Bailey calls it a conspiracy of silence, and asks the useful question. Matthew put it there on purpose. Why?

Who Was Herod?

Four things at once, and none of them simply.

Racially he was an Arab. His father came from an Arab tribe in Idumea, in the south, and his mother was from Petra, capital of the Nabatean kingdom in northern Arabia. One of his brothers was named Faisal, another Yusef, and his sister Salama. He was the only child in the family with a Greek name.

Religiously he was Jewish, by force. Around 135 BC the Jewish ruler Hyrcanus conquered the Idumeans and compelled them to become Jews on pain of death, then appointed Herod’s grandfather governor of the province.

Culturally he was Greek. Greek was his first language and he made repeated attempts to turn Jerusalem into a Greek city.

Politically he was Roman, siding with Rome in every major conflict of his career.

Was He Always a Monster?

No, and the decline is part of the point.

Early on he was good-looking and powerfully built, and he personally led his army in ten wars. His finest hour came after backing Antony against Octavian and losing. He travelled to Rhodes, appeared before the victor without a crown, admitted every bit of the support he had given Caesar’s enemy, and said that what he asked was that Caesar consider not whose friend he had been but what a good friend he was.

Octavian decided he was a man worth trusting and told him to put the crown back on.

Then the disintegration. Ten wives. Two favourite sons strangled on his order. His favourite wife Mariamne killed on suspicion, after which he wandered the palace calling her name and had servants beaten when they could not produce her.

His final order was to arrest thousands of notables from across the country, hold them in the stadium at Jericho, and execute them the moment he died, so that there would be mourning in the land. He knew nobody would weep for him. The order was not carried out.

A man with that record ordering the deaths of infants in a village is entirely in character.

Why Does Matthew Include It?

Two reasons, and the first is the one usually given.

Jesus is the new Moses. Moses was born during a slaughter of Hebrew infants ordered by Pharaoh, and one child escaped. Matthew builds the parallel deliberately, which is also why he attaches the line about calling a son out of Egypt.

The second reason is pastoral and Bailey draws it from experience. He writes as someone who lived through seven wars in Lebanon in thirty-five years, one of them lasting seventeen.

How do people keep faith under those conditions? Part of the answer is that they remember the Christmas story and the cross together. A mindless atrocity stands at the beginning of the Gospel and another at its end, so a reader is not caught unprepared by the human capacity for terror.

If the gospel can flourish in a world that produces the slaughter of the innocents and the cross, it can flourish anywhere.

Why Both Simeon and Anna?

Because Luke pairs men and women throughout, and the birth narratives contain three such pairs.

Gabriel visits Zechariah and Mary. Two songs are sung, one by each. Two witnesses testify in the temple, Simeon and Anna.

Simeon gets more words than Anna, and Luke apparently could find no record of what she said, choosing not to invent a speech for her. But set Zechariah against Mary and the balance runs the other way.

Zechariah is offered a son, which fulfils his own longing and costs him nothing, and he fails to believe it. His second miracle is judgment: he is struck silent until the birth.

Mary is offered a pregnancy that could have got her killed, and she accepts it. Her second miracle is a blessing: news that her cousin is expecting.

What Does Simeon Tell Mary?

That a sword will pierce her own soul, so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.

Bailey’s reading of that second clause is the useful one. Around the cross everyone is exposed. The disciples believe and run. Peter promises and denies. The high priest, protecting the sanctity of the temple and keeping Rome out of it, participates in killing an innocent man. The soldiers follow orders that violate Roman justice. Pilate, with a checkered record and a career to protect, decides his own position matters more than one village carpenter’s innocence.

A river of compromise runs around that cross, and Mary is standing in it.

She was not under arrest. She could have walked away, and she could not change anything by arguing with soldiers or pleading with priests. The only decision available to her was whether to stay, and she stayed.

Which is why Bailey reads her as a model of discipleship. Through her suffering she participates in exposing the evil that needs redeeming, and Simeon says so while she is still holding a baby.

What Does the Frame Do?

It refuses to let the story be sentimental.

Luke has just given her the annunciation, the Magnificat, the shepherds and the angels. Then an old man in the temple tells a young mother that a sword is coming, and the narrative moves on without comment.

Unspeakable brutality marks the beginning of this life and the end of it. The ministry happened inside a violent world and was directed at one.

Part of a series on the nativity. See also the birth of Jesus and the wise men and the vision of Isaiah.

Footnotes2

1. Herod being racially Arab, religiously Jewish by forced conversion, culturally Greek and politically Roman is the single most useful fact about him. It explains the insecurity that drove the killings, since a man who belongs to four worlds fully belongs to none of them and can be displaced from all four.
2. That Luke declines to invent a speech for Anna is a small mark of restraint worth noticing. He had a rhetorical pattern running and a gap in it, and he left the gap rather than filling it.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 4. Supports the account of Herod's mixed identity and his decline, the Rhodes episode, the final order at Jericho, the Moses parallel, the pastoral reason for including the massacre, the three male and female pairs in the birth narratives, the comparison between Zechariah and Mary, and the reading of Simeon's words about the thoughts of many hearts. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 2:13-18, Luke 2:22-38, Exod 1:8-2:10, and Hos 11:1.

Where the sourcing stops: the details of Herod's family and career come to us largely through Josephus, whose account of the Herodian house is not disinterested. The massacre at Bethlehem is not independently attested outside Matthew, which is unsurprising given the likely small number of infants in a village that size but is worth stating.