Matthew 2:21

“But when Herod was dead” turns the whole story. Herod the Great, the king Rome had set over the Jews, died in 4 BC. He was a suspicious and ruthless ruler, known for his lavish building projects and the intrigue of his court, and he put members of his own family to death when he suspected them of disloyalty. His order to kill every boy in Bethlehem from two years old and under (Matthew 2:16) fits everything that is known of him. That order is what drove Joseph into Egypt, when the angel warned him to flee (Matthew 2:13–18). Now the danger is gone. The small word dé that opens the verse (“But”) marks the turn from exile to return, and the verb for Herod’s death, teleutáō, means to finish one’s life, to come to the end. He died at the time God had set, because the lives and deaths of rulers are in God’s hand as much as anyone’s.

Then comes “behold”, idoú, a word that means “look!” and makes us attend to what happens next. What happens is that an angel appears. The Greek ángelos means a messenger, from a word for bringing news, and “an angel of the Lord” (kýrios, Lord) is a messenger who carries God’s own word, so what he says comes with God’s authority.

He comes “in a dream”, ónar, a dream in the night. God spoke to people in dreams in both Testaments, and Jews and their neighbours alike accepted a dream as a way God might speak. In these chapters of Matthew it is the way God guides Joseph at every turn. The angel first told him in a dream to take Mary as his wife (Matthew 1:20), then to flee into Egypt (Matthew 2:13), and this is the third time. Joseph is “in Egypt”, Aígyptos, which lay close at hand, had a large Jewish community, and had long been a place where Jews took refuge in hard times, as they did in Jeremiah’s day.

The angel’s message is short and urgent. “Arise”, egeírō, means to wake or rouse, often from sleep, and it calls Joseph to act at once. He is to “take the young child and his mother”. The young child, paidíon, is a little child, wholly dependent on others, which makes God’s care for him the more striking. The verb for “take” is the one Matthew uses again in the next verse, where it is explained below. Joseph is to bring them “into the land of Israel”, the land God promised to his people and the place where the Messiah’s work was to be done.

“For”, gár, gives the reason. “They are dead” is the verb thnḗskō in the perfect tense, which speaks of a death that has happened and whose result stands, so the threat is over for good. Those who died are those who “sought”, zētéō, the child’s life. The word means to seek with purpose, and here it describes a deliberate plot to kill him.

Joseph does exactly what he is told, in the same words. The angel said “Arise, and take … and go”, and Matthew records that “he arose, and took … and came”. The verb egeírō again shows a man who rises and acts at once. This is the pattern of Joseph’s life in these chapters. When the angel told him to take Mary, he “did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him” (Matthew 1:24), and when he was told to flee, he arose and took the young child and his mother by night (Matthew 2:13–14). Matthew tells it the same way each time (Matthew 1:20–24), and Joseph stands out as a faithful guardian who trusts God’s word and acts on it.

“Took” is paralambánō, to take to oneself or receive near. It is the word for taking someone into your company and care, and it shows Joseph as the protector of Jesus and Mary, as he was when he first took Mary as his wife on the word of the angel (Matthew 1:20–21).

“The land”, gē, means soil or a region, and with “Israel” it names the land God promised to Abraham and his descendants. The journey from Egypt was a demanding one for a family with a small child. Joseph made it on God’s word, much as Abraham did: “By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed” (Hebrews 11:8).

“In the room of his father Herod” translates the Greek anti, and it means that Archelaus sat in Herod’s own place. Joseph had meant to go back to Judaea, very likely to Bethlehem where Jesus was born, and he may have heard the news as he neared its border or from travellers on the road. “Afraid” is phobéō, from phobos, fear. It was the sober fear of a man who had just carried a child away from Herod’s sword and now heard that Herod’s son ruled in his place. The verse records it plainly, and God answers it with a clear word.

“He came and dwelt” uses érchomai, to come, and katoikéō, from words meaning “down” and “to dwell”, which means to settle and make a permanent home. Nazareth was where Jesus grew up. It was a small village in Lower Galilee, far from Jerusalem, with no place in Jewish tradition or prophecy, and people thought little of it. When Philip told Nathanael about Jesus of Nazareth, Nathanael asked, “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46).

Matthew says that this too was “fulfilled”. He uses this kind of fulfilment formula again and again to show that the events of Jesus’ life were ordered by God and foretold in Scripture (Matthew 1:22–23, 2:15). Here he speaks of “the prophets”, in the plural, and the words “He shall be called a Nazarene” are found in no single verse of the Old Testament. The word Nazōraîos means someone from Nazareth, and in time it came to mean a Christian. Believers differ on which prophecies Matthew had in mind, and three answers are given.

• The Branch. The Hebrew word netzer means a branch or shoot, and Isaiah uses it of the Messiah: “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots” (Isaiah 11:1). On this view the Nazarene is the Branch, the son of David and the new shoot of hope from Jesse’s line.
• The despised one. Nazareth’s low name made “Nazarene” a word of scorn, and the prophets foretold a Messiah who would be “despised and rejected of men” (Isaiah 53:3). On this view Matthew sums up the prophecies of a lowly, rejected Messiah.
• A theme of the prophets. Others hold that Matthew sums up a theme found across many prophets, the Messiah’s humble beginnings, his place among ordinary people and his rejection, all of which fit a man from Nazareth.

These answers can stand together, since the Branch from the stem of Jesse grew up in a town people scorned. The name stayed with Jesus and with those who followed him. Paul’s accusers called him “a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes” (Acts 24:5).

The child God guarded from Herod and Archelaus is the Lamb of God, “which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Men sought his life now, and they would seek it again, yet when he died he gave his life, and God raised him up, “having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it” (Acts 2:24). Herod’s end in these verses is a small picture of Christ’s victory over every power of darkness, sin and death. The one God kept safe now keeps his own, and of his sheep he says, “neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand” (John 10:28).

God guided the Son’s early life through angels and dreams, and in the last days he spoke through the Son himself, who “hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). In the safety of Nazareth “Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man” (Luke 2:52). In the land of Israel he would go on to preach that the kingdom of God was at hand (Mark 1:14–15), teach as one having authority (Matthew 7:28–29), show his glory in his first sign at Cana (John 2:11), give the cup at the supper as “the new testament in my blood” (Luke 22:20), and at last suffer and rise again so that repentance and remission of sins would be preached in his name (Luke 24:46–47).

The Nazarene’s lowly start belongs to that same path. He “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:5–8), and through that humility came our salvation. “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8), and “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16). That love was already at work in the safe keeping of one small child in these verses.

Joseph heard “the land of Israel” first and Galilee later, and he obeyed each word as it came. God leads his people in the same way. “I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye” (Psalm 32:8), and “I am the LORD thy God which teacheth thee to profit, which leadeth thee by the way that thou shouldest go” (Isaiah 48:17). Joseph’s fear was real and God met it with direction, so we can bring our own fears to him and trust him with the next step: “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths” (Proverbs 3:5–6).

The God who brought Herod’s plots to their end keeps watch over his people still: “The LORD shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul. The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore” (Psalm 121:7–8). And Nazareth shows that God does his great work in small places. The Son of God grew up in a town people mocked, and a humble life in an overlooked place is fully within God’s purposes.