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19 After Herod had died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. 20 He said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and set out for the Land of Israel, for the ones who were seeking the child’s life have died.” 21 He got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the Land of Israel. 22 When he heard that Archelaus ruled Judea in place of his father Herod, he became afraid and left. After he was guided by another dream, he traveled to the region of Galilee. 23 There he settled in a town called Nazareth, fulfilling what had been spoken through the prophet, namely, that he would be called a Nezer.

Comments

Herod was a client king who ruled on behalf of the Roman emperor and senate. After his death, his territory was divided among his three sons. Archelaus governed Judea, but was an even bloodier ruler than his father, and after ten years the Emperor Augustus removed him for incompetence and place Judea under the direct rule of a Roman governor.

Mt 2.23 is not so much a prophetic fulfilment as a pun. Nezer is the Hebrew word for branch, as in the famous messianic prophecy in Isaiah 11.1: A rod will come forth from the stem of Jesse, and from his roots a branch will grow. Mt is making a play on the similarity of sound between nezer and Nazorean. Nazareth, which was a small and insignificant village in Jesus’ day, is not mentioned in the OT.

Readers familiar with the Infancy Narrative in Lk will notice how difficult it is to reconcile the details of Mt’s account with Lk’s. For instance, if Joseph took Mary and the newborn Jesus to Egypt, how could he and Mary present Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple forty days after his birth, as described in Lk 2.22-38? The two stories are not completely irreconcilable: In the 2nd cent., Tatian harmonized the two accounts in his Diatessaron. In his telling, Mt’s Magi visited after Lk’s Temple Presentation (which actually makes good sense in light of Mt 2.16). Other problems persist though: Mt makes it appear that Joseph and Mary are from Bethlehem, and only settle in Nazareth after their return from Egypt, whereas in Lk’s version, they are from Nazareth, and only travel to Bethlehem for the sake of a census. Perhaps it is best to just say that Mt and Lk were working off of different traditions, and what matters here is the theological thrust of the story: God intervened in history out of love for his people, so that a child born to a poor couple would inherit the throne of his ancestor David, and a Jewish messiah would become a universal savior.