The Coventry Carol and the Massacre of the Innocents

Lully, lullay, Thou little tiny Child,

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

Lullay, thou little tiny Child,

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do,

For to preserve this day

This poor youngling for whom we do sing

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

Herod, the king, in his raging,

Charged he hath this day

His men of might, in his own sight,

All young children to slay.

That woe is me, poor Child for Thee!

And ever mourn and sigh,

For thy parting neither say nor sing,

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

Tomorrow, in the Western Church, is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, commemorating the boys of Bethlehem who, according to the Gospel of Matthew, were massacred by Herod the Great in his vain, paranoid attempt to eradicate the "threat" to his throne posed by the birth of Jesus, the one "born King of the Jews" (Matt 2:1-8, 16-18). 

This horrific story is one event narrated in the Gospels whose historicity has been regularly challenged (for example, see the back-and-forth a few years ago between James McGrath and Tony Jones here, here, here, and here). Without delving too far into the discussion, the historian in me acknowledges that there is no external (non-biblical) attestation of the event. Nevertheless, anyone who has ever read the first-century Jewish historian Josephus sympathetically (cf. Antiquities of the Jews 15.5-7, 50-87, 173-78, 232-36, 247-52, 260-66, 289-90; 16.361-94; 17.42-44, 167, 182-87) must acknowledge that the story is consistent with what may be known of Herod's character. Herod, though raised as a Jew, was ethnically an Idumean, and this nasty fact was never far from his mind as King. Although he was, in many respects, a cultured man and renowned for his architectural achievements, his rule, commencing in 37 BCE when the Roman Senate conferred on him the title "King of Judea/King of the Jews"--here we can discern Matthew's great skill as a story-teller--was increasingly a despotic one, punctuated by scores of massacres. Indeed, any ruler who had no compunction murdering his favorite wife (Mariamne I, in 29 BCE) and three of his sons (Mariamne's sons Alexander and Aristobulus in 7 BCE for high treason; Antipater II, his firstborn from his first wife, Doris, in 4 BCE; upon learning of this, Octavian is reported by Microbius to have commented, "It is better to be Herod's pig [hus] than his son [huios]") would have had no ethical qualms, even at almost the age of 70, about killing a dozen or so baby boys in a small, insignificant Judean town of no more than 1000 people.

Be that as it may, the story is one with powerful theological significance. Oftentimes in the West, we Christians have sentimentalized Christmas with saccharine pictures of quaint manger scenes with shepherds and Magi accompanying Mary and Joseph. But it is instructive to keep in mind that the early spring of 5 BCE was, like today, a troubled time, racked by violence, pain, and unsavory political machinations. Indeed, as N. T. Wright has written, "Before the Prince of Peace had learned to walk and talk, he was a homeless refugee with a price on his head" (Matthew for Everyone, Part One [London: SPCK, 2002] 14). But it was precisely that situation he came to reverse.

Scholars have routinely noticed that Matthew narrates the story of Herod and the Magi in a way that accentuates the tyrant's parallels with the prototypical enemy of God's people, Pharaoh, and highlights Jesus' own parallels with Israel's first deliverer, Moses. His implicit point is hard to miss: Jesus would "save his people from their sins" (Matt 1:21) by enacting the long-awaited "New Exodus" promised in Isaiah 40-55 that would, once and for all, bring an end to the protracted exile in which the Jewish people still languished. The Evangelist makes this point explicit in his oft-misunderstood quotation of Jeremiah 31:15 in Matthew 2:18. The slaughter of the baby boys in Bethlehem, writes Matthew, "fulfills" what was said through the prophet Jeremiah:

A voice is heard in Ramah,

    weeping and great mourning,

Rachel weeping for her children

    and refusing to be comforted,

    because they are no more.

The typical lay reader of scripture would assume that the Evangelist is claiming that the massacre fulfills a direct prophecy/prediction of its occurrence almost six centuries before it happened. But any serious reading of Jeremiah 30-31 should disabuse anyone of such naivete. These chapters are classics for the promise of Israel's restoration to divine favor and, consequently, the land after exile. Ramah, located just north of Jerusalem, was one of the villages through which the city's residents passed on their journey to Babylonia (see Jer 40:1). "Rachel," Jacob's favorite wife and the matriarchal personification of the people, refuses consolation because "her children are no more." Jeremiah, however, immediately relates Yahweh's comforting promise of "return from the land of the enemy," because of which she need no longer weep (Jer 31:16). Most significantly, this promise is the prelude to the great promise of a "New Covenant" which God would establish with the people, forgiving their sins and writing the Torah in their hearts (Jer 31:31-34). In Matthew's theological understanding of history, the massacre of the innocents was the "eschatological" "fulfillment" of Rachel's (the mother of the Jews) weeping in Ramah over the deportation of the tribes to Assyria (and, later, Babylon). In other words, it was the climactic act of Israel's exile and the prelude to the deliverance to be effected through the life--and, as is clear in Matthew's unfolding narrative, through the death and resurrection--of the one newly born "King of the Jews" in Bethlehem. As was promised in Jeremiah 31:16, "Rachel" need weep no longer because the long night of exile was soon to be over as God establishes his new covenant with the people (cf. Matt 26:28). The "consolation of Israel" (Luke 2: 25; cf. Isa 40:1-2) had arrived with the birth of this Jesus.

But the genius of the Christian faith is that it has no illusions that the world in which we now live is a perfectible one, let alone a perfect one. Yes, the New Testament teaches that God has, in Messiah Jesus, brought the promised "age to come" to bear on the world we live in. But this new age as yet exists in tension with the "present evil age" which will not meet its ultimate demise until the baby of Bethlehem, the crucified and risen Lord, returns to consummate the promised kingdom, where God's will shall be done "on earth as it is in heaven." This means, of course, that indescribably awful events such as we continue to experience daily will continue. But praise be to God that he has spoken truth to worldly power, that he has met the world's evil head-on in the person of his only Son, who bore the weight and consequences of that sin on the cross, and gives his followers the sure hope that one day in the not too distant future, we will experience the renewal for which we all hope, fully and forever. Soli Deo Gloria!