The Escape to Egypt
Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, “Arise and take the Child and His mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is going to search for the Child to destroy Him.” And he arose and took the Child and His mother by night, and departed for Egypt; and was there until the death of Herod, that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled, saying, “Out of Egypt did I call My Son.” (2:13–15)
The coming of the magi no doubt was a time of great encouragement and assurance to Joseph and Mary, confirming the wondrous words of the angels to them (Matt. 1:20–23; Luke 1:26–38), to Zacharias (Luke 1:11–20), and to the shepherds (Luke 2:8–14). It also confirmed the testimonies of Elizabeth (Luke 1:39–45) and of Simeon and Anna (Luke 2:25–38) about the Child to whom Mary gave birth. Even these wise men from far-off Parthia had been told the news by God and came to worship Jesus and give Him gifts.
But the rejoicing was short-lived. No sooner had the magi departed than an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, giving him a warning from God. This news was not of joy and hope, but of danger and urgency. Arise and take the Child and His mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is going to search for the Child to destroy Him. Just as the magi had been warned by God to disobey Herod (v. 12), Joseph was now warned by God to flee the evil, murderous king.
From pheugō (to flee) we get our word fugitive, one who escapes from something or someone. The word is here in the present imperative, indicating the beginning of action that is to be continued. Joseph and his family were immediately to begin fleeing, and were not to stop until they were safely within Egypt and beyond the reach of Herod. The distance from Bethlehem to the border of Egypt was about 75 miles, and another 100 miles or so would have been required to get to a place of safety in that country. Traveling with a baby made the trip both slower and more difficult.
Egypt was a natural asylum for the young Jewish family. During the period of Greek rule of the Mediterranean world, which occurred during the intertestamental period, Alexander the Great established a sanctuary for Jews in Alexandria, the Egyptian city he named for himself. Throughout the Roman rule that followed, that city was still considered a special place of safety and opportunity for Jews. The Jewish philosopher and historian Philo, himself a prominent resident of Alexandria, reported that by a.d. 40, a few years after the death of Christ, the city’s population included at least one million Jews. In the third century b.c. a group of Jewish scholars in Alexandria had produced the Septuagint, a translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek. The Septuagint was used by much of the early church, and it was from that version of the Old Testament that many New Testament writers quote.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, it seems reasonable that Joseph used the valuable gifts of the magi (the gold, frankincense, and myrrh) to pay for the trip to Egypt and the stay there, where the Lord instructed Joseph to keep his family until I tell you.
Obviously God could have protected His Son in many other ways and in many other places, even in Bethlehem or Jerusalem, under Herod’s very nose. He could have blinded Herod’s soldiers, destroyed them by an angel, or simply have miraculously hidden the family. But God chose to protect Him by the very ordinary and unmiraculous means of flight to a foreign country. The commands to go to Egypt and then to leave were given supernaturally, but the trip itself and the stay there were, as far as we are told, marked by no special divine intervention or provision. The family was not instantly transported to Egypt, but had to make the long, tiresome journey on their own, just as hundreds of other Jewish families had done during the previous several centuries. To decrease the chance of being noticed, Joseph took the common precaution of leaving by night, probably telling no one of his plans.
We know nothing of the stay in Egypt except the bare fact that Jesus and His family were there. Countless speculations have been made about the sojourn. Some ancient writers, supposing perhaps to enhance and improve on the biblical account, manufactured stories of the baby Jesus healing a demon-possessed child by placing His swaddling clothes on the afflicted child’s head, of causing robbers to flee into the desert, and of causing idols to disintegrate as He walked by them. Others, such as the second-century pagan philosopher Celsus, sought to discredit Jesus by claiming that He spent His childhood and early manhood in Egypt learning the occultic practices for which that country had long been famous. Like many Jewish opponents of Christianity during his day, Celsus maintained that Jesus then returned to Palestine to impress the people with miracles and deceive them into thinking He was the Messiah.
It is likely that the stay in Egypt until the death of Herod lasted no more than a few months. It is now that we are told the primary reason for the family’s going to Egypt: that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled, saying, “Out of Egypt did I call My Son.” The Old Testament writers were the Lord’s spokesmen. Just as they had no way of knowing, apart from divine revelation, that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, they had no other way of knowing that He would live awhile in Egypt. The flight to Egypt was one more piece of divine evidence that Jesus was God’s Son, the promised Messiah.
Seven centuries earlier God had told Hosea that “out of Egypt I called My son” (Hos. 11:1). Herod’s threat was no surprise to the Lord, who, long before Herod was born, had made plans to foil that wicked king’s plans against the true King. The reference to “My son” in the book of Hosea is to the nation Israel. It was a historical statement about what God had done in delivering His people from bondage under Pharaoh, calling them out from Egypt under the leadership of Moses. Why, then, did Matthew interpret as predictive an event that occurred perhaps 700 years before Hosea and an additional 700 years before Matthew quoted Hosea?
The setting of the book of Hosea is failure, decadence, and spiritual tragedy. Through the unfaithfulness of his own wife, Gomer, Hosea vividly portrays the unfaithfulness of Israel to the Lord. Gomer was a physical prostitute, and Israel was a spiritual prostitute. God’s chosen people had chased after false gods as unashamedly as Gomer had chased after her lovers. Though Hosea’s heart was grieved and broken, he continued to love his wife and sought to win her back. She wound up in a brothel, having lost all sense of decency and shame. The Lord then commanded Hosea to redeem her: “Go again, love a woman who is loved by her husband, yet an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the sons of Israel, though they turn to other gods” (Hos. 3:1). The prophet then bought Gomer’s freedom “for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a half of barley” (v. 2). He brought her home, gave her back her place of honor as his wife, and continued to love her as he had before. She was his wife, and he maintained his covenant. Hosea 11:3–4 tells how God taught the Israelites, carried them, healed them, led them, loved them, eased their burdens, and fed them. He called them from Egypt in order to be faithful to them, in spite of their unfaithfulness to Him.
Despite everything, God promised to bring Israel back to Himself. Israel would suffer His rebuke and His judgment, but one day that people would return to their God, because He had called Israel to be His son. Thus God reminded His people of His great and long-lasting love for them. “When Israel was a youth I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son” (Hos. 11:1). He would not go back on that calling. When Matthew quotes the last part of that verse from Hosea, he applies it to Christ. Though Hosea was not knowingly predicting that the Messiah would also one day be brought out of Egypt, Matthew shows that Jesus’ return from Egypt was pictured by Israel’s calling from that same country many centuries earlier. The Exodus, therefore, was a type of Jesus’ return from Egypt with Joseph and Mary. As God had once brought the people of Israel out of Egypt to be His chosen nation, He now had brought out His greater Son to be the Messiah.
A type is a nonverbal prediction, an Old Testament person or event that illustrates some aspect of the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ in the future but does not specifically describe it; the writer has no way to see the future antitype. God’s nonverbal predictions are as true and vivid as His verbal ones. But we cannot legitimately call a person or event a true Old Testament type except as the Bible itself tells us of it. The only certain Old Testament types are those given as such in the New Testament. No type is in itself visibly a type; such reality awaits the New Testament identification. When the New Testament uses something in the Old as a prefigurement of something that has occurred or will occur later, we can safely refer to the Old Testament something as a type. Ignoring such limits results in the freedom to allegorize, spiritualize, and typify the Old Testament by whimsy. Because types are veiled revelation, divine testimony to their identity must be given by the Holy Spirit in the New Testament text. Therefore, because of the specific association that Matthew gives here, we know that the Exodus of Israel from Egypt is a type of Jesus’ return from Egypt as a young child.
In a still deeper sense Jesus came out of Egypt with Israel under Moses. As Matthew has already shown, Jesus descended from Abraham and from the royal line of David. Had Israel perished in Egypt, or in the wilderness, or in any other way, the Messiah could not Himself have come out of Egypt or even have been born.[1]
15 The death of Herod brought relief to many. Only then, for instance, did the Qumran covenanters return to their center, destroyed in 31 BC, and rebuild it. In Egypt, Herod’s death made possible the return of the child, Mary, and Joseph, who awaited a word from the Lord. The Greek could be rendered “And so was fulfilled” (NIV) or “[This came about] in order that the word of the Lord … might be fulfilled.” Either way, the notion of fulfillment preserves some telic force in the sentence: Jesus’ exodus from Egypt fulfilled Scripture written long before.
The OT quotation almost certainly (see Notes) comes from Hosea 11:1 and exactly renders the Hebrew, not the LXX, which has “his children,” not “my son.” (In this Matthew agrees with Aq., Symm., and Theod., but only because all four rely on the Hebrew.) Some commentators (e.g., Bengel, Gnomon; Gundry, Use of the Old Testament, 93–94) argue that the preposition ek (NIV, “out of”) should be taken temporally, i.e., “since Egypt” or, better, “from the time [he dwelt] in Egypt.” The preposition can have that force; and it is argued that Matthew 2:15 means God “called” Jesus, in the sense that he specially acknowledged and preserved him from the time of his Egyptian sojourn on, protecting him against Herod. After all, the exodus itself is not mentioned until vv. 21–22.
Some commentators interpret the calling of Israel in Hosea 11:1 in a similar way. But there are convincing arguments against this. The context of Hosea 11:1 mentions Israel’s return to Egypt (11:5), which presupposes that 11:1 refers to the exodus. To preserve the temporal force of ek in Matthew 2:15, Gundry is reduced to the unconvincing assertion that the preposition in Hosea is both temporal and locative. In support of this view, it is pointed out that Jesus’ actual departure out of Egypt is not mentioned until v. 21. But, although this is so, it is nevertheless implied by vv. 13–14. The reason Matthew has introduced the Hosea quotation at this point, instead of after v. 21, is probably that he wishes to use the return journey itself to set up the reference to the destination, Nazareth (v. 23), rather than the starting point, Egypt (cf. Brown, Birth of the Messiah, 220).
If Hosea 11:1 refers to Israel’s exodus from Egypt, in what sense can Matthew mean that Jesus’ return to the land of Israel “fulfilled” this text? Four observations clarify the issue.
- Many have noticed that Jesus is often presented in the NT as the antitype of Israel or, better, the typological recapitulation of Israel. Jesus’ temptation after forty days of fasting recapitulated the forty years’ trial of Israel (see comments at 4:1–11). Elsewhere, if Israel is the vine that does not bring forth the expected fruit, Jesus, by contrast, is the True Vine (Isa 5; Jn 15). The reason Pharaoh must let the people of Israel go is that Israel is the Lord’s son (Ex 4:22–23), a theme picked up by Jeremiah (31:9) as well as Hosea (11:1, 3; cf. Ps 2:6–7, 12). The “son” theme (cf. T. de Kruijf, Der Sohn des lebendigen Gottes: Ein Beitrag zur Christologie des Matthäusevangeliums [Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1962], 56–58, 109)—already present since Jesus is messianic “son of David” and, by the virginal conception, Son of God—becomes extraordinarily prominent in Matthew (see comments at 3:17): “This is my Son, whom I love.”
- The verb “fulfill” has broader significance than mere one-to-one prediction (see Introduction, section 11.b; comments at 5:17). Not only in Matthew but elsewhere in the NT, the history and laws of the OT are perceived to have prophetic significance (see comments at 5:17–20). The letter to the Hebrews argues that the laws regarding the tabernacle and the sacrificial system were from the beginning designed to point toward the only Sacrifice that could really remove sin and the only Priest who could serve once and for all as the effective Mediator between God and man. Likewise, Paul insists that the Messiah sums up his people in himself. When David was anointed king, the tribes acknowledged him as their bone and flesh (2 Sa 5:1); i.e., David as anointed king summed up Israel, with the result that his sin brought disaster on the people (2 Sa 12, 24). Just as Israel is God’s son, so the promised Davidic son is also Son of God (2 Sa 7:13–14; cf. N. T. Wright, “The Paul of History,” TynBul 29 [1978]: esp. 66–67). “Fulfillment” must be understood against the background of these interlocking themes and their typological connections.
- It follows, therefore, that the NT writers do not think they are reading back into the OT things that are not already there germinally. This does not mean that Hosea had the Messiah in mind when he penned Hosea 11:1. This admission prompts W. L. LaSor (“Prophecy, Inspiration, and Sensus Plenior,” TynBul 29 [1978]: 49–60) to see in Matthew’s use of Hosea 11:1 an example of sensus plenior, by which he means a “fuller sense” than what was in Hosea’s mind but something nevertheless in the mind of God. But so blunt an appeal to what God has absolutely hidden seems a strange background for Matthew’s insisting that Jesus’ exodus from Egypt in any sense fulfills the Hosea passage. This observation is not trivial. Matthew is reasoning with Jews who could say, “You are not playing fair with the text!” A mediating position is therefore necessary.
Hosea 11 pictures God’s love for Israel. Although God threatens judgment and disaster, yet because he is God and not man (11:9), he looks to a time when in compassion he will roar like a lion and his children will return to him (11:10–11). In short Hosea himself looks forward to a saving visitation by the Lord. Therefore his prophecy fits into the larger pattern of OT revelation up to that point, revelation that both explicitly and implicitly points to the Seed of the woman, the Elect Son of Abraham, the Prophet like Moses, the Davidic King, the Messiah.
The “son” language is part of this messianic matrix (cf. Willis J. Beecher, The Prophets and the Promise [New York: Crowell, 1905], 331–35); insofar as that matrix points to Jesus the Messiah and insofar as Israel’s history looks forward to one who sums it up, then so far also does Hosea 11:1 look forward. To ask whether Hosea thought of Messiah is to ask the wrong question, akin to using a hacksaw when a scalpel is needed. It is better to say that Hosea, building on existing revelation, grasped the messianic nuances of the “son” language already applied to Israel and David’s promised heir in previous revelation so that had he been able to see Matthew’s use of 11:1, he would not have disapproved, even if messianic nuances were not in his mind when he wrote that verse. He provided one small part of the revelation unfolded during salvation history; but that part he himself understood to be a pictorial representative of divine, redeeming love.
The NT writers insist that the OT can be rightly interpreted only if the entire revelation is kept in perspective as it is historically unfolded (e.g., Gal 3:6–14). Hermeneutically, this is not an innovation. OT writers drew lessons out of earlier salvation history, lessons difficult to perceive while that history was being lived, but lessons that retrospect would clarify (e.g., Asaph in Ps 78; see comments at 13:35). Matthew does the same in the context of the fulfillment of OT hopes in Jesus Christ. We may therefore legitimately speak of a “fuller meaning” than any one text provides. But the appeal should be made, not to some hidden divine knowledge, but to the pattern of revelation up to that time—a pattern not yet adequately discerned. The new revelation may therefore be truly new, yet at the same time capable of being checked against the old.
- If this interpretation of v. 15 is correct, it follows that for Matthew, Jesus himself is the locus of true Israel. This does not necessarily mean that God has no further purpose for racial Israel; but it does mean that the position of God’s people in the messianic age is determined by reference to Jesus, not race.[2]
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[1] MacArthur, J. F., Jr. (1985). Matthew (Vol. 1, pp. 40–43). Chicago: Moody Press.
[2] Carson, D. A. (2010). Matthew. In T. Longman III & D. E. Garland (Eds.), The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: Matthew–Mark (Revised Edition) (Vol. 9, pp. 118–120). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
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