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12 The role of the magi in Matthew’s story is now complete, and they set off
for home. But their route home, no less than their arrival, is supernaturally
directed. This dream is not said to include an angelic messenger, but instead
(as also in 2:22 where again an angel is not mentioned) the verb translated
“warned” indicates the divine origin of the message; chrēmatizō is used
especially for divine communications, cf. Luke 2:26; Acts 10:22; Heb 8:5;
11:7; 12:25. Dreams, like stars, were for magi an expected form of divine
revelation, and God communicates with them in the terms they would
understand. But the route he now prescribes is to have serious consequences
(v. 16).
3. God’s Son Brought out of Egypt (2:13–15)
¹³When they had gone away, suddenly¹ an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph
in a dream and said. “Get up and take the child and his mother with you and run
away to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you; Herod is intending to search for the
child so that he can destroy him.” ¹⁴So Joseph got up and took the child and his
mother with him that same night and escaped² to Egypt ¹⁵and stayed there until
Herod had died. This was to fulfill what had been declared by the Lord through
the prophet, who said,
“Out of Egypt I called my son.”
The first relocation which Matthew narrates in this “geographical” chapter is one
which is mentioned nowhere else in the NT tradition. While later Christian
tradition has added imaginary elements to the story of the journey to Egypt,³
Matthew’s account is extremely brief and basic. He tells us nothing of the
journey (except that it began at night) or of where the family lived in Egypt, nor
of how that time was spent. Apart from explaining how the Messiah avoided
Herod’s infanticide, Matthew’s purpose in mentioning the Egyptian visit seems
to be to provide the basis for the second of his geographical formula-quotations,
with its specific mention of Egypt as the place from which God’s son has been
called.
The tradition of a time spent in Egypt has perhaps left its mark in the rabbinic
allegation that Jesus learned in Egypt the magical arts which enabled him to
“lead Israel astray.” This motif is found as early as R. Eliezer ben Hyrcanus at
the end of the first century A.D.,⁴ and became a recurrent feature in anti-
Christian polemic,⁵ reflected for instance in Origen, Cels. 1.29. This allegation
may derive from a garbled awareness of the tradition as narrated by Matthew,
but since in Jewish tradition Egypt was a center of magic, once Jesus came to be
viewed as a sorcerer an Egyptian connection could have been developed without
any historical foundation. It certainly cannot carry the weight of an independent
testimony to Matthew’s narrative, which concerns Jesus’ infancy rather than the
age at which he might have learned magic.
The inclusion of Egypt in Jesus’ infant itinerary has for Matthew two scriptural
resonances which do not fit neatly together. On the one hand, Jesus is the new
Moses, and it was in Egypt that Moses escaped the infanticide of Pharaoh, and
from Egypt that as an adult he fled to escape Pharaoh’s anger (Exod 2:11–15),
returning eventually to Egypt when “those who sought your life are dead” (Exod
14:19, echoed by Matthew in 2:20, see comments there). But on the other hand
Jesus is also the new Israel, God’s “son,” as the quotation from Hos 11:1 will
presuppose; as patriarchal Israel went down to Egypt and came back to the
promised land, so now does Jesus, the new Israel. If it is supposed that typology
must depend on exact correspondences, Matthew’s typology here is decidedly
loose, not only in that Jesus is seen both as the deliverer and the delivered, but
also in that whereas Moses escaped from Egypt and returned to it, Jesus (like
Israel) does the opposite. But typology depends on meaningful associations
rather than exact correspondences, and in each of these quite different ways the
mention of Egypt is sufficient to provide food for thought on the relation
between the events God directed in Egypt more than a millennium ago and what
the same God is now accomplishing through the new deliverer, who is identified
by the prophetic text as his Son.
A further effect of including Egypt in the story of Jesus’ infancy is to add an
important extra dimension to the geographical area which is involved in
preparing for the coming of the Messiah. Not only is he the Galilean Messiah
born in Judea, but he is honored by magi from “the East” (Mesopotamia?), who
bring gifts particularly associated with Arabia (and with biblical echoes of
Sheba) and part of his childhood is spent in safety in Egypt. Thus all the main
elements of Israel’s surrounding world as we know them from the OT are
involved in welcoming God’s Messiah, who, as the story unfolds, will prove to
be much more than only the deliverer of Israel.
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