Ramah

Matthew 2:13-23

". . . An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. 'Get up,' he said, 'take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod s going to search for the child to kill him" (Matthew 2:13)

Joseph must have woken up from his dream with a start. I imagine he woke Mary up immediately. "Mary, we must go." They must have gathered their small possessions and loaded their donkey in the dark. They would have had no time to say goodbye to any new friends. They would have had no time to send a message back to their home in Nazareth. There was no Internet, no phone, and no decent postal system. It might have been months before anyone knew what had become of them and that they were safely living in Egypt.

Joseph, Mary & Jesus escaped, but the Bethlehem's sons did not. The story takes a painful turn here. "When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity" (Matthew 2:16).

The verse that Matthew uses from Jeremiah to explain the killing is filled with pathos:

"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." (Matthew 2:18)

Ramah. "When Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians, those taken captive were assembled in Ramah before being moved to Babylon (Jeremiah 40:1). Jeremiah said: A voice was heard at Ramah, Rachel was weeping over her sons, because they were no more. (Jer. 31:15). Rachel had so desired children that she considered herself dead without them. (Gen. 30:1)"

"Jeremiah said that she was figuratively weeping because of the loss of the people killed or taken in captivity. And since she was the mother of Benjamin, it would fit because those in Ramah were Benjamites.

"Ramah is the town that was home to Samuel's mother Hannah and his father Elkhana, from which they journeyed to the sanctuary at Shiloh, where Hannah prayed to God to end her barren-ness and give her a child. ( 1 Sam 1-2)." (Ramah in Benjamin)*

Ramah is the city of barrenness, brokenness, and exile. The mother's of Bethlehem understood Ramah in their souls. It's hard to understand this. I wish the angel could have told all the mother's. Leave now! But he didn't.

Although Jesus did escape, he did not escape for long. Thirty-three years is not a long escape from death. When Jesus was walking to Calvary, a large number of wailing women followed him. Luke says that "Jesus turned and said to them, 'Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children. For the time will come when you will say, 'Blessed are the barren women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed! Then 'they will say to the mountains, 'Fall on us!' and to the hills, 'Cover us!' for if men do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?" (Luke 23:27-31).

I hear a response to the women of Bethlehem here. The compassionate Savior even in his own death stops to listen to the voices that cry from Ramah.


*I'm quoting from Wikipedia here .