Don't Know Much About History
(Continued)

Using Software Tools to better understand the world of the Bible.

How Close is Close Enough?

So just how close was Ramah to Bethlehem? Was it close enough to be included in Herod's decree of infanticide? After all, Matthew 2:16 does say that Herod's decree applied to Bethlehem and its vicinity. Was Ramah close enough to be regarded as being "in the vicinity" of Bethlehem? Put another way, was Rachel weeping in Ramah because there were babies murdered there as well?

We can find out how close these two towns were to one another by option-dragging the cursor from one town to the other. The distance of the resulting line will be displayed in the Instant Details Box, along with the elevation and map coordinates of the point on the map currently beneath the cursor.

As you can see from the illustration above, the distance from Benjamin to Ramah is about seventeen kilometers, or nearly eleven miles.

Eleven miles certainly isn't far, and it is quite easy to conceive that Herod's decree of infanticide might have included every town within such a distance from Bethlehem. Thus, Rachel might well have been described as weeping for her children at Ramah because Herod's pogrom actually extended that far north.

This is far from certain, however, and there is one significant factor which mitigates against such an understanding: namely, that if Herod actually slaughtered infants as far north as Ramah, the city of Jerusalem would have been included in the massacre. Look again at the map above. You'll see that Jerusalem is almost exactly halfway between Ramah and Bethlehem. Now, Jerusalem was the heart and soul of Herod's kingdom, and one of its most populous cities. If Herod's decree had included Jerusalem, it might have sparked rebellion. At the very least, such a campaign might be expected to be mentioned by the first-century Jewish historian, Josephus, who was not shy about pointing out Herod's cruelties.

Does Josephus mention Herod's decree of infanticide? We can find that out easily enough by selecting Bethlehem on the map and choosing the works of Josephus from the English texts pop-up menu of the Amplify palette. Doing so will open the works of Josephus and search them for every occurrence of the name Bethlehem. A quick glance of the search results shows no mention of such a campaign against Bethlehem. To verify that Josephus does not describe this episode, we might try doing other searches, such as for "Christ" or "boy* <AND> kill*" and so forth. Every such search I tried turned up no mention of this slaughter, a fact which would be hard to explain if it had taken place within the city of Jerusalem. Although arguments from silence are tenuous at best, Josephus' silence regarding the slaughter of the innocents would be easier to understand if it were limited only to the town of Bethlehem and the rural areas immediately surrounding it.

So what have we learned from all this speculation as to whether Ramah was close enough to Bethlehem to be included in Herod's decree of infanticide? Well, we've learned that while it was certainly possible that children were actually murdered at Ramah as well as at Bethlehem, it is not necessarily probable that this was the case. In other words, we must look beyond mere geographical proximity in order to find a satisfactory explanation for why Matthew would use a prophecy about Ramah to describe an event taking place at Bethlehem.