"Out of Egypt have I called my son"
How fulfilledRecorded in the GospelsResearch ratingTypological
1When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt.
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1When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt.
2As they called them, so they went from them: they sacrificed unto Baalim, and burned incense to graven images.
3I taught Ephraim also to go, taking them by their arms; but they knew not that I healed them.
4I drew them with cords of a man, with bands of love: and I was to them as they that take off the yoke on their jaws, and I laid meat unto them.
15And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.
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12And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.
13And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.
14When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt:
15And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.
16Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.
17Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying,
18In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.
Matthew records that the holy family fled to Egypt and returned after Herod's death, "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son" (). For Matthew, Jesus retraces the story of Israel, whom God called "my son, even my firstborn" (). Matthew follows the Hebrew "my son" rather than the Septuagint's "his children", a deliberate choice. The move from Israel's exodus to an individual was intelligible in Jewish reading: the Septuagint of says "a man shall come out of his seed ... God led him out of Egypt". Reading scripture as type and pattern in this way is the New Testament's own method.
Hosea's words are a statement in the past tense about the nation of Israel, and Matthew reads them as a pattern that Jesus fulfils by retracing Israel's journey. The Moses echoes in the story are part of that typology. No pre-Christian reading of the verse as a prophecy about a future individual is known.
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The verse looks back on the exodus: "When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt" (), and it goes straight on to Israel's sacrifices to the Baals. The flight to Egypt is found only in Matthew, and it does not fit Luke's sequence, in which the family "returned into Galilee, to their own city Nazareth" (). The angel's words to Joseph, "they are dead which sought the young child's life" (), reproduce the angel's words to Moses in the Septuagint (), down to the plural "they". Later stories linking Jesus with Egypt and magic (Celsus, the Talmud) are hostile, late and not independent.