Massacre of the Innocents

Based on Wikipedia: Massacre of the Innocents

Here is one of the darkest stories in the entire Christian tradition, and yet most people know almost nothing about it. Every December, we pull out the Nativity scenes, sing carols about a silent night, and celebrate the birth of a baby in a manger. But nestled right there in the Gospel of Matthew, just a few verses after the Magi follow their star, is a tale of mass infanticide ordered by a paranoid king.

It probably never happened. And that makes it even more interesting.

The Story Itself

The account is brief, almost shockingly so for something so horrific. In the Gospel of Matthew, the Magi—those enigmatic wise men from the East—arrive in Jerusalem asking where they might find the newborn king of the Jews. This question reaches the ears of Herod the Great, the Roman-appointed ruler of Judea, and it does not sit well with him.

Herod was already king of the Jews, thank you very much.

He directs the Magi to Bethlehem and asks them to report back once they've found this child. They find Jesus, present their famous gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, but then receive a warning in a dream not to return to Herod. They slip away by another route.

Matthew tells us what happens next with chilling economy:

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 who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.

That's it. One sentence. An order to slaughter every male toddler and infant in an entire region, and Matthew moves on almost immediately to quote an Old Testament prophecy about Rachel weeping for her children.

Why Most Scholars Think It Didn't Happen

The historical case against the Massacre of the Innocents is, frankly, overwhelming. Start with the most obvious problem: no other source mentions it. Not the other three gospels. Not Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian who wrote extensively about Herod and catalogued his many crimes with something approaching relish. Not Nicolaus of Damascus, who was Herod's personal friend and biographer.

This matters because Josephus did not shy away from recording Herod's atrocities. He tells us that Herod executed three of his own sons. He describes the king's paranoid rages, his political murders, his ruthless consolidation of power. If Herod had ordered the massacre of children in Bethlehem, this would have fit perfectly into Josephus's portrait of a tyrant. But there's nothing.

Some defenders of the story's historicity point to a quip attributed to the Roman emperor Augustus: "It's better to be Herod's pig than his son." The joke plays on the fact that Herod, nominally Jewish, wouldn't eat pork—so his pigs were safe, while his sons were not. A fifth-century writer named Macrobius even connected this witticism to the Bethlehem massacre, claiming Augustus said it after hearing that Herod's own son had been killed along with the other children.

But this late account, written four centuries after the supposed events, seems confused and may simply reflect the influence of Matthew's gospel rather than independent historical memory.

A Story Borrowed from Moses

If Matthew didn't get this story from historical records, where did it come from? The answer appears to be the Book of Exodus.

Consider the parallels. In Exodus, Pharaoh orders the death of Hebrew male children. A special child—Moses—is saved through divine intervention and the quick thinking of his parents. That child grows up to become the liberator of his people. Later, Moses must flee into exile, and he returns only after those who sought his life have died.

Matthew's story hits every beat. A paranoid ruler orders the death of male children. A special child—Jesus—is saved through divine warning (Joseph receives an angel in a dream). The family flees to Egypt. They return only after Herod dies.

The connection is not subtle, and it was not meant to be. Matthew was writing for a Jewish audience steeped in the Hebrew scriptures. By framing Jesus's infancy as a recapitulation of Moses's story, Matthew makes a theological argument: Jesus is the new Moses, the new liberator, the new lawgiver. The massacre story isn't primarily about history. It's about meaning.

This is something modern readers often struggle with. We tend to assume that ancient writers shared our obsession with factual accuracy, that they were trying to write what we would recognize as journalism or biography. But the gospels are theological documents first. They're making claims about who Jesus was and what his life meant. Whether every detail corresponds to what a video camera would have recorded was simply not the authors' primary concern.

How Many Children?

Here's where things get strange. If you ask different Christian traditions how many children died in the massacre, you'll get wildly different answers.

The Byzantine liturgy claims fourteen thousand victims. Early Syrian sources say sixty-four thousand. Coptic tradition goes all the way to one hundred forty-four thousand—a number borrowed from the Book of Revelation, where it represents the sealed servants of God.

These figures are obviously symbolic rather than demographic. Bethlehem was a tiny village. Scholars who take the story as historical and try to calculate realistic numbers estimate that the town's population was perhaps a thousand people. Given ancient infant mortality rates and family sizes, this might yield somewhere between six and twenty male children under the age of two.

That's still horrific, of course. Twenty murdered children is twenty murdered children. But it's a very different kind of atrocity than the massacre of thousands, and it might help explain why contemporary historians didn't record it. In the brutal context of Herod's reign—a reign that included the execution of his own family members and the wholesale slaughter of political rivals—the death of a handful of peasant children in a backwater village might not have registered as particularly noteworthy.

This is a grim thought, but it reflects the moral universe of first-century Judea.

Rachel Weeping for Her Children

Matthew follows his account of the massacre with one of the more puzzling quotations in the New Testament. He cites the prophet Jeremiah:

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.

The connection to Bethlehem isn't immediately obvious. Ramah was a different town entirely, located north of Jerusalem. And in its original context, Jeremiah's prophecy isn't about children being killed—it's about the Babylonian exile, with Rachel (the ancestral mother of several Israelite tribes) symbolically mourning as her descendants are carried off into captivity. The very next verses in Jeremiah speak of hope and restoration, of the exiles returning home.

So why does Matthew use this passage?

The answer lies in how ancient Jewish interpreters read their scriptures. They worked through patterns and associations, finding connections that might seem arbitrary to modern readers but felt profound to them. Rachel's tomb was traditionally located near Bethlehem. She died giving birth, and her dying words named her son Ben-oni—"son of my sorrow." She was already a figure of maternal grief.

By invoking Rachel, Matthew ties the Bethlehem massacre to the whole arc of Jewish suffering and hope. The exile ended. The children returned. The sorrow was not the final word. For Matthew's audience, this wasn't a random proof-text—it was a theological claim about suffering and redemption.

The Feast of Holy Innocents

By the late fifth century, the Western church had established a feast day commemorating the slaughtered children. It appears in the Leonine Sacramentary, one of the oldest surviving liturgical books, dating to around 485 AD. The children were venerated as the first Christian martyrs—an unusual category, since they died before Christ's ministry even began and obviously had no understanding of what was happening to them.

The date varies by tradition. Western churches—Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran—observe Holy Innocents' Day on December 28th, the fourth day of Christmastide. The Syriac Orthodox and related churches celebrate on December 27th. The Eastern Orthodox observe it on December 29th.

What's remarkable is how the feast developed over the medieval centuries. In many parts of Europe, particularly north of the Alps, Holy Innocents' Day became a festival of inversion. Children would take on the roles of adults. Boy bishops would preside over church services. Students and choirboys would temporarily rule over their teachers and choirmasters.

This sounds bizarre until you remember the Roman Saturnalia, that ancient December festival when social hierarchies were briefly suspended and slaves could play at being masters. The medieval church had a complicated relationship with such reversals—sometimes suppressing them, sometimes absorbing them into the Christian calendar. Holy Innocents' Day became one of the places where the old inversions survived in Christianized form.

There were stranger customs too. In medieval England and France, the day of the week on which Holy Innocents fell was considered unlucky for the entire following year. People would avoid starting new projects on that day of the week until the next Holy Innocents' Day reset the calendar. Philippe de Commynes, a minister to King Louis XI of France, recorded in his memoirs the anxiety he felt when he had to interrupt the king with urgent news on the forbidden day.

The Coventry Carol

Perhaps no artistic response to the massacre story is more haunting than the Coventry Carol, a sixteenth-century English Christmas carol that manages to be both beautiful and deeply unsettling.

The carol comes from a medieval mystery play performed in Coventry called The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors. These mystery plays—elaborate dramatic presentations of biblical stories—were performed by craft guilds throughout medieval England. The shearmen and tailors of Coventry were responsible for staging the Nativity and its immediate aftermath, including the massacre.

The carol is sung from the perspective of the mothers of Bethlehem, a lullaby to children who are about to die:

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child, bye bye, lully, lullay...

The melody is in a minor key, mournful and tender. The oldest surviving text was written down by a man named Robert Croo in 1534, with the melody recorded in 1591. It is traditionally sung without instrumental accompaniment, which only adds to its stark emotional power.

There's something almost unbearable about a lullaby for a doomed child. The mothers know what's coming. The audience knows what's coming. The song doesn't offer comfort or hope—it simply sits with the horror, giving voice to grief that refuses to be resolved.

Painters and the Massacre

If composers found the massacre story emotionally compelling, painters found it technically irresistible. Here was a subject that demanded everything Renaissance artists prized: complex compositions with many figures, violent action, dramatic emotion, heroic bodies in motion.

The great masters couldn't resist it. Giotto painted the massacre. So did Guido Reni, whose 1611 version uses an unusual vertical format that emphasizes the chaos and compression of the violence. Peter Paul Rubens painted it multiple times. Nicolas Poussin, that master of classical restraint, created his own version between 1625 and 1632.

But the most fascinating versions come from the Bruegel family. Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Massacre of the Innocents around 1565-67, and his son Pieter Brueghel the Younger produced multiple copies into the seventeenth century. What makes Bruegel's version extraordinary is that he set it not in ancient Bethlehem but in a Flemish village in winter, with soldiers carrying banners displaying the Habsburg double-headed eagle.

This was not subtle. The Netherlands in Bruegel's time was under Spanish Habsburg rule, and the Dutch Revolt was either brewing or actively underway. By depicting Herod's soldiers as contemporary imperial troops terrorizing a familiar European village, Bruegel made the ancient story into a commentary on present violence. The massacre wasn't something that happened long ago in a far-off land. It was happening here, now, to people who looked like your neighbors.

Cornelis van Haarlem's 1590 version pushes this even further. His painting, now in the Rijksmuseum, reflects the violence of the Dutch Revolt so directly that it reads almost as war reportage. And unusually, he doesn't depict the mothers as passive victims—some of them are shown fighting back, attacking the soldiers who have come for their children.

Pranks and Flour Fights

Not every culture treats Holy Innocents' Day as solemn. In Spain, much of Latin America, and the Philippines, December 28th is a day for pranks—the equivalent of April Fool's Day in English-speaking countries.

The pranks are called inocentadas, and their victims are called inocentes. There's a delightful ambiguity in the terminology: sometimes the inocentes are the victims of the jokes, but sometimes they're the pranksters themselves—and in that case, you shouldn't get angry with them, because as "innocents," they can't really be blamed for anything.

One of the most spectacular of these traditions is Els Enfarinats, an annual flour fight in the town of Ibi in the Alicante province of Spain. Participants dress in military uniforms and stage a kind of mock coup, during which they pelt each other (and bystanders) with flour. It's boisterous, messy, and about as far from a solemn commemoration of murdered children as you can get.

How did a feast day for slaughtered infants become an occasion for practical jokes? The connection seems to run through the medieval festivals of inversion. If Holy Innocents' Day was already a time when normal rules were suspended and hierarchies overturned, it's not such a leap to a day when normal rules of truth-telling are also suspended. The inocentes—whether the children who escaped Herod or the pranksters who can't be blamed—share an exemption from ordinary consequences.

What Does the Story Mean?

Strip away the historical questions, the artistic representations, the feast days and pranks, and you're left with a story about power and vulnerability. A king, threatened by a child, responds with overwhelming violence. The child escapes, but others do not. The powerful protect themselves; the powerless suffer.

Matthew's audience would have recognized this pattern. They lived under Roman occupation. They knew what it meant to be subject to the whims of rulers who could kill with impunity. The story of the Bethlehem massacre wasn't ancient history to them—it was a description of their world.

But Matthew's story also contains a counter-movement. The child escapes. The family flees to Egypt—reversing the Exodus, with Jews now finding refuge in the land their ancestors fled. Herod dies. The family returns. The threatened child grows up to be the one who, in Christian theology, ultimately defeats death itself.

Whether or not the massacre happened, the story captures something true about how hope survives in a brutal world. Rachel weeps for her children and refuses to be comforted. But Jeremiah's prophecy, which Matthew quotes, continues: "There is hope for your future, declares the Lord. Your children will return to their own land."

The lullaby ends. But the story doesn't end with the lullaby.

The Liturgical Details

For those interested in how the Catholic Church has marked this feast, the liturgical history is surprisingly complex. Before 1955, Holy Innocents' Day had a unique character. The vestments were violet—the color of penance—rather than the red typically used for martyrs. The Gloria, that great hymn of praise, was omitted. The joyful Alleluia was replaced with a more somber Tract.

The reasoning was subtle: these were martyrs, yes, but unwitting ones. They hadn't chosen their fate. They hadn't consciously died for Christ. There was something incomplete about their martyrdom that the liturgy acknowledged through its penitential character.

Unless, that is, the feast fell on a Sunday. Then everything changed—red vestments, Gloria, Alleluia, full festive celebration. It was as if the joy of the Lord's Day overruled the sorrow of the innocent dead.

Pope Pius XII simplified all this in 1955, suppressing the octave (the eight-day observance that extended the feast) and standardizing the celebration to use the festive elements regardless of what day it fell on. The current practice treats the Holy Innocents as full martyrs—red vestments, Gloria, Alleluia—honoring their unknowing sacrifice with the same liturgical dignity given to those who consciously chose death for their faith.

Bethlehem Today

Modern Bethlehem still keeps the memory. The Church of the Nativity, built over the traditional site of Jesus's birth, includes a space commemorating the massacre. The nearby Milk Grotto, according to tradition, is where Mary nursed Jesus while hiding from Herod's soldiers—a drop of her milk fell to the ground and turned the rock white, or so the story goes.

These sites layer legend upon legend, history upon tradition, faith upon archaeology. Whether any of it corresponds to what actually happened two thousand years ago is almost beside the point. Pilgrims come. They pray. They remember a story about vulnerable children and the violence of the powerful, and they hope that somehow, despite everything, the children return.

Rachel's weeping does not have the last word.