Matthew 2.23
At the end of his infancy narrative,
Matthew narrates that Joseph, who has just returned with his wife and child
from Egypt to the land of Israel, is afraid to go to Judea, because Archelaus
is reigning there. Warned in a dream, he withdraws to Galilee and settles in Nazareth,
and this is seen in the fulfillment of a prophecy that reads (2.23):
οτι Ναζωριος κληθησεται
For he will be called a Nazorean.
This fulfilment quotation confronts
the exegete with several problems, and some of these are relevant to its composite
character. First: does the quotation comprise (as supposed above) three words, οτι being a causal conjunction,
or two words, οτι
being recitative, that is, introducing a direct discourse, taking into account
that no other Matthean fulfilment begins with a recitative οτι, and that
Matthew shows a tendency to drop recitative οτι when he finds it in his sources, we
have to say that the former possibility is by far the most probable one.
Second: what is the Old Testament source of this quotation? In precisely this
form, it does not occur in the Old Testament, but a clause from Judg. 13.5, 7
comes rather close to it. These two verses concern the announcement of the
birth of Samson, and in this context it is twice said about him:
י־נזיר אלהים יהיה הנער מן־הבטן
For the boy will be a Nazirite to God from the womb.
In the LXX< there is some variation
in the translation; I give here the clause form 13.7 according to LXX A:
οτι ναζιραιον
θεου εσται το παιδαριον απο της γαστρος.
The initial οτι parallels the οτι in the beginning of Matthew’s
quotation. We further know from the LXX and from the other ancient Greek
translations of the Old Testament that there was, at the time Matthew wrote his
Gospel, an established tradition among Greek-speaking Jews of not translating
but transliterating the Hebrew noun נזיר into Greek characters, mostly with a
Greek ending as ναζιραιος.
So Matthew’s audience knew this word, and they would notice that it differed by
only one vowel from Ναζωραιος.
Contemporary Jewish biblical exegesis knew the ‘do not read . . . but . . .’ procedure
in which the vocalization of the Hebrew could be changed in order to arrive at
another reading of the biblical text. To my mind, Matthew applied this
procedure to the Greek transliteration ναζιραιος of the Hebrew word נזיר: he changed -ι- to -ω-, and so he
obtained the word Ναζωραιος
and he had an Old Testament quotation connecting Jesus with Nazareth.
Κληθησεται,
at the end of the quotation, is then a replacement for εσται in Judg. 13.5, 7. Its probable source
is Isa. 7.14, a biblical passage (already quoted in Matthew in 1.23) that is
unmistakably analogous to Judg. 13.5, 7. LXX A reads in this verse from Judges:
ιδου
συ
εν
γασττι εξεις και τεξη υιον,
‘see, you will be pregnant and will give birth to a son’. Apart from a change
of subject (‘the virgin’ instead of ‘you’) and a corresponding change of verbal
form, this clause is identical to a clause from Isa. 7.14 LXX: ιδου η παρθενος
εν
γαστρι εξει και τεξεται υιον
(in Hebrew, there is the same similarity). The Isaiah passage continues in the
LXX (which is here a correct rendering of the Hebrew): και καλεσεις
το
ονομα αυτου Εμμανουηλ,
‘and you will call his name Emmanuel’. On account of the analogy, Mathew could
import the verb καλειν
into his quotation; he adapted the verbal form to the new context. We have here
then a conflated quotation: one word from the basic text of Judg. 13.5, 6 has
been replaced by a word from the analogous text of Isa. 7.14.
The inserted word κληθησεται
contributes in several respects to the impact of the citation.
First, it is essential to what the citation in its Matthean context says: Jesus
will be called a Nazorean, that is, he will be known and addressed as a Nazorean,
as an inhabitant of Nazareth. In Matthew’s view, he was actually born in Bethlehem,
and he will certainly not be a Nazorean in the sense that this word
indicates his true identity; his true identity is that he is ‘the Christ, the Son
of God’ (see Mt. 16.16; 26.63-64; 27.54). Second, κληθησεται links the fulfilment
quotation in 2.23 to the one from Isa. 7.14 and 1.23: according to the first
fulfilment quotation in the infancy narrative Jesus will be called Emmanuel,
and according to the last one he will be called a Nazorean. Third, the quotation
in 2.23 implicitly makes Jesus and Samson in two parallel figures, and the link
with the quotation from Isa. 7.14 and 1.23 makes Jesus’ being conceived without
the intervention of a human father (see Mt. 1.18-25) part of this parallelism.
The story of Samson’s birth in Judges 13, ‘in contrast to all other wonder-birth
stories in the First Testament suggests the possibility of divine conception with
the benefit of an earthly father’. Matthew combined in 2.23 what he saw as Old
Testament announcements of the miraculous birth of Jesus and this implies that
the composite citation was an ad hoc creation of the evangelist. (Maarten
J. J. Menken, “Composite Citations in the Gospel of Matthew,” in Composite
Citations in Antiquity, ed. Sean A. Adams and Seth M. Ehorn, 2 vols.
[Library of New Testament Studies 593; London: T&T Clark, 2018], 2:52-54)