This illustration, painted in 2018 for a Christian publisher, pictures Mary and Joseph fleeing from soldiers sent by King Herod. Like most people in first-century Judea, Mary and Joseph were Jews living under the vicious rule of an egomaniacal, possibly syphilitic monarch, who was driven in his madness to forestall prophesy by killing every baby boy born under the appearance of a certain star over Bethlehem. This nightmarish echo of the Egyptian Pharaoh's edict, roughly 1400 years earlier – to drown every firstborn male in the Nile – would not have escaped the parents of baby Jesus. Now Egypt was the only sanctuary they could reach in a desperate attempt to save their child. Under the oppressive authority of Rome, Herod and his sons were unimaginably brutal, slaughtering tens of thousands of people, including their own subjects. Herod the Great was so paranoid and power-crazed, he even executed members of his own family, including his beloved wife Mariamne. His reign of terror is described in the Book of Matthew in "The Massacre of the Innocents."
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Image of the Week: Escape to Egypt
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This illustration, painted in 2018 for a Christian publisher, pictures Mary and Joseph fleeing from soldiers sent by King Herod. Like most people in first-century Judea, Mary and Joseph were Jews living under the vicious rule of an egomaniacal, possibly syphilitic monarch, who was driven in his madness to forestall prophesy by killing every baby boy born under the appearance of a certain star over Bethlehem. This nightmarish echo of the Egyptian Pharaoh's edict, roughly 1400 years earlier – to drown every firstborn male in the Nile – would not have escaped the parents of baby Jesus. Now Egypt was the only sanctuary they could reach in a desperate attempt to save their child. Under the oppressive authority of Rome, Herod and his sons were unimaginably brutal, slaughtering tens of thousands of people, including their own subjects. Herod the Great was so paranoid and power-crazed, he even executed members of his own family, including his beloved wife Mariamne. His reign of terror is described in the Book of Matthew in "The Massacre of the Innocents."