Birth and Infancy of Jesus

122:10.1But the watch­ers for Herod were not in­ac­tive. When they re­ported to him the visit of the priests of Ur to Beth­le­hem, Herod sum­moned these Chaldeans to ap­pear be­fore him. He in­quired dili­gently of these wise men about the new “king of the Jews,” but they gave him lit­tle sat­is­fac­tion, ex­plain­ing that the babe had been born of a woman who had come down to Beth­le­hem with her hus­band for the cen­sus en­roll­ment. Herod, not be­ing sat­is­fied with this an­swer, sent them forth with a purse and di­rected that they should find the child so that he too might come and wor­ship him, since they had de­clared that his king­dom was to be spir­i­tual, not tem­po­ral. But when the wise men did not re­turn, Herod grew sus­pi­cious. As he turned these things over in his mind, his in­form­ers re­turned and made full re­port of the re­cent oc­cur­rences in the tem­ple, bring­ing him a copy of parts of the Sim­eon song which had been sung at the re­demp­tion cer­e­monies of Je­sus. But they had failed to fol­low Joseph and Mary, and Herod was very an­gry with them when they could not tell him whither the pair had taken the babe. He then dis­patched searchers to lo­cate Joseph and Mary. Know­ing Herod pur­sued the Naz­a­reth fam­ily, Zach­a­rias and Eliz­a­beth re­mained away from Beth­le­hem. The boy baby was se­creted with Joseph’s rel­a­tives.

122:10.2Joseph was afraid to seek work, and their small sav­ings were rapidly dis­ap­pear­ing. Even at the time of the pu­rifi­ca­tion cer­e­monies at the tem­ple, Joseph deemed him­self suf­fi­ciently poor to war­rant his of­fer­ing for Mary two young pi­geons as Moses had di­rected for the pu­rifi­ca­tion of moth­ers among the poor.

122:10.3When, af­ter more than a year of search­ing, Herod’s spies had not lo­cated Je­sus, and be­cause of the sus­pi­cion that the babe was still con­cealed in Beth­le­hem, he pre­pared an or­der di­rect­ing that a sys­tem­atic search be made of ev­ery house in Beth­le­hem, and that all boy ba­bies un­der two years of age should be killed. In this man­ner Herod hoped to make sure that this child who was to be­come “king of the Jews” would be de­stroyed. And thus per­ished in one day six­teen boy ba­bies in Beth­le­hem of Judea. But in­trigue and mur­der, even in his own im­me­di­ate fam­ily, were com­mon oc­cur­rences at the court of Herod.

122:10.4The mas­sacre of these in­fants took place about the mid­dle of Oc­to­ber, 6 B.C., when Je­sus was a lit­tle over one year of age. But there were be­liev­ers in the com­ing Mes­siah even among Herod’s court attachés, and one of these, learn­ing of the or­der to slaugh­ter the Beth­le­hem boy ba­bies, com­mu­ni­cated with Zach­a­rias, who in turn dis­patched a mes­sen­ger to Joseph; and the night be­fore the mas­sacre Joseph and Mary de­parted from Beth­le­hem with the babe for Alexan­dria in Egypt. In or­der to avoid at­tract­ing at­ten­tion, they jour­neyed alone to Egypt with Je­sus. They went to Alexan­dria on funds pro­vided by Zach­a­rias, and there Joseph worked at his trade while Mary and Je­sus lodged with well-to-do rel­a­tives of Joseph’s fam­ily. They so­journed in Alexan­dria two full years, not re­turn­ing to Beth­le­hem un­til af­ter the death of Herod.