Years ago when it seemed like everyone I knew was reading the crime writer Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I picked it up and flinched when I saw the original Swedish title: Men Who Hate Women. Its lack of euphemism felt like a stinging slap. And, true to its title, the novel features a prolonged episode in which a woman is sexually tortured, a scene I wish I’d never read.
The biblical text we remember on this feast day of the Holy Innocents is similarly stark—“fraught with background,” as Erich Auerbach says of the Hebrew Bible, in the horror it relates. We might imagine it being titled People Who Hate Children. The setting is this: Magi from the East have journeyed to Jerusalem in search of a new king whose astral portent they’ve glimpsed. They approach the king of Judea, Herod, to see where they can find the royal child to pay him homage.
Hiding his fear, Herod asks the magi to let him know once they’ve managed to locate the child, on the pretense that he wants to join them in their worship of the new ruler. But the magi, warned in a dream not to trust Herod, don’t comply with his request, making their return trip by a different route. Then: “When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the magi” (Matt. 2:16).
Herod’s goal is clear enough: he wants to cast his punishing net widely enough that it catches the infant Jesus and thus ensures that his potential political rival is eliminated. The plot fails—thanks to an angelic intervention, Joseph and Mary whisk Jesus away to Egypt—but the damage is done. As many as two dozen infants are massacred as their mothers wail (“A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children,” v. 18), children whom the church commemorates on December 28: “We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod.”
In the literary design of the Gospel text, it is probably the case that Matthew relates this tragic story to present Jesus becoming a “new Moses” and a “new Israel.” As the great Catholic biblical scholar Raymond Brown explains:
Jesus, who is to save God’s people (1:21), relives both great past moments of [Israel’s] salvation [i.e., Israel’s exodus from Egypt and later return from exile] … [Matthew’s Old Testament citations], by mentioning Bethlehem, the city of David, Egypt, the land of the Exodus, and Ramah, the mourning-place of the Exile, offer a theological history of Israel in geographical miniature. Just as Jesus sums up the history of the people named in his genealogy, so his early career sums up the history of these prophetically significant places.
Jesus, in other words, escapes slaughter just as Moses did when Pharaoh issued a similar decree that Hebrew male babies be slaughtered (“Pharaoh commanded all his people, ‘Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile,’” Ex. 1:22). And Jesus eventually returns to his homeland from Egypt just as Israel did after suffering under Babylonian captivity.
But maybe we can say more. Jesus is here the new and greater Moses, he is true Israel, and as such he is also a targeted infant victim who barely escapes the fate that other innocent children suffer. From the very first moments of his life, he is hunted by the powerful for the purpose of extermination. He was a hated child.
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Last year when news broke that the Nobel Prize-winning writer Alice Munro had sided with her partner against her daughter when confronted with an accusation that he had sexually assaulted her, writer and critic B.D. McClay wrote:
People hate children. This is something I believe strongly to be true, even though a defensible version of this belief would have to have a million qualifiers. There is of course plenty of piety and rhetoric around children and their importance and so on, how they are innocent and the future and a hundred other things along these lines, but that has nothing to do with actual children and how people feel about them. There’s plenty of piety and rhetoric around veterans, too. But that doesn’t mean we as a society treat them particularly well.
And by “hate children” I don’t mean that people prefer the society of adults, or don’t want children themselves, or that sort of thing. I really mean they hate children for the fact of being children. And I think if you don’t perceive this hatred there’s something about the world you can’t understand. If you assume rhetoric about children represents anything like actual feeling you will assume that any mother, presented with the image of her husband abusing her daughter, would just kill him herself then and there. But that isn’t how it goes.
Reading those words when McClay published them, I felt a similar sort of stinging discomfort as when I read the original Stieg Larsson book title. I wondered if McClay was exaggerating; I certainly hoped she was. But the evidence for her claim is sadly not at all hard to find, though it may, as she says, feel impossible to grasp the enormity of.
What we’re confronted with on this dark feast day of the massacre of the Holy Innocents is the stark reality that people with the power to commit murder (which is to say, all of us) are willing to sacrifice infant lives to preserve that power. And what we’re comforted with is the truth that God became a hated child for the sake of hated children in all times and at all places—and for the sake of their haters. He loves children. He was one once. And he died to make even evil tyrants become children of God.
The Rev. Wesley Hill, PhD is associate professor of New Testament at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. He is the author of five books including Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus (IVP, 2025).
