“A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children; she wouldn’t be comforted, because they are no more.”
ExplanationCommentary
Verse 18. A voice was heard in Rama. [4] S. Jerom takes Rama, not for the name of any city, but for a high place, as appears by his Latin translation. Jerem. 31:15. But in all Greek copies here in Saint Matthew, and in the Septuagint in Jeremy, we find the word itself Rama, so that it must signify a particular city. Rachel, who was buried at Bethlehem, is represented weeping (as it were in the person of those desolate mothers) the murder, and loss of so many children: and Rama being a city not far from Bethlehem, in the tribe of Benjamin, built on a high place, it is said that the cries and lamentations of these children, and their mothers, reached even to Rama. Cornel. a Lapide on Jerem. xxxi. thinks that these words were not only applied by the evangelist in a figurative sense, but that the prophet in the literal sense foretold these lamentations. Witham.