In this series of posts, we've been exploring why Matthew sees the slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem as "fulfilling" Jeremiah 31:15, which speaks of Rachel weeping for her lost children at Ramah. In part one of this series, we saw that the connection between Bethlehem and Ramah has to do with Rachel's death in childbirth on the way to Bethlehem. It appears from 1 Samuel that she died and was buried in the vicinity of Ramah. In part two of this series, we looked at the geographical and historical context of Jeremiah 31:15. There we discovered that in Jeremiah's day, Rachel was weeping because it was from Ramah that the conquering Babylonians were deporting the captive Jews from Jerusalem. In this post, we'll conclude by putting all the pieces together so we can understand the point Matthew was trying to make.

When I taught this to my Sunday School class, I explained that Matthew is not merely quoting clear predictive prophecies about the Messiah. Rather, he is associating the events in Jesus' life with a wide range of events in the history of Israel. I said it's a bit like that word-association thing psychologists do:

Psychologist: "What do you think of when I say 'Bethlehem'?"
Matthew: "Rachel's death."
P: "And what does that make you think of?"
M: "Her tomb at Ramah."
P: "And 'Ramah'?"
M: "Rachel weeping for her lost children!"

If we understand this dynamic, then we can appreciate the parallels Matthew wants his readers to draw.

In Genesis, Rachel dies giving birth while on the road to Bethlehem. In the midst of her suffering, the midwife tries to comfort her with the news that she is having another son. In this way, her child is both her cause of weeping and her hope for the future.

In Jeremiah's day, Rachel weeps over her children once more, this time because they are being led into captivity and exile near the very spot where she is buried. She is then comforted with the promise that her children will return. Once again, her offspring are both her cause of weeping and her hope for the future.

In Matthew's day, Rachel weeps yet again: this time over the slaughter of the children at Bethlehem. No words of comfort are given her in Matthew, but the very next verse speaks of Herod's death and the return of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus to the land of Israel. Just as in Jeremiah's day, the situation seems bleak, but the hope of salvation lives on.

There are, of course, additional historical parallels in this passage. When the wicked king Herod orders the slaughter of innocent children to protect his rule, we naturally think of the Egyptian pharaoh who ordered the slaughter of Hebrew children. One child, Moses, escaped the slaughter and went on to deliver his people from captivity and exile. In the same way, Jesus escapes the slaughter of the innocents—ironically, by going into exile in Egypt. Like the Israelites, he is led into Egypt by a man named Joseph, a man whom God speaks to in dreams. Like the Jews for whom Rachel wept in Jeremiah's day, this child knows the experience of living in exile, and like the Israelites of Moses' day, he goes through his own exodus from Egypt. Just as Rachel was comforted with the promise that her children would be restored, and just as Moses' birth was a sign that the Israelites' deliverance was near, so Matthew's readers are meant to understand that the long-awaited Messiah has been born and the hope of salvation is close at hand.

Obviously, there's a lot more going on in Matthew's infancy narrative than most modern readers realize. If you want help in bringing out these kinds of connections, here are some resources you'll find helpful:

You may find this surprising, but the main resource I used in preparing my Sunday School lesson was our Bible Lands PhotoGuide. It's tempting to think of the PhotoGuide as primarily a collection of pictures, but it's actually one of the best places for clear, concise information about biblical sites. The photos are really just the icing on the cake. The PhotoGuide article on Ramah gave me all the relevant passages needed to explain the connection between Ramah and Bethlehem, so that constituted the bulk of my research.

Of course, this passage was focused specifically on a place name, so the PhotoGuide was an obvious place to begin. For other New Testament passages that deal with quotations from or allusions to the Old Testament, I find Beale and Carson's Commentary on the New Testament Use of The Old Testament to be particularly helpful. While most good commentaries will deal with the interpretive issues this commentary focuses on, it is precisely this commentary's focus which makes it so valuable. Rather than having to skim commentary which deals with the use of the Old Testament as one of a dozen important aspects of a passage, Beale and Carson put that one issue front and center.

Other resources which help to explain the links between the Old and New Testaments are the various Bible Background Commentaries available from Zondervan and IVP. These are not as narrowly focused on OT and NT parallels as Beale and Carson, but they'll generally draw your attention to those parallels, along with providing information on the historical background of a passage.

While explaining why Rachel was weeping at Ramah required having my Sunday School class look at a number of different passages together with several maps, they were able to follow my explanation without getting overwhelmed by the details. On the contrary, they were excited to see how all these passages fit together. I hope you've found this series helpful—and maybe even a little exciting—as well.

In Matthew's account of Jesus' birth, he points to specific events as the "fulfillment" of several Old Testament "prophecies." For the past several weeks, I've been exposing my Sunday School class to these Old Testament passages in their original context to show how Matthew's narrative is much more nuanced and profound than most of us realize. I wrote about doing this with the Immanuel prophecy in a previous post. This past Sunday, I talked about how Matthew saw the slaughter of the innocents as the fulfillment of Jeremiah's imagery of Rachel weeping at Ramah.

The subject of Sunday's lesson was all too painfully illustrated by the recent tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, and I hesitate to discuss it for that reason. While the wanton killing of small children is always shocking, it is, sadly, nothing new. It wasn't new in Matthew's day, either, and he tapped into the memory of a still more ancient infanticide to make his point.

I began by asking my class why Rachel would be weeping at Ramah over the slaughter of children at Bethlehem. Are these two towns close to each other?

To answer that question, I selected "Ramah" in Matthew 2:18 and chose my favorite Map background (Light Browns) from the Map submenu of the Amplify toolbar icon. This opened a map with two sites named Ramah highlighted in red. I didn't bother pointing out the northern Ramah, but quickly zoomed in on the one between Bethel and Jerusalem.

I then pointed out that Ramah and Bethlehem are not all that close. Ramah is north of Jerusalem, while Bethlehem is south of it. There are about 11 miles between them—a fact I just happened to mention, but I could easily have shown my class by option-dragging from one site to the other and pointing out how the distance is shown in the Instant Details panel. (See the image above.)

If these were not neighboring towns, why would Rachel weeping at Ramah have anything to do with the slaughter of the innocents at Bethlehem? To explain the connection between these two towns, I presented several seemingly disconnected passages. First, we looked at Genesis 35:16–20, in which Rachel dies giving birth to Benjamin somewhere along the road from Bethel to Bethlehem. In her suffering, she is comforted with the news that she is having another son.

Genesis 35 says that Rachel was buried on the way to Bethlehem, and tradition locates her tomb about a mile north of Bethlehem. I even showed my class a photo from the PhotoGuide of Rachel's Tomb. But then I explained that there are reasons to believe that Rachel was not quite so close to Bethlehem when she died. I had my class turn to 1 Samuel 7:17, which describes Ramah as the center of Samuel's prophetic activity. Then we looked at 1 Samuel 10:2, in which Samuel tells Saul that he will meet two men at Rachel's Tomb shortly after he leaves the town (of Ramah). This would seem to indicate that Rachel actually died in the vicinity of Ramah.

If true, that would certainly explain the connection Matthew saw between Ramah and Bethlehem: Rachel died near the one while traveling toward the other. Thus, she weeps at Ramah because she is buried there, and she weeps over what is happening in Bethlehem because it's as if she is still looking in that direction.

There's still more to this story, but I'll have to finish it in another post. In my next post, we'll look at why Jeremiah spoke of Rachel weeping at Ramah. In the process, I'll show you several little-known tricks to using the Accordance Bible Atlas.

On Monday, I recounted a study of Psalm 91 I did with my family last week. During his temptation of Jesus, the devil quoted Psalm 91:11-12, so we also looked at the account of the temptation in Luke 4. There we discovered that the devil was using these verses to tempt Jesus to throw himself down from the "pinnacle of the temple."

Have you ever wondered what the "pinnacle of the temple" is? Here's how to stop wondering and find out: simply select the phrase "pinnacle of the temple," then choose PhotoGuide from the English Tools menu of the Resource palette. (I'm assuming, of course, that you have the PhotoGuide, because, well, why wouldn't you?)

As I explained in a recent post, the value of the PhotoGuide is not just in its vast collection of photos, but in the detailed historical and geographical information it contains. If you want to know something about Jerusalem in general or the temple mount in particular, the PhotoGuide is one of the first places you should turn. Here we can see photos of the southeast corner of the temple mount, which is its highest point above ground level. We also see the model of what that location would have looked like in Jesus' day. The caption also discusses another possible identification of the "pinnacle" and points to another figure in that same article.

If you don't own the PhotoGuide, you could choose any other resource in your Accordance library, or even choose to search all your tools at once. To do the latter, simply select the phrase "pinnacle of the temple," then choose [All Tools] from the Search menu of the Resource palette. A Search All window will open displaying every occurrence of the phrase "pinnacle of the temple" in your entire Accordance library.

Now, it's certainly nice to be able to do such a broad search so quickly, but this particular example shows how problematic such searches can be. Browse the results, and you'll see that no Bible dictionary has an article on the pinnacle of the temple. Instead, almost all of the results come from the body text of articles focused on other things, such as the martyrdom of James or the account of Jesus' temptation. Click to read those articles and you'll find interesting information, but not much of it is focused on describing the pinnacle itself.

That's the challenge of library-wide searches: you get the results quickly, but then have to wade through them looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack. It doesn't take long for your Bible study to become bogged down looking for the answer to a simple question like "What is the pinnacle of the temple?"

In this way, it ends up being far more efficient to consult a resource like the PhotoGuide which specializes in illustrating such historical details. Remember to consult it, and you can usually find your answer quickly and get back to your passage of study.

Last week, I wrote a couple posts highlighting aspects of our Bible Lands PhotoGuide, the illustrated dictionary of place names included with our Graphics Bundle. Today I want to show you how to make the PhotoGuide more accessible by linking it to the Atlas.

When you're looking at a place name in the Atlas and you want to learn more about it, wouldn't it be nice if you could just double-click it to look it up in the PhotoGuide? Doing so would give you in depth information as well as illustrative photos. This is the primary way I access the PhotoGuide in my own study.

To establish this link, simply open the Preferences and choose the Map Tab Display settings. In the section labeled "Hypertext," choose PhotoGuide 3 from the Default Tool pop-up menu. That's it! Click OK to close the Preferences dialog.

From now on, you can double-click a place name in any new map window to look it up in the PhotoGuide. Spend some time double-clicking a few place names and see what you discover.

In order to make sure the Bible Lands PhotoGuide had adequate coverage of each biblical location, we supplemented our own photos with the work of some professional photographers. Not surprisingly, these photos are some of the most beautiful in the PhotoGuide. Yet as we went through their catalogues looking for photos, we found that not every photo was suitable for the PhotoGuide. This is because the PhotoGuide is focused on teaching you about the biblical and historical significance of a site rather than just offering you an attractive image.

While it is certainly possible for an attractive image to be useful for teaching, we were surprised how often the artistic shot was not necessarily the most illustrative shot. You see, an artist may look at a site and choose an angle which offers the most dramatic composition, while a different angle might offer a better view of the site's most significant features. For example, a photographer might be drawn to a site's beautiful Byzantine-era ruins while ignoring the much less impressive remains which can tell you something about the site during the biblical period. Thus, the best postcard image is not necessarily the best image for a dictionary of biblical locations.

We were therefore very selective when it came to licensing photos from other photographers. If the photo didn't help us explain something important about the site, we typically chose not to use it, even if it happened to be stunning from a purely aesthetic standpoint.

One of the articles which offers a particularly good mix of photos which are both aesthetically striking and instructionally helpful is the one on "Heptapegon" or "Tabgha." Heptapegon is the ancient name of the site, meaning "seven springs," while Tabgha is the modern name. It's a site at the northwest corner of the Sea of Galilee where tradition locates Jesus' feeding of the five thousand, sermon on the mount, and reinstatement of Peter. Three separate churches commemorate the three events, and the relatively undeveloped setting makes it easy to envision them happening there.

In addition to our own photographs, we licensed some beautiful shots from an Israeli photographer named Hanan Isachar, including this aerial shot showing the Church of the Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes (center) and the Church of the Primacy of Peter (right). The PhotoGuide article then moves from this orienting photo to detail photos of each church.

This same photographer also captured this shot of a crowd seated on the Mount of Beatitudes. Their modern dress aside, this shot really gives you a feel for what it would have been like to hear Jesus deliver a sermon here.

Many dictionaries which teach you about a site settle for one or two token photos which do not necessarily add much to your understanding of that site. The PhotoGuide seeks to use informative articles, illustrative photos, and detailed captions to give you a vivid understanding of a site's biblical and historical significance. If a photo didn't further that goal, it simply didn't make the cut.

The Accordance Bible Lands PhotoGuide contains more than 1,600 high-quality photographs of biblical sites and regions. Yet it is far more than just a photographic archive. The PhotoGuide is a carefully-researched dictionary of biblical places which is packed with useful information. Take the time to explore it, and you'll learn a great deal about the world of the Bible. Over the next several posts, I'll highlight a few of the gems you'll find in the PhotoGuide.

One of my favorite articles in the PhotoGuide is the one entitled, "Inscriptions and Ancient Texts." This article has photos and in depth descriptions of various hieroglyphic, cuneiform, Hebrew, Semitic, Greek, and Latin inscriptions. These include the Rosetta Stone, the Law-Code of Hammurabi, the Babylonian Flood Story, the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, the Gezer Calendar, the Siloam Inscription, the Lachish Letters, inscriptions from Herod's temple, some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Moabite Stone, and more.

Here are a few of my favorites:

The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, pictured here, celebrates that Assyrian king's many conquests. The figure bowing down before Shalmaneser is identified as "Jehu son of Omri," the king of Israel at that time. (By the way, this identification of Jehu shows some confusion on the part of the Assyrians. Can anyone tell me why?)

This paleo-Hebrew inscription was found at the entrance to the tomb of a royal steward located outside Jerusalem. The inscription is damaged at the place where his name is given, but scholars believe this may have been the tomb of Shebna, whom Isaiah condemned in Isaiah 22:14-19. (How does this inscription corroborate the sin Isaiah was condemning?)

We've all heard that Gentiles were not allowed beyond the Court of the Gentiles in Herod's temple, but the sign pictured here actually warned them in Greek that they would have no one but themselves to blame for their own death should they be found inside. The PhotoGuide actually gives you a transcription of the Greek as well as an English translation! (Who in the New Testament was accused of violating this prohibition?)

These are just a few of the fascinating inscriptions shown and explained in the PhotoGuide. The Inscriptions article alone can dramatically increase your knowledge of the Bible. If you own the PhotoGuide, take some time to read it. If you don't own it, what are you waiting for?

Our Graphics Bundle combines our interactive Bible Atlas, Bible Lands PhotoGuide, and interactive Timeline at a significant savings, which is probably why it's one of our best-selling products. To get the most out of this bundle, I recommend linking the Atlas and PhotoGuide in your preferences. Doing so will enable you to double-click a place name on the map to look it up in the PhotoGuide, giving you detailed information about that site along with spectacular and illustrative photographs.

To do this, simply open the Preferences panel and click the Map Tab Display settings. You'll then see a variety of settings you can tweak. In the section labeled Hypertext, select PhotoGuide 3 from the pop-up menu labeled Default tool.

That's all there is to it! From now on any new map you view will be linked to the PhotoGuide. Start double-clicking place names of interest and see what you discover.

As I mentioned last week, I've recently started a blog about a new book I'm writing called Feet to Follow, Eyes to See. At that blog, I've been discussing the value of traveling to Israel as a way to help "connect the dots" in our understanding of the Bible.

As I was writing that blog post, I remembered a similar discussion in the Introduction to our Bible Lands PhotoGuide. The PhotoGuide is an illustrated dictionary of biblical locations, and anyone who owns it quickly learns to link it to the Atlas so that it comes up whenever you double-click a place name. Doing so enables you to see photos of that location and learn about its biblical significance. Yet like most dictionaries, it's easy to dive right into using the PhotoGuide without ever reading its Introduction. If that's what you did, I'd recommend you go read the Introduction right now. Don't worry, it's pretty short.

The value of the PhotoGuide's Introduction is in its explanation of why the biblical narratives are so often short on detailed description and background information. I won't spoil it for you, but it has a great deal to do with the degree of shared context between the biblical authors and their original audiences. Grab hold of that idea, and it will change the way you approach the biblical texts, the resources you turn to for help, and the conclusions you draw.

So if you haven't read the Instroduction to the PhotoGuide, be sure to check it out. And if you haven't purchased the PhotoGuide yet, what in the world are you waiting for?

When we first developed the Bible Lands PhotoGuide, we envisioned it as a reference work and teaching tool. If Accordance users wanted to find out more about a site, they could look it up in the PhotoGuide and get an in depth description and photos with detailed captions. If they wanted to put together a slide presentation, they could do so simply by dragging the image thumbnails onto a Keynote drop-zone. With the advent of the iPad, we've discovered a new use for the PhotoGuide: as a tourist guidebook.

If you travel in Israel, Turkey, Egypt, Greece, or other Bible lands, you're likely to pick up a tourist guidebook of some kind. These books are usually a convenient size and offer listings of the sites tourists typically visit. They give information about the things worth seeing at each site, along with brief descriptions of hotels, restaurants, and other attractions. The better ones may include photographs and illustrations to help prepare you for what you'll be seeing.

I relied heavily on tourist guidebooks in preparing the PhotoGuide. They were able to give me insight into what I was seeing in modern photos of various sites, but they were not necessarily good at giving information that would help illustrate the Bible. For that I had to turn to historical atlases, Bible dictionaries, and the like. The result is that the PhotoGuide combines the best of both worlds. Like our human guide on this trip, who is able to explain the features of the land today, yet who is also a scholar with expertise in biblical geography, the PhotoGuide helps you see the living world of the Bible behind the ancient ruins which remain.

One reason tourist guidebooks only seem to give cursory information about the Biblical significance of each site is that they simply don't have the space for it. A guidebook has to cover hundreds of sites in a volume small enough to be carried with you, and it has to include information about hotels and amenities as well as historical information. There's simply no way they can do all those things well. The PhotoGuide, on the other hand, is not limited by the constraints of a print volume, and so is able to provide the depth those resources cannot. Of course, it's not very convenient to carry a laptop with you while hiking up Herodium, so its effectiveness as a guidebook while touring biblical sites has always been limited.

Now, however, you can load Accordance and the PhotoGuide on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. Which means, of course, that you can carry all that information with you to each site you visit. Where a print guidebook might offer a diagram of the Herodium which shows you the location of the synagogue or the round eastern tower, with the PhotoGuide you can find a photo which matches your current vantage point and read about what you're actually seeing.

Whether or not you ever get to travel to Israel or other Bible lands in person, the PhotoGuide can really help you appreciate the historical and geographical setting of the Bible. If you do get the opportunity to tour these places, remember to load the PhotoGuide on an iPhone or iPad so you can use it as a tourist guidebook: a tourist guidebook on steroids!

By the way, the PhotoGuide is currently on sale, along with two other collections of Holy Land photos.

As I mentioned a little over a week ago, my wife and I are currently touring Israel with some other members of the Accordance team. I've already described how I created custom maps of each day's itinerary to help my kids follow along with where we'll be each day. The maps include representative images from each site, together with a list of Scripture references. I printed each of those maps out and taped them to a wall in our home.

As soon as I finished those maps, I realized I would like to have quick access to them myself. So in addition to printing them to paper, I also printed them as a PDF which I could read on my iPad using GoodReader. I also downloaded the PhotoGuide and most of the Carta books to the iPad so I could travel light with the very best geographical resources available.

With my iPad thus equipped, I can view each day's map while riding on the tour bus. If I want to read the Scripture references on the map, I can simply select and Copy from GoodReader, then switch to Accordance and paste the string of references into a search view. If I want to find out more about a site, I can look it up in the PhotoGuide or one of the Carta books. For example, I knew the ancient port of Acco was associated with Joan of Arc in some way, but I couldn't remember how. A quick lookup in the PhotoGuide reminded me that Crusaders renamed it Saint Jean d’Acre in honor of her, and the town was subsequently referred to as Acre.

As you can imagine, with Dr. J and other members of the Accordance staff on this tour, we're getting deeper into each site than I assume the average tour group does. Add to that the fact that our tour guide is a biblical scholar in his own right, and it's hard to keep up. With Accordance on my iPad, I'm managing to look a little more knowledgeable than I am! ;-)