Apparently Joseph’s intention was to return to Bethlehem.  He may have thought that Nazareth would scarcely satisfy the angel’s injunction to go to the ‘Land of Israel,’ or that David’s city was the right home for David’s heir.  At all events, his perplexity appeals to Heaven for direction; and, for the fourth time, his course is marked for him by a dream, whether through the instrumentality of the angel who knew the way to his couch so well, we are not told, Archelaus, Herod’s son, who had received Judaea on the partition at his father’s death, was a smaller Herod, as cruel and less able.  There was more security in the obscurity of Nazareth, under the less sanguinary sway of Antipas, whose share of his father’s vices was his lust, rather than his ferocity.  So, after so many wanderings, and with such strange new experience and thoughts, the silent, steadfast Joseph and the meek mother bring back their mysterious charge and secret to the humble old home.  Matthew does not seem to have known that it had formerly been their home, but his account is no contradiction of Luke’s.

Again he is reminded of a prophecy, or perhaps, rather, of many prophecies, for he uses the plural ‘prophets,’ as if he were summing up the tenor of more than one utterance.  The words which he gives are not found in any prophet.  But we know that to call a man ‘a Nazarene’ was the same thing as to call him lowly and despised.  The scoff of the Pharisee to Nicodemus’s timid appeal on Christ’s behalf, and the guileless Nathaniel’s quest ion, show that.  The fact that Christ by His residence in Nazareth became known as the ‘Nazarene,’ and so shared in the contempt attaching to all Galileans, and especially to the inhabitants of that village, is a kind of concentration of all the obscurity and ignominy of His lot.  The name was nailed over His head on the cross as a scornful reductio ad absurdum of His claims to be King of Israel This explanation of the evangelist’s meaning does not exclude a reference in his mind to the prophecy in Isaiah xi. 1, where Messiah is called ‘a branch’ or more properly, ‘a shoot’ for which the Hebrew word is netzer.  The name Nazareth is probably etymologically connected with that word, and may have been given to the little village contemptuously to express its insignificance.  The meaning of the prophecy is that the offspring of David, who should come when the Davidic house was in the lowest depths of obscurity, like a tree of which only the stump is left, should not appear in royal pomp, or in a lofty condition, but as insignificant, feeble, and of no account.  Such prophecy was fulfilled in the very fact that He was all His life known as ‘of Nazareth’ and the verbal assonance between that name, ‘the shoot’ and the word ‘Nazarene’ is a finger-post pointing to the meaning of the place of abode chosen for Him.  The mere fact of residence there, and the consequent contempt, do not exhaust the prophecies to which reference is made.  These might have been fulfilled without such a literal and external fulfilment.  But it serves, like the literal riding upon an ass, and many other instances in Christ’s life, to lead dull apprehensions to perceive more plainly that He is the theme of all prophecy, and that in His life the trivial is significant and nothing is accidental.