“In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”
A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more. Jeremiah's original reference to Rachel weeping is set at Ramah, north of Jerusalem — the staging post for the Babylonian exiles being marched into captivity. Rachel, the mother of Joseph and Benjamin, mourns for the northern tribes taken away. Matthew hears in that ancient lament the voice of the mothers of Bethlehem whose children have been taken by Herod's soldiers. The refusal to be comforted is the honest response to irreversible loss — there is no comfort that restores what has been taken. Revelation 21:4 promises that God will wipe away every tear, which means the tears must first be allowed to be real. Matthew does not rush past the grief to the joy.
Church Fathers on Matthew 2:18
The Evangelist by this history of so bloody a massacre, having filled the reader with horror, now again sooths his feelings, shewing that these things were not done because God could not hinder, or knew not of them; but as the Prophet had foretold.
This passage of Jeremiah has been quoted by Matthew neither according to the Hebrew nor the LXX version. This shews that the Evangelists and Apostles did not follow any one’s translation, but according to the Hebrew manner expressed in their own words what they had read in Hebrew.
Or, it was heard on high, because uttered for the death of the innocent, according to that, 'The voice of the poor entereth into the heavens.' The 'weeping' means the cries of the children; 'lamentation,' refers to the mothers. In the infants themselves their death ends their cries, in the mothers it is continually renewed by the remembrance of their loss.