The Holy Innocents of Bethlehem

When the Magi did not return to Herod to report where the newborn King of the Jews was to be found, the enraged king sent soldiers to Bethlehem and slew all the male children of the town and its region who were two years old and under, hoping to destroy the Christ among them — but Joseph, warned by an angel, had already fled with the Child and His Mother into Egypt. The Gospel of Matthew (2:16-18) sees in the mothers' grief the fulfillment of Jeremiah's prophecy: 'A voice was heard in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her children.' Church tradition came to number the slain children at fourteen thousand, and honors them as the first martyrs to die for Christ — bearing witness not by word but by blood, in the very beginning of the Gospel. Herod's own wretched death soon followed. Their feast falls within the days of the Nativity.