Matthew 2:20

“Arise and take the young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel, for they are dead who sought the young child's life.”

Joseph is told to arise and take the young child, with His mother, and go into ‘the land of Israel'. Note again the reference to His mother as an added extra. All attention is on Jesus. She is mentioned in order to emphasise Jesus youthfulness. He is still a ‘young child'.

The description ‘the land of Israel' (repeated in the next verse, and nowhere else in the New Testament), deliberately takes the mind back to the time of early Israel when Israel was a newish nation in the time of the Judges, and even more to Ezekiel's vision of the return from exile. It was a reminder of the land that was available to them but which for a time they had lost. ‘And you will know that I am the Lord, when I bring you into the land of Israel, into the country for the which I lifted up my hand to give it to your fathers' (Ezekiel 20:42, compare Matthew 11:17). Now Jesus is entering in to possess ‘the land of Israel'.

‘For they are dead who sought the young child's life.' Compare Exodus 4:19. They had tried to kill Him, just as another once had Moses, but now it was they who were dead. The plural suggests that it was not only Herod who was unhappy about the prospective alteration to the status quo. The ‘they' probably has in mind Herod's commanders and his sycophants, whose influence would be dead even if they were not. However, it may well also have arisen because the Exodus 4:19 parallel is in mind. But whoever they were, His enemies were all known to God, and for the time at least they had been seen off.

The loose use of the phrase from Exodus 4:19 draws our attention to the parallels between Jesus and Moses. Moses had been delivered when children around him had been slaughtered, and he had also fled from a king to a place of safety, and had been called back once that king was dead. But that had been in a foreign land. In Jesus' case it had been in His own land, and by a supposed King of the Jews. He is as it were rejected even before He begins His mission, but like Moses enjoys God's protection. In the back of Matthew's mind may also have been the thought that while Moses returned to Egypt, Jesus was, on behalf of His people, leaving Egypt behind for ever. Here was a greater than Moses, taking the final stage in the deliverance of God's people. (In general there are no real grounds, apart from here, for thinking that Matthew was trying to portray Jesus as a new Moses. Elsewhere He is seen as representing the whole of Israel).