1883 Haydock Douay Rheims Bible
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| Matthew 2:18 | *A voice in Rama was heard, lamentation and great mourning: Rachel bewailing her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not. Jeremias 31:15. | A voice was heard in Rama.{ Ver. 18. Vox in Excelso audita est. Jeremias 31:15.|} St. Jerome takes Rama, not for the name of any city, but for a high place, as appears by his Latin translation. (Jeremias 31:15.) But in all Greek copies here in St. Matthew, and in the Septuagint in Jeremias, we find the word itself Rama, so that it must signify a particular city. Rachel, who was buried at Bethlehem, is represented weeping (as it were in the person of those desolate mothers) the murder, and loss of so many children: and Rama being a city not far from Bethlehem, in the tribe of Benjamin, built on a high place, it is said that the cries and lamentations of these children, and their mothers, reached even to Rama. Cornelius a Lapide on Jeremias xxxi. thinks that these words were not only applied by the evangelist in a figurative sense, but that the prophet in the literal sense foretold these lamentations. (Witham) |