Matthew 2 Verses 13-16:
When they had gone an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.
"Get up", he said, "take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him."
So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet:
"Out of Egypt I called my son."
When Herod realised that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.

Herod's reaction and order to kill all boys of two years old and under fits what is known of his character. The number of children killed in and around Bethlehem, (a small village), is unknown and logically was unlikely to have been in the thousands stated by tradition but was still an act of great brutality. The mass slaughter of innocents has continued into the 20th century and includes the Armenians, the Holocaust victims, the Cambodian people, the Tutsi's, the people of East Timor, the Bosnian Muslims and the Kosovo Albanians.

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