He took the young child and his mother. — The form adopted here, as in the preceding verse, is significantly reverential. In a narrative of common life the natural expression would have been “his wife and the young child.”
And departed into Egypt. — The brevity with which this is told is, to a certain extent, an argument for the non-mythical character of the narrative of which it forms a part. The legends of the Apocryphal Gospels, embodied in many forms of poetry and art, show how easily, in later times, the fabulous element crystallised round the Gospel nucleus of fact. The idols of Egypt bowed or fell down before the divine child; a well sprung up under the palm-tree that gave the traveller shelter. They were attacked by robbers, and owed their preservation to the pity of Dismas, one of the band, who was afterwards the penitent thief of the crucifixion. How far the journey extended we cannot tell. It would have been enough for Joseph’s object to pass the so-called River of Egypt, which separated that country from the region under Herod’s sovereignty.