Thus saith the LORD; A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rahel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not.
Ramah - in Benjamin, east of the great northern road, two hours' journey from Jerusalem. Rachel, who all her life had pined for children (Genesis 30:1), and who died with "sorrow" in giving birth to Benjamin, so that she called his name Benoni, "son of my sorrow," (Genesis 35:18-19, margin; 1 Samuel 10:2), and was buried at Ramah, near Bethlehem, is represented as raising her head from the tomb, and as breaking forth into "weeping" at seeing the whole land depopulated of her sons, the Ephraimites. Ramah was the place where Nebuzaradan collected all the Jews in chains, previous to their removal to Babylon (Jeremiah 40:1). God therefore consoles her with the promise of their restoration. Matthew 2:17-18, quotes this as fulfilled in the massacre of the innocents under Herod. 'A lesser and a greater event, of different times, may answer to the single sense of one passage of Scripture, until the prophecy is exhausted' (Bengel).
Besides the temporary reference to the exiles in Babylon, the Holy Spirit fo reshadowed ultimately Messiah's exile in Egypt, and the desolation caused in the neighbourhood of Rachel's tomb by Herod's massacre of the children, whose mothers had "sons of sorrow" (Benoni), just as Rachel had. The return of Messiah (the representative of Israel) from Egypt, and the future restoration of Israel, both the literal Israel and the spiritual (including the innocents), at the Lord's second advent, are antitypical to the restoration of Israel from Babylon, which is the ground of consolation held out here by Jeremiah. The clause, "They were not" - i:e., were dead (Genesis 42:13), does not apply so strictly to the exiles in Babylon as it does to the history of Messiah and His people-past, present, and future. So the words, "There is hope in thine end," are to be fulfilled ultimately, when Rachel shall meet her murdered children at the resurrection, at the same time that literal Israel is to be restored. "They were not," in Hebrew, is singular; each was not; each mother at the Bethlehem massacre had but one child to lament, as the limitation of age in Herod's order, "two years and under," implies. This use of the singular distributively (the mothers weeping severally, each for her own child) is a coincidence between the prophecy of the Bethlehem massacre and the event, the more remarkable as not being obvious: the singular, too, is appropriate as to Messiah in His Egyptian exile, who was to be a leading object of Rachel's lamentation.