Isaiah 11:1

Hebrew Bible

1 A shoot will grow out of Jesse’s root stock, a bud will sprout from his roots. 2 The Lord’s Spirit will rest on him—a Spirit that gives extraordinary wisdom, a Spirit that provides the ability to execute plans, a Spirit that produces absolute loyalty to the Lord. 3 His smelling is in the fear of the Lord7. He will not judge by mere appearances or make decisions on the basis of hearsay. 4 He will treat the poor fairly and make right decisions for the downtrodden of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth and order the wicked to be executed.

Matthew 2:23

New Testament

19 After Herod had died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt 20 saying, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.” 21 So he got up and took the child and his mother and returned to the land of Israel. 22 But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. After being warned in a dream, he went to the regions of Galilee. 23 He came to a town called Nazareth and lived there. Then what had been spoken by the prophets was fulfilled, that Jesus would be called a Nazarene.

 Notes and References

"... Exegetes are used to find intertexts which are not explicitly tagged. Matthew 2:23 is the opposite case: the quotation is tagged but the quoted text cannot be found in a known tradition. It is, as France has put it, an 'elusive quotation'. The great amount of work that has gone into finding a plausible pre-text has produced many, and somewhat complicated, suggestions ranging from a reference to Samson's Nazirite vow (Judges 13:5,7; 16:17) to an interconnection with Isaiah 11:19 or a rather general witness to Jesus' modest provenance. The arguments on all sides seem to neutralize each other. Interestingly enough, the meaning of the whole section 2:19-23 is pretty clear: the family's settlement in Nazareth 'fulfills' a scriptural utterance that witnesses to a person coming from that town. We may conclude that either the pre-text was known from sources not available to us or that the narrator is so reliable that he can make such a connection without having a definitive text in mind. After all, Nazareth is never mentioned in the Scriptures ..."

Mayordomo, Moisés "Matthew 1-2 and the Problem of Intertextuality" in Claire Clivaz, et al. (eds.), Infancy Gospels. Stories and Identities (pp. 277-278) Mohr Siebeck, 2011

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