Alfred Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, Book 2, Chapter 8:
Of two passages in his own Old Testament Scriptures the Evangelist sees a fulfilment in these events. The flight into Egypt is to him the fulfilment of this expression by Hosea, ‘Out of Egypt have I called My Son’ (Hos. 11:1). In the murder of ‘the Innocents,’ he sees the fulfilment of Rachel’s lament (Jer. 31:15, who died and was buried in Ramah) and there was bitter wailing at the prospect of parting for hopeless captivity, and yet bitterer lament, as they who might have encumbered the onward march were pitilessly slaughtered. Those who have attentively followed the course of Jewish thinking, and marked how the ancient Synagogue, and that rightly, read the Old Testament in its unity, as ever pointing to the Messiah as the fulfillment of Israel’s history, will not wonder at, but fully accord with, St. Matthew’s retrospective view. The words of Hosea were in the highest sense ‘fulfilled’ in the flight to, and return of, the Saviour from Egypt.[53] To an inspired writer, nay, to a true Jewish reader of the Old Testament, the question in regard to any prophecy could not be: What did the prophet�but, What did the prophecy�mean? And this could only be unfolded in the course of Israel’s history. Similarly, those who ever saw in the past the prototype of the future, and recognised in events, not only the principle, but the very features of that which was to come, could not fail to perceive, in the bitter wail of the mothers of Bethlehem over their slaughtered children, the full realisation of the prophetic description of the scene enacted in Jeremiah’s days. Had not the prophet himself heard, in the lament of the captives to Babylon, the echoes of Rachel’s voice in the past? In neither one nor the other case had the utterances of the prophets (Hosea and Jeremiah) been predictions: they were prophetic. In neither one not the other case was the ‘fulfilment’ literal: it was Scriptural, and that in the truest Old Testament sense.
[53]In point of fact the ancient Synagogue did actually apply to the Messiah Ex. 4:22, on which the words of Hosea are based. See the Midrash on Ps. 2:7. The quotation is given in full in our remarks on Ps. 2:7 in Appendix 9.