Matthew 2:17 is the seventeenth verse of the second chapter of the Gospel of Matthew

Gospel of Matthew

The Gospel According to Matthew is one of the four canonical gospels, one of the three synoptic gospels, and the first book of the New Testament. It tells of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth...

 in the New Testament

New Testament

The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....

. Herod has ordered the Massacre of the Innocents

Massacre of the Innocents

The Massacre of the Innocents is an episode of infanticide by the King of Judea, Herod the Great. According to the Gospel of Matthew Herod orders the execution of all young male children in the village of Bethlehem, so as to avoid the loss of his throne to a newborn King of the Jews whose birth...

 and this verse links this event to a quotation from the Old Testament

Old Testament

The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...

.

In the King James Version of the Bible the text reads:

Then was fulfilled that which was

spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying,

The World English Bible

World English Bible

The World English Bible is a public domain translation of the Bible that is currently in draft form. Work on the World English Bible began in 1997 and was known as the American Standard Version 1997...

 translates the passage as:

Then that which was spoken by Jeremiah

the prophet was fulfilled, saying,

For a collection of other versions see BibRef Matthew 2:17

The verse is setting up a quotation from Jeremiah 31:15 that appears in the next verse. Brown

Raymond E. Brown

The Reverend Raymond Edward Brown, S.S. , was an American Roman Catholic priest, a member of the Sulpician Fathers and a major Biblical scholar of his era...

 notes that the Old Syriac Sinaiticus states incorrectly that the quotation is from Isaiah

Isaiah

Isaiah ; Greek: ', Ēsaïās ; "Yahu is salvation") was a prophet in the 8th-century BC Kingdom of Judah.Jews and Christians consider the Book of Isaiah a part of their Biblical canon; he is the first listed of the neviim akharonim, the later prophets. Many of the New Testament teachings of Jesus...

. Isaiah is the Old Testament source Matthew most often refers to, but the verse in Matthew 2:18

Matthew 2:18

Matthew 2:18 is the eighteenth verse of the second chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament. Herod has ordered the Massacre of the Innocents and this verse quotes from the Book of Jeremiah to show that this event was predicted by the prophets....

 clearly comes from Jeremiah. Some scholars feel that this error was probably in the original version of Matthew, but that it was corrected by later translators. Brown feels it is just as likely the error was made by whoever transcribed the OSS.

Normally Matthew does not mention which Old Testament book is being quoted. His standard format is to introduce an OT quotation by "so it might be fulfilled." In this verse he makes an exception to state that it is the words of a prophet being fulfilled. Schweizer believes this is an attempt to distance God from the Massacre of the Innocents

Massacre of the Innocents

The Massacre of the Innocents is an episode of infanticide by the King of Judea, Herod the Great. According to the Gospel of Matthew Herod orders the execution of all young male children in the village of Bethlehem, so as to avoid the loss of his throne to a newborn King of the Jews whose birth...

by placing the prophet as an intermediate. This serves to reduce the impression that God mandated that the massacre take place.