Matthew 2:16-18 cites Jeremiah 31:15 ('a voice was heard in Ramah... Rachel weeping for her children') as fulfilled in Herod's massacre of the infants of Bethlehem. But Jeremiah 31 as a whole is about the joyful return of the exiles from Babylon — the verses immediately following v.15 (vv.16-17) explicitly promise comfort and that the children 'shall come back to their own country.' It is not a messianic prophecy at all, and Matthew has ripped a single grim line out of what is actually one of the most hope-filled chapters in the OT (leading into the New Covenant oracle of 31:31-34) to force-fit it onto an unrelated historical atrocity.

Concede the context fully: Jeremiah 31, in its 6th-century setting, is about the Babylonian exile and (surprisingly near-term, by ancient standards) promised restoration, and 31:15's grief is explicitly answered in the following verses, culminating in one of the most theologically important passages in the entire OT, the New Covenant oracle of 31:31-34 (quoted at length in Hebrews 8). Matthew's use, however, is built on precisely this context, not oblivious to it — this is allusive or 'echo' citation (to use Richard Hays's term), which trades deliberately on the reader recognizing the larger passage rather than treating the quoted fragment as a freestanding, context-free verbal prediction. The geographical detail matters: Ramah was the traditional staging point from which the exiles were marched away to Babylon (Jer 40:1), so Jeremiah's 'Rachel weeping' already functions as the paradigmatic image of Israelite maternal grief at the loss of children to violence and displacement. Centuries later, mothers weep again for slaughtered children in the same region. Matthew's point is an ironic and pointed echo, not a claim that Jeremiah predicted Herod: by invoking a chapter whose bitter opening image is immediately overturned by God's greatest promise of restoration in the whole book, Matthew signals that this fresh atrocity, too, stands at the threshold of God's ultimate saving act — the very Messiah whose birth just provoked Herod's violence. Craig Blomberg's commentary on Matthew's formula quotations classifies them into distinct functional types — some direct verbal predictions (Mic 5:2), some typological/analogical correspondences (this one, and the Hosea 11:1 citation) — and this range shows a deliberate, varied hermeneutical method, not indiscriminate proof-texting.

Read this way, Matthew 2:16-18 reinforces rather than undermines Matthew's coherent literary strategy across chapters 1-2: several of his five formula quotations in the infancy narrative function typologically or allusively rather than as direct verbal predictions, showing an author working with a consistent and sophisticated hermeneutical method — one that assumes his readers know the fuller context of the passages he cites, including their notes of ultimate hope.