Hymns based on Matthew 2

Matthew 2 has given hymn writers words for 3 hymns in this library, by writers including James Montgomery and W. Chatterton Dix. Each is listed below with the lines that echo the chapter and the verses they draw on, quoted from the World English Bible, a public-domain modern translation.

The verse these hymns return to most is Matthew 2:1: “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of King Herod, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying,”

Hymn writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries knew their Bibles almost by heart, and they wove its phrases into their lines — sometimes as a close paraphrase, as in the metrical psalms, and sometimes as a single image carried into a new setting. Reading the verse beside the line shows what the writer had in mind, and often why a hymn was chosen to be sung alongside a particular reading.