martyrdom · -4 · Bethlehem
Herod had asked the magi to bring him word, and they went home another way. Seeing himself tricked, he sent and killed every male child in Bethlehem and its district two years old and under, reckoning from the time the star had appeared. Bethlehem was a village: the count the Greek books later give — fourteen thousand — belongs to devotion rather than demography, and Matthew gives no number at all. He reads it against Jeremiah: Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.
The first blood shed on account of Christ, before he could speak.