International Standard Bible Encyclopedia
2. Herod the Great:
With a different environment and with a different character, Herod the Great
might have been worthy of the surname which he now bears only as a tribute of
inane flattery. What we know of him, we owe, in the main, to the exhaustive
treatment of the subject by Josephus in his Antiquities and Jewish War, and from
Strabo and Dio Cassius among the classics. We may subsume our little sketch of
Herod's life under the heads of (1) political activity, (2) evidences of talent,
and (3) character and domestic life.
(1) Political Activity.
Antipater had great ambitions for his son. Herod was only a young man when he
began his career as governor of Galilee. Josephus' statement, however, that he
was only "fifteen years old" (Ant., XIV, ix, 2) is evidently the mistake of
some transcriber, because we are told (XVII, viii, 1) that "he continued his life
till a very old age." That was 42 years later, so that Herod at this time must
have been at least 25 years old. His activity and success in ridding his
dominion of dangerous bands of freebooters, and his still greater success in raising
the always welcome tribute-money for the Roman government, gained for him
additional power at court. His advance became rapid. Antony appointed him "tetrarch"
of Judea in 41 BC, and although he was forced by circumstances temporarily to
leave his domain in the hands of the Parthians and of Antigonus, this, in the
end, proved a blessing in disguise. In this final spasm of the dying Asmonean
house, Antigonus took Jerusalem by storm, and Phasael, Herod's oldest brother,
fell into his hands. The latter was governor of the city, and foreseeing his
fate, he committed suicide by dashing out his brains against the walls of his
prison. Antigonus incapacitated his brother Hyrcanus, who was captured at the same
time, from ever holding the holy office again by cropping off his ears (Ant.,
XIV, xiii, 10). Meanwhile, Herod was at Rome, and through the favor of Antony and
Augustus he obtained the crown of Judea in 37 BC. The fond ambition of his
heart was now attained, although he had literally to carve out his own empire with
the sword. He made quick work of the task, cut his way back into Judea and
took Jerusalem by storm in 37 BC.
The first act of his reign was the extermination of the Asmonean house, to
which Herod himself was related through his marriage with Mariamne, the grandchild
of Hyrcanus. Antigonus was slain and with him 45 of his chief adherents.
Hyrcanus was recalled from Babylon, to which he had been banished by Antigonus, but
the high-priesthood was bestowed on Aristobulus, Herod's brother-in-law, who,
however, soon fell a victim to the suspicion and fear of the king (Ant., XV,
iii, 3). These outrages against the purest blood in Judea turned the love of
Mariamne, once cherished for Herod, into a bitter hatred. The Jews, loyal to the
dynasty of the Maccabees, accused Herod before the Roman court, but he was
summarily acquitted by Antony. Hyrcanus, mutilated and helpless as he was, soon
followed Aristobulus in the way of death, 31 BC (Ant., XV, vi, 1). When Antony, who
had ever befriended Herod, was conquered by Augustus at Actium (31 BC), Herod
quickly turned to the powers that were, and, by subtle flattery and timely
support, won the imperial favor.
The boundaries of his kingdom were now extended by Rome. And Herod proved
equal to the greater task. By a decisive victory over the Arabians, he showed, as
he had done in his earlier Galilean government, what manner of man he was, when
aroused to action. The Arabians were wholly crushed, and submitted themselves
unconditionally under the power of Herod (Ant., XV, v, 5). Afraid to leave a
remnant of the Asmonean power alive, he sacrificed Mariamne his wife, the only
human being he ever seems to have loved (28 BC), his mother-in-law Alexandra
(Ant., XV, vii, 8), and ultimately, shortly before his death, even his own sons by
Mariamne, Alexander and Aristobulus 7 BC (Ant., XVI, xi, 7). In his emulation of
the habits and views of life of the Romans, he continually offended and defied
his Jewish subjects, by the introduction of Roman sports and heathen temples
in his dominion. His influence on the younger Jews in this regard was baneful,
and slowly a distinct partly arose, partly political, partly religious, which
called itself the Herodian party, Jews in outward religious forms but Gentiles in
their dress and in their whole view of life. They were a bitter offense to the
rest of the nation, but were associated with the Pharisees and Sadducees in
their opposition to Christ (Matthew 22:16; Mark 3:6; 12:13).
In vain Herod tried to win over the Jews, by royal charity in time of famine,
and by yielding, wherever possible, to their bitter prejudices. They saw in him
only a usurper of the throne of David, maintained by the strong arm of the
hated Roman oppressor. Innumerable plots were made against his life, but, with
almost superhuman cunning, Herod defeated them all (Ant., XV, viii). He robbed his
own people that he might give munificent gifts to the Romans; he did not even
spare the grave of King David, which was held in almost idolatrous reverence by
the people, but robbed it of its treasures (Ant., XVI, vii, 1). The last days
of Herod were embittered by endless court intrigues and conspiracies, by an
almost insane suspicion on the part of the aged king, and by increasing
indications of the restlessness of the nation.
Like Augustus himself, Herod was the victim of an incurable and loathsome
disease. His temper became more irritable, as the malady made progress, and he made
both himself and his court unutterably miserable. The picture drawn by
Josephus (Ant., XVII) is lifelike and tragic in its vividness. In his last will and
testament, he remained true to his life-long fawning upon the Roman power (Ant.,
XVII, vi, 1). So great became his suffering toward the last that he made a
fruitless attempt at suicide. But, true to his character, one of the last acts of
his life was an order to execute his son Antipater, who had instigated the
murder of his halfbrothers, Alexander and Aristobulus, and another order to slay,
after his death, a number of nobles, who were guilty of a small outbreak at
Jerusalem and who were confined in the hippodrome (Ant., XVI, vi, 5). He died in the
37th year of his reign, 34 years after he had captured Jerusalem and slain
Antigonus. Josephus writes this epitaph:
"A man he was of great barbarity toward all men equally, and a slave to his
passions, but above the consideration of what was right. Yet was he favored by
fortune as much as any man ever was, for from a private man he became a king, and
though he were encompassed by ten thousand dangers, he got clear of them all
and continued his life to a very old age" (Ant., XVII, viii, 1).
(2) Evidences of Talent.
The life of Herod the Great was not a fortuitous chain of favorable accidents.
He was unquestionably a man of talent. In a family like that of Antipus and
Antipater, talent must necessarily be hereditary, and Herod inherited it more
largely than any of his brothers. His whole life exhibits in no small degree
statecraft, power of organization, shrewdness. He knew men and he knew how to use
them. He won the warmest friendship of Roman emperors, and had a faculty of
convincing the Romans of the righteousness of his cause, in every contingency. In
his own dominions he was like Ishmael, his hand against all, and the hands of all
against him, and yet he maintained himself in the government for a whole
generation.
His Galilean governorship showed what manner of man he was, a man with iron
determination and great generalship. His Judean conquest proved the same thing,
as did his Arabian war. Herod was a born leader of men. Under a different
environment he might have developed into a truly great man, and had his character
been coordinate with his gifts, he might have done great things for the Jewish
people. But by far the greatest talent of Herod was his singular architectural
taste and ability. Here he reminds one of the old Egyptian Pharaohs. Against the
laws of Judaism, which he pretended to obey, he built at Jerusalem a magnificent
theater and an amphitheater, of which the ruins remain. The one was within the
city, the other outside the walls. Thus he introduced into the ascetic sphere
of the Jewish life the frivolous spirit of the Greeks and the Romans.
To offset this cruel infraction of all the maxims of orthodox Judaism, he
tried to placate the nation by rebuilding the temple of Zerubbabel and making it
more magnificent than even Solomon's temple had been. This work was accomplished
somewhere between 19 BC and 11 or 9 BC, although the entire work was not
finished till the procuratorship of Albinus, 62-64 AD (Ant., XV, xi, 5, 6; XX, ix, 7;
John 2:20). It was so transcendently beautiful that it ranked among the
world's wonders, and Josephus does not tire of describing its glories (BJ, V, v).
Even Titus sought to spare the building in the final attack on the city (BJ, VI,
iv, 3). Besides this, Herod rebuilt and beautified Struto's Tower, which he
called after the emperor, Caesarea.
He spent 12 years in this gigantic work, building a theater and amphitheater,
and above all in achieving the apparently impossible by creating a harbor where
there was none before. This was accomplished by constructing a gigantic mole
far out into the sea, and so enduring was the work that the remains of it are
seen today. The Romans were so appreciative of the work done by Herod that they
made Caesarea the capital of the new regime, after the passing away of the
Herodian power. Besides this, Herod rebuilt Samaria, to the utter disgust of the
Jews, calling it Sebaste. In Jerusalem itself he built the three great towers,
Antonia, Phasaelus and Mariamne, which survived even the catastrophe of the year
70 AD.
All over Herod's dominion were found the evidences of this constructive
passion. Antipatris was built by him, on the site of the ancient Kapharsaba, as well
as the stronghold Phasaelus near Jericho, where he was destined to see so much
suffering and ultimately to die. He even reached beyond his own domain to
satisfy this building mania at Ascalon, Damascus, Tyre and Sidon, Tripoli,
Ptolemais, nay even at Athens and Lacedaemon. But the universal character of these
operations itself occasioned the bitterest hatred against him on the part of the
narrowminded Jews.
(3) Characteristics and Domestic Life.
The personality of Herod was impressive, and he was possessed of great
physical strength. His intellectual powers were far beyond the ordinary; his will was
indomitable; he was possessed of great tact, when he saw fit to employ it; in
the great crises of his life he was never at a loss what to do; and no one has
ever accused Herod the Great of cowardice. There were in him two distinct
individualities, as was the case with Nero.
Two powers struggled in him for the mastery, and the lower one at last gained
complete control. During the first part of his reign there were evidences of
large-heartedness, of great possibilities in the man. But the bitter experiences
of his life, the endless whisperings and warnings of his court, the
irreconcilable spirit of the Jews, as well as the consciousness of his own wrongdoing,
changed him into a Jewish Nero:
a tyrant, who bathed his own house and his own people in blood. The demons of
Herod's life were jealousy of power, and suspicion, its necessary companion.
He was the incarnation of brute lust, which in turn became the burden of the
lives of his children. History tells of few more immoral families than the house
of Herod, which by intermarriage of its members so entangled the genealogical
tree as to make it a veritable puzzle. As these marriages were nearly all
within the line of forbidden consanguinity, under the Jewish law, they still further
embittered the people of Israel against the Herodian family. When Herod came
to the throne of Judea, Phasael was dead. Joseph his younger brother had fallen
in battle (Ant., XIV, xv, 10), and only Pheroras and Salome survived.
The first, as we have seen, nominally shared the government with Herod, but
was of little consequence and only proved a thorn in the king's flesh by his
endless interference and plotting. To him were allotted the revenues of the East
Jordanic territory. Salome, his sister, was ever neck-deep in the intrigues of
the Herodian family, but had the cunning of a fox and succeeded in making Herod
believe in her unchangeable loyalty, although the king had killed her own
son-in-law and her nephew, Aristobulus, his own son. The will of Herod, made shortly
before his death, is a convincing proof of his regard for his sister (Ant.,
XVII, viii, 1).
His domestic relations were very unhappy. Of his marriage with Doris and of
her son, Antipater, he reaped only misery, the son, as stated above, ultimately
falling a victim to his father's wrath, when the crown, for which he plotted,
was practically within his grasp. Herod appears to have been deeply in love with
Mariamne, the grandchild of Hyrcanus, in so far as he was capable of such a
feeling, but his attitude toward the entire Asmonean family and his fixed
determination to make an end of it changed whatever love Mariamne had for him into
hatred. Ultimately she, as well as her two sons, fell victims to Herod's insane
jealousy of power.
Like Nero, however, in a similar situation, Herod felt the keenest remorse
after her death. As his sons grew up, the family tragedy thickened, and the court
of Herod became a veritable hotbed of mutual recriminations, intrigues and
catastrophes. The trials and executions of his own conspiring sons were conducted
with the acquiescence of the Roman power, for Herod was shrewd enough not to
make a move without it. Yet so thoroughly was the condition of the Jewish court
understood at Rome, that Augustus, after the death of Mariamne's sons (7 BC), is
said to have exclaimed:
"I would rather be Herod's hog hus than his son huios." At the time of his
death, the remaining sons were these: Herod, son of Mariamne, Simon's daughter;
Archelaus and Antipas, sons of Malthace, and Herod Philip, son of Cleopatra of
Jerusalem. Alexander and Aristobulus were killed, through the persistent
intrigues of Antipater, the oldest son and heir presumptive to the crown, and he
himself fell into the grave he had dug for his brothers.
By the final testament of Herod, as ratified by Rome, the kingdom was divided
as follows:
Archelaus received one-half of the kingdom, with the title of king, really
"ethnarch," governing Judea, Samaria and Idumaea; Antipas was appointed "tetrarch"
of Galilee and Peraea; Philip, "tetrarch" of Trachonitis, Gaulonitis and
Paneas. To Salome, his intriguing sister, he bequeathed Jamnia, Ashdod and
Phasaelus, together with 500,000 drachmas of coined silver. All his kindred were
liberally provided for in his will, "so as to leave them all in a wealthy condition"
(Ant., XVII, viii, 1). In his death he had been better to his family than in his
life. He died unmourned and unbeloved by his own people, to pass into history
as a name soiled by violence and blood.
As the waters of Callirhoe were unable to cleanse his corrupting body, those
of time were unable to wash away the stains of a tyrant's name. The only time he
is mentioned in the New Testament is in Matthew 2 and Lu 1. In Matthew he is
associated with the wise men of the East, who came to investigate the birth of
the "king of the Jews." Learning their secret, Herod found out from the "priests
and scribes of the people" where the Christ was to be born and ordered the
"massacre of the innocents," with which his name is perhaps more generally
associated than with any other act of his life.
As Herod died in 4 BC and some time elapsed between the massacre and his death
(Matthew 2:19), we have here a clue to the approximate fixing of the true date
of Christ's birth. Another, in this same connection, is an eclipse of the
moon, the only one mentioned by Josephus (Ant., XVII, vi, 4; text and note), which
was seen shortly before Herod's death. This eclipse occurred on March 13, in
the year of the Julian Period, 4710, therefore 4 BC.
LITERATURE.
Josephus, Josephus, Antiquities and BJ; Strabo; Dio Cassius. Among all modern
works on the subject, Schurer, The Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ (5
vols) is perhaps still the best.
Henry E. Dosker
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Copyright Statement
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Bibliography Information
Orr, James, M.A., D.D. General Editor. "Entry for 'HEROD'". "International
Standard Bible Encyclopedia". 1915.