After Mary gave birth to Christ, wise men living in the Babylonian region saw a sign of Him in the night’s sky. That was in the days before astrology had been separated from astronomy, and learned men still understood how to interpret the signs of the heavens.

The sign these men saw had been a particularly significant and may have been the heliacal rising of Jupiter in conjunction with Venus within the constellation of Leo which occurred on August 12th, BC3. (That, at least, is the theory that my father-in-law has put forward in his book Seven Steps to Bethlehem.)

Arriving in Jerusalem with their entourage, the foreigners could not help but arouse the attention of King Herod, who employed an elaborate system of espionage throughout Judea. When Herod learned that the magi were seeking one who had been born “King of the Jews”, he was indignant. There was only one king of the Jews as far as Herod was concerned, and it was himself.

Herod had long known about the Jewish hope of a Messiah, yet he paid as little attention to God’s prophecies as he did to God’s commandments. That is, until the magi arrived on the scene. Their words about the star made Herod begin to worry.

Throughout his career, the mere hint that someone might try to usurp his throne had been enough to trigger Herod off into a series of murderous rages. In order to preserve or consolidate his own power, Herod had killed three of his sons, his son-in-law, his mother-in-law, his uncle, his brother, his wife and numerous friends and associates. Now it seemed that the latest threat to his dynasty came from a mere baby.

Determined to seek out and kill the usurper, Herod asked the wise men to alert him to the child’s whereabouts as soon as they located him. He pretended this was because he too wished to worship the new king.

The wise men did eventually find the Christ-child. However, before they had a chance to tell Herod, the Lord warned them in a dream to return home by a different way.

When Herod learned that he had been tricked, he fell into a frenzy. Having ascertained from the Old Testament that the Jewish Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, only a few miles away from his palace-fortress of Herodium, Herod ordered a ruthless massacre of all male children in the region who were two years old and under. Even the callus Caesar Augustus was shocked when he heard the news. The Roman writer Macrobius (c. 395-423) recorded in his Saturnalia that “When he [Roman Emperor Augustus] heard that among the boys in Syria under two years old whom Herod, king of the Jews, had ordered to kill, his own son was also killed, he said: it is better to be Herod’s pig, than his son.”

In my blog post, “Childermas and the Sanctity of Life“, I mentioned how Christians have traditionally remembered this massacre on the first Sunday after Christmas. The Feast was instituted between 400 and 500 AD by the Latin speaking church and intentionally placed within the octave of Christmas to emphasize that the Holy Innocents – considered by many to be the church’s first martyrs – gave their life for the newborn Saviour. (Click HERE to read more about the Feast and its relevance in the ongoing fight against abortion.)

The slaughter of so many innocent children remains Herod’s most enduring crime, yet it was only one in a career littered with similar brutalities. But who was this man and where did he come from? Why has history remembered him as Herod “the Great”? To answer these and similar questions, we must backtrack centuries earlier and explore the history of the most fascinating region on earth.

A Land of Blood

There are few places on earth that have witnessed as much conflict and bloodshed as the land of Israel. Almost every power in the ancient world coveted this strip of land west of the Mediterranean. It is not hard to see why this was that case: though bordered by desert, in ancient times this land was filled with lush woodland and abundant wildlife. Moreover, it came to be an important trade route linking Egypt with Asia Minor.

The earliest recorded history shows tribal societies fighting for control of the land. Even after the descendants of Abraham were established in the area following their Exodus from Egypt in the late 15th century BC, times of peace were scant. The people of God had to constantly contend with the threat of violence from those tribes that the returning exiles had failed to drive out.

Only in the reign of Solomon in the 10th century BC did the nation achieve some measure of stability. Not having to focus on war, Solomon was able to direct his energies to building an elaborate temple according to the design that the Lord had given Moses.

The peace was not to last however. In the reign of Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, the kingdom split in two: Israel in the North and Judah in the South.

The first foreign empire to lay claim to the Holy Land was Assyria, which conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel in B.C. 712. The brutal Assyrian leader, Shalmaneser put Samaria under siege while his successor (and probable usurper), Sargon II, took the Northern ten tribes into captivity.

The Assyrians were defeated when the Chaldean king Nabopolassar (c.658 – 605 BC) joined forces with the Medes, a tribe from the Persian hills, to wage an attack on their stronghold of Nineveh in 612 BC. King Nabopolassar established a new Babylonian monarchy while his son, King Nebuchadnezzar, finally defeated the Assyrians and established Babylon as his capital.

Though Nebuchadnezzar’s empire was not as large as the Assyrian empire had been, he did manage to capture the Southern kingdom of Judah in BC 586, carrying the Jews into captivity and destroying Solomon’s temple. However, the neo-Babylonian or Chaldean empire was doomed from the start, as God had spoken through the prophet Jeremiah foretelling its downfall (Jeremiah chapters 50 and 51).

The destruction of the neo-Babylonian empire occurred when the warrior Cyrus united all the Persian tribes – including the Medes – into one nation. In 539 BC he overthrew Babylon in an event described in Daniel 5.

Cyrus lived up to the prophecies about him, which had proclaimed that he would be a blessing to God’s people (Isaiah chapters 13 and 45). In 536 BC, he issued a decree allowing the people of Judah to begin returning to their land (2 Chron. 36:22-23 & Ezra 1). Encouraged by the prophets Haggai and Zechariah, the people of God finished rebuilding the temple twenty years later.

Although the captives had returned and rebuilt the temple, Judah was still under the authority of Persia. Control passed to the Macedonians in 333 BC when Alexander the Great conquered Persia and asserted control over all the land. When Alexander died in 323 BC, his empire was divided among his generals. However, it was never decisively determined whether Judea would be part of General Ptolemy’s Egyptian-based empire or General-Seleucid’s empire of Syria. The struggle between Egypt and Syria would continue until the Syrian king, Antiochus III, secured the land following the battle of Panion in 199 BC.

The Jews generally supported Antiochus III. However, his brother and successor, Antiochus Epiphanes (r. 175-164) was a different matter. Antiochus Epiphanes immediately set himself up as the enemy of the Jews. One of ways he did this was by forcing the Jews to adopt the Greek religion. He forbad them from worshiping the Lord, circumcising their children and keeping the Sabbath, while he commanded the priests to make idolatrous sacrifices to Zeus. Antiochus even made the failure to eat pork – which was unclean according to Old Testament regulations – an act of treason. Moreover, Antiochus intentionally desecrated the Temple by sacrificing a pig on the brazen altar.

Thousands of Jews who refused to renounce their religion died at the sword. The book of 2 Maccabees describes how Antiochus Epiphanes

ordered his soldiers to cut down without mercy those whom they met and to slay those who took refuge in their houses. There was a massacre of young and old, a killing of women and children, a slaughter of virgins and infants. In the space of three days, eighty thousand were lost, forty thousand meeting a violent death, and the same number being sold into slavery.

The Hasmonean Dynasty

Resistance to Antiochus was organized by the Maccabee family. The revolt started when the elderly priest Mattathias slew the leader of the king’s messengers, in addition to killing a Jew who was prepared to offer the idolatrous sacrifices demanded by the king. In order to escape the authorities, Mattathias fled to the mountains with his sons where they organized a resistance movement. After Mattathias’ death, the revolt was continued by Mattathias’ son Judas Maccabeus (“the hammer”).

By using guerrilla warfare, the rebellion eventually succeeded in routing Antiochus’s forces. The Maccabees – as they were called because of their leader Judas Maccabeus – purified the temple and established an independent Jewish state. Two decades later Judas’ brother Simon established a dynastic kingdom known as the Hasmonean dynasty. In the new kingdom, the monarch also occupied the role of High Priest (always before, the two positions had been kept carefully separate).

During the 103 years of Hasmonean rule, the Judean state greatly expanded, capturing Samaria and Galilee in the North, the Idumaeans in the South and the Peraeans in the East. They also made treaties with Rome, the growing power in the West.

Meanwhile, the Hasmoneans began acting less like Jews and more like those in the surrounding Hellenized culture. This prompted a religious reaction among the Pharisees, a group that arose in the 2nd century BC and believed that Maccabean rule was an abomination to God. The Pharisees pointed out that the chief priests were supposed to be descended from the line of Zadok from the house of Aaron. Mattathias and his sons had been neither, but were descended from common priests.

The Pharisees taught the Law of Moses (along with their growing body of authoritative interpretations of those laws) to the common people. The Sadducees, a rival group, rejected many of the Pharisees’ interpretations of the Torah and disbelieved in the resurrection of the dead. They tended to cluster around Jerusalem and attracted aristocratic or wealthy Jews more sympathetic with the Hasmoneans.

Conflict between the Pharisees and the Hasmoneans reached a climax during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus (r. 103 BC to 76 BC). The more liberal Sadducees supported Jannaeus while the Pharisees rebelled against him after he intentionally broke their rules while officiating in his capacity as High Priest. Jannaeus showed little mercy to the Pharisees. Josephus records that he crucified 800 of his enemies in front of his palace at Jerusalem as entertainment while he and the women of his harem dinned. To intensify his enemies’ sufferings, Jannaeus had the throats of the rebel’s wives and children cut at the foot of the crosses.

From Hasmoneans to Herodians

When Alexander Jannaeus died in 76 BC, his wife, Salome Alexandra, ruled in his stead. Although she left the kingdom to her son Hyrcanus, his throne was coveted by his brother Aristobulus. Hyrcanus had no real desire to be king and gladly conceded the throne to his brother, who was cruel and ruthless like their father had been.

Now Hyrcanus’ had a scheming friend and advisor named Antipater, the son of a military governor. Antipater urged Hyrcanus to assert his right to the throne, knowing that if Hyrcanus was in power, he would be able to manipulate him to the advantage of his own family. Antipater thus urged the reluctant Hyrcanus first to wage a civil war against his brother and then to enlist the support of Rome.

Realizing that Hyrcanus would be easier to control than Aristobulus, the Roman general Pompey willingly assisted Hyrcanus in defending his throne. However, help from Rome came at a high price. Pompey brutally defeated Aristobulus’ forces by besieging Jerusalem and then slaying twelve thousand of its inhabitants, including the priests who were performing their sacrificial duties right up until the moment of the massacre. Worse still for the Jews, the Romans never left and Judea became a client state of Rome. Hyrcanus was made High Priest and Ethnarch of Judea, though most of the power rested with his friend and chief minister, Antipater.

Antipater’s loyalty to Pompey was short-lived. Antipater was a political genius and perceived that it would be beneficial to support the up and coming Julius Caesar in his civil wars.  After Caesar defeated Pompey and made himself the supreme dictator, he returned Antipater’s favors by conferring Roman citizenship on him and making his family exempt from taxation. Caesar also gave Antipater the position of Procurator of all Judea. With the title came power over all civil and religious matters. Antipater was even able to decide what happened with the taxes, provided that he kept the forts and towns on the frontier in good order.

The stage was being set for a new dynasty, which would take its name from Antipater’s son: Herod.

Galilee Under Herod

Antipater twenty-five year old son, Herod, was given command of the politically turbulent region of Galilee. This was no easy task. Antipater’s family was not Jewish but were from the Idumaeans that the Hasmoneans had conquered during the 2nd century BC. The Galileans were used to being ruled by a member of the Maccabees and resented this son of Esau reigning over them.
Herod first ran into trouble with the religious leaders when he ruthlessly killed the brigands who lived in the Galilean hill country. Though the brigands included Jewish nationalists and rebels, many were simply peasants who had been dispossessed of their houses and lands over the previous two generations and were forced to become cave-dwellers. According to a Jewish law which even Rome honored, the only agency which could legally condemn a Jew to death was the Grand Sanhedrin, the ruling council of Jews that met in Jerusalem and was made up of 71 leading Pharisees and Sadducees. But Herod was anxious to prove his sovereignty and disregarded the Sanhedrin’s jurisdiction. He butchered those who opposed his rule and tortured Hezekiah, the leader of the Galilean brigands.

When the Sanhedrin learned about Herod’s violent treatment of the Galileans, he ordered Herod to come before him to stand trial. Because Herod only ruled Galilee at this point, he had to at least pretend to cooperate with those in the other spheres of government. Though Herod consented to stand before the council of Jews, Josephus tells how he fled in the middle of the proceedings to escape the death sentence.

Donning the Maccabean Mantle

The chance to become sole ruler of the nation presented itself when the Hasmonean Prince, Antigonus II, joined with the Parthians and invaded Judea in 40 BC. After they successfully captured Jerusalem, Herod fled to Rome to appeal for support. Eager for Judea to be controlled by a competent ruler on good terms with themselves, the Romans conferred on Herod the title “King of the Jews.” Moreover, Rome offered Herod a detachment of soldiers with which to crush the rebellion.

Herod knew that the Jews would never accept him unless he could show a hereditary claim to the throne. Before laying siege to Jerusalem to crush the rebellion, Herod divorced his wife, Doris, and married Hyrcanus’s granddaughter, Mariamne (Miriam in English) who was twenty years his junior. The marriage couldn’t have been a better tactical move. By marrying a Hasmonean princess, Herod hoped to give legitimacy to his kingship. Since the House of Maccabees had permitted the marriage, this seemed to implicitly suggest Maccabean support for Herod, or at least that they considered him to be their own peer.

Even this would not prove enough for Herod, who nursed a grievance that his pedigree prevented him from also serving as High Priest. Not one to be constrained by the facts, Herod drew up a fraudulent genealogy, showing that he was descended from one of the priestly families who had gone into exile in Babylon. However, fearing that others would discover that the document was a forgery,  Herod withdrew it. He would have to settle with merely being king and leave the position of priest to his own puppets.

Judea Under Herod

Herod still remained subservient to the Romans who claimed Judea as part of their empire. However, it was within Rome’s best interests to allow kings like Herod, known as ‘client kings’, to exercise a large degree of autonomy. These client kingdoms at the frontiers of the empire acted as a buffer between Rome and her more powerful enemies. The key was for the client king was to remain on good terms with Rome. Herod took after his father and was particularly inept at this. He accomplished the seemingly impossible task of maintaining good relations with Rome through the respective reigns of Julius Caesar, Cassius, Antony and Augustus Caesar.

Herod had been nursing a grudge against the Sanhedrin for putting him on trial 10 years earlier. Once he was installed as king of the Jews he took his revenge by executing 45 of the council’s 70 members and restricting the Sanhedrin’s authority to religious matters.

Far from solidifying his rule, however, this merely increased the hatred that devout Jews felt against him. Throughout the remainder of his reign, Herod’s worst enemies continued to be those in his own backyard. As Samuel Sandmel observed in his book Herod: Profile of a tyrant, “The Jewish opposition to Herod, where it existed, was relentless, and Herod was relentless in destroying it.”
Herod developed a highly organized network of informants who kept him cognizant of anything suspicious. Those whom Herod suspected of disloyalty were quickly whisked away to spend the rest of their short lives in one of the king’s dreaded torture chambers.

Family Feuding

Herod may have been adroit at managing the various Roman emperors, but he failed miserably at managing his own household. He may have been able to bring order to Judea, but he could never bring order to his home, which was plagued by intense rivalry and bitter feuding.

At the root of the family feud was the virulent hatred that Herod’s sister, Salome, bore towards Herod’s second wife, Mariamne, whose outspokenness and royal birth made Salome feel inferior. Nothing Salome said could diminish Herod’s love for his Hasmonean princess. In fact, Herod’s love for Mariamne verged on insanity. The thought that he might one day die and Mariamne would be free to marry someone else nearly drove Herod mad with envy.

When Herod had to travel to Laodicea to meet Mark Antony, he left his uncle Joseph in charge. Unbeknownst to his wife, he left secret orders that if he were to die Mariamne should be immediately killed, along with her mother Alexandra. On one occasion when Joseph was telling Mariamne about his nephew’s great love for her, he revealed the dreadful instructions apparently thinking it would reveal the depths of Herod’s passion for her (it is also possible that Joseph loved Mariamne and wished to turn her against Herod, but we will never know).

Now Uncle Joseph was married to Herod’s sister, Salome, who had begun to despise her husband almost as much as she despised Mariamne. The opportunity to get rid of both Joseph and Mariamne in one stroke presented itself when Herod returned from visiting Antony. Salome accused the pair of having committed frequent adultery while the king had been away. As Mariamne pleaded her innocence, she and Herod both broke into tears and fell into a lovers’ embrace. As Herod clasped Mariamne to his bosom and whispered reassuring words of love, Mariamne said softly, “It was hardly a lover’s gesture to command that if anything happened to you, I should be killed also.”

At these words, Josephus tells us that “Herod went into a frenzy, crying and tearing his hair. This was damning proof of Joseph’s intercourse with her, he said, for Joseph would not have revealed it if they had not been intimate.”   Herod ordered his uncle’s execution, but could not bring himself to kill his wife. Mariamne began to realize just how much control she wielded over her husband and began to use her position to try to manipulate the king against his sister, Salome, and his mother Cyprus.

In time Herod had to go away again, and this time he left Soemus in charge of Mariamne and Alexandra (Mariamne’s mother). Once again, Josephus tells us that Herod left secret orders for the women to be killed if he failed to return, and once again Herod’s man had disclosed the plot. This time when Herod returned, Mariamne did not even pretend to love Herod. She mercilessly ridiculed him, despised him and treated him with contempt.

Salome and Cyprus soon got their opportunity to do away with Mariamne. They hatched a plot which made it look as if Mariamne was trying to poison the king. Herod eventually succumbed to the pressure and had Mariamne executed.

The king was never the same after his wife’s death. Remorse over her death nearly drove him mad, and for a while he refused to even acknowledge that she was no longer available to him. He would wander around the palace calling for Mariamne and even ordering his servants to bring her to him. Eventually, however, Herod’s remorse solidified into the dark moods, violent rages, drunkenness, paranoia, health problems and an unhealthy tendency to order the death of his closest friends.

Herod continued to put down plots or to react to rumors of false plots, and each time he became more brutal and callous; the more brutal he became, the more plots there were against him by those who wished to rid the land of his cruelty; the more plots there were against him, the more plots Herod suspected; the more plots Herod suspected, the easier it was for the members of his bickering household to plant poisonous suggestions in his mind against the other family-members that they hated.

As this suggests, the family bickering had not ended with the death of Mariamne. Four years after killing her, Herod married another Mariamne, the daughter of an insignificant priest. Herod appointed her father, Simon, to the position of High Priest. Meanwhile, Herod sent the two boys that the first Mariamne had born to him, named Alexander and Aristobulus, to be educated in Rome. Salome knew that Herod intended to make the boys his heirs, and as they grew older she began to look on them as a threat, lest they ever try to avenge their mother’s death which she had been responsible for. Salome thus focused all her attention on turning Herod against his sons, even as she had turned his mind against the first Mariamne.

The unhappiness of his household did not stop Herod from increasing its size. Whenever he grew tired of a woman, he married again and had more children by the new wife. As the household grew, so did the factions and intrigue. Each new wife took sides in the ongoing disputes, creating a continually shifting network of factions and alliances. By the end of his life, there were nine bickering wives all living under the same roof, each vying for the best interests of her children against the others and trying to discredit everyone else in the eyes of Herod. Herod himself hoped to reduce the strife and secure family interdependence through a network of interlocking marriages. However, the proliferation of so many children and intermarriages amongst them and their extended relatives merely added multiple layers of complexity to the continuous feuds and sub-feuds within the unhappy family.

As Herod aged he became even more brutal and untrustworthy. He began to be suspicious of everyone, fearing that those closest to him were plotting his overthrow. Josephus described Herod’s household as having “a general climate of horror” that resulted:

“The whole court soon became a scene of suspicion, gloom, and distrust: suspects were tortured and killed, while spies were everywhere. People accused their enemies of plots so that the king would kill them, and there was a general climate of horror.”

When Herod was first presented with the false allegations about his intended heirs, Alexander and Aristobulus, he refused to believe the charges. But sister Salome was very clever. Eventually the barrage of accusation became too much for Herod’s ailing mind to resist and he recalled his first wife, Doris and her son Antipater, in order to prepare the latter to be his heir. Antipater immediately took sides with Salome against Alexander and Aristobulus and even paid people to circulate roomers against his half-brothers and their supporters. Yet to his father’s face Antipater defended the brothers. Antipater was eventually implicated in a plot himself and killed, but not before he had succeeded in getting Alexander and Aristobulus butchered.

Madness and Death

As Herod grew older, his mental disposition verged on insanity. He tortured more and more people, including his own friends, merely because he suspected them of disloyalty. It is against this backdrop that the story of the massacre of the innocence must be understood. The historicity of the Bethlehem murders has been doubted because they are not mentioned by Josephus, who otherwise took care to record Herod’s myriad crimes. However, the description of the event given in Matthew’s gospel fits with what we know of Herod’s temperament. As Louis Matthews Sweet has put it in International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia,

Practically all of Herod’s murders, including those of his beloved wife and his sons, were perpetrated under the sway of one emotion and in obedience to a single motive. They were in practically every instance for the purpose of consolidating or perpetuating his power… The murder of the Innocents was another crime of the same sort. The old king was obsessed by the fear of a claimant to his petty throne; the Messianic hope of the Jews was a perpetual secret torment, and the murder of the children, in the attempt to reach the child whose advent threatened him, was at once so original in method and so characteristic in purpose as to give an inimitable verisimilitude to the whole narrative.

In 4 BC, Herod lay dying. Diseased in both body and mind, Herod’s death agony was excruciating. His disease was probably syphilis and included pains in the colon, fever, eye problems, itching, swollen feet, inflammation of the abdomen, convulsions, lung disease and gangrene in his privates.

Herod had many enemies who were eagerly awaiting the moment of his death. However, Herod was determined that there should be grief rather than joy at his passing. To facilitate this Herod ordered all the important men throughout the kingdom to be shut inside the hippodrome, with orders that as soon as he was dead these men should be murdered. In this way, Herod hoped to ensure that there would be grief throughout the kingdom at his passing rather than joy.

Though he had gained some favor among the Jews for rebuilding the temple on such a grand scale, it was a mixed blessing since Herod had insisted on keeping a golden eagle placed above the great door of the Temple. This depiction of Rome’s supremacy was a violation of the strict interpretations of Torah which forbad graven images. The eagle and everything it stood for was bitterly resented by the more zealous Pharisees. Among these were the learned Pharisees, Sariphaeus and Matthias. When a rumor circulated that Herod was dead, Sariphaeus and Matthias urged a group of youths to remove the hated object. Forty were caught in the act and arrested.

Though Herod was dying and could not even sit up, he insisted on hearing the case himself. All who had participated were to be killed with either the axe or the bowstring, while he ordered Matthias to be burned alive.

A few days later Herod himself died and Salome released the Jewish leaders that Herod had imprisoned in the Hippodrome.

Legacy

The Romans divided Herod’s empire and gave Iturea and the region of Trachonitis to Herod’s son Philip; they gave Galilee and Perea to his other son, Antipas and they gave Judea to his son Archelaus.

In addition to receiving their father’s land, the sons of Herod (with the exception of Philip) inherited his legacy of greed, malice, lust, treachery and violence. It is not surprising that when Joseph heard that Archelaus was reining over Judea instead of his father Herod, that he was afraid to enter the region but took the holy family to live in Nazareth instead, which was part of the Roman province of Syria at the time.

The immorality of the house of Herod continued to be legendary. John the Baptist would get himself beheaded by opposing Herod Antipas’s unlawful remarriage (Matthew 14:1-12; Mark 6:14-29). Jesus himself found himself having to endure the contempt and mockery of Antipas on the morning of his execution (Luke 23:5-12).

Herod’s grandson, Agrippa I, was no better, but stretched out his hand to harass the church (Acts 12:1), killing James (Acts 12:2) and claiming for himself divine honors before being struck down by God (Acts 12:20-23).

Evil as Herod’s legacy was, it was not entirely negative. He was a remarkably able leader who genuinely cared for his subjects. He may not have been able to sacrifice his lusts for the sake of his family, but he did make enormous sacrifices for the sake of his citizens. When a plague struck the land, he arranged for the infirm and elderly to get food from bread-kitchens. He even minted coins from the gold and silver ornaments in his own palaces in order to buy food from Egypt to feed his people.

It is not for nothing that he is remembered as “Herod the Great. He brought administrative order to the turbulent rejoin, secured the borders, made the roads safe and kept the various factions of the Jews intact. He created new harbors, opened trade routes, patronized the arts and brought stability to the finances of the region. Moreover, he possessed enough political sagacity to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of making friends with both the Romans and the Jews. It was this same shrewdness that was passed on to Herod’s grandson Agrippa, whom Jesus perceptively called “that old fox.” (Luke 13:32)

The most famous testament to Herod’s legacy was his impressive rebuilding of Solomon’s temple. This was the most ambitious building project ever to be undertaken in that part of the world and even exceeded Solomon’s temple in its magnificence. Herod also financed numerous other building projects throughout the East, even outside his own realm.

Lessons from the Life of Herod the Great

Herod’s ability to win the confidence of others, particularly those in positions of power, was truly remarkable. In his book Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans, Peter Richardson remarked that “His ability to win everyone’s confidence was one of the hallmarks of his career: in succession he sided with Caesar, Caesar’s assassins, Cassius and Brutus, their revengers Antony and Octavian, then with Antony and Cleopatra, and then with Octavian.” Herod was also able to earn the adoration of huge segments of the Jewish population through his economic policies, building program and skillful leadership. What Herod could never achieve, however, was to win the adoration of those who had to live with him.

In Herod we see the abiding human tendency to successfully manage one’s public life while failing pitiably to order one’s private affairs. In his public policy Herod was clever enough to know that sometimes rebellion could be overcome more effectively with kindness; in his own household, however, kindness was always in short supply. His aptitude communicating with Roman emperors and foreign dignitaries was matched only by his failure to properly communicate with the members of his own family. His adroitness as a military leader was matched only by his abject failure as a father and husband. Herod’s remarkable dexterity at quickly settling disputes with foreign powers like Cleopatra’s Egypt was matched only by his incapability to settle the domestic hostilities that became a regular feature of his house.

Herod represents the supreme folly of all those who would rule the world while neglecting responsibilities nearest to home. Though history has named him “Herod the Great” with an eye at his public accomplishments, it would perhaps be more fitting to call him “Herod the Horrible.”
Herod’s eventful but unhappy life helps us to better understand the nature of Christ’s ministry. Herod attempted to kill the Christ-child on the assumption that the Messiah’s reign would displace his own. Herod doubtless misunderstood the nature of the Christ’s kingdom, even as his successor, Antipas, had failed to comprehend the true nature of Jesus’ kingship when He sent him back to Pilot clothed in a royal robe (Luke 23:6-12). Yet Herod’s perceptions were not entirely erroneous.

Grounded in Messianic prophecies throughout the Old Testament, first-century Jews looked forward to a climactic event that would establish the God of Israel as the sovereign God of the entire world. They were not expecting a spiritualized, invisible kingdom that changed people’s hearts but made no difference to the public order. Had they expected that kind of king, Herod would never have lifted an eyebrow when rumor reached him that the Messiah had been born in Bethlehem. On the contrary, Herod knew what Zacharias knew and had prayed about in Luke 1:67-79: when the Messiah comes, the game will finally be up for tyrants like himself, and a new order of justice and peace will be introduced.

When Jesus’ began preaching the gospel of the kingdom, he subverted many of the common notions of what the Messiah’s kingship would look like. He taught that instead of ruling the world from an earthly throne like Herod, he would rule the world from heaven until His second coming (1 Cor. 15:24-26).  Instead of toppling tyrants like Herod in a sudden catastrophic revolution, the redemption of the nations would be a gradual process accomplished through discipleship, baptism and the work of missions (Matthew 28:18-20).

But though Jesus disrupted many false paradigms of the Messiah’s mission, He never disputed the idea his kingdom would be a physical, earthy entity. Herod, along with all first century Jews, was correct in anticipating that the Messiah’s kingdom would be of and for this world. Jesus never said that his kingdom is not of this world, despite wrong translations of John 18:36. The RSV translates John 18:36 closest to the original Greek: ‘My kingdom is not from this world.’ Christ’s kingdom is certainly of and for this world, but it does not arise out of or (from) this earth in the way that kingdoms such as Herod’s did. Rather, it comes from heaven to the earth just like Jesus did. That is why Christ taught us to pray, ‘thy kingdom come on earth…as it is in heaven’ (Mat. 6:10). The phrase ‘kingdom of heaven’ in the gospels has this same underpinning, referring to the rule of heaven (that is, of God), being brought to bear in the present space-time universe. This draws on the theological backdrop of passages like Daniel 7: 26-27 and is the same crowning vision we find in Rev. 11:15: “The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and His Christ…”

So Herod was right to fear Jesus. Jesus’ birth was a portent of the imminent catastrophe against tyrants such as himself. God was beginning to judge the world, and this was devastatingly reinforced in AD 70 when the Romans leveled the magnificent temple Herod had built. Years later even the resilient Roman empire would meet its doom and be replaced by European Christendom. The kingdom of Herod and the empire of the Caesars were both outdone by the Christ-child born in Bethlehem.

A shorter version of this article will be appearing in the monthly magazine of Christian Voice , a UK ministry whose website is http://www.christianvoice.org.uk/. The article is reprinted here with permission.

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