King Herod

73 BC - 4 BC

Herod, king of the Jews, is said to have ordered the murder of hundreds of babies – the ‘slaughter of the innocents’ – just to be rid of the infant Jesus. But there is much more to him than this infamous role.

Under Herod, the land of Judaea became an enterprise zone, and the Jewish faith was so fashionable that even some Romans took it up. But there was a problem: Herod wasn’t Jewish.

He was an Arab, born in 73 BC, when Judaea was part of the Roman empire His mother, Cyprus, was a princess from Petra in what is now Jordan. His diplomat father, Antipater, was an Idumaean, a member of a desert tribe that had been forced into Judaism at the point of a sword. To ‘real’ Jews, Herod came from a family of heathens. He would never be accepted as the legitimate ruler of Judaea and of the Jewish nation – the Bible said that only one of King David’s descendants could rule the Jews.

Herod grew up in Jerusalem playing in the corridors of power. But he might as well have been in Rome. His father was on first-name terms with Julius Caesar, who in 47 BC made him epitropos – regent – and bestowed Roman citizenship on him, the empire’s greatest honour.

He was being groomed for power when only in his teens, and when he was 26, he was made tetrarch (governor) of Galilee:

Although a destructive king in many ways, he was very creative, and is famous for transforming the mountain-top stronghold overlooking the Dead Sea at Massada, into a luxurious palace. He also created a vast artificial deep seaport, Caesarea which some think should be counted as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

The secret of his extraordinary design lay in a Roman innovation – volcanic ash cement that hardened in sea water. Herod’s engineers filled hundreds of wooden pontoons with the powder and sank them to form the foundations for the new harbour – about 40 hectares (100 acres) of confined ocean. The harbour walls were protected by unique wave-breaking structures.

Until Herod’s bold move, a late harvest in Egypt meant grain-carrying ships bound for Rome had to brave winter seas. Now they had a safe haven in which to sit out the storms. It was an instant success. The harbour became a giant cash machine for Judaea and a source of pride to Herod.

Twenty-eight years into his reign, Herod was entitled to feel pleased with himself. He’d rebuilt the city of God and created a city of commerce. The Romans were pleased and his subjects were rich. But the remaining years of his reign would be characterised by murder and madness.

Herod married a total of 10 wives, all (initially at least) for political reasons, the last three in the same year: 16 BC. These marriages had resulted in 15 children. As he reached his 60s, Herod couldn’t decide who should succeed him and, in his paranoia, became suspicious that his children were plotting against him.

In 14 BC, he was so desperate for someone he could trust that he brought back a wife and a son he’d banished 30 years previously. Doris and four-year-old Antipater had been thrown out when he had fallen for Mariamme. Now Antipater would become a front runner in the battle for the throne.

Alexander and Aristobulus, were his children by Mariamme and were strong contenders for the succession, but because they were Hasmonaean aristocrats, Herod didn’t trust them. In 7 BC, the king’s temper got the better of him and he had both Alexander and Aristobulus strangled.

If the Bible is to be believed, things were about to get even darker for the troubled monarch, when slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under.

However, whether the details of this story are true or not, there’s evidence that, in the last years of Herod’s reign, he began killing on an unprecedented scale, settling scores and murdering political rivals.

The period of his greatest atrocities coincided with his own physical decay. Herod, now almost 70 years old, was carried to his newest palace in Jericho.

Some have proposed Herod died of gonorrhoea. However, after close study of Josephus’s description of the king’s decline, Jan Hirschmann, a physician at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, thinks the symptoms are more consistent with chronic kidney disease. Herod sought many remedies for his excruciating ailments, from soaking in warm baths at Callirrhoe to sitting in a tub of warm oil. But nothing worked.

From his deathbed, Herod embarked on an orgy of violence. It began when he was told a group of high-spirited students, urged on by one of their teachers, had torn down the golden Roman eagle Herod had placed provocatively above one of the entrances to the Temple. He had the students and the teacher burned alive.

He then ordered ‘the most illustrious men of the whole Jewish nation’ to be imprisoned in Jericho and commanded his sister Salome and her husband Alexas to execute them all after his death so that every family would go into mourning and his funeral would be an even greater display of grief. All his life he’d been rejected by the Jewish aristocracy and now he would get his revenge. In the event, Salome and Alexas refused to carry out his command.

In his palace, courtiers attended the king round the clock, but neither prayers nor potions made any difference. Driven mad by pain, Herod even attempted to end his misery by trying to stab himself with a knife.

Impatient for power, Doris’s son Antipater now tried to mount a palace coup that would put him on the throne. Herod had him imprisoned. When Antipater heard sounds of mourning emanating from the palace, he wrongly assumed that the king had finally died, and he tried to bribe his captors to let him go. The principal keeper of the prison ran to tell the king. Herod ordered that Antipater be executed immediately.

When Herod died five days later, he was taken to the only site he had named after himself: Herodium, a palace sunk into the top of an artificial mountain. He was laid to rest in the marble tomb set within the awe-inspiring pleasure gardens. According to one writer there was a ‘bier all of gold, embroidered with precious stones, and a purple bed of various contexture, with the dead body upon it’ but the golden casket has yet to be found.

Herod’s death left a vacuum that his heirs simply couldn’t fill. His kingdom was divided between three of his remaining sons, including Herod Antipas, the man who would receive John the Baptist's head on a platter. Within a century, the Romans were burning Herod the Great’s temple and persecuting the Jews. Perhaps the stability he created was Herod’s best monument.

Co-ordinates given below for position of the Wailing Wall.