Herod the Great

Judaean king (r. 37-4 b.c.e.)

• Born: 73 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Probably Idumaea (now in Palestine)
• Died: Spring, 4 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Jericho, Judaea (now in Palestine)

As a loyal king of Judaea under Roman administration, Herod brought peace, prosperity, and a cultural flowering to the land he ruled. Nevertheless, negative aspects of his reign—including harsh dealings with family members and the inability to placate his Jewish subjects—have tended to overshadow these positive achievements.

Early Life

Herod (HEHR-uhd) was born into a prominent family of Idumaeans, an Arab people whose capital was Hebron, a city south of Jerusalem. During the time of Herod’s grandfather, Antipater, Idumaea had been conquered by Jewish armies and its citizens were forced to convert to Judaism. It is not clear, at that time or in subsequent periods, exactly how deeply the beliefs and practices of Judaism were ingrained into the lives of Idumaeans such as Herod’s family.

At the time of the Idumaean conquest, the Jews of the Holy Land were politically independent and ruled over by a royal family known as the Hasmonaeans. They were descendants of Judas Maccabaeus and his brothers, who had led a successful revolt (beginning in 168 or 167 b.c.e.) against their Syrian overlords and for the continuance of the monotheistic faith of Israel. When the Idumaeans came under Jewish domination later in that century, Herod’s grandfather served members of the Hasmonaean Dynasty with some distinction. Herod’s father, also named Antipater, in turn was also closely allied to some of the Hasmonaeans. By the time of Herod’s birth, a rift had developed in the Jewish royal family, with two brothers, Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, vying for the throne and the religiously significant position of high priest. Herod’s father supported the elder of the brothers, Hyrcanus, but the matter was still in doubt when the rival claimants both appealed for support to the Roman general Pompey the Great, then in Damascus, Syria. That was in 63 b.c.e., when Herod himself was about ten years old.

Antipater’s maneuvers were decisive in winning Pompey’s support for Hyrcanus, whose personality seemed as weak and passive as Antipater’s was aggressive and active. During the years that Herod was growing up, his father continued to show support for Hyrcanus. In fact, Antipater’s actions were aimed as much at bringing his own family to the favorable notice of powerful Romans. These twin concerns—family and Rome—continued to be prominent in the subsequent career of Antipater’s most famous son, Herod.

In the early 40’s, Julius Caesar became a force in the Near East, and Antipater provided him with significant military support. For this, he was rewarded by Caesar, who confirmed his growing prestige while not totally displacing the Hasmonaean Hyrcanus. Antipater was able to name Herod as governor of the area of Galilee and to place others of his children (he had four sons and a daughter) in positions of power. Shortly after Caesar’s death, Antipater was assassinated, a murder that Herod himself avenged. In the decade that followed, the confusion in Rome was mirrored in the provinces, and local leaders such as Herod had to be resourceful to retain power—and their lives. Herod succeeded admirably.

Hyrcanus’s brother had been killed, but one of his nephews joined with the Parthians (eastern rivals to the Romans) to wrest the throne from Hyrcanus. The resultant civil war forced Herod to flee. This turned out to be but a temporary setback, however, for Herod ultimately reached Rome and gained the friendship and backing of the two most powerful individuals of the day, Marc Antony and Octavian (later Augustus). In response to their urging, the senate of Rome declared that henceforth Herod was to be king of Judaea. That was in the year 40 b.c.e., when Herod was in his early thirties.

Life’s Work

On the basis of his family background and earlier achievements, it would appear that Herod was an ideal choice to occupy the kingship of Judaea—at least from the Roman point of view. He and his family had shown themselves to be loyal subjects and deft leaders. Herod, it seemed, could give the Romans what they wanted most: steady payment of taxes and other levies, military support against common enemies, and internal peace and stability within the lands he ruled. Moreover, Herod possessed physical characteristics that the Romans appreciated. He was tall, athletic, and able to enjoy and appreciate manly activities such as hunting and riding. Dressed in proper Roman garb, he looked and acted at home in the courts of the powerful Romans whom he had to please.

There is every reason to think that his Roman benefactors were very pleased indeed with Herod’s initial actions. In 40 b.c.e., he became a king in name, but not in fact, for his capital, Jerusalem, was still in the hands of his rivals. Within three years, that is, by 37 b.c.e., he had regained control of his capital and the land that was now his kingdom. At this point, Herod probably looked forward to a long and relatively serene reign. He had longevity (approximately thirty-three years); serenity was to prove far more elusive.

From the beginning, there were substantial numbers of Jewish subjects who doubted the depth of Herod’s commitment to Judaism. His Idumaean ancestry led to the taunt that he was but a half Jew. His commitment to Rome, with its polytheism and philosophical pluralism, was—in the opinion of many in Jerusalem—incompatible with the relatively austere monotheistic faith of Israel. Criticisms of Herod in this regard preceded his assumption of the kingship, and they undoubtedly increased as he consolidated power. A more pressing challenge, however, soon presented itself.

Herod was a king, and there was no mistaking it. However, the Jews still had their own royal dynasty in the surviving members of the Hasmonaean family. Hyrcanus, while essentially powerless, was still a potential rival. Herod sought to neutralize this threat, even turn it to his advantage, by marrying Hyrcanus’s granddaughter, Mariamne. Now, he may have thought, people would at last tire of bringing up details of his past, for the children he and Mariamne would produce would be royal from both the Jewish and the Roman perspectives. If such were his thoughts, he erred grievously. Hyrcanus was too old to pose a threat, but Mariamne’s mother, Alexandra, and eventually Mariamne herself were not. Then, too, there was Mariamne’s brother Aristobulus, whom Herod was forced to appoint as high priest. One by one, these Hasmonaeans were to be eliminated by Herod, for faults real and imagined. His murder of Mariamne in 29 b.c.e. was especially unsettling for Herod and may have pushed him to—and over—the brink of mental disorder and instability. In his anti-Hasmonaean actions, Herod was generally supported by members of his Idumaean family and in particular by his sister, Salome.

The Romans were not overly concerned about Herod’s domestic problems at this time. Herod had grown very close to Antony, who was the virtual ruler of the eastern portion of the Empire that included the lands Herod governed. When Antony did intervene, it was usually at the insistence of his queen, Cleopatra VII, who, according to one account, coveted the person of Herod as much as she did his lands. The civil war of the late 30’s that pitted Antony against Octavian found Herod continuing to provide vital assistance to his benefactor, Antony. It is a credit to Herod’s extraordinary abilities as diplomat and as briber that Octavian allowed him to retain his position after Antony’s resounding defeat.

The fifteen-year period from 28 to 13 b.c.e. was the high point of Herod’s reign. The most visible sign of this prosperity was the ambitious building program that Herod undertook. Throughout his kingdom and beyond, he constructed temples, amphitheaters, and even an entire city (Caesarea, on the Mediterranean coast) to honor the Romans and the civilization they represented. Part of that civilization was the worship of many gods through sacrificial offerings, athletic and dramatic competitions, and a wide array of other public functions. Herod actively promoted such activities, partly because he knew that they were important to his Roman overlords and partly—it is fair to say—because he enjoyed them. The Romans and their gods had been good to him, and he was only giving them their due.

Herod was not without gratitude toward the God of Israel, whose people he ruled and whose favor he also solicited. Herod’s rebuilding of the Temple of Jerusalem, a vast complex that stood at the very center of the Judaism of his day, was the most tangible expression of his concerns in this regard. Moreover, he sometimes was able to accommodate his own ambitions to the religious sensitivities of his subjects. For example, he generally refrained from setting up images—which would be seen as infringements of the Ten Commandments—in locations where they would attract attention. Nevertheless, most Judaean Jews were not as “broad-minded” as their monarch, nor did they regularly join in the praise Herod received when he aided Jewish communities outside Judaea.

During the last ten years of his life, domestic difficulties came to overshadow and almost cancel out all else. Herod had married ten times and had fathered numerous children. As he grew older, several of his sons grew bolder in their efforts to guarantee that they would succeed him. Some of them may even have plotted to hasten the day of their father’s death. The most prominent players in this deadly game were Mariamne’s sons, Alexander and Aristobulus, and Antipater, the son of Herod’s first wife. Mariamne’s sons, as the last heirs of the Hasmonaean Dynasty, were especially dangerous. They may well have been guilty of treasonous activities against the man who had killed their mother, uncle, grandmother, and great-grandfather. In this case, Augustus was unable to effect a final reconciliation between father and sons. Their execution occurred in 7 or 6 b.c.e. Herod was almost seventy years old, in very poor health, and in need of an heir.

For most of the period until his death, that heir was Antipater. Unwilling to wait gracefully, he persisted in meddling in his father’s plans to arrange the marriages of other offspring. More important, he grew impatient, and that impatience cost him his life and the throne just prior to Herod’s own death in the early spring of 4 b.c.e. Herod managed to identify three of his sons whom he judged to be worthy of portions of his kingdom. When Augustus, who was a prime financial beneficiary of Herod’s will, confirmed these choices, Herod’s legacy was, in one sense, complete and secure. In another sense, there is much about Herod’s legacy that is puzzling, even troubling.

Significance

It is difficult for scholars to take the measure of Herod as a man and as a ruler. This difficulty is almost as old as Herod himself. Nearly everything that is known of Herod is contained in the works of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who wrote almost a century after Herod’s death. Josephus used both pro- and anti-Herod sources and was not without biases of his own. Moreover, Josephus described Herod’s reign in two separate writings, Bellum Judaium (75-79 c.e.; History of the Jewish War, 1773) and Antiquitates Judaicae (93 c.e.; The Antiquities of the Jews, 1773), and the accounts are often contradictory. The problem described here is not unique to Herod. It recurs, for example, in the study of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and other leaders of antiquity.

In the case of Herod, it does seem possible to affirm certain things. His loyalty to Rome and the values it espoused is beyond question. His ability to conceive and carry out large-scale building projects cannot be doubted. His success in organizing his kingdom to produce vast revenues for Rome, himself, and his supporters was an impressive, if not always welcome, accomplishment. All of this was compatible, in Herod’s view, with a devotion to the Jewish religion and to the Jewish people. Herod undoubtedly believed that loyal support for Rome was the only hope for Jewish survival. Rebellion could only lead to disaster—a judgment that the Jewish revolts of the following centuries revealed as all too true.

Balanced against Herod’s achievements was, first of all, a cruelty so monstrous that it led the author of the Gospel of Matthew to write that Herod had ordered the slaughter of innocent children (see Matthew, chapter 2). Many historians do not believe that such an event ever occurred. Nevertheless, a man who would slaughter close members of his own family was certainly capable of the actions Matthew attributed to him. It was actions of this sort that led Augustus to say, in a play on words in Latin, that he would have preferred to be Herod’s pig than his son—or, one might add, his wife, his mother-in-law, or brother-in-law. Even in an admittedly violent age, it must be acknowledged, Herod’s cruelty, perhaps the result of some mental disorder, stands out.

Herod’s view of Judaism and Jewish survival was not without value. Still, it is hard to see what sort of Judaism Herod actually had in mind. His active support for polytheistic institutions would, it seems likely, have ultimately led to a dilution of Judaism’s insistence on monotheism. A Jewish people may then have survived, but without the distinctive features of their ancestral religion.

Sometime in antiquity, the epithet “the Great” was first applied to Herod. Initially, it may have served to designate him as an older son of Antipater or to distinguish him from several other individuals named Herod who followed him. At some point, it came to describe certain elements of his personality and career. In that context, it is appropriate. In an overall evaluation of Herod, however, “great” is not the word most likely to come to mind for most observers of this complex and somehow fascinating man.

Bibliography

Grant, Michael. Herod the Great. New York: American Heritage Press, 1971. A straightforward account of the reign of Herod. Grant takes care to place Herod in the larger political and cultural context of first century b.c.e. Rome. Viewed from this perspective, Herod, while far from a saint, is not quite the total sinner that he is made out to be in many other modern accounts. Includes illustrations.

Hoehner, Harold W. Herod Antipas. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1972. A detailed account of the reign of one of Herod’s heirs. It is particularly valuable because of its extensive bibliography that fully covers the reign of Herod and his successors.

Josephus, Flavius. Josephus. Books 1-3. Translated by H. St. James Thackeray. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. As described above, these are the primary ancient sources for the personal and public life of Herod. In this Loeb Classical Library edition, the original Greek text of Josephus is printed along with an authoritative English translation and notes. This is the essential starting point for all research on Herod.

Perowne, Stewart. The Life and Times of Herod the Great. 1956. Reprint. New York: Sutton, 2003. A balanced and sober account. Like Grant, Perowne makes the point that Herod was largely a product of his own time and must, to a degree at least, be judged by the standards of that period. Perowne continued his narrative in a second volume titled The Later Herods.

Roller, Duane W. The Building Program of Herod the Great. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. A systematic presentation of all the building projects known to have been part of Herod’s architectural achievement. Each is discussed within a broad historical and cultural context.

Sandmel, Samuel. Herod: Profile of a Tyrant. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1967. A clear and well-written account of the life and times of Herod. Sandmel attempts to re-create Herod’s mental state at key moments, such as when he had Mariamne killed. The author’s overall assessment of Herod is succinctly captured in the subtitle of his book.