Herod the Great
A balancing act
Before Herod could take the throne, he had to rid Judaea of the Parthians. However, the Jews preferred the king that the invaders had installed. With the help of two Roman legions, Herod began a long campaign against his own people.
Much of Judaea also revolted ... And right away every place was filled with murders. On the one hand, the Romans were enraged by frustration in their siege [of Jerusalem]. And, on the other, the Jews around Herod were eager to have no opponent left.
And whole masses were slaughtered: in the alleys, crowded in their houses and even taking refuge in the temple. There was no mercy for either young or old. Nor were the weakest women spared.
Josephus, The Jewish Antiquities
It was only in the summer of 37 BC – some three years after he had been given the crown in Rome – that Herod was actually able to enter his capital and set himself up as king. But it was a hollow victory. To his Jewish subjects, his authority was constantly in question.
Love and loathing
In his bid to gain legitimacy in the eyes of his people, Herod now married his Hasmonaean princess Mariamme. She bore him five children, including two surviving blue-blooded Jewish sons. But this was not a marriage made in heaven. To become king, Herod had put to death Mariamme’s grandfather Hyrcanus. As a result, Herod’s adored young wife loathed him, and he was wracked by jealousy and paranoia. Whenever he went on a dangerous mission, he left instructions for Mariamme to be killed if he failed to return.
Then, as now, Jerusalem was a city dedicated to worship, and real power was held by the religious authorities on the Temple Mount. To shore up his position, Herod desperately needed to win over the politician priests. He proposed Mariamme’s 17-year-old brother, Aristobulus – a Hasmonaean prince – for the job of high priest. When the boy first officiated at the altar, jubilant crowds swarmed to the temple, swooning with delight and hailing the return of the Jewish royals. As a non-Jew, Herod couldn’t even watch from the back.
Death of a prince
Herod’s jealousy at Aristobulus’s popularity grew, reaching a peak at a pool party at his palace in Jericho, a lush steamy weekend destination for the Jerusalem jet set. As the royals and their friends splashed and chatted in the swimming pool, a group of guards played what must have looked like a boisterous game in the deep end, Aristobulus, darling of the masses, in their midst. On Herod’s orders, his wife’s beloved brother was held under the water and drowned.
As the court went into mourning, Herod was summoned by Mark Antony to answer a charge of murder. The dead boy’s mother – Herod’s mother-in-law – was bent on revenge and she had called on an old friend for help. Cleopatra was only too happy to demand that Mark Antony punish Herod, preferably sentencing him to death. That would leave her free to take over his territories and, in particular, the oasis of Jericho, which had once belonged to Egypt. With its citrus grove, date wine industry and balsam plantations, Jericho was a jewel in Judaea’s crown.
Cleopatra and Herod
Mark Antony let his old friend Herod off the hook, but appeased Cleopatra by giving her Jericho as a gift. Rather than occupy her new possession, Cleopatra leased it back to Herod at vast expense for three years. It cost him almost half the national income. Once again, the impotent Herod was humiliated and reminded of his reliance on Mark Antony and Rome.
Herod resented the Egyptian queen’s hold over Mark Antony, and she delighted in baiting him. When she came to Judaea to survey her properties, she demanded that he escort her and even tried to seduce him. Herod was the only man known to have resisted the world’s most irresistible woman!
Rebuilding the Temple
Having destroyed Jerusalem in a ghastly siege, which was followed in 31 BC by a devastating earthquake, Herod set about rebuilding it. He constructed a new market, amphitheatre, headquarters for the Sanhedrin and palace. Then his architects went to work on a project so monumental that, to this day, it is still the most famous landmark in Israel: the Temple Mount.
The original temple built by King Solomon was the most sacred place in the Jewish world, but now, over 900 years old, it was a virtual ruin. Even though, as a non-Jew, Herod would never be allowed to enter it, he was bent on giving his people a new temple in a glorious setting. But it wouldn’t be easy.
It took him eight years to create a new holy of holies and dramatically expand the area of the Temple Mount itself. Surrounded by colonnaded walkways, its southern end was dominated by a building that was part palace and part shopping mall, a vantage point for Herod from which he could keep an eye on the turbulent priests below. The site was opened up to all – Jews, gentiles and even women – making it a centre for business as well as devotion.
Rebuilding the Temple was undoubtedly a shrewd move, albeit an expensive one, and the main motivation was undoubtedly internal politics. It is unknown whether Herod even believed in God, but all his palaces featured Jewish ritual baths and his households observed strict religious law. He may not have been of pure Jewish blood, but is it possible that his rebuilding of the Temple was motivated by belief?
Civil war
By the middle years of his reign, Herod was exhausted from the balancing act he was forced to perform: pleasing Rome, placating Jerusalem and monitoring palace gossip for anything that might menace his throne. Then in 31 BC the very root of his power was threatened – ill feeling between Mark Antony and his rival Octavian erupted into civil war.
In September, Octavian fought Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the great sea battle of Actium. But Herod wasn’t there to support his patron. Instead, Mark Antony had wanted him to intervene with the Navateans, so he was kept busy in the desert fighting a small border war.
The man who had made Herod king and to whom he owed everything was defeated. Herod now faced a crucial decision. His future hanging in the balance, he once again braved winter seas to visit Octavian, the new ruler of the Roman world. If Herod was to remain king of the Jews, he would have to perform a spectacular U-turn.
Betrayal
In 30 BC, Mark Antony took poison and died in Cleopatra’s arms. He did so knowing that Herod, the man he had called his friend, had already betrayed him. Herod had gone to see Octavian, purposely without any of the paraphernalia of his royal status. He had said, in effect, ‘I was loyal to Mark Antony, but now I offer my loyalty to you.’ Surprisingly Octavian had accepted the offer and confirmed Herod in his kingship, even offering him more lands.
It appears to have been yet another triumph for Herod’s silver tongue. But Octavian’s remarkable open-handedness towards this friend of his old enemy may have had more to do with chests of silver. Octavian was bankrupt, and Herod came to him with at least 700 talents – 21,000 kilograms (44,300lb) – of pure silver.
The last of Mariamme
Herod had a new sponsor and even more territory. He returned to Judaea in triumph but his joy was short lived. There were rumours that his wife Mariamme, the woman he loved more than anything, had taken a lover, and he seems to have been unable to deal with those suspicions in any rational way.
Herod had Mariamme executed and then went into the wilderness in despair. ‘So hot was the flame of his desire that he could not believe her dead,’ Josephus wrote, ‘but, in his sickness of mind, talked to her as if still alive, until time revealed to him the terrible truth, and filled his heart with grief as passionate as his love had been while she lived.’
