Herod the Great
Settling scores and murdering rivals
Herod had 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
Herod’s next eldest sons, Alexander and Aristobulus, were his children by Mariamme. They were also strong contenders for the succession, but because they were Hasmonaean aristocrats, Herod didn’t trust them.
Their attitude towards him didn’t help. Part of this was snobbery on their part – they had been educated in Rome and he was a badly educated provincial type who was getting old. It didn’t help matters that he’d executed their mother. They may have heard the rumours that, ever since her death, he had kept her body embalmed in a jar of honey, and that in his madness he visited her at night to continue their relationship.
They had been named as Herod’s successors in his early wills, and for years, he had tried to get along with them. But they were always a threat, and he came to believe that they were scheming against him by trying to win the support of the army. Then Antipater, Doris's son, instigated a successful campaign against them. Among his charges was that one of the pair had called Herod ‘a shameless old man who dyed his hair’. In 7 BC, the king’s temper got the better of him and he had both Alexander and Aristobulus strangled.
The slaughter of the innocents?
If the Bible is to be believed, things were about to get even darker for the troubled monarch. It tells of three wise men who appeared in Judaea in the 34th year of Herod’s reign. They brought gifts for the king of the Jews, but it wasn’t Herod they had in mind.
Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is he that is born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.’
When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. And when he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born. And they said unto him, ‘In Bethlehem of Judaea: for thus it is written by the prophet.’
Matthew 2:1-5
Herod listened with growing fury as the wise men spoke of a star and a prophecy. He played the innocent, saying, ‘Go and search diligently for the young child; and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also.’
According to the Bible, Herod’s troops advanced on Bethlehem, but God had warned Joseph in a dream and the holy family escaped to Egypt. As for the wise men, they had left Judaea by another route, conveniently avoiding Herod.
The king was furious when he realised that he’d been outwitted, and his revenge was swift:
Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.
Matthew 2:16
Herod was sometimes a murderous king, but did he really order this ‘slaughter of the innocents’? We only have those few lines in Matthew’s gospel as evidence. The gospel of St Luke confirms that Jesus was born in the time of Herod but doesn’t mention the mass killing of the baby boys. Josephus, from whom we know so much about Herod and who delights in cataloguing the king’s darker deeds, never mentions the slaughter at all.
It is possible that the massacre never took place. 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.
Physical decay
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. Josephus gives a very graphic description of his illness:
There was a gentle fever upon him, and an intolerable itching over all the surface of his body, and continual pains in his colon, and dropsical turnouts about his feet, and an inflammation of the abdomen, and a putrefaction of his privy member, that produced worms. Besides which he had a difficulty of breathing upon him, and could not breathe but when he sat upright, and had a convulsion of all his members.
Josephus, The Jewish War
Some have proposed that Herod had 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, disagrees. He has concluded that the symptoms, with the exception of genital gangrene (‘putrefaction of his privy member’), are more consistent with chronic kidney disease, especially the itching that Herod experienced. The rotting of his penis or scrotum was probably caused by the rare Fournier's gangrene.
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.
Driven mad by pain
From his deathbed, Herod embarked on an orgy of violence. It began when word reached him that 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 both the students and the teacher burned alive.
Aware of his impending demise, Herod then ordered ‘the most illustrious men of the whole Jewish nation’ to be imprisoned in Jericho. He 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 attempted to end his misery:
Presently after he was overborne by his pains, and was disordered by want of food, and by a convulsive cough, and endeavored to prevent a natural death. So he took an apple, and asked for a knife for he used to pare apples and eat them. He then looked round about to see that there was nobody to hinder him, and lifted up his right hand as if he would stab himself. But Achiabus, his first cousin, came running to him, and held his hand, and hindered him from so doing.
Josephus, The Jewish War
The end of Antipater
Impatient for power, Doris’s son Antipater now tried to mount a palace coup that would put him on the throne. But Herod’s first-born, the son he had brought back from exile to succeed him, jumped too soon – his dying father, having discovered his plot, had rallied. Returning from Rome in answer to Herod's summons, Antipater arrived at Caesarea to find no one waiting to greet him. The sight of the deserted wharf, empty of sycophants, well-wishers or allies, must have chilled his blood.
Arriving at Herod’s palace, he attempted to salute his father, only for the king to cry:
Even this is an indication of a parricide, to be desirous to get me into his arms, when he is under such heinous accusations. God confound thee, thou vile wretch. Do not thou touch me, till thou hast cleared thyself of these crimes that are charged upon thee.
Josephus, The Jewish War
Although protesting his innocence, Antipater was convicted of having lied about his half-brothers, so contributing to their execution, and of trying to poison his father. Herod had him imprisoned, wanting to be in better shape before executing him.
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.
Herod’s death
When Herod finally 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.
There was a bier all of gold, embroidered with precious stones, and a purple bed of various contexture, with the dead body upon it, covered with purple; and a diadem was put upon his head, and a crown of gold above it, and a sceptre in his right hand; and near to the bier were Herod's sons, and a multitude of his kindred; next to which came his guards, and the regiment of Thracians, the Germans also and Gauls, all accoutred as if they were going to war; but the rest of the army went foremost, armed, and following their captains and officers in a regular manner; after whom 500 of his domestic servants and freed-men followed, with sweet spices in their hands: and the body was carried 200 furlongs, to Herodium, where he had given order to be buried.
Josephus, The Jewish War
Today, sheep graze where Herod’s mighty funeral procession stopped. His 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.
‘In most respects he enjoyed good fortune if ever a man did,’ wrote Josephus of Herod. ‘He came to the throne though he was a commoner, occupied it a very long time, and left it to his children. But in his family life, he was the most unfortunate of men.’
