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Kingdom of Judaea
Herod I, the Great – Jewish King: 40-4 B.C.
Bronze Half-prutah 13mm (0.74 grams) of the Jerusalem mint
Reference: Hendin 1190 (5th Edition)
BACIΛ HPWΔ; cornucopia with inscription above and below.
Eagle standing right.
This is the first coin issued by a Jewish ruler with a graven image. The eagle may represent the golden bird King Herod placed above the entrance to the Jerusalem Temple. In 4 BCE, young Jewish disciples smashed the golden eagle over the main entrance of the Temple of Jerusalem after the Pharisee teachers claimed it was an idolatrous Roman symbol. Herod arrested them, brought them to court, and sentenced them.
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 Herod (Hebrew: הוֹרְדוֹס, Hordos, Greek: Ἡρῴδης, Hērōidēs), also known as Herod I or Herod the Great (born 71, 73 or 74 BCE, died 4 BCE in Jericho, according to other data, 1 BCE), was an Edomite Jewish Roman client king of the Roman provinces of Judea, Galilee and Samaria (present-day Israel). He was described as “a madman who murdered his own family and a great many rabbis.” He is also known for his colossal building projects in Jerusalem and other parts of the ancient world, including the rebuilding of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, sometimes referred to as Herod’s Temple. Some details of his biography can be gleaned from the works of the 1st century CE Roman-Jewish historian Josephus Flavius.
His son Herod Archelaus was made ethnarch of Samaria, Judea, and Edom from 4 BCE to 6 CE. He was judged incompetent by Augustus who then made Herod’s other son Herod Antipas ruler of Galilee from 6 CE – 39 CE.
Biography
Herod was born around 74 BCE. He was the second son of Antipater the Idumaean, a high-ranked official under Ethnarch Hyrcanus II, and Cypros, a Nabatean. A loyal supporter of Hyrcanus II, Antipater appointed Herod governor of Galilee at 25, and his elder brother, Phasael, governor of Jerusalem. He enjoyed the backing of Rome but his excessive brutality was condemned by the Sanhedrin.
In 43 BCE, following the chaos caused by Antipater offering financial support to Caesar’s murderers, Antipater was poisoned. Herod, backed by the Roman Army, executed his father’s murderer.
After the battle of Philippi towards the end of 42 BCE, he convinced Mark Antony and Octavian that his father had been forced to help Caesar’s murderers. After Antony marched into Asia, Herod was named tetrarch of Galilee by the Romans. However, as Herod’s family had converted to Judaism, his religious commitment had come into question by some elements of Jewish society. When the Maccabean John Hyrcanus conquered the region of Idumaea (the Edom of the Hebrew Bible) in 140-130 BCE, he required all Idumaeans to obey Jewish law or to leave; most Idumaeans thus converted to Judaism, which meant that they had to be circumcised. While King Herod publicly identified himself as a Jew and was considered as such by some, this religious identification was undermined by the decadent lifestyle of the Herodians, which would have earned them the antipathy of observant Jews.
Two years later Antigonus, Hyrcanus’ nephew, took the throne from his uncle with the help of the Parthians. Herod fled to Rome to plead with the Romans to restore him to power. There he was elected “King of the Jews” by the Roman Senate. Josephus puts this in the year of the consulship of Calvinus and Pollio (40 BCE), but Appian places it in 39 BCE. Herod went back to Israel to win his kingdom from Antigonus and at the same time he married the teenage niece of Antigonus, Mariamne (known as Mariamne I), in an attempt to secure a claim to the throne and gain some Jewish favor. However, Herod already had a wife, Doris, and a three-year-old son, Antipater, and chose therefore to banish Doris and her child.
Three years later, Herod and the Romans finally captured Jerusalem and executed Antigonus. Herod took the role as sole ruler of Israel and the title of basileus (Gr. Βασιλευς, king) for himself, ushering in the Herodian Dynasty and ending the Hasmonean Dynasty. Josephus reports this as being in the year of the consulship of Agrippa and Gallus (37 BCE), but also says that it was exactly 27 years after Jerusalem fell to Pompey, which would indicate 36 BCE. (Cassius Dio also reports that in 37 “the Romans accomplished nothing worthy of note” in the area.) According to Josephus, he ruled for 37 years, 34 years of them after capturing Jerusalem.
Model of Herod’s Temple
Herod later executed several members of his own family, including his wife Mariamne. A summary of the rest of his life can be found in the Chronology section below.
Architectural achievements
Herod’s most famous and ambitious project was the expansion of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.
In the eighteenth year of his reign (20-19 BCE), Herod rebuilt the Temple on “a more magnificent scale”. The new Temple was finished in a year and a half, although work on out-buildings and courts continued another eighty years. To comply with religious law, Herod employed 1,000 priests as masons and carpenters in the rebuilding. The finished temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE, is sometimes referred to as Herod’s Temple. Today, only the four retaining walls remain standing, including the Wailing Wall or Western Wall. These walls created a flat platform (the Temple Mount) upon which the Temple was then constructed.
Some of Herod’s other achievements include the development of water supplies for Jerusalem, building fortresses such as Masada and Herodium, and founding new cities such as Caesarea Maritima and the enclosures of Cave of the Patriarchs and Mamre in Hebron. He and Cleopatra owned a monopoly over the extraction of asphalt from the Dead Sea, which was used in ship building. He leased copper mines on Cyprus from the Roman emperor.
Discovery of quarry
On September 25, 2007, Yuval Baruch, archaeologist with the Israeli Antiquities Authority announced their discovery of a quarry compound which provided King Herod with the stones to renovate the Second Temple. Coins, pottery and iron stakes found proved the date of the quarrying to be about 19 BCE. Archaeologist Ehud Netzer confirmed that the large outlines of the stone cuts is evidence that it was a massive public project worked on by hundreds of slaves.
New Testament references
Herod the Great appears in ancient Christian scriptures, in the Gospel according to Matthew (Ch. 2), which describes an event known as the Massacre of the Innocents.
According to Matthew, shortly after the birth of Jesus, Magi from the East visited Herod to inquire the whereabouts of “the one having been born king of the Jews”, because they had seen his star in the east and therefore wanted to pay him homage. Herod, who was himself King of the Jews, was alarmed at the prospect of the newborn king usurping his rule. Herod assembled the chief priests and scribes of the people and asked them where the “Anointed One” (the Messiah, Greek: Ο Χριστός (ho christos)) was to be born. They answered, in Bethlehem, citing Micah 5:2. Herod therefore sent the Magi to Bethlehem, instructing them to search for the child and, after they had found him, to “report to me, so that I too may go and worship him”. However, after they had found Jesus, the Magi were warned in a dream not to report back to Herod. Similarly, Joseph was warned in a dream that Herod intended to kill Jesus, so he and his family fled to Egypt. When Herod realized he had been outwitted by the Magi, he gave orders to kill all boys of the age of two and under in Bethlehem and its vicinity. Joseph and his family stayed in Egypt until Herod’s death, then moved to Nazareth in Galilee in order to avoid living under Herod’s son Archelaus.
Regarding the Massacre of the Innocents, although Herod was certainly guilty of many brutal acts, including the killing of his wife and two of his sons, no other known source from the period makes any reference to such a massacre. Since Bethlehem was a small village, the number of male children under the age of 2, would probably not exceed 20. This may be the reason for the lack of other sources for this history, although Herod’s order in Matthew 2:16 includes those children in Bethlehem’s vicinity making the massacre larger numerically and geographically.
The only other canonical gospel to give an explicit nativity narrative, the Gospel of Luke, places the birth of Jesus ten years after Herod’s death, during the Census of Quirinius, and as such makes no mention of Herod or any Massacre of the Innocents.
Death
Since the work of Emil Schürer in 1896 most scholars have agreed that Herod died at the end of March or early April in 4 BCE.
Further evidence is provided by the fact that his sons, between whom his kingdom was divided, dated their rule from 4 BCE., and Archilaus apparently also exercised royal authority during Herod’s lifetime. Josephus states that Philip the Tetrarch’s death took place after a 37-year reign, in the 20th year of Tiberius (34 CE).
Josephus tells us that Herod died after a lunar eclipse. He gives an account of events between this eclipse and his death, and between his death and Passover. A partial eclipse took place on March 13, 4 BCE, about 29 days before Passover, and this eclipse is usually taken to be the one referred to by Josephus. There were however three other, total, eclipses around this time, and there are proponents of both 5 BCE with two total eclipses, and 1 BCE.
Josephus wrote that Herod’s final illness – sometimes named as “Herod’s Evil” – was excruciating. From Josephus’ descriptions, some medical experts propose that Herod had chronic kidney disease complicated by Fournier’s gangrene. Modern scholars agree he suffered throughout his lifetime from depression and paranoia. More recently, others report that the visible worms and putrefaction described in his final days are likely to have been scabies; the disease might have accounted for both his death and psychiatric symptoms. Similar symptoms attended the death of his grandson Agrippa I in CE 44.
Josephus also stated that Herod was so concerned that no one would mourn his death, that he commanded a large group of distinguished men to come to Jericho, and he gave order that they should be killed at the time of his death so that the displays of grief that he craved would take place. Fortunately for them, Herod’s son Archilaus and sister Salome did not carry out this wish.
After Herod’s death, his kingdom was divided among three of his sons. Archilaus became king of Judaea, Herod Antipas became tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea, and Philip became tetrarch of territories east of the Jordan.
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