Herod

King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans

Peter Richardson, Amy Marie Fisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351670913
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans examines the life, work, and influence of this controversial figure, who remains the most highly visible of the Roman client kings under Augustus. Herod's rule shaped the world in which Christianity arose and his influence can still be seen today.

In this expanded second edition, additions to the original text include discussion of the archaeological evidence of Herod's activity, his building program, numismatic evidence, and consideration of the roles and activities of other client kings in relation to Herod. This volume includes new maps and numerous photographs, and these coupled with the new additions to the text make this a valuable tool for those interested in the wider Roman world of the late first century BCE at both under- and postgraduate levels. Herod remains the definitive study of the life and activities of the king known traditionally as Herod the Great.

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Part I

Herod’s life

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1 In the end is the beginning

The eagle, or a king’s eclipse

On the night of March 13, 4 BCE, there was an eclipse of the moon. On the previous day, in the dénouement of the famous “eagle affair,” the Rabbi and instigator, Matthias, and some students were executed.

A few days earlier, as it became widely known that Herod was dying, Matthias the son of Margalus and Judas the son of Sepphoraeus, teachers with a large following of students and wide popular support, urged that the time was ripe to rid the temple of the one object that defaced it—a great golden eagle. The law of Israel, they said, forbade images and likenesses of living things; and even if death should follow from their actions, the students would gain fame and honor by pulling it down (Josephus, War 1.648–55; Ant. 17.149–67).

The students acted with bravado as crowds strolled in the temple precincts at midday. Since Herod had placed the eagle above the “great Gate,” Josephus says, the students were in clear view of both the people and the guards. The students got up on a roof, let themselves down with ropes, hacked off the golden eagle (probably a low relief stone sculpture covered with gold leaf), and were promptly arrested by the temple captain with a band of guards. The crowds fled, but forty students were seized along with Judas and Matthias and taken before Herod (Baumgarten 2012). They defended their actions on the basis of Torah, “the laws that Moses wrote as God prompted and taught him,” and happily accepted punishment, even death, for their “piety.”

They were sent to Jericho where Herod was gathering Jewish officials (Ant. 17.160). Sick almost to death, Herod accused them and raged against the ingratitude he had faced, then praised his own reconstruction of the temple. The result was not in doubt; Matthias and the main perpetrators were burned alive while others were simply executed. The eclipse of the moon also symbolizes the eclipse of Herod himself as Herod’s illness neared its climax. He had only days to live, and this expectation began to release the tensions buried just beneath the surface of a calm kingdom, tensions motivated to a large extent by religious devotion, attachment to Torah, and hope for a state governed by obedience to God. As Herod’s health deteriorated, the courage of those opposed to Herod and his rule increased.

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But how offensive was the golden eagle over the great gate? Had Herod deliberately flaunted a symbol of Roman control before his resistant subjects? Had Jews quietly accepted for some time an image of a living creature without protest? The answer to the last question is probably yes, and they had accepted it for years, not days or months, since the major portion of the work on the temple was completed in 15 BCE. If, as some claim, the eagle was not over the gate but on the Holy Place, it might have been there since the late 20s (Grant 1971, 206–10). In any case, until this incident there seems to have been no strong objection to the eagle’s presence and no disability to sacrifice was created by it (Schalit 1969, 734).

Whether the offense was egregious depends on the eagle’s location. It is not clear which gate the eagle was over. It may have been the same gate as the one Josephus refers to elsewhere as “Agrippa’s Gate” (War 1.416), given the symbolism of the eagle, perhaps representing Rome, though this is not said or implied by Josephus; it could, for example, have been a “Nabatean” eagle, with wings pulled back and sitting erect rather than a Roman eagle with wings spread. Still, if the eagle was a Roman eagle above a gate named after Augustus’s chief lieutenant, the symbolism would have been doubly powerful. We do not know, however, which gate was Agrippa’s. Wilkinson shows the eagle over the doors of the temple proper in a frequently reproduced reconstruction that many scholars simply assume is correct (Wilkinson 1978, 87), but his suggestion is unlikely for several reasons. (1) Herod avoided needless offense and would hardly have spent the huge sums he did on the temple to curry his people’s favor only to lose it by putting an eagle right on the Holy Place. (2) To let themselves down by rope from the roof of the Holy Place to hack off the eagle, the students would have had to have profaned the Holy Place by entering it and climbing the inner stair. (3) It is much likelier that the roof in question was the roof of a stoa surrounding the temple, to which access was publicly available. (4) The eagle was probably in a ceremonial location, especially if the gate was the Agrippa Gate, possibly at the bridge to the upper city or near the Antonia fortress (Richardson 2004, chapter 14; see Figure 10.2).

These considerations suggest that the eagle was not placed over the main door to the Holy Place, an offense almost too great to contemplate for most pious Jews. It was also not likely to have been placed over any one of the several entrances to the Court of Women, though from an architectural point of view that would have been possible, and one gate, Nicanor’s Gate, might be considered a great gate. It also seems unlikely that the eagle stood over a gate with symbolic significance such as the Huldah Gates, which led up from the City of David, or the Golden Gate that led in from the Mount of Olives.

This logic leads to the suggestion that the eagle was over the gate above what is now called Wilson’s arch, the bridge leading to the temple from the upper city. Its plausibility rests on several factors. (1) This was the route to the temple taken by the upper classes living on the western hill, among whom were persons more tolerant of Hellenism and compliance with Rome. (2) This was also the route from Herod’s palace, on the site of what is now the Citadel near the Jaffa Gate, and was thus the natural ceremonial route for distinguished visitors to enter the temple. (3) Such a location would permit the eagle to be placed either on the inside or outside face of the gate itself, though the normal position for symbolic architectural decoration was on the exterior, as demonstrated in the theatron at Si‘a (near Canatha) surrounding the Temple of Ba‘al Shamim, with the same eagle motif, a structure associated with Herod (see Chapters 10 and 11; Butler 1907, 382). (4) In such a location the students would have had access to the stoa’s roof from the courtyard (War 2.48; Ant. 17.259), whence they could get to the sculpture, where they would have been readily visible. (5) The uniqueness of this approach over a bridge at the end of an imposing vista might well justify the term great being applied to the gate.

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To the question of whether Herod gave deliberate offense to Jews by the eagle, the answer is yes and no. Offense there certainly was to some Judeans—but the offense was muted by the fact that worshippers could not see the eagle from inside the temple and could easily avoid it from the outside by using another gate. In any case, this decorative motif had ancient precedent in the Temple of Solomon, which was decorated extensively with “cherubim” (1 Kings 6:23–9) or, as Josephus says, “eagles” (Ant. 8.74, 81–3).

To sum up: (1) rather than confirming a high degree of Hellenization in Herod’s buildings, the incident shows that the eagle was an exception from Herod’s normal aniconic practice, an exception the religious authorities and the populace generally tolerated because it was relatively minor. (2) Still, it triggered religiously motivated dissent among a small and coherent cohort. (3) Herod balanced two competing needs: his commitment to Judaism prompted him to give as little offense as possible, especially in the temple in Jerusalem; but his attachment to Rome caused him to include, in as politically astute a way as possible, a symbol of Roman authority. The “eagle affair” was important both to Herod and his critics: Herod was affronted by the opposition, while his critics saw it as a sign of how near the end was for a ruler who now had only a fragile hold on power.

Death of a king

A short while later Herod died at his winter palace in Jericho of a painful and chronic kidney disease, complicated by Fournier’s gangrene (Hirschman et al. 2004). His symptoms included fever, itching, pains in the colon, swollen feet, inflammation of the abdomen, gangrene of the penis, lung disease, convulsions, and eye problems. After going to Jericho to try those accused in the “eagle affair,” he then went to the hot springs on the east shore of the Dead Sea at Callirrhoe. All to no avail; the end was near.

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Josephus’s accounts are very dramatic; in what follows we prefer War 1.656–73 plus 2.1–100 over Ant. 17.168–323, though the latter is fuller. It has been debated whether all the events can be fitted into the time available; we think it is possible, if tight. When Herod saw no improvement from his visit to the hot springs, he despaired of recovery. He first distributed fifty drachmas to each soldier, with more going to commanders and friends. Then, when he returned to Jericho, he ensured that there would be an outpouring of grief at his death by gathering the elite of Jewish society together in the hippodrome (presumably Josephus means those gathered at the time of the “eagle affair”), closing the gates, and instructing his sister Salome—who had stuck by him through thick and thin—and her husband Alexas to execute them at his death.

First, a subplot concerning Herod’s eldest son Antipater had to be played out. The relations of father and son had been very volatile; at this time Antipater was under sentence of death, a judicial decision confirmed by Augustus in Rome.¹ But then a letter arrived, according to Josephus, stating that if Herod were inclined merely to banish Antipater, the Emperor was agreeable.

At this stage of events Herod despaired so much over his health—he was in his seventieth year and acutely ill—that he tried to kill himself with a paring knife. His cousin Achiab (Kokkinos 1998, 153–5), who was attending him at the time, prevented him from carrying out this desperate act. The incident brought such a cry from those present that others in the palace, including Antipater in his detention room, thought that Herod had died. Antipater, filled with hope, thought he had outlasted his father and tried to bribe his jailer to free him. But the jailer went to Herod’s bedside and told him of Antipater’s bribery attempt, so Herod ordered Antipater’s immediate execution and burial at Hyrcania, the nearest and most notorious of his desert fortresses. Herod immediately rewrote his will. He survived Antipater by only five days.

The date of the executions, and following that the date of Herod’s death, are linked to the eclipse of the moon “that same night” (Ant. 17.167; Schürer 1973–87, 1.326–9). March 13 in 4 BCE, which we prefer following Schürer and others, is not the only possible date. Barnes insists that Herod’s death was in either 5 or 4 BCE, but he prefers 5 BCE. Another proposal, 1 BCE, has been supported by Filmer (1966) and Martin (1978). After discussing other suggested dates, Mahieu comes to her preferred date of 1 CE (Mahieu 2012, 235–87, 289–358). It seems counter-intuitive that on an important historical event with considerable evidence of various kinds there would be a difference of five years or more on the correct date, especially when there is substantial agreement on the dating of events during the majority of Herod’s reign. One reason, it may be suspected, for the sometimes passionate debates over the correct dating is that the date of Herod’s death has implications for the date of Jesus’s birth, a by-product of the date of Herod’s death (see Chapter 13). The issues are complex and an extensive consideration of them here would lead too far astray.

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Before it was widely known that he had expired, Salome dismissed the s...