The Herods

Murder, Politics, and the Art of Succession

Bruce Chilton

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506474281
• eBook ISBN: 9781506474298
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Until his death in 4 BCE, Herod the Great's monarchy included territories that once made up the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. Although he ruled over a rich, strategically crucial land, his royal title did not derive from heredity. His family came from the people of Idumea, ancient antagonists of the Israelites.

Yet Herod did not rule as an outsider, but from a family committed to Judaism going back to his grandfather and father. They had served the priestly dynasty of the Maccabees that had subjected Idumea to their rule, including the Maccabean version of what loyalty to the Torah required. Herod's father, Antipater, rose not only to manage affairs on behalf of his priestly masters, but to become a pivotal military leader. He inaugurated a new alignment of power: an alliance with Rome negotiated with Pompey and Julius Caesar. In the crucible of civil war among Romans as the Triumvirate broke up, and of war between Rome and Parthia, Antipater managed to leave his sons with the prospect of a dynasty.

Herod inherited the twin pillars of loyalty to Judaism and loyalty to Rome that became the basis of Herodian rule. He elevated Antipater's opportunism to a political art. During Herod's time, Roman power took its imperial form, and Octavian was responsible for making Herod king of Judea. As Octavian ruled, he took the title Augustus, in keeping with his devotion to his adoptive father's cult of "the divine Julius." Imperial power was a theocratic assertion as well as a dominant military, economic, and political force.

Herod framed a version of theocratic ambition all his own, deliberately crafting a dynastic claim grounded in Roman might and Israelite theocracy. That unlikely hybrid was the key to the Herodians' surprising longevity in power during the most chaotic century in the political history of Judaism.

1

Antipater

A Noble Idumean Mercenary Founds a Dynasty

Antipater, father of Herod the Great, navigated the conflicting forces of his time by choosing sides and then fiercely standing by his choices. He ruled Idumea on behalf of the Maccabees, preferring their priestly theocracy to the Hellenizing regime of the Seleucids. That choice involved supporting the Maccabean monarchy over the objections of Jewish groups such as the Essenes. As Antipater set about establishing a dynasty for his family, however, the Maccabees themselves fell into internecine civil war. Antipater remained loyal to the high priest Hyrcanus, whose victory ultimately depended on the incursion of the Romans under Pompey. That great general became the first example among many of Rome’s alliance with Antipater and his successors.

The founder: Loyal, adept, generous, fearless; gifted commander of eclectic forces

Setting

A rocky, red-clay kingdom stretched south of Judea from the Sinai Peninsula to beyond the Dead Sea; Israelites had called it Edom (which means “red” in their language). Despite close trading and ethnic relationships between the two nations, Edom warred frequently with Israel. Biblical legend had it that the people of Edom descended from Esau, the slightly elder of the patriarch Isaac’s two sons. The book of Genesis says that at his birth, Esau was red or ruddy like his land, and also hairy (Gen 25:25): a born outdoorsman.

Esau’s younger twin brother, Jacob1—who is also given the name Israel as an adult (Gen 32:28)—tricked Esau out of his birthright as Isaac’s principal heir. Genesis recounts the trick in two different ways, each derived from its own source. In one, Esau returns from hunting so famished that he is willing to trade anything for the vegetable stew that his domesticated younger brother has prepared. Jacob agrees to give him some at the price of his privileged position as the firstborn son of Isaac. Esau consents, exchanging his birthright for a vegetable stew that had been made—in the story’s etiological flourish—from red lentils (Gen 25:29–34).

In the second source, the account of Jacob’s appropriation of Esau’s birthright is more dramatic and complicated (Gen 27:1–40). Isaac, blind and aware that he is dying, intends to bless his firstborn son, thereby giving Esau preeminence over all the family. An endowment of that kind implies preference, and Isaac makes it clear that his favoritism is grounded in Esau’s status as a hunter, a man of fields rather than flocks. He sends Esau to hunt for the game meat he likes to eat so that he can relish a meal from the prey as he bestows the blessing.

Isaac’s wife, Rebecca, however, shows partiality in her own way: her favorite son is Jacob. She overhears the conversation between Isaac and Esau, and once Esau leaves for the hunt, she arranges with Jacob to prepare a meal from young goats, seasoned as if it were game. Jacob becomes nervous: since his build is not at all like his brother Esau’s, he fears even the blind Isaac will recognize the deception. But Rebecca clothes Jacob in Esau’s garments, putting goatskin on his hands and neck, and Jacob presents himself and his meal to Isaac. The deception reaches its ironic peak when Isaac speaks words that would signal his deep paternal recognition of and attachment to Esau. He eats, smells the disguised Jacob in his animal skins, and says, “The smell of my son is like the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed” (Gen 27:25–27). So Jacob receives the blessing intended for Esau, including the promise that his brothers will do obeisance to him, and all because Esau smelled like a goat.

The narrative continues with Esau’s ongoing and understandable rage as well as Jacob’s long and guileful history; the fraught relationship between the brothers portends succeeding centuries of border skirmishes between Edom and Israel. Genesis conveys a deep sense of jealous suspicion between the brothers, and the stories more accurately convey the social reality of how Edom and Israel interacted than they give information about their progenitors Jacob and Esau. As Genesis puts the matter, Esau was a man who hunted in the open field, while his young brother preferred pastoral life in the shelter of tents (Gen 25:27). The two lifestyles never fully converged, and on the contrary, they often conflicted, as the people of Edom retained renown for hunting, mobility, and outdoor prowess, while Israel—itself named after Jacob’s byname, “striver with God” (Gen 32:28)—made its way as an agricultural and increasingly sedentary nation. The horse became as emblematic of Edom2 as the courtyarded farmhouse was of Israelite society.

The legendary blessing that Isaac gave to Jacob, mistakenly or not, took generations to approach accomplishment. The Davidic monarchy might have seemed to realize the promise in the nation Israel, but after the time of David and his son Solomon, the country was divided into Israel in the north, with its capital in Samaria, and Judah (or Judea, Ioudaia in Greek) in the south, with its capital in Jerusalem. The internecine war between the two states only came to an end when the northern kingdom, which had taken the name Israel, was destroyed by the Assyrian Empire in 722 BCE. In the south, Judah barely survived Babylonian deportation in 586 BCE and eked out a limited autonomy under the hegemony of Cyrus the Persian and then Alexander the Great and his successors. Only a part of the land David and Solomon had conquered and a fraction of the people that claimed descent from Jacob remained: Israel had been reduced to the ancient clan of Judah. Their name is the reason people in the ancient world came to think of their religion as “Judaism” (from the Greek term Ioudaïsmos). The people of Judea, the Ioudaioi, were the only widely recognized inheritors3 of the blessing that Isaac had bestowed on Jacob.

Neither Israel nor Edom could contend against the great imperial powers that surrounded and dominated them. Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, and the Hellenistic empires of Alexander the Great and his successors took the territory they desired when it pleased them.4 By the second century BCE, the territories of Jacob’s and Esau’s progenies were caught between two empires, each founded by one of Alexander’s generals: the Ptolemaic dynasty ruled from Egypt and the Seleucid dynasty from Antioch. Although Edom and Judea had been kingdoms in their own right, their national existence had been overcome by imperial hegemony. Judea held on to a centralizing focus of power—the temple in Jerusalem—while Edom reverted to prenational competition among rival warrior leaders and trading interests. In any case, neither Israelite nor Edomite ambition played a dominant role in the region. The Ptolemies to the west and the Seleucids to the east overwhelmed old rivalries in tides of new power.

In Egypt, Alexander’s general Ptolemy had established a dynasty that concentrated the command of the territory in its hands. The rulers took on the trappings of new pharaohs, and they harnessed the fertility of the Nile to secure an agricultural preeminence within the Mediterranean Basin. In the Near East, a general named Seleucus seized power in order to pursue the program of Alexander the Great. That involved rapid conquest and the imposition of Greek language and culture—worship, dress, and art, all under a military aegis—known as Hellenization. While the Ptolemies’ strategy was to clothe their dynasty in the indigenous legacy of the pharaohs, their counterparts in the Seleucid dynasty, without recourse to the pretense that they ruled under traditional authority, relied on violence within their vast and diverse territory, which reached from Afghanistan to Turkey under Antiochus III. To govern this sprawling range of peoples required stunning displays of military dominance and an insistence on the superiority of the Seleucids’ variant of Hellenistic civilization.

The Maccabees

Edom and Judea soon became pawns in the clash of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires. During the second century BCE, the Seleucids pressed their distinct military advantage. Aware of the fragility of their regime in political terms, over the years, they incorporated advanced techniques of war, including the most expensive. Hannibal, the great general from Carthage and renowned in the use of elephants in war, had personally pledged his military acumen to the Seleucids.5 Armored and equipped with a platform to carry archers and lancers, each beast was surrounded by supporting cavalry. An elephant could be deployed as a shield for infantry and as a mobile siege engine that could be directed against its target to crush gates, walls, and retreating soldiers.

Conquest served the Seleucids as a means to consolidate an already extensive commercial influence so that the Mediterranean would be their western portal for trading links that reached deep into Asia. In addition, the rise of the Parthian Empire in ancient Iran made westward expansion a Seleucid imperative in order to compensate for losses to Parthia to the east. In that effort, Edom appeared a minor annoyance; some of its ancestral lands had already been consumed, and what remained posed little obstacle to Seleucid expansion. Judea was only the rump of the once much larger kingdom of Israel, invaded and parceled out in a series of imperial invasions from the Assyrians in the eighth century to Alexander the Great in the fourth century.6

The Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV pressed on with the final annexation of the reduced inheritances of Jacob and Esau into the Seleucid Empire. Taking the name Epiphanes—a Greek term that means “revealed one,” since he held himself to be a divinity manifest—he pursued a policy of Hellenizing the territories he occupied. His campaign reached such an extreme that he converted the temple in Jerusalem to the worship of Zeus in 167 BCE, complete with the sacrifice of swine’s flesh on the altar; concurrently, he outlawed Judaism.7 He started this program in person by entering and plundering the temple himself when he returned from a campaign against Ptolemaic Egypt, leaving it to his general Apollonius to implement his wishes for conquest and domination. Then he returned to his magnificent palace in Antioch, the Syrian city that had replaced Seleukia as the capital of the Seleucid Empire. Meanwhile, Apollonius and his more than twenty-two thousand mercenary troops put Antiochus’s policy into effect. They were paid to obliterate Judaism in Jerusalem and were allowed at the same time to take from their victims what profit they wished. This complex of tyranny—from the desecration of the altar to the ruin of individual Israelites—is the horror that the book of Daniel calls “an abomination that desolates” (Dan 9:27; 11:31).

Antiochus’s tactics of state terror shaped contemporaneous Judaic literature and later remembrance. His soldiers hunted women who had consented to their infant sons’ circumcision on the eighth day in accordance with the Torah. Apollonius’s troops patrolled the city and entered homes, free to strip infants to look for evidence of what was considered to be their parents’ religious crime. They killed circumcised babies with the stroke of a sword and hung the corpses around the necks of their mothers, who were marched through the city and displayed on the city walls around Jerusalem. Crowds looked on as these women were pushed to their deaths off parapets from heights of up to a hundred feet. Some of the onlookers, horrified yet defiant, fled Jerusalem to embrace the continued practice of circumcision as a means of passive resistance against the Seleucid tyranny. Others, either opposed or indifferent to Judaism, saw the killings as collateral damage in the advance of the Seleucid’s Hellenistic empire. But whether in horror or admiration, the crowd looked on, because it was a crowd, and the Seleucid general understood the art of spectacle. Apollonius perfected the policy of coercing religion into service of the empire.8

Apollonius acted under Antiochus’s orders to set up a statue of Zeus within the temple, a blatant display of idolatry. As a matter of course, he arranged for the slaughter of pork, Zeus’s preferred meat according to Hellenistic theology, and Seleucid priests, protected by Apollonius’s troops, herded swine through the city and into the slaughter yard just north of the altar in the temple. Pursuing his program with the zeal of a fundamentalist and the bloodlust of a thug, Apollonius forced the consumption of pork on the population of Jerusalem; his soldiers gave their victims the choice of either eating swine’s flesh or being hacked to death.

An old scribe named Eleazar said he would rather die and receive the reward for his soul that God would bestow in the next life than betray what he called the “holy laws” of Judaism that he had upheld for some ninety years (2 Macc 6:28). His torturers punished him with blows and cuts designed to inflict pain rather than death, but neither their vicious cruelty nor their offers of clemency caused the old man to waver before he died. He even turned down the option of pretending that food which he had prepared himself was the pork offered to Zeus (2 Macc 6:21–25). In his mind, even the pretense of disobedience of the Torah, under threat of death or not, was a form of treason against God. A literature of Judaic resistance celebrated Eleazar’s recalcitrance. Stories of such courage, multiplied in the rich canon of martyrdom from the Judaism of this period (no doubt idealized and exaggerated), gave birth to a religious revolution that had not been seen before. The scale of Judean resistance, with a program of martyrdom animated by the belief in the resurrection of the righteous, was unanticipated and irresistible.

The vital center of and leadership for the Judaic revolution was a family of priests that came to be known as the Maccabees. They were of provincial background, from Modi‘in, and mounted a resistance to attempts by Antiochus’s officers to compel the population there to offer idolatrous sacrifice. Combining direct, physical combat with a zeal for the Torah, the Maccabean resisters killed an Israelite on the verge of sacrificing to Zeus, murdered the officer who had supervised the act, and destroyed the altar set up in Modi‘in (1 Macc 2:1–28). The Maccabees did not pause to consider that they were taking on the heirs of Alexander’s general, Seleucus, when they fought the Seleucid dynasty. They were confident that the honor of God would always prevail against the oppressor, however powerful he might be.

The Maccabees celebrated a warrior from their family called Eleazar (nicknamed Avaran), who cut his way through a phalanx in order to eviscerate a Seleucid siege elephant from beneath. He died under the weight of the beast, and they said, “He gave his life to save his people and to win for himself an everlasting name” (1 Macc 6:43–46, 44).9 The episode depicts the tactical resourcefulness of the Maccabees in using guerilla tactics and conveys how the theology of martyrdom was weaponized in their asymmetrical warfare. They trained willing recruits and employed mercenaries, pushing back against the Seleucid forces with every means at their disposal. Three years of sanguine strife pitted an organized insurgency against an increasingly disorganized imperial force and culminated in the Maccabees’ rededication of the temple to the worship of the God of Israel. Their name—and that of Eleazar Avaran—seemed to them eternal at the time. Their historical memory has indeed survived the demise of their dynasty and has done so out of all proportion to the power and influence they wielded in their time.

Their victory is celebrated still with the powerful legends of Hanukkah (which means “[re]dedication”). Traditions of the Talmud, a text produced centuries after the Maccabees rededicated the temple, tell the story that the rebels found a single vial of oil that had not been defiled by the Seleucids and that it alone sufficed to illuminate the temple lamps during the eight days of purifying sacrifice necessary to rededicate the polluted temple (Talmud Bavli, Shabbat 21a).10 The Maccabean leaders of the resistance relied less on the miraculous means of legend and more on themselves as God’s agents, and they destroyed the Seleucids’ abominations with unquenchable zeal. Their magnificent and violent campaign was headed by a leader called Judas Maccabeus—Judas the “Hammer”—and he gave this name11 to the movement and the family as a whole.

The sacerdotal dynasty turned quickly from resistance to stabilization and finally to conquest; over several decades, their regime absorbed more territory than any previous sovereign of Israel, even David and Solomon. The new regime annexed Samaria and Galilee in the north and Iturea and Perea on the eastern side of the Jordan River. In that policy of extension, they overran Edom, now called Idumea in Greek, which had already been pushed west as compared to ancient Edom with the growing power of the Nabataean kingdom.12 Caught between the greater powers of Judea and Nabataea, Idumea chose the Maccabees, accepting the requirement of conversion to Judaism and the compulsory circumcision of male infants on the ei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Antipater
• 2. Herod’s Debut
• 3. King Herod
• 4. Mariamme
• 5. Archelaus
• 6. Antipas, Herodias, and Philip
• 7. Agrippa I
• 8. Bereniké and Agrippa II
• Epilogue
• Chronology
• Dramatis personae
• Notes
• Bibliography of Sources
• Index of Historical Figures
• Index of Scholars