How did Herod the Great die?

The illness, as Josephus tells it

Almost everything we know comes from Josephus, the Jewish historian, writing some eighty years later and drawing on Herod’s friend Nicolaus of Damascus. He lists the symptoms with grim care (Jewish War 1.656; Antiquities 17.168–169):

• a low fever, and an unbearable itching over his whole body
• constant pain in the bowels, and a hunger nothing could satisfy
• swollen, fluid-filled feet and an inflamed belly
• gangrene of the genitals that bred worms
• breath so short he could breathe only sitting up, foul breath, and convulsions in every limb

Diviners called it punishment. Shortly before, young men urged on by two teachers had cut down the golden eagle Herod set over the Temple gate, and Herod had them burned alive. That night, Josephus adds, the moon was eclipsed (Antiquities 17.167).

The last weeks at Jericho

Herod still hoped to live. At the hot springs of Callirrhoe, near the Dead Sea, his doctors lowered him into a tub of warm oil, and he fainted. He gave up hope and went back to his winter palace at Jericho.

There, Josephus says, he planned his cruelest act. He summoned the leading men of the nation, locked them in the hippodrome and told his sister Salome to have them killed the moment he died, so the country would weep at his funeral, if not for him. Salome let them go.

Then a letter from Augustus left him free to deal with his eldest son, Antipater, convicted of plotting against him. Herod asked for an apple and a knife and tried to stab himself; his cousin Achiab caught his hand. Hearing the cries, Antipater thought his father was dead and tried to bribe his jailer. Herod had him killed at once, and died five days later (Antiquities 17.187–191).

When did he die?

Josephus gives Herod thirty-seven years from his appointment by Rome, and places his death after that eclipse and before a Passover. Most historians date it to the spring of 4 BC, after the eclipse of March 13 that year; a minority argue for 1 BC. Since Matthew sets Jesus’s birth before Herod’s death (Matthew 2:19), this date is why his birth falls in the years “BC,” as the December 25 page explains.

The funeral and the tomb

His son Archelaus gave him a king’s procession. The body lay on a golden bier set with precious stones, wrapped in purple, with a diadem and a gold crown on the head and a scepter in the right hand. His Thracian, German and Gallic troops and the whole army marched behind, then five hundred servants carrying spices, to Herodium, his palace-fortress on a cone-shaped hill near Bethlehem (Antiquities 17.196–199).

For centuries the tomb was lost. Ehud Netzer dug at Herodium from 1972, and in 2007 he announced what he identified as Herod’s tomb on the slope: the base of a mausoleum and the smashed pieces of an ornate stone sarcophagus, with no body. In 2013 two archaeologists, Joseph Patrich and Benjamin Arubas, argued it was too modest for Herod. Netzer could not reply; he had died in a fall at the site in 2010.

Worms, tyrants and another Herod

Modern physicians have proposed chronic kidney disease, Fournier’s gangrene and more; without a body, none can be proven. Ancient readers saw a pattern instead: worms were how tyrants died in Jewish storytelling. Second Maccabees says worms swarmed out of the persecutor Antiochus IV (2 Maccabees 9:9).

Immediately an angel of the Lord struck him, because he didn’t give God the glory. Then he was eaten by worms and died.

That verse is often pinned on Herod the Great, but it is about his grandson, Herod Agrippa I, who died at Caesarea in AD 44.