Who was Herod the Great?

A king made in Rome

Herod was born in the early 70s BC into a family from Idumea, the old land of Edom south of Judea, whose people had been made to adopt Judaism by the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus. His father, Antipater, rose by serving Rome; his mother, Cypros, came from a noble Nabataean Arab family. Herod learned the lesson early: he was governor of Galilee in his twenties.

In 40 BC the Parthians put a rival, Antigonus, the last Hasmonean king, on the throne in Jerusalem. Herod fled to Rome, where Mark Antony and Octavian backed him and the Senate named him king of Judaea. With Roman legions he took Jerusalem in 37 BC, and Antigonus was executed. When Antony lost at Actium in 31 BC, Herod went to meet the winner on Rhodes and offered him the same loyalty. Octavian, soon to be called Augustus, kept him on the throne.

The builder

Herod built like a Roman, on a scale the region had never seen.

• The Temple. Around 20 BC he began rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem on a vast new platform of about 14 hectares. Its retaining wall still stands: the Western Wall. Work went on for decades: “It took forty-six years to build this temple!” (John 2:20).
• Caesarea. A port city on the open coast, named for Caesar Augustus, with an artificial harbor of concrete that set underwater.
• Palaces and fortresses. Masada above the Dead Sea, Herodium on its cone-shaped hill near Bethlehem, Machaerus across the Jordan.
• Cities and shrines. He rebuilt Samaria as Sebaste, Greek for “Augusta,” and walled the Cave of the Patriarchs at Hebron, where his stonework still stands.

He could be generous too: in the famine of 25 BC he bought grain from Egypt for his people.

A family at war

His court was a battlefield. At one point he had nine wives at once, Josephus says (Antiquities 17.19), and sons by several of them competing to inherit. His beloved Mariamne was a Hasmonean princess, and her royal blood made her family dangerous. He had her teenage brother Aristobulus, whom he had made high priest, drowned in a pool at Jericho in 35 BC. He had Mariamne tried and executed in 29 BC. In 7 BC he had her two sons, Alexander and Aristobulus, executed for treason, and in his last days his eldest son, Antipater.

In Rome, Augustus is said to have joked that it was better to be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son. In Greek the words are close, hus and huios, and a Jewish king would not slaughter a pig. The line survives in Macrobius, a Roman writer of about AD 400 (Saturnalia 2.4.11).

The Herod of Christmas

Matthew’s Herod fits that record. When foreign magi arrive asking for the newborn “King of the Jews,” a title Herod himself held, “he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him” (Matthew 2:3).

Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked by the wise men, was exceedingly angry, and sent out and killed all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all the surrounding countryside, from two years old and under.

No other ancient source mentions this massacre. Some historians think it fits Herod and a small town; others read it as an echo of Pharaoh’s order in Exodus.

Not every Herod is this Herod

The New Testament has several. Herod Antipas, his son, ruled Galilee, beheaded John the Baptist and questioned Jesus at his trial; Jesus called him “that fox” (Luke 13:32). Herod Agrippa I, a grandson, killed the apostle James (Acts 12:2). Agrippa II heard Paul’s defense (Acts 25–26). The first and greatest of them died in agony at Jericho, a story told in how Herod the Great died.