Who was Salome in the Bible?

The girl with no name

Mark and Matthew tell of a dance at Herod Antipas’s birthday banquet and the reward it won: the head of John the Baptist. That story is told in How did John the Baptist die? Neither Gospel names the dancer.

When the daughter of Herodias herself came in and danced, she pleased Herod and those sitting with him. The king said to the young lady, “Ask me whatever you want, and I will give it to you.”

The word Mark uses for her, korasion, means a little girl. He uses it a chapter earlier for the daughter of Jairus, who is twelve (Mark 5:42). The dancer was probably in her early teens, not the grown seductress of later painting. The manuscripts even disagree about whose daughter she was. The oldest copies of Mark, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, read “his daughter Herodias,” as if she were Antipas’s own child and bore her mother’s name. The World English Bible, like the King James before it, follows the reading “the daughter of Herodias herself.”

Salome, according to Josephus

Her name comes from outside the Bible. Josephus, writing around AD 93, sets out the family of Herod the Great (Antiquities 18.136–137). Herodias was first married to a son of Herod whom Josephus calls Herod; Mark calls him Philip (Mark 6:17), one of the story’s small puzzles. Their daughter was Salome. After her mother left for Antipas, Salome married her father’s half-brother Philip, the tetrarch of the lands north-east of the lake, who died childless around AD 34.

Then she married her cousin Aristobulus, a son of the king of Chalcis, and bore him three sons: Herod, Agrippa and Aristobulus. In AD 54 the emperor Nero made her husband king of Lesser Armenia (Antiquities 20.158). Bronze coins of Aristobulus show her profile beside the Greek words “of Queen Salome,” one of the very few portraits of anyone who appears, even unnamed, in the New Testament. The girl at the banquet became a queen and a mother of three. Nobody recorded her death.

Salome the disciple

The only Salome the Gospels actually name is someone else: a Galilean woman who followed Jesus. Mark puts her among the women watching the crucifixion from a distance (Mark 15:40), and then on the road at dawn on Sunday.

When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, that they might come and anoint him.

Where Mark names Salome at the cross, Matthew has “the mother of the sons of Zebedee” (Matthew 27:56), so many readers since early times have taken her to be the mother of James and John. Some go further and make her the sister of Jesus’s mother in John 19:25, his aunt. The Gospels never say so. Her morning at the grave belongs to Who found the empty tomb?

Salome, from the Hebrew word for peace, was common: with Mary, the most popular name for Jewish women of the time. Later writings spread hers. In the second-century Protevangelium of James, a midwife named Salome doubts the virgin birth and her hand burns as if with fire until she takes up the child (19–20). The Gospel of Thomas gives a Salome a conversation with Jesus (saying 61).

The seven veils

The famous dance is not ancient at all. Oscar Wilde wrote his play Salomé in French in 1891. London’s censor banned it in 1892, because it put biblical characters on stage, and it was first performed in Paris in 1896, while Wilde was in prison. A single stage direction in it gave the world the dance of the seven veils. Wilde changed the story, too: his Salome desires the prophet who rejected her, and kisses the severed head. In Mark, the girl goes out to ask her mother what to choose. Richard Strauss turned the play into an opera in Dresden in 1905, and the veils have stayed in the legend ever since.