Herod the Great

Herod the Great ruled Judea from 37 to 4 BCE as a client king appointed and supported by Rome, and his reign forms the immediate political backdrop for the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke. He is one of the most complex figures in the New Testament's world - a brilliant administrator and builder who was also capable of extraordinary cruelty, a man who rebuilt the Jerusalem Temple on a scale that made it one of the wonders of the ancient world and who ordered the execution of members of his own family when he suspected them of threatening his throne. Matthew's account of the massacre of the infants of Bethlehem fits the pattern of behavior attested in other ancient sources, even though it is not independently confirmed outside the Gospel.

Herod was Idumean by descent - his family had been among the Idumeans forcibly converted to Judaism by John Hyrcanus. His claim to the Jewish throne was therefore always contested on ethnic grounds: he was not, in the view of many Jews, truly Jewish. This insecurity about his legitimacy drove some of his most significant actions. The rebuilding of the Temple - begun around 20 BCE and still not complete at the time of Jesus's ministry - was in part a bid for legitimacy, an attempt to prove his devotion to Judaism through monumental building. It worked architecturally if not politically: the Temple Herod built was by all accounts spectacular, and the disciples' admiration of it in Mark 13 reflects the genuine awe it inspired.

Josephus, the Jewish historian who is our primary source for Herod's reign outside the New Testament, presents a detailed and deeply ambivalent portrait. Herod was energetic, capable, and genuinely skilled at managing the competing demands of Roman overlords and Jewish subjects. He maintained peace and relative prosperity for most of his long reign. He also executed his wife Mariamne, her mother, her brother, and two of his own sons when he became convinced - rightly or wrongly - that they were plotting against him. The Roman emperor Augustus reportedly quipped that he would rather be Herod's pig than his son, a joke that depends on the knowledge that Jews did not eat pork.

Herod died in 4 BCE, shortly after the birth of Jesus - which is why historians date Jesus's birth to before 4 BCE rather than at the year 1 CE as the calendar might suggest. (The calendar was miscalculated by a 6th-century monk named Dionysius Exiguus who did not have access to Herod's death date.) After Herod's death his kingdom was divided among his sons: Archelaus received Judea, Samaria, and Idumea; Herod Antipas received Galilee and Perea; and Philip received territories to the northeast. It is Herod Antipas who imprisoned and beheaded John the Baptist and before whom Jesus appeared during his trial. The Herod family's presence runs through virtually the entire New Testament narrative.