January 11, 2004

At Christmas and Lent we hear a lot about King Herod. It is confusing because there were dozens of Herods, many with the same names, making this more complicated than two Adamese, Harrisons, Roosevelts, and Bushes. Here are the basics.

In 76 BC Hyrcanus II succeeded his father Alexander Jannai as high priest in Jerusalem. He was of the Hamonean family and his mother Salome Alexandra was the chief political power. His younger brother Aristobulus overthrew him in 67 BC but the Roman army moved in and he was restored with the help of the Idumean leaderAntipater. The Roman general Pompey denied him the title of “Basileus” (Greek for king). Hyrcanus was mutiliated by his nephew Antigonus, disqualifying him from the high priesthood. Antipater’s son, who had the same name, took revenge on Antigonus. He was a friend of Julius Caesar and married Mariamne, the granddaughter of Hyrcanus. In 55 BC Caesar gave him virtually all the Jewish areas. He exploited religion for political ends, and was only nominally Jewish. The religious cynicism of the Herodian kings would create the unrest that marked Jewish culture in the lifetime of Jesus.

Antipater Jr.’s son was Herod the Great for whom the Herodian line named. He died in 4 BC, shortly after the birth of Christ (our dating system of BC and AD is off by a few years). Marc Antony got him the title King of Judaea. He shrewdly allied with Octavian (later Emperor Augustus) after the battle of Actium, and courted the Jewish vote by building the great new Temple and reinstituting the Jewish governing council of the Sanhedrin. Deranged and ten times married, in 6 B.C. he killed his sons Aristobulus and Alexander, whose grandfather had been Hyrcanus II. Two years later he killed his son Antipater. This was around the time he massacred the Holy Innocents in Bethlehem (Matthew 2).

He divided his kingdom among three sons (“tetrarchs”). Archelaeus in south Palestine was deposed by Augustus. Herod Antipas ruled Galilee and the east bank of the Jordan at the time of Christ’s crucifixion, having beheaded John the Baptist. After his scandal with his niece Herodias and other crises, he was banished in 39 AD by the mad Emperor Caligula. Philip ruled the Gentile area of the Golan Heights. He built the magnificent Caesarea Philippi, and was probably the sanest of the Herodians. In 39 AD, the eldest son of Aristobulus (whom Herod the Great executed) was given Philip’s tetrachy byCaligula whom he accompanied on army manoeuvres along the Rhine in Germany. This Herod Agrippa I promoted Judaism, and built what we now call Beirut. He killed St. James and imprisoned St. Peter (Acts 12). His son Herod Agrippa II went to Rome after the fall of Jerusalem, which Jesus predicted, and the Herodian line dwindled out.

Fr. George W. Rutler