Herod the Great

Origins and early life

Herod was born around 72 BCE, the son of Antipater, an Idumean whose people had been converted to Judaism, by force or by choice, under the Hasmonean John Hyrcanus two generations earlier, and of Cypros, a Nabatean Arab; he was raised and lived as a Jew of the Second Temple, kept its law in public, married into the Hasmonean royal house, and was denounced by his rivals as a 'half-Jew' and an Idumean — this fiche admits him on the ground that he lived as a Jew, and records that his Jewishness was contested in his lifetime and has been argued over ever since.

Work and career

Governor of Galilee at twenty-five, he fled the Parthian invasion of 40 BCE to Rome, where the Senate, at the urging of Mark Antony and Octavian, named him king of Judea; he took Jerusalem in 37 BCE and reigned for thirty-three years as Rome's client, keeping his kingdom whole through the civil war that ended the Republic. He was the greatest builder the land ever had: from about 20 BCE he rebuilt the Temple of Jerusalem on a platform whose retaining walls stand today as the Western Wall, and raised the harbor city of Caesarea from nothing, the fortress-palace of Masada, the mountain of Herodium, the city of Sebaste, palaces at Jericho, and the walls, theatres and aqueducts of the Roman East; in the famine of 25 BCE he sold his plate to buy Egyptian grain for his people.

And he was a monster in his house, as this fiche states plainly: he executed his wife Mariamne, her brother, her mother and her grandfather, and three of his own sons, and the Gospel of Matthew — alone among the sources — charges him with the massacre of the infants of Bethlehem. He died at Jericho in 4 BCE and was buried at Herodium, where his tomb was found in 2007.