Herod the Great

Herod ruled Judea as a king dependent on Rome for more than three decades in the late first century BCE. He rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem on a vast scale and filled his kingdom with fortresses, palaces and new cities, yet he is also remembered for his suspicion and cruelty, including the execution of his wife and three of his sons. Most of what is known about him comes from the first-century CE Jewish historian Josephus.

Herod was born around 72 BCE in Idumea, the region south of Judea. His father, Antipater, was a powerful official serving the Hasmonean ruler Hyrcanus II; his mother, Cypros, came from a noble Nabataean family of Petra. The Idumeans had been made to adopt Judaism by the Hasmoneans in the late second century BCE, and Herod was raised as a Jew, but his origins led some of his subjects to question his Jewishness throughout his life.

Antipater gained the trust of Julius Caesar, and around 47 BCE Herod was made governor of Galilee, where he collected taxes for Rome and suppressed bandits so harshly that the Jewish council, the Sanhedrin, condemned him. In 41 BCE Mark Antony named Herod and his brother Phasael tetrarchs. The following year Antigonus, a Hasmonean prince backed by the Parthians, seized power, and Herod fled to Rome, where, to his own surprise, the Senate declared him king of the Jews, in 40 BCE according to Josephus or 39 according to Appian. With Roman troops he took Jerusalem in 37 or 36 BCE; Antigonus was executed, ending the Hasmonean line of kings. Herod had already married Mariamne, a Hasmonean princess, sending away his first wife Doris and their son.

The Hasmonean family remained a threat. In 35 BCE Herod had Mariamne's teenage brother, the high priest Aristobulus III, drowned. When Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BCE, Herod, who had backed the losing side, quickly travelled to Rhodes and persuaded the victor to confirm him as king. Octavian, later Augustus, enlarged his kingdom in the years that followed. At home Herod relied on a bodyguard of some 2,000 men, including foreign contingents, on heavy taxes and, some historians suggest, on informers, though he also bought grain from Egypt for the hungry during a famine in 25 BCE.

Herod's projects were among the most ambitious of the age. From around 20 BCE he rebuilt the Second Temple in Jerusalem and doubled the platform on which it stood; its retaining walls, including the Western Wall, still survive. He built the port city of Caesarea Maritima with an artificial harbour, rebuilt Samaria as Sebaste in honour of Augustus, and raised fortress-palaces such as Masada and Herodium. He also built temples to pagan gods for the non-Jewish population, and his placing of a golden eagle over the Temple gate offended many Jews.

Herod's later years were dominated by plots, real or imagined. He had Mariamne executed in 29 BCE on a charge of adultery, and her mother soon after. In 7 BCE their sons Alexander and Aristobulus were tried and executed for treason, and shortly before his own death his eldest son Antipater was put to death as well. The Gospel of Matthew says he ordered the killing of the infant boys of Bethlehem after the birth of Jesus, but no other ancient source mentions this and most modern historians doubt that it happened.

Herod died at Jericho after a long and painful illness. Most scholars follow a nineteenth-century chronology that dates his death to 4 BCE, while some recent studies argue for 1 BCE. Augustus divided the kingdom among his sons Archelaus, Antipas and Philip, and in 6 CE Judea came under direct Roman rule. Josephus says he was buried at Herodium, where archaeologists announced the discovery of his tomb in 2007, an identification some still dispute.

Our 1 BCE map shows the region at the very end of his reign, under the overlordship of the Roman Empire, in an area that today lies within Israel and the Palestinian territories.