Jerusalem: The Biography

40 BC–AD 10

THE FALL OF ANTIGONOS: LAST OF THE MACCABEANS

Herod sailed to Ptolemais, mustered an army and started to conquer his kingdom. When rebels held out in impregnable caves in Galilee, he lowered his troops in chests held by chains and, armed with hooks, these soldiers fished out his opponents and sent them hurtling into the canyons below. But Herod needed Antony’s support to take Jerusalem.

The Romans were driving back the Parthians. In 38 BC, Antony himself was besieging a Parthian fortress at Samosata (south-eastern Turkey) when Herod marched north to offer, and ask for, help. The Parthians had ambushed Antony when Herod counter-attacked and saved the baggage-train. The bluff Antony welcomed Herod like an old comrade, affectionately hugging him in front of his army, paraded in honour of the young king of Judaea. The grateful Antony despatched 30,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry to besiege Jerusalem in Herod’s name. As the Romans pitched camp just north of the Temple, Herod married the seventeen-year-old Mariamme. After a forty-day siege, the Romans stormed the outer wall. Two weeks later, they burst into the Temple, ravaging the city ‘like a company of madmen’, cutting down the Jerusalemites in the narrow streets. Herod had to bribe the Romans to stop the slaughter – and then sent the captured Antigonos to Antony who solicitously beheaded the last Maccabean king. The Roman strongman then set off to invade Parthia with 100,000 troops. His military prowess was much exaggerated; his expedition was a near-disaster, and he lost a third of his army. The survivors were saved by Cleopatra’s delivery of provisions. Antony’s reputation in Rome never quite recovered.

King Herod celebrated his conquest of Jerusalem by liquidating forty-five of the seventy-one members of the Sanhedrin. Demolishing the Baris Fortress north of the Temple, he built a square fortified tower with four turrets, the Antonia, named after his patron, and colossal enough to dominate the city. Nothing is left of the Antonia except traces of its stone-cut base, but we know what it must have been like because many of Herod’s fortresses survive: each of his mountain strongholds was designed to combine impregnable security with peerless luxury.^* Yet he never felt secure, and now he had to defend his kingdom from the intrigues of two queens, his own wife Mariamme – and Cleopatra.³⁸

HEROD AND CLEOPATRA

Herod may have been feared but he himself was wary of the Maccabeans, and the most dangerous of them was in his own bed. The king, now aged thirty-six, had fallen in love with Mariamme, who was cultured, chaste and haughty. But her mother, Alexandra, a real-life version of the stereotype of the mother-in-law from hell, immediately started to conspire with Cleopatra to destroy Herod. The Maccabean women were proud of their lineage and she resented her daughter having married into the mongrel Herodians. Yet Alexandra did not realize that, even by the feral standards of first-century politics, the psychotic Herod was more than a match for her.

Since the mutilated old Hyrcanus could no longer officiate in the Temple, Alexandra wanted her teenaged son Jonathan, Mariamme’s younger brother, to become high priest, an eminence to which Herod, the half-Arab Idumean parvenu, could not aspire. Jonathan happened to be not only the rightful king but also of arresting beauty in an age when appearances were believed to reflect divine favour. He was mobbed wherever he went. Herod feared the teenager and solved this problem by raising an obscure Babylonian Jew to the high priesthood. Alexandra secretly appealed to Cleopatra. Antony had increased Cleopatra’s kingdom with lands in Lebanon, Crete and north Africa and also gave her one of Herod’s most valuable possessions – the balsam and date groves of Jericho.^† Herod rented them back from her but it was obvious that she coveted Judaea, the territory of her forefathers.

Dangling the pretty Jonathan like a tasty morsel, Mariamme and her mother Alexandra sent a painting of the boy to Antony who, like most men of his era, appreciated male as much as female beauty. Cleopatra promised to support his claim to be king. So when Antony summoned the boy, Herod was thoroughly alarmed and refused to let him go. Herod placed his mother-in-law under close surveillance in Jerusalem, while Cleopatra offered asylum to her and her son. Alexandra had two coffins made to smuggle them out of the palace.

At last Herod, unable to resist Maccabean popularity and the entreaties of his wife, appointed Jonathan as high priest at the Feast of Tabernacles. When Jonathan went up to the altar in his gorgeous robes and royal-priestly headdress, the Jerusalemites loudly praised him. Herod solved his problem in Herodian style: he invited the high priest to join him at his sumptuous palace in Jericho. Herod was alarmingly kind; the night was steamy; Jonathan was encouraged to swim. In the pleasure pools, Herod’s henchmen held him under water, and his body was found floating there in the morning. Mariamme and her mother were heart-broken and outraged; Jerusalem grieved. At Jonathan’s funeral, Herod himself broke down in tears.

Alexandra reported the murder to Cleopatra, whose sympathy was purely political: she had killed at least two and probably three of her own siblings. She persuaded Antony to summon Herod to Syria. If Cleopatra got her way, he would not return. Herod prepared for this risky encounter – and showed his love for Mariamme in his own sinister way: he placed her under the guardianship of his uncle Joseph, viceroy in his absence, but ordered that if he was executed by Antony, Mariamme must be instantly put to death. When Herod was gone, Joseph repeatedly told Mariamme how much the king loved her, so much, he added, that he would rather kill her than let her live without him. Mariamme was shocked. Jerusalem seethed with rumours that Herod was dead. In Herod’s absence, Mariamme lorded it over the king’s sister, Salome, one of the most vicious players in a viperous court.

In Laodicea, Herod, that expert at handling Roman potentates, charmed Antony who forgave him; the two banqueted together day and night. On Herod’s return Salome told her brother how their uncle Joseph had seduced Mariamme while his mother-in-law was planning rebellion. Somehow Herod and Mariamme were reconciled. He now declared his love for her. ‘They both fell into tears and embraced’ – until she let on that she knew about his plan to execute her. Herod, tormented with jealousy, placed Mariamme under house arrest and executed his uncle Joseph.

In 34 BC, Antony reasserted Roman power, after his early bungled expedition, by successfully invading Parthian Armenia. Cleopatra accompanied him to the Euphrates and, on the way home, visited Herod. These two beguiling monsters spent days together, flirting and considering how to kill one another. Herod claimed that Cleopatra tried to seduce him: this was probably her usual manner with any man who could do something for her. It was also a deadly snare. Herod resisted and decided to kill the serpent of old Nile, but his counsellors advised strongly against it.

The Egyptian queen progressed home to Alexandria. There Antony, in a spectacular ceremony, raised Cleopatra to ‘Queen of Kings’. Caesarion, her son by Caesar, now thirteen years old, became her co-pharaoh, while her three children by Antony became kings of Armenia, Phoenicia and Cyrene. In Rome, this Oriental posing appeared unRoman, unmanly and unwise. Antony tried to justify his Eastern wassails by writing his only known work of literature entitled ‘On His Drinking’ – and he wrote to Octavian, ‘Why have you changed? Is it because I’m screwing the queen? Does it really matter where or in whom you dip your wick?’ But it did matter. Cleopatra was seen as a fatale monstrum. Octavian was becoming ever stronger as their partnership fell apart. In 32 BC, the Senate revoked Antony’s imperium. Next Octavian declared war on Cleopatra. The two sides met in Greece: Antony and Cleopatra mustered his army and her Egyptian-Phoenician fleet. It was a war for the world.³⁹

AUGUSTUS AND HEROD

Herod had to back the winner. He offered to join Antony in Greece but instead he was ordered to attack the Arab Nabataeans in today’s Jordan. By the time Herod returned, Octavian and Antony were facing each other at Actium. Antony was no match for Octavian’s commander, Marcus Agrippa. The sea battle was a debacle. Antony and Cleopatra fled back to Egypt. Would Octavian also destroy Antony’s Judaean king?

Herod again prepared for death, leaving his brother Pheroras in charge and, just to be safe, having old Hyrcanus strangled. He placed his mother and sister in Masada while Mariamme and Alexandra were kept in Alexandrium, another mountain fortress. If anything happened to him, he again ordered that Mariamme was to die. Then he sailed for the most important meeting of his life.

Octavian received him in Rhodes. Herod handled the meeting shrewdly and frankly. He humbly laid his diadem crown at Octavian’s feet. Then instead of disowning Antony, he asked Octavian not to consider whose friend he had been but ‘what sort of friend I am’. Octavian restored his crown. Herod returned to Jerusalem in triumph, then followed Octavian down to Egypt, arriving in Alexandria just after Antony and Cleopatra had committed suicide, he by blade, she by asp.

Octavian now emerged as the first Roman emperor, adopting the name Augustus. Still only thirty-three, this punctilious manager, delicate, unemotional and censorious, became Herod’s most loyal patron. Indeed the emperor and his deputy, almost his partner-in-power, the plain-spoken Marcus Agrippa, became so close to Herod that, in Josephus’ expression, ‘Caesar preferred no one to Herod besides Agrippa and Agrippa made no one his greater friend than Herod besides Caesar.’

Augustus increased Herod’s kingdom to include swathes of modern Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Like Augustus, Herod was an icily competent manager: when famine struck, he sold his own gold and bought Egyptian grain to import, saving the Judaeans from starvation. He presided over a half-Greek, half-Jewish court, serviced by pretty eunuchs and concubines. Many of his entourage were inherited from Cleopatra. His secretary Nikolaus of Damascus had been the tutor to her children,^* and his bodyguard of 400 Galatians had been her personal bodyguard: Augustus gave them to Herod as a present and they joined his own Germans and Thracians. These blond barbarians handled torture and murder for this most cosmopolitan king: ‘Herod was Phoenician by descent, Hellenized by culture, Idumean by place of birth, Jewish by religion, Jerusalemite by residence and Roman by citizenship.’

In Jerusalem, he and Mariamme resided at the Antonia Fortress. There he was a Jewish king, reading Deuteronomy every seven years in the Temple and appointing the high priest, whose robes he kept in the Antonia. But outside Jerusalem he was a munificent Greek monarch whose new pagan cities – chiefly Caesarea on the coast and Sebaste (being the Greek for Augustus) on the site of Samaria – were opulent complexes of temples, hippodromes, and palaces. Even in Jerusalem, he built a Greek-style theatre and hippodrome where he presented his Actian Games to celebrate Augustus’ victory. When this pagan spectacle provoked a Jewish conspiracy, the plotters were executed. But his beloved wife did not celebrate his success. The court was poisoned by the struggle between the Maccabean and Herodian princesses.⁴⁰

MARIAMME: HEROD IN LOVE AND HATRED

While Herod had been away, Mariamme had once again charmed her guardian into revealing her husband’s plans for her if he did not return. Herod found her personally irresistible yet politically toxic: she openly accused him of killing her brother. Sometimes she made it humiliatingly obvious to the entire court that she was denying him sex; at other times they were passionately reconciled. She was the mother of two of his sons, yet she was also planning his destruction. She taunted Salome, Herod’s sister, with her commonness. Herod was ‘entangled between hatred and love’, his obsession all the more intense because it was mixed up with his other reigning passion: power.

His sister Salome ascribed Mariamme’s hold on him to magic. She brought him evidence that the Maccabean had beguiled him with a love-potion. Mariamme’s eunuchs were tortured until they revealed her guilt. The guardian who had watched Mariamme in his absence was killed. Mariamme herself was imprisoned in the Antonia then put on trial. Salome kept up the momentum of revelations, determined that the Maccabean queen should die.

Mariamme was sentenced to death, whereupon her mother Alexandra denounced her, hoping to save her own skin. In response, the crowd booed her. As Mariamme was led to execution, she behaved with astonishing ‘greatness of soul’, saying that it was a shame her mother should expose herself in that way. Probably strangled, Mariamme died like a real Maccabean ‘without changing the colour of her face’, displaying a grace that ‘revealed the nobility of her descent to the spectators’. Herod went berserk with grief, believing that his love for Mariamme was a divine vengeance designed to destroy him. He shrieked for her around the palaces, ordered his servants to find her, and tried to distract himself with banquets. But his parties ended with him weeping for Mariamme. He fell ill and erupted in boils, at which Alexandra made a last bid for power. Herod had her killed, and then murdered four of his most intimate friends who perhaps had been close to the charming queen. He never quite recovered from Mariamme, a curse that was to return to destroy another generation. The Talmud later claimed that Herod preserved Mariamme’s body in honey, and this may have been true – for it was fittingly sweet, suitably macabre.

Soon after her death, Herod started to work on his masterpiece: Jerusalem. The Maccabean Palace opposite the Temple was not grand enough for him. The Antonia must have been haunted by the ghost of Mariamme. In 23 BC, he expanded his western fortifications by building a new towered citadel and palace complex, a Jerusalem-within-Jerusalem. Surrounded by a wall 45 feet high, the Citadel boasted three sentimentally named towers, the highest, the Hippicus (after a youthful friend killed in battle), 128 feet high, its base 45 feet square, the Phasael (after his dead brother) and the Mariamme.^* While the Antonia dominated the Temple, this fortress ruled the city.

To the south of the Citadel, Herod built his Palace, a pleasure dome containing two sumptuous apartments named after his patrons, Augustus and Agrippa, with walls of marble, cedarwood beams, elaborate mosaics, gold and silver decorations. Around the palace were constructed courtyards, colonnades and porticoes complete with green lawns, lush groves and cool pools and canals set off by cascades, above which perched dovecotes (Herod probably communicated with his provinces by pigeon post). All this was funded by Herod’s Croesian wealth: he was, after the emperor, the richest man in the Mediterranean ^† The bustle of the palace, with the trumpets of the Temple and the rumble of the city in the distance, must have been pacified by the cooing of birds and tinkle of fountains.

But his court was anything but tranquil. His brothers were pitiless intriguers: his sister Salome ranks as a peerless monstress and his own harem of women were all apparently as ambitious and as paranoid as the king himself. Herod’s priapic tastes complicated the politics – he was, wrote Josephus, ‘a man of appetites’. He had married one wife, Doris, before Mariamme; and, after her, he married at least another eight, choosing beauties for love or lust, never again for their pedigree. As well as his 500-strong harem, his Greek tastes extended to the pages and eunuchs of his household. But his burgeoning family of half-spoiled, half-neglected sons, each backed by a power-hungry mother, became a devil’s brood. Even the masterful puppeteer himself struggled to manage all this hatred and jealousy. Yet the court did not distract him from his most cherished project. Knowing that the prestige of Jerusalem was linked to his own, Herod decided to equal Solomon.⁴¹

HEROD: THE TEMPLE

Herod pulled down the existing Second Temple and built a wonder of the world in its place. The Jews were afraid he would destroy the old Temple and never finish the new one, so he called a city meeting to persuade them, preparing every detail. A thousand priests were trained as builders. Lebanese cedar forests were felled, the beams floated down the coast. At quarries around Jerusalem, the massive ashlar stones, gleaming yellow and almost white limestone, were marked and cut out. A thousand wagons were amassed, but the stones were gargantuan. In the tunnels alongside the Temple Mount, there is one stone, 44.6 feet long, 11 feet high, that weighs 600 tons.^* No din, no hammering had polluted the building of Solomon’s Temple, so Herod ensured that everything was readied offsite and silently slotted into place. The Holy of Holies was ready in two years, but the entire complex was not completed for eighty.

Herod dug down to the foundation rock and built from there, so he would have destroyed any remnants of Solomon’s and Zerubbabel’s Temples. Though limited to the east by the steepness of the Kidron Valley, he expanded the esplanade of the Temple Mount to the south, filling the space with a substructure held up by eighty-eight pillars and twelve vaulted arches, now called Solomon’s Stables, to create a 3-acre platform, twice as large as the Roman Forum. Today, it is easy to see the seam in the eastern wall, visible 105 feet from the south-western corner of the city, with Herodian ashlars to the left and smaller Maccabean stones to the right.

The courts of the Temple led in diminishing size to ever-increasing sanctity. Gentiles and Jews alike could enter the huge Court of Gentiles, but a wall encircled the Court of Women with this warning inscription:

FOREIGNER! DO NOT ENTER WITHIN THE GRILLE

AND PARTITION SURROUNDING THE TEMPLE

HE WHO IS CAUGHT

WILL HAVE ONLY HIMSELF TO BLAME

FOR HIS DEATH WHICH WILL FOLLOW

Fifty steps led up to a gate that opened into the Court of Israel, open to any male Jew, which led to the exclusive Court of Priests. Within that stood the Sanctuary, the Hekhal itself, containing the Holy of Holies. This rested upon the rock where Abraham was said to have almost sacrificed Isaac, and where David built his altar. Here the sacrifices were conducted on the Altar of Burnt Offering, which faced the Court of Women and the Mount of Olives.

Herod’s Antonia Fortress guarded the Temple Mount in the north. There, Herod constructed his own secret tunnel into the Temple. In the south the Temple was reached by monumental stairs passing through the Double and Triple Gates, to underground passages decorated with doves and flowers that led into the Temple. On the west, a monumental bridge, doubling as an aqueduct bringing water into huge hidden cisterns, stretched across the valley into the Temple. In its sheer eastern wall stood the Shushan Gate, used exclusively by the high priest to progress to the Mount of Olives to sanctify the full moon, or to sacrifice that rarest, holiest of victims, the unblemished red heifer.^*

There were pillared porticoes on all four sides but the greatest of these was the Royal Portico, a vast basilica which dominated the whole mountain. About 70,000 people lived in Herod’s city but during the festivals hundreds of thousands arrived on pilgrimage. Like any bustling shrine, even today, the Temple needed a gathering place for friends to meet and for rituals to be arranged. This was the Royal Portico. When visitors arrived, they could shop on the busy shopping street that ran beneath the monumental arches along the western walls. When it was time to visit the Temple, pilgrims took purifying baths in the many mikvahs – ritual pools – that have been found around the southern entrances. They would climb one of the monumental staircases that led into the Royal Portico where they saw all the sights of the city, before it was time to pray.

At the south-eastern corner, the towering walls and cliff of the Kidron Valley created a precipitous peak, the Pinnacle, where the Gospels say the Devil tempted Jesus. At the south-western corner, facing the wealthy Upper City, priests announced the start of festivals and Sabbaths on Friday nights with trumpet blasts that must have echoed across the desolate gorges. A stone, thrown down by Titus in AD 70, proclaims ‘The Trumpeting Place’.

The design of the Temple, supervised by the king and his anonymous architects (an ossuary has been found inscribed ‘Simon builder of the Temple’), showed a brilliant understanding of space and theatre. Dazzling and awe-inspiring, Herod’s Temple was ‘covered all over with plates of gold and at the first rising of the sun reflected back a fiery splendour’ so bright that visitors had to look away. Arriving in Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, it reared up‘like a mountain covered with snow’. This was the Temple that Jesus knew and that Titus destroyed. Herod’s esplanade survives as the Islamic Haram al-Sharif supported on three sides by Herodian stones that still gleam today, particularly in the Western Wall revered by the Jews.

Once the Sanctuary and the esplanade were complete – it was said there was no rain in the daytime, so that work was never delayed – Herod, who could not enter the Holy of Holies since he was not a priest, celebrated by sacrificing 300 oxen.⁴² He had reached his apogee. But his undeniable greatness was to be challenged by his own children when the crimes of the past returned to haunt the heirs of the future.

HEROD’S PRINCES: THE FAMILY TRAGEDY

Herod now had at least twelve children by his ten wives. He seemed to ignore most of them except for his two sons by Mariamme, Alexander and Aristobulos. They were half-Maccabee, half-Herodian and they would be his successors. He sent them to Rome where Augustus himself supervised their education. After five years, Herod brought the two teenage princes home to marry: Alexander wed the daughter of the King of Cappadocia while Aristobulos married Herod’s niece.^*

In 15 BC, Marcus Agrippa arrived to inspect Herod’s Jerusalem, accompanied by his new wife, Julia, Augustus’ nymphomaniacal daughter. Agrippa, Augustus’ partner and victor of Actium, was already friends with Herod, who proudly showed him Jerusalem. He stayed in his eponymous apartments in the Citadel and there gave banquets in Herod’s honour. Augustus already paid for a daily sacrifice to Yahweh in the Temple, but now Agrippa sacrificed a hundred oxen. He managed to behave with such tact that even the prickly Jews gave him the accolade of laying palms in his path and the Herodians named their children after him. Afterwards, the pair toured Greece with their fleets. When local Jews appealed against Greek repression, Agrippa backed Jewish rights, Herod thanked him and the two embraced as equals.⁴³ But on his return from hobnobbing with the Roman potentate, Herod was challenged by his own children.

Princes Alexander and Aristobulos, polished by a Roman education, inheriting the looks and arrogance of both parents, soon blamed their father for their mother’s fate and, like her, disdained the half-breed Herodians. Alexander, being married to a king’s daughter, was particularly snobbish; both boys mocked Aristobulos’ Herodian wife, thus insulting her mother, their dangerous aunt Salome. They boasted that when they were kings they would put Herod’s wives to labour with the slaves and use Herod’s other sons as clerks.

Salome reported all this to Herod, who was infuriated by the ingratitude and alarmed by the betrayal of these spoilt princelings. He had long ignored Antipater, his eldest son, by his first wife Doris. But now in 13 BC, Herod recalled Antipater and asked Agrippa to take him to Rome with a sealed document for the emperor: it was his will, disinheriting the two boys and instead bequeathing the kingdom to Antipater. But his new heir, probably in his mid-twenties, was embittered by paternal neglect and fraternal envy. He and his mother conspired to destroy the disinherited princes, whom they accused of treason.

Herod asked Augustus, staying at Aquileia on the Adriatic, to judge the three princes. Augustus reconciled father and sons, with the result that Herod sailed home, called a meeting in the court of the Temple and announced that his three sons would share the kingdom. Doris, Antipater and Salome set about reversing this reconciliation for their own purposes, but they were helped by the arrogance of the boys: Prince Alexander told everyone that Herod dyed his hair to look younger and confided that he deliberately missed his targets out hunting to make his father feel better. He also seduced three of the king’s own eunuchs, giving him access to his father’s secrets. Herod arrested and tortured Alexander’s servants until one confessed that his master planned to assassinate him out hunting. Alexander’s father-in-law, the King of Cappadocia, who was visiting his daughter, managed to reconcile father and sons again. Herod expressed his gratitude by presenting the Cappadocian with a very Herodian gift: a courtesan who gloried in the name Pannychis – All-Night-Long.

The peace did not last long: the torture of servants now revealed a letter from Alexander to the commander of the Alexandrium Fortress that said: ‘When we have achieved all we set out to do, we’ll come to you.’ Herod dreamed that Alexander was raising a dagger over him, a nightmare so vivid that he arrested both boys, who admitted they were planning to escape. Herod had to consult Augustus, by now tiring of his old friend’s excesses – though the emperor himself was no stranger to naughty children and tangled successions. Augustus ruled that, if the boys had plotted against Herod, he had every right to punish them.

Herod held the trial in Berytus (Beirut), outside his formal jurisdiction – and therefore supposedly a fair place for the trial. The boys were sentenced to death as Herod wished, which was hardly surprising since he had generously embellished the city. Herod’s counsellors advised mercy – but when one hinted that the boys were suborning the army, Herod liquidated 300 officers. The princes were taken back to Judaea and garrotted. The tragedy of their mother Mariamme, the curse of the Maccabees, had come full circle. Augustus was not amused. Knowing that Jews eschewed pork, he commented drily: ‘I’d rather be Herod’s pig than his son.’ But this was just the beginning of the Grand Guignol decay of Herod the Great.

HEROD: THE LIVING PUTREFACTION

The king, now in his sixties, was ailing and paranoid. Antipater was the sole named heir, but there were many other sons available to inherit the kingdom, and Herod’s sister Salome started to plot against him; she found a servant who claimed that Antipater was planning to poison Herod with a mysterious drug. Antipater, who was in Rome meeting with Augustus, rushed home and galloped to the palace in Jerusalem, but he was arrested there before he could reach his father. At his trial, the suspect drug was given to a convict who dropped down dead. More torture revealed that a Jewish slave belonging to the Empress Livia, Augustus’ own wife and herself an expert on poisons, had forged letters to frame Salome.

Herod sent the evidence to Augustus and drew up his third will, leaving the kingdom to another of his sons, Antipas, the Herod who would later encounter John the Baptist and Jesus. Herod’s illness distorted his judgement and weakened his grip on the Jewish opposition. He placed a gilded bronze eagle on the great gate of the Temple. Some students climbed on to the roof, abseiled down in front of the crowded courtyard and cut it down. The troops of the Antonia Fortress rushed into the Temple to arrest them. Paraded before Herod on his sickbed, they insisted they were obeying the Torah. The culprits were burned alive.

Herod collapsed, suffering an agonizing and gruesome putrefaction: it started as an itching all over with a glowing sensation within his intestines, then developed into a swelling of his feet and belly, complicated by ulceration of the colon. His body started to ooze clear fluid, he could scarcely breathe, a vile stench emanated from him, and his genitals swelled grotesquely until his penis and scrotum burst out into suppurating gangrene that then gave birth to a seething mass of worms.

The rotting king hoped he would recover in the warmth of his Jericho palace but, as his suffering increased, he was borne out to the warm sulphur baths at Callirhoe, which still exist on the Dead Sea, only for the suphur to aggravate the agony.^* Treated with hot oil, he passed out and was carried back to Jericho where he ordered the summoning of the Temple elite from Jerusalem, whom he had locked en masse in the hippodrome. It is unlikely that he planned to slaughter them. Probably he wanted to finesse the succession while holding all troublemaking grandees in custody.

At around this time, a child named Joshua ben Joseph, or (in Aramaic) Jesus, was born. His parents were a carpenter, Joseph, and his teenaged betrothed, Mary (Mariamme in Hebrew), based in Nazareth, up in Galilee. They were not much richer than peasants, but it was said they were descended from the old Davidian house. They travelled down to Bethlehem where a child, Jesus, was born ‘that shall rule my people Israel’. After he had been circumcised on the eighth day, according to St Luke, ‘they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord’ and make the traditional sacrifice in the Temple. A wealthy family would sacrifice a sheepor even a cow, but Joseph could afford only two turtle-doves or pigeons.

As Herod lay dying, Matthew’s Gospel claims, he ordered his forces to liquidate this Davidian child by massacring all newborn babies, but Joseph took refuge in Egypt until he heard that Herod had died. There were certainly messianic rumours afoot and Herod would have feared a Davidian pretender, but there is no evidence that the king ever heard of Jesus or massacred any innocents. It is ironic that this monster should be particularly remembered for the one crime he neglected to commit. As for the child from Nazareth, we do not hear of him again for about thirty years.^*

ARCHELAUS: MESSIAHS AND MASSACRES

Emperor Augustus sent his reply to Herod: he had had Livia’s slave girl beaten to death and Herod was free to punish Prince Antipater. Yet Herod was now in such torment, he seized a dagger to kill himself. This fracas convinced Antipater, in his nearby cell, that the old tyrant was dead. He exuberantly called in his jailer to unlock the cell. Surely, finally, Antipater was King of the Jews? The jailer had heard the cries too. Hurrying to court, he found Herod was not dead, just demented. His servants had seized the knife from him. The jailer reported Antipater’s treason. This pustulous but living carcass of a king beat his own head, howled and ordered his guards to kill the hated son immediately. Then he rewrote his will, dividing the kingdom between three of his teenaged sons – with Jerusalem and Judaea going to Archelaus.

Five days later, in March 4 BC, after a reign of thirty-seven years, Herod the Great, who had survived ‘ten thousand dangers’, died. The eighteen-year-old Archelaus danced, sang and made merry as if an enemy, not a father, had died. Even Herod’s grotesque family were shocked. The body, wearing the crown and gripping the sceptre, was borne on a catafalque of purple-draped, bejewelled gold in a parade – led by Archelaus and followed by the German and Thracian guards, and by 500 servants carrying spices (the stink must have been pungent) – the 24 miles to the mountain fortress of Herodium. There Herod was buried in a tomb^* that was lost for 2,000 years.⁴⁴

Archelaus returned to secure Jerusalem, ascending a golden throne in the Temple, where he announced the softening of his father’s severity. The city was filled with Passover pilgrims, many of whom, certain that the king’s death heralded an apocalyptic deliverance, ran amok in the Temple. Archelaus’ guards were stoned. Archelaus, although he had just promised an easing of the repression, sent in the cavalry: 3,000 people were slaughtered in the Temple.

This teenage despot left his steady brother Philip in charge and sailed for Rome to confirm his succession with Augustus. But his younger brother, Antipas, raced him to Rome, hoping to win the kingdom for himself. As soon as Archelaus was gone, Augustus’ local steward, Sabinus, ransacked Herod’s Jerusalem Palace to find his hidden fortune, sparking more riots. The Governor of Syria, Varus, marched down to restore order but gangs of Galileans and Idumeans, arriving for Pentecost, seized the Temple and massacred any Romans they could find as Sabinus cowered in Phasael’s Tower.

Outside Jerusalem, three rebels – ex-slaves – declared themselves king, burned Herodian palaces and marauded in a ‘wild fury’. These self-appointed kings were pseudo-prophets, proving that Jesus was indeed born at a time of intense religious speculation. Having spent all of Herod’s reign awaiting such leaders in vain, the Jews found that three arrived at once: Varus defeated and killed all three pretenders,^* but henceforth pseudo-prophets kept coming and the Romans kept killing them. Varus crucified 2,000 rebels around Jerusalem.

In Rome, Augustus, now sixty, listened to the squabbles of the Herodians and confirmed Herod’s will but, withholding the title of king, appointed Archelaus as ethnarch of Judaea, Samaria and Idumea with Antipas as tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea (part of today’s Jordan), and their half-brother Philipas tetrarch of the rest.^† The life of the rich in the Roman villas of Archelaus’ Jerusalem was louche, Grecian and extremely unJewish: a silver goblet, buried nearby, lost for two millennia before it was bought in 1911 by an American collector, depicts explicit homosexual couplings – on one side, a man lowers himself using a pulley onto a catamite as a voyeur slave peeps through the door, while on the other two lithe boys intertwine on a couch. But Archelaus turned out to be so vicious, inept and extravagant that, after ten years, Augustus deposed him, exiling him to Gaul. Judaea became a Roman province, and Jerusalem was ruled from Caesarea on the coast by a series of low-ranking prefects; it was now that the Romans held a census to register taxpayers. This submission to Roman power was humiliating enough to provoke a minor Jewish rebellion and was the census recalled by Luke, probably wrongly, as the reason that Jesus’ family came to Bethlehem.

For thirty years, Herod Antipas ruled Galilee, dreaming of his father’s kingdom which he had almost inherited, until John the Baptist, a charismatic new prophet, burst out of the desert to mock and challenge him.⁴⁵