Augustus) at Actium in 31 BCE, Herod convinced Octavian to keep him in power. He argued that his loyalty to Rome was proven, his effectiveness a fact, and his raw ambition should be enough to satisfy Octavian that he would fight on his behalf no less than he had for Antony. Josephus writes in his Jewish War:
I [Herod] share Antony’s defeat, and with his fall I relinquish the diadem of kingship. I come to you [Octavian] with honesty as my hope of salvation and trusting that what you will want to examine is not whose friend I have been, but how good a friend I was.« To this Caesar replied: »Well, consider yourself safe, and your position as king now more secure. The premium you set on friendship enhances your right to rule a nation […] I have the brightest hopes for the quality I see in you.6
In his decades on the throne, Herod made himself both famous and notorious. Domestically, Herod succeeded in expanding the borders of Jewish lands (not through conquest, but through gifts of land from Augustus), and in suppressing the lawlessness and banditry that unsettled it. He executed large-scale building projects, elaborately refurbishing the Jerusalem Temple, erecting magnificent palaces and fortresses—notably Masada, Herodium, and the rebuilt city of Samaria-Sebaste—as well as creating the harbor and port city of Caesarea—a place that would become an exposed Roman nerve center in the region in the century ahead. He also dotted the land with Roman-style theaters, arenas, and markets.
Herod raised the profile of Judea across the greater Roman Empire through generous acts of euergetism. He endowed the Olympic games, among other things, and was by no means restricted by Jewish squeamishnehss about honoring foreign gods:
After all this building, Herod extended examples of his generosity to numerous cities outside his borders. He provided gymnasia for Tripolis, Damascus, and Ptolemais, a wall for Byblus, halls, arcades, temples, and public squares for Berytus [Beirut] and Tyre; and then theatres for Sidon and Damascus, an aqueduct for the coastal city of Laodicea, and for the people of Ascalon baths, grand fountains, and colonnades of remarkable quality and size; and elsewhere he made dedications of parks and green spaces. […] He supplied corn to all who needed it. Time and again he contributed funds for shipbuilding at Rhodes, and when the temple of Apollo there was burnt down he rebuilt a better temple at his own expense.7
Conforming to the role of client king in nearly all respects, Herod yet preserved his own ethnic particularity. He seems not to have funded pagan temples in heavily Jewish territories (cf. War 2.266); archaeological excavations of his palaces show evidence that in his Roman-style baths he included Jewish ritual baths (mikvahs); and the kitchenware from the sites suggest that he or members of his household followed Jewish dietary laws.8 He was apparently concerned that the family marry according to Jewish custom and blocked the marriage of his sister Salome to the Nabatean Syllaeus because he refused to get circumcised (Ant. 16.225). Yet Josephus depicts Herod as broadly unpopular with Jews, not infrequently intermingling his unorthodox Jewish genealogy (descendent of Idumean converts) and remarks about his brutality. It is hard to know how seriously to read these insinuations; it is not irrelevant in this debate to note that Agrippa I, Herod’s grandson, was embraced fully by Jews as a Jewish king.
Herod was rightly paranoid about Hasmonean traditionalists within the Hasmonean family, who saw him as an upstart who had, along with his father, usurped Hasmonean prerogatives. They fought for decades to oust him and reinstate their own. He may have hoped his marriage to a Hasmonean princess would solidify his local legitimacy, but his union with Mariamme I—granddaughter of Aristobolus II and Hyrcanus II—was a fraught one. Herod struggled to be embraced not only by the royal family—who taunted him for, among other things, being uncouth, uneducated, and using a cheap hair dye (War 1.490)—but by traditional Jews and Hasmonean loyalists alike. Although he desired the imprimatur of the Hasmoneans, he also feared them.
Mariamme’s hatred of him [Herod] was as deep as his love for her. With good reason to hate him for what he had done, and his devotion as her license to speak her mind, she would explicitly bring up against him the business of her grandfather Hyrcanus [whom Herod executed] and her brother Jonathan. Even he, though still a young lad, had been given no mercy by Herod. He was 17 when Herod made him High priest, and then killed him immediately after this appointment—and all because when the boy had donned the priestly vestments and was approaching the altar at one of the festivals, the whole attendant crowd had wept tears of joy. And so the boy was sent by night to Jericho, and there, on instructions, the Gauls drowned him in a swimming pool.9
The tragic paranoia and brutality of this scene encapsulates Herod’s bind and the too-blunt force he often used to manage it. To counter Hasmonean resistance, he appointed high priests from families unconnected to the Hasmoneans and systematically dismantled other entrenched and hostile elites. He ignored and may have disbanded the Sanhedrin (a tribunal made up hierocrats), enriching a new aristocracy loyal to him. His personal guard was made up of foreign solders (War 1.397).
Herod’s policies saw short term benefits, but seeded problems that would bloom down the line. For centuries the largely priestly Judean elite had helped to mediate between foreign rulers—Persian, Greek, and Roman—and the less cosmopolitan Jews. The faith instilled by the people in the priesthood and other culturally bilingual elites allowed them to translate between the cultures of Judaism and those of foreigners, they eased the acceptance foreign domination. By empowering a new elite without influence over or legitimacy in the eyes of the Jewish masses, the region lost a vital mechanism for managing conflict.
Regional unrest was often fueled by economics, and the costs of Herod’s expensive ambitions were borne by his increasingly disenfranchised subjects. Another source of unrest, intertwined with economic factors, was cultural insensitivity. While Herod seems to have made many decisions based on Jewish law and practice, his reign’s impact was to overwhelmingly Hellenize the Jewish landscape and so, visibly plight Judea’s troth to Rome.
3 Herodian Dynasty (4 BCE–66 CE)
After his death in 4 BCE, Herod’s realm was divided among three of his children, and the Romans downgraded their authority. Of the three, Philip and Herod Antipas were demoted to the rank of tetrarch. They ruled the peripheries of Herod’s kingdom much as their father had—interested in building infrastructure and maintaining loyalty to Rome, while being attentive to local mores. Herod Antipas ruled the Galilee and Peraea (cf. Mark 6:14–16), and Philip ruled in the north. Only Archelaus held the title ethnarch, and he dramatically failed. He ruled Judea, Samaria, and Idumea, which included Jerusalem and Caesarea. He proved a tyrant, whom Augustus removed from power in 6 CE, replacing him with a Roman prefect under direct Roman control.
The swan song of the Herodian dynasty was the reign of King Agrippa I, grandson of Herod the Great, who ruled from 41 to 44 CE. Agrippa was educated in Rome with the city’s highest elite; he was a favorite of emperors Caligula (37–41 CE) and Claudius (41–54 CE). Supported by these relationships, in 41 Agrippa gained control of the bulk of Herod’s territories. He was by nearly all accounts a popular Jewish king, able to balance his Herodian blood, Roman ties, and eugertistic practices with piety and a steady ruling hand. Agrippa died in 44 at the height of his popularity, but the Roman emperor Claudius did not appoint his son, Julius Marcus Agrippa, better known as Agrippa II, in his stead.
So reduced, Agrippa II, the last of the Herodian kings, was given control over a smaller more peripheral realm that included Chalcis, Batanea, and Lebanon, among other small fiefdoms (ca. 48–66 CE); he later acquired parts of Galilee and Peraea. He was also granted the authority to appoint the high priest. The core territories of Judea and Samaria that his father had ruled devolved to direct Roman rule as an equestrian province under the aegis of the Syrian legate.
In the two decades from the death of Agrippa I in 44 CE to the outbreak of rebellion in Judea in 66, lawlessness and widening economic disparities between the urban elite and the rural poor intensified. Alongside these trends was a set of volatile religio-political ideas that finally erupted into war.
4 Flavius Josephus
Josephus is the historian from whom we learn nearly everything we know about the Jewish rebellion