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Who was Herodias?
Synoptics: “His [Herod’s] brother Philip’s wife” ([Matt. xiv, 3]; [Mark vi, 17]; [Luke iii, 19]).
Herodias was a grand-daughter of Herod the Great, and married her uncle Herod, the disinherited son of Herod the Great. She subsequently married Antipas, the Herod who is said to have put John to death. Herod’s brother Philip (Tetrarch of Trachonitis and Gaulonitis) was not the son of Marianne, as the first husband of Herodias was, but the son of Cleopatra. Philip’s wife was Salome, the daughter of Herodias. The daughter of Herodias, instead of being a damsel dancing at the court of Herod, as the Synoptics declare, was at this time the wife of an aged ruler of a foreign province. According to Whiston, she became a widow in the very year in which John died. Herodias was not the wife, but the mother-in-law of Herod’s brother Philip. Whiston, in his translation of Josephus, attempts to gloss over the Synoptics’ error by inserting in brackets after Herod the word “Philip.” Scribners’ “Bible Dictionary” concedes the error and accounts for it “By supposing that there is a confusion between the first husband and the son-in-law of Herodias, for her daughter Salome married Philip the tetrarch.”