[224] Ibid., XIV. i. 3, ii. 1, 2.
[225] Ibid., XIV. iv. 1–2.
CHAPTER VI
HEROD THE GREAT
The headless corpse of Pompey was tossing in the waves, off the coast of Egypt, fifteen years after his bloody conquest of Jerusalem, “and there was none to bury him because he had scorned Him with dishonour: he remembered not that he was man, and considered not what was to come. He said, I will be lord of land and sea, and he knew not that God is great, mighty in His great power.”[226] It is thus that a Jewish psalmist of Herod’s time draws the moral of vengeance on the desecrator of the Holy of Holies.
Antipater, the friend of Hyrcanus, helped Julius Cæsar in his advance on Egypt in the same year, 48 B. C., and was left in charge of Jewish affairs.[227] His son Herod, who dared the Sanhedrin, and who distinguished himself by subduing brigands near Tiberias, was set to govern Galilee. The growing power of this Idumæan family was hateful to the Hasmonæan party, and when Cæsar was murdered in 44 B. C., Antipater was poisoned by the butler of Hyrcanus.[228] But they had still to reckon with Herod, who revenged his father’s death on Malichus, the Jewish general who had incited the deed. The Idumæans—both father and son—were singularly astute in taking the right side during all the troubles that preceded and followed Cæsar’s death. Herod knew how greedy of money the Romans were, and he bribed in turn Cassius and Antony, yet succeeded later in holding power under Augustus. For peace, and strong government in Palestine, were needful to the Roman policy which made the Mediterranean an Italian lake, and the time was not yet ripe for direct rule.
THE PARTHIANS
The republicans sent Cassius to Syria and Labienus to Parthia before they met with disaster at Philippi in 42 B. C. The former became the patron of Antigonus—nephew of Hyrcanus—who thus took the losing side, while Herod found a friend in Mark Antony. Two years later Labienus stirred up the Parthians to attack the new triumvir, and they marched on Palestine under Pacorus, the son of the Parthian king Orodes I. Herod had expelled Antigonus from Judea, but the latter joined the invaders and the Idumæan cause seemed hopeless. Herod sent his family for safety to the great fortress of Masada on the shores of the Dead Sea, and escaped to Egypt and to Rome, seeking aid from Antony. The Parthians gave over Hyrcanus to Antigonus as a prisoner, and the nephew cut off his uncle’s ears, to prevent his ever again officiating as high-priest, for, when so mutilated, he could not fulfil priestly offices without breaking the law. Thus for three years Antigonus reigned in Jerusalem.[229]
Herod in Rome was recognised as king in 40 B. C. by Antony and Augustus; and Ventidius was sent to drive back the Parthians. These were the events which led, three years later, to the siege of Jerusalem by Sosius and Herod, when the hated Idumæan, who was “only a private man” and only “half a Jew,” was re-established by Roman power.[230] It would seem clear that Josephus dates the thirty-seven years of Herod’s reign from the time of his capture of the city in the summer of 37 B. C., his death thus occurring in 1 A. D. For he says that the battle of Actium—which was fought on September 2, 31 B. C.—took place in Herod’s seventh year,[231] and that he reigned thirty-four years after Antony had put Antigonus to death at Antioch.[232] The siege began in a sabbatic year[233]—consequently in 37 B. C.—and from this year the reign of Herod should be reckoned. Whiston has been followed by most modern writers in dating the reign from 40 B. C.; yet, not only does this conflict with the date of the battle of Actium, but it also supposes that Antony was in Syria, and about to celebrate his triumph in Egypt, in 37 B. C., whereas he was then engaged in naval war off the Italian coast; and, on the other hand, he was in Syria in 34 B. C., and held a triumph at Alexandria immediately after. The point is of great importance because it affects the date of the Nativity, of which recent writers have treated without any regard to the Gospel statement that Jesus was about to enter His thirtieth year in the fifteenth year of Tiberius, or 29 A. D.[234] Matthew and Luke both make the Nativity precede the death of Herod; and on the “fifteenth of Tiberius” the Christian era was based by the Roman abbot, Dionysius Exiguus, in 532 A. D. He seems to have considered the evidence more carefully than Whiston did. An eclipse of the moon happened during the last illness of Herod, which Whiston identified with a small partial eclipse of March 13, 4 B. C. More probably it was the total eclipse of January 9, 1 B. C., that occurred before Herod’s distemper became serious.[235]
The great army of Sosius and Herod attacked Jerusalem in 37 B. C., and as usual from the north. Three banks were erected, and engines were used by the besiegers and also by the besieged, who fought bravely in spite of famine and of the sabbatic year, mines and countermines being driven to meet. The north wall fell after forty days, and the wall of the upper city fifteen days later; but the Temple still held out till some of the cloisters were set on fire, and the lower city and outer courts of the sanctuary taken. Antigonus then came down from the citadel (Antonia), and the siege ended on the same day on which Pompey had stormed the Temple twenty-six years earlier—that is, on Sivan 27, which would be early in June.
HEROD’S BUILDINGS