Herod, byname Herod the Great, Latin Herodes Magnus, (born 73 BCE—died March/April, 4 BCE, Jericho, Judaea), Roman-appointed king of Judaea (37–4 BCE), who built many fortresses, aqueducts, theatres, and other public buildings and generally raised the prosperity of his land but who was the centre of political and family intrigues in his later years. The New Testament portrays him as a tyrant, into whose kingdom Jesus of Nazareth was born.
Herod was born in southern Palestine. His father, Antipater, was an Edomite (a Semitic individuals, recognized by some students as Arab, who transformed to Judaism within the 2nd century BCE). Antipater was a person of nice affect and wealth who elevated each by marrying the daughter of a noble from Petra (in southwestern Jordan), at the moment the capital of the rising Arab Nabataean kingdom. Thus, Herod was of Arab origin, though he was a working towards Jew.
When Pompey (106–48 BCE) invaded Palestine in 63 BCE, Antipater supported his marketing campaign and commenced a protracted affiliation with Rome, from which each he and Herod had been to profit. Six years later Herod met Mark Antony, whose lifelong buddy he was to stay. Julius Caesar additionally favoured the household; he appointed Antipater procurator of Judaea in 47 BCE and conferred on him Roman citizenship, an honour that descended to Herod and his youngsters. Herod made his political debut in the identical 12 months, when his father appointed him governor of Galilee. Six years later Mark Antony made him tetrarch of Galilee.
In 40 BCE the Parthians invaded Palestine, civil conflict broke out, and Herod was pressured to flee to Rome. The senate there nominated him king of Judaea and geared up him with a military to make good his declare. In the 12 months 37 BCE, on the age of 36, Herod grew to become the unchallenged ruler of Judaea, a place he was to keep up for 32 years. To additional solidify his energy, he divorced his first spouse, Doris, despatched her and his son away from court docket, and married Mariamne, a Hasmonean princess. Although the union was directed at ending his feud with the Hasmoneans, a priestly household of Jewish leaders, he was deeply in love with Mariamne.
During the battle between the 2 triumvirs Octavian and Antony, the heirs to Caesar’s energy, Herod supported his buddy Antony. He continued to take action even when Antony’s mistress, Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, used her affect with Antony to realize a lot of Herod’s greatest land. After Antony’s remaining defeat at Actium in 31 BCE, he frankly confessed to the victorious Octavian which aspect he had taken. Octavian, who had met Herod in Rome, knew that he was the one man to rule Palestine as Rome wished it dominated and confirmed him king. He additionally restored to Herod the land Cleopatra had taken.
Herod grew to become the shut buddy of Augustus’s nice minister Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, after whom one in every of his grandsons and one in every of his great-grandsons had been named. Both the emperor and the minister paid him state visits, and Herod twice once more visited Italy. Augustus gave him the oversight of the Cyprus copper mines, with a half share within the earnings. He twice elevated Herod’s territory, within the years 22 and 20 BCE, in order that it got here to incorporate not solely Palestine however elements of what at the moment are the dominion of Jordan to the east of the river and southern Lebanon and Syria. He had meant to bestow the Nabataean kingdom on Herod as nicely, however, by the point that throne fell vacant, Herod’s psychological and bodily deterioration made it unimaginable.
Herod endowed his realm with huge fortresses and splendid cities, of which the 2 biggest had been new, and largely pagan, foundations: the port of Caesarea Palaestinae on the coast between Joppa (Jaffa) and Haifa, which was afterward to change into the capital of Roman Palestine; and Sebaste on the long-desolate web site of historic Samaria. At Herodium within the Judaean desert Herod constructed an ideal palace, which archaeologists in 2007 tentatively recognized as the positioning of his tomb. In Jerusalem he constructed the fortress of Antonia, parts of which can nonetheless be seen beneath the convents on the Via Dolorosa, and a powerful palace (of which half survives within the citadel). His most grandiose creation was the Temple, which he wholly rebuilt. The nice outer court docket, 35 acres (14 hectares) in extent, continues to be seen as Al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf. He additionally embellished international cities—Beirut, Damascus, Antioch, Rhodes—and plenty of cities. Herod patronized the Olympic Games, whose president he grew to become. In his personal kingdom he couldn't give full rein to his love of magnificence, for worry of offending the Pharisees, the main faction of Judaism, with whom he was all the time in battle as a result of they regarded him as a foreigner. Herod undoubtedly noticed himself not merely because the patron of grateful pagans but in addition because the protector of Jewry exterior of Palestine, whose Gentile hosts he did all in his energy to conciliate.
Unfortunately, there was a darkish and merciless streak in Herod’s character that confirmed itself more and more as he grew older. His psychological instability, furthermore, was fed by the intrigue and deception that went on inside his family. Despite his affection for Mariamne, he was vulnerable to violent assaults of jealousy; his sister Salome (to not be confused along with her great-niece, Herodias’s daughter Salome) made good use of his pure suspicions and poisoned his thoughts in opposition to his spouse so as to wreck the union. In the tip Herod murdered Mariamne, her two sons, her brother, her grandfather, and her mom, a lady of the vilest stamp who had usually aided his sister Salome’s schemes. Besides Doris and Mariamne, Herod had eight different wives and had youngsters by six of them. He had 14 youngsters.
In his final years Herod suffered from arteriosclerosis. He needed to repress a revolt, grew to become concerned in a quarrel along with his Nabataean neighbours, and at last misplaced the favour of Augustus. He was in nice ache and in psychological and bodily dysfunction. He altered his will 3 times and at last disinherited and killed his firstborn, Antipater. The slaying, shortly earlier than his loss of life, of the infants of Bethlehem was wholly per the disarray into which he had fallen. After an unsuccessful try at suicide, Herod died. His remaining testomony offered that, topic to Augustus’s sanction, his realm can be divided amongst his sons: Archelaus must be king of Judaea and Samaria, with Philip and Antipas sharing the rest as tetrarchs.
