Herodian Kingdom

King by a vote

Drafted from Richardson, Studies on Personalities of the New Testament (1996)formation

In the winter of 40 BC the Roman senate voted Herod king of the Jews. Antony proposed it, Octavian supported it, the vote was unanimous, and the two of them walked him up to the Capitol between them to sacrifice and to deposit the decree in the treasury.

He held none of the territory. The Parthians had overrun Syria and installed a Hasmonean in Jerusalem; Herod had escaped with his family to Masada and then to Rome to ask for help for his brother-in-law, and had come away with a kingship he had not asked for and would have to conquer. It took him three years.

A right conferred, and nothing else

Herod's claim to rule rested on a grant from an external sovereign, and on nothing else at all.

Consider what was not available to him. Descent from the old royal line was out: he was an Idumaean commoner whose grandfather had been a temple official at best, whose family had been Jewish for two generations because a Hasmonean king conquered Idumaea and imposed the law, and whose opponents said for fifty years that this did not count. Priestly sanction was out — he was not a priest and could not be, and the high priesthood he appointed and removed at will. A claim on some predecessor's own title was out — he took none as his ground. And conquest describes how he got Jerusalem, not why he was entitled to it in the first place; he had been king for three years before the siege.

What he had was the vote. The Latin formula for what it made him was rex socius et amicus populi Romani, a king who was an ally and friend of the Roman people, and Herod's account of himself never left it.

It is the same arrangement the Arab client kings of late antiquity held five centuries later — the Jafnids on the Roman frontier, the Nasrids on the Persian — and it has the same weakness in every case. A right conferred can be withdrawn, and its holder spends his reign making sure that the sovereign who conferred it does not want to.

This is not the first record entered with the value; the Nasrid page came first. It is the case the argument should have been made from.

The other half of the title

King of the Jews, and Herod meant both words.

He was a Roman client and he was also the ruler of a Jewish kingdom, and Richardson's book makes its argument in its subtitle: the two were a single arrangement rather than a contradiction managed. Herod built temples to Augustus at Caesarea, Sebaste and Panias, in the parts of his kingdom that were not Jewish, and did not put one anywhere that was. He struck coins with no human image for circulation in Judaea. He rebuilt the Temple on a scale nobody had attempted and did not enter the parts of it he was not entitled to enter. He sent his sons to Rome to be educated and married a Hasmonean.

It is a career of holding two audiences at once, and the reason it is legible in this much detail is Josephus, who used Nicolaus of Damascus — Herod's own court historian — and then wrote against him. Very few ancient states are visible through a hostile source drawing on an official one.

Forced to plough

Drafted from Josephus, The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus (1895)expansion

Herod's kingdom grew the way a client king's kingdom grows: the emperor gave him places, and expected results.

Josephus describes one of the transfers and what followed, and it is the clearest statement anywhere of what Rome thought a client was for.

Augustus took Trachonitis — the lava country south-east of Damascus, broken, defensible and inhabited by people who lived by raiding their neighbours — away from its previous holder and added it to Herod's territory.

The inhabitants, Josephus writes, now had not power to rob, but were forced to plough the land and to live quietly, which was a thing they did not like; and when they did take the trouble, the ground did not produce much fruit for them anyway.

The reputation

Herod would not let them go back to raiding, and Josephus says this procured him a great reputation for his care.

That sentence is the transaction in miniature. Rome had a lawless district on a provincial frontier and no wish to garrison it. It handed the district to a king who would suppress the raiding at his own expense, using his own troops, and who would be commended for it. What Herod got was territory and standing. What Augustus got was a quiet border and no legion tied down.

What happened when he left

The arrangement's weakness showed the moment he was out of the country.

Herod sailed for Rome — it was the voyage on which he went to accuse his son Alexander and commend another son to Caesar's protection — and the Trachonites put about a report that he was dead, revolted, and went back to robbing their neighbours.

His commanders put them down in his absence. About forty of the principal raiders, frightened by what had happened to those already taken, left the country altogether and went into Arabia, where the Nabataean minister Syllaeus took them in and gave them a stronghold to live in.

Josephus adds the detail that explains why: Syllaeus had wanted to marry Herod's sister Salome and had been refused.

The shape of the thing

So the expansion of Herod's kingdom looks like this. An emperor reassigns a district. The new king stops the inhabitants living the way they have always lived and makes them farm ground that will not carry them. They wait for him to be away, spread a rumour that he is dead, and start again. The survivors go over the border to a neighbouring court, which shelters them out of a private grievance about a marriage.

None of it is conquest and all of it is work. A client kingdom was a subcontract, and Herod was good at it — which is why he kept being given more, and why what he did with the money is the part worth looking at.

The building

Drafted from Richardson, Studies on Personalities of the New Testament (1996)peak

The list is unreasonable for a kingdom this size. Caesarea Maritima, a city and an artificial deep-water harbour built into open sea with hydraulic concrete shipped from Italy. Sebaste, a rebuilt Samaria. Masada, Herodium, Machaerus and a chain of desert fortress-palaces with cisterns, baths and swimming pools. Jericho's winter palaces. Aqueducts. The Antonia. Public building at Athens, Rhodes, Antioch, Berytus, Damascus and Nicopolis, and a subsidy to the Olympic games.

And the Temple, begun about 20 BC: the Second Temple rebuilt on an artificial platform that doubled the enclosure to something like fourteen hectares, the largest sacred precinct in the Roman empire. The work outlasted him by decades and was finished about six years before Titus burned it. Its retaining wall is still standing, and is probably the most visited thing any polity of that century built.

What paid for it

Herod had three sources of money, and two of them are unusual enough to be worth setting out.

Land tax is the ordinary one: an agricultural kingdom taxed agriculturally, and Josephus preserves the figures the sons' territories were assessed at when the kingdom was divided.

Then there is the balsam, held as an outright royal monopoly. The groves at Jericho and Ein Gedi produced a resin that grew nowhere else in the world, was used in medicine and perfume, and was worth extraordinary sums; the kings held them as a royal possession. Cleopatra had extracted them from Herod and leased them back to him, which tells you what they were worth to both of them.

The strangest line in the accounts is mining. Josephus has Augustus grant Herod the lease of the copper mines of Cyprus at half the revenue. The king of Judaea drew income from extraction in a province he did not rule, by the gift of the emperor who had made him king — which is his whole position compressed into a bookkeeping entry.

What it was for

Richardson's reading is that the building programme is the argument. A client king is retained for as long as he is more useful than a province, and Herod spent his reign making the case in stone: harbours and roads that served Roman trade, fortresses that held a difficult frontier, cities named for the emperor, and a Temple that kept the population of his own kingdom occupied with something other than him.

It worked for thirty-three years, which is longer than most eastern client kingdoms managed, and it is the same calculation the Nabataean record in this region describes from the other side of the Dead Sea. Both kingdoms lasted as long as they were worth more to Rome intact than converted.

Ten years after Herod died, Judaea was a province.

The eagle and the hippodrome

Drafted from Josephus, The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus (1895)contraction

Josephus gives the last months of Herod's reign at length, and the two scenes he chooses are the ones the dynasty never lived down.

The first is the eagle. Herod had set a great golden eagle over the principal gate of the Temple. Two teachers of the law with a following of young men persuaded their pupils that the image was contrary to the law and that to pull it down would be a pious act even if it cost them their lives — and while the king lay ill and a rumour went round that he was dead, they let themselves down from the roof on ropes in the middle of the day and cut the eagle to pieces with axes in front of the crowd. The captain of the Temple guard arrested about forty of them. They did not deny it. Brought before the king, they said they had obeyed a better law than his and were glad. Herod, carried out on a litter because he could no longer stand, had the teachers and the men who had actually cut the image burned alive, and deposed the high priest for having let it happen.

The second is what he ordered from his sickbed. Josephus says Herod knew the country would celebrate his death, and could not bear it; so he had the notable men of the whole nation summoned to Jericho, shut them into the hippodrome, and gave his sister and her husband an instruction: the moment he was dead, they were to surround the place with soldiers and kill everyone in it, so that every family in Judaea would be in mourning on the day of his funeral whether it wanted to be or not.

He died. They let the men go home. Josephus records both halves — the order and the refusal — and it is the refusal that is the more useful fact, because it says what the household thought of the instruction.

Between the two scenes Josephus puts the illness, in a catalogue of symptoms so specific that physicians have been diagnosing it ever since: a slow fever, an intolerable itching over the whole surface of the body, continual pains in the bowels, swollen feet, convulsions, difficulty breathing except upright. He was taken to the warm springs across the Jordan and lowered into a bath of oil, and came out of it apparently dead, and revived. He tried to stab himself with a knife he was using to cut an apple and was stopped by a cousin. The cry raised in the palace at that moment reached his eldest son Antipater in the prison below, who offered his gaolers money to let him out — and the gaoler reported it, and Herod, hearing of it, had Antipater executed at once. He died five days later.

Josephus is not an impartial witness of the family and says so about other things, but he is not inventing the pattern. He has already given the strangling of the two sons by the Hasmonean princess, and their mother's execution before them, and Herod's own remorse afterwards. What the last months add is the direction of travel: a king who could no longer tell a religious protest from a rebellion, and who assumed at the end that his subjects' grief would have to be manufactured.

The kingdom he left had temples, harbours, a rebuilt Jerusalem, and a fortress at every strategic point in the country, and Rome thought well enough of him to confirm his will in most particulars. Within ten years of his death the Judaean half of it had been put under a Roman governor at the request of its own inhabitants.

The will

Drafted from Richardson, Studies on Personalities of the New Testament (1996)contraction

Herod had ten wives and a great many children and he killed three of his sons. Alexander and Aristobulus, the two by Mariamme the Hasmonean, were strangled at Sebaste in 7 BC. Antipater, the eldest, was executed five days before Herod's own death. The Augustan joke Macrobius preserves — that it is better to be Herod's pig than his son — depends on the pig being safe because a Jew would not eat it.

He rewrote his will at least six times. The last version divided the kingdom between three surviving sons: Archelaus to have Judaea, Samaria and Idumaea with the royal title, Antipas Galilee and Peraea, Philip the territories north-east of the Sea of Galilee.

Ratified elsewhere

It did not take effect on his death. It went to Rome.

Archelaus and Antipas both sailed to argue it before Augustus. A delegation of fifty Judaeans went too, and asked for something neither brother had proposed: no king at all, and incorporation into the province of Syria under Roman governors, on the grounds that they had had enough of this family. Josephus says eight thousand Jews of Rome turned out to support them.

Augustus heard all of it and issued a settlement that was mostly the will with alterations. The three sons got their territories. Archelaus got Judaea but not the title of king — he was made ethnarch, with the kingship held out as a possibility if he behaved.

So the succession had two steps and both were required. The king designated, in writing, repeatedly. And the designation was an application rather than a decision, because the office had been conferred by Rome and only Rome could confer it again.

Meanwhile, in the months the hearing took, the country rose. There were risings in Judaea, Galilee and Peraea, a former royal slave and a shepherd both declared themselves king, the Jerusalem garrison was besieged, and Varus came down from Syria with two legions and crucified two thousand people restoring order.

Ten years

Archelaus lasted until AD 6, when a joint delegation of Jews and Samaritans — who agreed about very little else — went to Rome to complain about him. Augustus deposed him, exiled him to Gaul, and annexed Judaea, Samaria and Idumaea as a Roman province under a prefect.

The assessment for taxation that followed is the census of Quirinius, and it produced the revolt of Judas the Galilean. Josephus treats that movement, and the philosophy he says Judas founded, as the seed of the war sixty years later.

So the Judaean core of this kingdom was a client kingdom for forty-three years and a province for the rest, with one interruption: Agrippa I, Herod's grandson, held the whole of his grandfather's territory from AD 41 to 44 because he had been in Rome and had been useful to Claudius on the day Caligula was murdered. He died suddenly at Caesarea after three years, in a scene Josephus and the Acts of the Apostles both describe and describe similarly, and it reverted.

The kingdom was therefore absorbed in instalments rather than conquered: three absorptions across eighty-six years, each an administrative act taken on the death or removal of a client, and no campaign fought for any of them.

From the besiegers' camp

Drafted from Smallwood, Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 20 (1976)end

The war began in 66 and Titus took Jerusalem in the summer of 70. Herod's Temple — begun about 20 BC, finished around AD 64 — burned.

Agrippa II, the last of the family to hold territory, spent the war on the Roman side. He had tried to prevent it: Josephus gives him a long speech to the crowd in Jerusalem in 66 arguing that Rome could not be beaten, listing the nations that had tried, and it is a set piece rather than a transcript but the position is certainly his. When it failed he sent two thousand cavalry to the Roman army, was wounded at the siege of Gamla, and was with Titus at Jerusalem. His sister Berenice became Titus's mistress and nearly his wife.

He kept his northern territories for another twenty-two years and died about 92, and Rome took them.

The shape of the record

A dynasty founded by a Roman vote to make Judaea governable spent its last act watching Rome destroy the thing it had built, from the winning side, and was then quietly wound up.

What ended, and what was ended

There are two endings here and they do not coincide.

The dynasty was absorbed the way client dynasties are: a territory at a time, on the death or removal of its holder, with no campaign fought against it. Agrippa II kept his districts through the war and after it, and died childless.

The thing that ended in 70 was not the dynasty. It was the Temple, the priesthood, the pilgrimage and the sacrificial cult — the whole apparatus of a religion practised in one building — and Judaism afterwards is what was rebuilt without them. A client kingdom's administrative dissolution and the destruction of a temple happened in the same country within a generation of each other, and only one of them is still consequential.

The pair

The pairing between this dynasty and the Hasmoneans is closer than a succession. The Hasmonean record's single influence count is Judaism carried into Idumaea by John Hyrcanus in 112 BC — and that campaign is why there was a Herod at all. His family were Jews because of it, and the charge his enemies pressed for fifty years was that being a Jew that way did not count. The one lasting thing the Hasmoneans did produced the dynasty that extinguished them, seventy-five years later.

The two houses also gave opposite answers to the same question. The Hasmoneans had no lineage and wrote themselves a constitution: an assembly of the people and the priests confirmed Simon and his heirs. Herod had no lineage and got a Roman vote. Election and appointment, in the same city, a century apart, both addressed to the identical problem of ruling Judaea without being descended from anybody entitled to.

Neither answer survived contact with the empire next door, and the Temple outlasted both dynasties by six years.

A daughter named Berenice

Drafted from Josephus, The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus (1895)afterlife

Herod's kingdom was not inherited by anybody. It was broken into pieces at his death and the pieces were afterwards handed round among his descendants by Roman emperors, individually, by letter, as favours — and taken back the same way.

Josephus records one such transaction as a matter of routine administration, and the routineness is the point.

In the twelfth year of his reign Claudius bestowed on Agrippa the younger the tetrarchy that had been Philip's, and Batanaea, and added Trachonitis to it, with Abila, which had been the tetrarchy of Lysanias. And he took Chalcis away from him, which Agrippa had governed for four years.

Three districts granted, one withdrawn, in a single sentence, by an emperor who had never been there.

What the family did with what it had

The other thing Josephus records in the same passage is what the Herodian house had become useful for, which was marriages.

Agrippa gave his sister Drusilla to Azizus, king of Emesa — on condition that he be circumcised. She had previously been promised to Epiphanes, son of King Antiochus, who had undertaken to come over to the Jewish religion in order to marry her and then declined to go through with it, and the match had fallen apart on exactly that point.

He gave his other sister Mariamne to Archelaus son of Helcias, to whom their father had betrothed her.

And from that marriage, Josephus notes, came a daughter, whose name was Berenice.

A dynasty as a clearing house

Read those two paragraphs together and the position is exact.

The Herods no longer ruled a kingdom; they held whatever assortment of tetrarchies the current emperor had assigned them. What they still possessed that nobody else in the region did was a royal Jewish pedigree combined with complete familiarity with Rome — which made them the natural intermediaries between the Jewish population and the empire, and made their daughters valuable to the small kings of Syria and Commagene, for whom marrying one meant acquiring a connection at the imperial court.

The price of the connection was circumcision, negotiated in advance, and at least one prospective bridegroom found it too high once the moment came.

The end of it

The last of them, Agrippa II, sat with the Roman army outside Jerusalem in 70 and watched the Temple his great-grandfather had built come down. He kept his districts, died childless around the end of the century, and the family stops.

Herod had spent forty years buying a place for his house in the Roman world, successfully, by being more useful than any alternative. What his descendants inherited was the usefulness rather than the kingdom, and when the thing they were useful for stopped existing — a Jewish population with a Temple, requiring management — so did they.