Herod the Great

When did Herod live?

Herod the Great is dated c. 73 BC – March/April 4 BC in the archive, which places Herod in the Apostolic Age (AD 4–70). The dating is traditional and approximate; the archive marks it as uncertain rather than fixing a year the sources do not give.

Which early sources mention Herod?

Herod the Great is named in 12 primary-source passages catalogued here, drawn from Matthew, Luke, Flavius Josephus and —. Every passage is quoted from a named public-domain translation, earliest first.

Where was Herod from?

The archive associates Herod the Great with Jerusalem · Jericho · Caesarea Maritima · Masada · Herodium.

Who were Herod’s contemporaries?

The archive links Herod the Great to 8 other figures, including Herod Antipas, Herod Archelaus, Mary, the Mother of Jesus and Joseph the Carpenter. Each connection is drawn from a source that places them together, not from inference.

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him. When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.

Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.

There was in the days of Herod, the king of Judaea, a certain priest named Zacharias, of the course of Abia: and his wife was of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elisabeth.

[Josephus is the source for nearly all that is known of Herod, and the archive holds his account. He records the executions within the royal house, the burning of the men who pulled down the golden eagle from the Temple gate, the eclipse of the moon that fell in that season — the datum on which the year of Herod’s death is usually fixed — and the last illness at Jericho. **He does not report the killing of the children at Bethlehem**, which is attested by Matthew alone — stated here rather than implying corroboration where there is none. Josephus’s account is selective toward the royal house and the Temple, and a small number of deaths in a village would not have entered it; see the profile.]

Josephus, *Antiquities of the Jews* — held in this library. English: William Whiston (1737), public domain.

[The legend is Greek and reads ΗΡΩΔΟΥ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ — **“of King Herod”** — never Hebrew or Aramaic, unlike the Hasmonean kings he displaced. The types are deliberately **aniconic**: an anchor, a double cornucopia with a caduceus between the horns, a tripod, a ceremonial helmet with a star between plumes, a poppy head, a shield. No man and no animal appears on any of them. One early series is dated — ΒΑΣΙΛ ΗΡΩΔ ΕΤ Γ, “King Herod, year 3” — which is the only dated Herodian issue and the closest thing to a document he signed. The consequence for this archive is exact. **Herod put no portrait on his own coinage, so no likeness of him was ever struck**, and none survives from any other source. He is the best physically attested figure in the corpus and there is no image of his face — a king who built in stone on a scale nobody has matched here, and who left no picture of himself because his subjects would not have accepted one.]

Objects. Herod struck bronze only — silver and gold were an imperial prerogative — in denominations from the half-prutah to eight prutot. Catalogued by Ya‘akov Meshorer, *A Treasury of Jewish Coins* (2001), nos. 44–74. Specimens are common and held by most major collections; this archive has not yet mirrored a photograph of one, and the picture queue records it as wanted.

[The *War* catalogues what the *Antiquities* only summarises: the Temple, the three towers of the upper city, the palace at Jerusalem, Herodium, Masada, Machaerus, Antipatris, Phasaelis, the rebuilding of Samaria as Sebaste, and gifts to cities outside his kingdom — Tyre, Sidon, Damascus, Antioch, Rhodes, and the Olympic games. **He built more than any king of Judaea before or after him**, and it is the reason his name is attached to so much standing masonry.]

Not held in this library. Josephus, *The Jewish War*, c. AD 75; the William Whiston translation of 1737 is in the public domain.

[Josephus gives the building of the Temple its own long account: Herod took down the second Temple in the eighteenth year of his reign and raised a new one on an enlarged platform, **a thousand wagons to carry the stones and ten thousand skilled workmen**, the priests themselves trained as masons for the inner courts so that no layman entered them. The sanctuary was finished in a year and a half; the cloisters and outer courts took eight years more. It is this platform, not the building, that survives.]

Josephus, *Antiquities of the Jews* — held in this library. English: William Whiston (1737), public domain.

[Josephus describes Herod building a harbour on a coast that had none — **blocks of stone fifty feet long sunk in twenty fathoms of water** to make a mole against the south-west wind — and naming the city Caesarea for Augustus. Underwater survey has since found the hydraulic concrete and the sunken breakwaters where he says they were.]

Josephus, *Antiquities of the Jews* — held in this library. English: William Whiston (1737), public domain.

[Josephus reports that Herod burned the men who had pulled down the golden eagle from the Temple gate, and that **on that same night there was an eclipse of the moon**. He then describes the last illness at Jericho, the execution of Antipater five days before the end, and the death itself. The eclipse is the one astronomical fixed point in the whole account, and it is why the archive dates his death to the spring of 4 BC.]

Josephus, *Antiquities of the Jews* — held in this library. English: William Whiston (1737), public domain.

[[DIS AUGUSTI]S TIBERIEVM / [PO]NTIVS PILATVS / [PRAEF]ECTVS IVDA[EA]E — a block reused as a step in the theatre at Caesarea, naming Pilate as prefect of Judaea. **Pilate’s existence had been doubted** on the ground that no inscription named him.]

Object. Cited here because it was found in the city Herod founded, and because it is the archive’s standing example of an argument from silence being overturned by a stone. Held as evidence on the profiles of Pontius Pilate and of Jesus of Nazareth.

[The stones are laid without mortar, dressed with a flat boss and a shallow margin, and the largest of them — in the western wall of the platform — is estimated at **over 500 tonnes**. Nothing else attributed to Herod can be stood in front of. This is why the archive treats the argument from Josephus’s silence about Bethlehem with care: what Herod did at scale is unusually well evidenced, and what he did in a village is not the kind of thing the record preserves either way.]

Object and site. The platform, its retaining walls and the courses of drafted-margin ashlars are the largest surviving physical evidence for any figure in this archive. Robinson’s Arch and Wilson’s Arch, the southern steps and the Western Wall are all Herodian work; the sanctuary that stood on it was destroyed in AD 70.

[A cone-shaped artificial hill with a fortified palace inside its summit, a lower palace, a pool with an island, and a theatre with a painted reception room. **It is the only building Herod named after himself**, and Josephus says he was carried here from Jericho in a funeral procession of the whole army. The sarcophagus found in 2007 had been deliberately broken into hundreds of pieces — consistent with the destruction of the site during the revolt of AD 66–73.]

Object and site. Josephus names Herodium as the place of Herod’s burial (*Jewish War* I.673); Ehud Netzer of the Hebrew University identified the mausoleum and a smashed sarcophagus of reddish limestone on the north-eastern slope in 2007, after thirty-five years of searching the site. The identification rests on the location, the date and the quality of the work rather than on an inscription, and is not universally accepted.