Who was Herod?

Perowne, Stewart

Herod the Great: His Life and Times.

New York, Dorsett Press,1956

Review by Adrian Peetoom

This may be an old book, but it is a valuable one for whom “Herod” arouses curiosity. After all, this man played a role in Matthew’s account of the birth and early life of Jesus, by having all babies in Bethlehem killed. But what kind of a man was he?

It turns out, a powerful and attractive figure who played prominent roles in the politics of that region for many decades. Friend and confident of a number of Roman emperors. Entrepreneur, politician, statesman, general, fighter, lover.  Above all a builder, whose architectural achievements were famous, and whose legacies can still be found both in Jerusalem and elsewhere.  By reading this book one gets a solid grounding in the politics current in the decades prior to the birth of Jesus. Ironically, as he was  born a descendant of Ishmael (an Arab, in other words) but made his fame in Israel.

 Herod did his level best to become a good Jew, and he managed to gain the trust of the Sadducees and also of many of the ordinary folks of the region.  Only the Pharisees consistently opposed him.  This book also confirms the observations by many authors, namely that within the bosom of Israel always lurked the divide between the centrality of the Temple (Aaron and his descendants, the Sadducees) on the one hand, and Moses and the Torah (the Pharisees) on the other.  Of course Jesus was party to neither, and despised by both for his relativizing of both when compared to the central command to “love God and love one’s neighbor as oneself.”

The book records how Herod became a madman during the last ten years of his long life, his body and mind destroyed by too much food and too much alcohol, and perhaps venereal disease.  Even so, that very Christian love helps us recognize that in essence this was a prominent and in some ways attractive figure, child of his time but one with vision and often having the welfare of his underlings in mind.

Reading this book also made me conscious of the radicality of Jesus’s preaching of the Kingdom of God into a world of established power structures which considered ordinary human beings as fodder for slavery, taxes, labour and exploitation only. In his own way Herod tried to be kind and charming, but he was an Oriental despot just the same. He didn’t like the threat of Jesus as a baby, and his descendant Herods wouldn’t like Jesus as an adult.