Herod Antipas

When Herod the Great died in 4 BCE, his will divided the kingdom among three surviving sons, subject to Roman ratification. Augustus confirmed the division but withheld the royal title Herod himself had held, giving Antipas the lesser rank of tetrarch over Galilee and Perea while his brothers Archelaus and Philip took Judea and the northeastern territories. Antipas ruled his tetrarchy for over four decades, longer than any other Herodian, rebuilding Sepphoris after a revolt at the start of his reign and, around 20 CE, founding a new capital on the Sea of Galilee that he named Tiberias for the reigning emperor, built in part over an old burial ground that made it ritually unclean to observant Jews and slow to attract Jewish settlement.

Antipas's downfall grew from his second marriage. He divorced the daughter of the Nabataean king Aretas IV to marry Herodias, the wife of his own half brother, a match Jewish law treated as unlawful while both former spouses lived. The jilted Aretas defeated Antipas in a border war around 36 CE that Josephus reports many Jews read as divine punishment for his treatment of John the Baptist. Ambition finally cost Antipas his tetrarchy: in 39 CE, urged on by Herodias, he travelled to Rome to request the royal title his nephew Agrippa I had just received, and Caligula instead stripped him of his territory and exiled him to Gaul, where Herodias chose to join him rather than accept a pardon offered to her alone.

Antipas appears in the Gospels chiefly through two episodes he does not narrate himself. Mark and Matthew report that he had John the Baptist arrested for publicly condemning his marriage to Herodias, and that Herodias's daughter, unnamed in the text but identified from Josephus as Salome, danced at his birthday feast and was rewarded with John's head on a platter after Herodias told her what to ask for. Josephus, writing independently and without the Gospels' interest in Herodias's role, gives a different immediate cause, reporting that Antipas had John killed at the fortress of Machaerus out of fear that his popularity with the crowds might tip into rebellion. The two accounts are not easily reconciled into one sequence of events, and most historians treat them as complementary rather than contradictory, a private grievance and a political anxiety reinforcing each other.

Luke's Gospel alone places Antipas in the Passion narrative, reporting that Pilate, on learning Jesus was a Galilean and so under Antipas's jurisdiction, sent him to Antipas, who was in Jerusalem for Passover, questioned him, had his soldiers mock him, and returned him to Pilate without passing judgment, an episode Luke reads as reconciling two rulers who had been enemies. Jesus is elsewhere reported calling Antipas a fox, a term of contempt rather than respect, in response to a warning that Antipas wanted him dead. Neither Gospel episode appears in Josephus, whose interest in Antipas ends with the Aretas war and the exile.