Herod the Great

The temple the exiles rebuilt after the return from Babylon was modest, and by Herod's time it was nearly five centuries old. Around 20 BCE he began not a repair but a reconstruction on a scale nothing in the region matched. The Temple Mount platform was roughly doubled by building enormous retaining walls out from the natural hill and filling behind them, producing an artificial esplanade of about fourteen hectares, the largest sacred precinct of the ancient world. Josephus reports that the sanctuary itself was rebuilt by priests trained as masons so that no unconsecrated person entered the holy area, and finished in about eighteen months, while the surrounding courts and porticoes took eight years and work on the complex continued for decades after his death.

Herod's political problem shapes the whole project. He was an Idumaean, from a people forcibly converted to Judaism only a generation or two earlier, installed by Rome after a siege of Jerusalem, and married into the Hasmonean house whose surviving members he then killed. He could not be a legitimate king in the eyes of many of his subjects, and the temple was the most conspicuous answer available: whatever else was said of him, he had built the house of God more magnificently than Solomon.

Everything above the platform was destroyed by Roman forces in 70 CE. The retaining walls remain, and their western face is the Western Wall, the holiest accessible site of Judaism, so that the most venerated surviving structure in Jewish practice is the substructure of a building project by a king whom the tradition largely despised. The lower courses of enormous drafted-margin ashlars, some weighing many tons, are Herodian work.

Josephus, who is the source for almost everything known about the reign, describes a king increasingly consumed by suspicion of his own household. Herod had his Hasmonean wife Mariamne executed in 29 BCE on a charge of adultery, along with her mother, her brother the young high priest Aristobulus, and her grandfather. Later he had two of his sons by her, Alexander and Aristobulus, strangled at Sebaste in 7 BCE, and his eldest son Antipater put to death five days before his own death in 4 BCE. The Roman emperor Augustus is reported to have remarked in Greek that it was safer to be Herod's pig than his son, a pun that works because a Jewish household would not slaughter a pig.

That documented record is the background against which the second chapter of the gospel of Matthew places its account of the killing of the male children of Bethlehem under two years old after magi from the east enquire about a newborn king. The episode appears in no other gospel and in no other source, and Josephus, who catalogues Herod's crimes at length and had no reason to protect his memory, does not mention it.

Most historians therefore treat the massacre as unhistorical, a narrative constructed to place Jesus in parallel with Moses, who also escapes a king's slaughter of infants. A minority argue that Bethlehem was a small village where such a killing might have involved perhaps a dozen children and would not have registered in a chronicle of a reign full of larger atrocities. What both sides agree on is that the story was told about Herod because it fitted him, and that the fit was earned.