Since tonight is Christmas Eve, I thought I might pass along this (sort of) Christmas-related National Geographic article about the King Herod from the Christian gospels.
The article centers around recent archeologist's excavations that have shed some new light on Herod as a person, his political career and his affect on life in Judea at the beginning of the Common Era:
An astute and generous ruler, a brilliant general, and one of the most imaginative and energetic builders of the ancient world, Herod guided his kingdom to new prosperity and power. Yet today he is best known as the sly and murderous monarch of Matthew's Gospel, who slaughtered every male infant in Bethlehem in an unsuccessful attempt to kill the newborn Jesus, the prophesied King of the Jews.
Apparently, even soon after his death and before the rise of Christianity, he was hated by a significant part of populace of Judea:
The condition of the sarcophagi fragments confirm that Herod remained vilified even in death: Hammer marks reveal that the sarcophagi were intentionally destroyed. The one made of pink limestone received particularly savage treatment, and was broken into hundreds of pieces. This damage apparently occurred about 70 years after Herod's death, when Jewish fighters occupied Herodium during two brief, ill-fated rebellions, called the First and Second Jewish Revolts, against the besieging Romans. "They viewed Herod as a Roman collaborator, a traitor to the faith and political independence of the Jews,"...."They weren't just looting. This was revenge."
Though, with final requests like the following, that's not all that surprising:
During his last illness he devised a scheme to plunge the entire kingdom into mourning when he died, ordering his army to imprison a crowd of leading Judaean citizens in the hippodrome in Jericho, and to massacre them when his death was announced.
Clearly, not someone you would want to sit down and have a beer with.
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