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The Hasmonean dynasty fell victim to a toxic confluence of internal dissent and Roman might. In 63 BCE, in response to internal Hasmonean battles over succession to the throne, Roman general Pompey sacked Jerusalem and deposed the Hasmonean kings. He later reestablished Hasmonean leadership with Hyrcanus II as high priest, now significantly stripped of his royal title king (basileos) and much reduced in scope and power. Chaos prevailed in the region in the middle decades of the 1st century BCE, exacerbated by the years-long Roman civil wars leading up to and in the aftermath of the assassination of Caesar in 44 BCE. Roman triumvir Marc Antony was based in Egypt and closely allied with Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra. They shared interests in Judea, which fell into their sphere of influence. Octavian was expanding his power base from the west. From the east the Parthians were looking for an opportunity to exploit this confusion to claim the rich territories of Judea for themselves.

Herod was an ambitious Jewish courtier who advanced amidst and because of this chaos. He was the son of Antipater I, a Jew of Idumean stock, whose father was forcibly converted under Hasmonean ethnarch and High priest John Hyrcanus. Antipater had effectively run the country for the Hasmonean weakling Hyrcanus II, the High priest and later titular head of the Hasmonean dynasty (ethnarch) even after it was subsumed under Rome. Like his father, Herod was a savvy political operator who understood that Rome was vital not only to his own success but to the stability and prosperity of Judea. He began his career in 47 BCE as a governor of the Galilee, a hotbed of banditry—allowing Herod to prove himself tough on crime. His successes there and his carefully cultivated relationships with local Roman officials led to the expansion of his realms.

In 40 BCE, simmering Jewish resentment against Roman rule propelled the ambitions of Hyrcanus II’s nephew Antigonus II, who, backed by the Parthians and popular with Judean Jews, rose to claim the Hasmonean throne. This apparent set back, one that left his brother dead and patron maimed, was Herod’s big break. Herod fled to Rome before the encroaching Parthian troops, and in that same year, backed by Marc Antony who recognized in him a strong ally in the region, was named king of Judea by the Roman senate (Rex socius et amicus populi Romani). His prime aim was ousting the Parthian-backed Antigonus and protecting Roman hegemony in the region. Herod returned to Judea in 39 and defeated Antigonus, whom Antony then executed in 37 BCE.⁵ Herod was now king of the Jews in more than just name.

As a client king, Herod was part of a recognized system of Roman rule of subordinated peoples. He had autonomy to rule more or less as he wished but had no freedom to execute his own foreign policy or keep a large standing army.

By most measures Herod was a successful minor potentate. Vitally, he stabilized the region. Indeed, he was so effective that when Antony and Cleopatra fell to Octavian (soon to become the emperor Caesar Augustus) at Actium in 31 BCE, Herod convinced Octavian to keep him in power. He argued that his loyalty to Rome was proven, his effectiveness a fact, and his raw ambition should be enough to satisfy Octavian that he would fight on his behalf no less than he had for Antony. Josephus writes in his Jewish War:

I [Herod] share Antony’s defeat, and with his fall I relinquish the diadem of kingship. I come to you [Octavian] with honesty as my hope of salvation and trusting that what you will want to examine is not whose friend I have been, but how good a friend I was.« To this Caesar replied: »Well, consider yourself safe, and your position as king now more secure. The premium you set on friendship enhances your right to rule a nation […] I have the brightest hopes for the quality I see in you.⁶

In his decades on the throne, Herod made himself both famous and notorious. Domestically, Herod succeeded in expanding the borders of Jewish lands (not through conquest, but through gifts of land from Augustus), and in suppressing the lawlessness and banditry that unsettled it. He executed large-scale building projects, elaborately refurbishing the Jerusalem Temple, erecting magnificent palaces and fortresses—notably Masada, Herodium, and the rebuilt city of Samaria-Sebaste—as well as creating the harbor and port city of Caesarea—a place that would become an exposed Roman nerve center in the region in the century ahead. He also dotted the land with Roman-style theaters, arenas, and markets.

Herod raised the profile of Judea across the greater Roman Empire through generous acts of euergetism. He endowed the Olympic games, among other things, and was by no means restricted by Jewish squeamishnehss about honoring foreign gods:

After all this building, Herod extended examples of his generosity to numerous cities outside his borders. He provided gymnasia for Tripolis, Damascus, and Ptolemais, a wall for Byblus, halls, arcades, temples, and public squares for Berytus [Beirut] and Tyre; and then theatres for Sidon and Damascus, an aqueduct for the coastal city of Laodicea, and for the people of Ascalon baths, grand fountains, and colonnades of remarkable quality and size; and elsewhere he made dedications of parks and green spaces. […] He supplied corn to all who needed it. Time and again he contributed funds for shipbuilding at Rhodes, and when the temple of Apollo there was burnt down he rebuilt a better temple at his own expense.⁷

Conforming to the role of client king in nearly all respects, Herod yet preserved his own ethnic particularity. He seems not to have funded pagan temples in heavily Jewish territories (cf. War 2.266); archaeological excavations of his palaces show evidence that in his Roman-style baths he included Jewish ritual baths (mikvahs); and the kitchenware from the sites suggest that he or members of his household followed Jewish dietary laws.⁸ He was apparently concerned that the family marry according to Jewish custom and blocked the marriage of his sister Salome to the Nabatean Syllaeus because he refused to get circumcised (Ant. 16.225). Yet Josephus depicts Herod as broadly unpopular with Jews, not infrequently intermingling his unorthodox Jewish genealogy (descendent of Idumean converts) and remarks about his brutality. It is hard to know how seriously to read these insinuations; it is not irrelevant in this debate to note that Agrippa I, Herod’s grandson, was embraced fully by Jews as a Jewish king.

Herod was rightly paranoid about Hasmonean traditionalists within the Hasmonean family, who saw him as an upstart who had, along with his father, usurped Hasmonean prerogatives. They fought for decades to oust him and reinstate their own. He may have hoped his marriage to a Hasmonean princess would solidify his local legitimacy, but his union with Mariamme I—granddaughter of Aristobolus II and Hyrcanus II—was a fraught one. Herod struggled to be embraced not only by the royal family—who taunted him for, among other things, being uncouth, uneducated, and using a cheap hair dye (War 1.490)—but by traditional Jews and Hasmonean loyalists alike. Although he desired the imprimatur of the Hasmoneans, he also feared them.

Mariamme’s hatred of him [Herod] was as deep as his love for her. With good reason to hate him for what he had done, and his devotion as her license to speak her mind, she would explicitly bring up against him the business of her grandfather Hyrcanus [whom Herod executed] and her brother Jonathan. Even he, though still a young lad, had been given no mercy by Herod. He was 17 when Herod made him High priest, and then killed him immediately after this appointment—and all because when the boy had donned the priestly vestments and was approaching the altar at one of the festivals, the whole attendant crowd had wept tears of joy. And so the boy was sent by night to Jericho, and there, on instructions, the Gauls drowned him in a swimming pool.⁹

The tragic paranoia and brutality of this scene encapsulates Herod’s bind and the too-blunt force he often used to manage it. To counter Hasmonean resistance, he appointed high priests from families unconnected to the Hasmoneans and systematically dismantled other entrenched and hostile elites. He ignored and may have disbanded the Sanhedrin (a tribunal made up hierocrats), enriching a new aristocracy loyal to him. His personal guard was made up of foreign solders (War 1.397).

Herod’s policies saw short term benefits, but seeded problems that would bloom down the line. For centuries the largely priestly Judean elite had helped to mediate between foreign rulers—Persian, Greek, and Roman—and the less cosmopolitan Jews. The faith instilled by the people in the priesthood and other culturally bilingual elites allowed them to translate between the cultures of Judaism and those of foreigners, they eased the acceptance foreign domination. By empowering a new elite without influence over or legitimacy in the eyes of the Jewish masses, the region lost a vital mechanism for managing conflict.

Regional unrest was often fueled by economics, and the costs of Herod’s expensive ambitions were borne by his increasingly disenfranchised subjects. Another source of unrest, intertwined with economic factors, was cultural insensitivity. While Herod seems to have made many decisions based on Jewish law and practice, his reign’s impact was to overwhelmingly Hellenize the Jewish landscape and so, visibly plight Judea’s troth to Rome.