Who Was King Herod?
History has seen the rise and fall of countless tyrants, but there are very few whose names have become as infamous as that of Herod the Great, King of Judea.
Those familiar with the Bible can recall the gospel of Matthew, 2, 16–18, where Matthew remembers that the old King of the Jews, Herod, paranoid that the new Messiah is about to be born, has his magi found out the location where the child was to be born, then ordered his soldiers to murder every boy aged under two there, in Bethlehem.
This act of infanticide against the Son of God was what made Herod unforgettable for the next two thousand years, but trust me, there’s a lot more to the man than just being a baby-murdering tyrant.
Early life
Born around 73 BC, Herod was the younger son of an official called Antipater. Though Antipater and his family were living in the Hasmonean Kingdom of Judea, a kingdom that had become independent of the Macedonian-Greek Seleucid dynasty in the mid-2nd century BC.
At the time Herod was born, the Middle East was quite a chaotic place. From the 540s to the 330s, the region was ruled by the Persian Empire, but the brilliant young Macedonian general Alexander the Great conquered the empire in a lightning campaign.
