Martin Goodman - Herod the Great: Jewish King in a Roman World

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0:56Joining us is Martin Goodman to discuss his book, Herod the Great, Jewish King in a Roman World. A little background on Martin for those of you that don't know him. Mr. Goodman is Emeritus Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford and a fellow of the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. His numerous books include A History of Judaism, Roman Jerusalem, The Clash of Ancient Civilizations, and Josephus' The Jewish War, A Biography. Martin, thanks for joining us today. Thank you very much for having me. Awesome. You're joining us from Oxford, obviously, and we have seemed to make a market in great British authors.

1:34So this is very fun and you're keeping us on point and on theme. We always like to start out by asking this question because obviously you have other titles that are around this subject or you've obviously done a lot of your work in this arena. What inspired you to write this book particularly about Herod? Well, the original idea came from the series editors of the Jewish Lives series published by Yale, who've had a lot of biographies of, excellent biographies of Jews over about the last 10 years, most of which have been about Jews of the 19th and 20th centuries. and they were looking to do some more ancient people.

2:20And Herod is one of those Jews from antiquity, about whom a very great deal is known. Well, that's good because I'm kind of old school, old school guy. Let's start with the historians you draw from and who were the authors and what were the texts that you drew from? So the main narrative about Herod comes from the writer Josephus Josephus, who was writing at the end of the first century CE, so writing about 70 to 100 years after the death of Herod. But he wrote at immense length about the life and the rule of Herod in his Jewish Antiquities, which comprised the whole of the history of the Jews from the beginning, which in Josephus' eyes began with the creation of the world because he was fondling the Bible, down to his own day, he had 20 books of which two and a half were devoted to Herod.

3:24And the reason why he had such a huge amount about Herod was that he had access to a primary source, which was the writings of Herod's court historian, a man called Nicolaus of Damascus. who had himself written at length about Herod and whose work was available to Josephus. So the end result of that is that we have far more knowledge about Herod than about any other Jew from antiquity. Who was in power in Judea when Herod was born? And can you explain what the Roman involvement was at that time in Judea, you know, upon his birth? So Herod was born in 73 BCE, and at that time Judea was under the control of the Hasmonean dynasty.

4:16Now the Hasmoneans were priests who had come to power in Judea a century earlier, just under a century earlier at the revolt of the Maccabees. So they were the family of the Maccabees, and they were ruling over Judea very much in the local style, I mean, the style of other kingdoms of the Near East at the time. So, imitating Hellenistic Greek-style kings like the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids up in Syria. And that dynasty was based around the temple in Jerusalem, where the Hasmoneans were the high priests. But Herod's father, Antipater, was a minister of one of the Hasmonean high priests, Hercanus.

5:07And then can you explain where we were at in the Ptolemaic dynasty? I mean, obviously, as our listeners know, you had Alexander the Great, you had his generals, the Ptolemies that followed. And we're not to Cleopatra yet. Can you explain what was going on in the Ptolemaic dynasty at the time? Yes, the Ptolemies, like the other kingdoms which have fallen on after Alexander the Great, were in terminal decline by the time that Herod was born as a result of the push to the east by Rome. So the Romans, based, of course, in a small city, well, by this stage, a larger city in Italy, had conquered the whole of the Western Mediterranean, more or less, by 200 BCE.

5:59it took about another century for them to arrive into Syria. And it's just at the time of Herod's birth that they began to show an interest in the southern Syria and the Levant, the area of Judea. And it was the intervention of the Romans that was causing the decline of these other kingdoms, the Hellenistic kingdoms, but also giving opportunities for small kingdoms like the Hasmoneans to become a local, regional superpower. And you kind of tapped at this, but I think you pointed out in your book at the time, Alexandria was a far more impressive and grand city than Rome at that time, for example.

6:43Oh, yes. So Alexandria's had well over 200 years to get really impressive. Lots of wealth that came from Egypt, not least because the Egyptian agriculture was the only irrigation economy in the Mediterranean world. So it's fantastically wealthy. And the autonomous were really good at spending it on their one city. So that helped, of course. It was all centralized in one place. Yeah, yeah. Were client kings a common practice in 80 to 70 BCE and help our audience understand how these kings were helpful to Rome? Yes, I mean, at the time when Herod was born, the Romans hadn't yet arrived in Judea, so they weren't yet attempting to influence the politics of Judea and of the Hasmodeans.

7:40It's going to happen as he's a child, so during his early teens was the point at which the Romans seriously arrived. and 63 BC was the point at which Pompey the Great conquered Jerusalem and turned Hyrcanus the high priest into a public king, a client king of Rome. Sure. The Romans were completely used to ruling through client kings, meaning friendly kings they called them, allies, who were technically independent, but in practice dependent upon Roman power to retain their power. And their normal practice, and they did this all over their empire, was to recognize one or other member of the existing dynasty who could then rule over that region as a friend of Rome, in effect, on Rome's behalf.

8:45Sure. So what kind of power does that mean there was at Judea economically and militaristically? Once the Romans had decided that they were going to intervene, a local king or local ruler in the case of Hyalcanus the Hasmonean. He wasn't allowed the title of king after Pompey conquered Jerusalem. A local ruler had economic power. Local politics were under his control. He would have an army, but he couldn't use the army outside his realm without permission from Rome. So the Romans kept a close eye on any military activities taken by any of their client friends. What kind of wealth was there when he's being born?

9:44Was there a vast resource? You kind of commented on the agricultural nature of Egypt. Was there that kind of resources present around the time of his birth or did those resources come later? In Judea, the economic resources are nowhere like what you have in Egypt. So Jerusalem is in a very unhelpful place, really, for economic purposes. It's up in the Judean hills on the edge of where the desert starts as you go down towards the Rift Valley and towards Jericho and the Dead Sea. So the only reason why Jerusalem ever became a major city and the capital of the Hasmonean dynasty and eventually Herod's capital was because of its religious importance.

10:44and the site there of a temple. And otherwise, it's, as I said, a very unhelpful place economically. The agriculture of the region is not particularly wealthy, and it's not on a trade route. It's quite difficult to get at. Sure, yeah, because you mentioned some of the crops they did have there, like olives, but these were not vast resources to your point. The Jewish state, as you put it in your book, was administered, quote, on Hellenistic lines, end quote. Explain what that means. In other words, we can make that assumption that it's non-Jewish in terms of how they're ruling, but can you teach us what you mean by Hellenistic lines?

11:27Yes, I mean, Hellenistic is a useful term and around since the 19th century to describe the way in which local cultures in the Near East were combined with Greek political forms. So different from just simply being Greek. Sure. And in the case of the Hasmoneans, their central institution in Jerusalem was the temple and the high priest as its ruler. But the high priest as ruler also had an army before the Romans arrived, which he was using. this is Alexander Janaius, or in the rabbinic tradition, Janai, same person, he was using this army for campaigns to conquer the region around Judea. And so by the time that the Romans did arrive in Judea and Pompey conquered Jerusalem in 63 BCE, the Hasmonean state had taken control of the coastal regions of Judea, where there were numerous Greek cities, places like Ashkelon, Akko.

12:46These were, Akko was the name of the Greek city there. These were independent Greek cities, which were brought under the control of the Hasmoneans in the early first century BC. And the reason they were doing that is that's what you were expected to do if you were a Hellenistic type king like the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Syria. Sure. So Herod's young. He is taken off to Petra with other family members to be protected. Why was Antipater doing that and what was going on around that time in his life? So he's very young. He's aged six in 67 BC at the point at which the widow of Alexandre Genes, Shalom Sion, or Salome, who'd ruled from 76 BC.

13:46So she'd been there for nine years. She died, leaving two sons, who then fought for control over Jerusalem. And Herod's father, Antipater, attached himself to the older son, Heracinus, who Shalom Sion wanted to be the new high priest. he was really high priest wanted to remain as high priest and as ruler of Judea after her death and this was challenged by Iricanus' younger brother Aristobulus and there were a whole series of battles over control of Judea and Antepidus sent his young family off with his wife, Kipros, who was herself a Nabataean princess. So that's why they went off to Petra. This is going off to stay with family, somewhere nice and safe.

14:51We don't know how often Herod actually went back to Petra, which was an impressive city then, but nowhere like as impressive as it was going to be by the end of Herod's life. the really fine building in Petra, was going to happen fairly soon after Herod died, just after his death. So teach us about Herod's grandfather, Adipas, and his father, Antipater. What was their role in the state? So they came from Idumea, which is the area around Hebron, south of Judea. and they were heavily quite wealthy in Itumia. We don't know quite where their wealth came from, but certainly well-connected in Itumia.

15:41But Harry's grandfather and then his father both had made their careers in Jerusalem as ministers of the Hasmonean rulers. First Alexander Janais and then Shalom Sion and then after that Herakonis. And one reason why they could become so influential as ministers of the Hasmoneans was because they were Idumean, because they were not from the Judean aristocracy. They couldn't be a political challenge to the Hasmoneans. They couldn't certainly never expect to have a role in the Jerusalem temple because they were not priests. And the Idumeans were Jews, but they'd only become Jews by conversion a couple of generations earlier, either in the 120s or the 110s BCE.

16:37Yeah, so they were converted under compulsion. Isn't that what you're saying? And explain that, unpack that a little bit more for us. What does it mean to become Jewish by compulsion? We actually have differing accounts as to quite how they came to be Jewish in the 120s and the 110s BC. It's happening at that period as part of the expansion of the Hasmonean states. So the Hasmoneans, in the case of Idumea, incorporated the region into their state as citizens of the state. if we look for a parallel it's what was happening in Italy in the same kind of period in the second and early first century BCE with the Roman state incorporating Italians as Romans as Roman citizens so something very similar going on with the incorporation of the Idumeans the Hasmoneans didn't do it to all the regions that they conquered they did it when they went south in the southern highlands in Idumea in the north in Galilee, did the same kind of thing in the late second century BC.

17:55The coastal cities, they didn't try to make them become Jews. It appears that most Idumeans were quite happy to be Jews and to think of themselves as Jews. And certainly in the generations after Herod's death, We have plenty of evidence of Idumeans identifying with the Judeans in Jerusalem and seeing Jerusalem as their mother city. So how important to the rise of Herod as king was the trouble of Rome? Obviously, you had the first triumvirate. You had Pompey, Crassus, and Julius. Julius obviously is killed, as we all know, Etiu Brute. and then you wake up with the new triumvirate of Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus.

18:44There was a power struggle. They needed to find a power sharing arrangement, and you couldn't play whack-a-mole in every part of the empire. So how valuable was that power struggle to really give Herod might and attractiveness to the triumvirate around that time? Herod would never have been king of Judea if there hadn't been the Roman Civil War. Okay. He simply, the idea would not have occurred to him. Josephus gives us a nice story of an Essene who saw him as a child and who prophesied that he'd become a king of Judea and go to the bad. Yeah. And Heron thought it was a joke. It was a joke. I mean, it was extremely unlikely that the Romans would ever choose somebody like him, unless there was a crisis.

19:50And it's difficult to exaggerate how big the crisis was between 49 and 31 BC, everything leading up to the Battle of Actium. So just a huge amount of military activity all over the Mediterranean world, all just to ensure that individual aristocrats could make their, Roman aristocrats could make their bid to be more powerful than others. Sure. And what mattered most to Herod as a result of that was that the Romans ceased to notice the weakness on their eastern border. Crassus in 53 BC had invaded Parthia Good reason in Roman eyes, which is that he wanted a victory And for Roman aristocrats, getting a victory is the way you get prestige Otherwise, no particular reason to invade The Parthians hadn't done anything wrong and were showing no signs of wanting to do anything in the future to Rome.

21:05But it was a revenge attack by the Parthians in 40 BC, which they could do because the Romans were so distracted by fighting each other. And that involved the invasion of northern Syria all the way down to Jerusalem, the capture of Jerusalem, which made that Jerusalem was no longer under Roman control. And that was the point at which Herod turned up in the Senate in Rome, seeking Roman support, which he needed not least in order to save his family. He'd left all his womenfolk in Masada, where they were holed up, but they weren't going to stay there indefinitely. They needed to be rescued. Sure.

21:50And he was only in Rome for a week. But within that week, they decided to appoint him as king of Judea in the hope that he could reconquer Jerusalem on behalf of Rome. Sure, because reading your book, the way you explain it from the account is they say, hey, you're king of Judea, which meant almost absolutely nothing other than you had a royal blessing, I'll call it from, you know, Rome to go out and do whatever you need to do. And they would obviously provide some resources to you. But you had to, you know, it's like a startup business. I'm giving you some capital. I'm giving you some goodwill.

22:28Go do something with it. And that's what Herod had to go back to Judea and begin. is that a fair assessment? Yes, they didn't even give him many resources. So, conquering Jerusalem required the intervention of Roman forces under the control of a Roman governor, Sausius. As far as Sausius was concerned, first of all, he had to be persuaded that Jerusalem was worth conquering. And then when he succeeded in conquering it, as far as Saucyus was concerned, that was his triumph. And he had a triumph through the streets of Rome in 34 BC to celebrate what he managed to do. So Harry's main job was to make sure that the Roman soldiers didn't do what they would normally do after a great victory at the end of a siege, which is to go wild.

23:31And that was standard. There would be a period to usually about 24 hours. Plunder. Yeah, plunder. It's an important part of Roman military discipline, that the soldiers remain very disciplined until they've succeeded. And then once they've succeeded, they're allowed off the leash for 24 hours or so. And then they come back under discipline again. Not this time, because it was Herod's new capital. So he would quite like to have it in one piece, more or less. It reminds me of a sports team winning a major championship or a world title. They're allowed to go crazy for about a week. Real quick, I want to go back to something Martin said about what the generals wanted was a victory.

24:18and I know it's a fiction movie, but in the movie Ben-Hur, Ben-Hur was chained and he rescued the general who was gonna just go kill himself out on a float in the water and then they came and saved him and said, by the way, we won a great victory and then all of a sudden he goes back to Rome and he's the top dog again, just like what Martin says, that that's all that mattered to these guys was the victory. So Herod fights a battle with Pappas. How divine was his intervention in this problem? So, Harrod was clearly aware that he'd had a difficult life already when he was young. All sorts of things that he'd managed to do, scrapes that he'd managed to survive through.

25:08Sure. Unlike his father, Antipater, who ended up being poisoned. And then when Herod managed to avoid an unexpected accident, an anticipated accident, he put it down to divine intervention. So one case was when a dining room collapsed just after he'd been dining there, but he wasn't hurt. and then a rather extraordinary story of him going and having a bath down near Jericho and then finding a couple of the enemy soldiers fully armed who sort of just ran away when they saw him. And again, these were put down to divine intervention. Otherwise, how did he manage to survive? and that belief that somehow or other what he was doing was divinely protected seems to be quite helpful in getting him through all sorts of scrapes for the rest of his life the scene i thought of when when he's you know taking a bath the guys come in i actually thought of gone with the wind when the the yankee officer comes in and tries to steal money you know here you are the enemy's in your home and that was the scene in my mind that i thought of herod you're taking a bath and the enemy walks in and they're more worried about getting out of town.

26:39And so for some reason, gone with the wind came to my mind. Also on the, yeah, on the divine intervention, there was a pattern, you know, in the old Testament where God would deliver the enemies of the Jewish people. And then for a while, they'd have a reputation that, Hey, we don't want to touch these guys. These guys, God likes them. Right. And it's a similar kind of a divine intervention. So he gains control, but weren't most people of power around him legally and militaristically still bribable? Yes. In the case of Romans, it's very effective.

27:21So having money or, in Herod's case, the expectation of money, because when he was in Rome in 40 BC, he appears to have been there without any cash at all. so it's in the expectation that once he is ruling he will have sufficient money so he can then pay bribes to all his Roman patrons and the need to keep his Roman patrons supporting him is constant down to the end of his rule in 4 BCE and one of his problems was that who his Roman patrons should be was not so obvious until the end of the Civil War, because in his part of the world, there were a whole series of different Romans who were in supreme power, from Pompey to Julius Caesar, to Cassius, who'd killed Julius Caesar, to Antony, and eventually to Octavian.

28:25And he had to shift allegiance from one to the other without looking as if he was completely untrustworthy. Not an easy thing to do. Sure. And others appeal to Rome. You talk about Antigonus did as well. He goes to Rome after Herod's king and tries to explain to Rome how bad he is for Rome to try to become their newest person to support, if you will. That's not successful, though. Is this part of the divine nature of Herod, where Octavian just chooses Herod resolutely? Or was there more to it in that they just didn't trust Antigonus at all? Well, Antigonus had been supported by the Parthians. and so he'd sort of rather burnt his boats, burnt his bridges with any Roman patrons.

29:27He was also quite well known in Rome where he'd been also fallen out of favor because of constant trident interference earlier in his career. I was going to say, Martin, during the book, because I keep on thinking about this divine aspect that we're touching at, which I think is a theme of Herod's life, all the way out through his legacy. The other thing, because of the title of the book, I was mentally making a checklist the entire book. I was like, Jewish, not Jewish. Jewish, not Jewish. My next question kind of touches at that. Herod needed a high priest. So the prior rulers were not only priests, but they were the leader and ruler of Judea.

30:08So Herod is playing the role of king, but he's not ethnarch. In other words, he is not the religious leader, which is what the high priest has to be. And he goes through a series of high priests. As he goes through all these high priests, I mentally tell myself not Jewish because it just seems like it's almost like he's using this role as a way to please his kingship, not as a way to lead the Jewish people spiritually, if that makes sense. Is that a fair assessment? I think it's slightly unfair on him. Okay. He had a political problem, which was that the political rulers of Judea had for the previous more than 100 years been Hasmoneans.

31:00And the main institution of their capital, Jerusalem, was the temple. And so that remained the case. It was the main, all the way through Herod's life, it was the main meeting place for the population in Jerusalem. And Jerusalem was by far the most important city within Israel. So he had to rule through the temple. He couldn't himself be a high priest because he was not a priest. Sure. But what he did was to get perfectly kosher, valid priests. Nobody ever objected to their lineage going back all the way to Aaron. But they came from outside Judea. So he got them from Alexandria, or he got them from Babylonia, originally from Babylonia and they had an Alexandrian high priest.

32:05So they were all Levites? Oh yeah, yeah. So by Herod's time it was assumed that those who ran the temple in Jerusalem were not just Levites but were a particular group within the Levites, the Koenim, the priests. and the Levites is another larger element within the tribe of Levi who also had roles to do in the temple but at a lesser level and within the priesthood any priest technically could be the high priest they'd been appointed before Herod's time, before the Hasmoneans they've been appointed by the Hellenistic kingdoms. They've been appointed by the Seleucids and before that by the Donamans.

33:00The Hasmoneans turned it into a dynastic inheritance within the family. And Herod changed the system. He got, say, a perfectly valid priest to do it, but priests who had no local political clout. doing much the same thing to them as the Hasmoneans had done to his family as Idumeans. And that's how they'd come to power in the first place. So it was quite effective. But part of it involved giving a patina of respectability to what these priests were doing, which much the most impressive was the rebuilding of the temple. So Herod's rebuilding of the Temple of Jerusalem was a quite astonishing architectural feat.

33:56And although he did lots and lots of other building in his kingdom and indeed outside, none of it is anything like the degree of ambition that was involved in the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple. and that must be significant. That was his main identity, was this Jewish identity as a Jewish king. Yeah, a lot of goodwill was attached to that. And to follow on that, so then he only allows priests to build. In other words, you had to come from a priestly background to even build the temple. So he takes what I'll call a very Jewish view of the building of the temple. It's just not any masons that can go out there.

34:41It's got to be priestly people because it is a holy place. Does that just give us a really big picture into the Jewishness of him? Yes. There was a distinction, actually. It's a central shrine that only priests could work on, which is a sort of smaller area within the temple. And there, we're told that the priests were trained up to be masons and to the repairs and the rebuilding of it. The major work on the temple site was the building of the temple platform, which is still there, and it's what Al-Aqsa stands on. So this huge courtyard that was created by a building out from the side of the hillside, the natural slope of the hill, using arches to provide a support for the vast open courtyard that allowed far more pilgrims to come into the temple and to gather than had been possible previously.

35:56And that was using the latest, most up-to-date architectural techniques that were the same as were being used in contemporary Rome in the rebuilding of Rome by Augustus and the creation of a new marble city there as part of the Augustan age. Sure, but that didn't stop him from building pagan temples and statues either. In other words, he was in the Greek cities you laid out. He was still out building very Greek or Roman style things in other places that were more influenced by other culture outside the Jewish state? Yes, there are two things, I think. One is that the architectural style was Greek or, in the case of the techniques, often Roman.