44 CHAPTER ONEdistricts of Galilee, Samaria, Judaea, and his native Idumaea—with the help
of a detachment of Roman troops and Jewish troops that he succeeded in
raising himself. By unspoken agreement with his overlords, he left the Greek
cities of the coast and the Transjordan in peace. Jerusalem was the last place to
fall to Herod, and when it did, in 37B.C.E., Herod’s Jewish troops committed a
great slaughter of their coreligionists besieged in the city, which Herod re-
strained only with difficulty. This event, at first glance surprising, is not diffi-
cult to understand if we assume that the troops were non-Judaean Jews, like
Herod himself. Among such people, resentment against the Judaeans may
never have been far from the surface. King Antigonus was captured and sent
off to Antony for execution, and Herod now reigned as king of the Jews.
Herod (reigned, 37–4B.C.E.)
Herod was a product of the age of the civil wars, both Hasmonean and Roman,
an age that offered great opportunities to the ruthlessly ambitious. From his
grandfather and father he inherited a complex of friendships with Hasmone-
ans, Nabataean kings and courtiers, and important Roman personages. He
exploited this inheritance brilliantly and extended it when, as a young com-
mander and an administrator in Galilee, he earned the friendship of various
local Jewish and pagan grandees. He deepened and broadened his relations
with leading Romans, most importantly in the later 40s with Marc Antony,
leader of the Caesarian faction for a time after the dictator’s assassination in
44 B.C.E. Thanks to his friendship with Antony, when the Parthians conquered
Palestine in 40B.C.E., the Roman senate granted Herod, and not a Hasmo-
nean, the royal title and the job of providing local military support to the
Roman legions in their attempt to reconquer southern Syria.^64
Herod himself helped conquer Jewish Palestine and was later given exten-
sive gifts of non-Jewish territory—the coastal Gree kcities, the Golan Heights,
and other rural territories in southern Syria—by Antony and subsequently the
emperor Augustus. But he was considered and considered himself primarily
king of the Jews; he seems to have administered the pagan territories on behalf
of the emperor and senate and to have received a portion of the revenues from
them.^65 But Herod was not of priestly descent, and so he could not serve
(^64) On the importance of “friendship” in Herod’s early career, see S. Schwartz, “King Herod,
Friend of the Jews,” and Shaw, “Tyrants, Bandits, and Kings,” 184–89.
(^65) See Josephus,Ant14.9, 15.373, 15.409, 16.291, 16.311; Nicolaus of Damascus apudAnt
14.9; Cassius Dio 49.22.6; Macrobius,Saturnalia2.4.11; Persius,Saturae5.180; Tacitus,Histor-
iae5.9.1–2; Strabo,Geographica16.2.46; Eusebius,Histori aEcclesi astic a1.7.11–12; Aelian,De
Natura Animalium6.17; H. Cotton and J. Geiger,Masada II: The Yigael Yadin Excavations 1963–
5, Final Reports: The Greek and Latin Documents(Jerusalem: IES, 1989), nos. 804–16, with the
comments on pp. 147–48. In these documents, Herod is calledrex Herodes iudaicus.