POLITICS AN DSOCIETY 45simultaneously as king and high priest. He was furthermore not a Judaean but
a judaized Idumaean, and many of his domestic policies reflected the con-
cerns of the non-Judaean Jews and their sometimes ambivalent relations to
the central Judaean institutions as they had been administered by the Hasmo-
neans.^66 One of the main tendencies of his reforms seems to have been, in
fact, to turnJudaeaninstitutions intoJewishones by enhancing their attrac-
tiveness to non-Judaean Palestinian Jews and Jews of the Diaspora.
Herod’s ReformsGiven his inability to serve as high priest, Herod had to reform the high priest-
hood. His reforms had several interesting characteristics. Under Herod, and
after his time until the destruction of the temple in 70C.E., the high priest-
hood was no longer held for life and passed from father to son. Rather, the
incumbents held the position for brief terms of irregular length, and the king
retained exclusive right of appointment. Clearly Herod was interested in keep-
ing tight control over a position that could easily turn into a focus of political
opposition.^67 After Herod’s death the high priesthood became again de facto
dynastic, since Herod’s descendants and Roman successors preferred to ap-
point to the post descendants of Herod’s high priests. But the only distinctive
characteristic that Herod’s appointees shared, as far as we can tell, is that five
of the seven who served in the course of the thirty-three years of Herod’s reign
were not Judaean: one was brought from Babylonia, one resided in Galilee,
and several came from Egypt. Of the Judaeans, one was Herod’s young
brother-in-law, the Hasmonean prince Aristobulus (sometimes assigned the
dynastic number “III”), of whom the king was profoundly jealous. He drowned
under suspicious circumstances, to say the least, after a very brief term of
office (Ant15.50–56).
Herod failed to assign an important role to the old religious organizations
of the Pharisees and Sadducees. We have already seen that after the death of
Salome Alexandra in 67B.C.E., the Pharisees and Sedducees, which had
played an important administrative role previously, were pushed to the mar-
gins by the conditions prevailing in the civil wars. Herod ended the civil war
but did not restore the sects. The fact that they had been eliteJudaeanorgani-
zations may explain Herod’s interest in depriving them of any significant role
in his state. From now on they would be small organizations competing for
(^66) See S. Cohen,Beginnings of Jewishness, 13–24.
(^67) See Schu ̈rer-Vermes, 2.227–36; P. Richardson,Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the
Romans(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 240–47; M. Stern, “The Poli-
tics of Herod and Jewish Society towards the End of the Second Commonwealth,”Tarbiz 35
(1966): 235–53.