102 A History of Judaism
Antigonus, the senate turned to Herod, the son of Antipater, whose
machinations on behalf of Hyrcanus through the 40s bce had brought
both him and his sons to the attention of powerful Romans, including
Mark Antony, who in 40 bce was the de facto ruler of much of the east-
ern Mediterranean.
The senate’s decision in the autumn of 40 bce to appoint someone
like Herod to rule Judaea was as anomalous in terms of normal Roman
policy as it was for Jewish tradition, and it would have been impossible
if the Roman world had not been in crisis. Herod was from Idumaea,
the region south of Judaea converted to Judaism only some seventy
years previously. His mother was a Nabataean Arab. He was not related
to the royal family of the Hasmonaeans, and, since he was not a priest,
he could not preside in the Jerusalem Temple. It took three years for him
to gain control of his kingdom, aided first by Roman defeat of the Par-
thian forces in Syria in 39 and 38 bce and finally, in spring 37 bce, by
Roman help in besieging Antigonus in Jerusalem. On the capture of the
city Antigonus was taken in chains to the Roman general Sosius. Sosius
sent him to Mark Antony, who had him beheaded at Herod’s
behest. Antigonus had protested that Herod was unsuitable to be king
of Judaea because he was only an Idumaean, ‘that is, a half- Jew’ – all the
more reason for Herod to want him out of the way.^21
For the next century all Jewish rulers in Judaea depended entirely on
Roman favour to maintain their power. Herod himself navigated with
skill through the treacherous shoals of the final decade of the Roman
civil war. Finding himself on the wrong side in 32 bce after the defeat
of Mark Antony by Octavian Caesar (the future emperor Augustus), he
pledged to the victor that he would be as faithful in his allegiance to the
new master of the eastern Mediterranean world as he had been to his
predecessor. By the time of Herod’s death in 4 bce, he had become a
major figure in the Roman world – a friend of the emperor, a major
benefactor of Greek cities, a remarkable builder and by far the best-
known Jew among ordinary Romans.
To those Romans, Herod was indeed an archetypal Jew: the Sabbath
was ‘the day of Herod’. The judgement of other Jews will have been
more equivocal. In Judaea, Herod married Mariamme, the grand-
daughter of the former Hasmonaean High Priest Hyrcanus II, but was
believed to have engineered the accidental death by drowning of Mari-
amme’s young brother in case he proved a magnet for disaffection, and
his lavish expenditure on the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple (see
Chapter 3) was balanced by the erection of a temple in honour of Rome