Jerusalem: The Biography

The design of the Temple, supervised by the king and his anonymous architects (an ossuary has been found inscribed ‘Simon builder of the Temple’), showed a brilliant understanding of space and theatre. Dazzling and awe-inspiring, Herod’s Temple was ‘covered all over with plates of gold and at the first rising of the sun reflected back a fiery splendour’ so bright that visitors had to look away. Arriving in Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, it reared up‘like a mountain covered with snow’. This was the Temple that Jesus knew and that Titus destroyed. Herod’s esplanade survives as the Islamic Haram al-Sharif supported on three sides by Herodian stones that still gleam today, particularly in the Western Wall revered by the Jews.

Once the Sanctuary and the esplanade were complete – it was said there was no rain in the daytime, so that work was never delayed – Herod, who could not enter the Holy of Holies since he was not a priest, celebrated by sacrificing 300 oxen.⁴²

He had reached his apogee. But his undeniable greatness was to be challenged by his own children when the crimes of the past returned to haunt the heirs of the future.

HEROD’S PRINCES: THE FAMILY TRAGEDY

Herod now had at least twelve children by his ten wives. He seemed to ignore most of them except for his two sons by Mariamme, Alexander and Aristobulos. They were half-Maccabee, half-Herodian and they would be his successors. He sent them to Rome where Augustus himself supervised their education. After five years, Herod brought the two teenage princes home to marry: Alexander wed the daughter of the King of Cappadocia while Aristobulos married Herod’s niece.^*

In 15 BC, Marcus Agrippa arrived to inspect Herod’s Jerusalem, accompanied by his new wife, Julia, Augustus’ nymphomaniacal daughter. Agrippa, Augustus’ partner and victor of Actium, was already friends with Herod, who proudly showed him Jerusalem. He stayed in his eponymous apartments in the Citadel and there gave banquets in Herod’s honour. Augustus already paid for a daily sacrifice to Yahweh in the Temple, but now Agrippa sacrificed a hundred oxen. He managed to behave with such tact that even the prickly Jews gave him the accolade of laying palms in his path and the Herodians named their children after him. Afterwards, the pair toured Greece with their fleets. When local Jews appealed against Greek repression, Agrippa backed Jewish rights, Herod thanked him and the two embraced as equals.⁴³ But on his return from hobnobbing with the Roman potentate, Herod was challenged by his own children.

Princes Alexander and Aristobulos, polished by a Roman education, inheriting the looks and arrogance of both parents, soon blamed their father for their mother’s fate and, like her, disdained the half-breed Herodians. Alexander, being married to a king’s daughter, was particularly snobbish; both boys mocked Aristobulos’ Herodian wife, thus insulting her mother, their dangerous aunt Salome. They boasted that when they were kings they would put Herod’s wives to labour with the slaves and use Herod’s other sons as clerks.

Salome reported all this to Herod, who was infuriated by the ingratitude and alarmed by the betrayal of these spoilt princelings. He had long ignored Antipater, his eldest son, by his first wife Doris. But now in 13 BC, Herod recalled Antipater and asked Agrippa to take him to Rome with a sealed document for the emperor: it was his will, disinheriting the two boys and instead bequeathing the kingdom to Antipater. But his new heir, probably in his mid-twenties, was embittered by paternal neglect and fraternal envy. He and his mother conspired to destroy the disinherited princes, whom they accused of treason.

Herod asked Augustus, staying at Aquileia on the Adriatic, to judge the three princes. Augustus reconciled father and sons, with the result that Herod sailed home, called a meeting in the court of the Temple and announced that his three sons would share the kingdom. Doris, Antipater and Salome set about reversing this reconciliation for their own purposes, but they were helped by the arrogance of the boys: Prince Alexander told everyone that Herod dyed his hair to look younger and confided that he deliberately missed his targets out hunting to make his father feel better. He also seduced three of the king’s own eunuchs, giving him access to his father’s secrets. Herod arrested and tortured Alexander’s servants until one confessed that his master planned to assassinate him out hunting. Alexander’s father-in-law, the King of Cappadocia, who was visiting his daughter, managed to reconcile father and sons again. Herod expressed his gratitude by presenting the Cappadocian with a very Herodian gift: a courtesan who gloried in the name Pannychis – All-Night-Long.