Jerusalem: The Biography

The peace did not last long: the torture of servants now revealed a letter from Alexander to the commander of the Alexandrium Fortress that said: ‘When we have achieved all we set out to do, we’ll come to you.’ Herod dreamed that Alexander was raising a dagger over him, a nightmare so vivid that he arrested both boys, who admitted they were planning to escape. Herod had to consult Augustus, by now tiring of his old friend’s excesses – though the emperor himself was no stranger to naughty children and tangled successions. Augustus ruled that, if the boys had plotted against Herod, he had every right to punish them.

Herod held the trial in Berytus (Beirut), outside his formal jurisdiction – and therefore supposedly a fair place for the trial. The boys were sentenced to death as Herod wished, which was hardly surprising since he had generously embellished the city. Herod’s counsellors advised mercy – but when one hinted that the boys were suborning the army, Herod liquidated 300 officers. The princes were taken back to Judaea and garrotted. The tragedy of their mother Mariamme, the curse of the Maccabees, had come full circle. Augustus was not amused. Knowing that Jews eschewed pork, he commented drily: ‘I’d rather be Herod’s pig than his son.’ But this was just the beginning of the Grand Guignol decay of Herod the Great.

HEROD: THE LIVING PUTREFACTION

The king, now in his sixties, was ailing and paranoid. Antipater was the sole named heir, but there were many other sons available to inherit the kingdom, and Herod’s sister Salome started to plot against him; she found a servant who claimed that Antipater was planning to poison Herod with a mysterious drug. Antipater, who was in Rome meeting with Augustus, rushed home and galloped to the palace in Jerusalem, but he was arrested there before he could reach his father. At his trial, the suspect drug was given to a convict who dropped down dead. More torture revealed that a Jewish slave belonging to the Empress Livia, Augustus’ own wife and herself an expert on poisons, had forged letters to frame Salome.

Herod sent the evidence to Augustus and drew up his third will, leaving the kingdom to another of his sons, Antipas, the Herod who would later encounter John the Baptist and Jesus. Herod’s illness distorted his judgement and weakened his grip on the Jewish opposition. He placed a gilded bronze eagle on the great gate of the Temple. Some students climbed on to the roof, abseiled down in front of the crowded courtyard and cut it down. The troops of the Antonia Fortress rushed into the Temple to arrest them. Paraded before Herod on his sickbed, they insisted they were obeying the Torah. The culprits were burned alive.

Herod collapsed, suffering an agonizing and gruesome putrefaction: it started as an itching all over with a glowing sensation within his intestines, then developed into a swelling of his feet and belly, complicated by ulceration of the colon. His body started to ooze clear fluid, he could scarcely breathe, a vile stench emanated from him, and his genitals swelled grotesquely until his penis and scrotum burst out into suppurating gangrene that then gave birth to a seething mass of worms.

The rotting king hoped he would recover in the warmth of his Jericho palace but, as his suffering increased, he was borne out to the warm sulphur baths at Callirhoe, which still exist on the Dead Sea, only for the suphur to aggravate the agony.^* Treated with hot oil, he passed out and was carried back to Jericho where he ordered the summoning of the Temple elite from Jerusalem, whom he had locked en masse in the hippodrome. It is unlikely that he planned to slaughter them. Probably he wanted to finesse the succession while holding all troublemaking grandees in custody.

At around this time, a child named Joshua ben Joseph, or (in Aramaic) Jesus, was born. His parents were a carpenter, Joseph, and his teenaged betrothed, Mary (Mariamme in Hebrew), based in Nazareth, up in Galilee. They were not much richer than peasants, but it was said they were descended from the old Davidian house. They travelled down to Bethlehem where a child, Jesus, was born ‘that shall rule my people Israel’. After he had been circumcised on the eighth day, according to St Luke, ‘they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord’ and make the traditional sacrifice in the Temple. A wealthy family would sacrifice a sheepor even a cow, but Joseph could afford only two turtle-doves or pigeons.