Herod the Great, the ugliest of all mortals

“Behold Herod, the foaming wave, seeking to drown the Lord of the seas!”
St Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns of the Nativity and Theophany

To anyone who dreams of going to Jerusalem, I recommend that they carve out a little space in their overloaded itinerary of sightseeing and photographs, buses and hotels, churches and bazaars, airline tickets and souvenirs, ascents and descents amongst, upon and beneath those pale, dusty hills (which, in their geographical naivety, the Jews call mountains), so that they may pause, at least once, high up on the Mount of Olives and gaze out from there at the Old City as the sun sets. The experience is incomparable, utterly unforgettable – the panorama of Jerusalem is a palimpsest of walls, trees and graves, a jumble of eras crammed one into the other, fighting for every square centimetre, struggling, each vying to rise to the surface, yet so harmonious that the city seems to have been designed to look this way from the very beginning; so much so that, if you didn’t know its history, you might imagine that everything you see was built at the same time. When you cast your eyes over that steep slope, in the golden haze of the sunset, your gaze is inevitably drawn to the immense dome of the Dome of the Rock, covered in gold leaf – defiant, fantastical, impossible to miss – practically eclipsing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The sun is its finest accomplice, and now, on the cusp between day and night, it seems to gaze into the colossal dome as if into a mirror, to let its hair down over it, finally finding its twin.

But all this splendour pales in comparison to that of the great Temple, the Second Temple in Jerusalem, as it stood in its final form before the Romans destroyed it1. Josephus tells us of this magnificent place of worship, worthy of a place amongst the wonders of the ancient world: ‘It was covered throughout with gold plates, and at sunrise it reflected the light in an incandescent splendour, causing all who strained to look at it to avert their gaze, just as the sun itself would have done”2, appearing, from a distance, “like a snow-capped mountain”3. It was here that Christ the Saviour preached, here that He performed miracles, here that He said He was in His Father’s house, here that the apostles came to worship even after Pentecost, in this temple which has gone down in history as Herod’s Temple. Yes, we are talking about that Herod, the one who ordered the slaughter of fourteen thousand infants.

To decipher the mindset of this tyrant who has become a legend, to understand how a man, in full possession of his mental faculties, could order a veritable holocaust against children ‘aged two years and under’4, we must entera realm that transcends even the bounds of the abnormal and delve deep into history, hundreds of years before Herod’s birth, when the Jewish people were in Babylonian captivity and the Old Testament was still an unfinished book. Above all, we must place him back in his historical context. What the Bible does not mention is that the king—‘Jewish’, so to speak—was a particularly important figure in the lives of some of the greatest men of his time and, indeed, of all time: Octavian Augustus, Mark Antony, Cleopatra. But it is not only the turbulent history of the 1st century BC that is an intrinsic part of Herod’s life, but also one of the most harrowing family sagas ever to have unfolded. Compared to his own family, the intrigues of the Borgias seem like the stuff of a soap opera, whilst Henry VIII and Ivan the Terrible appear like mere children. Married ten times, Herod was, according to the same Flavius, ‘blessed with all the advantages of appearance, mind and body’5, but also ‘a slave to his passions’3.

But how did he come to sit on the throne of Judea? It all begins with the endless political crisis of the Maccabees, or the Hasmonean dynasty, as it is officially known. I shall avoid being drawn into this black hole that is the Hasmonean civil war, focusing only on what is relevant to Herod’s life. Namely: Hyrcanus II, former king of the Jewish kingdom, had Antipater as his chief adviser, the father of Herod the Great, an Idumean whose father had been forcibly converted to Judaism when John Hyrcanus I had compelled the Idumeans to change their religion if they wished to retain their lands. Antipater was, therefore, a foreigner, belonging to only the second generation to have been Judaised; yet he was also a foreigner in Edom, of which he was governor, for his family actually hailed from the Phoenician coast. His wife was a Nabataean princess from the famous Petra; consequently, the future King Herod would be anything but Jewish. Hyrcanus was aided by Antipater in his struggle against his other Maccabean brother, Aristobulus, who held Jerusalem, but none of this mattered any longer, for the Roman Empire, in the person of Pompey, was stretching its greedy arms towards Judea, like ivy. Unable to reach an agreement with Aristobulus, the triumvir stormed the Temple, killed the priests, abolished the monarchy and appointed Hyrcanus as high priest, associating Antipater with him in government—Antipater who would, in reality, hold all the power.

Now we finally understand why God chose Caesar to be the victor and dictator of Rome, even though he was no less vicious than his fellow triumvirs. Both will be guilty of sacrilege against the Most High God. Pompey, curious like all pagans, who were simply fascinated by the mystery of the great Temple, will enter the Holy of Holies, where not even the high priest entered more than once a year. He will not, however, steal anything. A little later, Crassus, famous for his greed, will finance his expedition against the Parthian Empire by plundering all the riches of the Temple and even the solid gold beam from the Holy of Holies. The plunder was of no use to him; the Parthians would rout his army, and their king, Orodes II, would gladly receive his head, pouring molten gold into his mouth so that he might, as he put it, have his fill of what he had desired all his life. Five years later, Pompey’s head would fall into Caesar’s hands; just as his rival had, at the very least, had the good sense not to plunder the Temple, so too would Caesar refrain from any grandiose gesture à la Orodes.

We can easily imagine the terror that gripped Antipater when he saw his protector defeated. It was imperative that he win Caesar’s favour, and the opportunity was not long in coming – a truly brilliant one at that. The Roman dictator, now an ally of Cleopatra, was in Alexandria when the Egyptians rose up against this foreigner. And they would have won, and world history would have been different, had it not been for the exceptional opportunism—which he would pass on in full to his son—of our Idumean, who came to his aid with three thousand soldiers, whilst at the same time rousing the Jewish population of Egypt to battle. Caesar was saved; consequently, he retained the leaders of Judea, granting Antipater increased powers as procurator of the entire province. The young Herod became governor of Galilee. It was here that he began his career as a tyrant, executing, without the consent of the Sanhedrin, a group of religious fighters.

Caesar’s sun was already setting. Having himself reached his zenith under the protection of the great Roman’s influence, Antipater would not survive longer than the blue hour, once the sunset had faded. Entangled in the usual web of intrigue, he would be poisoned and, later, avenged by his tyrannical son. From the ashes of the night that followed, a new day would rise on two legs: the first being Octavian, the other Mark Antony. And, just like his father before him, Herod will initially make the wrong choice, befriending the latter more closely. The latter completely overshadowed the Maccabean heir, granting de jure power to Herod and his brother, Phasael. But now the people enter the scene. The people, who would never accept or love Herod, who would always see him as an upstart of foreign origin (no matter how hard he tried to win their favour), oppressed by the Roman yoke, fully manifested through the Edomite brothers, and still deeply loyal to their own dynasty, will take advantage of the Parthian invasion to bring Antigonus, the grandson of Hyrcanus, to power. The gates of Jerusalem are opened to Prince Pacorus, heir to Orodes, who installs Antigonus as both king and high priest. Phasael either commits suicide or is killed. And so Herod did what all the frightened men of those days did – he sought refuge with Cleopatra. On the way, pursued by the new king’s men, he attempts suicide but is stopped by his guards, who wrest the weapon from his hand; indeed, we shall see that, in extreme situations, suicidal thoughts will be a recurring feature of his personality. Little by little, Herod’s character takes shape before us: cruel, power-hungry, passionate, theatrical and, worst of all, extremely mentally unstable.

Cleopatra tries to keep him in Alexandria, but he sets off for Rome, the centre of power. There he is received as a king and made king. The Senate declares him ‘rex socius et amicus populi Romani’6, and he leaves the Senate building escorted by Antony and Octavian. Thus, not yet 40 years old, Herod is Rome’s supreme ‘satellite’, with all its splendour behind him.

Now begins a series of bloody battles to reclaim Judea and defeat the rebels, in which the new king saves the life of Mark Antony, who has been caught in an ambush. The two embrace before the Roman army, which pays tribute to the Jewish king; the result of this episode being that an army of thirty-six thousand Romans would lay siege to Jerusalem on his behalf, the siege ending in such a horrific massacre that Herod was forced to bribe the Romans to call it off. It would be interesting to know whether or not he realised at the time that the people of Jerusalem would never forget the massacre, that this was one of the points of no return in the shaping of his reputation. Antigonus is beheaded; Herod kills 45 of the 71 members of the Sanhedrin, and with them the Jews’ hope of self-government. In honour of Mark Antony, he built the Fortress of Antonia, immense and sumptuous, dominating the landscape. This was to be the site of the praetorium where Christ the Saviour was condemned to death, and it is from here that the Via Dolorosa begins.

Since we have already mentioned Henry VIII, taking the comparison a step further, it is worth noting that Herod also had his own Anne Boleyn. Mariamne the Hasmonean, the tyrant’s second wife (after he had repudiated his first), is, however, a far more controversial figure than the English queen. One might argue that, being a Maccabee and the granddaughter of two kings, Herod had married her to consolidate his reign, but the truth is that, unlike most aristocrats, his marriages had nothing to do with any political calculation. We shall return to their disastrous marriage; for now, we must contend with another dragon – Alexandra, Mariamne’s mother. For the very same reasons that the people did not want Herod as king, she, too, was not keen to have him as her son-in-law; for her royal lineage, this was an unacceptable misalliance. And then, she also had a teenage son, whom she dreamed of making high priest; however, Herod could not stand him because of his extraordinary popularity, so he put someone else in his place, at which point a conspiracy amongst the women began, spearheaded by none other than the Queen of the Nile, who had for some time coveted Judea, which her Ptolemaic ancestors had once ruled7. Antony had already granted her many Levantine territories, and Herod had been forced to lease to her the balsam tree plantations in Jericho (an extremely valuable part of Jewish exports), the queen controlling almost the entire Jewish coastline, of which Herod was left with nothing but Gaza. Cleopatra agreed to help the young prince claim the crown, whilst Alexandra and Mariamne persuaded Mark Antony to summon him, but Herod grew fearful and would not let him go. Once again, it is clear just how much the people loved the Maccabees at Herod’s expense – unable to withstand the pressure from the people, as well as Mariamne’s insistence, he eventually made him high priest. The crowds are ecstatic to see the marvellous young man in the robes of a high priest – yet another occasion on which the king realises just how unloved and alone he is. Out of envy or fear, or perhaps both, he will treacherously murder his brother-in-law, having him drowned. The women of the Maccabees, the entire city and the whole land of Judea were overcome with deep mourning; it seems that Herod himself, either through excellent pretence or his characteristic mental instability, wept at his funeral.

Cleopatra, accustomed to always getting her way, turns her old friend Antony against Herod. Summoned by the general to Syria, knowing that his entire life was at stake, Herod prepared for the journey, secretly ordering that, should he be killed, Mariamne was to be put to death immediately. Joseph, the viceroy and her uncle, tells the queen that her husband loves her so much that he would rather kill her than have her live without him, but the news has a devastating effect on the mother and daughter, who see nothing touching in the tyrant’s madness and plan to flee. Fortunately for them, Herod manages to make a complete reconciliation with the powerful Roman, and then reconciles with his wife as well, weeping together and embracing one another. However, another woman enters the scene: Herod’s sister, Salome, who accuses Mariamne of adultery with Joseph. Although he does not believe her at first, when the queen cannot resist asking him about his dubious order for the execution, Herod becomes convinced that the viceroy could not have revealed the secret to him unless they had become very close, which is why he kills his uncle. However, he spares Mariamna’s life.

In 34 BC, unable to accept defeat, Cleopatra visits the court of Judea. Herod is not at all impressed and plots her assassination, but his advisers dissuade him from such a rash act. The Roman Empire was facing yet another decline; the clash between Octavian and Antony became inevitable, and the Battle of Actium proved an epic disaster for the latter8. Herod, who had offered his services to Octavian, does what his father had done when he switched from the camp of the vanquished to that of the victors. He flatters, lies, grovels, travels to Octavian in Rhodes and lays his crown at the victor’s feet – though, of course, not before ordering once more that, should he fail to return, his wife be put to death. Herod asks Augustus not to consider whose friend he had been, but what sort of friend he was, and the latter, just like Caesar before him, shows the same clemency, no doubt less impressed by the Idumean’s fawning, being well aware of the political value of a true opportunist. Both he and Marcus Agrippa, his great commander and deputy, became inseparable friends with Herod, so close that Josephus says: ‘Apart from Agrippa, Caesar favoured no one more than Herod, and Agrippa, apart from Caesar, had no better friend than Herod’9. In the years that followed, the King of Judea would take full revenge on the late Queen of Egypt, annexing vast territories to his kingdom and ‘inheriting’ a significant portion of Cleopatra’s staff. To celebrate Octavian’s victory, he commissioned the construction of a theatre and a hippodrome right in Jerusalem, organising the Actian Games10, but this would once again enrage the Jewish population, faithful to their monotheistic traditions – an anti-Herodian conspiracy arose, which Herod (what else could we have expected?) would drown in blood.

His marriage to Mariamne was to meet the bloodiest of ends. Fed up with the death sentences Herod sent her whenever he found himself in danger, as if they were love letters, the queen begins to accuse him of her brother’s death, to humiliate him in public, and to mock his sister and her plebeian origins. The two women would face off to the death, with Salome emerging victorious when she convinced Herod that Mariamne had made him fall in love with her using a magic potion. Under torture, her eunuchs confessed everything they were asked to – once again, we are struck by the profound belief held by so many people, over the millennia, that true confessions can be obtained through torture. The queen is sentenced to death and dies with the dignity of a Maccabean princess intact. Her mother, however, makes a fool of herself for all the centuries to come when she accuses Mariamna in order to escape a potential punishment. The crowd, in fact, boos her. Taking advantage of the terrible depression that overwhelms the king, Alexandra makes a final attempt to seize power, and Herod kills her, claiming other victims who were in fact his very close friends. The king would wander through the palace wailing for his lost wife, ordering his servants to bring her back to him and throwing parties that ended in his loud sobbing. For seven years he kept her embalmed body preserved in honey.

Now we have the opportunity to see another side of Herod (the only bearable one): Herod as a man of culture, a tireless builder, a patron of the arts. There is no doubt that he was a well-read, cosmopolitan figure with a broad perspective on the world; we are told that he was ‘Phoenician by descent, Greek by culture, Idumean by birthplace, Jewish by religion, Jerusalemite by residence and Roman by citizenship’11. He had everything he needed, then, to understand, in depth, the cultural complexity of the civilised world; we often observe this paradox in the world’s great tyrants – many of them tend to be true intellectuals, with a profound love for beautiful things, matched only by the passion with which they love to kill. Proof that, unfortunately, art and culture are no guarantee of morality. Herod was also filthy rich – it is estimated that no one in the Mediterranean basin possessed greater wealth than he, apart from the Roman emperor, holding rights even over the mining operations on the island of Cyprus. The zeal with which he set about rebuilding Jerusalem, however, reveals but one thing: an obsession with being accepted by the people as a Solomon, a great and beloved king, the king of kings. From a new system of fortifications to yet another royal palace, gardens and irrigation systems, all characterised by overwhelming luxury and impeccable taste, he spared no expense; and yet, when he died, he left a million drachmas to Augustus, without causing any harm to his own heir’s family. As for the Temple, here he truly outdid himself. Using state-of-the-art technology, the most expensive materials and the finest craftsmanship, Herod practically rebuilt the Second Temple, which was probably the greatest architectural project of the century. It took a great deal of persuasion to get the citizens to accept the demolition of the old buildings, as everyone feared that the king’s fantastical project could never be completed, but Herod kept his word to the letter. Because Solomon’s original Temple had been built in silence, Herod took care to follow this tradition, crafting all the components outside Mount Moriah and assembling them in the deepest silence. At the inauguration, he sacrificed three hundred oxen. This Temple screamed ‘love me!’ from every one of its gilded pores, just like all his other works. As well as rebuilding Jerusalem, he also built other cities, such as Sebaste and Caesarea Maritima, and when a great famine struck, he used his own gold to buy vast quantities of grain from Egypt. And yet, even amidst these sublime deeds, both he himself and God knew how to draw a distinction, as did the people.

His court was a hive of unrivalled turmoil; his wives, like his numerous children, hated one another, and intrigue was the natural state of affairs, the status quo of the palace. His punishment came through his own sons, Alexander and Aristobulus, the only ones who mattered to him, because they were Mariamne’s sons. Raised in Rome, under the watchful eye of Augustus, with Maccabean blood in their veins, they spoke ill of their father and declared, loud and clear, that when they seized power, they would treat Herod’s relatives as slaves. They had loved their mother and had never forgiven their father. Salome hastened to report all these irregularities; her intrigues were compounded by the words of Antipater, Herod’s eldest son, born of his first wife. Eventually, Herod sent the emperor a will in which he named his first-born son as heir, excluding Mariamne’s sons from the throne, but Octavian made efforts to reconcile them all. A whole series of intrigues and twists followed, and evidence—more or less conclusive—of the treachery of his rebellious sons, of which perhaps the most significant event was the dream in which the king saw Alexander attacking him with a dagger. Herod’s paranoia tormented him more and more with each passing day. The troublesome children were to be strangled, and Augustus, himself disgusted by the king’s inexhaustible cruelty and aware of the dietary prohibitions of the Jews, uttered the famous phrase: ‘I would rather be Herod’s pig than his son’. Herod did all this, and yet the Saviour Christ had not even been born.

Then the Saviour Christ was born, and all the king’s fears, all his darkest nightmares, seemed to be embodied in the little Child of Bethlehem. What was salvation for all humanity became, for Herod—this antichrist before Christ—the ultimate damnation. In circumstances where no one had ever seemed to love him selflessly, where everyone had hated him, and all had sought to dethrone him—from his own children right down to his lowliest subject—the king now focused all his energy, all his murderous fury, against the One who had not come to destroy him, but to save him. Against the One who loved him. For Herod the intellectual knew all too well the ancient prophecies concerning the Messiah. Surely, the words of Jeremiah had haunted him all his life: ‘There shall never fail David a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel’12. Yet he was not of the line of David; he was not even a Jew. That is why, at his command, Nicolaus of Damascus, the court chronicler13, had concocted an entire false genealogy for him, in which his ancestors were noble Jews from Jerusalem, taken into Babylonian captivity. Now, the sword that had hung over his head for as long as he could remember was finally about to fall – the true heir, from the house of David, was being born.

Old and weakened by his own horrific existence, Herod watched in horror as the heavens seemed to be crashing down, as his sun set, only for another, far brighter one to rise. The time was ripe, like an overripe fruit ready to fall from the branch, or, as Scripture says, the fullness of time had come – to plerōma tou chronou (το πλήρωμα του χρόνου), in Greek, whose more accurate translation – the fullness of time – implies infinitely deeper meanings. Saint Ephrem the Syrian, the great poet of the fourth century, makes a stirring revelation about the mothers of Bethlehem who, he says, came to worship Christ the Saviour: ‘They prophesied concerning their infants that by their slaying they would be offered as a sacrifice to Him’14. To those who do not give credence to the Evangelist Matthew, arguing that the massacre of the infants could not have taken place because Josephus makes no mention of it, we remind them, in the words of the biblical exegete R. T. France, regarding the absence of this event from Antiquities of the Jews, that ‘the killing of a few infants cannot be compared to the spectacular assassinations recounted by Josephus’15. In other words, the chronicler, who was not a Christian, did not feel the need to write about the deaths of the infants as well, having already recounted a thousand other crimes committed by Herod, which were far more significant from a political point of view. However, we should add that there are also pagan sources which attest to the infanticide, for example Macrobius’s Saturnalia.

Around the same time, Herod would also remove his eldest son from the line of succession, suspecting him of high treason, again because of Salome. This cleared the way in the line of succession for Herod Antipas, the future murderer of Saint John the Baptist. The king would once again face the wrath of the crowd when he had the ill-advised idea of installing a gilded eagle above the entrance to the Temple. As any image carved of a human or animal was strictly forbidden under the old law, a group of young men tore it down and destroyed it. Herod was already bedridden when all this was taking place, but he still found the energy to be carried to the theatre in Jericho, where he delivered a fiery speech before the Jewish leaders, which can be seen as the testament to his entire failed life – the king rebukes the Jews for their lack of gratitude for his benevolence. It is both ridiculous and tragic, the pathos with which this bloodthirsty tyrant, now reduced to helplessness, considered himself sincerely wronged by his subjects. And, to prove to them that he was worthy of love, he would burn alive those unfortunate souls whose only crime had been the destruction of a statue.

Herod’s spectacular illness may well have been the result of chronic venous insufficiency; in any case, his entire pelvic region became gangrenous and maggots began to eat him alive, giving off an unbearable stench. Josephus claims that the king was so terrified that no one would mourn him that he imprisoned a large group of chieftains, ordering that, after his death, they were to be killed, so that the people might be plunged into the mourning he so desperately craved for himself. His surviving relatives, who, it seems, did not love him in the slightest either, would, however, take care to disregard his command. Unable to bear it any longer, Herod tried once more to take his own life, but even this pitiful attempt failed. Antipater, locked up in a nearby cell, hears the commotion of the soldiers who have rescued Herod and, believing the tyrant to be dead, leaps for joy and cries out to be set free, for he is now the rightful king of the Jews. The jailer reports this to the ailing king, who, with his last ounce of strength, screams for his son to be executed at once. Shortly after crowning his murderous reign with the killing of his first-born son, Herod the Great—the king who had sought to kill God—breathed his last. And Arhelaus, his son, sang and danced as though it were the greatest of celebrations.

*

Whilst humanity spent two thousand years worshipping at the tomb of the Child of Bethlehem, for two thousand years Herod’s tomb was forgotten. It was not until 2007 that a team of archaeologists discovered something which, matching the description in the Antiquities of the Jews, is believed to be his sarcophagus, though some historians dispute this identification. There are two possibilities, each sadder than the other for the king, who had so carefully prepared a magnificent final resting place for himself (beneath an artificial hill 64 metres in diameter, at the Herodion fortress): either the tomb remains lost, or the 2007 discovery is correct, but this would mean that his family provided him with a sarcophagus far too modest for a king and, at the same time, that the anti-Herodians, in the seventh decade of our era, ransacked his burial site and did not leave him in peace even in death, for his body is missing. The historian Seth Schwartz, a specialist in classical Jewish civilisation, says of him: “Herod is probably the only figure in ancient Jewish history who is equally hated by later generations of Jews and Christians, the rabbis, the Evangelists and the Church Fathers, all of whom remember him as a bloodthirsty tyrant”16.

Today, gazing at the sunset over ancient Jerusalem, it is hard to imagine how it appeared through Herod’s eyes two millennia ago. An object of consuming desire, a possession that was never fully granted to him, a city that the king must have loved passionately, since he spent fortune upon fortune to adorn it, but which, in turn, never loved him, remaining perpetually stubborn, deaf, destructive and as cold as ice, despite its scorching climate – proof that not even the love of city walls can be bought. But the city has not been denied only to the Edomite tyrant, but to all those who, ever since then, have been naive enough to believe that they can truly rule it. That they can tame it. For who has ever truly possessed Jerusalem?

‘Born is He who feels the sunset’17, said our great Eastern saint, contemplating the day of the Lord’s Nativity and referring, of course, to the most beautiful sunset he had ever seen in his entire life, the heavens: the sunset of the One who is prior to the sunset, of the One who alone beheld the sunset whilst the sun did not yet exist, but light moved freely through the air, still unfettered. Untamed. He is born and already senses the sunset – His own blood-red sunset, the fiery sunset of the Temple, the darkened sunset of the gods, the sunset of all mankind. And the final sunset, when He shall finally return to His ancient capital to judge the world.

Until then, bathed in the slanting light of the afternoon, stretched out like a lion cub in the sun, Jerusalem sits impassively in the same place, despite the centuries that press in upon it. It sees nothing for which it would be worth rising. The city of the Great King has borrowed something of its Master’s traits – that habit of remaining unshaken, regardless of the vicissitudes of life. And, although there is no city that the world has struck harder, there is no city more cut off from the world.

• 1

  This final version of the Temple was burnt down in 70 AD by Titus’s Roman conquerors.

• 2

  Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, trans. by Ion Acsan, Hasefer Publishers, Bucharest, 2001

• 3a3b

  Ibid.

• 4

  Matthew 2:16 “But when Herod realised that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious; and he sent men to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and throughout its surrounding district who were two years old and under, according to the time he had learnt from the Magi.”

• 5

  Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, trans. by Ion Acsan, Hasefer Publishers, Bucharest, 2001

• 6

  In Romanian – an allied king and friend of the Romanian people.

• 7

  Between approximately 301 and 198 BC

• 8

  Following this, both Mark Antony and Cleopatra took their own lives: he believing that the queen had already killed herself, and she to escape the humiliation of being Octavian’s prisoner.

• 9

  Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, trans. by Ion Acsan, Hasefer, Bucharest, 2001.

• 10

  Similar to the Olympic Games, they also had a strong religious element, being dedicated to the god Apollo. They were held in various parts of the Roman Empire to celebrate the victory at Actium.

• 11

  Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: A Biography, translated by Luminița Gavrilă Cioroianu, Smaranda Nistor and Constantin Dumitru Pălcuș, Ed. Trei, Bucharest, 2012.

• 12

  Jeremiah 33:17.

• 13

  Who had previously been the tax collector for Cleopatra’s children.

• 14

  Saint Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on the Nativity and Theophany of the Lord (7, 12), trans. by Deacon Ioan I. Ică Jr., Deisis Publishers, Sibiu, 2010.

• 15

  R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, published by Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2007.

• 16

  Seth Schwartz, The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad, published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014

• 17

  St Hieromonk Antim Ivireanul, Didahii (A Sermon on the 25th of December: On the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ), Litera Publishers, Chișinău, 1998