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All right, let's say you're going to an Applebee's and you're there with a group of people that you need to impress. I've got a three-step plan for how to pull this off. One, you gotta let everybody get a couple of those gallon margaritas in them. That'll soften them up. Two, you gotta remember that the bar is set low, so be calm. These are people who are impressed by microwave imitation pork rib chunks. You've got this thing. Third, and this is the really important part, you need to go memorize some general nebulous observation from one of the really big name classical Greek philosophers. And then just wait for somebody to say anything and drop it right after that. And pro tip here, you don't want to go and get like some fancy obscure philosopher that you Googled or something, because if they haven't heard of him, it's not gonna work. So just stick to the big ones Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. In this case, we're going with Aristotle. So somebody hawks back a big swig of margarita, and they say, you know, I'm worried about where the economy's going. This is your chance. You jump in and say, Well, according to Aristotle, nature abhors a vacuum, and everybody's gonna be like, you're the best person at the table. It doesn't matter that you don't know what that means. I don't know what that means. I think Sir Isaac Newton knew what that means. I think Robert Boyle knew what that meant. I not really God's gift to science, but I do know a little bit about how human nature works. And I can tell you that Aristotle is spot on in that regard. Human nature abhors a power vacuum. Now, this is always true. There's only so much power to go around. And when somebody has it, and they've usually probably used it in some weird ways, there's a whole lot of people lining up to get the next swipe at that power when the opportunity comes. And that's exactly how things played out when the maniacal, insane, sick, stinking, and rotting Herod the Great died in like six, five, four, or one BC. There are competing theories as to when he actually died. Some people look at some different astronomical reference points that we get from later historians and try to triangulate when he died from that. Other people look at some of the political movements of Rome and try to get a sense of when he died from that. Other people yet assume that Herod's successors tried to backdate their ascension to power and front date his death so as to make it look like they overlapped with him and therefore had more of his blessing. That's kind of what muddies the waters. And there are some consequences to this debate as to when exactly he died, because in Luke, we've got a timetable that is referenced off of a census that happened when Quirinius was governor. And so we kind of have a sense of when that census might have been, where there are two censuses. If we were doing a thing on Luke, we'd break that whole thing down. So for our purposes, we're just going to acknowledge that we don't know exactly what year Jesus was born, and that Herod overlapped with Jesus just a teeny, teeny tiny little bit, obviously, based on this text. But as we get into Matthew chapter 2, verses 19 and 20, we've got three words we're going to get hung up on, but I'm going to read the whole thing anyway. After Herod died, those are the three words, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who are trying to take the child's life are dead. After Herod died, it seems so simple, but it is so not simple. And part of the reason for this is when you're married to 11 different women, I don't know what the actual number is, but it's something like that. Seriously, you're going to have some succession problems that come along with that. Also, when you tend to murder family members when they irritate you, that is going to create some instability. And all of those decisions come home to roost in the last two to five years of Herod the Great's life. Now remember, Herod the Great governed with the blessing of his buddy, Caesar Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. And clearly, whatever happened next was going to only occur with the blessing of Rome. As we talked about in earlier episodes, Herod did not go out well. I don't think I talked about exactly what that looked like, but he got a disease that made him just reek, apparently. I don't know what reeking disease is, but it was so bad and so embarrassing that it further diminished his already floundering state of mind. At one point, we've got a record of him trying to kill himself with a knife and being stopped by a family member. And we also see a really erratic changing of plans from almost month to month in the home stretch of his life as to what the succession plan will be. Now here's the deal: Herod married in to the Hasmonean dynasty. Those are the descendants of the Maccabees, the family that threw off the Greek rule and was eventually toppled in the mid-first century BC, formally by Pompeii. So this dynasty still has descendants in it, and Herod bolstered his claim and his reputation by vaguely being a part of this family and by producing heirs who were heirs to the Hasmonean dynasty. So his two kids, Aristobulus and Alexander, for the longest time just looked like the very obvious successors to his throne upon his death. But Aristobulus and Alexander got into some trouble and ran afoul of Herod and larger authorities, and they got executed in about 7 BC. So then the only remaining heir from that particular marriage is a kid named Antipater, but he tries to off his dad for various reasons. And obviously that takes him out of the picture. I mean, if Herod did horrible things to people who didn't try to off him, but we're just standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. You can imagine that he wasn't very fond of this Antipater kid after that. So now Herod looks to his youngest son from all of these relationships, and this is Antipas. Now, Antipas is the name you should know. This is the guy who is the Herod of the rest of the gospel accounts. This is the Herod who shows up for Jesus' trial. So there's a changing of the guard happening in these three words in verse 19, as Jesus is coming back to his home country where he's going to do his work. So his rival is also coming to power in this very same moment. So Antipas looks like he's going to inherit just about everything. But then Herod, you know, smelling his own stench and he can't decide what to do. And so he flips around. He's like, no, we're going to go with your older brother. This is a kid named Archolus, and he's going to be in charge of most everything. But Antipas, he'll get Galilee and some other stuff. And we're just going to divide the whole thing up into multiple authority groups or units. And as a result, you know, Herod dies. All of these different claimants rush to Rome and they're appealing to Caesar Augustus. They're like, it should be me. No, it should be me. They all give their case. And Augustus, in a move that's kind of reminiscent of Pilate just doing the, I don't know what to do with you, Judeans, whatever, just washes his hands of it and just goes with whatever Herod said before he died. So the way this works, and this is important, is that Archolus, the oldest remaining heir, ends up with the title Ethnarch. He wanted the title king, but king was too powerful a title. Ethnarch just means a ruler of a homogeneous ethnic group. Now he's going to be in charge of Judea, Samaria, and the old homeland of the Herod family. His younger brother, Antipas, is going to end up being in charge in the north, in Galilee, and he's going to get the title of Tetrarch. A Tetrarch is a title that describes one quarter king, one quarter ruler, like, you know, monarch would be like, see the mon, like one. What do you call it? Duoarch? Biarch? Diarchy? I don't know the term. It's going to be so obvious when it comes to me later, but you get the, you get the idea. So Tetris, Tetrarch, you got the four different units. So Antipas gets one quarter, and then Philip, who we probably won't talk about as much, gets another quarter, and Archolus effectively gets two quarters. So that's the way it gets divided up. But Augustus is grossed out by Archulus's leadership style. And it's just into Jesus' early life, maybe five or six years in, that Arculus gets deposed by Caesar Augustus. And Augustus is like, nah, Judea is way too important. We're not going to leave this as two-fourths of a Tetrarchy. We're just going to send our own governors and handle it this way. And so Pontius Pilate is one of the people who occupied that prefecture or governor role of the Roman province of Judea. It's also why he's still interacting, Pontius Pilate, that is, with Tetrarchs like Antipas or Philip, later on, because both of these power structures kind of remain. Now, there are more Herods who come up, and I'll give you just the quick overview so that we can kind of try to keep this straight. Herod Antipas is not only the guy who's at Jesus' trial, he's also the guy who married his brother Herod Philip's wife, Herodias, which is some kind of messed up thing. So John the Baptist, you'll recall, says you can't do that. You can't just marry your brother's wife, and she's the one who has a kid do the super sexy dance for Herod Antipas, and then Herod Antipas is embarrassed at a party, and he has to agree to take John the Baptist's head. So that's Herod Antipas. Herod Archolus is again the one that got deposed. Philip the Tetrarch doesn't really come up that much for other things. And then the last Herod you need to know about is Herod Agrippa I, who's kind of the next generation, and he's the guy who imprisoned Peter and executed James in Acts chapter 12? Is it Acts chapter 12? Let's say it's Acts chapter 12. Now I'm gonna look. Yes, Acts chapter 12. And that Herod Agrippa I at the end of Acts chapter 12 is the one who famously dies by being eaten by worms in kind of a cool cryptic passage there. So why does this all matter? Okay, I kind of hinted at it earlier, but it matters because this is the foil to Jesus. This is the political backdrop against which the adult life of Jesus and the early church is going to happen. This is what the original audience would have had in their mind as they were reading about this stuff. These were the political pressures that they were facing when they heard Jesus talk. If we don't understand the Herod family, as confusing as it all is, and we don't understand where they all fit, I really think we're hamstringing ourselves in terms of our ability to understand the rest of this gospel, especially from the perspective of the original audience. So we're gonna get a little bit of a break from talking about the Herod family and where all of this fits, but come on, we do we really want that big of a break. It's very juicy and it's very entertaining. Now, tomorrow we will get into this whole prophecy about Jesus being called a Nazarene and the controversy that goes along with that. And we'll move forward into chapter three after that. Thanks to everybody who supports the program at patreon.com slash the TMBH podcast. And thanks to everybody who doesn't. I'm super glad you're all here. And I can't wait to get into more of this stuff tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do it again soon.