Hey, I'm Matt. Welcome back to the 10 Minute Bible Lember Podcast. This week of the program is brought to you by Dwell Audio Bible app. They've got all kinds of customizable playlists as well as the ability to just power through gigantic chunks of Bible. Anything you want, I'm a big fan. Check it out down in the show notes for more information. All right. Yesterday we talked about this weird, convoluted story for how Herod the Great comes to power and his dynasty ends up ruling over the client king state of Judea, well, and really Galilee, on behalf of the occupying Romans. And it really is a goofy story because we go from leaving off in the Old Testament with one set of global powers running the show to something completely unrecognizable a few hundred years later. But Herod, along with Rome, these are the two, I suppose, sort of defining characters that are really epitomized the change that's gone on. And yesterday I talked a lot about how reviled Herod would have been amongst most of Matthew's audience. Maybe I gave the impression that he would have been reviled by everyone. But in this episode, I want to try to be fair to the things that maybe went okay in Herod's reign, and that maybe a small percentage of Matthew's audience might have liked about Herod. And then I want to talk a little bit more about some of the crazy stuff because it's just juicy and interesting and fun, and it'll give you a better picture of why a whole bunch of people didn't like Herod, and you can get a sense of how they would have felt when his name pops up in the narrative. So, off the top of my head, I'm going to try to do a list of the good things. If I were to say something nice about Herod at a party because I was socially obligated to, I might say Herod navigated some difficult family situations that could have jeopardized stability in the region he oversaw. Now, admittedly, most of these difficult situations he ran into were because he murdered his own family members, most notably his wife, and that caused a succession crisis that came after that. But rather than letting everything melt down like some prominent members of Israel's history had in the past, he worked with the home office in Rome, avoided a succession crisis, painted outside the lines a little bit, and created a tetrarchy, divide up the kingdom, then you won't have infighting and a civil war. I mean, effectively, you could argue that Herod made decisions that kept the peace within his family and therefore within his region that postponed Rome's invasion and snuffing out of the rebellious ideas of the Jewish people for another 70 years. You could argue that. Enormously loyal to the death. And then after the Battle of Actium, where Antony and Cleopatra lost to Caesar Augustus, who is also called Octavian, he then is forced into a position where he now needs to be loyal to Octavian and is actually like a pretty good pal to Caesar Augustus, one of the few people that Augustus kind of treated as a peer and leaned on a little bit. And they only ever really had one little dust up, which was straightened out by maybe another good thing that Herod pulled off, which was putting in his life a philosophically minded thinker to maybe soften some of the rough edges of his own personality. There was a guy named Nicholas of Damascus, who was his biographer. And I'm not sure Nicholas totally wanted to be there, but it does seem that on more than one occasion, Herod's good judgment in employing this guy resulted in good both for Herod and for everybody else who was around. So again, if I were at a party and I had to say five nice things, what do I have done? That's like it's like three so far, right? Okay, so what else can we say? It's the nights without Herod. Um, he built things, he built really pretty buildings. I mean, he took all the money from crazy places. I'll tell you about one of the places he rounded up a little extra cash here in just a minute. But he built some really awesome stuff. Most of the stuff he built was born out of crazy paranoia. Well, not most of it, but just some. Like the palace fortress of the Herodian, which I think is where people believe that he's buried, which is this giant, like cone-shaped, impenetrable fortress. I'm pretty sure he built Masada, which is the place maybe you've heard of it, that that plateau mountain kind of uh Dead Sea region fortress where that mega suicide happened. But that fortress, which was almost impregnable, was built by Herod. Herod built the port city of Caesarea that factors very heavily into the book of Acts and the story of the early church, the life of the Apostle Paul. He is also famously responsible for expanding the temple, the parts of the temple in Jerusalem right now that you can still see. I think every little fragment that's left would be part of Herod's building projects. So there's that as well. It would seem that the region he oversaw became richer under his attention. So I don't know, is that five nice things? I think that's five nice things. That's pretty good. But but you still have the ethnic issue that I talked about before, and you still have the crazy issue that I talked a little bit about yesterday. Now, obviously, murdering family members is one good example of crazy, but it wasn't just that he murdered people, he had like Shakespearean Macbeth level visions of them still being alive and trying to murder him and calling for spouses he'd already killed. He was also hyper paranoid about just how he came off. He had kind of this little man's disease, and he dyed his hair to look younger, longer. And I mean, he was an old man. He lived for a long time. He was born in the 70s BC and he died in 4 BC. I gotta come back to that at some point, too. That date is a little bit confusing right on the surface. So there was a paranoia about his height and his weight and his appearance that some of his rival family members made fun of him for, and that made him more paranoid and angry, and actually caused legitimate political problems just because people in his own family made fun of how he looked and came off. And then maybe the coup de gras of crazy is that he had a family member. I uh let me see, it would have been his sister, who he instructed as he got old and his body's falling apart. He's like, all right, I'm gonna die soon, and everybody hates me, but there will be mourning for me in my country. And the way we're gonna do it is right when you think I'm about to just die, I need you to real quick send some people out and be like, uh, the king said you gotta round up a whole bunch of noblemen or something, and you gotta put them all in, I don't remember what it was, like the Hippodrome or some stadium or theater in Jericho. Don't tell them why. Just be like, you just have to for reasons. And then as soon as I die, kill them all. And then everybody's gonna be super sad, and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth on the day of my death. And his sister, I'm pretty sure it was his sister, was smart enough to be like, that that's probably not good for anybody. I'm gonna, I'm gonna skip the giant crazy false pretenses massacre party. I think that would make me really unpopular in my boomerang. And so, even to the very end, this dude's paranoia and and hyper loyalty to Rome would have been the most off-putting to the most doggedly independence-minded Jewish people. And I mentioned earlier that there is one more amazing anecdote that I want to tell you, and it is a doozy, has to do with a moment where apparently he was on hard times, and so he decides to go and rustle up a little cash from an unusual source. And we find this in Josephus's book, The Antiquities. He's a Jewish historian from later on in the first century, and it's the story of Herod at night loading up with some of his boys and going tomb raiding. I am not kidding. You know what, actually, I've got it here. This will take a minute, but this is so worth it. I'm just gonna read it to you. Okay, it's in Book 16, chapter 7, of the Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus. Here is the story. As for Herod, he had spent vast sums about the cities, both without and within his own kingdom. And as he had before heard that Hercanus, who we talked about in the last episode, who had been king before him, had opened David's sepulchre and taken out of it three thousand talents of silver, and that there was a much greater number left behind, and indeed enough to suffice all his wants, he had a great while intention to make the attempt. And at this time he opened that sepulchre by night and went into it, and endeavored that it should not be at all known in the city, but took only his most faithful friends with him. As for any money, he found none, as Hercanus had done, but the furniture of gold and those precious goods that were laid up there, all which he took away. However, he had a great desire to make a more diligent search and to go further in, even as far as the very bodies of David and Solomon, Matt's aside here. They buried a whole bunch of the family of David in this tomb, apparently. Even to go as far as the very bodies of David and Solomon, where two of his guards were slain by a flame that burst out upon those that went in, as the report was. What? Is this Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark, where there are booby traps? Or is this Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade where people melt for messing with holy stuff? I don't know, but it's awesome. So uh he was terribly affrightened and he went out and he built a propitiatory monument out of that fright he had been in, and this of white stone at the mouth of the sepulchre, and that at a great expense also. History is wonderful. That anecdote had been floating around for a long time, and the original members of Matthew's audience knew that anecdote, and it was just one of many reasons they could not stand this guy. It wasn't enough that he was a lousy king, it wasn't enough that he was a paranoid jerk, but he had no respect for their history and their culture, and more importantly, their religious tradition and belief that God had made unique covenants with them to accomplish stuff. I'm actually having to be really efficient with these back-to-back episodes on Herod because he's a very well-sourced historical character, and all the anecdotes about him are so juicy. I mean, he's the mad king. Before it was fashionable to be the mad king, kill anybody who threatens you, do whatever you want financially, but he also cut taxes at times and seems to have bailed out his people from famine and hardship a couple of times. So I don't want to leave my slight overstatement from the last episode out there unchecked. The people who Matthew probably had in mind who he believed might respond to the message of Jesus, would really have not liked Herod. And the idea of him deciding to round up a whole bunch of the babies and just murder them, uh, one, they would have remembered it, and two, that wouldn't have sounded far-fetched to anybody, even in later generations, because it seems to really fit with the character of Herod. So when he died in 4 BC, which happens chronologically in Matthew chapter 2, probably not too many people would have been super sad about it, although a few people would have wondered if some of the, I don't know, devil you know, good, stable things that come with having a dictator who's at least predictable. I think some people would have wondered or worried what was next. And I think what they found was that they just got a lot more of the same with his descendants until ultimately that revolutionary mindset kicked in, and the people of Israel go into open rebellion against Rome, and things turn very, very ugly in 70 AD. At which point it's effectively the end of the political influence of Herod the Great and his family. So there we go. We've framed up the whole Herod thing, hopefully well enough to give us a sense of the character and how people would have thought of him and to set us up to better understand and appreciate his weaseling as described by Matthew as we get into the story of him and the magi. Once again, this week of the program is brought to you by Dwell Audio Bible app. They're doing 33% off an annual membership for anybody who clicks on the link down there below. So instead of 30 bucks for a year of this fantastic Bible app, you can get it for 20. And they're also doing a lifetime thing. So if you super like it and you're like, just do this thing forever, 33% offset of 150 bucks, it's a hundred bucks just forever. Okay, thanks for kicking around the history side. We're gonna get into some more of the theology side later this week after we talk about who these magi were tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. We'll catch you soon.