Hey, I'm Matt, and this week of the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast is brought to you by Dwell. It's an audio Bible app that I love. There's a whole bunch more information about that if you follow the link down below in the show notes. All right, we are on to chapter two of the book of Matthew, and we have got a whole bunch of talk about regarding Herod the Great, one of the weirdest, most enigmatic characters in the history of the Bible. So let's get after it. After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea during the time of King Herod, Magi from the East came to Jerusalem and asked, Where's the one who's been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the East, and we've come to worship him. All right, again, this is a Christmas story, but we're not going to handle this like a Christmas story. There's some serious deep water to get into historically to even understand who on earth this Herod guy is, right? Imagine that you're reading the Bible straight through, and you get to the end of the Old Testament, and you're like, okay, we do this Malachi thing. Let's see what happens at the end of the Old Testament. Uh oh, wow, burning, furnace. See, I will send the prophet Elijah before the great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, or else I will come and strike the land with a curse. Okay, so it's more that blessing and curse language. That last verse also kind of sums up the hope language that we see in the Old Testament. Historically, contextually, this is happening a little bit before the time of Alexander the Great. So Persia is still the big dog. And now let's just turn this page here real quick. I know that one's a blank one. We'll turn the next one. This is the New Testament. And then we get to the next one. And there's Matthew 1, and there's a lot of names, and that's great. And then there's okay. And uh now we're in Judea, Bethlehem and Judea during the time of King Herod. King who? We have kings again? Wait, what's going on? I thought we were a captive people. Well, guess what? A lot's happened since then, and so we need to just clarify what on earth is going on. There's water under the bridge historically, and none of this is going to make any sense to us or the person who just happens to read straight through the Bible without clarifying what that is. Well, you and I have spent a bunch of time already talking about the general picture of the history between the testaments. Quick version: captivity in Babylon. Babylon gets conquered by Persia. Cyrus the Great lets the Jews go back and rebuild things. They do. And then we go quiet for a while. Alexander the Great in between comes along, he conquers the whole world, Greekifies everything. Alexander dies, doesn't leave an heir, his generals divide up the empire. The Seleucids under General Seleucus end up in control of Palestine, Judea, Galilee, whatever you want to call it at any given time. And it doesn't go super well. And then there's a rebellion held by the Maccabees family, and this leads to a Jewish dynasty that starts up in the second century, starting in 140 BC. Then the Romans come along and they conquer it, and then we get to Jesus, and now Rome is in charge. So that's a lot. But I want to narrow in a little bit more specifically to figure out where King Herod fits in, because why do we have a king if the Romans are in charge? Wouldn't that just be an emperor? I mean, wouldn't it be like Caesar Augustus is the only name that you really need to know? Well, the Romans had a system called the client king system. When they conquered a place, they figured out that it was way to their advantage to just have a local ruler handle most of the business. You know, we've talked about this before, but collect taxes, ensure peace, and then the Romans would have a governor present as well, and that governor would handle more of the communications with the home country and making sure things work. But conquered people tended to not like the Roman governor and be more cooperative with the local governor. But also the Romans at times were a little bit ham-fisted about this because they didn't really understand the religious, ethnic, social history of a given conquered people. And that is definitely the case of what happens here in Judea. All right, so once again, the Old Testament leaves off with Persia in charge and the Jews enjoying the rebuilding of Jerusalem and a degree of self-governance under the very long leash of the Persians. But the Persians, somewhere in there, ranging from between the time of Esther to the intertestamental time, get into it with the Greeks. And you know, you've seen the movie 300, maybe. Well, that's an account of something that happened right at the tail end of the Old Testament. So there's this great big superpower war between the independent Greek city-states and the Persians that's happening in the background here. Well, eventually the Greeks went out, Persia goes off and does their own thing on the other side of the world, the Greeks start to engage in civil war and struggle, and the results is that a kind of Greekish group from up north, the Macedonians, under the leadership of Philip II, conquer all of Greece. And Greece isn't crazy about it, but it's also not the worst thing that ever happened, because at least it's still Greek-ish. But Philip II dies, and his kid Alexander, a very young man, 18, takes over his dad's empire. And he's like, you know who I hate? Those stupid Persians. Let's go get them. And so he decides to go conquer Persia. So it begins this march in 332 BC, no, 333 BC, excuse me, Alexander defeats the Persian king Darius III. That has implications because, again, the Jews are enjoying being under the authority of the Persians, because again, the Persians kind of let them do what they want and govern themselves based on religious rule. Well, Alexander goes straight down to Jerusalem because he's going to conquer everything, and there's no point in fighting. And so Alexander in 332 bloodlessly conquers Jerusalem. Then he goes and establishes Alexandria in Egypt and goes back on the march through modern-day Iraq and Iran. Eventually, he completely defeats the Persian Empire and establishes himself as monarch, fights all the way into India, then dies as a young man, leaves no heir, and the Seleucids end up in charge of the part of the world that includes Jerusalem. They want to Greekify everything. And so this doesn't go very well. And eventually, the Maccabees family throws off this authority in a great big rebellion that's celebrated in the intertestamental books of the Deuterocanon or Apocrypha, depending on what kind of religious background you're from. It's what Hanukkah is in part a celebration of. And they set up an independent Jewish state that a lot of people don't know ever existed. It's called the Hasmonean dynasty, and it existed from 140 BC to 37 BC. So it's like a hundred-year kingdom. That's pretty good. But this is not a nice era in Jewish history. All of the corruption and yuck that goes on in all the neighboring countries goes on there. It isn't like a re-establishment of the awesomeness of the glory days of the best kings of old. Family members murder each other. One in particular, Aristobulus, famously let his mother starve to death in a prison to make a point. At one point, a guy named Hercanus opens David's sepulchre to bribe the Seleucids to spare them after an attempt at pushing out the boundaries of the Hasmonean dynasty. I mean, ick. And I think the guy who did that was actually the high priest at the time. It's just a gross era. And so they're semi-independent until that moment I just talked about when John Hercanus rebels against the weakened Seleucid Empire, trying to expand the boundaries. And in doing so, he picks up a few little territories, including one called Idumia or Edom. And Hercanus does a thing where he's like, hey, you're gonna, you know, convert or die. And so, well, they end up converting. And obviously, that's gonna lead to bad blood and bad history between Edom and also the actual Jewish people. Neither really likes each other or feels good about the arrangement. Well, Hercanus' son, interestingly enough, his name is Hercanus II, causes a civil war with his other family members, and this results in Rome, who we haven't even heard of to this point, this far western power that's been gradually expanding. Now, Rome in the first century BC shows up, and one of their great generals, a guy named Pompeii, Gnaeus Magnus Pompeii, pretty big deal, comes in to settle the matter of dispute. Well, you don't bring in the big dogs like that and have them just settle the matter and then leave. There's going to be a price to pay. And the price to pay is effectively that Judea is now a client king, subservient to Rome. So the Herod we're reading about in the Bible here, his dad is an advisor to the weakened Hercanus II, and eventually that results in Herod himself being made governor of Galilee in 47. And of course, nobody likes that at all. Stupid half-breed conquered types who aren't even really Jewish. Now they're in a position of authority over all of the Jewish people, and it's kind of one of those uh all-time backfires. Well, Julius Caesar, as you might remember, gets killed on the Ides of March, 44 BC, and that disrupts a lot of things politically empire-wide. Hyrcanus II gets captured and mutilated, but his rivals still can't control Judea. And so after Herod's dad gets assassinated, it falls to Herod the Younger to get his guy backed by Rome. So Herod asks Mark Antony to restore Hyrcanus II, and instead, Mark Antony makes Herod king of Judea if he can win it. Which he does by calling in a ton of military favors. And now the weird latter Hasmonean dynasty that started with the promising Maccabean revolution is over in 37 BC. Herod cleans house, murders everybody, gets rid of his Hasmonean wife, and kills her and the kids, and effectively that ends all Jewish rule and Jewish legitimate independence. And so Jewish people are hyper mad at him and hyper mad at Rome. This guy was smart, ambitious, capable, morally flexible, and increasingly nuts and paranoid in his old age. He knew his power was based on basically nothing. I mean, you just heard the story. That's a very flimsy claim to authority, especially considering that Mark Antony, the guy who put him in power, was the one who famously was against Caesar Augustus in a civil war to decide who would rule after Caesar died. And now you know the story. Caesar Augustus won. Mark Antony and his girl Cleopatra killed themselves by snake bite in Egypt. So you still got this guy hanging out over here who's Harrod, and he's like, ah, the dude who killed himself with a snake is the only reason I'm in charge. So I just like to make nice with everybody. And of course, he doesn't feel like he's on firm footing. And you know what it's like when people don't feel like they're on firm footing and they're an imposter? They do crazy weird stuff and they lash out to justify it, and maybe they're overly generous and lavish and spend money and get violent and get mad and defensive. And that is exactly who this Herod character is. Matthew is writing to an audience who already doesn't like this guy and knows the story I just told you like the back of their hand. So when Matthew invokes the name King Herod, everybody in that original audience starts to feel the bad blood and the grossness, and it would have conjured all kinds of feelings amongst people. And so Matthew might be doing something really clever here by choosing to include this story, and we'll get to that next time around. Okay, so that is the rundown on how Herod ended up in power and a little bit about him. Tomorrow I want to talk about more of his quirks and maybe even a few of the things that went all right in his reign to give us a little bit more of a sense of what the original audience would have been thinking when his name popped up in the text. All right, looking forward to getting after it tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.