Herod the Great Spent Years Having Sex With His Dead Wife
Herod the Great (74 BC – circa 1 AD) was a Roman client king of Judea who built some massive projects during his reign, such as the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and the fortress of Masada. However, he is best known from the Christian Gospels as the king who ordered the Massacre of the Innocents when Jesus was born. Less known is that he was also a royal pervert of the grossest kind.
Herod was not religiously observant. He was born to an Edomite father, from a people who had been forcibly converted to Judaism only a generation or two before Herod’s birth. However, he was raised as a nominal Jew, and he married into the ruling Jewish Hasmonean Dynasty, tying the knot with princess Mariamne, one of the last Hasmonean heirs. He then killed her relatives, removing contenders for the throne of Judea, and got the Romans to make him king of the Jews.
Mariamne was a stunning beauty, and Herod was crazy about her – but not in a good way. On the one hand, he was passionately in love with her. On the other hand, he was also crazy jealous. While Herod loved Mariamne, she did not return the feeling. It was probably understandable, considering that Herod had killed her brother and uncle, and that Herod’s father had killed Mariamne’s father, then embalmed him in a tub of honey. Nonetheless, Herod had five children with her – two girls and three boys.
Eventually, like Shakespeare’s Othello, the tensions got too much, and Herod ended up destroying the object of his affections and obsessions. Mariamne hated Herod, and his children grew up hating him as well. So Herod eventually had Mariamne executed, as well as his two older sons with her. That was bad enough, but things soon went from bad to monstrous.
Despite having ordered Mariamne’s execution, Herod exhibited intense grief for her death. He often broke into uncontrollable fits of weeping, went into a deep depression, and was unable to let her go. That his, he was literally unable to let her go. According to the Talmud, Herod had his dead wife’s body preserved, and he kept making love to the corpse for seven whole years. The Talmud described it as Herod “fulfilling his animalistic desires” with the cadaver. It wasn’t just icky, but also sticky: Herod had supposedly preserved Mariamne’s corpse with honey.