King Herod the Great: The Original Baby Killer
If history is a drama, then King Herod has been cast as the eternal villain. The role he is remembered most for would be in the story of Jesus Christ: King Herod opposed the Christian figure and wished him dead. So it is no surprise his life is remembered as an evil one.
Herod, however, notwithstanding that he was a Roman client king, was responsible for quite a lot more than simply playing the antihero in the great Christian drama. Perhaps his most famous achievement was the building, or the extension of the Second Temple of Jerusalem, along with numerous other monumental building projects that added the ‘Great’ to his name quite deservedly.
The New Testament, however, portrays Herod as a tyrant, and Jesus of Nazareth was born under his vicious rule. Had he not taken that role, however, it is quite probable that the legacy of Christ would have been stillborn, since no tragedy can fully evolve without a villain; and Herod certainly played that role. It is the Gospel of Luke that describes the quintessential ‘Herodian” episode, and the essence of it is simply that Pontius Pilate, Roman prefect of Judea, passed the responsibility to judge Jesus of Nazareth on to Herod, under whose jurisdiction he technically lay. After mocking him, goading him to perform miracles and generally making fun of the whole affair, Jesus was tossed back across the net to Pilate, and the rest, of course, is history.
What gives Herod a place in this particular pantheon, however, was one act that could not easily be explained away. The ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ was the fiendish scheme to slaughter all male infants in the vicinity of Bethlehem once the prophetic news had reached him that a king had been born in that settlement. According to the Bible, Mary and Joseph, the parents of Jesus, were warned by angels, and fled to Egypt ahead of the massacre. But behind them in Bethlehem, Herod’s troops conducted the infamous deed of slaughtering the innocents.
History, of course, has picked over the bones of this story ever since, and in the end probably only twenty or so infants were killed, but just coming up with an idea like that puts a man right in the frame of being an absolute and utter bastard, no doubt about it.