In the film version of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, the church pageant director, played by Loretta Swit, is trying to explain the Christmas story to the Herdman children. "Who's Herod?" they ask. "He was a king," she says patiently. "King of what?" they want to know? Loretta Swit gives them this blank look and says something like, "Well, just a king!"
And that's the most explanation we usually get about Herod. Yet the politics of it all is really puzzling, isn't it? We know that Jesus was born during the time of the Roman Empire, that Caesar Augustus was making decrees; so what's this king doing having anything to say about newborn babies?
This week--coincidentally--Ponytails and I read the solution in Genevieve Foster's Augustus Caesar's World. According to Foster, Herod was the governor of Galilee until the Parthians took over Jerusalem and--to make a long story short--they kicked him out. He went running to Marc Antony in Rome, and Antony persuaded the Senate that they needed Herod's loyal service back in Jerusalem with all this trouble going on there with the Parthians, Antigonus and Hyrcanus. But since they needed to make him sound powerful but not really have any power, they decided to give him the new title of King of Judea, or King of the Jews. (Herod wasn't even from Judea; he was from Edom, and he was only half Jewish anyway.)
There. Now you know.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
And of course Hyrcanus, a Hasmonean (Macabbee) was the legitimate King of Judea. But the Romans were better off with a puppet king of questionable sanity, Thus their support of Herod, who was not a Jew at all. (Jewish law does not recognize half-identities. If a person is the child of a mother who was Jewish at the time of his, then he is a Jew. If not, not).
Thanks, Elisheva!
Post a Comment