Herod The Great: The Years Before Christ

The life of Herod the Great provides a remarkable record of public adventures and successes, and of private melodramas and disasters within his household. Yet there is so little known of the man outside of Christian scripture. Herod is the subject of much misunderstanding and confusion, some deserved and some not. He stands in a no-man's land between the Jewish faith and the corrupting influences of the Greco-Roman civilization imposed upon Israel. For forty years, Herod walked a difficult and precarious political tightrope between his Roman masters and Jewish authority. He had to be enough of a Jew to retain control of his kingdom, and enough of a pro-Roman despot to preserve the confidence of Emperor Augustus. He made Palestine a large and prosperous country, but he also thought of himself as the promised Messiah. Herod's paranoia set the stage for the Slaughter of the Innocents described in the Gospel of Matthew.