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Herod from Hell
Confessions and Reminiscences
By Craig R. Smith AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2013 Craig R. Smith
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4918-2950-9
CHAPTER 1
In the Beginning
I, Herod, having had my soul released on the Ides of May of 2007 from the ossuary in which I was entombed, now speak to you from Hell. It happened this way. When I was buried with a glorious funeral, my enemies waited until nightfall and then moved the ossuary in which I was interred. They hid it and put a curse upon it: namely, that my soul would be entrapped in the ossuary until it was discovered. After more than two thousand years, my tomb was found in the fortress at Herodium which I built into a conical, scruffy 300 foot high hill eight miles south of Jerusalem. Because of my sins, once released from Herodium, my soul was immediately consigned to a lower chamber in Hell. However, there is no need for you to mourn for me, though I doubt many people regret my death given the publicity I was subjected to after my death by the New Testament writers.
I do not need sympathy because here in Hell I have company and the chance to catch up on all that has happened since my death. Beyond the fires and the absence of Yahweh that we endure every day, we are shaped and tortured by the unforgiven sins that marred our souls at the time of our deaths. For example, my soul is plagued with a stomach full of cramps. Cleopatra's soul is ripe, puffy and redolent, making her look like a blistered tomato instead of the beauty she had been. Henry VIII's soul is red and blotchy. The Renaissance monk Savonarola's soul is streaked with the scars of his burning at the stake. The good news is that we can wear apparel to cover our corrupted souls hiding the pustules, pock marks, and scars of our sins.
My penance requires that I recount the events of my life, and that of my off spring, in an honest manner. Once I have fulfilled this autobiographical duty, I will be allowed to move up to higher levels of chambers in this inferno. To help me complete my sentence, I am allowed to consult any of my relatives and former acquaintances who are down here. And let me tell you, there are a lot of them. I can also talk to historians and philosophers from my time and after as long as I do not wander too far from my level of confinement in Hell.
The story that I will relate to you is one of the most interesting in all of history if I do say so myself. It is particularly relevant to you because the story brings together forces that affect you to this day. Let me begin by confessing that though I was dubbed "King of the Jews" by the Romans, I was not Jewish, I am of Nabataean Arab and Idumean descent. As you shall see, this heritage led to a great deal of trouble with the Jews over whom I ruled. But my story is also of interest because I dealt with the only major imperial power in the world, Rome, and kept it at bay by cleverly befriending its major leaders, one after the other. They killed one another off with great regularity; so I had to be very adaptable as new leaders emerged. Not only did I acquire more territory and wealth than either Kings David or Solomon, I became the second wealthiest ruler in the Roman Empire and established a line of rulers that lasted to the end of the First Century A.D
Despite this dramatic history, I get short shrift in your culture. When Hollywood does mention me, it is as the man who tried to kill the infant Yeshua—the one some call Jesus—by ordering a mass slaughter of young male babies in my vicinity. (A libel I will refute later in these memoirs.) In the recent cable series on Rome, I was seen merely walking through a few scenes. I have learned from my son Herod Antipas in the chamber above me that Hollywood has done Rome big time. From the original "Ben Hur" through "Quo Vadis" to "Gladiator," Hollywood has featured the Roman Empire in all of its glory, gore, and corruption. But not me and mine. And Hollywood certainly does Yeshua bar Yoseph, some call him Jesus the Christ; Yeshua is regularly visited by film makers from "The Sign of the Cross" to "The Passion of the Christ". These cinematic fictions either portray me and my family as vicious or as fops; Antipas was particularly offended by "Yeshua Christ Superstar."
My story turns the Hollywood perspective around in several ways. First, it functions as a corrective on some very inaccurate portrayals of me and my off-spring. Second, it examines the Roman rulers and your Christ and his followers through my eyes and the eyes of my successors. This is necessary because most people do not know the difference between Herod the Great—I ruled at the time of Yeshua's birth—and my son, Herod Antipas, who ruled at the time of Yeshua's crucifixion. Few have heard of my grandson Herod Agrippa I, though he is featured in the New Testament's Acts of the Apostles, or his son Herod Agrippa II, who would rule for 43 years. This narrative tries to set the record straight and along the way undo some other myths.
Let me begin by talking about where I am now. Different religions have different interpretations of what and where Hell is. I can tell you now that the Jews were right. Before Yahweh created the earth, he erected Heaven on his right side and Hell on his left side. After the revolt of Satan and the dark angels, Hell was lowered into the Abyss, the deep pit, with its lake of fire at the bottom. This is the realm that Satan rules, never to see Yahweh again. (The name Yahweh is derived from the Hebrew letters YHWH, which come from JHVH for Jehovah; the Jews do not say the name of their God; however, sometimes they say "Adonai," for Lord.)
To complete my assignment, I believe it will be most natural for me to examine history from the point of view of the Herodian dynasty, which the historian here tells me has not been attempted before. As I have observed, our link to the Romans was a strong one and our interaction with the teacher Yeshua was important. As I mentioned, he was born in the last year of my life and died during the reign of my son Antipas in 33 A.D. For their crimes, my sons, Antipater and Archelaus are in a chamber 8, one below mine; Antipas and my grandson and great grandson Agrippa's I and II are in chamber 6, one above mine. My sons and grandsons have helped me piece together the story of the Herodian dynasty, which runs from my birth to Agrippa II's death.
However, there is another conundrum I wished to get out of the way before beginning my personal story. The tension among the Jews that I faced may surprise many people who are unfamiliar with Jewish governance. On one side were those who could trace their lineage back through the Old Testament using their tribal heritage. Some were Levites, some descended from Joseph, and some were members of the tribes from Esau, who had lost his birthright to his brother Jacob. The traditional Jews retained the stories of triumph and captivity; their scribes wrote them into the books of the Old Testament five hundred years before my time. After destroying Solomon's Temple and annexing Judah, Nebuchadnezzar II took the Jews to Babylon. Seven decades later, Cyrus, the King of Persia, freed them. In gratitude, the Jews re-named him Koresh, which means savior. Ironically, the Old Testament as I came to know it would never have been written had the Jews not endured the Babylonian captivity. It gave their scribes something to do while captives; they gave the world a solidified religion with a well woven set of myths based on facts available to them that had been handed down in their oral culture.
By my time, the last century before the birth of Yeshua, many of the "authentic" Jews also claimed to be followers of the Maccabees who had thrown off the yoke of Greek rule and evolved into the Hasmonean dynasty, named for their founder Hashmon. They awaited a Messiah descended from King David; that Messiah was supposed to lead them to political dominance in the region, much as David had centuries earlier. The problem with these beliefs is that I ran counter to them. Were I to take over Judea and recreate the kingdom of David, it would prove their prophets wrong. So they opposed me at every turn. This was very annoying. They could accept a Persian as their savior centuries before my time, but not accept me, an Arab Idumean. This was particularly galling to me since my father had helped keep the Romans off their backs. In their attacks on me, they often retold the story of how Jeremiah, the noisiest of their prophets, had been sent to an Idumean leader to face judgment, and therefore, Idumeans must endure the disdain of Jews through time. It is ironic that some Christians would issue the same kind of condemnation of the Jews because their leaders had requested the crucifixion of Yeshua.
On the other side of the first century B.C. divide were those who followed me, Herod. I came to power through heroic military campaigns, and with the aid of my father and allies in Rome. However, because I was not an "authentic" Jew, I was almost always being tested by those loyal to the Hasmonean dynasty.
That's why the story of my dynasty often reads like a soap opera. It is a story complicated by characters who have the same names, sons being named after their fathers, daughters after their aunts, and so forth. My father was named Antipater; so following tradition, I named my first son Antipater. My sister Salome also named her son Antipater and one of my son's wives, Herodias, named her daughter by her first husband after her aunt Salome. This younger Salome became the most infamous strip dancer in history. Despite this confusion, I will do my best in telling this story to keep the main characters straight by numbering them and referring you to the dynastic chart in the front of this book.
So to the beginning. In what is now southern Palestine, I, Herod the Great, was born in late 73 B.C. under the rule of Queen Alexandra of the Hasmonean line. My name means heroic, so from the beginning, I had a name to live up to. My father, the Idumean ruler Antipater, was always close to the Jews of nearby Judea, though he had married the Nabataean Princess Cypros, my mother. As I grew up, my father was my best mentor, but he also exposed me to Jewish scholars. I was quite familiar and comfortable with the ways of the Jews, particularly their monotheism. One of my teachers, Manaemos, after coming out of a trance predicted that I would someday become king of the Jews. Manaemos was an Essene Jew, which meant he was very strict and very puritanical. So his predictions held some weight with my father. Thus, to prepare me for my fate, I was sent to Rome for a few years to observe their republic and learn Greek, Latin, philosophy and rhetoric.
The capital of Idumea was Hebron, from which King David ruled for seven years. The tomb of the patriarchs is in a nearby cave. It houses Abraham, the forefather of the Arabs and the Jews. Through his slave Hagar, Abraham begat Ishmael, the founder of the Arab tribe after he and his mother were banished when Abraham's wife Sarah became pregnant with Isaac. Sarah, Isaac, and Isaac's wife Rebecca were buried in the cave with Abraham as was Isaac's son Jacob, and his wife Leah. Abraham took a nomadic people from the land of Ur and made them into land-loving farmers and shepherds in Canaan. My father's people, the Idumeans, descended from the Edomites and lived between the Arabs and the Jews. The Edomites had an ancient enmity with the Jews because the Edomites believed the Jews were interlopers. The Edomites had encouraged Nebuchadnezzar to invade Judea and take the Jews away to Babylon. The Edomites then hoped to take over Judea giving themselves some breathing room since they had been squeezed between the Arabs and the Jews for so long. The Jews rightly felt betrayed by these Edomites. And when they returned from their Babylonian captivity, they often fought with the Edomites and their descendants, the Idumeans. However, this is only one of the many historic reasons why the Jews held me and my family in disrepute.
The second reason stems from a ruthless king named Antiochus IV, one of the descendants of the Seleucids who were put in charge of the Middle East by Alexander the Great. Antiochus decided he wanted to take Egypt away from the dynasty that descended from Ptolemy Sotar, another general who had received a piece of the Greek empire from Alexander two hundred years earlier. On his way to the land of the Ptolemies, Antiochus came through Judea, noted the unruliness of the people, and concluded that the region must be under his complete control if he was to succeed in his march on Egypt, which he hoped to begin in 168 B.C. Foolishly, he ordered the end of the practice of Judaism. (When has any foreign nation succeeded in stamping out an indigenous religion?) He forbade the worship of God and substituted Zeus, erecting his statue in the inner area of the old Jewish Temple. The Jews were not allowed to worship any god beside Yaweh according to the Commandments handed down to Moses. So the Jews were horrified with the erection of the statue of Zeus in their temple. Things went from bad to worse when Antiochus not only ignored the Jews, but offered a pig to Zeus at the Temple thereby desecrating the altar of the Jews. These actions led to the revolt by Judah Maccabee and his followers. The Maccabees wrote and distributed the Book of Daniel during this time to strengthen the faith of the Jews in general and to urge them not to worship false gods in particular.
After four years of war, the Jews defeated King Antiochus creating a new Jewish independent state in 164 B.C., the first since before the Babylonian captivity. Mattathias ben Johanan, the first of the Jewish leaders, died shortly thereafter. He was followed by his sons Judah Maccabee, who ruled until 160 B.C. and Jonathan Apphus, who ruled to 142 B.C. and then Simon Thassi, who ruled until 134 B.C. Mattathias' grandson, Johanan Hyrcanus I ruled from 134 to 104 B.C.; his son Aristobulus ruled for only a year when Alexander Jannaeus, another son, succeeded him.
During his reign, Hyrcanus I contributed to the bad blood between my people and the Jews by trying to convert the Idumeans to Judaism in a rather primitive way. He was not wrong to sense that the Idumeans could be converted. Like me they were ready to accept the precepts of Jewish faith, which I can recall to this day. There was one, omniscient, omnipotent, ineffable God; He was eternal; we were obligated to love Him and no other; Moses was the greatest of the prophets and brought the Ten Commandments, which we must follow as interpreted by the Pharisees; God inspired the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament; God punishes evil and rewards good; God will send a Messiah, who will resurrect the dead; only then will they gain paradise. None of this was a problem for my people. However, forcing the Idumean men to become circumcised created a great deal of bad blood, figuratively and literally. So the Idumeans came to hate the Maccabean Jews.
My grandfather tried to repair the damage with the Jews by working with Hyrcanus' successor, Alexander Jannaeus. Alexander put my grandfather in charge of Idumea and tolerated some of our customs. That is how my family came to rule Idumea. My grandfather and then my father Antipater watched Alexander's conquests from 103 to 76 B.C. He established something of an empire which incorporated such states as Idumea, Galilee, Moab, Samaritis and Gaza. To take Samaritis, Alexander destroyed the capital, Samaria. Like many other Hasmoneans, which the Maccabees came to call themselves, Alexander adopted the names and ways of the Greeks, which led to internal turmoil among the Jews. The traditionalists claimed that their priests descended from the priest of David and Solomon called Zadok. These people did not want to be Hellenized, that is, made into pale imitations of the Greeks. So they became Zealots, and rioted. We have used their name ever since to portray people who are pro-active, true believers; people who act with zeal. Alexander's dictatorial ways and the stories from the past provided the folklore that strengthened the resolve of the Zealots, who went on to refuse to compromise with foreign powers and sought liberty under Yahweh. They were in their own way the first Zionist movement.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Herod from Hell by Craig R. Smith. Copyright © 2013 Craig R. Smith. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
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