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(21) Herod’s Dying Provision for a National Mourning

With this passage we reach the N.T. period. The grim story of an intended massacre, happily in this case averted, affords a parallel to the Gospel story of the murder of the innocents.

4 B. C.

Now, although his sufferings seemed beyond human endurance, he did not despair of recovery. He sent for physicians, and consented to try every remedy which they prescribed. He crossed over the river Jordan, and surrendered himself to treatment in the hot springs at Callirrhoe. These waters, besides their general remedial properties, are fit to drink; they debouch into the so-called Bituminous^[133] Lake. Here, the physicians deciding that a higher temperature was needed, he was placed in a vat of oil. To this treatment he appeared to have succumbed, but when his attendants fell to lamentation, he rallied, and now abandoning all hope of recovery, gave orders that every soldier should be paid fifty pieces of silver;^[134] he made further large bequests to their commanding officers and to his personal friends. Returning to Jericho, he had an attack of black bile, which rendered him so savage with all the world^[135] that, although now nearing his end, he contrived the scheme which I proceed to describe.

By his orders, the principal men from every quarter of the entire Jewish nation waited upon him. They came in large numbers, as the summons was to the nation and was universally obeyed, death being the penalty for disregard of the injunctions. For the king was mad with rage against all alike, whether innocent or suspected of guilt. He then locked them all up in the hippodrome, and sent for his sister Salome and her husband Alexas.

He told them that his bodily sufferings were now so great that death could not be far off. Death could be borne, and came to all as a welcome guest; but what grieved him most was the thought that he would lack the lamentations and miss the mourning usually accorded to a king. He was not blind to the feelings of the Jews, and knew what relief and intense delight his death would bring them,^[136] because, even in his lifetime, they were always ready to rebel and to treat his projects with contumely. “It is therefore your task,” he proceeded, “to resolve^[137] to afford me some alleviation of this particular pain. If you do not refuse your consent to my wishes, I shall receive a great funeral, such as no king ever had before me, and a heartfelt national lamentation for my sport and delectation. When, therefore, you see that I have given up the ghost, let the troops be drawn up round the hippodrome, still unaware of my death—the news must not be published to the world till you have done this—and the order given to shoot down the prisoners within with their javelins. If you kill them all in this manner, you will without fail do me a double favour. You will execute my dying injunctions; you will also get me the honour of a memorable mourning.”

Such was the charge which, with tears and supplication and appeals to the loyalty due to a kinsman and their faith in God, he laid upon them, and bade them preserve him from dishonour. And they promised not to fail him.

From these final injunctions even a friendly critic of the king’s former actions, who attributed his treatment of his family to self-preservation, might read the mind of the man and see how destitute it was of every spark of humanity; since on the very verge of his exit from life he could lay his plans for throwing the whole nation into mourning and desolation for their nearest and dearest. For his orders were to butcher one out of every household, men who had done him no wrong and were not accused on any other ground; and these orders were given at an hour when persons with any pretensions to virtue commonly lay aside their rancour, even towards those whom they justly regard as enemies.—Ant. XVII. 6. 5 f. (171-181).