Jerusalem: The Biography (18 page)

Herod pulled down the existing Second Temple and built a wonder of the world in its place. The Jews were afraid he would destroy the old Temple and never finish the new one, so he called a city meeting to persuade them, preparing every detail. A thousand priests were trained as builders. Lebanese cedar forests were felled, the beams floated down the coast. At quarries around Jerusalem, the massive ashlar stones, gleaming yellow and almost white limestone, were marked and cut out. A thousand wagons were amassed, but the stones were gargantuan. In the tunnels alongside the Temple Mount, there is one stone, 44.6 feet long, 11 feet high, that weighs 600 tons.
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No din, no hammering had polluted the building of Solomon’s Temple, so Herod ensured that everything was readied offsite and silently slotted into place. The Holy of Holies was ready in two years, but the entire complex was not completed for eighty.

Herod dug down to the foundation rock and built from there, so he would have destroyed any remnants of Solomon’s and Zerubbabel’s Temples. Though limited to the east by the steepness of the Kidron Valley, he expanded the esplanade of the Temple Mount to the south, filling the space with a substructure held up by eighty-eight pillars and twelve vaulted arches, now called Solomon’s Stables, to create a 3-acre platform, twice as large as the Roman Forum. Today, it is easy to see the seam in the eastern wall, visible 105 feet from the south-western corner of the city, with Herodian ashlars to the left and smaller Maccabean stones to the right.

The courts of the Temple led in diminishing size to ever-increasing sanctity. Gentiles and Jews alike could enter the huge Court of Gentiles, but a wall encircled the Court of Women with this warning inscription:

FOREIGNER! DO NOT ENTER WITHIN THE GRILLE
AND PARTITION SURROUNDING THE TEMPLE
HE WHO IS CAUGHT
WILL HAVE ONLY HIMSELF TO BLAME
FOR HIS DEATH WHICH WILL FOLLOW

Fifty steps led up to a gate that opened into the Court of Israel, open to any male Jew, which led to the exclusive Court of Priests. Within that stood the Sanctuary, the Hekhal itself, containing the Holy of Holies. This rested upon the rock where Abraham was said to have almost sacrificed Isaac, and where David built his altar. Here the sacrifices were conducted on the Altar of Burnt Offering, which faced the Court of Women and the Mount of Olives.

Herod’s Antonia Fortress guarded the Temple Mount in the north. There, Herod constructed his own secret tunnel into the Temple. In the south the Temple was reached by monumental stairs passing through the Double and Triple Gates, to underground passages decorated with doves and flowers that led into the Temple. On the west, a monumental bridge, doubling as an aqueduct bringing water into huge hidden cisterns, stretched across the valley into the Temple. In its sheer eastern wall stood the Shushan Gate, used exclusively by the high priest to progress to the Mount of Olives to sanctify the full moon, or to sacrifice that rarest, holiest of victims, the unblemished red heifer.
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There were pillared porticoes on all four sides but the greatest of these was the Royal Portico, a vast basilica which dominated the whole mountain. About 70,000 people lived in Herod’s city but during the festivals hundreds of thousands arrived on pilgrimage. Like any bustling shrine, even today, the Temple needed a gathering place for friends to meet and for rituals to be arranged. This was the Royal Portico. When visitors arrived, they could shop on the busy shopping street that ran beneath the monumental arches along the western walls. When it was time to visit the Temple, pilgrims took purifying baths in the many
mikvahs
– ritual pools – that have been found around the southern entrances. They would climb one of the monumental staircases that led into the Royal Portico where they saw all the sights of the city, before it was time to pray.

At the south-eastern corner, the towering walls and cliff of the Kidron Valley created a precipitous peak, the Pinnacle, where the Gospels say the Devil tempted Jesus. At the south-western corner, facing the wealthy Upper City, priests announced the start of festivals and Sabbaths on Friday nights with trumpet blasts that must have echoed across the desolate gorges. A stone, thrown down by Titus in
AD
70, proclaims ‘The Trumpeting Place’.

The design of the Temple, supervised by the king and his anonymous architects (an ossuary has been found inscribed ‘Simon builder of the Temple’), showed a brilliant understanding of space and theatre. Dazzling and awe-inspiring, Herod’s Temple was ‘covered all over with plates of gold and at the first rising of the sun reflected back a fiery splendour’ so bright that visitors had to look away. Arriving in Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, it reared up‘like a mountain covered with snow’. This was the Temple that Jesus knew and that Titus destroyed. Herod’s esplanade survives as the Islamic Haram al-Sharif supported on three sides by Herodian stones that still gleam today, particularly in the Western Wall revered by the Jews.

Once the Sanctuary and the esplanade were complete – it was said there was no rain in the daytime, so that work was never delayed – Herod, who could not enter the Holy of Holies since he was not a priest, celebrated by sacrificing 300 oxen.
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He had reached his apogee. But his undeniable greatness was to be challenged by his own children when the crimes of the past returned to haunt the heirs of the future.

HEROD’S PRINCES: THE FAMILY TRAGEDY

Herod now had at least twelve children by his ten wives. He seemed to ignore most of them except for his two sons by Mariamme, Alexander and Aristobulos. They were half-Maccabee, half-Herodian and they would be his successors. He sent them to Rome where Augustus himself supervised their education. After five years, Herod brought the two teenage princes home to marry: Alexander wed the daughter of the King of Cappadocia while Aristobulos married Herod’s niece.
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In 15
BC
, Marcus Agrippa arrived to inspect Herod’s Jerusalem, accompanied by his new wife, Julia, Augustus’ nymphomaniacal daughter. Agrippa, Augustus’ partner and victor of Actium, was already friends with Herod, who proudly showed him Jerusalem. He stayed in his eponymous apartments in the Citadel and there gave banquets in Herod’s honour. Augustus already paid for a daily sacrifice to Yahweh in the Temple, but now Agrippa sacrificed a hundred oxen. He managed to behave with such tact that even the prickly Jews gave him the accolade of laying palms in his path and the Herodians named their children after him. Afterwards, the pair toured Greece with their fleets. When local Jews appealed against Greek repression, Agrippa backed Jewish rights, Herod thanked him and the two embraced as equals.
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But on his return from hobnobbing with the Roman potentate, Herod was challenged by his own children.

Princes Alexander and Aristobulos, polished by a Roman education, inheriting the looks and arrogance of both parents, soon blamed their father for their mother’s fate and, like her, disdained the half-breed Herodians. Alexander, being married to a king’s daughter, was particularly snobbish; both boys mocked Aristobulos’ Herodian wife, thus insulting her mother, their dangerous aunt Salome. They boasted that when they were kings they would put Herod’s wives to labour with the slaves and use Herod’s other sons as clerks.

Salome reported all this to Herod, who was infuriated by the ingratitude and alarmed by the betrayal of these spoilt princelings. He had long ignored Antipater, his eldest son, by his first wife Doris. But now in 13
BC
, Herod recalled Antipater and asked Agrippa to take him to Rome with a sealed document for the emperor: it was his will, disinheriting the two boys and instead bequeathing the kingdom to Antipater. But his new heir, probably in his mid-twenties, was embittered by paternal neglect and fraternal envy. He and his mother conspired to destroy the disinherited princes, whom they accused of treason.

Herod asked Augustus, staying at Aquileia on the Adriatic, to judge the three princes. Augustus reconciled father and sons, with the result that Herod sailed home, called a meeting in the court of the Temple and announced that his three sons would share the kingdom. Doris, Antipater and Salome set about reversing this reconciliation for their own purposes, but they were helped by the arrogance of the boys: Prince Alexander told everyone that Herod dyed his hair to look younger and confided that he deliberately missed his targets out hunting to make his father feel better. He also seduced three of the king’s own eunuchs, giving him access to his father’s secrets. Herod arrested and tortured Alexander’s servants until one confessed that his master planned to assassinate him out hunting. Alexander’s father-in-law, the King of Cappadocia, who was visiting his daughter, managed to reconcile father and sons again. Herod expressed his gratitude by presenting the Cappadocian with a very Herodian gift: a courtesan who gloried in the name Pannychis – All-Night-Long.

The peace did not last long: the torture of servants now revealed a letter from Alexander to the commander of the Alexandrium Fortress that said: ‘When we have achieved all we set out to do, we’ll come to you.’ Herod dreamed that Alexander was raising a dagger over him, a nightmare so vivid that he arrested both boys, who admitted they were planning to escape. Herod had to consult Augustus, by now tiring of his old friend’s excesses – though the emperor himself was no stranger to naughty children and tangled successions. Augustus ruled that, if the boys had plotted against Herod, he had every right to punish them.

Herod held the trial in Berytus (Beirut), outside his formal jurisdiction – and therefore supposedly a fair place for the trial. The boys were sentenced to death as Herod wished, which was hardly surprising since he had generously embellished the city. Herod’s counsellors advised mercy – but when one hinted that the boys were suborning the army, Herod liquidated 300 officers. The princes were taken back to Judaea and garrotted. The tragedy of their mother Mariamme, the curse of the Maccabees, had come full circle. Augustus was not amused. Knowing that Jews eschewed pork, he commented drily: ‘I’d rather be Herod’s pig than his son.’ But this was just the beginning of the Grand Guignol decay of Herod the Great.

HEROD: THE LIVING PUTREFACTION

The king, now in his sixties, was ailing and paranoid. Antipater was the sole named heir, but there were many other sons available to inherit the kingdom, and Herod’s sister Salome started to plot against him; she found a servant who claimed that Antipater was planning to poison Herod with a mysterious drug. Antipater, who was in Rome meeting with Augustus, rushed home and galloped to the palace in Jerusalem, but he was arrested there before he could reach his father. At his trial, the suspect drug was given to a convict who dropped down dead. More torture revealed that a Jewish slave belonging to the Empress Livia, Augustus’ own wife and herself an expert on poisons, had forged letters to frame Salome.

Herod sent the evidence to Augustus and drew up his third will, leaving the kingdom to another of his sons, Antipas, the Herod who would later encounter John the Baptist and Jesus. Herod’s illness distorted his judgement and weakened his grip on the Jewish opposition. He placed a gilded bronze eagle on the great gate of the Temple. Some students climbed on to the roof, abseiled down in front of the crowded courtyard and cut it down. The troops of the Antonia Fortress rushed into the Temple to arrest them. Paraded before Herod on his sickbed, they insisted they were obeying the Torah. The culprits were burned alive.

Herod collapsed, suffering an agonizing and gruesome putrefaction: it started as an itching all over with a glowing sensation within his intestines, then developed into a swelling of his feet and belly, complicated by ulceration of the colon. His body started to ooze clear fluid, he could scarcely breathe, a vile stench emanated from him, and his genitals swelled grotesquely until his penis and scrotum burst out into suppurating gangrene that then gave birth to a seething mass of worms.

The rotting king hoped he would recover in the warmth of his Jericho palace but, as his suffering increased, he was borne out to the warm sulphur baths at Callirhoe, which still exist on the Dead Sea, only for the suphur to aggravate the agony.
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Treated with hot oil, he passed out and was carried back to Jericho where he ordered the summoning of the Temple elite from Jerusalem, whom he had locked en masse in the hippodrome. It is unlikely that he planned to slaughter them. Probably he wanted to finesse the succession while holding all troublemaking grandees in custody.

At around this time, a child named Joshua ben Joseph, or (in Aramaic) Jesus, was born. His parents were a carpenter, Joseph, and his teenaged betrothed, Mary (Mariamme in Hebrew), based in Nazareth, up in Galilee. They were not much richer than peasants, but it was said they were descended from the old Davidian house. They travelled down to Bethlehem where a child, Jesus, was born ‘that shall rule my people Israel’. After he had been circumcised on the eighth day, according to St Luke, ‘they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord’ and make the traditional sacrifice in the Temple. A wealthy family would sacrifice a sheepor even a cow, but Joseph could afford only two turtle-doves or pigeons.

As Herod lay dying, Matthew’s Gospel claims, he ordered his forces to liquidate this Davidian child by massacring all newborn babies, but Joseph took refuge in Egypt until he heard that Herod had died. There were certainly messianic rumours afoot and Herod would have feared a Davidian pretender, but there is no evidence that the king ever heard of Jesus or massacred any innocents. It is ironic that this monster should be particularly remembered for the one crime he neglected to commit. As for the child from Nazareth, we do not hear of him again for about thirty years.
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