After the birth of Jesus, Herod sent soldiers to Bethlehem to kill all male children under the age of two. Joseph, Mary, and the infant Jesus fled to sanctuary in Egypt, generating a lovely legend.
Pursued by Herod’s murderous soldiers, the Holy family took refuge in a cave. The night was cold. A hoar frost covered the ground. A spider, seeing the shivering baby Jesus, spun a closely-knit web across the cave entrance. The ice-covered web stretching across the entrance convinced the pursuing soldiers that the cave was empty. Story tellers say that the glittering tinsel streamers that some of us place on Christmas trees represent the ice-covered spider’s web that protected the baby Jesus from Herod’s bloodthirsty soldiers.
A Thousand Year summary
The return from Babylonian exile closes the pages on the Hebrew Bible. The New Testament begins four hundred years later. The four centuries between the Old and New Testaments explain Herod’s paranoia. His attempt for retribution goes back to Solomon’s time. To make a thousand year story more palatable, a few embellishments endeavor to brighten the narrative and a cavalier style aims to improve interest.
ALEXANDER’S GREAT GENETICS. Some guys have all the luck. Alexander the Great was born with beauty, brains, and bravado. Alexander’s father, the Macedonian King Phillip II, gave him training in military tactics. He won a sword fighting scholarship to Athens University where he studied under Aristotle, who had been mentored by Plato, a student of Socrates. He also got Bucephalus, the best horse in the barn. Soon legends about his exploits began to appear. One of finest involved Alexander and the Gordian knot. It was said that the man who could untie the knot would rule the world. Alexander didn’t bother with esoteric solutions. He drew his sword and with one mighty blow slashed the rope in half. Soon Greek culture dominated the world.
Another legend says that when Alexander discovered he had no more worlds to conquer, he wept. After drying his eyes, he mysteriously died. Some say he was poisoned; others contend that he drank himself to death. When legend and truth are in conflict, print the legend. Poisoned reads a lot better.
Alexander’s death threw the dynasty into turmoil. Even before the pallbearers were picked, his buddies drew straws over who would be King of the World. Antigonus drew Asia Minor; Ptolemy got Egypt; and Seleucus chose Babylon-Mesopotamia.
ROME BUILDS AN EMPIRE. While the Greeks were drawing straws, the Romans were building a house of bricks. Conflicts with Cartage taught the Romans that fighting could be profitable. Defeating Hannibal enabled them to possess ski property in the Alps and gave them enough elephants to dominate the circus market. After acquiring the best beach property in France and all the condos west of Italy, the empire builder, Julius Caesar, pursued his chief rival, Pompey, into Egypt. Caesar dispatched Pompey. While investing in Egyptian pyramids, Caesar fell under Cleopatra’s spell. But before she could let the snake out of her bag, he returned to Rome. (Caesar’s famous line—“I came, I saw, I conquered”—referred to Gaul, not Cleopatra). On the Ides of March (March 15) in 44 BC, the knives of Brutus and the Brutes made Caesar wish he had spent more time counting shekels with Cleopatra.
MOVIE MATERIAL. When Julius Caesar died, Octavian and Mark Anthony controlled the empire. After they defeated the Brutus Brutes, Anthony decided to cruise the Nile with Cleopatra. Distracted by Cleopatra’s décolletage, Anthony became an easy prey for his ex-friend Octavian. Finding Anthony dead, Cleopatra committed suicide by Asp so people could make movies about their love affair. Wanting to be in movies himself, Octavian changed his name to one with more marquee appeal—Augustus.
MEANWHILE BACK ON THE RANCH. A few decades earlier, the vilest of all villains, Antiochus IV a Greek descendant of the straw-drawing Seleucus, had been creating a desert storm in Mesopotamia. Antiochus IV had two great enemies, the Romans and the Jews. He infuriated the Romans by favoring Greek culture. Advocating Greek culture when Rome is in power is not a smart thing to do. The Romans chased him all over the Mesopotamian desert. He finally retreated to Palestine where he began reading the Desert Times best selling book, When in Rome, Do as the Romans Do. Between chapters, he waxed his mustache and tormented the Jews.
Antiochus IV required Jews to offer Pagan sacrifices. He forbade the observance of the Sabbath, disallowed reading the Mosaic Law, and tortured those who followed Jewish tradition. He build an altar dedicated to Zeus in the Jerusalem Temple where he sacrificed swine (the “Abomination of Desolation” mentioned in the Book of Daniel).
Whenever a villain does dastardly deeds, the hero soon appears. The hero’s father, Mattathias, killed a royal official who was demanding that the Jews offer pagan sacrifices. Mattathias and his five sons fled into the wilderness sparking a revolt. After Mattathias died, leadership fell to his son, Judah.
NAME THAT REVOLT. The names get a little confusing here. Because Judah’s nickname was Maccabee—Aramaic for “hammer,” the revolt lead by him is known as the Maccabean Revolt. Yet, because Judah came from the Hasmonean tribe, the revolt is sometimes called the Hasmonean Revolt. No matter what name is used, Judah and his brothers hammered the Seleucids. In December 164 BC, Judah recaptured the Jerusalem temple, dismantled the pagan altar, and cleansed the temple.
IT LOOKS A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS. Hanukkah, an eight-day festival that commemorates the cleansing and rededication of the temple following the Maccabean victory, is the only Jewish festival not specified in the Hebrew Bible. Jewish tradition recounts that when the Temple was rededicated the priests could only find enough oil to keep the sacred candelabra (called the Menorah) burning for one day. Miraculously, however, it lasted for eight days. Hanukkah also called the Feast of Lights begins on the 25th day of Kislev (December) and, like Christmas, involves gift-giving, lighting candles, praying, and playing games.
HEROD RETURNS. The Hasmonean Revolt leads us back to Herod the Great. In 37 BC, the Roman Senate with the approval of Mark Anthony (before he died) and Octavian (before he changed his name) appointed Herod as King of the Jews and gave him rule over Judea, Galilee, and Samaria.
Herod was an Edomite. The Jews considered him a half-breed, unfit to rule. To secure his throne, Herod married a descendant of Judah Maccabee, a Hasmonean princess, Mariamne. But the Jews still didn’t like him.
Herod tried another tactic to win friends and influence Jews. He started a huge building campaign. He built a new palace in Jerusalem and added a theater, hippodrome, and stadium to the city. He built a magnificent port facility and constructed a series of fortresses including Masada and the Herodium.
THE TEMPLE OF THE LORD. Herod’s crowning achievement was restoring the Second Temple. In 959 BC, Solomon completed the First Temple on a Jerusalem hill where Abraham had been willing to sacrifice Isaac. After having been plundered several times, The First Temple was finally destroyed in 586 BC during the Babylonian captivity. When the Jews returned from exile, a Second Temple was built. Herod rebuilt and refurbished the Second Temple, doubling the size of the Temple complex with massive earthfills, adding retaining walls, expanding the building, and overlaying its marble façade with gold trim.
DEATH AND HOPE. Despite his building projects, Herod remained feared and unloved. Exacting vengeance on real and imagined conspirators, he murdered his wife Mariamne, his mother-in-law, three of his sons, and dozens of other family members and government officials. Before he died the vicious old man ordered the arrest and imprisonment of seventy eminent Jerusalem citizens. He commanded his soldiers to assassinate these distinguished Jews upon his death. Herod reasoned that these murders assured the shedding of tears at his funeral. When Herod suffered a horrible death in 4 BC, Jesus, Joseph, and Mary returned from Egypt where they had been hiding.
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