The last illness of Herod the Great, king of Judaea.

NTRODUCTION FOR most of us living in the second half of the twentieth century, Herod the Great remains a shadowy figure who is recalled only at Christmas when we read of his massacre of the innocents (Matt. 2:16). He is even confused with Herod Agrippa who persecuted the Church and also died a miserable death (Acts 12:23). Our ancestors, however, were better informed since they often kept, on the same shelf as the Family Bible, a copy of Whiston's Works ofFlavius Josephus. Josephus in his Jewish Antiquities and Jewish War gives a vivid account of the life of Herod the Great. Flavius Josephus, an aristocratic Jew, was born Joseph ben Mathias in A.D. 37-38. He took part in the Jewish revolt in Galilee and was captured at Iotapata by the Romans in A.D. 67. Josephus prophesied that the victor, Vespasian, would rise to Imperial power and Vespasian was, in fact, raised to the purple in A.D. 69. Josephus accompanied Titus to the Siege of Jerusalem and thereafter spent 30 years or more in Rome, taking citizenship there. After the death of Titus he became historian and apologist of the Jewish nation. Thackeray (1929) assesses him as an egoist, self-centred and time serving, and a flatterer of his Roman patrons. He had nevertheless great merits and contributed much to learning and history. His Contra Apionem is a fine apologia for Judaism. Our main sources of information concerning Herod the Great are his histories and these in turn are based on works of Nicolas of Damascus, a close relative of Herod and friend of the Emperor Augustus. In Antiquities Josephus, unlike Nicolas of Damascus, severely censures the crimes of Herod. The story of Herod is told twice over, rather briefly and analytically in Wars and chronologically in three full books of Antiquities. Thackeray believes that in the main Josephus' narrative is trustworthy.