his religion he had built that glorious Temple, and for his residence the noblest of

palaces, at the north-western angle of the Upper City, close by where Milo had been in

the days of David. It seems almost incredible, that a Herod should have reared the

Temple, and yet we can understand his motives. Jewish tradition had it, that a Rabbi

(Baba ben Buta) had advised him in this manner to conciliate the people,50 or else thereby

to expiate the slaughter of so many Rabbis.51 52 Probably a desire to gain popularity, and

superstition, may alike have cont ributed, as also the wish to gratify his love for splendour

and building. At the same time, he may have wished to show himself a better Jew than

that rabble of Pharisees and Rabbis, who perpetually would cast it in his teeth, that he

was an Idumæan. Whatever his origin, he was a true king of the Jews - as great, nay

greater, than Solomon himself. Certainly, neither labour nor money had been spared on

the Temple. A thousand vehicles carried up the stone; 10,000 workmen, under the

guidance of 1,000 priests, wrought all the costly material gathered into that house, of

which Jewish tradition could say, 'He that has not seen the temple of Herod, has never

known what beauty is.'53 And yet Israel despised and abhorred the builder! Nor could his

apparent work for the God of Israel have deceived the most credulous. In youth he had

browbeaten the venerable Sanhedrin, and threatened the city with slaughter and

destruction; again and again had he murdered her venerable sages; he had shed like water

the blood of her Asmonean princes, and of every one who dared to be free; had stifled

every national aspiration in the groans of the torture, and quenched it in the gore of his

victims. Not once, nor twice, but six times did he change the High-Priesthood, to bestow

it at last on one who bears no good name in Jewish theology, a foreigner in Judæa, an

Alexandrian. And yet the power of that Idumæan was but of yesterday, and of mushroom