Temple. The two ringleaders, and forty of their followers, allowed themselves to be taken
by Herod's guards. A mock public trial in the theatre at Jericho followed. Herod, carried
out on a couch, was both accuser and judge. The zealots, who had made noble answer to
the tyrant, were burnt alive; and the High-Priest, who was suspected of connivance,
deposed.
1. And yet Keim speaks of his Hochherzigkeit and natürlicher Edelsinn! (Leben Jesu, i.
1. p. 184.) A much truer estimate is that of Schürer, Neutest. Zeitgesch. pp. 197, 198.
2. See the horrible description of his living death in Jos. Ant. xvii. 6. 5.
After that the end came rapidly. On his return from Callirhoe, feeling his death
approaching, the King had summoned the noblest of Israel throughout the land of Jericho,
and shut them up in the Hippodrome, with orders to his sister to have them slain
immediately upon his death, in the grim hope that the joy of the people at his decease
would thus be changed into mourning. Five days before his death one ray of passing joy
lighted his couch. Terrible to say, it was caused by a letter from Augustus allowing Herod
to execute his son Antipater - the false accuser and real murderer of his half-brothers
Alexander and Aristobulus. The death of the wretched prince was hastened by his attempt
to bribe the jailer, as the noise in the palace, caused by an attempted suicide of Herod, led
him to suppose his father was actually dead. And now the terrible drama was hastening to
a close. The fresh access of rage shortened the life which was already running out. Five
days more, and the terror of Judĉa lay dead. He had reigned thirty -seven years - thirty-
four since his conquest of Jerusalem. Soon the rule for which he had so long plotted,
striven, and stained himself with untold crimes, passed from his descendants. A century
more, and the whole race of Herod had been swept away.
We pass by the empty pageant and barbaric splendor of his burying in the Castle of
Herodium, close to Bethlehem. The events of the last few weeks formed a lurid back-
ground to the murder of 'the Innocents.' As we have reckoned it, the visit of the Magi
took place in February 750 a.u.c. On the 12th of Marc h the Rabbis and their adherents
suffered. On the following night (or rather early morning) there was a lunar eclipse; the
execution of Antipater preceded the death of his father by five days, and the latter
occurred from seven to fourteen days before the Passover, which in 750 took place on the
12th of April.3
3. See the calculation in Wiesler's Synopse, pp. 56 and 444. The 'Dissertatio de Herode
Magno,' by J.A. van der Chijs (Leyden, 1855), is very clear and accurate. Dr. Geikie
adopts the manifest mistake of Caspari, that Herod died in January, 753, and holds that
the Holy Family spent three years in Egypt. The repeated statement of Josephus that
Herod died close upon the Passover should have sufficed to show the impossibility of that
hypothesis. Indeed, there is scarcely any historical date on which competent writers are
more agreed than that of Herod's death. See Schürer, Neutest. Zeitg., pp. 222, 223.
It need scarcely be said, that Salome (Herod's sister) and her husband were too wise to
execute Herod's direction in regard to the noble Jews shut up in the Hippodrome. Their
liberation, and the death of Herod, were marked by the leaders of the people as joyous
events in the so-called Megillath Taanith, or Roll of Fasts, although the date is not