Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea

By Frederick Fyvie Bruce

Chapter 2

How well Antipas served Rome’s interests may be gauged in part from the absence of revolt or open unrest on any scale in the two areas of his tetrarchy during those years. The troubles which beset Judaea when it became a Roman province in A.D. 6 do not seem to have affected Galilee or Peraea, even though Judas, who led the revolt in Judaea at this time, was in some sense a Galilaean, according to both Luke and Josephus.⁹ (Whether he is to be identified with the Judas who staged the rising at Sepphoris nine years earlier is uncertain.)

Although Antipas received no higher title than tetrarch throughout the whole of his public career, his own subjects informally called him ‘king’, especially (no doubt) when they spoke Aramaic, in which malka is a term with a wider range of meaning than Latin rex or even Greek basileu,j. This looser usage is reflected in the Gospel of Mark who (followed to some extent by Matthew) speaks of him as ‘King Herod’;¹⁰ to the accurate Luke, as to Josephus, he is ‘Herod the tetrarch’.

Antipas was the ablest of Herod’s sons. Like his father, he was a patron of Hellenistic culture and a great builder. His chief building enterprise was the city of Tiberias on the western shore of the Lake of Galilee, which he named in honour of the Emperor Tiberius (A.D. 22). It was mainly a Gentile city; since it was built on the site of a cemetery, Antipas’s Jewish subjects reckoned it unclean. But Jewish scruples were overcome later, and Tiberias became a famous seat of rabbinical learning. Before the end of the first century, the lake on which it stood came to be called after it―the Lake of Tiberias.¹¹ Antipas also rebuilt Sepphoris, which had been destroyed in the fighting that followed the revolt of 4 B.C., and renamed it in honour of Augustus. In his Transjordanian territory he rebuilt Beth-ramphtha (Beth-haram of the Old Testament),¹² which had been burned by insurgents in 4 B.C., and fortified it, as an outpost against the Nabataean kingdom, calling it first Livias (after the Empress Livia) and then Julias (after Princess Julia). There was some debatable land between Peraea and the Nabataean kingdom which was liable to be a bone of contention between the two realms,¹³ and a time came in Antipas’s career when he needed all the fortification he could have against the Nabataeans.

Early in his reign he married a daughter of the Nabataean king Aretas IV (9 B.C.-A.D. 40), but after living with her for twenty years or more he transferred his affections from her to another lady. Once, on a journey to Rome, he lodged with his brother Herod (son of the second Mariamme), who had married his niece Herodias (daughter of Aristobulus, Herod the Great’s son by the first Mariamme). Antipas fell in love with Herodias and proposed marriage to her; she accepted the proposal on condition that he divorced the Nabataean princess. But the Nabataean princess forestalled them; getting wind of what was afoot she arranged to have her residence moved to the Peraean palace-fortress of Machaerus, near the Nabataean frontier, and from there she seized an opportunity of crossing into her father’s territory.¹⁴ Aretas was naturally incensed at the insult offered to his daughter, and waited for a favourable opportunity to take his revenge on Antipas.

With the Nabataean princess out of the way, Herodias came to live with Antipas as his wife. Josephus asserts, and the Evangelists imply, that her first husband was still alive when she married Antipas. The Slavonic text of Josephus, indeed, suggests that he was now dead,¹⁵ but this text (misinterpreting the language of Mark vi 17)¹⁶ confuses her first husband with Philip the tetrarch, and has no claim on our credence. However, even if her first husband had died before she married Antipas, the marriage would still have been offensive in Jewish eyes. Marriage between an uncle and his niece was tolerated by the Pharisaic interpretation of the law (though not by the Essene interpretation),¹⁷ but marriage between a man and his deceased brother’s widow was forbidden, except in the special case of the levirate marriage where the deceased brother had left no child to perpetuate his name¹⁸ and Herodias and her first husband did have at least one child, Salome. Antipas’s brother Archelaus had caused great scandal several years before when he married Glaphyra, who had formerly been the wife of his half-brother Alexander, executed by Herod in 7 B.C.¹⁹

But Antipas aggravated his offence by marrying his brother’s wife before her first husband’s death. It may have been with reference to this incident that Jesus declared that if a woman ‘divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery’.²⁰ It was not open for a woman to divorce her husband by Jewish law, but it was possible by Roman law, and the Herods were Roman citizens. In any case, the ladies of the Herod family were a law to themselves; over fifty years earlier Salome, sister of Herod the Great, divorced her Idumaean husband Costobar, ‘not following her country’s law’, says Josephus, ‘but acting on her own authority’.²¹

---

⁹ Cf. Acts v 37; Josephus, BJ ii 118; Ant. xx 102. According to Ant. xviii 4 Judas belonged to the city of Gamalain Gaulanitis, east of the Jordan. The term ‘Galllaean’ as applied to him may have a political and not a merelygeographical connotation.

¹⁰ Mark vi 14, 22, 25, 26, 27; Matt. xiv 9. But in Matt. xiv 1 he is called ‘Herod the tetrarch’, as regularly by Luke (Luke iii 19; ix 7; Acts xiii 1) and Josephus (e.g. Ant. xviii 102, 109, 122).

¹¹ It is so called in John vi 1; xxi 1.

¹² Josh. xiii 27.

¹³ Josephus, Ant., xviii 113.

¹⁴ Josephus, Ant. xviii 109-112.

¹⁵ In an insertion following BJ ii 168, plainly contradicting Ant. xviii 136.

¹⁶ Mark, followed by Matthew (xiv 3), calls Herodias’s former husband Philip, but does not identify him with Philip the tetrarch.

¹⁷ In CD v 8-11 ‘the builders of the wall’ are condemned because they permit such marriages; it is argued that while such marriages are not explicitly forbidden in the Law they are implicitly forbidden by the prohibition of marriage between a man and his mother’s sister (Lev. xviii 13).

¹⁸ Deut. xxv 5 ff.

¹⁹ Ant. xvii 341, 349-353. After her first husband’s death Glaphyra married Juba, king of Libya; when this marriage was dissolved, Archelaus divorced his wife Mariamme in order to marry her.

²⁰ Mark x 12. Cf. F. C. BURKITT,’ The Gospel History and its Transmission, 1967, pp. 98 ff.

²¹ Ant. xv 259 ff.

 

To display the Greek & Hebrew words in this article you will need the BibleWorks Greek and Hebrew fonts for Windows

Original files can be downloaded from http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/