Whether the words of Jesus refer directly to Herodias or not, there is no ambiguity about the words of John the Baptist. According to Mark, he told Antipas plainly that he had no right to marry his brother’s wife.²² This is corroborated by Luke, with his independent and fuller information about the Herod family: Antipas, he tells us, having been rebuked by John ‘over the affair of his brother’s wife Herodias and for his other misdeeds, crowned them all by shutting John up in prison’.²³

Josephus also records Antipas’s imprisonment and execution of John, though he does not mention John’s denunciation of the marriage. According to him, John

was a good man, who exhorted the Jews to practise virtue, to be just one to another and pious towards God, and to come together by baptism.²⁴ Baptism, he taught, was acceptable to God provided that they underwent it not to procure remission of certain sins but to effect bodily cleansing when the soul had already been purified by righteousness. When the others gathered round John, greatly moved as they listened to his words, Herod was afraid that his great persuasive power over men might lead to a rising, for they seemed ready to follow John in everything. Accordingly he thought the best course was to arrest him and put him to death before he caused a riot, rather than wait until a revolt broke out and then have to repent of permitting such trouble to arise. Because of this suspicion on Herod’s part, John was sent in chains to the fortress of Machaerus... and there put to death.²⁵

The reference by Josephus to John’s baptismal doctrine has had fresh light cast on it in recent years in the religious texts from Qumran.²⁶ According to Mark, although Antipas imprisoned John, he was reluctant to proceed to severer measures against him because he stood in awe of this Elijah-like figure. He looked on John as ‘a good and holy man; so he kept him in custody. He liked to listen to him, although the listening left him greatly perplexed’.²⁷ “But Herodias felt no such awe; she was bent on having John’s head for his denunciation of her marriage, and an opportunity came around for her to gratify her spite―and perhaps, also to give her a sense of security, for could she ever feel her status secure while this influential preacher was persuading people that her marriage was null and void?

Mark has preserved for us the colourful story of Antipas’s birthday party which had John’s execution as its sequel.

Herod on his birthday gave a banquet to his chief officials and commanders and the leading men of Galilee. Her daughter came in and danced, and so delighted Herod and his guests that the king said to the girl, ‘Ask what you like and I will give it you’. And he swore an oath to her: ‘Whatever you ask I will give you, up to half my kingdom.’ She went out and said to her mother, ‘What shall I ask for?’ She replied, ‘The head of John the Baptist’. The girl hastened back at once to the king with her request: ‘I want you to give me here and now, on a dish, the head of John the Baptist’. The king was greatly distressed, but out of regard for his oath and for his guests he could not bring himself to refuse her. So the king sent a soldier of the guard with orders to bring John’s head. The soldier went off and beheaded him in the prison, brought the head on a dish, and gave it to the girl; and she gave it to her mother.²⁸

Mark does not say where the party was held. The prima facie impression usually received from his account is that it was held in: the same place where John was held, prisoner, since Herodias’s dancing daughter asks for John’s head at once (evxauth/j) and receives it on a plate (evpi. pi,naki), evidently while the party is still going on. The party would in that case have been held in the palace at Machaerus, where Josephus says John was imprisoned. And Josephus is certainly right in this last respect; John was active in Peraea and the lower Jordan valley, but not (so far as we know) in Galilee.

But a further impression received from Mark’s account is that the party was held in Galilee: it was attended by Antipas’s chief officials and commanders―his magnates and chiliarchs―and the leading men of Galilee. No mention is made of the leading men of Peraea, whose presence might have been expected at a birthday party in Machaerus. On the whole it seems most likely that the party was held at Tiberias,²⁹ and that the impression we get that John’s head was delivered to the girl on a plate while the guests were still present is due to the vividness with which Mark’s tale is told.

Mr. Sherwin-White finds in Mark’s description of the party a neat display of the style maintained by the petty princes of the Syro-Palestinian area at this time. The magnates (μελιστανες) would be the inner circle of Antipas’s government; the chiliarchs fit the scale of his tetrarchy: ‘His hosts are only at battalion strength. Since the Roman term speculator³⁰ appears in the continuation of this account of Herod’s administration, everything in this sketch is in focus. It shows the court and establishment of a petty Jewish prince under strong Roman influence’.³¹

One problem remains: the identity of the dancing girl. It is usually inferred from the story that, while she was Herodias’s daughter, she was not her daughter by Antipas. The only daughter of Herodias otherwise known to us is Salome, her daughter by her first husband, who married her grand-uncle Philip the tetrarch.³² The dancing girl of Mark’s narrative has therefore been popularly identified with Salome. But was she Salome? Herodias herself was at least thirty-five years old at the time (since her father was put to death in 7 B.C.) If both she and her daughter, like other ladies of the Herod family, married about the age of sixteen, then Salome could well have been in her later teens; and already the wife of Philip the tetrarch, by the time of the Baptist’s death. But Mark pictures a little girl (kara,sion), a girl young and naïve enough to run and ask her mother how she should respond to the tetrarch’s generous offer, a girl therefore (considering the precocity of the ladies of that family) not more than twelve years old, and perhaps considerably younger than that. We may have to think of a princess not elsewhere mentioned―conceivably, as one reading of Mark vi 22 suggests,³³ a daughter of Antipas and Herodias, whose own name was likewise Herodias.

The objection that a princess of the blood royal would not have danced at Antipas’s birthday party for the delectation of the host and his guests need not be taken seriously. It is not suggested that there was any impropriety about the dance; the fantasy that it was the dance of the seven veils’ has no basis in our primary documents. The ladies of the Herod family could certainly be counted upon to act unconventionally, but they could always be counted upon to remember what the family dignity demanded.

The terms in which Antipas swore his lavish oath to the girl are similar to those of the offer which the Emperor Gaius made to Herod Agrippa at a sumptuous feast to which Agrippa had invited him the offer to which Agrippa responded by asking Gaius to give up his idea of having a statue of himself erected in the Jerusalem temple.³⁴ In both stories the fact that the promise was made in the hearing of so many witnesses is emphasized. To enumerate the circumstances in which a man might be absolved from the performance of a rash oath is beside the point here; it was not a religious regard for his oath that made Antipas keep it, but the fact that he had sworn it in such absolute terms before his distinguished guests. Had he broken it―above all, had he broken it in order to save the life of John the Baptist―he would have lost face in their estimation to a degree which he was not disposed to tolerate.³⁵

It is unlikely that Mark’s account depends on anything like direct eyewitness testimony. It had simply come to be known that John’s execution was somehow a sequel to Antipas’s birthday party in that year (A.D. 29). Luke, who knows more about the Herod family than any other New Testament writer, is content in this connexion to, record that Antipas imprisoned John and beheaded him,³⁶ but he omits the story of the birthday party.

²² Mark vi 18; cf. Matt. xiv 4.

²³ Luke iii 20.

²⁴ Gk. βαπτισμω συνιέναι, i.e. to form a baptismal community.

²⁵ Ant. xviii 117-119.

²⁶ E.g. 1QS iii 3 ff.; cf. M. BLACK, The Scrolls and Christian Origins, 1961, p. 96.

²⁷ Mark vi 20.

²⁸ Mark vi 21-28.

²⁹ W. M. CHRISTIE, Palestine Calling, 1939, pp. 45 ff., suggests that the party was held in a palace on the same site as the ruin called Qasr Bint el-Malik near Tiberias. He may be right in this, but not in his further suggestion that this, and not Machaerus, was the place of John’s imprisonment. He appeals to the statement found in all the printed editions of Josephus, Ant. xviii 112, that Machaerus was subject to Aretas at the time of his daughter’s flight from Antipas (eivj to.n Macairou/nta [to.n tw/ Bekker] patri .auvth/j u`potelh/); but the. manuscript tradition (eivj to.n Macairou/nta tw /te patri .auvth/j u`potelei/ ) does not make this statement (cf. E. SCHÜRER, G.J.V. i⁴, p. 436, n. 20).

³⁰ Gk. spekoula,twr, translated ‘a soldier of the guard’ (Mark vi 27); it appears also as a Ioanword in Rabbinical Hebrew, spiqlator (‘executioner’).

³¹ Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament, p. 137.

³² Josephus, Ant. viii 137, where we are also told that on Philip’s death in A.D. 34 (about five years after the present incident), she married her first cousin Aristobulus, son of Herod of Chalcis, to whom she bore three sons.

³⁴ Ant. xviii 289 ff.

³⁵ J. D. M. DERRETT, ‘Herod’s Oath and the Baptist’s Head’, Biblische Zeitschrift, N.F. ix, 1965; pp. 49 ff., 233 ff.