Quote of the Day (Archaeologist Ehud Netzer, on Herod the Great as Urban Planner)

“Herodium was built according to a comprehensive master plan, which, Netzer believes, Herod himself probably conceived. ‘Herodium may well have represented the ideal city in Herod's mind,’ he told me, ‘whose orderliness, palatial buildings, colonnades, and splashing water created an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity that he probably yearned for elsewhere.’ All this beauty from a man who killed his wife and sons, tortured courtiers, and spent long months in stammering madness.”—Ehud Netzer quoted in Tom Mueller, “King Herod Revealed: The Holy Land’s Visionary Builder,” National Geographic, December 2008

(The discoveries of Israeli archaeologist Ehud Netzer focus on Herodium, the civic project closest to the heart of Herod the Great, King of Judaea at the time of the birth of Christ. The recovered world of Herodium serves as an usual springboard into the psychology and history surrounding a legendary ruler that, Mueller claims, was “almost certainly innocent” of the crime of which he is accused in the Gospel of Matthew: the slaughter of every male infant in Bethlehem, in an unsuccessful effort to destroy the prophesied Messiah. Mueller offers no proof of his assertion and, indeed, there is much throughout the rest of the piece about the many deaths for which this cruel ruler was responsible.

Nevertheless, this article sheds much light on how one ancient king sought to put his imprint on the physical landscape of his time, even as he struggled to survive the lethal political environment in which he found himself. In the process, it demonstrates the desperate longing of ancient Jews for a more ethical ruler—and of the profoundly fallen world that Christ came to redeem.)