Quote of the Day (Gospel of Matthew, on the Holy Family Threatened by Tyrants)

“When Herod had died, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, ‘Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.’ He rose, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go back there. And because he had been warned in a dream, he departed for the region of Galilee. He went and dwelt in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, ‘He shall be called a Nazorean.’”—Matthew 2: 19-23

This portion of the Gospel of Matthew is not simply about how Jesus came to live in Nazareth, nor even about the damage wrought by tyrants—the slaughter of boys two years old and under, discussed in the immediately prior verses—but about the persistence of cruelty. Herod the Great’s massacre of the innocents doesn’t merely echo Pharaoh’s similar massacre of the innocents in Genesis, but foreshadows the modern wholesale butchering of children that became epidemic in the horrible 20th century.

Cruelty persists in another fashion here: the hereditary nature of tyranny. In reading the above quote, my eye was stopped short by one name: Archelaus. In the various cinematic accounts of the life and death of Christ, this son of Herod the Great is nowhere to be seen, and he appears only this once in the Gospels. Who was he?

The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that in the Temple, Herod Archelaus started his reign by promising “to have regard to the wishes of his subjects,” in much the same way that leaders nowadays promise a break from their awful immediate predecessors.

But within nine years, the Jews and Samaritans—famously at odds with each other, as we know from the Gospels—found unexpected common ground. Their hatred for Herod Archelaus was so intense that they both petitioned their Roman overlords to oust him for what the historian Flavius Josephus, in Antiquities of the Jews, termed “barbarous and tyrannical usage of them.” (It didn’t help that 3,000 people died during Passover riots breaking out over the rehabilitation of two Jewish teachers burned alive for protesting a golden eagle—regarded as an idol—placed in the Temple at Jerusalem.) Amazingly, that petition was granted, and Archelaus was exiled.

This short passage from Matthew is, in a sense, a study of good and bad seeds.

Joseph raised the “good seed,” Jesus, who preached and lived a life of good works, and who has been remembered, with special love, every year at this time. The structure Jesus erected, the Church, remains—though under assault now, from within and without, as it was in his time.

The “bad seed,” Archelaus, emulated his father through public works and jealous intelligence on rivals. But nothing remains of what he built, and if he is remembered at all now, it is only with a shudder.

(The image accompanying this post, by the way, is by Guido Reni, St. Joseph With Infant Christ in His Arms (1620s)

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.)