Meet the horrible Herods. This site is a brief
introduction to the Herod family and its scandalous doings, as known
from the Bible and extrabiblical
accounts,
with links to additional sources.
We begin with . . .
Incestuous marriage and lust. Religious persecution.
Beheadings. Burning
people alive. The massacre
of a town's male infants.
On his deathbed, Herod ordered that all the important men of Judea be summoned to Jericho and imprisoned, to be slain there when he died, so there would be mourning at the time of his death. (The order was not carried out.)
Herod is most famous for ordering the massacre of all male children two years old or younger in the town and region of Bethlehem, for fear that a prophesied king of the Jews had been born there.
Though the story of the Bethlehem massacre is found only in the Gospel of Matthew, and some scholars thus question the event's historicity, the story is credible. Herod the Great, history shows, was more than capable of committing such an atrocity.
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