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Herod Burned the Teachers Who Broke His Eagle

Two lecturers heard the king was dying and sent their students up the Temple gate with axes. Forty of them stayed when the soldiers came.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Eagle Over the Great Gate
  2. Noon, and the Forty Who Did Not Run
  3. The King on a Couch in the Theater
  4. The Debts Behind the Fire
  5. The Men Locked in the Hippodrome
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The Eagle Over the Great Gate

Judas son of Sepphoraeus and Matthias son of Margalothus were the two men in Jerusalem most worth listening to, and every young man in the city who wanted to be good came to their lectures in the morning. What they taught that season was the golden eagle.

Herod had fixed it over the great gate of the Temple, a large one, expensive, dedicated as a gift to the house. The law does not allow the making of any living creature in an image, and the bird sat there in gold above the crowds going in to pray. The teachers had said nothing about it for years. Then word came through the city that the king's disease was past curing.

So they said it to their students plainly. Pull down the things he built against the law of our fathers. If it costs you your lives, that is a smaller loss than it sounds, because the hour of dying comes to everyone and almost nobody gets to choose what it is spent on. You will be spoken well of by the men alive now and remembered by the ones not born yet, and what you leave your children will be worth more than what you could earn for them by staying quiet.

Noon, and the Forty Who Did Not Run

A rumor reached the lecture room that Herod was already dead. That settled it. In the middle of the day, with the courts full of people, the students got up onto the gate and cut the eagle down and broke it apart with axes.

The king's captain came at a run with a band of soldiers behind him, expecting something larger than what he found. Most of the young men scattered. Forty of them stayed where they were, and the two teachers would not move either, because walking away from a soldier looked worse to them than being taken by one. They were bound and brought to the king.

Herod asked whether they had really dared to pull down what he had dedicated to God. They answered together. "What was contrived, we contrived, and what has been performed, we performed it." The laws Moses left in writing, they said, were worth more attention than the commands of a living king, and they would take whatever punishment he had with pleasure, since they had done nothing unrighteous.

The King on a Couch in the Theater

He sent them under guard to Jericho and called the principal men of the nation to meet him in the theater there. He could not stand up, so they carried him in and he lay on a couch to speak.

He went through the whole account. What he had endured on their behalf. What the Temple had cost him to build, and the fact that the Hasmoneans in a hundred and twenty-five years of government had never managed anything for the honor of God on that scale. The donations he had made to it. He had thought he was leaving himself a memorial. And these men had waited until he was lying down, and gone at his gift in daylight, in front of everybody, and pulled it to the ground.

The assembly said the thing had been done without their approval and that the men responsible could be punished. Herod let most of them go home. He stripped the high priest of his office. Then he had the teacher Matthias burned alive, and the men taken with him burned beside him. That same night the moon went out.

The Debts Behind the Fire

His body was already going. A fire burned in him that could not be felt from outside, which left him ravenously hungry and unable to keep anything down. His bowels ulcerated. Water gathered in his feet. Worms bred in him, his breath was foul, and convulsions came through his whole frame. He went across the Jordan to the warm springs at Callirrhoe. The physicians lowered him into a vessel of oil and his household began screaming over him, thinking he was gone, and he came back. He paid every soldier fifty drachmae and had himself carried to Jericho.

He knew nobody would cry for him. He had put down old Hyrcanus, the mildest man in the country, who had wanted nothing but to be left alone and to whom Herod owed his own rise. Herod's agent had carried Hyrcanus's letter to the Arabian governor, resealed it, brought back the reply, and handed the whole correspondence to the king, who produced it before the council and had the old man killed the same day. He had killed Mariamne, his wife, whose mother stood up in front of the crowd as they led her out and tore her own hair and shouted that her daughter was a wicked, ungrateful woman, in order not to be next. Mariamne did not answer her. She looked at her mother once and then walked to the place of execution without her face changing color.

The Men Locked in the Hippodrome

So he made an arrangement. He sent letters to every notable family in the country ordering the head of it to come to him, and made refusal punishable by death, and when they arrived he had them shut inside the hippodrome at Jericho. Then he sent for his sister Salome and her husband Alexas.

He told them he was dying and that dying was bearable, but that he could not stand to die unlamented, with no mourning of the kind a king expects. He knew his death would be a holiday. So the moment he stopped breathing, before anyone announced it, they were to put soldiers around the hippodrome and shoot the men inside with darts. Every household in Israel would lose someone that day, and the whole nation would weep from the soul, and he would have the funeral he wanted. He cried while he asked, and reminded them what they owed him as kin, and made them swear.

They swore. Then he died, and Salome and Alexas went down to the hippodrome first, before the news was given out, and opened it, and told the men inside that the king had released them and they were free to go home. They walked out into the morning not knowing yet that he was dead.

HerodTempleRomeMartyrdom
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From the tradition

Sources

4 sources

The texts behind this telling. Some cards carry a translation of the source; others are our own retelling of it, and each card says which. Every card links out to the original.

Antiquities XV.4-6Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Antiquities of the Jews, trans. William Whiston · Public Domain

Herod had the throne, but the Hasmonean family still haunted him. His wife Mariamne was a Hasmonean princess. Her mother Alexandra was relentless in promoting Hasmonean claims. And the most dangerous threat of all was a seventeen-year-old boy named Aristobulus III, Mariamne's younger brother, the last male Hasmonean who could legitimately serve as high priest.

Herod initially tried to sideline the boy by appointing an obscure priest from Babylon to the high priesthood. Alexandra was furious. She secretly wrote to Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, who pressured Mark Antony to intervene. Herod, sensing danger from Antony's involvement, reversed course and appointed young Aristobulus as high priest.

It was a catastrophic miscalculation. Josephus describes in his Antiquities what happened next. During the Festival of Sukkot, the teenage Aristobulus stood at the altar in his priestly vestments. The crowds went wild. They wept. They shouted blessings. They showered the boy with the kind of adoration that made very clear where their loyalties lay. Herod watched it all and understood that this boy would destroy him if he lived.

Shortly after the festival, Herod invited Aristobulus to a banquet at his palace in Jericho. It was a warm evening. After dinner, the party moved to the pools in the courtyard. The young men began swimming and playing in the water. As night fell, some of Herod's men pushed Aristobulus under the surface and held him down. They kept dunking him, as if in sport, until he drowned.

He was eighteen years old.

Herod staged an elaborate funeral, weeping publicly, playing the grieving brother-in-law. Nobody was fooled. Alexandra reported the murder to Cleopatra, who again pressured Antony. Herod was summoned to explain himself. He went to Antony loaded with gifts and bribes. Before leaving, he gave secret orders to his deputy Joseph: if Herod did not return alive, Joseph was to kill Mariamne immediately. Herod could not bear the thought of his wife surviving him and belonging to another man.

Antony acquitted him. The bribery worked. But the secret order about Mariamne would soon leak out, setting in motion a chain of jealousy and murder that would consume Herod's entire household.

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Antiquities XV.7-8Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Antiquities of the Jews, trans. William Whiston · Public Domain

Mariamne was everything Herod wanted and everything he feared. A Hasmonean princess of extraordinary beauty, she gave him legitimate connection to the dynasty he had overthrown. Josephus writes in his Antiquities that Herod's love for her was obsessive, almost pathological. He could not stand to be apart from her, but he could not stop suspecting her either.

The crisis began when Herod left to meet Mark Antony, uncertain whether he would return alive. He placed Mariamne under the guard of a man named Sohemus with secret instructions: if Herod died, Sohemus was to kill her. Herod could not tolerate the idea of Mariamne living after him, possibly marrying someone else.

Sohemus, however, was gradually won over by Mariamne and her mother Alexandra. He revealed the king's secret order. When Herod returned triumphant from his meeting with Antony, Mariamne confronted him. She threw the death order in his face. Herod was stunned. The only way she could have learned the secret was from Sohemus, and the only reason Sohemus would have told her, Herod concluded, was if they were having an affair.

The accusation was almost certainly false. But Herod's sister Salome, who had long despised Mariamne, fanned the flames. She produced a servant who claimed Mariamne had tried to poison the king. A trial was held. Herod condemned his wife to death.

Josephus describes Mariamne's final moments with devastating clarity. She walked to her execution without a word of fear. She did not beg. She did not weep. Her composure was absolute. Alexandra, her own mother, publicly denounced her at the end, calling her ungrateful and deserving of death, in a transparent attempt to save herself from Herod's wrath.

The moment Mariamne was dead, Herod's grief consumed him. He wandered his palace calling her name. He ordered his servants to summon her as if she were still alive. He fell into a violent illness that his doctors feared would kill him. Josephus records that he withdrew to the desert near Samaria, hunting obsessively, trying to outrun a despair that never lifted.

Alexandra saw her chance and tried to seize the fortresses in Jerusalem. Herod, roused from his grief by the threat, had her executed too. Then he hunted down every remaining connection to the Hasmonean bloodline. Costobarus, Salome's ex-husband, had been secretly sheltering the sons of a Hasmonean loyalist named Babbas for twelve years. When Salome revealed this during their divorce, Herod had Costobarus and the sons of Babbas killed. The Hasmonean line was being systematically erased.

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Antiquities XVII.1-5Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Antiquities of the Jews, trans. William Whiston · Public Domain

Two Torah scholars convinced their students to tear a golden eagle off the Temple gate in broad daylight. Herod burned them alive for it.

The Josephus says in Antiquities XVII, the crisis began in the final year of Herod's life. Judas ben Saripheus and Matthias ben Margalothus were the most revered Torah teachers in Jerusalem, known for educating the youth in Jewish law and attracting large daily audiences. When word spread that Herod's illness was terminal, these two rabbis told their students the time had come to act.

The target was a massive golden eagle Herod had mounted above the great gate of the Temple. Jewish law forbids graven images, and this Roman-style eagle was an insult that the people had tolerated only out of fear. The rabbis declared that anyone who died destroying it would achieve eternal glory, since the Torah promises reward to those who defend God's commandments.

At midday, when the Temple courts were packed with worshippers, about forty young men climbed up and hacked the golden eagle to pieces with axes while their teachers stood below rallying the crowd. The king's soldiers arrived quickly, arresting the perpetrators along with their teachers. Herod, racked with illness and fury, had himself carried on a litter to the trial.

He demanded to know who had ordered the destruction. The young men answered without hesitation: their teachers had commanded it, and the Torah itself had authorized it. Herod replaced the high priest who had failed to prevent the uprising, then ordered Judas and Matthias burned alive along with several of their students. The rest of the arrested men were handed over to executioners.

That same night, there was an eclipse of the moon. Josephus records this detail almost in passing, but it marks the moment. A dying king burning scholars for defending Jewish law. The Temple cleansed of its eagle, but at a terrible price. Herod's final act of authority was an act of fire.

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Antiquities XVII.6-8Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Antiquities of the Jews, trans. William Whiston · Public Domain

Herod died the way he lived: in agony, surrounded by plots, and trying to control what happened after he was gone. His body was rotting while he was still inside it.

The Josephus says in Antiquities XVII, the disease that killed Herod was horrific. His intestines were ulcerated. His feet swelled with fluid. His genitals were gangrenous and bred worms. His breathing came in convulsions. Every physician in the kingdom was summoned, and none could help. He crossed the Jordan to the hot springs at Callirrhoe for treatment. When attendants lowered him into a bath of warm oil, he fainted and nearly died on the spot.

Back at Jericho, Herod devised one final monstrous plan. He ordered the most distinguished men from every village in Judea locked inside the hippodrome. He told his sister Salome and her husband Alexas to have them all killed the moment he died, so that every family in the nation would be mourning, even if they were mourning the wrong person. He refused to die ungrieved.

His will changed three times in his final days. First he named Antipater heir, then Antipas, and finally Archelaus. Antipater, still imprisoned for attempting to poison Herod, made one last bid for the throne by trying to bribe his jailer. When Herod learned of it, he summoned enough strength to order his son's execution. Five days later, Herod himself was dead, around 4 BCE, at roughly seventy years of age.

Salome and Alexas, to their credit, released the men in the hippodrome instead of slaughtering them. Archelaus staged a lavish funeral procession from Jericho to the fortress of Herodium, where the king was buried in purple, crowned in gold, with his scepter in his hand. Then the family descended on Rome to fight over the kingdom. Augustus Caesar eventually split it three ways: Archelaus got Judea, Antipas got Galilee, and Philip got the northeast territories. The Herodian dynasty fractured exactly as its founder had feared.

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