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Herod Burned the Teachers Who Broke His Eagle

Two Torah teachers tear a golden eagle from the Temple gate in broad daylight, and Herod, dying but still dangerous, has them burned alive.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Young Priest in the Pool
  2. The Wife He Loved and Killed
  3. The Eagle at the Temple Gate
  4. The King Who Would Not Die Quietly

The Young Priest in the Pool

Herod's fear began with beauty. Aristobulus III, seventeen years old, Hasmonean-born, brother of his own wife Mariamne, stood at the Temple altar during Sukkot in his priestly vestments and the people wept. Not from sadness. From memory. They saw the dynasty that had liberated the Temple standing at the altar where it belonged, and the weeping was loyalty too strong to hide.

Herod saw it too. He understood what the beautiful young priest meant to the crowd in a way the boy himself may not have fully understood. A king who is not beloved cannot afford a priest who is. Within months, Aristobulus was drowned in a pool at Jericho during a celebration. Herod wept publicly over the body. Josephus records the performance with cold precision.

The Wife He Loved and Killed

Mariamne, Herod's Hasmonean wife, carried the dynasty in her blood. Herod loved her with the intensity that frightened him. He was afraid of losing her to rivals. He was afraid that if he died, she would find someone better. While he traveled to Rome, he left instructions, twice, that if he did not return, she should be killed. He could not tolerate the possibility of Mariamne belonging to any future that did not include him.

She found out. She did not pretend she had not. The marriage that Herod had tried to hold through control collapsed under the weight of what he had planned for her. Herod, caught between love and paranoia, eventually had her executed on charges that Josephus treats with visible skepticism. He spent the rest of his life alternating between grief for her and attempts to convince himself the execution was just.

The pattern runs through his entire reign. Herod wanted legitimacy, beauty, and loyalty around him, and he destroyed each one as soon as it threatened to exist independently of him.

The Eagle at the Temple Gate

Near the end of his life, Herod installed a large golden eagle above the great gate of the Temple. Roman eagles were symbols of imperial power. A Roman eagle over the most sacred Jewish site was a statement about who owned what. It was also a violation of the commandment against graven images in the place of worship.

Two teachers, Judas son of Sepphoraeus and Matthias son of Margalus, told their students what needed to be done. The Torah forbade idolatrous images. The Temple gate bore one. Removing it was an act of religious courage, even if the king was dying in his palace and the timing seemed to make it safe.

In broad daylight, at noon, the teachers lowered their students by ropes from the roof above the gate. The students cut the eagle down. The crowd in the lower courts watched.

The King Who Would Not Die Quietly

Herod was ill. He was in agony, Josephus describes a disease of the entire body, a corruption that moved through him as the eagles were being cut down. He should have been too sick to respond. He was not.

He ordered the teachers and students brought to him. He questioned them directly: who had authorized the destruction of the eagle? The teachers answered that it had been the Torah. No human authority had appointed them. The law itself had given the order.

Herod had the teachers and the students who had actually done the cutting burned alive. He replaced the high priest with his own appointment. Then he continued dying. He lasted a few more weeks and then died in Jericho, in the town where he had also arranged the drowning of the beautiful young Aristobulus thirty years before.

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

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.

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

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)

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)

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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