The moment Herod was dead, the nation exploded. Three separate revolts broke out across the country before his sons could even settle who inherited what.
According to Josephus in Antiquities XVII, the trouble started during Passover. Crowds in Jerusalem demanded that Archelaus punish the men who had burned the rabbis alive for tearing down the golden eagle. Archelaus tried to calm them, but the mourners would not stop. When his soldiers entered the Temple courts to restore order, the crowd pelted them with stones. Archelaus sent in the full army. Three thousand pilgrims were killed on the festival grounds. The rest fled to the surrounding hills.
While Archelaus sailed to Rome to plead his case before Augustus, his regent Sabinus looted the Temple treasury, seizing four hundred talents of gold. The Jews besieged Sabinus and his troops in Herod's palace. Fighting engulfed the Temple porticoes, which the Romans set on fire. Soldiers poured into the burning sanctuary and plundered what was left.
The chaos spread everywhere at once. In Galilee, Judas ben Hezekiah raided the royal armory at Sepphoris and armed a rebel force. In Perea, a former royal slave named Simon crowned himself king, burned the palace at Jericho, and terrorized the Jordan valley until a Roman commander tracked him down and beheaded him. In Judea, a shepherd named Athronges, a man of enormous physical strength with no claim to nobility whatsoever, declared himself king and led his four brothers in guerrilla attacks on Roman supply lines.
Varus, the Roman governor of Syria, marched south with two full legions and burned Sepphoris to the ground, selling its entire population into slavery. He crucified two thousand captured rebels along the roads. The message was clear: Rome would hold Judea by force. Augustus divided the kingdom, denied Archelaus the title of king, and gave him only the lesser rank of ethnarch. The age of an independent Jewish monarchy was over. What followed was direct Roman rule, and eventually, war.