Run Time: approx. 60 min.
Language: English
He carved a bloody path to power, built an army of 40,000 men that instilled terror into the hearts of both his enemies and those he ruled, and he even murdered his own wives and children. Can anything about this ruthless tyrant make him worthy of the title, Herod the
Great?
Join the world's leading archeologists, historians and scholars as they search for
the truth about one of Chrisianity's most legendary villains.
On the extreme eastern edge of the Roman Empire, Herod ruled the earthly kingdom into which Jesus was born with a cruelty born of paranoia. Killing any who stood in his way, Matthew's Massacre of the Innocents describes his attempt to murder the infant Jesus by sending troops to slaughter of every male child in Bethlehem under two years of age. Yet at the same time Herod raised some of the architectural marvels of the Roman world – the brilliant new Temple in Jerusalem – the largest man-made structure in the Empire, Caesarea Maritima, the world's first fully man-made harbor with sumptuous palaces, temples, hippodrome and amphitheater that he wished to rival Rome.
In the words of the 1st century historian, Josephus, Herod "stole the throne like a fox, ruled like a tiger and died like a dog". Obsessed by the kingdom of this world, Herod the Great was the complete opposite of piety.