Herod the Great
King of Judaea · About 40–1 BC
The Years
- Began 40 BC
- “the Kingly title was devolved upon Herod by their generall suffrage”
- Ended 1 BC
- The eclipse of the 10th of January, 1 BC, before he died. Ussher: 4 BC
- “having enjoyed the kingdom 34 years after he had killed Antigonus”
Herod, the king of Judaea (Luke 1:5), made king by the Roman Senate. The wise men came to him at Jerusalem (Matthew 2:1-3), and he died while the young child was in Egypt (Matthew 2:19-20). The text does not date his death; the timeline puts it early in 1 BC, before the Passover. Josephus tells of an eclipse of the moon shortly before Herod died and a Passover soon after, and between them his sickness, the baths at Callirrhoe, the death of his son Antipater, and the funeral. The eclipse of the 10th of January, 1 BC, was total and leaves about three months for them; it fits the early church’s date for the Lord’s birth, 3 or 2 BC (see The Birth of Jesus Christ). Most historians put his death in 4 BC, after the partial eclipse of the 13th of March, only twenty-nine days before the Passover: Herod’s sons counted their reigns from 4 BC (see Archelaus), and Josephus’s thirty-seven years from his appointment by the Senate in 40 BC, and thirty-four from his taking of Jerusalem in 37 BC, point to it. Those who hold 1 BC count those years from later starts, and hold that the sons dated their reigns from before their father died. Ussher dates his death about the 25th of November, in the autumn quarter of the Year of the World 4001, the margin's 4 BC.
Where the year isn’t Ussher’s, the text sets it, and the note says how. Ussher’s years and sentences are from his Annals of the World (1658), quoted as printed.
