To read more from Daniel, visit his blog, Sic Et Non. 

In this column, I offer one last parting post-seasonal thought about the Christmas story.  After a meal at a winter party on the Saturday following last month’s mega-holiday, a group of us, friends over many years, sat for a little while in a rough circle.  Our pre-assigned task had been to name the character from the gospel accounts of Christ’s nativity who resonates most with us, the figure with whom we most identify.

I chose King Herod.  Some, of course, won’t be surprised by this.  They’ll see the choice as an obvious one for me, given my striking similarity to Herod in both character and temperament.  But there were other reasons for my choosing the late Judean king.  For one thing, I hadn’t received the memo about our little party activity; I heard about it only while driving to the gathering, and I had nothing prepared.  And all the others who were seated around the circle had already spoken their piece by the time my turn arrived.  The respectable figures in the story had already been claimed—some of them more than once.

So, what can be said about Herod?  Not much that’s good, I’m afraid.  And, in that light, he suddenly struck me as a powerful illustration of why Christ had to come, of why that divine baby needed to be born, and of the dysfunctional nature of much in this fallen mortal world.  Herod suddenly seemed to me a cause for sorrow and, yes, even an object of pity.  (How he would have hated that!)

The Book of Mormon teaches that “wickedness never was happiness” (Alma 41:10).  And Herod appears to have been a very unhappy man, continually anxious and insecure.  At one point in Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part II” (III.i.1735), the king bemoans his position as monarch.  Why?  Because, unlike his poor and simple subjects, he can never find a moment of peace and repose.  “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” he laments.

It’s understandable that the duties of high office might weigh heavily upon any responsible leader.  But Herod’s anxiety clearly ran far deeper and further than ordinary conscientiousness.  Of course, there will always be a measure of insecurity associated with being a prominent politician, to say nothing of being a hated tyrant, a gang leader, or a mafia don.  We ordinary folk seldom need to worry very much about coups, turf wars, or assassinations.  But Herod seems to have been severely paranoid, perhaps even clinically so.

For one thing, he felt himself continually obliged to fend off challenges to his rule.  And, in doing so, he had many people tortured and shed great quantities of blood, including that of members of his own family.  Thus, for instance, apparently influenced by his sister’s intrigues, he had his wife Mariamne executed, and then grieved her death for many months.  He also killed her mother and her grandfather.  He had his brother-in-law, Aristobulus III, drowned at a party in 35 BC.  And he killed his eldest son, Antipater II, as well as Alexander and Aristobulus IV, his two sons with Mariamne.

The late-Roman grammarian Ambrosius Macrobius, writing in his “Saturnalia” around AD 400, credits Augustus Caesar with a rather grim Greek pun.  It relies implicitly on the fact that observant Jews, one of whom Herod at least pretended to be, abstain from eating the flesh of swine.  On hearing about Herod’s having ordered the execution of one of his children, Augustus is said to have quipped that, if he were forced to choose, he would rather be Herod’s pig (“hus”) than Herod’s son (“huios”).

And, of course, his murderous behavior toward his own kinfolk makes all the more plausible the famous account in Matthew 2 of “the slaughter of the innocents.” That biblical story, too, cites Herod’s insecurity on the throne of Judea as his motivation.  For the sake of freshness, I cite the account here as it’s given in the New International Version of the New Testament:

“After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”  When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born. “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written.” . . . Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.”” (Matthew 2:1-5, 7-8)

But, of course, Herod never had any actual intention of worshiping the newborn “king of the Jews.”  So, the account records that the wise men, having been warned by God in a dream not to do so, never returned to make any report to him.

“When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.” (Matthew 2:16)

And it was Herod’s lethal paranoia in that instance that impelled Joseph, Mary, and the infant Jesus to flee Judea for refuge beyond Herod’s reach:

“When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”  So, he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.” (Matthew 2:13-15)

In the Great Power politics of his day, of course, everything in the Mediterranean Basin and well beyond it had already begun to revolve around the rising Roman Empire.  Accordingly, much of Herod’s energy was devoted to currying favor with the overlords of Rome.  (He could not afford to have them as enemies.)  That, for instance, is why he named his magnificent Mediterranean port city “Caesarea Maritima” in honor of Caesar Augustus.

However, Caesarea was only one of Herod’s many massive architectural creations—which are a major reason for the title that he has been given in history: “Herod the Great.”  (It certainly doesn’t derive from his moral example!)  Tourists and pilgrims to modern Israel will likely also have seen his two stunning palaces atop the isolated plateau of Masada, which soars above the Judean wilderness alongside the Dead Sea.  Those palaces were also intended as fortified and inaccessible places to which he could flee in the event of an invasion or where he could escape a potential uprising among his oppressed subjects.  And no tourist or pilgrim to Israel can fail to see what remains of Herod’s reconstruction of the Second Temple.  The temple itself, which had been an impressive structure even by the standards of imperial Rome, is entirely gone now.  No trace of it remains.  But the enormous retaining walls of the platform that Herod created to support his splendid temple are still prominently visible, and still remarkable.  They give us some hint of the grandeur of the structure that once rested atop them.  Thus, Herod’s memory lives on, albeit more for evil than for good.

Some visitors to Bethlehem will probably also catch an occasional glimpse in the distance of the Herodium or Herodion, the artificial volcano-shaped mountain that was built by the king as both a fortress and a palace.  It is also, in fact, his burial place—which may have been located near Bethlehem to promote Herod’s association with that town’s famous son, King David, and with David’s royal line (to which Herod had, in fact, no actual biological connection).  Herod’s tomb itself seems to have been designed on the model of earlier royal tombs such as those of Philip of Macedon and of Philip’s son, Alexander the Great, who had both come to be widely regarded as, in some sense, divine.  But Herod’s Jewish subjects were not inclined to deify human kings, and certainly not such a man as he.  In fact, sometime in antiquity, his tomb was robbed, his sarcophagus was smashed, and his bones were lost.

In other words, Herod’s plans for posthumous glory and veneration didn’t work out quite as he had planned.  Especially one of the most dramatic and wicked of those plans:  In his “Antiquities of the Jews,” the famed first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus writes that Herod worried that nobody would mourn his death.  In fact, he feared that many of his subjects would actually rejoice at his demise.  So, he commanded a large group of distinguished men to come to Jericho.  And then, intending to guarantee that there was public mourning when he died, he ordered that they all be killed immediately after his death.  There would, thus, be public displays of great grief, even if, strictly speaking, the grieving wasn’t for Herod himself.  Fortunately, his brother-in-law Alexas and his sister Salome disobeyed his orders.

In the end, though, Herod’s unhappy and insecure life seems to have culminated in an exceptionally miserable death.  (Sensitive souls may want to skip the rest of this paragraph.)  His last days included intense itching, painful intestinal problems, breathlessness, and convulsions of every limb. Ultimately, at least one modern medical scholar suggests, Herod died from a fatal combination of chronic kidney disease and a rare infection that causes gangrene of the genitalia.  It was a terrible end for a frankly terrible man.

But even Herod was a child of God.  Moreover, since he was born into mortality, we know that he had passed his premortal first estate.  So, his spectacular moral failure in this probationary second estate is deeply tragic.  When I was a boy in southern California, one of the books on my mother’s shelf was a 1951 novel entitled “A Tear for Judas,” written by a North Carolina journalist and writer named LeGette Blythe.  I scarcely remember the book now, although I can still visualize it.  I recall that it portrayed Judas as, in his way, a tragic figure.  And, with that in mind, I wonder whether we might not ourselves be able to shed at least a tear for King Herod.  I expect that Herod’s Father in Heaven did.  (To support my expectation, I point to such scriptural passages as Isaiah 14:12-17, Doctrine and Covenants 76:25-27, Ezekiel 33:11, Matthew 23:37, Luke 23:34, and Moses 7:28-37.)

Speaking from a Nephite wall not long before the advent of Christ, Samuel the Lamanite told his unreceptive Nephite audience,

“But behold, your days of probation are past; ye have procrastinated the day of your salvation until it is everlastingly too late, and your destruction is made sure; yea, for ye have sought all the days of your lives for that which ye could not obtain; and ye have sought for happiness in doing iniquity, which thing is contrary to the nature of that righteousness which is in our great and Eternal Head” (Helaman 13:38).

It’s well beyond my pay grade to decree Herod’s eternal fate, and I cannot set a limit to the mercy of God.  Still, I suppose that those same words might aptly have applied to him, as well.  He sought happiness by means that could never succeed.  And how sad that is!  “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).  In sending his Son, I believe that our common Father hoped, if at all possible, to rescue even a soul so rebellious and proud as Herod’s.

But aren’t all of us occasionally tempted to seek happiness in ways that cannot deliver it?

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,” taught Jesus, “where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal” (Matthew 6:19-20).  Nearly two thousand years after Gethsemane and Golgotha, the risen Lord explained to Joseph Smith that “I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent” (Doctrine and Covenants 19:16).

We have a Savior who offers us not only a Plan of Salvation but a Plan of Happiness.  “These things I have spoken unto you,” he says at John 16:33, “that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”