Herod's Lost Tomb

This excellent documentary about King Herod the Great produced by the National Geographic Society in 2008 was shown on the National Geographic Channel in 2009. It is available on a DVD and runs to almost one hour.

Herod was born ca. 71 BC and died ca. 4 BC. In this documentary we hear about his life and career, about his building program and about the search for his tomb.

He was king of the Jews and a friend of the Romans. He was king only because the Romans allowed it. He was not very popular with the Jewish people, especially the Jewish elite family, the Hasmonaeans, who had ruled the area for many years.

The documentary tells us that he was Arab by blood and Jewish by faith. Critics say that he stole the throne like a fox, ruled like a tiger, but died like a dog.

Several scholarts are interviewed for the documentary. All witnesses are well chosen, because they are experts in the field.

Early on we meet Jodi Magness, archaeologist and author of The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (2002). Speaking of Herod she says: 

“He is the single most important person in the archaeology of the land of Israel. He left an archaeological imprint that is still visible today.”

Later on we meet Peter Richardson, historian and author of Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans (1999). He explains how Herod’s alliance with Rome was originally set up in 40 BC, when eastern affairs were controlled by Mark Anthony (whose Latin name is Marcus Antonius). After the battle of Actium in 31 BC, when Mark Anthony was defeated by Octavian (the future Augustus), Herod rushed to Rome to renew his alliance with the new leader.

The documentary also presents Herod’s extensive building program which falls into three groups:

** To please the Jews, he began the construction of the second temple in Jerusalem. The huge project was begun around 20 BC, but it was not yet completed when he died in 4 BC.

** To please the Romans, he built Caesarea Maritima, a Roman town on the coast northwest of Jerusalem. The new town built 25-13 BC had a theatre, a hippodrome, a temple, an aqueduct, and a harbour. Speaking of the harbour Beverley Goodman, a marine archaeologist, says: “Technologically, it was beyond its years. It was truly one of the greatest engineering feats in the Mediterranean.”

** To please himself - and to improve his own safety - he built several fortified palaces. The Herodium, named after the king himself, was a circular structure built ca. 30-20 BC on top of an artificial mountain 13 km south of Jerusalem. Masada, further south, was a palace complex built 37-31 BC on a high and inaccessible piece of rock which included several large cisterns where water could be stored.

The central witness in the documentary is Ehud Netzer (1934-2010), archaeologist and author of The Architecture of Herod: The Great Builder (2008), who first came to the Herodium in 1972. Remains of the palace on top of the mountain are still visible today, and so is the rectangular pool on the flat land below. But where was Herod’s tomb? The ancient writer Titus Flavius Josephus tells us that Herod was buried somewhere around the Herodium. But for years nobody knew where it was. At the foot of the mountain Netzer discovered the remains of a building which turned out to be a triclinium, built for mourners; it was not a mausoleum, not a tomb. But he was getting close.

In 2006 Netzer had a new idea: he drew a line from the rectangular pool through the triclinium to the eastern tower of the palace. Somewhere along this line, he assumed, the tomb must be. This idea paid of. In April 2007, when Netzer and his team started digging on the slope of the mountain, about half way between the pool and the palace, they found a mausoleum with a tomb containing fragments of three sarcophagi, one red and two white. They assume the red one was for Herod. They do not know who were placed in the white ones.

It seems the mausoleum was destroyed and buried about 60 years after Herod’s death. This happened during the Jewish uprising in AD 66-70 when Jewish troops were using the palace on top of the mountain as a military base. They hated Herod, who was seen as a Roman agent, so they smashed his sarcophagus and buried his mausoleum. This explains why it remained undiscovered until Netzer and his team found it in 2007.

Herod was not a nice person. The documentary states this fact many times. He married into the ruling family, the Hasmoneans, in order to be accepted by the old Jewish elite, but this plan did not work very well. He had a very suspicious mind: he had his second wife Mariamne killed. He felt threatened by some of his sons: he had some of them killed, too. But he was an important person who played a major role in the history of the Jewish people. He did everything on a grand scale, both the good and the bad things in his life. As Jodi Magness says:

“He built more monuments, larger monuments, more elaborate monuments than any other person” in the history of the land of Israel.

The documentary consists of several elements:

 

(1) We get to see what these places look like today.

 

(2) By means of computer technology we get to see what they would have looked like in Herod’s time.

 

(3) Some situations have been reconstructed with modern actors.

 

(4) We get to meet several scholars and hear them explain their case. Their contributions are clear and concise.

This documentary is well written and well produced. All arguments and conclusions seem to be supported by solid evidence. Therefore it is highly recommended.

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Herod's Lost Tomb,

National Geographic Society, 2008, 50 minutes

 

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