One temple was not enough. He built another in Samaria, dedicated to the divine emperor Augustus, and a third as a sanctuary for the local cult of Abraham in Hebron, the capital of Idumea. Ranging abroad, he rebuilt the temple of Apollo in Rhodes. He was nothing if not catholic in his religious dedication.
And temples were only the beginning. Herod made himself a major benefactor throughout the eastern Mediterranean. He financed important construction projects in Athens, Lycia, Pergamum, and Sparta. He re-walled Byblos, built a forum in Tyre and another in Beirut, an aqueduct in Laodicea, amphitheaters in Sidon and Damascus, gymnasia in Ptolemai's and Tripoli. He built a two-and-a-half-mile paved colonnade along the main street of Antioch, finished in polished marble.
But perhaps most stunningly from a modern perspective, in 16 B.C. he came to the aid of the ailing Olympic Games, pledging huge sums of money to ensure that they were held regularly and in suitable pomp. Such munificence came with honors, naturally, and he was awarded the title of Life President of the Games.
Life President is exactly the kind of title that tyrants still lay claim to today. And Herod was indeed a tyrant, no doubt about that. Like every other ruler of his day. The very idea of democracy was seventeen hundred years away. This was a time when royalty was often melded with divinity, when kings and queens—Augustus, Cleopatra—declared themselves gods and insisted on being worshipped as gods. Whether their subjects literally saw them as gods is quite another question, but traditions like the healing "royal touch" lasted well into the Middle Ages. Even the realm of the purely divine was called "the kingdom of god." Herod at least was a secular tyrant.
His lack of divinity was not by choice. Like any ruler of the time, he would have claimed it if he could. But he ruled at the pleasure of someone else: the emperor in Rome. He could not declare himself divine, since that would be to challenge the emperor, and that was the one thing he could not afford to do.
Still, he must have longed to be thought of as a god. Divinity at least ensures a certain measure of resignation, if not acceptance; secular tyrants turn out to be hated all the more. Herod lacked that god-given element of divine awe, and the high priests he appointed lacked the authority of god-appointed ones—that is, the traditional hereditary ones. Human fear was all that remained, but he at least knew how to enforce that.
Tyrants the world over and through time turn out to be remarkably alike. Herod's network of spies and informers, like Saddam Hussein's in Iraq, included one branch spying on another. Continual tests of loyalty resulted in instant execution for failure. And again like Saddam Hussein, Herod's megalomania went hand in hand with paranoia. He repeatedly struck out at those closest to him if he suspected treachery. And he suspected it everywhere, most probably justifiably.
One precaution he took was to avoid using Judeans in his army; they could turn against him all to easily. Instead, he cannily used soldiers from Samaria and Idumea—longtime enemies of the Judeans—together with foreign mercenaries from Thrace, Germany, and Gaul.
Yes, Gaul, or what is now France. However much westerners, and of course the French in particular, still think of France as the nexus of civilized culture, two thousand years ago it was the back of beyond. Gaul was the kind of place nobody wanted to live—so much so that when Herod's eldest son Archelaus, the client ruler of Judea after his father's death, was ousted and exiled by the Romans for an extraordinary mix of brutality and ineptitude (the brutality was fine; the ineptitude was not), it was to Vienne, on the Rhone in southeastern France. Thirty-three years later, when his younger brother Antipas was himself deposed and banished by the emperor Caligula in 39 A.D. it was to Lyon, in eastern France.
Force alone was clearly not enough to stay in power. It never is. Guile was needed too, and Herod the Great was a master of it, with a sophisticated understanding of how the world—that is, the Roman Empire—worked.
A client king needs to be able to read the political winds correctly, and to have the right patron at the right time. So Herod always covered his back. He knew how to use what the Romans called unguentaria, from the word for healing and fragrant oils. This was "ointment money" used to smooth the way of the ambitious, or in Dickensian parlance, good old palm grease. In short: bribes. Every official, from the most powerful to the pettiest functionary, took them. At the highest levels, they are oddly referred to in most historical accounts as "gifts." They were not. They were well calculated quid pro quos, especially in the hands of a master like Herod, who plundered the accumulated treasures of the Jerusalem temple, much of which found their way into the coffers first of Julius Caesar, then Mark Antony, and then Octavian, who declared himself Augustus Caesar.
Herod's extraordinary balancing act was made easier by a fact of geopolitics that still holds true today. Palestine straddled the land route from Egypt, which provided a third of Rome's annual grain consumption, and it was a buffer between the Roman Empire and its enemies to the east. Palestine, that is, was essential to controlling the eastern Mediterranean. And Herod assured the Romans of continuing control. He was a brilliant choice for client ruler: absolutely loyal to whoever was in power, no danger of him declaring himself divine since he was not fully accepted by his own people, and above all, capable of keeping things quiet in Palestine.
So far as Rome was concerned, it worked perfectly. Once Herod had fought his way to Jerusalem and claimed the throne, the Romans didn't have to send in their own troops until the year he died. They got thirty-five years of obedience and profit at no substantial cost to themselves: the perfect colonial deal.
Except, of course, for the colonialized.
Somebody had to pay for Herod's grandiose ambitions. The Olympic Games alone were as outrageously expensive to stage then as they are now. Without television networks to pay broadcasting fees, or commercial sponsors, the burden fell on those who could least afford it:Palestinian peasants.
Not that Herod didn't have considerable personal wealth. Wealth was the chief prerogative of power. He had the income from the crown domains, which included the immensely valuable date plantations and balsam groves of Jericho. Under lease from Augustus, he had half the income of the copper mines of Cyprus. He also had customs and excise taxes from his Mediterranean ports and from points of entry such as Capernaum at the northern end of the Sea of Galilee, where camel and mule trains traveling north from Arabia along the Dead Sea valley would turn west to reach the seaports. On top of all this, he had the interest on huge loans to the Nabateans, whose realm stretched the length of the east side of the Dead Sea valley, and a free hand, if not exactly license, in plundering the temple treasury.
But with ambitions such as his, none of this was enough. The shortfall could only be made up from the land he directly controlled. That is, from taxes.
The tax burden was crippling. As usual, it fell hardest on the poor. First, one third of the crop went straight to Herod, collecting for the Romans—and for himself. Then a further ten percent was due in priestly tithes: first fruits and so on. And then there was the annual half shekel to be paid directly to the temple, levied not per family but per male in the family, which is why whenever a population census was proposed, uprisings were inevitable. In all, almost half of a farmer's produce was taken away immediately in tithes and taxes, often seized right on the threshing floor. And since whatever the tax collector could extract above and beyond the required amount was his to keep in addition to his regular commission, many peasants paid still more.
The moment the tax collectors appeared over the ridge from Sepphoris—always with a military escort—all the chatter and songs, the excitement and bustle of harvest came to a stop. The usual hubbub of people that greeted travelers the moment they set foot in Nazareth was non-existent. Young boys were hushed so that they wouldn't snicker at the sight of grown men riding on mules, when everyone knew that only the sick and the very elderly did that. A sullen silence descended on the village. Even the donkeys dragging the threshing boards over the newly harvested wheat seemed
to move sluggishly, as though under a great burden.
The soldiers were unpredictable, the taxmen thuggish. If they weren't presented with what they considered their due, they took it by force, and then some, to make up for the trouble of exerting themselves. Only the family heads gathered to meet them in the center of the village. Women and girls kept their distance, lest the soldiers decide that rape was part of the bargain. Like girls her age throughout the Galilee, Maryam looked on from high up on the olive terraces, witnessing the shame of her menfolk humbled by extortionists.
Those farmers who could afford it could simply bribe the taxmen to understate their tax liability. This could take hours of desperate negotiation as the soldiers supervised the loading of the mules with wheat, barley, olive oil, whatever was in store or in season. Those who couldn't afford the bribes were often forced on the road to dispossession. They had to ask for credit against the following year's crop, either from Herodian officials or from the priestly aristocracy or, worst, from the tax collectors themselves. In a spiral of indebtedness still known to small farmers the world over, they borrowed against future harvests, and so mortgaged the farm.
Once you started on this road, there was little chance of turning back. The loans were risky. Even under the best conditions, productivity was never very high; a peasant family's plots would produce little more than what was needed for subsistence. If the next year was a drought year, the family was already in danger. Two drought years in a row, and they were done for. The collateral for the first year's loan was the harvest; for the second year, it was the land itself.
Men who had owned their land—land that their fathers and grandfathers and great grandfathers had owned, on down into the past for more generations than anyone could count—became tenant farmers in what had been their own fields, or were forced into construction work in Sepphoris or Jerusalem. Family structures were broken up this way. But more, so was the whole basis of peasant life.
Palestinian anthropologist Ali Qleibo points out that in peasant societies, "the bond with the land is very difficult to sever on emotional, social and historical grounds. It is a highly charged symbol in terms of which one's sense of identity is produced." Family survival on the land of your ancestors—on the land planted with olive trees older than the legends told around the fire at night—was, and still is, the supreme value. Dispossession is more than the loss of the house, or even of the land itself; it is the loss of identity.
This is why the long tradition of great prophets was still so alive in Maryam's mind, and why in time she would make sure to pass it on to her son. The prophets were the guardians of identity. One after another, they invoked divine judgment against rulers who exploited the peasantry and appropriated their lands. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Amos, Micah, Nehemiah—all weighed in forcefully.
Nehemiah, writing soon after the founding of the second Jerusalem temple in the fifth century B.C., recorded the people's complaints word for word:
"We are having to pledge our fields, our vineyards, and our houses in order to get grain during the famine . . . We are having to borrow on our fields and vineyards to pay the king's tax . . . We are forcing our sons and daughters to be slaves, and some of our daughters have been ravished. We are powerless, and our fields and vineyards now belong to others."
Yes, slaves. As in Afghanistan and other countries today, children were often sold to help pay off debts. And since the continuity of the family was invested in the sons, especially the eldest one, it was the daughters who were most likely to be traded away in payment of debt. Daughters like Maryam.
It didn't have to be this way. The old Mosaic law, established in Exodus and reiterated in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, dictated a sabbatical release every seventh year from debt and debt-slavery—a forgiveness of debt that many fundamentalists might consider adding to their religious practice today, particularly if they happen to be bankers. But as with most ideals, this forgiveness was observed more in the breach than in the letter. Like the command to monotheism, it was a principle but not a custom.
As the debt crisis worsened, the temple aristocracy invented the prosbul, a special legal device to help make credit available in a sabbatical year, when lenders normally wouldn't want to give any credit at all. The intention was worthy, perhaps, but it backfired. In effect, it simply abolished the very idea of a debt sabbatical.
Yet the ideal lived on. Forgiveness of debt was something Jesus would insist on among his followers. He advocated it in what we now know as the Lord's Prayer, an extraordinary text that today resonates mainly as metaphor. In the Palestine of two thousand years ago, however, it focused on everyday reality in the most concrete way. It addressed the two prime concerns of peasant life: "Give us our daily bread" and "Forgive us our debts." When you do not have enough to eat and are being forced off your land, you do not have much time for metaphor; you mean what you say.
This is how the Lord's Prayer started out, at least. The earliest version, in Matthew, reads, "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." But by the time Luke was written, the text had lost partial sight of debt, becoming, "Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive every one who is indebted to us." Eventually, that partial blindness would become total, and the official version of the Lord's Prayer would read, "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us."
The change in wording had a certain logic. Luke and later writers were at a further remove from Palestine than the earlier Matthew, both in time and space. They were writing for an audience blissfully unaware of the situation of Galilean and Judean peasants living under Roman and Herodian rule. But the very fact that debts were changed into sins is sobering. It implies a judgment, as though those in debt were at fault, sinning against some higher order. In an ironic instance of what happens when cultural context is lost, the dominant version of the Lord's Prayer runs contrary to everything Jesus stands for in the gospels. By conflating debt with sin and trespass, it takes the side of the lender against the debtor, of the rich against the poor.
Resistance was inevitable. Especially in the Galilee, where the Arbel guerrillas were now led by Hezekiah's grandsons. But though the guerrillas were heroic figures throughout the hill villages like the Galilee Bethlehem and Nazareth, they also had strong urban support. This was centered in the lakeside town of Magdala, the home of Mary the Magdalene, the woman who represents the meeting place of rural peasant and urban laborer.
There is nothing in the gospels of the real Magdala—no indication that this was the only place in Galilee whose population reached into the thousands instead of the hundreds, and would remain the largest town in the province until Herod Antipas started to build Tiberias, a few miles south, in 19 A.D. Nor is there any awareness of its importance as the center of the Galilean fishing industry.
And industry it was. Magdala was, in essence, a fish-processing plant: a quasi-industrial township populated by peasants who had been forced off their land by drought, war, and tax debt. They streamed into "the city," and there they worked for daily or piece wages, lived in crowded hovels, and found themselves little more than slave labor for others. The whole place seethed with anger and resentment, with visions of a world without the Romans, without Herod, without tax collectors and government agents, bribery and corruption. It was, in short, not unlike any number of third-world towns today where people forced off the land congregate, mired in poverty and filth, and where despair builds on despair.
It's easy now to perch on the big rounded stones of the lakeshore on a calm spring day, near the ruins of a Byzantine monastery overgrown with wild mint and guarded by a Moslem caretaker and his dogs, and think of this as a bucolic place. Easier by far not to imagine how it was two thousand years ago, when tons of fish were hauled out onto the piers every day to be gutted and cleaned, then processed—salted, pressed, smoked, fermented, pickled—and finally sealed in heavy clay jars and sent by mule train south to Beit Shean, then east along the Jezreel Valley to the port of Caesarea, where the
y were shipped to Rome.
Magdala's specialty was a spicy fish extract known as garum. This condiment was a treasured delicacy in high-class Roman banqueting halls. It had the added allure of being thought of as a medicinal cure-all, though it quite possibly killed as many people as it cured. Think a very fishy version of Korean kimchi, or nuoc nam, the anchovy sauce used in Thai and Vietnamese cuisine, then think twice as pungent, and you have an idea what garum was like. It was made by leaving the salted and spiced entrails of small fish to ferment in the sun for several weeks—yes, weeks—then straining away the residue. Anyone in England horrified by this description, incidentally, might do well to check what's in a bottle of Worcestershire sauce.
As you might expect, Magdala stank. The putrid reek of rotting fish was everywhere: on hands, in nostrils, in hair, in the mud, in the air. It mixed with the stench of open sewers and acrid smoke from the curing towers until the smell hung close in the narrow alleys, filling the air of the dark slum hovels and permeating the clothes of the townspeople. Cormorants and vultures hovered in huge packs on the outskirts of the town, swooping in on the mounds of steaming bones and innards.
The air was utterly stifling in the still, humid days of summer, when so much moisture rose in evaporation from the lake that you could barely see the hills of the Arbel behind you, let alone the far shore or the snow-covered Mount Hermon rising far to the north. At least winters were balmy by contrast, except for the days when sudden storms came up from seemingly nowhere.
These storms were quick and treacherous. The gorges all around the lake funneled the wind, creating furious gusts that whipped the water into foaming, peaked waves, then drove them against the shores. The waves bounced back to collide with incoming ones, water clashing against water, and tranquility turned into turmoil in a matter of minutes. In the turmoil, fishermen in small boats drowned.
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