HEROD'S TOMB (if that's what it is) is used in an L.A. Times essay as a launching point for an essay on archaeology and modern Israeli-Palestinian politics. Palestinian Temple denial also comes up.

King Herod's return
How Israelis and Palestinians put their own spin on archeology to claim an ancestral homeland.
By Walter Reich, WALTER REICH is a professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior at George Washington University, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former d
May 30, 2007

AFTER 2,000 YEARS of indignity and ignominy, Herod the Great has finally gotten his revenge.

During their revolt against Roman rule over Judea between AD 66 and 72, Jews who remembered King Herod as a Roman puppet smashed his sarcophagus, which had been interred with royal pomp about 70 years before. Christians have identified him as a baby killer who forced Jesus' family to flee Bethlehem. And Herod's habit of having his rivals and relatives killed has hardly burnished his image.

True, he built monumental projects — not only Masada and Caesarea but the grand expansion of the second Jewish temple in Jerusalem, the best-known remnant of which is the Western Wall. In the main, though, he's been a forgotten and derided historical figure.

But now Herod is back, at least in spirit. Israeli archeologists announced earlier this month that they've found his tomb, eight miles south of Jerusalem. And that tomb has become yet another impediment on the already impassable road to Israeli-Palestinian peace.

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