Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem may be more transcendent and his mesa-top retreat at Masada more spectacular, but Herodium (about 10 miles south of Jerusalem on the occupied West Bank) was where I channeled the spirit of the man. I was also channeling the spirit of a monster. From 37 to 4 B.C., Herod the Great (not to be confused with a slew of lesser heirs and successors who shared his name) ruled Judea with a bloody, iron fist. Though the account by the Gospel writer Matthew of an “exceeding wroth” Herod slaughtering the innocents of Bethlehem is probably apocryphal, the king did murder a wife, mother-in-law and three sons, along with untold numbers of enemies and rivals.A long travelogue that covers the major sites associated with Herod.
Yet he was one of the world’s great builders — an instinctive architectural genius who planned, sited, sourced and landscaped magnificent structures of classical antiquity. Epic was his preferred scale. No project was too ambitious or daring, whether it was throwing up a city from scratch or replacing Judaism’s holiest site from the ground up. Judea rejoiced when Herod died, but I found myself breathless with admiration after a week spent tracking his footsteps.
UPDATE: Related: Jesus, Herod and the Irgun — All in One Jerusalem Room. 2,700 Years of History Unearthed in Old City Prison (Ben Sales, The Forward).
(JTA) — When Amit Re’em embarked on a 1999 excavation of an abandoned Ottoman prison in the Old City of Jerusalem, he didn’t expect anything revolutionary.Background on that story is here. Also, background on Herodium and Herod's possible tomb there, as well as on the recent Herod exhibtion in the Israel Museum, is here and here with many links. And some past posts on Herod the Great himself are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
The dig was primarily aimed at inspecting the site before it was transformed into an event space for the nearby Tower of David Museum, and Re’em, then just 28, hoped at most to uncover some remains of a Herodian palace, or maybe part of a wall from the second century.
He did find those things — along with much more.
In one 160-by-30-foot space, Re’em unearthed an archaeological timeline of Jerusalem dating back 2,700 years. Layers from nearly every era of the city’s history lay on top of each other, from the time of the First Temple through the Roman, Crusader and Ottoman periods, and up to Israel’s independence in 1948.
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