Herodias was shaped by the family that raised her, and the Herodians were no Cleavers.
WICKED QUEEN 2.0
It would be easy to blame Herodias’s sins on her grandfather, Herod the Great. If she were alive today, Herodias would be the star of Keeping Up with the Herodians, and YouTube would be flooded with videos of her complaining about her terrible childhood, her loser ex-husband, and her difficult life.
We know very little about Herodias from the Bible. Mark tells us that Herod Antipas arrested John the Baptizer because John openly criticized Antipas’s marriage to Herodias.1 Antipas had been married to a princess from the Nabatean kingdom, a client kingdom of Rome that had given the Herodians trouble for decades. Antipas’s marriage represented an uneasy peace, one that his divorce disrupted.2
John the Baptizer wasn’t concerned with the politics, however. He criticized the divorce as immoral, an affront to God. John’s repeated vocal criticism of Herod Antipas for this divorce and remarriage is why Antipas arrested John.
Despite Antipas’s anger at John, Mark tells us Antipas was afraid to kill the prophet. Mark implied that Herodias hated John so much that Antipas had to protect him from her. And Mark tells us that Herodias conspired against Antipas to see John dead.3
Many Jews of Jesus’ day anticipated Elijah’s return ahead of the Messiah, and Mark positioned John as Elijah returned. He would come as a harbinger of the end. As he did the first time, Elijah would call God’s people to repent.
Not only did Mark introduce John with a prophecy from Isaiah, but John also dressed as Elijah did (in a simple camel-skin garment) and maintained a similar diet (locusts and honey). Elijah spent a lot of time across the Jordan River, the traditional boundary of the Promised Land, and John called people to the Jordan to be baptized. They symbolically returned to the wilderness, repented, and entered back into the Promised Land as God’s people, washed and ready to welcome the Messiah.
Conveniently for Mark’s narrative, John came with his own archenemies. Just as Ahab and Jezebel opposed Elijah, so John faced Antipas and Herodias. Just as Elijah condemned Ahab’s marriage to Jezebel, John condemned Antipas’s marriage to Herodias. But Herodias was more than just a warmed-over Jezebel.
Because Herodias is absent from the rest of the Scriptures, we must rely on nonbiblical sources to tell us what Herodias was like. Those sources make it difficult not to feel bad for Herodias. She grew up in a mixture of privilege and terror. She lived in the center of the Roman Empire, but as a foreigner. She was royalty, but the granddaughter of a vassal king. She was a woman. She lived in the center of power with enough privilege to see power, but she had no power herself. Many of the slaves in Augustus’s household had more influence than she did.
Herodias grew up far from the court of her grandfather, Herod. But while Herod ruled thousands of miles from her, he shaped the course of her life. Herod and his second wife, Mariamne I, gave birth to Aristobulus IV, who married his cousin, Berenice.4 They had three sons and two daughters, one of whom was Herodias. Because of Herod’s close relationship with Augustus, Aristobulus and his brother were educated in Rome, in Augustus’s own house, which means Herodias grew up in the very center of the Roman Empire, under the guidance of Augustus and his wife, Livia.
Herodias was also a child bride, married off to her uncle. While we rightly condemn both child marriage and incest today, both were common in the ancient world, particularly among royal families. Herodias’s first wedding to her uncle, Herod II, would have raised no eyebrows. Even John the Baptizer didn’t condemn that union.
Incestuous marriage is only the tip of the iceberg for Herodias. Here are some highlights of the Herodian family history that pertain especially to her. Imagine how much fun their family reunions were:
Herodias’s great-aunt Salome I manipulated her grandfather, Herod, into killing Herodias’s grandmother, Mariamne I, more than a decade before Herodias was born.
That great-aunt was also Herodias’s grandmother, since Salome I’s daughter, Berenice, was Herodias’s mother.
Herodias’s father, Aristobulus, was by all accounts very good-looking and wildly popular among the Jews. That popularity made his father, Herod, very nervous. Herod’s oldest son, Antipater II, used that jealousy to convince Herod that his handsome younger brother was conspiring against them both, so Herod killed Herodias’s father when she was only eight years old.
After her father was executed, Herod decided his granddaughter, Herodias, should be married to her uncle, Herod II, who was second in line for the throne, after her uncle Antipater II (the one who had her father killed). Herod engaged Antipater II to Herodias’s older sister.
Antipater II (the uncle who got her father, Aristobulus, killed by convincing Herod that Aristobulus wanted to kill him) actually did try to kill Herod a couple of years later. Herod executed him.
Herodias’s husband, Herod II, should have been next in line for the throne, but because his mother (Herod’s third wife) knew about the assassination plot, Herod removed Herodias’s husband, Herod II, from the line of succession.5
Herod named Archelaus, the eldest son of his fourth wife, his new heir.
Herod II and Herodias had a daughter. Her name was either Herodias, after her mother, or Salome, after her great-grandmother. Given the Herodian proclivity for naming themselves Herod, there’s no way to know. Most scholars call the daughter Salome to avoid confusion—at least a little.
After her grandfather died, Herodias’s uncles all traveled to Rome to argue before Augustus over who got to be king. Augustus divided the kingdom into quarters, giving half to Archelaus, a quarter to Herod Antipas, and a quarter to Philip.6
Herod Archelaus proved to be worse than his father. He was deposed after a decade for being terrible, and his territory was converted into the Roman province of Judea, complete with a Roman governor.7
At some point after Antipas became tetrarch over the Galilee, he divorced his Nabatean wife to marry Herodias.
After Antipas and Herodias married, her daughter, Salome, married her uncle/brother-in-law Philip the Tetrarch.
Exhausted yet? Keeping track of Herodias’s family tree is more daunting than tracing houses in Game of Thrones or sorting out Henry VIII’s wives. What we know of Herodias comes to us because her story weaves in among the stories of the Herodian kings and tetrarchs. She was born to, engaged to, married to, divorced from. Herodias is mentioned in the Bible only because of her divorce and remarriage.
Herodias was born to a family of schemers and plotters, a family for whom power and security must be achieved at all costs. Family was never a safe space for Herodias. Parents and grandparents were killed. Uncles were prospective husbands or would-be assassins. Mothers, sisters, and cousins were swapped routinely to serve the interests of whichever man was currently in the line of succession. Herodias grew to womanhood knowing her family as the people who manipulated her to get what they wanted.
Another family shaped Herodias, a family whose influence makes the portrait of her we see in Mark all the more probable. Herod sent his sons by Mariamne I to be educated in Augustus’s house in Rome. Herodias was born and raised in the household of Caesar Augustus, under the guidance of his wife, Livia. Though Herodias was a Jew, she was raised Roman, and Roman women held a different place in society than Jewish women did, especially among the nobility. Livia was widely regarded as Augustus’s equal and became (in)famous for the masculine ways she employed power. Though the traditional Roman woman’s place was to oversee the home, Livia traveled with Augustus. She greeted dignitaries and participated in ceremonial diplomatic duties. She even mediated between Augustus and Roman citizens.8
So Herodias grew to womanhood watching a strong royal woman exercise her will freely, in partnership with the emperor of Rome. And Mark’s Herodias is a cunning, vengeful woman who saw John as an obstacle to her power and position. When her husband would not execute him, Herodias took matters into her own hands, crafting a clever scheme that neither Ant
ipas nor John saw coming. In a few brief verses, Herodias demonstrated the ruthlessness of her grandfather Herod and the political savvy of her patroness Livia. She was the product of her families.
Mark positioned Herodias as a latter-day Jezebel who opposed God’s divinely ordained prophet because she was evil. But as with Jezebel, the shortcomings of the evil-queen trope don’t let Herodias be fully human. She was a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother.
Herod’s and Livia’s legacies shaped Herodias. She learned from the time she was born that the only power, the only agency she would have was what she took for herself. As a queen, she would command no armies. As a Jew, she would occupy no Senate seat. As a woman, she could silence no opposition. The tools available to her were cunning and persuasion, and she grew up in a family where those were wielded as dangerous weapons.
How could Herodias possibly have seen John as anything other than an opponent? And given how both Herod and Livia treated their opponents, how else would Herodias have responded to someone who was a threat to her power?
None of this excuses Herodias. No matter how our families shape us, we are accountable for our actions. But perhaps her story should give us pause. Her family shaped her so that it was very difficult for her to hear God’s voice calling her to repentance through John. Instead, like Cain, she lashed out, killing the voice of challenge rather than heeding the prophet.
THE APPLE DOESN’T FALL FAR
Every family has its own unique legacies of sin. In the Scriptures, we clearly see generational sin, and God warns us against it as early as the Exodus story, when Israel receives the Ten Commandments. Woven into the commandment against idolatry is this: “I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments” (Exodus 20:5-6).
When I was a teenager, these verses terrified me. My parents divorced when I was thirteen, and I spent a lot of years wondering exactly how God would punish me (and even, possibly, my great-grandchildren) for what my parents had done. In recent years, I’ve learned I’m descended from a slave owner in Virginia. I’ll never know the extent to which my ancestors are to blame for the state of race relations in the United States today. It’s impossible to determine how much of the good I enjoy is possible because at some point in the past, a member of my family owned other human beings. But the reality is that in both recent and distant history, my family has sinned.
I grew up in a church tradition that never examined sin as anything other than morally wrong actions committed by an individual. When I did something wrong, I often imagined a giant chalkboard in heaven where God would add another hash mark beside my name.9
In this understanding of sin, the concept of generational sin seems profoundly unjust. Why should I suffer because my parents chose to divorce? Why should I be punished because an ancestor of mine bought and sold other humans? Why should I bear the consequences of anything someone else did? Even small children know that’s not right.
The problem is that experience tells us sin does get passed down from generation to generation. Children of alcoholics are much more likely to become alcoholics themselves. Victims of sexual abuse are up to three times more likely to become sexual abusers themselves.10 From our families, we learn to fight and we learn how to perceive our bodies. The critical voice in our head sounds like an older sibling, a parent, a grandparent, an aunt, or an uncle. Go back enough generations, and certain sins pop up over and over again. Like a tree that grows around a fence, our family trees become entwined with certain sins.
We certainly can speak of sin as individual bad actions. But the Bible speaks of sin as much larger and more insidious than merely individual action. Catholic theologian Robert Barron describes it as an atmosphere that poisons us from the moment we’re born:
There is no moral act or psychological attitude that does not, in one sense, affect the entire organism which is the human race, and there is therefore no warping or misuse of spiritual energy that does not adversely affect the whole “body” of the humanum. The abuse of freedom, from the earliest people down through the centuries, has set up a sort of negative field of force that, willy-nilly, affects every person on the planet today. Egotism exists as a kind of poisonous spiritual atmosphere that all of us breathe from the moment we enter into the human condition. The originating sin of fear moves into our institutions, our governments, our modes of social organization, our systems of education, our languages, our religions, our literature and philosophy, our mythic stories, our military establishments, our styles of recreation, our economic structures. Through these systems and institutions, sin surrounds us, envelops us, almost determines us. Like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, we find ourselves—despite our best efforts and intentions—held in place by the shackles of institutionalized sin.11
Sin is inescapable because we have been pumping it into our institutions, cultures, and families since humans have walked the earth. Sin, like a disease, infects us from the first breath we take, warping us as we grow. We shrug and say, “To err is human.” We have normalized sin to the point that we can’t even see that it is sin anymore.
How could Christians have marched in the Crusades? How could Christians have actively participated in every level of the slave trade? How could Christians murder people they consider heretics? How could Christians turn a blind eye to the Holocaust? Today we make excuses: “They were people of their time. It’s not fair to judge the actions of yesterday by the morality of today.”
Fine (I guess). But the more important question here is: How am I a “person of my time”? What sins might I be participating in today—totally assured of my own righteousness—that will be condemned by the church of the future? Might they ask, “How could Christians have spewed hatred and death threats at the LGBTQ community? Why was the church so segregated? How could the Western church ignore the millions in the Global South who don’t have access to clean water? Didn’t they realize that creation is a precious gift from our Creator? How could they have been so careless with their food, their fuel, and their trash?”12 Sin has thoroughly warped the very fabric of our institutions. Like fish that cannot comprehend the ocean, we are blind to sin because it’s so pervasive, because it’s been infecting us since the moment of our birth.
We inherit sin from our families, from our culture, from our world. We grow up warped and twisted. Our idolatry has disastrous consequences, not just for us, but also for the generations that follow us.
SOMEWHERE I BELONG
Camp conversion syndrome helped me to understand the problem of generational sin. I grew up in a church with a large, active youth group. We went to summer camp every year, so I was familiar with the “camp conversion” phenomenon. Camp conversion syndrome happens when a teenager has an experience at camp—either a conversion or rededication of his life to God. He makes any number of commitments, swearing off anything from dating to drugs and alcohol to swearing. And for about two weeks after camp, he sticks to those commitments. But sooner or later (usually sooner), the teen has reverted to his pre-camp behaviors.
We could dedicate a whole book to problematizing the camp conversion experience—harping on the emotionalism of altar calls and the dangers of tying a relationship with God so closely to behaviors. But in my six years as a youth pastor, I saw plenty of kids experience genuine movements of the Spirit at camps (and retreats and so on). I witnessed genuine changes and earnest desires to follow God’s way and share in the life of the Spirit.
And then those same kids went home, back into the environments in which they had learned sin in the first place. The problem wasn’t that the teens hadn’t experienced genuine change. They had. They had shown up as a square peg, and God had transformed them to a round peg. But when they returned home, to their families, to school, to their friends, they found nothing else had changed. A square hole was still waiting for
them.
In my experience, it took about two weeks of not fitting for most kids to decide it was easier to go back to acting like a square peg. It wasn’t that their experience wasn’t real. It was that the pull of their sinful family structures was so strong.
Sin is more than the sum of our immoral actions. Sin is a toxic atmosphere we’ve been breathing in since birth. That said, being born into patterns of sin is not the same as sinning. In the wake of the exile, many Israelites wondered why they had to bear the punishment for their parents’ sins. Israel’s prophets had long warned that if Israel did not turn from idolatry to worship God, God would give them over to their enemies. They didn’t listen, so God followed through. Without God’s protection and provision, the Babylonian Empire conquered Judea, destroyed Jerusalem and the temple, and deported the Jewish leaders to Babylon.
The Israelites understood the exile as the consequence of their sin. But the exile didn’t affect only the adult Israelites. Their children bore the weight of exile too. When they turned to the Scripture to understand why, they found that same promise in the Ten Commandments. They protested as we do, “It’s not fair!”
To their protest, Ezekiel announced,
You say, “Why should not the son suffer for the iniquity of the father?” When the son has done what is lawful and right, and has been careful to observe all my statutes, he shall surely live. The person who sins shall die. A child shall not suffer for the iniquity of a parent, nor a parent suffer for the iniquity of a child; the righteousness of the righteous shall be his own, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be his own. (Ezekiel 18:19-20)
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