Shielding my eyes from the glare of the
morning sun, I look toward the horizon
and the small mountain that is my
destination: Herodium, site of the
fortified palace of King Herod the
Great.
I'm about seven miles south of
Jerusalem, not far from the birthplace
of the biblical prophet Amos, who
declared: "Let justice stream forth like
water." Herod's reign over Judea from 37
to 4 B.C. is not remembered for justice
but for its indiscriminate cruelty.
His
most notorious act was the murder of all
male infants in Bethlehem to prevent the
fulfillment of a prophecy heralding the
birth of the Messiah. There is no record
of the decree other than the Gospel of
Matthew, and biblical scholars debate
whether it actually took place, but the
story is in keeping with a man who
arranged the murders of, among others,
three of his own sons and a beloved
wife. Long an object of scholarly as
well as popular fascination, Herodium,
also called Herodion, was first
positively identified in 1838 by the
American scholar Edward Robinson, who
had a knack for locating biblical
landmarks. After scaling the mountain
and comparing his observations with
those of the first century Jewish-Roman
historian Flavius Josephus, Robinson
concluded that "all these
particulars...leave scarcely a doubt,
that this was Herodium, where the
[Judean] tyrant sought his last repose."
Robinson's observation was confirmed
later that century by Conrad Schick, the
famous German architect and
archaeologist who conducted extensive
surveys of Jerusalem and its nearby
sites. But where precisely was the king
entombed? At the summit of Herodium? At
the base? Inside the mountain itself?
Josephus didn't say. By the late 1800s,
Herod's tomb had become one of biblical
archaeology's most sought-after prizes.
And for more than a century
archaeologists scoured the site.
Finally, in 2007, Ehud Netzer of Hebrew
University announced that after 35 years
of archaeological work he had found
Herod's resting place. The news made
headlines worldwide—"A New Discovery May
Solve the Mystery of the Bible's
Bloodiest Tyrant," trumpeted the London
Daily Mail. "In terms of size, quality
of decoration and prominence of its
position, it's hard to reach any other
conclusion," says Jodi Magness, an
archaeologist in the Department of
Religious Studies at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has
excavated at other sites where Herod
oversaw construction projects.
Ken
Holum, a University of Maryland
archaeologist and historian who served
as a curator for the traveling
Smithsonian exhibition "King Herod's
Dream," cautions that "it is always wise
to be less than certain when there is no
identifying inscription or other
explicit identification." But he says he
personally believes Netzer has indeed
discovered Herod's tomb. Netzer, 75, is
one of Israel's best-known
archaeologists and a renowned authority
on Herod. Trained as an architect, he
worked as an assistant to the
archaeologist Yigael Yadin, who from
1963 to 1965 led an exhaustive dig at
Masada, the fortified plateau near the
Dead Sea where Herod built two palaces.
In 1976, Netzer led a team that
discovered the site of one of Herod's
infamous misdeeds: the murder of his
young brother-in-law, Aristobulus, whom
Herod ordered to be drowned in a pool at
his winter palace complex near Jericho.
Yet the discovery of Herod's tomb would
be Netzer's most celebrated find. And as
is often the case with such discoveries,
Netzer found it where, for years, he
least expected it. Arriving at Herodium,
which is not only an active
archaeological site but also, since the
late 1960s, a national park, I drive
partway up the mountain to the parking
lot where I will meet Netzer.
In the
early 1980s, before the first intifada
turned the West Bank into a conflict
zone, Herodium drew some 250,000 people
per year. For the moment I'm the sole
visitor.
At a kiosk I buy a ticket that
lets me ascend on foot to the summit. At
the base of the mountain the remains of
a royal complex, known as Lower
Herodium, sprawl across nearly 40 acres.
Gone are the homes, gardens and stables;
the most recognizable structure is an
immense pool, 220 by 150 feet, which is
graced with a center island. A narrow
trail hugging the hillside leads me to
an opening in the slope, where I enter
an enormous cistern now part of a route
to the summit, more than 300 feet above
the surrounding countryside.
The air
inside is pleasantly cool, and the walls
are smooth and dry, with patches of
original plaster. I follow a network of
tunnels dug during the second Jewish
revolt against the Romans in A.D. 135
and enter another, smaller cistern.
Daylight pours in. I climb a steep
staircase and emerge at the summit, in
the middle of the palace courtyard. The
palace fortress once reached close to
100 feet high and was surrounded by
double concentric walls accented by four
cardinal point towers. Besides living
quarters, the upper palace had a
triclinium (a Greco-Roman-style formal
dining room lined on three sides by a
couch) and a bathhouse that features a
domed, hewn-stone ceiling with an oculus
(round opening). It's strange to find
such a perfectly preserved structure
amid the ancient ruins, and it leaves me
with an eerie sense of standing both in
the past and the present.
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