Herod, Jews and Magi

Today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas (Twelfth Night—beginning the night of January 5) or the Feast of The Three Kings (who weren’t kings), Russian Christmas or The Epiphany (the revealing or unveiling). That’s a lot of names for one miserably wet and slippery day in winter.
It commemorates the arrival of Magi (magicians, Zoroastrian priests) from Persia (modern Iran) to salute the recently born Christ Child—or, as they called him, the King of the Jews. They were astrologers who read in the stars that a new king was born. They came to honor him.
Herod and his Jewish subjects had seen them before. Their arrival caused King Herod, “and all Jerusalem with him”, to be troubled. Those are wonderfully diplomatically nuanced words. They must have rocked with something very close to pure terror.
Two things tell us they weren’t looking at three old crocks sitting on a camel. It’s very safe to say that these Magi had with them as escort more troops on the ground than Herod had. After all, the Roman legions were up in Syria and down in Egypt. In Judea, all Herod would have had is a battalion or two of auxiliaries—think National Guard.
The Magi would have been escorted by battalions of the finest cavalry of their time. The first thing that tells us this is so is that the Magi—following a star’s direct path—would have come across the Arab-held Jordanian desert. The Nabataean Arabs were tough customers.
They had conquered parts of modern Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia. They had licked Jewish armies, Roman armies and held their own against Alexander the Great. In their spare time, they enjoyed raiding caravans that crossed their territory. You didn’t cross it without a large, formidable escort—like battalions of Parthian (Persian) cavalry.
The Parthians were nasty customers too. They fought a seven hundred year long cold and hot war with Rome, giving as good as they got. Forty years before the birth of Christ they had gone on an expansionist kick. They overwhelmed Marc Anthony (one of Caesar’s top generals) and drove him out of modern Asiatic Turkey. Another column conquered Jerusalem and Judea, sending young Herod running for his life.
During this episode, the Parthians (the Magi were very important figures in their culture) killed Herod’s father, tortured his older brother so badly he beat his own brains out on the walls of his cell, and nearly captured Herod and his mother. Herod escaped—in a run worthy of an action movie—and found his way to Rome.
Here he was given an army, made “King of the Jews” (under Roman authority), and sent back to recapture Jerusalem. He besieged Jerusalem for three years, before Anthony—who had recaptured Asia Minor—came down to help. During the siege of Jericho, the Parthians killed Herod’s younger brother.
The Herod family remembered the Magi very, very well. The Parthians had kept dabbling in Judean affairs, leading an ever more suspicious Herod to kill his favorite wife and several of sons to head off plots against his throne—some of which were real.
By the time the Magi came, about two years after Christmas, Herod was a sick old man, wracked with excruciating pain and paranoia. (His staff wouldn’t even let him have a bread knife for fear he would kill himself with it.) Someone was always trying to take his throne away, his subjects hated him because he was not Jewish, and back came the Magi to announce a NEW king of the Jews (read threat).
A truce with the Parthians had been signed by Augustus at Damascus twenty years earlier. There was official peace between them with a DMZ stretching from modern Georgia to Arabia. The Magi and their escort had slipped through a lightly guarded stretch along the Jordan River.
One more thing tells us they had more troops than Herod. Bethlehem, where the Magi were told to go look for a promised savior/king, lay a mere six miles from Jerusalem. Herod had the finest intelligence apparatus in the Roman Empire—he could track anyone anywhere.
Herod had to ask the Magi to, pretty please, come back and tell him where the new king lived. He couldn’t get a single spy through to watch where the Magi went. The Magi threw out a formidable screen of cavalry that nothing could penetrate. That’s a lot of troops.
So they came to the house where Mary and Joseph lived with their son. The Magi worshipped. They gave royal gifts—enough so that Joseph and Mary could support themselves after they escaped to Egypt to prevent Herod from killing their child. They probably had enough left to buy a business when they returned to Nazareth after Herod died.
The Feast is called the “unveiling” or “revealing” for here was the first time that the Christ Child was shown to non-Jews, to the Gentiles. It was deemed to be an “epiphany” for the entire non-Jewish world. That is why non-Jewish Christians celebrate it to this day. In the Eastern (Greek/Russian) Church it is considered to be THE Christ Mass celebration.
And that, boys and girls, is why Herod was so “troubled”. I had always wondered about that verse. There was a lot of history involved, some of it not so flattering to Rome, and Matthew being a good Roman bureaucrat (tax collector) trod very lightly when he told the story.