'King of the Jews' by vote of the Roman Senate — which is the title the magi walk into his palace and unknowingly ask him to give up. An IDUMEAN (Edomite by descent, Jewish by religion, and in the eyes of many of his subjects not Jewish by blood), son of Antipater, he was granted the kingship in 40 BC and had to besiege Jerusalem for three years to take possession of it. He ruled some thirty-three years and was by any measure an extraordinary builder: the temple whose vast retaining wall still stands in Jerusalem, the artificial harbour at Caesarea, the fortresses of Masada and Machaerus, and the palace-tomb of the Herodium. ⚠ He is also the man Josephus describes executing his favourite wife Mariamne, her brother, her grandfather and her mother, and three of his own sons — the last of them, Antipater, five days before his own death — and ordering the leading men of Judea shut in the hippodrome to be killed the moment he died, so that the nation would be seen to mourn (his sister quietly cancelled it). Josephus does not mention the killing at Bethlehem; it would not have been the most newsworthy act of that reign. He died, on the usual reckoning, in 4 BC, and his will divided the kingdom between three sons. ⚠ Not to be confused with them: the 'Herod' who beheaded John the Baptist and questioned Jesus is his son ANTIPAS, tetrarch of Galilee, and the 'Herod' of Acts 12 is his grandson Agrippa I.