One of the more popular characters in my City of God series is Queen Berenike. She was an important member of the powerful Herod family. This is a continuation of my most recent blog post, in which I followed Berenike’s life from her birth in about the year AD 28, up to the year AD 41. In that year, her father Agrippa became King of Judea, Samaria, Galilee, Idumea, Perea, and the entire region known today as the Golan Heights. He had fully achieved his greatest ambition in life—to be king over the same domain as his famous grandfather, Herod the Great.
Berenike was now about 13 years old, a beautiful young princess, living the dream. But that was actually a problem for her…
A Princess Bride
Old debts have a way of coming back to haunt you. Alexander, the alabarch in Egypt who had loaned Agrippa money ten years earlier, had a son of marriable age, a young man named Marcus. It seems that Alexander wanted more than mere cash to pay off his old loan. Alexander wanted a princess for his daughter-in-law. History doesn’t say if this was part of the negotiations that went into the loan in the first place. But Alexander got his wish.
13-year-old Berenike was sent to Egypt to marry the alabarch’s son, Marcus Julius Alexander. We don’t know what she thought of this idea. We do know that Marcus died quite soon after, leaving Berenike a widow at the tender age of 14 or 15. This may have seemed like a stroke of good luck, but it wasn’t…
Berenike returned to her father’s house, but her merry widowhood didn’t last long. Very soon, her father chose for her a second husband—her uncle. (The Herod family seems to have turned incest into a competition.) Berenike’s uncle, whose name was Herod (what a surprise), was king of the small kingdom of Chalcis. Berenike was now officially a queen.
Again, we don’t know if Berenike was happy. We do know that she got pregnant twice and bore two sons, Bernicianus and Hyrcanus. Shortly after her marriage, her father died. Quite possibly, he was poisoned with arsenic, but we don’t really know. Agrippa was Jewish, and he was hated by his non-Jewish subjects. His kingdom died with him, and no Jewish king ruled over Jerusalem ever again. From this point on, Judea, Samaria, and Galilee were managed by Roman procurators as part of the larger province of Syria.
As for Berenike, she was now trapped in a marriage to her uncle, raising two sons. But all bad things must come to an end…
A Woman of Strange Fortune
When Berenike was 19 or 20, her luck changed again. About the year AD 48, her uncle/husband died, leaving her a widow once more. She had no choice but to return to the house of her brother, Agrippa Junior.
Young Agrippa was now about 21 years old and already the highest-ranking man in the Herod family. The emperor gave him his dead uncle’s kingdom of Chalcis. Agrippa also received the right to name the high priest in Jerusalem, along with possession of the famous Hasmonean Palace in Jerusalem overlooking the Temple Mount. This palace had been built by the Maccabees about two hundred years earlier. And both Agrippa and Berenike had Maccabean blood.
But Agrippa Junior failed to get the one thing he really wanted—the kingdom of Judea, Galilee, and Samaria. He had to be content with a dinky kingdom while he watched the Romans mismanage Judea. Over the next few years, Agrippa gained a bit of new territory, including some of the same lands that had been ruled by his father in the Golan Heights area.
Scandals
Agrippa had a duty to arrange marriages for his sisters. Around the year AD 49 or so, he married off his 15-year-old sister, Mariamne. Around the year AD 53, he married off his youngest sister, the beautiful Drusilla, whom he betrothed to the non-Jewish King of Emesa (on condition that this king must be circumcised). Drusilla would have been 14 or 15 at the time.
But Drusilla had ideas of her own. At about the age of 16, after meeting the Roman procurator of Judea, Antonius Felix, she abandoned her husband and married Felix. This was a scandal on two counts. First, a Jewish woman couldn’t divorce her husband, so the best she could do was leave him and hope he would issue her a divorce (and we don’t know if this ever happened). Second, Drusilla’s new husband was uncircumcised. She instantly became the black sheep of her family, an embarrassment to Agrippa and Berenike.
Around the year AD 55, Agrippa acquired control of Tiberias, the city where he and Berenike had lived as young children. Sometime in this time period, Berenike shipped her two sons off to Rome to be educated. We don’t know how she felt about this, but sons of the Herod family were usually educated in Rome, so this was probably no great surprise.
And at some point in this time period, (according to rumors we hear from both Josephus and the Roman satirist Juvenal,) Berenike and Agrippa began sleeping together. We don’t know whose idea this was. The slut-shamers for many centuries have blamed Berenike. My view is that Agrippa was the person with all the power in the relationship. He was king. So my opinion is that Agrippa was the aggressor here. But word got out, as it usually does…
The rumors got too much to bear. Berenike persuaded Agrippa to find her a new husband. They settled on Polemo, king of Cilicia, who agreed to be circumcised. This marriage didn’t last long. We don’t know when it began, but we know that Berenike left this third husband and returned to her brother’s house. She never married again, although she came close.
But a funny thing happened somewhere in this time period. Berenike became co-regent with her brother Agrippa. She again had the title “Queen,” and now she was on the same level as her brother. In some inscriptions, she is even listed before Agrippa, her older brother. That’s quite remarkable. We don’t know how Berenike finagled this deal. My hunch is that she was much smarter than Agrippa, and he knew it. He needed her as much as she needed him.
The Hearing With Paul
Around the year AD 59, Felix was called back to Rome in disgrace, taking his wife, Drusilla, with him. Berenike was probably happy to be rid of them both. Felix was dishonest and vicious, and Drusilla had shamed the family.
A new procurator replaced Felix, a fair-minded man named Festus. Agrippa and Berenike visited him in Caesarea, the seat of power in Judea. Festus asked them to sit in on a hearing with a very strange prisoner, Saul of Tarsus. The chief priests in Jerusalem had brought certain religious charges against Saul when Felix was in office. Felix could make no sense of the charges, but Saul refused to be tried in Jerusalem. Instead, he had appealed to Caesar. And now Festus had to clean up the mess.
Agrippa and Berenike gave an audience to Saul, but they were unable to help Festus with his immediate problem—to decide what charges to send with Saul. So Festus shipped Saul off to Rome to stand trial before Nero without any specific charges that we know of.
Around this time, Berenike and Agrippa added another floor to the Hasmonean Palace in Jerusalem—a new dining room that now had visibility directly into the inner part of the Temple, where the sacrifices were made. The chief priests in the Temple were offended by this and built an ugly wall on top of the Temple porticoes to block the view. This caused a problem for the Roman soldiers trying to maintain security on the Temple Mount, because their view was now blocked also.
Tensions escalated, and eventually the high priest, Ishmael, led an embassy to Nero to complain. Ishmael won the battle, but lost the war. Nero ordered the wall to stay in place, but he also kept Ishmael in Rome as a hostage. Agrippa and Berenike responded by naming a new high priest.
The Last Years Before the Insurrection
Around the year AD 62, Festus died suddenly, leaving no Roman procurator in Judea for several months. The high priest, Hanan ben Hanan, illegally executed a peaceable man, James the brother of Jesus of Nazareth. (The story of this is told in my novel Premonition.) When Agrippa and Berenike found out, they replaced Hanan with a new high priest.
Within the next few years, the situation in Judea fell apart rapidly. The new Roman procurator, Albinus, was a dishonest grifter who rounded up bandits and then took bribes to release them.
Things got even worse in the year AD 64. There was a drought in Judea, leading to widespread hunger. After about eighty years of work, Herod the Great’s reconstruction of the Temple Mount was finally completed, leading to massive unemployment in Jerusalem. Agrippa and Berenike paid for a new construction project—paving the streets with stone—to provide work for the unemployed men.
The turning point came that year, when a fire destroyed much of Rome. Nero sent a new procurator, Gessius Florus, to Judea. His job was to raise as much tribute money as possible to help pay for the reconstruction of Rome. But you can’t squeeze blood from a stone, and Judea fell behind in its tribute.
Florus tried anyway. And that opened the way for Berenike to do something truly extraordinary…
(To be continued.)
