There was a reverse side to Herod's open-handedness. He spent beyond his means to please his patrons and on good causes at home or abroad.
His lavish expenditure on the recipients of his bounty made him a source of misery to the people from whom he took the money. Well aware that he was hated for the injustices...He could see no easy way to redress these wrongs...Instead he remained defiant, using the resentment (of the exploited) as an excuse to satisfy his wants.
His insecurity produced a constant longing for adulation. Any apparent questioning of his authority opened the floodgates of reprisals. So Josephus concludes:
These excesses he committed from a desire to be uniquely honoured. To support my contention that this was his overriding motive I can refer to the ways in which he gave honour to Caesar, Agrippa and his other friends. He expected to receive the same deference himself...The Jewish people, however, have been taught by their Law...to admire righteousness rather than the pursuit of glory. As a result, they incurred his displeasure, finding it impossible to flatter the king's ambition with statues, temples and marks of honour.
Josephus's reasoning may be superficially correct, but it cannot fully account for the actions of Herod that are not all reducible to self-interest. The benevolent measures he took to alleviate his subjects' misery at the time of the famine went far beyond the call of duty and with one foot in the grave he could not expect any return for his exceptional liberality towards Augustus and Julia. While one contemporary Josephus expert calls Herod an "infamous king", more perspicacious observers will retrieve his complex true self. For them, Herod is a tragic hero whose good intentions and far-reaching political wisdom come to naught because of the frightening flaws of his personality and the nefarious influence of his family.
He strove for an undreamt-of improvement of the social, cultural and economic standards of the Jews, and longed for, but failed to harvest, gratitude and love. Seeing in Rome God's gift to mankind, and in Augustus the universal saviour, Herod tried his best to ensure the integration of his Jewish kingdom into the new world order.
His great dream collapsed for two reasons. For the Jews, the Roman Empire was not the new creation forecast by the prophets, nor was Augustus the final redeemer. They preferred to await their own Messiah and his Kingdom of God. And the bloodbath inflicted by Herod on the respected Hasmoneans, including his wife and sons, completely offset the impact of his generosity towards the Jewish nation.
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