Apocalyptic Herods

C. E. Douglas’s 1915 study of Revelation, The Mystery of the Kingdom, is an eccentric work in a number of ways, but for just that reason highly stimulating, provocative of insight.

He rejects, for instance, both the “standard” dating of the book in the reign of Domitian (based on Irenaeus) and the “early” dating in the reign of Nero, arguing that we should take Epiphanius as guide and date the book in the reign of Claudius (41-54). He claims that this is the only date where the politics of Revelation match the politics of Palestine.

Specifically, this is the only time that lives up to what we find in Revelation 13, an alliance of a sea beast (Rome) and a land beast (a Palestinian false prophet). That was a reality in the reign of Claudius, when Rome was cozy with a Palestinian persecutor, Herod Agrippa I.

More generally, he argues that the Herodian dynasty must be recognized in the Apocalypse. He describes a parallelism between Roman order and Palestinian order: “Rome accepted a sacred monarch of the regular oriental type, to which the Hasmonean priest-kings were a very close approach. Simultaneously a change came over the Kingdom of the Jews which marked it as definitely Satanic. Herod the Great and his successors might be rulers under a wider dominion than the dynasty whose place they took, but this could not mask the fact that they were only the echoes of the Imperial system, deputies of an overlord rather than a rallying point for a free people.” Revelation 13 and 17, he argues describe “the affairs of Palestine under the Herods and the intimate association of these Kinglets with Rome and the Caesars. Their family was formally adopted into the gens Iulia . . . Their dominions were a whirlpool of nationalities and religious cults, with Jerusalem as the metropolis, and they owed their position solely to the Emperors, whose clients they were. Antipas, the Herod of the Gospels, named his capital Tiberias after his patron Tiberius. His brother Philip was responsible for Caesarea (Philippi) in the norther tetrarchy, and Agrippa II renamed the same place Neronias after Nero. Samaria became Sebaste (Augustus). . . . In very truth, the Herodian Kingdom was ‘full of names of blasphemy’ from the honours paid to Caesar” (184).

Douglas suggests that there were parallels between the history of the Herods and that of the early empire that make it appear that the Apocalypse can apply equally to both. Caesar’s death was, he claims, the “death-stroke” suffered by the sea beast (Revelation 13:3): “the death of Julius Caesar was a historical and political event of the first importance, a ‘death-stroke’ not only to the first appearance of the Imperial system, but even to the power of Rome itself. Under Marcus Antonius and Octavian East and West became separate again, and it was not until eleven years afterwards that the Empire was re-united in the person of the second Caesar.” His has a “curious parallelism” with Palestinian history around the same period: “Julius, the first of the Caesars, and Antipater, the first of the Herods, were murdered in consecutive years. Neither was technically ‘King,’ yet each was each of a founder of a royal house” (185). When John sees a beast arising from the sea, he is seeing the rise of Satanic power in Palestine, the imperial power of Rome but exercised through their Herodian clients.