ReViews
Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans
Peter Richardson
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996) xxviii + 360 pp., $34.95
CAESAREA MARITIMA—There was shock in Caesarea and Jerusalem, and as far away as Damascus and Ashkelon, at news of the death of King Herod, a wise administrator, able politician, and brilliant military commander … He will be missed.1
A flurry of blatantly fictional news flashes, interviews with the man on the street and reports from throughout Judea—all reporting on the death of Judea’s king—open Peter Richardson’s bold new biography of Herod. The splashy reports are only fitting for a book published 2,000 years after Herod’s death in 4 B.C.E.