Counting Herod’s victims

The three Herods mentioned in the Holy Scripture were all notorious for their cruelty. The first was Herod of Ascalon, aka Herod the Great, ruler of Judea by the will of the Roman empire when the Messiah was born, and who killed the Holy Innocents. The second was his son Herod Antipas, the one who ordered the beheading of Saint John the Baptist. The third was one of his grandsons, Herod Agrippa, the one who put Saint James to death and who imprisoned Saint Peter.

The entry for Dec. 28 in Butler’s Lives of the Saints entitled, “The Holy Innocents, starts: “Herod, called ‘the Great’, who governed Jewry under the Romans in the time of the birth of our Lord, was an Idumean; not a Jew of the house of David or of Aaron, but the descendant of people forcibly Judaized by John Hyrcanus and himself exalted by the favor of imperial Rome.” (Originally published 1756 to 1759; quoted from the second edition, Herbert J. Thurston, S.J. and Donald Attwater, 1956, volume 4, page 626.) Idumea, the land of Edom aka Esau, was a region south of Judea; Esau was the twin brother of Jacob, who, although the older son of Isaac, sold his birthright to Jacob “for a mess of pottage.”

Herod realized he should have taken the magi more seriously when he heard stories about shepherds visiting a “king of the Jews,” and so he ordered the killing of the Innocents—but he was unaware that one of the babies was his own son, who had been sent for wet-nursing to Bethlehem.

Yet the Holy Innocents were only a few of Herod’s victims. From Butler’s again: “Josephus [a first century Jewish historian] says of Herod that ‘he was a man of great barbarity towards everybody’, and narrates a number of his crimes, crimes so shocking that the slaughter of a few young Jewish babies becomes insignificant among them, and Josephus does not mention it. The number of Herod’s victims is popularly supposed to have been great: the Byzantine liturgy speaks of 14,000, the Syrian menologies 64,000, and by an accommodation of Apocalypse XIV: one to five, it has even been put at 144,000 … Bethlehem was a small place and, even including the environs, could not at one time have had more than 25 boy-babies under two, at the very most; some inquirers would put the number so low as about half a dozen.”

The figure of 14,000 infant martyrs is commemorated by the Orthodox Church of America (oca.org) on Dec. 29. If that happened nowadays, I think it would be more than sufficient to warrant the attention of the International Criminal Court.

How Herod the Great ended. Here is Jacobus de Voragine again (see “The first Christmas census,” 12/20/25; quoted from “The Golden Legend,” pp. 58 to 59): “Finally, when Herod was 70 years old, he fell ill with a deadly disease, being tormented with a high fever, an itch all over his body, incessant pain, inflammation of the feet, worms in the testicles, a horrible smell, and shortness and irregularity of breath. His physicians placed him in a bath of oil, but he was taken out almost dead. Then, hearing that the Jews were looking forward joyfully to the moment of his death, he had young men from the noblest families in all Judea taken into custody.”

Herod told his sister Salome—not the same as the Salome who asked her stepfather Herod Antipas for the head of John the Baptist on a platter—to kill all these young Jews so that all Judea would mourn over him, against their will though it be. Five days later Herod died; but Salome freed those he had ordered her to execute.

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The Social Weather Stations report this week was: “Fourth Quarter 2025 Social Weather Survey: 68 percent of adult Filipinos expect a happy Christmas, up from 65 percent in 2024” (www.sws.org.ph, 12/23/25). The 3-point gain from last year is nice to see, yet not enough to recover to the 71 to 79 percent range of happy holiday seasons in pre-pandemic 2014 to 2019. It is a throwback to the decade of 2004 to 2013 when the happy national percentage ranged entirely in the 60s. Its peak was at 82 in 2002 when the series began. Then it drooped to 77 in 2003, before falling to the 60s.

Interestingly, the current percentages expecting a happy Christmas are significantly higher in southern Philippines: 64 in the National Capital Region, 64 also in Balance of Luzon, 73 in Visayas, and 76 in Mindanao.

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mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.