The cruelty of a husband, the love of a father, and a war that ended a golden age…

There was a very public divorce at the time of Jesus and John the Baptist. Herod Antipas was married to a Nabataean princess and they had lived together ‘a great while’ (Josephus Antiquities 18.109), some think for close to thirty years. Her name was Phasaelis.[1] Prior to the marriage, Herod the Great had fought two wars with Nabataea, but since Aretas IV became king of the Nabataeans there had been a long period of peace (from 9 BCE to 36/7 CE), particularly since the marriage of his daughter to Herod.

All that was all about to change after Herod took a fateful trip to Rome. Josephus tells that he lodged with his half-brother Philip and fell in love with his wife, Herodias. It was a complicated relationship from the outset. Herodias was not only Herod Antipas’ sister in law, but also his niece, as she was the daughter of Herod and Philip’s brother Aristobulus. So smitten was Herod that he spoke of marriage to Herodias while in Rome and she accepted. They made an agreement with two conditions. The first was that she would come to him as soon as he returned from Rome, and the second was that he would ‘cast out’ his current wife Phasaelis, Aretas IV’s daughter, in order to marry Herodias (Ant. 18.110). This caused outrage amongst the Jews because Herod’s intention was to marry a woman with a living husband which was against Jewish law (Ant. 18.136; Mk 6:17-29; Matt. 14:1-12; Luke 3:19).

Josephus uses ἐκβάλλειν to describe the way in which Herod intended to cast Phasaelis out of his court. This word has more than a hint of violence (cp. Luke 20:12 and Acts 13:50), and her flight from the palace, outlined in dramatic detail in Ant. 18.111-12, implies that she knew she was in immediate danger. Herod was unaware that Phasaelis knew of his plan to oust her so when she asked to visit Machaerus, the fortress castle and prison positioned on the border of the territories owned by Herod and her father, Herod agreed without question. Unknown to him, a good while earlier Phasaelis had sent messages to Machaerus seeking help, and the general of her father’s army had organised for her escape. Josephus describes her flight in poignant detail recalling how she was carried from one of her father’s generals to another until she arrived safely to her father in Petra.

The disappearance of Phasaelis from the Herodian palace after many years would not have missed the attention of one of Jesus’ earliest followers, Joanna, who was married to Chuza, Herod’s finance minister (Luke 8:3).[2] The palace was suddenly without its queen, and very soon, following John the Baptist’s criticism of Herod’s re-marriage to Herodias, would also witness the aftermath of the beheading of John the Baptist at Herod’s birthday party which was attended by his lords and military commanders and the leading people of Galilee (Matt 14:3-4; Mark 6:17-21; Luke 3:19-20). Roman Judea was a tinderbox in many respects at this time but this issue proved particularly explosive.

The reaction of Herod to John when he criticised his marriage to Herodias provides an insight into why the question posed to Jesus by the Pharisees is called a ‘test’ in Matt 19:3.[3] They asked ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason?’ The Pharisees might as well have added … ‘as Herod has done?’ A question whose answer would not usually incite violence (because the school of Hillel maintained that men could divorce their wives and marry another for any reason, including a fairer prospect – m. Git 9.10; b. Git. 90a-b), was now potentially explosive.[4] In the context of John’s public criticism of Herod’s marriage to Herodias, and his subsequent beheading, meant Jesus’ answer, if in any way critical of Herod, could prove fatal for him.

Interestingly, Jesus’ response to the Pharisees was even more pointed than John’s. Jesus reflected back to Genesis (1:27; 2:24), which was a standard proof text for monogamy in the Judaisms of his day,[5] and taught that God had joined males and females in pairs from the beginning and what God had joined together man should not tear asunder (Matt 19:4-6).[6] He concluded (Mark 10:11-12): ‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her; and if she herself divorces her husband and marries another man, she is committing adultery’ (cf. Matt 5:32; Luke 16:18). This message placed responsibility on the one who divorces, regardless of gender, and as such seemed more directed at Herod and Herodias than John’s message was. The main difference was that John focused on Herod breaking Jewish law where Jesus’ message focused on marriage being God joined from the beginning.

There are four things about Aretas IV that stand out when considering his swift assistance of his endangered daughter. The first is his name. Unlike the prevalent use of Roman titles ‘Friend of the Romans’ or ‘Friend of the Emperor’ for territories associated with Rome, Aretas’ full title as given in the inscriptions was ‘Aretas, King of the Nabataeans, who loves his People’.[7] The second is that Aretas continued an earlier trend of Nabatean kings to depict the head of the queen on coinage, and for the first time in the history of Nabataean mintage, had depicted the queen’s name on coins as well.[8] Even more striking, in the fifth year of his reign (4 BCE), the queen is shown standing in a full length depiction with her right hand raised with an open palm towards the viewer, a feature found on no other coinage.[9] Thirdly, although King Aretas IV had two wives, they were probably successive. Huldu’s image appears on coins first up to 16 CE, with the title ‘Huldu, Queen of the Nabataeans’, and following her death, Shuqailat appears on coins from 18 CE with the title ‘Shuqailat, Queen of the Nabataeans’.[10] Herod’s wife Phasaelis is thought to be the daughter of Huldu.[11]

The fourth notable feature is the account of what Aretas did after his daughter fled from Herod. Josephus Ant. 18.113-14 says the divorce was the beginning of Aretas’ enmity towards Herod, and the first occasion for outworking that enmity came in 36/7 CE. An argument arose between the kings about the territory of Gabalis and this inflamed to the point where both leaders raised armies and prepared for war. Herod’s army was destroyed as a consequence, when some fugitives from the tetrarchy of Philip joined Herod’s army, and then betrayed him.

It was unforgivable for Aretas IV to instigate a war against a Roman appointed king. Herod, knowing this, wrote to the Emperor Tiberius after his defeat and asked him to take action against Aretas in order to reinstate Rome’s power. Tiberius was predictably angry about Aretas’ actions and immediately wrote to Vitellius, the Governor of Syria, commanding him to wage war on Aretas, and to either take him alive, or bring him in chains, or to kill him, and send him his head (Ant. 18.115).

Vitellius moved quickly after gathering two legions of armed men, and all of the available light armature and horsemen drawn from the kingdoms of the Romans. When they arrived at Ptolemais some leading Jews met them and discouraged them from marching through Judea with their many Roman ensigns, bearing images, which was against Jewish law (Ant. 18.121). Vitellius was persuaded by the men and parked his army on the great plain while he and Herod went to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices during the ancient Jewish festival that was taking place there (Ant. 18.122).

This delay of three days proved pivotal. On the fourth day letters arrived in Jerusalem informing Vitellius that Tiberius was dead and Vitellius being unsure what authority he now had sent the army home (Ant. 18.124). Though this war broke out eight years after John the Baptist criticised Herod for his marriage to Herodias, Josephus remembers that the Jews thought Herod’s defeat by Aretas in 36/7 CE was divine vengeance for beheading John (Ant. 18.116-17). The issue was still current for the Jews.

There is no clear reason why Aretas did not act earlier against Herod. Some think the introduction of the Herodias story into Antiquities is a literary device to set the scene for the third Nabataean war, and therefore bore no real connection to the instigation of the war.[12] However, a better explanation is that the territory dispute in 36/7 CE was somehow connected to Herod and Phasaelis’ divorce. Josephus not only mentions that the Jews, after the defeat, remembered Herod’s connection to John the Baptist’s death, but he also recalls that it was Aretas’ enmity following the divorce that ignited the war. The territory in question was the district of Gabalis (or Gamala) that was situated in the tetrarchy of Philip prior to his death in 34 CE. This territory arguably lay in a pivotal position to the east of Galilee, and provided access to the north-south Spice route, a main source of trade and wealth for the Nabataeans.[13]

There had been two previous wars between Herod the Great and the Nabateans, both over access to the Spice route. Herod the Great won the first war in 31 BCE (War 1.371-385 and Ant. 15.123-160),[14] and the Nabataeans won the second war in 9 BCE when they sought to regain access to the Spice route lost in the first war. Challenges over these territories largely dissipated once Aretas IV came to power, primarily because of his diplomacy and democratic approach, as well as the marriage of his daughter to Herod which would have settled inflammatory boundary disputes.

Phasaelis, a Nabataean by birth, would have converted to Judaism when she married Herod. This was the practice of foreign women who married Jews.[15] Richard Bauckham says this was taken for granted in the case of Gentile women,[16] and Shaye Cohen agrees when he says ‘the act of marriage to a Jewish husband was de facto an act of conversion’.[17] The same was true for Gentile men. Herod the Great required that Syllaeus, a Nabataean, convert to Judaism before allowing him to marry his sister, Salome (Ant. 16.225). The Herodian practice of requiring non-Jewish spouses to convert to Judaism was part of the general Herodian policy of not gratuitously offending Jewish subjects, and as most of Herod’s subjects were Jews, he would have kept to this policy when he took a Gentile wife.[18]

As a Jewish wife, Phasaelis would have been party to a Jewish marriage contract (Hebrew: pl. ketubbot). In the nine extant Jewish marriage contracts known from the provinces of Judea and Arabia, all dating to the late first or early second centuries CE, five of these are written in Greek and four in Aramaic. The Greek contracts show a fusion of Roman and Greek elements whereas the Aramaic documents are traditional Jewish ketubbot.[19] Two of the Jewish marriage contracts written in Greek (P. Yadin 18 and 37), and one in Aramaic (P. Yadin 10) are from the cache of documents known as the ‘Babatha archive’.[20]

The archive comprised the personal papers of a Jewish woman named Babatha who lived in the town of Maoza in the new Roman province of Arabia which until 106 CE had been in the kingdom of Nabataea.[21] The papers were found in a cave alongside the Dead Sea known as the ‘Cave of Letters’ where they had evidently been hidden in 132 CE by local residents caught up in the Bar Kochba revolt. The cache contains thirty-five documents in three languages – Greek, Aramaic and Nabataean, ranging in date from 93 to 132 CE. These shed valuable light on the life and legal affairs of a provincial Jewish woman in the early second century.[22]

A recurrent feature in marriage contracts of this period is a maintenance clause where the husband undertakes to feed and clothe his wife, which often followed on directly from the groom’s acknowledgement of the receipt of dowry. Examples of this clause are found in P. Eleph. 1 (311 BCE), M. Chr. 286, (13 BCE), XHev/Se 69, and P. Yadin 10 (an Aramaic ketubbot) from the Cave of Letters. In some marriage contracts, alongside the maintenance clause is a liability clause (for example, XHev/Se 69; XHev/Se 65; P. Yadin 18) that pledged the husband’s entire property to guarantee the upkeep of his wife.

These stipulations were in addition to the dowry that the wife brought to the marriage, which often included property, to be returned to her following divorce or death. Greek contracts from Egypt and some contracts from the Judean desert include the liability clause to guarantee the dowry after divorce or death.[23] These contracts do not just offer as security the property possessed by the husband at the time of concluding the contract but also the property that he acquired after its conclusion.

Generally, it did not matter who took the initiative in seeking or imposing a divorce, it was thought the only procedure by which it could be achieved was the transmission to the wife of a document written by or on behalf of the husband. Later Rabbinic law took for granted that a Jewish divorce could only be executed by means of a writ of divorce written by or in the name of the husband and given to the wife (mYev. 14:1; mQid. 1:1; cf. tKet 12.3), but while some documents from the Judean desert confirm later Rabbinic practice (P Mur 19), another shows a woman drawing up a renunciation of claims, thus instigating a divorce from her husband herself (P. Hever 13). And if the reflexive middle of ἀπολελυμένηn was intended in Ant. 18.136, it was Herodias who initiated the divorce from Philip.[24] In the archaeological record, marriage contracts, bills or writs of divorce, and deeds of gift are found more often amongst the papers of women than men, probably because they were generally drawn up in favour of women.[25]

Therefore, it is quite plausible that Josephus refers back to the circumstances of the divorce eight years earlier because an agreement settled after the divorce regarding territory was now being breached. It is probable that there was a transfer of property in the dowry that Phasaelis brought to the marriage and that following the divorce this was returned to her. If Herod’s activities in Gamala were perceived to void that agreement regarding territory this would be good reason for Aretas’ enmity to reignite against Herod. Herod’s actions would signal to Aretas that their relationship had disintegrated to the point where a return to hostilities like that seen under Herod the Great were probable, and access to the Spice routes that were the basis of trade and the wealth of Nabataea were again threatened.

The almost fifty-year golden age between the Herodian’s and the Nabataeans had now firmly come to an end based largely on the repudiation of a Nabataean princess, Phasaelis.