6 AD - Archaelaus is deposed

Archelaus, Herod's son who inherited the territory of Judea, had all the defects of his father's character and very little of his strengths and capabilities. In a land in which religious sensibilities was particularly delicate, Archelaus gave great offence by marrying Glaphyra, the wife of his half-brother. The custom of levirate marriage would have excused him for the act but levirate marriage applied only to the widow of a brother who had not bored any sons.¹ Glaphyra, however, was a mother several times over. Worse than that, however, was the tyranny of his rule. Such were things with Archelaus that Matthew (in the only reference to Archelaus in the Bible) reports that when Joseph, father of Jesus, thought of resettling in Judea after his sojourn in Egypt and heard that "Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets: 'He will be called a Nazarene'" (Mt 2:22-23).

Things came to a head when two embassies—one from Judea and the other from Samaria—arrived in Rome and provided quite unanimous reports of Archelaus' tyranny. To forestall the possibility of a revolt by the people, the Emperor deposed Archelaus, and exiled him to Vienne in the Rhone Valley.² Judea was then to be reorganized as a Roman province under the control of a prefect or "procurator" appointed directly by the Emperor; Coponius was the first, but probably the most famous, at least for most Christians, was Pontius Pilate.³

The task of taking care of the details for this decision was given to the Legate of Syria, Sulpicius Quirinius.⁴ He had, first, to liquidate Archelaus' estates, and then order a new census in order to determine how much the new province may be taxed. This census provoked an uprising under Judas the Galilean and gave birth to the movement known as the Zealots, one of whose members, Simon the Zealot, would become one of the Twelve (Mt 10:4; Mk 3:18; Lk 6:15; Acts 1:13).

Footnotes

1. The Herod family is infamous for highly complex marital relationships. For more details see the Herodian Family Tree ☰.

2. In what was then barbaric Gual; modern France.

3. In 41 this rule by prefects was interrupted for some years by the appointment of Herod Agrippa as 'King of Judea' by Emperor Claudius. On Pontius Pilate, see entry for 26 AD.

4. Quirinius is mentioned in Lk 2:2 which is usually translated as "This was the first census that took place when Quirinius was governor of Syria." The adjective prote, 'first,' however, also means 'before.' Nigel Turner thinks that the sentence is best translated "This enrolment was before that made when Quirinius was governor of Syria," (Grammatical Insights into the Greek New Testament (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1966) 23f).