Yesterday’s edition of the I for Monday, 14th December, carried a couple of interesting pieces of archaeological news. The first was a snippet on page 2, ‘Bible ‘throne room’ found in excavation. This ran
The throne-room where Biblical character Salome is said to have danced before the kind and demanded the head of John the Baptist has been discovered at the Dead Sea fortress at Machaerus in Jordan, archaeologists report. The excavations are being done by a Hungarian team of experts.
Herod was cruel and sadistic. Not only did he kill all the boys in Bethlehem, according to the Bible, fearing that one of them would be Jesus, the future king who might take his throne from him, but he was responsible for any number of other atrocities. He had several of his own sons killed as well as his wife, according to the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. He later regretted this, and had her embalmed with honey. He talked to her corpse and is even supposed to have had sex with it. He died of a disease of his lower quarters, which gave him great pain and which doctors have now diagnosed as genital gangrene. However, he was also a great builder, rebuilding Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem as well as a number of other great buildings. He was also an ally of Rome. John the Baptist was imprisoned and bitterly hated by Herod’s wife, because she had originally been married to one of the king’s brothers. She’d left him to run off with the despot, in contravention of Jewish law. John had denounced the two for it, and so been arrested and thrown into prison. The Bible states that Salome was put up to asking for the Baptist’s head by her mother when she danced at a feast held by her father. This impressed him so much, that he offered to grant her anything she wanted. So her mother told her to demand John’s death. Herod was reluctant, but couldn’t back down in front of his guests. And so Christ’s herald was executed.
Tags: Flavius Josephus, Herod, Jerusalem, Jesus Christ, John the Baptist, Jordan, Roman Empire
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 
December 15, 2020 at 6:24 pm |
An exciting discovery. I watched a tv documentary the other night about a chap who is searching for an hidden chamber below the foundations of Solomon’s temple, which he has concluded is not on temple mount but over what was King David’s temple further down the hill from the mount and next to a spring. He gets his info from a mysterious ‘code’ that he believes exists within the Bible. Oh, and the Ark of the Covenant will be found in this hidden chamber.