The Fate of Herod Antipas & Salome

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The Fate of Herod Antipas & Salome

TIA | August 31, 2024

Herod Antipas was the tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Herod Philip was the tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis. In The Antiquities of the Jews, Flavius Josephus reports that Herodias, who was an evil and ambitious woman, left her husband Philip to marry Herod, who divorced his former lawful wife.

John rebukes Herod: ‘It is not lawful for you to have Herodias’

No one dared to rebuke the powerful lord except for St. John the Baptist, who came to the palace and reproved Herod, saying, “It is not lawful for you to have her.”

Herod was angry at this rebuke given by St. John the Baptist. Conniving with the vengeful Herodias, he had John arrested, and then bound him and put him in prison. Although Herod wanted to put him to death, he feared the people, for they saw John the Baptist as a great prophet.

In the Golden Legend, Jacobus Voragine tells us that Herod and Herodias began to plot against St. John to figure a way to make him die. They ordained between them secretly that, when Herod should celebrate a feast on his birthday, the daughter of Herodias named Salome should demand a gift of him for her dancing. Then, before the principal princes of his realm seated at his table, Herod would arise to feet and swear to her by his oath that he should grant whatever she would so desire.

The dance of Salome

And so it came to pass. Herod’s birthday came, and Salome danced before Herod and all the guests in the banquet hall. Herod showed himself so pleased that he promised with an oath to give her whatever she asked, even half of his kingdom. And Salome, after consulting with her mother, replied: “Give me here on a platter the head of John the Baptist.”

Pretending to be grieved although he was glad in his heart, the King commanded that the terrible deed be done because of his oath and because of his dinner guests. And so he gave the order that John should be beheaded in the prison.

Then the hangman came and smote off his head and delivered it to the serving maid, who laid it in a platter and presented it at the dinner to Salome and her evil mother, who delighted to see punished the man who had dared to confront her with her sin. This took place sometime in the years 28-29 AD at the fortress of Machaerus.

And so St. John died a martyr to his calling at age 32. To him applies the 8th beatitude: Blessed are they who suffer persecution, for justice’ sake.


God's just vengeance

After this martyrdom, John's disciples carried his body to Sebaste (Samaria), all except for the head, which Herodias took. The wretched woman did not think her vengeance complete until she had pierced with a hairpin the tongue that had not feared to utter her shame.

Herodias mutilates the tongue of St. John

The vengeance of God fell heavily upon Herod Antipas and Salome. The historian Josephus relates how he was overcome in battle by the Aretas, the father of Herod’s first wife whom he had repudiated in order to follow his wicked passions. And the Jews thought the destruction of Herod’s army justly came from God for what he had done against John the Baptist.

Disgraced, Herod was deposed by Rome from his tetrarchate, and banished to Lyons in Gaul. He and the ambitious Herodias , who shared his disgrace, both died a miserable death there.

As for Salome, there is a tradition gathered from ancient authors, that one winter day she went out to dance upon the frozen Sicoris river. Nichephorus relates that the ice broke beneath her, and not without the providence of God.

Straightway she sank down up to her neck, and then the ice froze again when it reached her neck. This made her dance and wriggle about with all the lower parts of her body, not on land, but in the water. Her wicked head was glazed with ice, and at length severed from her body by the sharp edges, not of iron, but of the frozen water. Thus in the very ice she displayed the dance of death, and furnished a spectacle to all who beheld it, and brought to mind the evil that she had done.

The top part of the skull of St. John the Baptist, which has been set into a wax skull, has long been honored in San Silvestro Basilica in Rome in the Pieta chapel.

Amiens Cathedral in France contains the precious relic of St. John’s skull (the facial bones without the lower jaw). It was displayed there until the French Revolution when the revolutionaries demanded that the relic be buried, but the town mayor kept it in his house.

In 1816 the head of St. John the Baptist was returned to the Cathedral and in 1876 a new silver plaque was added to the relic to give it greater glory.