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rcwitness
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When John the Baptist condemned Herod for marrying his brother’s wife, what basis was he coming from? Was it a Jewish law or a Roman law?
Thanks
Michael
Thanks
Michael
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RPRPsych
Guest
Jewish, I think. I doubt John the Baptist, even if he had been conversant with Roman law, would have used this as the basis for the condemnation; he was the new Elijah, and his arguments would be from the Torah and not from pagan Rome. Leviticus 18: 16 forbids intercourse with a “brother’s wife”, and in a broader sense, it was an adulterous union. condemned under Deuteronomy 5: 18.
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ivdaeorum
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I think John the Baptist accusation was based on the Mosaic covenant (the covenant between God and the children of Israel) which of course is part of Jewish law. It did not allow for a man to marry his brothers wife except in the case of Levirate marrIage.
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Nita
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In addition to the above, it’s good to note also that Herod’s brother Philip (Herodias’s first husband) was still alive when she left him and married Herod.
Luke 3:1 In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiber’i-us Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Iturae’a and Trachoni’tis, and Lysa’ni-as tetrarch of Abile’ne,
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RPRPsych
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Thanks, that’s a very good point.
That would explain John the Baptist’s condemnation, as well as Herod’s ambivalence, and Herodias’ desire for revenge (people react to guilt in quite different ways, after all.)
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rcwitness
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So, that means Herod and Herodias were breaking secular law as well? I would think John would be mainly accusing him of this. Because why would he be held accountable for breaking Jewish law? It would only be one of a thousand things he was sinning agaisnt the laws of Moses.
Thanks so much you guys
Michael
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sirach2v4
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And possibly with these direct details, there is the general matter that Herod was “the king of the Jews’” – quite a scandelous thing for a person so designated to be unfaithfull to actually being Jewish.
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Nita
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I don’t know about the secular law; Philip and Herodias most likely were divorced. Jewish law allowed divorce. It was the fact that Herodias had been his brother’s wife that violated Jewish law.
ivdaeorum mentioned the Levirate law that allowed an exception when the husband died without leaving offspring. (See Gen. 38:8; Deut. 25:5-10; for example, Ruth 3; 4:10)
But the Levirate law did not apply here since Herodias’s husband Philip was still alive.
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bogeydogg
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The issue here is the breaking of Torah. John, being a prophet, has the role of bringing God’s suit against His people for breaking the covenant. All the prophets did this. John’s call to repent and the baptizing of Jews was an outward display of how far the Jews had gone from the covenant. So much so that God, instead of returning them to it, was making it new by sending His Son to fulfill it so that not one point would.
John declaring the king was an adulterer and incestuous further suit against the people because God had warned that He would punish them by sending kings like the nations around them, and instead of protesting the Idumean rule over them they accepted it de facto in exchange for the limited religious freedoms Rome gave them. Remember that Herod the great had assumed the throne when Marc Antony had executed the last Hasmonean King; the same line of kings who had saved Judea from the rule of Antiochus Epiphanies in Maccabees. So the line of these vassal kings was illegitimate anyway and they had, at every turn, been complicit with Rome in keeping the Jews underfoot.
But instead of viewing these rulers as punishment from God the people accepted them and John, the prophet, was pointing out that the outward and obvious illicit lifestyle of this ruler was really only the surface of a deeper corruption that had fallen on all the nation. So John’s call to the king would have been all about the Torah and of course the king, who not even a Jew, would not have been subject to this covenant and this fact caused a lot of trouble. Which is why John was killed.
Because remember the Torah also said the king would come from among their own and they would not have a foreigner to rule over them. Which is why when the Pharisees protest that the Jews were slaves to no one they did so with the full knowledge of the fact that a foreigner sat over them each and every day, and his rule was an extension of Rome.
It just shows how far the Nation had fallen.
God Bless
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steve53
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Wrong Philip.
Herodias’ first husband was Herod Philip of Rome, not the tetrarch Herod Philip, who ruled a quarter of Herod the Great’s old kingdom, with Herod Antipas ruling another neighboring quarter of it.
Note that Herodias had a daughter with Herod Philip of Rome, Salome, making the divorce especially scandalous. Both Herodias and her daughter moved to the east. Herodias married Herod Antipas, and her daughter, Salome, married the much older tetrarch Herod Philip!
So John the Baptist had a lot of grist to work on. Salome was the dancer, BTW, who eventually did him in.
But Josephus doesn’t even mention John’s invectives against Herodias and Herod Antipas as the reason for John’s arrest. He states Herod Antipas fears John would disrupt his army, which, according to some, was preparing to invade Nabotea not far away from John’s encampment on the east side of the Jordan River.
Hagan in “Year of the Passover” does a good job of going through all this fascinating though confusing Bible history.
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