Herod's Building Program

Combined with his desire to cultivate the main diaspora Jewish communities and the relative ease of communications during the Pax Romana that followed the establishment of the Principate under Augustus in 27 BCE, Herod’s building program had an immense impact. It turned Palestine into a proper temple state, still under Roman protection. Capital—human, material, and cultural—flowed into Judea from all corners, with enriching, stimulating, but also destabilizing effects. 

One should not automatically ascribe rational economic motives to Herod’s activities. Josephus claimed that Herod built in order to glorify himself, his Roman patrons, and his family members—to whom his new towns and fortresses were usually dedicated—and, in the case of the Jerusalem Temple, to put his otherwise dubious Jewish piety on display. 

Jerusalem under Herod 

Herod rebuilt and massively enlarged the Jerusalem Temple and transformed it into a magnet for pilgrimage and general tourism, religious and otherwise. Jerusalem became a sprawling and overcrowded multilingual city, part of the Roman system but also irreducibly alien—its foreignness only accentuated by the construction work and promotional efforts of the ardently pro-Roman Herod. The Temple itself was the main economic engine for the city. 

Jerusalem also benefited from euergetism, the modern name for the ancient practice whereby a city’s wealthy citizens were expected to bear a disproportionate share of the financial burden of support for their cities. In return, they received honor, deference, and commemoration from the citizens. Some of the most conspicuous and best-known features of Hellenistic Greek and Greco-Roman cities—theaters, amphitheaters, bathhouses, the thousands of honorary statues and decrees, and dedicatory inscriptions—are the result of the euergetistic economy. 

Jerusalem had its own Judaized version of a euergetistic economy: the wealthy were to be pious and to pay for care for the poor and infirm, and in return they were commemorated not usually by honorary inscriptions, and certainly not by statues, but by oral recitations. Herod attempted to introduce a standard euergetistic economy into Jerusalem, but it enjoyed, at best, a mixed reception. The Judeans were evidently more suited to the laissez-faire Persian and Macedonian Empires than they were to the Roman Empire. 

A hereditary priesthood played a disproportionate role in local affairs, just one way in which Jerusalem was different from other cities of the Roman east. In every other Greco-Roman city, the public market was flanked by temples and filled with statues of the city’s benefactors and monuments to the emperors and their friends and families. Jerusalem, too, had a public market, but there was no public figurative imagery of any sort. In the Roman east, all public writing on buildings and monuments was in Greek, even in non-Greek-speaking provinces like Egypt and Syria. In Jerusalem, there was little public writing, but burial-related inscriptions were mainly in Aramaic, secondarily in Greek, and occasionally in Hebrew. Finally, there were no public baths in Jerusalem at all; private baths served the needs of a populace who needed to be ritually pure in order to enter the Temple complex. 

In cultural terms, Jerusalem was not a center of Hellenism, although it was not closed to it either. Jerusalemite aristocrats approximated aspects of their lifestyle to that of the wealthy citizens of Greco-Roman cities in general. The townhouses of Jerusalem are directly comparable in design and decoration to those of Pompeii, near Naples, although the Jewish houses lack figurative wall-painting and floor mosaics. Some Jerusalemites used Greek for their relatives’ epitaphs, and presumably they did not find some level of Greek education entirely useless. But in making Jerusalem the central node of an economic and cultural network that was overwhelmingly Jewish, Herod guaranteed that the truly important cultural norms in Jerusalem and Judea would be specifically Jewish ones. 

Herod’s Building Campaigns 

In addition to restoring the Temple in Jerusalem, Herod embarked on a massive building campaign, erecting various temples in honor of his friends and Caesar. Herod’s construction projects also incorporated defensive measures that were aimed to build and reinforce Jerusalem’s protective walls, such as the fortresses in Cypros, Masada, Jericho, and Herodium. Of special mention is the Antonia fortress at the north end of the Temple, historically a location more vulnerable to enemy incursions. 

Herod also financed numerous other public works outside Judaea, in cities throughout the region. Among the other settlements on which he lavished funds was the moribund seaside town called Strato’s Tower that he transformed into Caesarea Maritima, the most modern and attractive harbor on the southeastern Mediterranean coast. Herod celebrated the completion of Caesarea with a festival and games to rival those of Rome and other great cities. He also built cities to honor his deceased father and brother. Images of many of Herod’s building projects can be found in Visual and Material Culture. 

Demography and the Economy 

The population of Jerusalem, and of Judea as a whole, was also highly unusual. Rising land prices, a direct result of an economy inflated by the influx of great quantities of cash, meant that old patterns of land tenure were dead. In Judea, few free small landholders still subsisted on the “Mediterranean triad” of grain, olives, and grapes, as they did in Galilee. Instead, the needs of the Temple, and the population it had attracted, drove the local economy. Small farmers had probably become tenant farmers or found work somewhere within the Temple economy. Josephus’ oft-quoted statement that the conclusion of construction work on the Temple, only a few years before its destruction, put eighteen thousand laborers out of work, should certainly not be taken at face value, but it does give one an idea of the sorts of opportunities available to the peasantry, and of their economic fragility.