![\"Ellen](\"https:\/\/th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com\/TKJ0Hkovq8rml95n8Ayo649SuxY=\/fit-in\/160x80\/filters:no_upscale()\/https:\/\/tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/accounts\/headshot\/ellen_wexler.png\")
\n <\/div>\n Ellen Wexler<\/a><\/p>\n Near the end of her life, Zora Neale Hurston<\/a> wrote to her editor at Scribner\u2019s that she was \u201cunder the spell of a great obsession.\u201d She had been working feverishly on the early chapters of a project, which, she assured him, \u201chas EVERYTHING.\u201d<\/p>\n The all-consuming subject? \u201cThe life story of HEROD THE GREAT,\u201d she wrote. \u201cYou have no idea the great amount of research that I have done on this man.\u201d Hurston believed that history had shortchanged Herod<\/a>, best known as the biblical villain who murders Bethlehem\u2019s children<\/a> in his quest to kill the infant Jesus, and she would dedicate her final years to rehabilitating his reputation.<\/p>\n The author had high hopes for the project, even asking Winston Churchill<\/a> to write an accompanying commentary (he politely declined) and floating the idea of involving filmmakers like Cecil B. DeMille and Orson Welles in a Hollywood adaptation. She wrote of Herod frequently in her correspondence to editors and friends, missives that read like love letters to the ancient ruler himself, whom she described<\/a> as \u201chandsome, dashing, a great soldier, a great statesman, a great lover. He dared everything, and usually won.\u201d<\/p>\n But Hurston, unlike Herod, dared everything and lost. When Scribner\u2019s rejected the work in 1955, she assured her editor that she wasn\u2019t troubled by the news, perhaps because she had \u201csuch faith in the material.\u201d Two more publishers passed on it in 1958 and 1959.<\/p>\n In January 1960, Hurston died in a welfare home in Fort Pierce, Florida. She was buried<\/a> in an unmarked grave<\/a> in a segregated cemetery. Days after her funeral, a janitor was sent to dispose of her belongings. He gathered her papers\u2014including the unfinished manuscript of The Life of Herod the Great<\/em>\u2014and set them on fire.<\/p>\n Papers rescued from the fire<\/p>\n Deborah G. Plant<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n Many of the pages were badly damaged.<\/p>\n Deborah G. Plant<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n Hurston had been a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance<\/a> in the 1930s, but she had faded into obscurity by that day in 1960, her final work consumed by flames in a pile of trash. Fortunately, a deputy sheriff who had seen the smoke arrived at the scene<\/a>. He had known Hurston and wondered if her papers might be valuable\u2014perhaps valuable enough to help pay off her debts? He extinguished the fire with a garden hose. The charred pages eventually went to Hurston\u2019s archives<\/a> at the University of Florida, where they collected dust for more than half a century.<\/p>\n Now, the project will finally see the light of day. The unfinished draft of The Life of Herod the Great<\/em><\/a> was published on January 7\u2014Hurston\u2019s 134th birthday. According to the publisher\u2019s description<\/a>, the novel tells the story not of \u201cthe wicked ruler of the New Testament\u201d but rather a \u201cforerunner of Christ\u2014a beloved king who enriched Jewish culture and brought prosperity and peace to Judea.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShe was so committed to it,\u201d says Deborah G. Plant<\/a>, the Hurston scholar spearheading the project. \u201cShe kept at it until she was no longer here with us, but she left enough\u2014even in spite of the fire\u2014she left enough such that we have almost the whole thing.\u201d<\/p>\n In The Life of Herod the Great<\/em>, the titular king\u2019s advisers and subjects alike have nothing but praise for the tall, handsome hero, complimenting his fighting prowess (\u201cWhat a marvelous hurl, O Herod!\u201d), his intellect (\u201cWhat a wealth of information you have!\u201d), his benevolence (\u201cO you who loves and takes care of his people!\u201d) and even his wardrobe (\u201cHerod, you have the most exceptional and agreeable taste in dress of any man in the inhabitable world!\u201d).<\/p>\n In other words, Hurston\u2019s protagonist is not your father\u2019s Herod\u2014and certainly not her<\/em> father\u2019s Herod.<\/p>\n Born into a Baptist family in 1891, Hurston learned about the Bible from her father, John Hurston<\/a>, who served as a minister at a church in Eatonville, Florida. \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t think that a person who was born with God in the house would ever have any questions to ask on the subject,\u201d the author wrote in her autobiography<\/a>. \u201cBut as early as I can remember, I was questing and seeking.\u201d Her father provided answers to those questions, explaining \u201call about God\u2019s habits, his heaven, his ways and means. Everything was known and settled.\u201d<\/p>\n At church, the congregation seemed satisfied with her father\u2019s answers, \u201cworking like a Greek chorus\u201d to absorb and amplify the mood of his sermons. She recalled sitting in the pews watching heads nod \u201cwith conviction in time to Papa\u2019s words.\u201d But when she expressed her questions, her father and his colleagues responded with \u201cshocked and angry tirades\u201d that left her \u201cfull of misty fumes of doubt.\u201d<\/p>\n Hurston\u2019s \u201cquesting and seeking\u201d fueled an interest in anthropology, which brought her to New York City in 1925. At age 34, she had landed a scholarship to Barnard College<\/a>, eventually becoming its first Black graduate. During those years, she conducted field studies<\/a> of folklore among Black Southerners and became a part of the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance<\/a>, using her studies to inform a wide-ranging collection of novels, nonfiction, short stories and poetry. \u201cAs an anthropologist, she\u2019s looking at how stories get told, how they get handed down,\u201d says Plant. \u201cHow those stories, even when they\u2019re not true, become the truth that we live by.\u201d<\/p>\n Hurston in 1937, at the height of her career<\/p>\n PhotoQuest \/ Getty Images<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n Hurston\u2019s breakthrough work was her second novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God<\/em><\/a> (1937), which follows a Black woman in her 40s reflecting on her early years in the mid-20th-century American South. Two years later, Moses, Man of the Mountain<\/em><\/a>, which reimagines the familiar biblical story using Black folklore, cemented Hurston\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n In 1945, Hurston revealed in a letter that she was \u201cburning to write\u201d a \u201chighly controversial\u201d story about the \u201c3,000 years struggle of the Jewish people.\u201d But her interest soon turned to a relatively minor character in that 3,000-year struggle: Herod.<\/p>\n As she conducted her research, Hurston developed a lot of questions about the Judean king, who quickly \u201cmoved from the margins of her mind and the margins of her manuscript into the center of it,\u201d says Plant. She was startled by the idea that Herod wasn\u2019t the biblical villain she\u2019d learned about as a child, and she wanted to tell readers the truth.<\/p>\n But readers were forgetting about Hurston. By the 1950s, the talented author who had worked with Langston Hughes<\/a> and won a Guggenheim fellowship<\/a> was struggling to make ends meet, working as a maid<\/a> and taking other odd jobs<\/a>. She dedicated her spare time to the Herod project, which quickly spun out of control. Despite a string of rejections, she was determined to reveal \u201cthe real, the historical Herod, instead of the deliberately folklore Herod.\u201d<\/p>\n In the popular imagination, Herod is known for his brief appearance at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew<\/a>, when he learns that a new \u201cking of the Jews\u201d will soon be born in Bethlehem. In an attempt to kill the newborn Jesus, the Judean monarch \u201cslew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from 2 years old and under,\u201d the gospel states.<\/p>\n Today, most historians<\/a> are skeptical that Herod was responsible for such an event, known as the Massacre of the Innocents<\/a>. The story doesn\u2019t appear in any of the other gospels and isn\u2019t backed by archaeological evidence. But it still serves a meaningful purpose in the New Testament. Many<\/a> scholars argue<\/a> that Matthew\u2019s gospel was written for a primarily Jewish audience in the early days of Christianity. As such, Herod\u2019s massacre would have evoked a familiar Old Testament story in which the Egyptian Pharaoh orders all Jewish newborns to be slaughtered in an effort to kill the infant Moses.<\/p>\n \u201cWe see what we call typology, this comparison between Jesus and Moses, throughout the gospel,\u201d says Aaron Gale<\/a>, a religious studies scholar at West Virginia University. Jesus is introduced \u201cas kind of a new Moses \u2026 Moses 2.0.\u201d The two stories are full of parallels: For instance, Joseph saves Jesus from Herod\u2019s massacre by fleeing to Egypt, mirroring the Jews\u2019 exodus from <\/em>Egypt in the Old Testament. \u201cThat\u2019s not a coincidence,\u201d says Gale. \u201cAs I tell my students, why didn\u2019t he take him to Toledo<\/a>?\u201d<\/p>\n Massacre of the Innocents<\/em>, Marco Berlinghieri, circa 1260<\/p>\n Public domain via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n Massacre of the Innocents<\/em>, Guido Reni, circa\u00a01611-1612\u00a0<\/p>\n DeAgostini \/ Getty Images<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n Scholars think Herod may have been picked for the Pharaoh role because he died around the time Jesus was born\u2014and he had a reputation as an angry tyrant.<\/p>\n The historical Herod was Judea\u2019s client king<\/a> from 37 to 4 B.C.E., when the region was under Roman control. During his reign, which was peaceful and prosperous, he oversaw grand building projects, including the mountain fortress on Masada<\/a> and the storied Second Temple<\/a> in Jerusalem, which included what is now known as the Western Wall. Despite these achievements, many scholars believe the king deserves his tyrannical reputation.<\/p>\n \u201cHerod was a genius in many ways,\u201d says Gale. But \u201che was not liked by his subjects for many, many reasons. He was, of course, ostensibly cruel. He killed three of his sons. He killed his own wife and other family members. He was a pretty devious character.\u201d<\/p>\n Much of our knowledge<\/a> of Herod comes from the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus<\/a>. Born around 37 C.E.\u2014some four decades after the king\u2019s death\u2014Josephus likely relied on firsthand accounts of Herod\u2019s rule written by Nicholas of Damascus<\/a>, a close adviser to the ruler, that have since been lost to history.<\/p>\n While Josephus doesn\u2019t mention the Massacre of the Innocents, he paints an unfavorable picture of Herod, describing him<\/a> as \u201ca man who was cruel to all alike and one who easily gave in to anger and was contemptuous of justice.\u201d By these accounts, the king was ruthless and paranoid, slaying his own family members when he felt threatened; greedy, levying heavy taxes on his people; and vain, concerned with his physical appearance<\/a> and graying hair<\/a>.<\/p>\n An aerial view of the Herodium fortress that the ancient king built in the Judaean desert<\/p>\n Menahem Kahana \/ AFP via Getty Images<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n When Herod died in 4 B.C.E., his demise was long and painful. Josephus describes Herod\u2019s suffering as \u201cthe penalty that God was exacting of the king for his great impiety\u201d\u2014a tyrant\u2019s death. As the story goes, Herod feared that he would have to \u201cgo without the lamentation and mourning that are customary when a king dies.\u201d The ailing monarch summoned \u201cnotable Jews\u201d from throughout the land and gathered them in the hippodrome in Jericho. When he died, these men were to be killed, too. That way, his people would be mourning, even if they weren\u2019t mourning him.<\/p>\n Nearly two millennia later, long after Herod\u2019s reputation had been solidified, Hurston stumbled across<\/a> a line in an unspecified text: \u201cScholars state that there is no historical basis for the legend of the slaughter of the innocents by Herod.\u201d In The Life of Herod the Great<\/em>, Hurston goes far beyond debunking the biblical tale, however, insisting that the king was a brilliant ruler whose \u201cpopularity was enormous.\u201d<\/p>\n In the introduction, she warns against interpreting \u201cvery ancient facts through very modern concepts,\u201d writing that Herod, \u201clike all other historical figures, is out of context unless seen against the background of his era.\u201d Political assassinations, for instance, were a \u201ccustom held true on both sides of the Mediterranean.\u201d Bribery? \u201cIt was the etiquette of the times.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Hurston writes, Josephus is a \u201cpoisoned source\u201d who was biased against Herod from the start. Born into a family of aristocratic Jewish priests, the ancient historian \u201cindulges on every possible occasion\u201d in noting Herod\u2019s \u201c\u2018mean\u2019 or \u2018low\u2019 birth,\u201d because the king was \u201cneither a Jew nor of the priestly line.\u201d Hurston argues that while Josephus records the facts of Herod\u2019s reign, he invents ugly motives for his actions.<\/p>\n \u201cHe states that he will tell the truth, which he does in a way, but then in the next paragraph sets out to supply motives for the splendid acts of Herod that are in direct conflict with the fact previously stated,\u201d she writes. \u201cThis occurs in so many instances that it becomes a pattern. Herod\u2019s motives Josephus could not know, for he was born 41 years after the death of Herod and therefore had no means of knowing anything outside of the recorded facts.\u201d<\/p>\n An illustration of Josephus<\/p>\n Hulton Archive \/ Getty Images<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n Modern historians rely heavily on Josephus, but they also acknowledge his limitations. \u201cYes, he was biased, and he does sort of contradict himself at times,\u201d says Gale. \u201cBut I would not negate his entire compendium of works on the basis of that argument.\u201d Similarly, Martin Goodman<\/a>, author of Herod the Great: Jewish King in a Roman World<\/em><\/a>, notes that scholars approach Josephus carefully, trying to weed out the obvious biases, but \u201cit would be very unusual for anybody who works on this material professionally simply to dismiss all that Josephus said.\u201d<\/p>\n Goodman says that Herod\u2019s reputation has improved somewhat in recent decades, particularly among Jewish thinkers, who have re-evaluated the king\u2019s contentious connection to Judaism and emphasized his accomplishments as a builder. But even so, these shifts have been far subtler than Hurston\u2019s dramatic retelling.<\/p>\n \u201cShe sounds like she has a good imagination,\u201d says Goodman. \u201cDoes anybody at any point think that Herod died beloved [by] his people? The answer is no. I don\u2019t think, as far as I know at any stage, that any historian has tried to rehabilitate him to that extent.\u201d<\/p>\n Hurston initially wanted to write The Life of Herod the Great <\/em>as a straightforward biography. Why she changed course is unclear, though perhaps, as Plant speculates, she thought a novel would be more appealing to editors. In any case, all attempts to salvage the project failed, and the surviving fragments \u201cdemonstrate why Hurston was unable to find a willing publisher,\u201d writes Carla Kaplan<\/a>, a literary scholar at Northeastern University, in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters<\/em><\/a>. \u201cIt is hard to imagine how Hurston could not have known there were problems with the Herod book.\u201d<\/p>\n But the subject \u201cpossessed\u201d Hurston, who \u201cspent most of her waning energy the last seven years of her life attempting to write this story,\u201d according to Robert Hemenway\u2019s 1977 biography<\/a> of the author. \u201cIt is easy to see why Scribner\u2019s rejected it. \u2026 Zora\u2019s manuscript suffers from poor characterization, pedantic scholarship and inconsistent style; the whole performance touches the heart by revealing a talent in ruins.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2007, nearly 50 years after Hurston\u2019s death, archaeologists announced that they had discovered<\/a> the ruins of Herod\u2019s tomb. Excavations at Herodium, the king\u2019s lavish palace complex south of Jerusalem, revealed hundreds of red limestone fragments\u2014perhaps pieces of the king\u2019s sarcophagus. Given Herod\u2019s reputation, Ehud Netzer<\/a>, the archaeologist who led the team, thought it could have been intentionally smashed<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a nice image of Herod-haters going around bashing his sarcophagus up,\u201d says Goodman. But while this notion is \u201ccertainly possible,\u201d he cautions that we can\u2019t draw any conclusions from the available evidence. As Hurston writes in The Life of Herod the Great<\/em>, assigning modern motives to events from antiquity is \u201cworse than useless.\u201d<\/p>\n The cover of\u00a0The Life of Herod the Great<\/em><\/p>\n HarperCollins<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n Perhaps the same is true for Hurston\u2019s final novel. We have her letters, papers and published works, but will we ever know the full story of why this giant of the Harlem Renaissance became so fixated on Herod the Great?<\/p>\n Based on her correspondence, Hurston believed that the ancient king could teach us a lot about global affairs, writing that \u201cthe answer to what is going on in Europe, Asia and America lies in that first century [B.C.E.]\u201d On several occasions, she mentioned the \u201cstruggle between East and West,\u201d noting the strained relations between the United States and Russia. \u201cShe was very astute in her observations and analysis of government,\u201d says Plant. \u201cWhen we fast-forward to the 21st century, we have the same issues.\u201d<\/p>\n Plant worked hard to compile a manuscript true to Hurston\u2019s vision, all while navigating around burnt pages and missing pieces. (Plant was also the editor of Barracoon<\/em><\/a>, a nonfiction manuscript for which Hurston never found a publisher. Under her direction, the full text was published for the first time in 2018.) \u201cI\u2019m just kind of like a midwife who\u2019s with the mother, who\u2019s having a very difficult labor,\u201d she says. \u201cI get to be in the room, and I get to help and I get to bring her great obsession to the world.\u201d<\/p>\n The Life of Herod the Great\u2014<\/em>which includes a preface and introduction written by Hurston and commentary written by Plant\u2014stops at chapter 19. \u201cThere is no ending as such, because it\u2019s just simply not there,\u201d says Plant. \u201cBut we know how she intended to end it because she told us in her letters.\u201d<\/p>\n The novel\u2019s epilogue features excerpts from these letters\u2014which, in the absence of concluding chapters, even provide a final line: After a long and fruitful reign, Hurston\u2019s Herod \u201cdied peacefully in his bed and was borne to his tomb in splendor.\u201d<\/p>\n A fragment of what may be Herod’s sarcophagus<\/p>\n David Silverman \/ Getty Images<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n![\"Burned](\"https:\/\/th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com\/X_ydRhhi2t1ofWjqDPwQTw7wbyI=\/fit-in\/1072x0\/filters:focal(480x640:481x641)\/https:\/\/tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/filer_public\/91\/fa\/91fa21d3-f45d-4157-a9f5-0eda8195d558\/img_5451.jpeg\")
![\"Burned](\"https:\/\/th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com\/qo-owFQsITv3zBZqEC61KI3Fuuo=\/fit-in\/1072x0\/filters:focal(480x640:481x641)\/https:\/\/tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/filer_public\/4f\/48\/4f48bc51-b5dc-4a31-b7df-4d2befe13050\/img_5288.jpeg\")
![\"Hurston](\"https:\/\/th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com\/WRFY14qvPXM2SrO5R6TnpW72nK8=\/fit-in\/1072x0\/filters:focal(2470x1976:2471x1977)\/https:\/\/tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/filer_public\/ce\/af\/ceafd119-c1e4-4b48-b893-8a96481df525\/gettyimages-576768841.jpg\")
![\"Berlinghieri](\"https:\/\/th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com\/lx7P6oDLh9P6eAQvGWz8hGcXr4Q=\/fit-in\/1072x0\/filters:focal(512x853:513x854)\/https:\/\/tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/filer_public\/9d\/d7\/9dd7f699-8157-4fbb-b1c1-b96d8ec01b6b\/berlinghieri.jpg\")
![\"Guido](\"https:\/\/th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com\/4-Y59coOmABPFMsE9eWj80ExraA=\/fit-in\/1072x0\/filters:focal(512x853:513x854)\/https:\/\/tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/filer_public\/0d\/20\/0d2031b7-611c-49a3-8de0-70474791dc91\/painting2.jpg\")
![\"Herodium](\"https:\/\/th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com\/3RCib_7iRmrCVAFQviVmgNmmAjw=\/fit-in\/1072x0\/filters:focal(2690x1793:2691x1794)\/https:\/\/tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/filer_public\/0e\/23\/0e23735e-2c3f-47aa-b697-8677f47fc703\/gettyimages-1230040068.jpg\")
![\"Josephus\"](\"https:\/\/th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com\/nLnSi77JPl4NJzGUm1TQOqQ7bRQ=\/fit-in\/1072x0\/filters:focal(1064x1439:1065x1440)\/https:\/\/tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/filer_public\/32\/8a\/328a3088-337a-422f-a8f7-4a070db3344b\/gettyimages-2630002.jpg\")
![\"The](\"https:\/\/th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com\/CvfC-aqd2rk0uNmXDh8D706ov_Q=\/fit-in\/1072x0\/filters:focal(175x265:176x266)\/https:\/\/tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/filer_public\/e3\/31\/e3314438-2cc8-4086-8177-eaf7bebb4cb3\/9780063161023_1.webp\")
![\"Herod's](\"https:\/\/th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com\/v2T_Udvu_GwJ-nvzyryo_uD2K_w=\/fit-in\/1072x0\/filters:focal(1500x1043:1501x1044)\/https:\/\/tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/filer_public\/a4\/f1\/a4f1d94c-0d19-44de-8b5d-8d76f1b11e6c\/gettyimages-74099257.jpg\")