Mystery of the Magi: The Quest To Identify the Three Wise Men by Dwight Longenecker

Author:Dwight Longenecker [Longenecker, Dwight]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781621576563
Google: rAWUDgAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 40538401
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2017-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

The Hornet’s Nest of the Middle East

The Middle East in the first century BC was a hornet’s nest of rival monarchies and civil wars. It can be difficult to keep them straight, but the shifting relationships and political maneuverings provide more evidence that Nabatea was the home base of the wise men.

The Hasmoneans were a violent and unstable dynasty of Jews who ruled Judea, first under the auspices of the Greeks and then for a time on their own. In the decades leading up to the birth of Jesus, the remaining members of the Hasmonean dynasty clung to power while eyeing nervously the rising power of Rome and the equally daunting power of Parthia to the northeast.

Meanwhile, because the Nabateans needed access across southern Judea to the port of Gaza, their conflicts with the Hasmoneans simmered. The Roman general Pompey took advantage of the quarrel and advanced against both Jerusalem and Petra. His army was humiliated by the Nabateans, and the Nabatean king Aretas III established with the Romans what David Tschanz calls “a working accommodation with a high degree of ambivalence.”6

Aretas III, however, was hedging his bets. When civil war broke out between Pompey and Julius Caesar, he sent soldiers to fight with Pompey in 48 BC, but a year later his soldiers fought with Julius Caesar. Aretas also had to consider whether his real allies might be the Parthians, who, having invaded Syria in 42 BC, moved south to knock out the Romans’ vassal in Judea, the Hasmonean king Hyrcanus II. To keep the peace, the Parthians installed Hyrcanus’s nephew Antigonus as king.

Herod the Great steps onto the stage at this point. He and his brother Phasael had been given positions of power in Judea during the reign of Hyrcanus II. Shrewdly building a power base and cultivating the favor of the Romans, they found their hopes dashed when the Parthians swept south and put Antigonus on the throne. The Parthians captured Phasael, who eventually committed suicide, while Herod escaped to Petra. King Aretas III’s Nabatean successor, Malichus, did not welcome Herod, however, so he fled to Rome7—a wise move, for within two years the Romans had driven the Parthians out of Syria and Judea. The Judean throne was now vacant, and in 40 BC the emperor-to-be, Octavian, had the senate appoint Herod King of the Jews.8

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