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Real Life Biblical Kings and Other Historic Bible Facts and Figures

Khalid Elhassan April 25, 2025 18 min

Bible - Yul Brynner as the pharaoh in 'The Ten Commandments' — Yul Brynner as the pharaoh in 'The Ten Commandments'. Wikimedia

8. Finding Fort Machaeurs

Machaerus Fortress as it would have looked in John the Baptist’s era. Gardens of the Roman Empire

Herod Antipas was a son of Herod the Great – the baddie king, above, to whom the New Testament ascribes the Massacre of the Innocents when Jesus was born. Herod Antipas had the good fortune to not be executed by his father, and inherited part of the kingdom, over which he reigned as a client king of the Roman Empire. He ruled from atop a hilltop desert frontier fortress, Machaerus. It was reportedly there, in 29 AD, that Salome performed the Dance of the Seven Veils and John the Baptist was executed. Nearly two thousand years later, a Hungarian archaeological team announced a dramatic discovery: they had found the pavilion and courtyard where Salome danced for Herod.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.