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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

22. Crazy in Love – Literally

The Magi in the House of Herod. Brooklyn Museum

Herod was born to an Edomite father, from a people forcibly converted to Judaism only a generation or two earlier. Nonetheless, he was raised as a nominal Jew and married into the ruling Jewish Hasmonean Dynasty, wedding Princess Mariamne, one of the last Hasmonean heirs. He then killed her relatives to remove rivals for Judea’s throne, and got the Romans to make him king of the Jews. Unsurprisingly, Mariamne resented how her husband had treated her relatives. Letting her resentment show did not turn out well for Mariamne. It also did not turn out well for two of her sons with Herod, Alexander and Aristobolus, who resented their father’s treatment of their mother.

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.