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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

21. A Toxic Family

Bible - Herod the Great — Herod the Great. Wikimedia

Mariamne was gorgeous, and Herod was crazy about her – but not in a good way. Herod was passionately in love with Mariamne. He was also crazy jealous. While Herod loved Mariamne, she did not feel the same. It was probably understandable, since Herod had killed her brother and uncle. Also, Herod’s father had killed Mariamne’s father, then embalmed him in a tub of honey. Nonetheless, Herod had five children with her – two girls and three boys. Herod might have been crazy in love with Mariamne, but considering how many of her relatives Herod had murdered, loving him back was difficult. Eventually, after she gave birth to their fifth child, Mariamne stopped sleeping with him. That fueled his suspicions that she was cheating on him. Herod’s mother and sister fanned those suspicions, and added to them accusations that Mariamne planned to poison him.

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.