The all-consuming subject? “The life story of HEROD THE GREAT,” she wrote. “You have no idea the great amount of research that I have done on this man.” Hurston believed that history had ...

Few figures in history have had such a controversial reputation as King Herod I of Judaea. In the Christian tradition, Herod is the villain in the Christmas story. The Gospel of Matthew recounts ...

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) spent her financially distressed final decade enthralled by the life of King Herod and working on a novel about him. The books of the 1930s and ’40s that made her ...

Christians remember Herod the Great as a murderous tyrant, and so do Jews. According to the Gospel of Matthew, when Herod heard that a rival king of the Jews had been born in a stable, he sent out ...