This Herod is Herod Agrippa. Now Herod Agrippa was the grandson of Herod the Great. He was the son of Herod Antipas. Now Herod Antipas was executed in 7 BC. He was executed, incidentally, at the behest of his own father, Herod the Great. Real nice people; loved one another. When he was orphaned, at least he no longer had a father (his mother's name was Bernice), and Bernice took Herod Agrippa (he was not Herod Agrippa yet, but he was Agrippa), to Rome. And I do not know whether there was a relationship between Bernice and the emperors or not, but there may have been because Herod Agrippa was raised, as we would say today, right in the castle. So he grew up with the royal family and he had royal tastes. He was considered, even by those people, to be a playboy. He amassed such a mass of debts that by the age of 23, he had to flee Rome.
He had so many creditors chasing after him that he had to flee Rome, and he fled to Idumea, see, which is back in the area of Palestine once again. Well, he kind of knocked around there and finally his uncle (I think it was Philip, who was the tetrarch of that area) gave him asylum and gave him a pension to live on. But they did not get along. So finally he was able to finagle his way back to Rome. He did this in 36 AD. He got there and he immediately offended the Emperor Tiberius. Tiberius had him thrown in prison.
But alas, for the Jews anyway, Tiberius died in 37. And along comes Agrippa's friend, Caligula. Crazy Caligula. He was crazy. He let Agrippa out of prison. He not only let him out of prison but he sent him back to the area of Palestine and he made him king over the north end of the area there.
Now Agrippa was coming into his own. Well, Caligula died in 41 AD and along comes the kid he grew up with, Claudius. You have probably heard of Claudius. He was the guy who had the epileptic seizures. Remember the story I, Claudius on television? And Claudius was his boyhood chum. Claudius makes Agrippa king over the whole area. He adds the southern part of Palestine to Agrippa's area, and now, Agrippa not only rules northern Palestine, southern Palestine, but also the areas of what is present day Lebanon and Syria. He had a pretty good empire over which he was ruling. And the guy was nutty as a fruit cake. He was as nutty as Caligula was, at least.
Well, he did not get along with anybody. He tried hard though, but nobody trusted him. But he played the political game right up to the hilt. And so in Rome he became as the Romans. But when he was in Palestine, he did a complete about-face and he adopted all of the customs of the Jews. So in Rome, he would bowed down to the emperor, and he had worshipped Minerva or whoever it was there that they worshipped in Rome. But then when he got to Judea, he kept the feast. On at the Feast of Tabernacles, he would get up, and because it said in the book of Deuteronomy that the king was supposed to read the book, you see, he would get up and read the Bible to the people there in Judea. I mean, he and his wife went the whole schmear. They offered the animal sacrifices and everything. He tried hard to make friends with people, but nobody would cotton up to him because his reputation went everywhere. I mean, he was a chameleon if there ever was one.
