Tool Beta
The Ancient World Behind the Text
Pick a passage anywhere in the New Testament. See the customs and ideas a first reader knew without being told.
Matthew 14:1-12, John beheaded at a birthday feast
Herod the tetrarch hears about Jesus and thinks John has risen. Matthew tells how Herod, bound by an oath at his birthday, had John beheaded.
Matthew 14:1-12, in every translation this tool compares.
Herod Antipas hears the reports and tells his servants that John has been raised. Matthew explains that Herod had imprisoned John for condemning his marriage to Herodias, but feared the crowd, who held John a prophet. At his birthday, Herodias' daughter dances, Herod swears to give her whatever she asks, and she asks for John's head on a platter. John's disciples bury the body and tell Jesus.
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- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/reclining-at-table\/","n":"Reclining at table","s":"At banquets men lay on couches, propped on the left elbow, and where you lay showed your rank.","r":""}
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/oaths-and-vows\/","n":"Oaths and vows","s":"Calling God, or something holy, to witness that you speak the truth or will keep your word. People swore by lesser things to keep God's name safe if they broke it.","r":""}
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/burial-and-mourning\/","n":"Burial and mourning","s":"Mourners came at once, the dead were buried the same day, wrapped in linen in rock tombs, and family carried the duty of burial. Pagan mourning, with little hope beyond a shadowy underworld, could be bleak.","r":""}
Matthew uses the correct title, tetrarch (Keener). Birthday celebrations were a Gentile custom, and Keener notes Josephus says Jews were forbidden to celebrate them. Beheading with a sword was a Greek and Roman penalty, not a Jewish one, and here there is no trial. Josephus gives his own reason for the killing: Herod feared that "the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion." The sources differ on where the feast was held. Wilkins and the Zondervan Bible Dictionary set it at Machaerus, where excavators found a colonnaded court leading to a banquet hall; the Zondervan Atlas doubts Josephus and thinks a birthday banquet likelier at Antipas's palace in Tiberias. Herodias's first husband was a half brother living privately in Rome, not Philip the tetrarch (the Bible Dictionary).
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, on Matthew 14:1, 14:5-6, 14:8-9, 14:10-11 and 14:12
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, notes on Matthew 14:1, 14:6, 14:7, 14:10 and 14:12
- Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18.5.1-2, trans. William Whiston
- Michael J. Wilkins, Matthew, in Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary, ed. Clinton E. Arnold, on Matthew 14:6
- J. D. Douglas and Merrill C. Tenney, Zondervan Illustrated Bible Dictionary, entry Herod
- Carl G. Rasmussen, Zondervan Atlas of the Bible, The Life of Christ
