Herod the Great, King of Judea, died more than 2,000 years ago, in 4 B.C. He is remembered, among other things, for ordering the Massacre of the Innocents, the systematic execution of baby boys in Bethlehem. It was an attempt, if we are to believe biblical records, to kill the newborn Jesus.
The bloody example set by Herod in Judea in the first century B.C., marked by the paranoid, brutal and unpredictable nature of his 36-year rule, continues in the Middle East of the 21st century. Yet this week, Herod is not the subject of a historical discussion, but a medical one: at the Clinical Pathology Conference held at Baltimore's University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Jan Hirschmann, professor of medicine at the University of Washington's School of Medicine, will reveal on Friday how the 69-year old Herod died. Like the power struggles in the Middle East in Herod's time, the disease that claimed him is still around. And like the struggles, it is getting worse.