Bible Person
Female · 4 cross references
Herodias is the politically ambitious wife of Herod Antipas whose grudge against John the Baptist leads to his death. She is one of the Gospels' clearest figures of manipulative power working through court and family entanglement. First appears in Matt 14:6.1
AI summary: Herodias matters because the cross references present her as a driving force behind the execution of John the Baptist. Her resentment over John's rebuke, combined with courtly spectacle and her daughter's performance, turns a rash oath into judicial murder. She embodies the corruption of desire, politics, and vengeance. Taken together, the material presents Herodias as a calculating royal figure whose hostility helps bring about John's death.1
Central Figure
Herodias
(Matt.
(Matt. 14:3-11; Mark 6:17-28; Luke 3:19), the daughter of Aristobulus and Bernice. While residing at Rome with her husband Herod Philip I. and her daughter, Herod Antipas fell in with her during one of his journeys to that city. She consented to leave her husband and become his wife. Some time after, Herod met John the Baptist, who boldly declared the marriage to be unlawful. For this he was “cast into prison,” in the castle probably of Machaerus (q.v.), and was there subsequently beheaded. 3
AI-assisted summary prepared for ai-BIBLE and stored as page content, based on dictionary material, person metadata, and linked Bible cross references.
Alistair de Blacquiere-Clarkson, “ai-BIBLE Bible Names JSON Factsheet Aggregating Material from Smith’s Bible Dictionary & Hitcocks’s New and Complete Analysis of the Bible.” ai-BIBLE electronic edition, version 1.0.
M.G.Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary, ai-BIBLE electronic edition, version 1.0.
Robert Rouse, “Theographic Bible Information,” Theographic-Bible-Metadata, 2020, https://github.com/robertrouse/theographic-bible-metadata.