What can one think about the slaughter Herod carried out in Bethlehem? A crime? Without question. Terrible, unheard-of? In general, no, as awful as that sounds. Even in antiquity it was not something extraordinary...
What can one think about the slaughter Herod carried out in Bethlehem? A crime? Without question. Terrible, unheard-of? In general, no, as awful as that sounds. Even in antiquity it was not something extraordinary, and even less so against the background of events in recent centuries.
The most terrible thing here is not cruelty as such, but the logic that gives rise to this cruelty. This is not about justifying it: rulers like Herod did not consider it necessary to justify cruelty when it seemed expedient to them. And Herod, the murderer of children, by the way, entered history with the epithets "the Great" and "the Builder." He was remembered as a clever and skillful ruler who maneuvered artfully through the intricacies of the great Near Eastern politics of his time, and as, in modern language, an "effective manager" who carried out a whole series of large-scale projects. In particular, it was he who carried out the reconstruction, and in essence the complete rebuilding, of the Jerusalem Temple, turning it into a grand and majestic structure.
But people, as we see, interested Herod only in the context of these same large-scale projects. Anyone who posed even the slightest threat to them had to disappear, not to mention those who, even hypothetically, might in some way threaten his own power. Such, apparently, is the reverse side of "effective management": people here become nothing more than expendable material. And the cheapest material of all.
For the Kingdom, every person matters. For the rulers of this world, no one does.
