NOTES for Mar 6:17-29
In every age and among every people, an oath bound the person who had to fulfill it, or else consequences would come down upon his head that he would have cause to regret. It is no accident that ancient peoples, including the Yahwists, swore by the names of their gods, and in Yahwism too it was customary to swear by God’s name, the name of Yahweh. In this way, a person called as witnesses and guarantors of the promise those whom it was either simply impossible or, at the very least, mortally dangerous to deceive. Yet this naturally raised a question: did every promise please those who, according to the person taking the oath, were to guarantee its fulfillment?
Take Herod’s oath, for example. He most likely also swore by the name of Yahweh, in whom he may not truly have believed. But does that mean that Yahweh really became the guarantor of Herod’s oath? The question is rhetorical: swearing by the name of any god, and all the more by the name of the One God, presupposed involvement in a profound relationship with the one by whose name the oath was sworn. That cannot be said of Herod and Yahweh: their relationship was entirely superficial, if it existed at all.
There was something else, however: false pride, which can sometimes make a person do something he will most likely regret deeply afterward simply because he wants to appear “tough.” That is what happened to Herod. He hated and feared John, yet at the same time involuntarily respected him, so much so that although he kept him in a prison for especially dangerous criminals, Herod nevertheless came more than once to talk with him. He hardly wanted John to die; he merely wanted John to fall silent, so that his denunciations of Herod’s sins and crimes would no longer be heard in public.
Yet things turned out differently: a rash oath and the unwillingness to “lose face” in the eyes of those around him made Herod a murderer. Of course, this murder was neither the first nor the last in his life, but this time it was the murder of a prophet, a man of God whom, moreover, Herod had not wanted to kill. This is how pride and false notions of honor take a person captive, forcing him to do what he otherwise would never have done. It is a terrible case, but in the fallen world, alas, an entirely natural one.