The Massacre of the Innocents: The Controversial History of King Herod the Great’s Order to Murder Male Babies in Bethlehem

Herod is one of the more well-known characters of the Bible, as even those with a limited knowledge of the Bible will recognize the name and maybe have some idea of who Herod was. One of the most popular stories, known even to non-Christians, is “Herod’s slaying of the Innocents,” a gruesome part of the Christmas story. Others who may know a little bit more about the Bible will know of the accounts of Herod and John the Baptist, Herod and Jesus, Herod who was eaten by worms and maybe even Herod and Paul.

Given that the Massacre of the Innocents is the most notorious aspect of Herod’s reign and a seemingly central aspect in the narrative of Jesus’s birth, it often surprises readers that the massacre is barely referenced in the Bible and remains a contentious topic. The Gospel of Matthew gives only three verses to the killing of the male infants of Bethlehem, the first passage in the New Testament about an act of open violence. Herod’s political fear quickly turns into state terror, and it leaves behind a grief that the evangelist voices documented through Jeremiah’s figure of Rachel weeping for her children.

However, outside the First Gospel, there is no historical evidence for the massacre, and it was not mentioned by Josephus or any other ancient historian mentions it. This is the paradox at the center of the subject: a story with almost no basis in the historical record has shaped Western cultural memory for 2,000 years. As such, the lasting force of Matthew 2:16-18 does not depend on what actually happened, and the narrative’s authoritarian tyrant, vulnerable victims, and machinery of state violence was flexible enough to let readers over two millennia name the tyrants and victims of their own times. Preachers, philosophers, medieval playwrights, and 20th century political dissidents all reworked Matthew’s narrative to make sense of state violence and human suffering, ensuring that Herod’s reputation as the archetypal tyrant has endured.