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Near the end of her life, Zora Neale Hurston wrote to her editor at Scribner’s that she was “under the spell of a great obsession.” She had been working feverishly on the early chapters of a project, which, she assured him, “has EVERYTHING.”
The all-consuming subject? “The life story of HEROD THE GREAT,” she wrote. “You have no idea the great amount of research that I have done on this man.” Hurston believed that history had shortchanged Herod, best known as the biblical villain who murders Bethlehem’s children in his quest to kill the infant Jesus, and she would dedicate her final years to rehabilitating his reputation.
The author had high hopes for the project, even asking Winston Churchill to write an accompanying commentary (he politely declined) and floating the idea of involving filmmakers like Cecil B. DeMille and Orson Welles in a Hollywood adaptation. She wrote of Herod frequently in her correspondence to editors and friends, missives that read like love letters to the ancient ruler himself, whom she described as “handsome, dashing, a great soldier, a great statesman, a great lover. He dared everything, and usually won.”
But Hurston, unlike Herod, dared everything and lost. When Scribner’s rejected the work in 1955, she assured her editor that she wasn’t troubled by the news, perhaps because she had “such faith in the material.” Two more publishers passed on it in 1958 and 1959.
In January 1960, Hurston died in a welfare home in Fort Pierce, Florida. She was buried in an unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery. Days after her funeral, a janitor was sent to dispose of her belongings. He gathered her papers—including the unfinished manuscript of The Life of Herod the Great—and set them on fire.
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Hurston had been a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s, but she had faded into obscurity by that day in 1960, her final work consumed by flames in a pile of trash. Fortunately, a deputy sheriff who had seen the smoke arrived at the scene. He had known Hurston and wondered if her papers might be valuable—perhaps valuable enough to help pay off her debts? He extinguished the fire with a garden hose. The charred pages eventually went to Hurston’s archives at the University of Florida, where they collected dust for more than half a century.
Now, the project will finally see the light of day. The unfinished draft of The Life of Herod the Great was published on January 7—Hurston’s 134th birthday. According to the publisher’s description, the novel tells the story not of “the wicked ruler of the New Testament” but rather a “forerunner of Christ—a beloved king who enriched Jewish culture and brought prosperity and peace to Judea.”
“She was so committed to it,” says Deborah G. Plant, the Hurston scholar spearheading the project. “She kept at it until she was no longer here with us, but she left enough—even in spite of the fire—she left enough such that we have almost the whole thing.”
In The Life of Herod the Great, the titular king’s advisers and subjects alike have nothing but praise for the tall, handsome hero, complimenting his fighting prowess (“What a marvelous hurl, O Herod!”), his intellect (“What a wealth of information you have!”), his benevolence (“O you who loves and takes care of his people!”) and even his wardrobe (“Herod, you have the most exceptional and agreeable taste in dress of any man in the inhabitable world!”).
In other words, Hurston’s protagonist is not your father’s Herod—and certainly not her father’s Herod.
Born into a Baptist family in 1891, Hurston learned about the Bible from her father, John Hurston, who served as a minister at a church in Eatonville, Florida. “You wouldn’t think that a person who was born with God in the house would ever have any questions to ask on the subject,” the author wrote in her autobiography. “But as early as I can remember, I was questing and seeking.” Her father provided answers to those questions, explaining “all about God’s habits, his heaven, his ways and means. Everything was known and settled.”
At church, the congregation seemed satisfied with her father’s answers, “working like a Greek chorus” to absorb and amplify the mood of his sermons. She recalled sitting in the pews watching heads nod “with conviction in time to Papa’s words.” But when she expressed her questions, her father and his colleagues responded with “shocked and angry tirades” that left her “full of misty fumes of doubt.”
Hurston’s “questing and seeking” fueled an interest in anthropology, which brought her to New York City in 1925. At age 34, she had landed a scholarship to Barnard College, eventually becoming its first Black graduate. During those years, she conducted field studies of folklore among Black Southerners and became a part of the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance, using her studies to inform a wide-ranging collection of novels, nonfiction, short stories and poetry. “As an anthropologist, she’s looking at how stories get told, how they get handed down,” says Plant. “How those stories, even when they’re not true, become the truth that we live by.”
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Hurston’s breakthrough work was her second novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), which follows a Black woman in her 40s reflecting on her early years in the mid-20th-century American South. Two years later, Moses, Man of the Mountain, which reimagines the familiar biblical story using Black folklore, cemented Hurston’s legacy.
In 1945, Hurston revealed in a letter that she was “burning to write” a “highly controversial” story about the “3,000 years struggle of the Jewish people.” But her interest soon turned to a relatively minor character in that 3,000-year struggle: Herod.
As she conducted her research, Hurston developed a lot of questions about the Judean king, who quickly “moved from the margins of her mind and the margins of her manuscript into the center of it,” says Plant. She was startled by the idea that Herod wasn’t the biblical villain she’d learned about as a child, and she wanted to tell readers the truth.
But readers were forgetting about Hurston. By the 1950s, the talented author who had worked with Langston Hughes and won a Guggenheim fellowship was struggling to make ends meet, working as a maid and taking other odd jobs. She dedicated her spare time to the Herod project, which quickly spun out of control. Despite a string of rejections, she was determined to reveal “the real, the historical Herod, instead of the deliberately folklore Herod.”
In the popular imagination, Herod is known for his brief appearance at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, when he learns that a new “king of the Jews” will soon be born in Bethlehem. In an attempt to kill the newborn Jesus, the Judean monarch “slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from 2 years old and under,” the gospel states.
Today, most historians are skeptical that Herod was responsible for such an event, known as the Massacre of the Innocents. The story doesn’t appear in any of the other gospels and isn’t backed by archaeological evidence. But it still serves a meaningful purpose in the New Testament. Many scholars argue that Matthew’s gospel was written for a primarily Jewish audience in the early days of Christianity. As such, Herod’s massacre would have evoked a familiar Old Testament story in which the Egyptian Pharaoh orders all Jewish newborns to be slaughtered in an effort to kill the infant Moses.
“We see what we call typology, this comparison between Jesus and Moses, throughout the gospel,” says Aaron Gale, a religious studies scholar at West Virginia University. Jesus is introduced “as kind of a new Moses … Moses 2.0.” The two stories are full of parallels: For instance, Joseph saves Jesus from Herod’s massacre by fleeing to Egypt, mirroring the Jews’ exodus from Egypt in the Old Testament. “That’s not a coincidence,” says Gale. “As I tell my students, why didn’t he take him to Toledo?”
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Scholars think Herod may have been picked for the Pharaoh role because he died around the time Jesus was born—and he had a reputation as an angry tyrant.
The historical Herod was Judea’s client king from 37 to 4 B.C.E., when the region was under Roman control. During his reign, which was peaceful and prosperous, he oversaw grand building projects, including the mountain fortress on Masada and the storied Second Temple in Jerusalem, which included what is now known as the Western Wall. Despite these achievements, many scholars believe the king deserves his tyrannical reputation.
“Herod was a genius in many ways,” says Gale. But “he was not liked by his subjects for many, many reasons. He was, of course, ostensibly cruel. He killed three of his sons. He killed his own wife and other family members. He was a pretty devious character.”
Much of our knowledge of Herod comes from the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. Born around 37 C.E.—some four decades after the king’s death—Josephus likely relied on firsthand accounts of Herod’s rule written by Nicholas of Damascus, a close adviser to the ruler, that have since been lost to history.
While Josephus doesn’t mention the Massacre of the Innocents, he paints an unfavorable picture of Herod, describing him as “a man who was cruel to all alike and one who easily gave in to anger and was contemptuous of justice.” By these accounts, the king was ruthless and paranoid, slaying his own family members when he felt threatened; greedy, levying heavy taxes on his people; and vain, concerned with his physical appearance and graying hair.
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When Herod died in 4 B.C.E., his demise was long and painful. Josephus describes Herod’s suffering as “the penalty that God was exacting of the king for his great impiety”—a tyrant’s death. As the story goes, Herod feared that he would have to “go without the lamentation and mourning that are customary when a king dies.” The ailing monarch summoned “notable Jews” from throughout the land and gathered them in the hippodrome in Jericho. When he died, these men were to be killed, too. That way, his people would be mourning, even if they weren’t mourning him.
Nearly two millennia later, long after Herod’s reputation had been solidified, Hurston stumbled across a line in an unspecified text: “Scholars state that there is no historical basis for the legend of the slaughter of the innocents by Herod.” In The Life of Herod the Great, Hurston goes far beyond debunking the biblical tale, however, insisting that the king was a brilliant ruler whose “popularity was enormous.”
In the introduction, she warns against interpreting “very ancient facts through very modern concepts,” writing that Herod, “like all other historical figures, is out of context unless seen against the background of his era.” Political assassinations, for instance, were a “custom held true on both sides of the Mediterranean.” Bribery? “It was the etiquette of the times.”
Meanwhile, Hurston writes, Josephus is a “poisoned source” who was biased against Herod from the start. Born into a family of aristocratic Jewish priests, the ancient historian “indulges on every possible occasion” in noting Herod’s “‘mean’ or ‘low’ birth,” because the king was “neither a Jew nor of the priestly line.” Hurston argues that while Josephus records the facts of Herod’s reign, he invents ugly motives for his actions.
“He states that he will tell the truth, which he does in a way, but then in the next paragraph sets out to supply motives for the splendid acts of Herod that are in direct conflict with the fact previously stated,” she writes. “This occurs in so many instances that it becomes a pattern. Herod’s motives Josephus could not know, for he was born 41 years after the death of Herod and therefore had no means of knowing anything outside of the recorded facts.”
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Modern historians rely heavily on Josephus, but they also acknowledge his limitations. “Yes, he was biased, and he does sort of contradict himself at times,” says Gale. “But I would not negate his entire compendium of works on the basis of that argument.” Similarly, Martin Goodman, author of Herod the Great: Jewish King in a Roman World, notes that scholars approach Josephus carefully, trying to weed out the obvious biases, but “it would be very unusual for anybody who works on this material professionally simply to dismiss all that Josephus said.”
Goodman says that Herod’s reputation has improved somewhat in recent decades, particularly among Jewish thinkers, who have re-evaluated the king’s contentious connection to Judaism and emphasized his accomplishments as a builder. But even so, these shifts have been far subtler than Hurston’s dramatic retelling.
“She sounds like she has a good imagination,” says Goodman. “Does anybody at any point think that Herod died beloved [by] his people? The answer is no. I don’t think, as far as I know at any stage, that any historian has tried to rehabilitate him to that extent.”
Hurston initially wanted to write The Life of Herod the Great as a straightforward biography. Why she changed course is unclear, though perhaps, as Plant speculates, she thought a novel would be more appealing to editors. In any case, all attempts to salvage the project failed, and the surviving fragments “demonstrate why Hurston was unable to find a willing publisher,” writes Carla Kaplan, a literary scholar at Northeastern University, in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. “It is hard to imagine how Hurston could not have known there were problems with the Herod book.”
But the subject “possessed” Hurston, who “spent most of her waning energy the last seven years of her life attempting to write this story,” according to Robert Hemenway’s 1977 biography of the author. “It is easy to see why Scribner’s rejected it. … Zora’s manuscript suffers from poor characterization, pedantic scholarship and inconsistent style; the whole performance touches the heart by revealing a talent in ruins.”
In 2007, nearly 50 years after Hurston’s death, archaeologists announced that they had discovered the ruins of Herod’s tomb. Excavations at Herodium, the king’s lavish palace complex south of Jerusalem, revealed hundreds of red limestone fragments—perhaps pieces of the king’s sarcophagus. Given Herod’s reputation, Ehud Netzer, the archaeologist who led the team, thought it could have been intentionally smashed.
“It is a nice image of Herod-haters going around bashing his sarcophagus up,” says Goodman. But while this notion is “certainly possible,” he cautions that we can’t draw any conclusions from the available evidence. As Hurston writes in The Life of Herod the Great, assigning modern motives to events from antiquity is “worse than useless.”
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Perhaps the same is true for Hurston’s final novel. We have her letters, papers and published works, but will we ever know the full story of why this giant of the Harlem Renaissance became so fixated on Herod the Great?
Based on her correspondence, Hurston believed that the ancient king could teach us a lot about global affairs, writing that “the answer to what is going on in Europe, Asia and America lies in that first century [B.C.E.]” On several occasions, she mentioned the “struggle between East and West,” noting the strained relations between the United States and Russia. “She was very astute in her observations and analysis of government,” says Plant. “When we fast-forward to the 21st century, we have the same issues.”
Plant worked hard to compile a manuscript true to Hurston’s vision, all while navigating around burnt pages and missing pieces. (Plant was also the editor of Barracoon, a nonfiction manuscript for which Hurston never found a publisher. Under her direction, the full text was published for the first time in 2018.) “I’m just kind of like a midwife who’s with the mother, who’s having a very difficult labor,” she says. “I get to be in the room, and I get to help and I get to bring her great obsession to the world.”
The Life of Herod the Great—which includes a preface and introduction written by Hurston and commentary written by Plant—stops at chapter 19. “There is no ending as such, because it’s just simply not there,” says Plant. “But we know how she intended to end it because she told us in her letters.”
The novel’s epilogue features excerpts from these letters—which, in the absence of concluding chapters, even provide a final line: After a long and fruitful reign, Hurston’s Herod “died peacefully in his bed and was borne to his tomb in splendor.”
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