The Palace of Herod

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Michigan · Aug 29, 1865

The Palace of Herod.

The palace of Herod stands on a table of land, on the very summit of the hill, overlooking every part of the surrounding country; and such were the exceeding softness and beauty of the scene, even under the wilderness and waste of Arab cultivation, that the city seemed smiling in the midst of her desolation. All around was a beautiful valley, watered by running streams and covered with a rich carpet of grass, sprinkled like an open book before me, a boundary of fruitful mountains, the vine and the olive rising in terraces to their very summits; there, day after day, the haughty Herod had sat in his royal palace; and, looking out upon all these beauties, his heart had become hardened with prosperity; here, among those still towering columns, the proud monarch had made a supper for "his lords, and high captains, and chief estates of Galilee;" here the daughter of Herodias, Herod's brother's wife, "danced before him, and the proud king promised, with an oath, to give her whatsoever she asked, even to the half of his kingdom." And while the feast was going on, the "head of John the Baptist was brought in a charger and given to the damsel." And Herod has gone, and Herodias, Herod's brother's wife has gone, and "the lords, and the high captains, and the chief estates of Galilee" are gone: but the ruins of the palaces in which they feasted are still here; the mountains and valleys which beheld their revels, are here; and, oh! what a comment upon the vanity of worldly greatness! A Fellah was turning his plough on one of the columns. I was sitting on a broken capital under a fig tree by its side, and I asked him what were the ruins that we saw; and while his oxen were quietly cropping the grass that grew among the fragments of the marble floor, he told me that they were the ruins of the palace of a king, he believed of the Christians; and while pilgrims from every quarter of the world turn aside from their path to do homage in the prison of his beheaded victim, the Arab who was driving his plough among the columns of his palace, knew not the name of the haughty Herod. Even at this distance of time, I look back with a feeling of uncommon interest upon my ramble among those ruins, talking with the Arab ploughman of the king who built it, leaning against a column which, perhaps, had often supported the haughty Herod, and looking out from this scene of desolation and ruin upon the most beautiful country in the Holy Land.