Charles Ellicott Commentary Matthew 14

Herod the tetrarch — He was the son of Herod the Great by Malthace. Under his father’s will, he succeeded to the government of Galilee and Perea with the title of Tetrarch, as ruler of a fourth part of the Roman province of Syria. His first wife was a daughter of Aretas, an Arabian king or chief mentioned in 2 Corinthians 11:32 as king of the Damascenes. Herodias, the wife of his half-brother Philip (not the Tetrarch of Trachonitis from Luke 3:1, but a son of Herod the Great by Mariamne who, though wealthy, held no official position as a ruler), was the daughter of Aristobulus, the son whom Herod put to death. She was therefore the niece of both her husbands.

Prompted partly by passion and partly by ambition, she left Philip and became the wife of Antipas (Josephus, Antiquities 18.5.4). The marriage, at once adulterous and, by the Mosaic law, doubly incestuous, shocked the conscience of all the stricter Jews. This union involved Antipas in a war with the father of the wife whom he had divorced and dismissed. It was probably in connection with this war that we read of soldiers on active duty coming under the teaching of the Baptist in Luke 3:14. The prophetic spirit of the Baptist—the very spirit of Elijah in his dealings with Ahab and Jezebel—made him the spokesman for the general feeling, and so brought him within range of the guilty queen’s vindictive bitterness.

Heard of the fame of Jesus — These words do not necessarily imply that no news had reached him until now. Our Lord’s ministry, however, had been underway for at most a year at this time, and possibly less. Antipas, residing at Tiberias and surrounded by courtiers, might well have been slow to hear of the works and teaching of the Prophet of Nazareth. Possibly, the nobleman of Capernaum (John 4:46), Manaen the tetrarch's foster brother (Acts 13:1), or Chuza his steward (Luke 8:3), may have been among his first informants, along with the “servants” (the word is not the one used for “slaves”) to whom he now shared his theory about the reported wonders.

This is John the Baptist — In Matthew 16:14 and Luke 9:7-9, this is one of three opinions circulating among the people about our Lord’s identity. The other two were:

1. that He was Elijah, and
2. that He was one of the old prophets who had risen again.

The tetrarch's policy connected him with the Sadducean priestly party rather than the more popular and rigid Pharisees. A comparison of Matthew 16:6 with Mark 8:15 suggests that the “leaven of Herod” is identical to that of the Sadducees.

Given this connection, Herod's acceptance of the first of these rumors is especially remarkable. The superstitious terror of a guilt-stained conscience proved stronger than his skepticism as a Sadducee, even though it was likely mixed with the wider unbelief of Roman Epicureanism.

To him, this new Prophet—who worked signs and wonders that John had never performed—was the reappearance of the man he had murdered. It was more than a ghost from the unseen world, more than the metempsychosis of John’s soul into another body. It was John himself.

Put him in prison — Josephus (Antiquities, Book 18, Chapter 5, Section 2) gives Machaerus, in Perea, as the scene of the imprisonment and death of the Baptist.

For John said to him — The Jewish historian (Ant. xviii. 5, § 2) states more generally that Antipas was afraid that some popular outbreak would result from the Baptist's preaching, influencing the excitable common people of Galilee.

He feared the multitude — Mark, whose account is the most detailed of the three, adds that Herod himself feared John, knowing him to be a just and holy man, and was greatly perplexed—this, rather than “did many things,” is the true reading—and heard him gladly (Mark 6:20). There was still a struggle of conscience against passion in the weak and wicked tetrarch, just as there was in Ahab in his relationship with Elijah. In Herodias, as in Jezebel, there was no halting between two opinions, and she, in the bitterness of her hatred, thirsted for the blood of the prophet who had dared to rebuke her guilt.