Acts 12:21-23 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

And upon a set day Herod, &c.— Upon occasion of the games and approaching festival hinted at in the last verse, there was a great resort of the governors and principal men of the neighbouring provinces, and of persons of figure from all the surrounding countries. On the second day of that solemnity, Herod Agrippa came early in the morning, most probably into the amphitheatre, built by his grandfather Herod the Great, dressed in a robe of most curious workmanship, all made of silver, as Josephus informs us; which, reflecting the rays of the rising sun with an unusual and almost insupportable splendor, gave him a most awful and majestic appearance. In that magnificent manner he sat upon his throne, and made an oration to the people; which when he had finished, they cried out with flattering acclamations, "Surely this is the Bath kol,—the speech of God,—and not of any mortal man!" See the Syriacversion. The king was pleased with this blasphemous applause, and did not reprove the persons, nor reject their impious adulation. Mr. Fleming imagines, that they herein referred to the glory with which the Shechinah used to appear; and that Herod being profane enough to assume the honour of it, provoked the Divine Majesty beyondany further sufferance; so that he sent a disease upon him, which rendered him equally contemptible and miserable. "As he did not rebuke this impious flattery, says Josephus, he was immediately seized with exquisite and racking tortures in his bowels, so that he was compelled, before he left the place, to own his folly in admitting such acclamations, and upbraided those about him with the wretched condition in which they saw their God; and being carried out of the assembly to his palace, he expired in violent agonies the fifth day after he was taken, in the fifty-fourth year of his age, and the seventh of his reign;" reckoning from the time of his first advancement by Caligula to the tetrarchy of his uncle Philip, being the fourth year of the emperor Claudius, in the year of the Christian aera, 44. The word Σκωληκοβρωτος, Acts 12:23 signifies in the general consumed with vermin, and may express the disease called morbus pedicularis, of which several cruel and persecuting princes have died. Elsner has given several instances ofthe madness of heathen princes, who arrogated divinity to themselves, and came to the most infamous and shocking ends. Antiochus Epiphanes and Herod the Great both died in the same manner with Herod Agrippa. See 2 Maccab. Acts 9:9 and on Matthew 2:19. Herod Agrippa's knowledge of the true God, and of his jealousy with respect to divine honours, no doubt aggravated his guilt. The reader will find, by referring to Josephus, a wonderful harmony between the accounts which he and St. Luke have given of this affair. Josephus is indeed larger and more express; though out of a partial fondness, as it seems, for Herod Agrippa, whom he had so much extolled, he has concealed the particular disease, which was the true cause of the excruciating pains in the bowels which he mentions. Herod left behind him a son called Agrippa, then seventeen years of age, before whom St. Paul afterwards appeared, and made an apology for Christianity. He left also two daughters, taken notice of in the New Testament; namely, Berenice, who was married to Herod king of Chalcis, his father's brother, being sixteen years of age; and Drusilla, who was afterwards married to the governor Felix; as well as Mariamne, of whom there is no mention in the Scripture. After the death of Herod Agrippa, the kingdom was again reduced to a Roman province, when the persecution of the Christians for a while abated. Comp. 2 Samuel 24:16. 2 Kings 19:35.