Smithsonian, January 2025
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.”
