If you want to accuse me of satisfying my personal curiosity tonight, I will forgive you,
because that is basically what my studying thus far this week has been all about.
Interwoven throughout the Book of Acts and the four Gospels has been the family of Herod, and
even though we have looked at some of these people before, I have a terrible time keeping them straight.
We have another one of them brought to our attention here.
In my reading I became amazed at the ongoing wickedness of this so-called “royal” family.
And we aren’t done with them yet; some more of them come up again in the next two chapters.
But . . . . we are going to stop with this one more look at the family of Herod.
We are told that Drusilla was a “Jewess.”
Is it correct to you call a Roman Catholic a “Christian”?
Drusilla was as much a Jewess as a Catholic is a “Christian.”
The son was the Agrippa, which we will see in the next two chapters, Herod Agrippa II.
The girls were Berenice (sixteen), Mariamne (ten), and little Drusilla, only six years of age.
It was quite consistent with the traditions of the Herodian family that Berenice should, while still a teenager, be given in marriage to her uncle Herod of Calchis, old enough to be her father.
At twenty, a widow with two children, she came to Rome to live in the house of her brother.
There was nothing, either in his character or in hers, to prevent horrible suspicions about wickedness between them.
So to avert scandal, Berenice married Polerno, a “king” from somewhere in Asia Minor.
she will so captivate the heart of Emperor Titus that only the loudest protests by indignant Romans will keep him from making her Empress of Rome.
But then we come to this poor little Drusilla, named for her father’s old friend at court – Drusus, son of Tiberius.
At the time when her brother set up business as king on a small scale at Caesarea Philippi,
she, only 15, and a famous beauty, was married to Aziz, “king” Hamath, a few days’ journey to the north.
Then along comes another man.
They had been, several years before, purchased as slaves by Antonia, mother of the then Emperor
Pallas became her confidential servant, and eventually both brothers received their freedom through her.
At her death they began to serve her son, in some ways making themselves indispensable.
Pallas became the manager of the palace; and Felix rapidly rose in the ranks of the Roman army.
He even added the name of the Emperor to his own, becoming Felix Antonius.
Obviously, he not only knew how to receive flattery, but he knew how to give it as well.
In 52AD a delegation of Jews arrived in Rome with complaints against the administration of Cumanus, the then Governor of Judea.
Since Agrippa called himself a Jew, they turned to him, and they won the help of Pallas by proposing to petition the emperor to give the governorship to his brother Felix.
And so the former slave of the mother of the Emperor became the Governor of Judea.
And as I’ve said before, Tacitus said that “with all manner of ferocity and lust, he wielded the power of a king with the temper of a slave.”
Felix used had no principles against using anything to get his way.
For example, Felix ordered the assassinated of Jonathan, one of the Jews who got him his job.
Felix had been in Caesarea about a year, when Agrippa came to be his neighbour.
And with him came visits from his sister, the young and beautiful Queen of Hamath.
They were introduced – and seduced.
Felix was able to convince Drusilla that to be his wife would be a greater honour than to be the wife of the King of Hamath.
So she left her husband and shacked up with Felix.
It might have been caused by a broken heart; it might have been from old age; or it might have been something more unnatural.
Caesarea, like any modern city, was prone to furious outbreaks between its various ethnic and racial citizens.
One such took place towards the end of Paul’s two years’ imprisonment, and Felix ended it with the slaughter of hundreds of people.
This sent complaints to Rome that he had not only caused wanton slaughter, but that he had used this opportunity to make himself even more rich than he had been before.
He had considered himself safe in any crime so long as his brother Pallas continued near the ear of Nero.
But this time he had ventured too far.
To the relief of the Jewish people, in 60 AD he was recalled to Rome; taking with him Drusilla.
The prosecution forced him to give up much of his stolen wealth; but the influence of Pallas screened him from severer punishment.
Felix and Drusilla then both vanish out of history at that point, and Felix never appeared again.
But about nineteen years later we get a glimpse of a forty-year-old former beauty living by the Bay of Naples.
In her company is her grown-up son, named Agrippa.
It seems as if the world were threatened with the infestation of yet another generation of the accursed race of Herod.
But God is merciful.
The awful eruption of Vesuvius, which overwhelmed Pompeii and all its debaucheries, blessed mankind by suffocating and burying the princess Drusilla and her only child.
Have you ever seen pictures of the mummified forms of the dead at Pompeii?
You could very well have seen the remains of this Drusilla of Acts 24, the grand-daughter of Herod the Great.