Where were Herod's palaces?

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Accepted Answer

Herod the Great built palaces all over his kingdom. In Jerusalem his palace stood on the western hill by the three towers Hippicus, Phasael and Mariamne, where the Citadel by the Jaffa Gate now stands; at Caesarea a palace ran out on a promontory into the sea; at Jericho he enlarged the Hasmonean winter palaces at the mouth of Wadi Qelt, where he died; at Herodium, 12 km south of Jerusalem and 5 km from Bethlehem, he raised a palace-fortress on a hill he had heaped higher, and was buried there; Masada above the Dead Sea had his northern and western palaces, and Machaerus east of the sea, Cypros above Jericho, Alexandrium and Hyrcania were fortresses with palaces. Josephus is the source for most of them, and nearly all have been excavated. The New Testament meets these buildings without naming Herod. The Roman governors, who lived at Caesarea, used his Jerusalem palace when they came up for the feasts, and most scholars now place there the praetorium of the Passion, where “the soldiers led him away into the hall, called Prætorium; and they call together the whole band”, rather than at the Antonia of the Via Dolorosa tradition; Philo tells how Pilate hung gilded shields in Herod's palace. Herod Antipas, “who himself also was at Jerusalem at that time”, probably stayed in the old Hasmonean palace. Paul at Caesarea was ordered “to be kept in Herod's judgment hall”, the promontory palace, and Agrippa I, after Peter's escape, “went down from Judæa to Cæsarea, and there abode”, and died there. Ehud Netzer dug Herod's buildings for nearly forty years: the Jericho palaces from 1973, Herodium from 1972, and in 2007 he found on the hill's slope the mausoleum and smashed sarcophagus that he identified as Herod's tomb, a claim some have questioned. Yigael Yadin uncovered Masada in 1963–1965, and the promontory palace at Caesarea was first dug by Netzer and Lee Levine in 1976 and further in the 1990s. Of the Jerusalem palace only its platform survives, under the Citadel and the Armenian Garden; the base of one tower, Phasael or Hippicus, is the “Tower of David”. Herod took Jerusalem in 37 BC and died about 4 BC; the palace is dated to about 23 BC.