Berenice—Herod the Great’s great-granddaughter—was far more than the silent royal cameo in Acts: she was a devout Jewish political actor who took a Nazirite vow, publicly confronted the Roman governor Gessius Florus to defend Jerusalem and the Temple, and later rose to extraordinary influence through her relationship with Titus. Both Jewish and Roman male sources distorted her memory through misogyny, political bias, and slander, so recovering her story sheds new light on Judaism, early Christianity, and the nature of female power in the first-century Roman world.
See also Berenice: Queen in Roman Judea (Yale University Press, 2026).
By Bruce Chilton
Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion
Bard College
March 2026
Berenice, the great-granddaughter of Herod the Great, makes a cameo appearance in the Book of Acts. There, she is portrayed as making a courtesy visit with her brother, Agrippa II, to the recently installed Roman procurator, Festus. Unlike her brother, Berenice never speaks, but she is a silent presence even during the apostle Paul’s audience (Acts 25:13-26:32). Yet it turns out that her sympathy for Paul went deeper than the banter that her brother is depicted as keeping up with Paul.
Paul had been taken into custody because he had entered the Temple in the course of leading a group of four men completing their Nazirite vows (Acts 21:17-36). The rumor spread that he deliberately introduced gentiles into the holy place, a false accusation but an effective incentive for a riot, since it would have constituted an act of defilement. To a significant extent, then, the case that Berenice and Agrippa helped Festus to adjudicate involved assessing the importance of the Nazirite vow. This was a question on which Berenice was making herself an expert. She herself, a few years after she had consulted with Festus about Paul, completed her own Nazirite vow in Jerusalem. She went beyond the practice of some of her relatives and other wealthy patrons of Judaism, who as an act of piety generously sponsored the cost of sacrifices for those who undertook the Nazirite vow. She appeared herself in Jerusalem, as a Nazirite with her head shaved after she had removed her hair and had it placed on the altar, in accordance with the vow.
She completed her vow just as one of the successors of Festus, Gessius Florus, ratcheted up the level of violence in Jerusalem. He confiscated sacred property, engaged in extortion, and resorted to rioting gangs as well as armed soldiers to impose a reign of expropriation. His policies, in the judgment of Josephus, made open war inevitable (Josephus, Antiquities 20 §§ 252-258). Some form of objection to this systematic villainy from a Jewish authority was vital. None came from King Agrippa II, who was on a state visit to Egypt at this time. Instead, it came from Berenice, who appeared before Gessius Florus in order to plea the case of her people; she came with a bare head as a result of her vow, and barefoot in penitence (Josephus, Jewish War 2 §§ 310-314). She argued for a peaceful settlement and the preservation of the Temple, organizing a formal petition to object to what Gessius Florus was doing (Josephus, Jewish War 2 §§ 333-335).
The tangled skein of events that unraveled from that point are detailed in Berenice: Queen in Roman Judea. The New Testament shows no awareness of what she did in the Temple, yet knows all too well that the Romans destroyed that Temple under Titus in 70 CE. Even during that period, however, Berenice was still a powerful political force. In fact, by the time of the Temple’s destruction she had become the most notorious woman in the Roman Empire. She and her brother had accommodated Titus and his father Vespasian in Caesarea Philippi during their bloody military campaign in Galilee (Josephus, Jewish War 3 §§ 443-461). Titus and Berenice began an affair, and after the war was won and Vespasian became emperor, the Roman historian Dio Cassius complains (Roman History 65.15.3-5) that Berenice took up residence in Rome and behaved in every way as if she were the wife of Titus. With Titus groomed to succeed his father, the prospect of marriage brought her the promise of imperial standing, and she exploited that promise fully.
She had vaulted to a position of imperial influence comparable in degree to that of her father, Agrippa I, and even her great-grandfather, Herod the Great, although totally different in kind. The Roman part of Berenice’s story is not related by Josephus. For that Roman historians—not only Dio Cassius but also Tacitus and Suetonius, as well as the grammarian Quintillian—are crucially important. In the Book of Acts, Luke is as highly selective as Josephus is in what he says and does not say about Berenice. There is no word of her Nazirite vow, her heroic confrontation with Gessius Florus, or her affair with Titus. Yet each of those phases of her biography illuminates an aspect of Judaism that was involved in the emergence of Christianity. The Nazarite vow was central to the practice of James, the brother of Jesus, as well as of Paul. The attempt to reconcile Roman authorities to the practice of their religion was a major motive of Christian as well as Jewish apologetic. And the goal of winning imperial favor, almost but not quite achieved by Berenice, was at last accomplished not by a Jewish Queen, but by the Christian concubine who was the mother of Constantine.
The New Testament, in its focus on the most central figures of earliest Christianity, is not comprehensive in its evaluation of the political forces during its period. Largely for that reason, in an earlier work, The Herods: Murder, Politics, and the Art of Succession (2021), I considered that history from the perspective of the Herodians as a whole, because they were on the sharp end of Roman power in its engagement with Judaism and Christianity for the whole of the first century. That broad focus is productive, but it does not permit the full individuality of each of the Herodian players to emerge. (Perhaps inevitably, several reviewers of The Herods have privileged Herod the Great in this regard, who is as dominant in the memory of his dynasty as Henry VIII is in the memory of his dynasty.) At the time, Berenice struck me as the most interesting and surprising member of the dynasty. When asked about likely subjects for Yale’s “Ancient Lives” series by its editor, James Romm, I expressed just that opinion, and the eventual result was this book.
Part of the enjoyment of conducting research was that Berenice made an impact on Roman sources, and evaluating them made a break from the attention to Aramaic texts that has preoccupied me in recent years. Yet whether in Latin or in Greek, whether or not pagan, and whether Christian or Jewish, the ancient sources are palpably wary of Berenice. Acts is not the only writing that doesn’t let her come to voice. (Oddly, Luke in Acts 24:24 does not even mention that Drusilla, the wife of Festus’ predecessor Felix, was Berenice’s sister.) Other members of the Herodian dynasty were also controversial, Herod the Great most of all. But Herod had an apologist, Nicholas of Damascus, who permitted that vicious but effective king to come to voice in the pages of the Jewish historian Josephus. Berenice had no such defender, and Josephus—who might reasonably have taken her part—joined in the rumor that Berenice engaged in incest with her brother, Agrippa II (Antiquities 20 §§ 145-146). In regard to Berenice, Josephus showed himself more the partisan of Rome than he was the advocate of Judaism that he liked to pose as. Indeed, he becomes incoherent in his desire to please his Roman patrons, ridiculing Berenice as libidinous but extolling Agrippa II, her alleged sexual partner, as noble. A woman who provoked the pushback that Berenice received from so many quarters obviously deserves attention, and tracing antipathy to her is an education itself.
The rumor that Josephus passed on did not originate with him. On balance, references in Dio Cassius incline me to think that Cynic critics in Rome, who attacked Berenice and her impending marriage with Titus, authored the calumny. Once it became current, it was treated as if it were somehow the key to understanding her. Juvenal referred to this claim in his sixth Satire, which is devoted to the theme that marriage should be avoided. Among other risks, a young wife might run away with valuables. Imagine the case, he says, of her absconding with a diamond once worn by the incestuous Berenice, from the land “where barefoot kings observe sabbaths as feasts, and custom grants clemency to elderly pigs” (Satire 6.153-160). Juvenal’s casual anti-Semitism is as much on show as his misogyny and his fear, in retrospect, of the kind of power Berenice might have acceded to. Less crudely, but with no less condescension, during the nineteenth century the German historian Theodor Mommsen characterized her as “Cleopatra in miniature.”[1]
Berenice’s story, because it was told in a biased way by censorious male writers, needs to be disentangled from systematic slander. The process of disentanglement, fascinating in itself, illuminates both the women herself and those who, as their reactions show, were frightened by her and by what she represented. Her life story and her underlying intentions offer unparalleled insight into the realities of political power during the first century.
[1] See the later edition of his Römische Geschichte V (Berlin: Weidmann, 1927), 539.