Amotz Asa-El, The Jewish March of Folly (Part II)

Now for Herod.

Asa-El acknowledges that Herod was a paranoid psychopath who murdered most of his family. Despite that, he is a Herod fan because Herod was a master politician. Herod brought peace and prosperity to Judea (as long as you didn't cross him) while preserving the nominal status of Judea as and "ally" of Rome rather than a "subject" of Rome.

Asa-El considers the petition to Caesar to replace Herod's son with a Roman governor to be the first of the two blunders that led to the destruction of the Temple. (The second blunder was the rebellion itself.) He thinks that a Jewish king, no matter how tyrannical, would have been preferable to a Roman governor, no matter how benign, because a Jewish king would not have made the kind of culturally offensive blunders that e.g. Pontius Pilate made.

That's domestic policy. What about foreign policy? Would a Jewish monarchy have kept Judea alive indefinitely as a political entity? How sure is Asa-El that a Jewish king wouldn't have screwed up foreign policy? For a short time, Judea did again have a Jewish king, Herod's grandson Agrippa I, who got his appointment as a reward for helping Claudius navigate the politics of succession after the assassination of Caligula. Suppose that, as the Romans suspected him of trying, Agrippa had succeeded in organizing a rebellion of the Eastern provinces against Rome. He would have suffered the same fate that Zenobia suffered two hundred years later, and the Temple would have been destroyed right on schedule.