The world recoiled from World War I only to instigate the forces which would produce World War II. The pattern of crisis of the twentieth century is well known: the crisis of faith in God, of faith in science, of faith in history, and of faith even that man can learn from or correct his own errors. The holocaust soiled the century with a horror nearly indescribable. The crisis of the century repeated itself over and over in the crises of individual consciences. Yet, out of these ashes of faith emerged a kind of beauty as men continued to live and artists continued to create. Pär Lagerkvist is one of the many who created in spite of and inspired by the crisis of his world and of his personal world view. Using the two thousand year only division of history as a touchstone, Lagerkvist explores the reality of the human condition in many of his novels. Two such novels, Barabbas (1951), and Herod and Mariamne (1967), portray humanity against the backdrop of Christ's incarnation. The first begins at the crucifixion; the second ends with the nativity. In the novels, Lagerkvist depicts mankind with reference to one of the most significant events in religious history and reveals the same turmoil, confusion, and incompleteness that has always defined man. He dramatizes that God is not a significant variable in the human equation.

Barabbas depicts the convict who was acquitted when Christ was crucified. Barabbas is forever scarred by his view of Calvary: the man dying, the women watching, and the darkness descending. He stays in Jerusalem for a while, living distantly from others as he probes the mystery of this event. He speaks with some of the disciples of Christ, including Peter, but is excluded from their circles when word spreads of his identity. He never regains his former life, and his bandit cohorts and his mistress think it is because of his prison experience. Barabbas wonders himself if the darkness he had witnessed was not perhaps merely a result of slow recovery of his eyes from the prison gloom. After spending a brief ineffectual time with the robber band, he is no longer heard of until he becomes a slave in copper mines, chained to another slave who is a believer in the crucified one. When Barabbas eventually confides to him that he had seen Jesus die, the old slave draws him into an alliance of belief. Yet, Barabbas backs away from his profession of belief, and later, after being released to lighter duty on the governor's estate, is not crucified with the slave when the owner discovers the slave's Christianity. One night, after the household has moved to Rome, Barabbas, while looking for a Christian meeting in the catacombs, gets lost and becomes terrified until he is finally able to make his way out. In that mood, he comes across a home burning and a hired mob accusing the Christians. In a final violent effort to join them, he torches several homes thinking that the world was to be burned and that their Savior had come. Later, in prison, he again meets Peter, a fellow prisoner, who tells him that he was only helping the worldly god, Caesar, and that the Christians' ‘Lord is love’. In a poignant final scene, Barabbas, odd man out, trails the chained pairs of Christians out to be crucified. His cross hangs farthest out in the rows of crosses, and no one speaks to him. When he dies, as he lived, it is as if to the darkness that he delivers up his soul.

Herod, the principal character in Herod and Mariamne, is also affiliated with Christ through death. It is this Herod who, when three men following a star come to the temple to seek a newborn king, decrees that all the infants be slaughtered. Soon after, he dies. The story can be outlined even more simply than Barabbas. The King, Herod, builds and beautifies the Jewish temple, and yet is hated by the people. The cruel and violent Herod sees the elegant, gracious Mariamne and is stunned by her beauty. He finally meets her when she petitions him to release a young kinsman, a twelve year old Maccabean boy who had tried to stab a cruel soldier. He agrees to release him, and Mariamne continues in the following months to ask for the release of several others whom people implore her to help. Eventually, Herod proposes marriage, and she accepts out of a desire to help others through her softening effect upon him. The effect lasts for a while, but Herod cannot learn to love and Mariamne cannot love without a sense of duty to him and to the others. His passion eventually cools and he fills the palace with women again. Unfettered from his wonder of her, his suspicion of what is different from himself and of what he cannot control by force causes him to hire someone to murder her. His cruelty and power increase until his death, yet Mariamne continues to perplex him also. He dies ‘stretching out his arms into the darkness’ crying ‘Mariamne! Mariamne!’¹

Most liberties which Lagerkvist takes with the histories of Herod and Barabbas are of addition rather than alteration. Most sources agree that, as the Oxford scholar, Alfred Edersheim, states, ‘Bar-Abbas belonged to that class, not uncommon at the time, which, under the colourable pretence of political aspirations, committed robbery and other crimes’.² Nothing is known of his subsequent history. However, Herod's history is more interesting. History claims him to be every bit as cruel as the portrait in the novel. He did, apparently, love Mariamne, a Maccabean princess, ‘in his own mad way’.³ It was through a complex intrigue of jealousies and the fear that Mariamne might become someone else's wife that Herod was finally brought to the point of killing her. History reports that she received a mock trial before her execution, rather than being killed by a hired assassin as Lagerkvist describes. According to The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, ‘Herod was never able to accept sanely the reality that Mariamne was dead’.⁴ History also affirms Herod's contribution to the construction of the temple. Herod embellished the temple as no other had done. According to Jewish tradition, ‘He that has not seen the Temple of Herod, has never known what beauty is’.⁵ Edersheim explains the many ways that the reign of the Jewish King Herod paralleled the reign of the earlier King Solomon. In a comparison relevant to this study, he declares, ‘Herod was not the antitype, he was the Barabbas, of David's Royal Son’.⁶

The many close similarities between the two novels are worth noting specifically. The two characters, Barabbas and Herod, parallel each other in more than a relationship to Jesus. They are similar men in temperament. Herod is described in the novel ‘as the cruellest, most ungodly man who ever lived—as the scum of the human race’ (p. 7), ‘a monster in human form’ (p. 12). Even his joy in life is described as wild, as ‘joy in violence, blood, and battle; joy in rampant horses trampling bleeding enemies underfoot; joy in killing … in the capture and rape of women … in success, gold, power—in a word, joy in life entire’ (p. 9). Usually Herod led his army not only by command but by fighting at the front as well: ‘If anyone delighted in battle it was he … and … fury … usually distinguished him’ (p. 9). If not king, Herod could have easily led a band of robbers such as the one Barabbas led. Such a life was to Herod ‘the life of his forebears, such as they had led in their desert realms to the south, with raids into Judea and attacks on the caravans bound thither. It was a hard, cruel life, and … the life that had given him his soul’ (pp. 20-21).

Barabbas, although not known particularly for his cruelty and not possessing a royal sceptre, was a rough and amoral bandit:

He it was who used to plan most of their ventures and be the first to carry them out. Nothing seemed impossible for him, and he used to pull it off too … and they had grown used to relying on everything turning out well. He became a kind of leader …⁷

During one raid on a wagon of tithes he ‘cut down’ two of the temple guards and ‘afterwards he even outraged their bodies, behaving so incredibly that the others thought it was going too far and turned away’ (p. 78). He had already used the help and inexperienced emotions of a girl with a hare-lip, had impregnated her, and subsequently deserted her.

Herod is constantly described as a ‘desert’ man. He takes solitary nocturnal walks in the temple he is renovating. In fact, he is ‘easily bored and repelled by the people he gathered around him’ (p. 101). Consequently, he dies in ‘utter solitude’ (p. 116). The desert and the darkness are repeated throughout the novel to enforce Herod's solitude. Barabbas, too, is an outsider and man of the desert, often referred to as a stranger. He is never more than a sexual partner to his mistress in Jerusalem. He had always been distant from the other bandits, but becomes even more inexplicably strange to them after the Jerusalem acquittal: ‘He was just like a stranger to them and he too must have thought they were strangers …’ (p. 77). He is characterized by his perpetual silence and his eyes which are so sunk into his head as to be hardly seen. The closest Barabbas comes to anyone is to the Christian slave, Sahuk, with whom he is so long chained. In his old age he dreams of Sahuk and wakes with tears in his eyes to find no one sleeping bound next to him: ‘He was not bound together with anyone. Not with anyone at all in the whole world’ (p. 132). At his crucifixion, he is ‘out’ from the others in every way possible, and it is significantly as though to darkness that he gives up his soul. Herod and Barabbas share the solitude of the desert and the dark.⁸

Although Lagerkvist, in Barabbas, says that the appearance of a man is of little consequence, the similarity even in the appearance of Herod and Barabbas is significant. Both are large, powerfully built men. Barabbas' complexion is sallow, while Herod's is described as yellow. Herod's hair is blackish-red; Barabbas' hair is black, but his beard is red.⁹ Their eyes give no relief or consolation to anyone. Barabbas' eyes are so deep-set, ‘hidden away’, that they reflect nothing. Herod's brown eyes with lighter flecks make men uncomfortable and are not soon forgotten; his gaze is ‘dangerously observant’ (p. 10). There is also about the appearance of each something menacing. In the case of Barabbas it is the famous mark of a Hollywood ‘bad guy’, a deep scar which disappears into his beard. In Herod's case it is a heavier tread with his right foot than with his left. It is described as giving ‘more force and somehow more menace to his figure …’ (p. 10).

Herod and Barabbas, although both outsiders, differ significantly as to what each desires. Barabbas is outside belief. He tries to believe, to convince himself of the facts in which others believe. Too much uncertainty and lack of proof prevents him. He later attempts to join the slave, Sahuk, in his belief. It is almost as if he wants the reverence of Sahuk to draw him, too, into the circle of slaves to Jesus. But this does not occur. Finally, his confusion in the catacombs and perhaps his desperation cause him to join enthusiastically in the burning. Barabbas gropes for belief throughout the novel, aptly illustrating Irene Scobbie's comment: ‘One can dismiss religion, but not man's need for it’.¹⁰ The closer Barabbas gets to the inside of a group that believes, such as the imprisoned and crucified Christians at the end, the farther out he remains.

Herod, however, is outside of love. He is described as loving no one, and as being loved by no one. He is so far outside of love that it suffers a transformation to something else when it contacts him. Several times the narrator clarifies that for Herod love itself is evil. His difficulty is clearly explained:

He had never experienced love before, and knew nothing about it. It was foreign to his nature. He knew that he loved her, but did not know what this should imply. And love wrought no change in him.

(p. 57)

The novel explains that Herod's desire for her is what he believes to be love, since it is not the same lust as he feels for whores, nor is she like any other woman, but is ‘new to him, and his very opposite’ (p. 57). Although outside of love, he comes close to love, and when retreating from a sexual relationship with Mariamne, ironically reveals a degree of real care for her.

The gap between Herod and love is analagous to the gap between Barabbas and belief. The close parallel is revealed through many incidents of the plots. The closer both come to the ends they seek, the less personal power each has. When Barabbas admits Sahuk, his fellow slave, into some of his own privacy, when he allows the name of Christ to be scratched on the back of his slave medallion, he is in the worst possible bondage—‘the most ghastly punishment imaginable’ of the Cyprian copper mines. When he thinks that the Christians are burning the world and he runs to join the burning, he only ends in prison. When Herod is first entranced with Mariamne and during the beginning of their marriage, before the truth of her mere fondness for him dawns on him, his usual cruel inclinations are tempered by the mercy he extends at her request. He admits his reasons to her and acknowledges, ‘I ought not to do it—I know that very well” (p. 37).

Even while personal power is lost, a degree of catharsis occurs concurrently. Mariamne wonders about Herod's continual softening and thinks of him as a captive in his own fortress (p. 41). After meeting Mariamne, Herod clears the whores from his palace in language reminiscent of scripture: ‘He had cleansed his whole house’ (p. 37). There were many signs of change. Mariamne eventually ‘induced him to be gentler and more considerate with her’ in sexual relations (p. 46). The palace begins to look more like a home; ‘she dispelled its desolation’ (p. 47). At one climactic point in their marriage, after he had spitefully killed her young Maccabean relative, he reached his most vulnerable point:

When Herod beheld her and perceived what he had done to her—perceived how much she had borne on his account—he fell down at her feet with a groan, and the sweat of anguish broke out upon his forehead. He held up his arms, but without touching her, and looked at her imploringly with bloodshot eyes. Wordlessly he begged forgiveness for his wickedness, for being what he was.

(p. 72)

She eventually strokes his head until ‘he seemed to find a kind of peace’ (p. 72). But within a page Lagerkvist implies the end of this release into peace: ‘For a while Herod was calmer (p. 73). As Roy Swanson expressed so well, ‘His love proves to be an inescapable love of self and his elevation is seen to be merely apparent and abruptly transitory.’¹¹

Barabbas also experiences partial release from bondage concurrent with his lack of personal power. After temporary acceptance of the Christian bond with the slave to whom he is chained in the copper mine, he is also released above ground to lighter slave labour. That he had escaped an earthly hell on the strength of the word of another is clear. Another liberation, less positive certainly, occurs at the end of the novel, when, after a last misguided attempt to join the believers, he is freed from the burden of his quest by death. When Barabbas attempts belief, he is thwarted, and fails to believe. When Herod attempts to love, he, too, fails to achieve much more than self-serving lust and distant melancholy. Even though he uses the language of Christianity, Barabbas gives his soul up as though to darkness, and Herod's despair is impenetrable even to the desire for love.

Finally, Barabbas and Herod are both intimately involved in others' deaths. In Herod and Mariamne, the old serving woman from Mariamne's former home and the young kinsman rebel are killed either directly by Herod or on his orders. The deaths in Barabbas are not caused by him, yet, because the girl with the hare-lip and the slave both die for the belief that he cannot accept, he is intimately involved as he watches both die. The one whom they die for is Jesus. Yet Barabbas seems uncertain about Jesus even up to his own death despite the momentous truth that Jesus had literally died for him. Mariamne, too, dies instead of Herod—or so he thinks. Freed from his fascination for her by his realization of her lack of love, his suspicious nature causes him to doubt her. His doubt becomes an obsession, until he thinks ‘the unthinkable’, that Mariamne wanted his life. Although he rides back to Jerusalem in a mounting fury which can remind one of Barabbas' fury to burn Rome, he can only watch her die and repeat over and over, ‘Beloved’ (p. 97).¹²

Several of the symbols of both Barabbas and Herod and Mariamne work in similar ways to reinforce the novels' meanings. Similar to the circuitous dark catacombs in which Barabbas loses his way are the palace and temple of Herod. The palace is essentially empty, except for whores and officials, and is only temporarily made liveable by Mariamne. The temple more nearly parallels the catacombs, for, as Herod habitually walks there at night, he is always in darkness, and always alone:

Why did he do it? He himself could not have said: There was no object in it. And yet he went there, and walked for a long time in the darkness. Then he would stand outside for a while, looking up at the fiery night sky.

He had no link with the divine. Inwardly he was a wilderness, and the stars drove their cold spears into his soul.

(p. 54)

The cold spears communicate nothing more to him in his wanderings, than the gleams of light Barabbas sees, follows, and loses in the catacombs. These lights do not lead to the Christians' meeting that he looks for, nor do they lead him to the earth above. If anything they only confuse him, making him more desperate to escape, which he finally does on his own. And who would be surprised that Herod, who only experiences stars as cold spears, should react to a larger star leading to some new born king as a challenge to be opposed? Even the cool silvery qualities of Mariamne remind Herod of the cold silvery starlight realm that he walks under so often. She, too, is essentially unattainable to him.

The night and darkness of both novels work in the same way, and the desert home and habits of both male protagonists identify a metaphorical wasteland. But the temple that Herod builds, greater and more beautiful than Solomon's, to a God he barely gives even lip service to, should remind the reader of Barabbas' medallion. Barabbas, too, in his more limited way, controls an outward sign, a physical entity reflecting a relationship with the divine. For Barabbas, too, it is emptied of any security. He wears a name crossed out, and Herod wanders in an unfinished house of God, staring at soul-piercing stars.

Herod and Barabbas remain outsiders until their deaths: one through lack of love, the other through lack of belief. Love links the death of Jesus, who, Peter tells Barabbas, is the Lord of love, to the death of Mariamne, whom Herod finally addresses as beloved after her death. But one must be careful of oversimplistic statements. Lagerkvist's fiction, for all its parallels, presents an ambiguous world both AD and BC. The novel, Barabbas, never decides the ‘Lordship’ of the Jesus who dies for Barabbas. And Herod's Mariamne represents the possibility of love, but is not representative of love itself.¹³ She is, rather, throughout the novel, representative of sacrifice and goodness, for she knows from the beginning that ‘she could never love him; but she could feel pity. And in feeling this she felt also the need to sacrifice herself. … Of love she knew nothing; she believed only that she would sacrifice herself’ (p. 43).

Mariamne is more nearly a representative of goodness than of love. Her goodness is dramatized by her inability to live in a palace with the dungeon of condemned men beneath her and by the reaction of the Jerusalem people to her even after they realize that she no longer has influence over Herod: ‘… they smiled at her whenever they saw and recognised her, and many continued to kneel and kiss the hem of her mantle’ (p. 76). It is also dramatized by her inability to have believed, even if told, that her kinsfolk hated her for her marriage to Herod. Much of the attraction of Herod towards Mariamne is the rare quality of her goodness, a complete lack of guile, so different from himself and anyone he had ever encountered. The novel describes her as simply but regally dressed with garments edged in silver, with silver thread, sash, and sandal straps. The people call her ‘Mariamne the silver-clad’. She seems to care little for the temple Herod builds, and remains as a temple unto herself. The novel also compares her to a tree ‘which has no consciousness of itself, and is a secret’ (p. 79).¹⁴ Truly she is selfless and good.

Just as Mariamne does not represent pure love, neither is Mariamne's goodness or sacrifice the pure antithesis of Herod's evil. Viewing the two as direct opposites will cause one to miss the irony. Mariamne is sometimes sexually aroused by Herod, and even, despite his violence with her, sometimes fulfilled. And just as Herod, when realizing that her feeling for him was not like his own, proudly forces himself to no longer approach her (only in fact to reveal his love for her in so doing), so, too, does Mariamne in trying to please him, try even harder to pretend a need for him, only to further convince him that she feels little.¹⁵ In trying not to show love, Herod reveals a degree of love. In trying to show love, Mariamne reveals the lack of it. They share the same, sometimes frustrating, humanity.

The characters who people Barabbas are more clearly a blend of good and evil than are either Herod or Mariamne. Barabbas murders a fellow bandit but carries the hare-lipped girl's body to an appropriate grave. He burns a Roman neighbourhood but dreams nostalgically of a former friend. Herod's evil is nearly total. His accidentally revealed ‘lustlove’ and accompanying mercy are momentary. And Mariamne's goodness seems nearly pure, only slightly marred by the pretense of real love. The ‘chiaroscuro’ world of fiction, the light-dark dualism described by D. G. Kehl, is within Barabbas and between the characters, Herod and Mariamne.¹⁶

To discuss Lagerkvist in terms of his ambiguity is no new idea, yet it is a constant reminder that even though individual characters are less complex in the later work, no easy conclusions are possible. Adolph Benson's statement that Pär Lagerkvist reveals ‘a firm belief that good will conquer evil’ is indefensible.¹⁷ Robert Spector describes the novelist's ‘deliberate ambiguity’: ‘For Lagerkvist, Christians do not exist without doubt; doubt cannot have meaning without faith. Death and life, love and hate, fidelity and betrayal—these exist simultaneously for mankind’.¹⁸ Fifteen years between Barabbas and Herod and Mariamne did not wash this quality from Lagerkvist's fiction. He is reported to have said at one point, ‘I constantly conduct a dialogue with myself; one book answers the other’.¹⁹

The style of both novels reflects the theme of ambiguity. The ambiguous language of Barabbas has been noted by many and commented upon fully. It can be represented by the phrase ‘as though’, used to describe Barabbas at Sahuk's crucifixion and at his own ‘… he gave a gasp and sank down on his knees as though in prayer’ (p. 126), and ‘… he said out into the darkness’, as though he were speaking to it: ‘To thee I deliver up my soul’ (p. 149). Such tentative language is also characteristic of Herod and Mariamne. The narrative continually repeats words such as ‘yet’, ‘perhaps’, ‘surely’ and ‘probably’.²⁰ It continually uses the verbal structure which includes the probable ‘may’: ‘he may have been right’, ‘so far as may be conjectured’, ‘this may have been’. The passive voice sometimes increases the possibility of doubt: ‘It was believed by all who watched the temple rise—and is believed to this day’. Other phrases reflecting uncertainty recur such as ‘One could not be sure. One could never be quite sure’. Even words of certainty are ironically used with uncertain factors: ‘Certainly it promised to be a fair, rich temple’ (emphasis added). One sentence describing Herod's life illustrates well the continual layering of ambiguous language: ‘A vicious life, no doubt; yet perhaps not exactly for the reasons given by the people’ (p. 19).

One of the features of Barabbas which prevents the scepticism from controlling the novel, other than the attraction of belief, is the possibility of resurrection. The bleakness of Herod and Mariamne is also countered by more than its attraction of love. There are nearly as many deaths in Herod and Mariamne as in Barabbas; in fact, the darkness, the sense of death as pure extinction, is strong. However, even though no one is resurrected, someone is, at the end, born.²¹ And not just anyone, but Jesus, already escaping death at the powerful hand of Herod, the cause of all the other deaths in the novel. Perhaps some would view this as a possibility of ‘saving grace’. Victory over death some may see represented in the scene of the threesome foiling the great Herod by a trip to Egypt. However, the novel lends no support to this causality.

If Lagerkvist's work indeed answers itself, and if, in the case of Herod and Mariamne, the characters are fewer and less complex while continuing Lagerkvistian ambiguity, how does the novel with a pre-incarnation setting fit into the total fiction? It has been termed an ‘independent epilogue’, ‘a variation of the major themes’ of Lagerkvist's work²² and ‘an underscoring of the theme of the separation of man from God’.²³ The first novel after the crucifixion pentology (as the five preceding novels beginning with Barabbas have been labelled) portrays the same difficulties, searches, painful perplexities, and, ambiguities of the human condition that are portrayed in the earlier fiction.

By moving the characters from AD to BC, however, Lagerkvist has accomplished much more. D. G. Kehl's incorrect statement should alert the reader to the problem. He claims that ‘the controlling obsessive symbol of the crucifixion appears in some form in all Lagerkvist's novels’.²⁴ But it does not. That is the point. By placing the novel in an era before Christ, Lagerkvist has removed Christ from inside the circle of man's quest to somewhere outside this circle. For Barabbas, Jesus was the problem which nagged him until his own death. Herod's dealings with the star followers, however, are subordinate to his central concern for his own death and his memories of Mariamne. The novel subordinates the birth to Herod's death. Christ may be one aspect of the total picture, but he is not a significant variable in the human equation.

In addition, the unique contribution of Herod and Mariamne to the whole of Lagerkvist's fiction suggests itself by the more extreme and less complex characterizations of the two characters. One might wonder if the quest for meaning and happiness in Lagerkvist's fictional world was complicated even further by the arrival of Christianity. Did life become more ambiguous and even less certain as divine characteristics, before reserved for consideration in temples and dogmas, became mixed with human characteristics in a man claiming to be God? Is it easier and more clear when love can be aspired for from humans and when worship and obedience can be given to God in temples? Does the incarnation muddy waters already tumultuous with human dilemmas? Mankind is a mixture of good and evil. Herod and Mariamne may coalesce more of one quality within themselves than another, but it is love they are immediately concerned with, not the concept of love resulting from belief about someone who died, who might have risen, and who might have been God. In the world before Christ in Lagerkvist's fiction, the human dilemma is seen more clearly. As a self-confessed ‘religious atheist’, Lagerkvist does not leave God out of the picture. Herod, after all, builds a temple, and tries to kill a baby familiar to the readers as ‘Immanuel’ (God with us). Yet, Lagerkvist in Herod and Mariamne relegates Jesus to a less significant role in the story, and may, therefore, be making a statement about the elements which contribute to man's confusion in an age of crisis.

The human equation is no simple formula, and Lagerkvist knows it. He implies in all his fiction that it may require a ‘higher calculus’ than mankind knows in order to solve it satisfactorily. He may be suggesting with his last novel that Jesus is perhaps a variable in the equation rather than a constant, and not a significant one at that. In a century born in crisis and reared in conflict, the word crisis doesn't cause the sharp pain it once did. But like a bad tooth, the ache is still there. Lagerkvist prods his readers and probes the ache of the human dilemma, sometimes roughly, sometimes gently, reminding them always that suffering, struggling, and searching is the triple heritage of Christianity and crisis.

Notes

1. Pär Lagerkvist, Herod and Mariamne, translated by Naomi Walford (New York: Knopf, 1968), p. 116. Further references to this novel are included in the text.

2. Alfred Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, 8th ed., II (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1897), p. 577. Edersheim speculates whether his name ‘Son of the Father’ may have been a part of the political pretence, ‘a political Anti-Christ’, since he was suggested by Pilate as the people's choice rather than one of the two who were finally crucified with Jesus. Pierson Parker speculates that his father might have been a leader in Jewish religious circles, ‘Barabbas’, The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, I, (New York: Abingdon Press, 1962).

3. Edersheim, I, p. 125.

4. Samuel Sandmel, ‘Herod’, The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, II, p. 589.

5. Edersheim, I, p. 120.

6. Edersheim, I, p. 111.

7. Pär Lagerkvist, Barabbas, translated by Alain Blair (New York: Bantam, 1951), p. 78. Further references to this novel are included in the text.

8. The desert lives of Barabbas and Herod might be refreshed by symbolic springs also present in Lagerkvist's fiction. Apparently, it is a symbol which recurs in his poetry and fiction and is, according to Gunnel Malmstrom, ‘a pure mystical longing for … something other than man’, ‘The Hidden God’, Scandinavica, 10 Supplement (1971), 64-65. The spring in Herod and Mariamne occurs at the end of the novel as miraculous spring water in a jar given to the newborn king by one of the star followers. Irene Scobbie logically maintains that the spring water gift, and the other two gifts of a thistle sprung up in the desert, and a pebble worn smooth by the vast movements of sand, represent the hope and aspiration of man, particularly the newly arrived son of man, to ‘liberate himself from spiritual isolation’ as Herod had been unable to do. ‘An Interpretation of Lagerkvist's Mariamne’, Scandinavian Studies, 45 (1972), 133.

9. Adele Bloch makes a puzzling comment in this regard. She contends that some of Lagerkvist's characters are reprobates, particularly the Dwarf, Barabbas, and Herod, ‘who belong to the ancient red-haired progeny of Cain, Esau and Judas, sinners and sinned against, firebrands endowed with Promethean traits’ in ‘The Mythical Female in the Fictional Works of Pär Lagerkvist’, International Fiction Review, 1, No. 1 (1974), 50. Part of the difficulty with Ms Bloch's statement is that, although Esau is known to have had red hair, there seems to be no indication in scripture or folk material that Cain or Judas had red hair. Both are known for their violence and treachery, however. One verification for Ms Bloch's inclusion of the Dwarf in her list comes from Louis Ginzberg's The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publishing Society of America, 1954). According to Ginzberg, ‘Some of the Cainites are giants, some of them are dwarfs’ (Vol. 1, p. 114).

10. Irene Scobbie, ‘The Significance of Lagerkvist's Dwarf’, Scandinavica, 10 Supplement (1971), 35.

11. Roy Swanson, ‘Lagerkvist's Dwarf and the Redemption of Evil’, Discourse 8 (1970), 195.

12. Judith Sloman's comments are instructive: ‘Lagerkvist shows his characters who search for certainty as having undergone a symbolic death, which ironically threw them into consciousness of life. Having died by realizing that they could have died, they have lost the instinctive ability to make contact with other people and spiritually they are as alien as Lazarus’. ‘Existentialism in Pär Lagerkvist and Isaac Bashevis Singer’, The Minnesota Review, 5 (1966), 211.

13. Robert Spector claims that Mariamne's love suggests divine love since she needs no temple, the people receive love from her, she is selfless, she has an inner beauty which stuns Herod much the way that Paul was struck and on the same road to Damascus, and she is as remote from Herod's understanding as God is from man's. Pär Lagerkvist (New York: Twayne, 1973), pp. 134-135.

14. Many aspects of Mariamne's effect on Herod are similar to Esther's influence upon King Ahasuerus. Louis Ginzberg explains legendary characteristics of Esther which fit the presentation of Mariamne. The name Esther means ‘she who conceals’ like the secretive essence of Mariamne. The silvery qualities of Mariamne can be associated with the moon, and Ginzberg reports that some Hebrew sources reveal that the moon ‘became a symbol of Israel and the pious’ (V, p. 34). He says also that Esther was known for her good deeds and that they spread her fame abroad even more than her beauty. In fact, her beauty was a beauty of goodness primarily. Finally, Esther's other name, Hadasah, means myrtle, symbolizing the pious because of its green colour all year long. ‘Above all’, Ginzberg states, ‘she was the hidden light that suddenly shone upon Israel in his rayless darkness’ (IV, p. 25).

15. Roy Swanson in ‘Lagerkvist's Dwarf and the Redemption of Evil’, shrewdly observes: ‘One cannot, however, enter the lists unless he knows evil (his opponent) and love (his weapon). Inasmuch as his opponent and weapon are both parts of his being, his fight is like that of a person deploying forces in his own body against an organic disease’ (p. 197). Since this knowledge never comes to Mariamne, she is disadvantaged in the struggle.

16. D. G. Kehl, ‘The Chiaroscuro World of Pär Lagerkvist’, Modern Fiction Studies 15 (1959), 241-250.

17. Adolph B. Benson, ‘Pär Lagerkvist: Nobel Laureate’, College English 13 (1952), 419.

18. Spector, p. 70.

19. Quoted by Malmstrom, p. 57.

20. All examples of language ambiguity given here occur in the first section of the novel, the first twenty-one pages, and are representative of the whole.

21. Up until this point in the novel, the reader observes a childless world. Despite the children that the historical Herod fathered (even by Mariamne), the Herod of Lagerkvist produces no progeny. Barabbas had fathered a child by the girl with the hare-lip, but the child had been stillborn. Perhaps sterility can be associated with the world of searching, and often cruel, humanity.

22. Malmstrom, p. 58.

23. Spector, p. 136.

24. Kehl, p. 245.