person
Herod
also: Ирод
The biblical king associated with the Massacre of the Innocents (Matthew 2), invoked here alongside Cain as one of the two proverbial bywords for monstrous cruelty that the mother reports the neighbors using of her son.
Reading notes
- At the Mill §47 Каин и Ирод
Cain, the first murderer of the Bible (Genesis 4; see also), and Herod, the biblical king associated with the Massacre of the Innocents (Matthew 2) -- paired here as the two most proverbial figures of fratricidal and infanticidal cruelty in the Russian folk-Christian imagination, the harshest possible names the mother reports the neighbors giving her son.