There was in the days of Herod, the king of Judea, a certain priest named Zacharias, of the priestly division of Abijah. He had a wife of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth.
Herod ... This ruler is the one known historically as Herod the Great, a savage Idumean, who had acquired the kingship of several provinces in Palestine from the Roman Senate, influenced by Octavius, to whom Herod had given large sums of money.  He was a descendent of Esau and fully as profane as his progenitor.  Technically, he reigned from 40 B.C. to the year of his death in 4 B.C.; but his actual control of the country dates from 37 B.C.[7] The event narrated here occurred in either 7 B.C. or 5 B.C., depending upon the exact date assigned to the birth of our Lord. Dummelow favored 6 B.C.,[8] and Boles 4 B.C.[9] The reckoning of time from the birth of Christ began a long time after the event of his birth, the error remaining long undetected; and this accounts for the paradox that Christ was born in a year called B.C.!  The uncertainty of the exact year stems from Matthew's statement that Herod slew all the children "two years old" and under  (Matthew 2:16).  If the two years were those lost by the Wise Men in finding Jesus (which would suppose the star to have appeared two years before he was born), then the date would be 4 B.C.; but if the two years represented the two-year period while Herod searched for Jesus, then his birth would have been no later than 6 B.C. One thing is sure, Jesus was born before the death of Herod on April 1,4 B.C.