Herod Agrippa I — grandson of Herod the Great, the king who had killed St. James the Greater and arrested Peter — had a dispute with the people of Tyre and Sidon, who came in delegation to ask peace. Herod received them at the Roman amphitheatre at Caesarea Maritima on an appointed day, clad in royal robes embroidered with silver that caught the morning sun. He took his seat on the rostrum and made a public oration.
The crowd, partly courtiers, shouted: 'The voice of a god, and not of a man!' Herod accepted the acclamation as his due. Immediately an angel of the Lord smote him, 'because he did not give God the glory.' He was carried back to his palace; he died after five days in great agony, 'eaten by worms' (probably perforation of the gut by intestinal parasites complicated by sepsis). The Jewish historian Josephus, writing for non-Christian Roman readers, independently records the same event (Antiquities 19.343–352) with the same essential details — the silver robes catching the sun, the acclamation as a god, the sudden severe abdominal pain, the five days of agony, the death. The double attestation is among the strongest extra-biblical confirmations of an Acts-of-the-Apostles narrative.