Josephus by Norman Bentwich

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[Footnote 1: Ant. XIII. vii. 3.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. XII. ix. 7. The ruins of the Temple were unearthed a
few years ago by Professor Flinders Petrie.]

[Footnote 3: Ant. XIII. iii.]

[Footnote 4: I Macc, xvi, 23.]

From this period onwards till the end of the _Antiquities_, Josephus had
no longer any considerable Jewish document to guide him, nor have we any
Jewish history by which to check him. For an era of two hundred years he
was more completely dependent on Greek sources, and it is just in this
part of the work where he is most valuable or, we should rather say,
indispensable. Save for a few scattered references in pagan historians,
orators, and poets, he is our only authority for Jewish history at the
time. It is, therefore, the more unfortunate that he makes no
independent research, and takes up no independent attitude. For the most
part he transcribes the pagan writer before him, unable or unwilling to
look any deeper. And he tells us only of the outward events of Jewish
history, of the court intrigues and murders, of the wars against the
tottering empires of Egypt and Syria, of the ignoble feuds within the
palace. Of the more vital and, did we but know it, the profoundly
interesting social and religious history of the time, of the development
of the Pharisee and Sadducee sects, we hear little, and that little is
unreliable and superficial. Josephus reproduces the deficiencies of his
sources in their dealings with Jewish events. He brings no original
virtue compensating for the careful study which they made of the larger
history in which the affairs of Judea were a small incident.

The foundation of his work in the latter half of book xiii and
throughout books xiv-xvii is Nicholas, who had devoted two special books
to the life of Herod, and by way of introduction to this had dealt more
fully with the preceding Jewish princes.[1] We must therefore be wary of
imputing to Josephus the opinions he expresses upon the different Jewish
sects in this part of the _Antiquities_. He introduces them first during
the reign of Jonathan, with the classification which had already been
made in the _Wars_:[2] the Pharisees as the upholders of Providence or
fate and freewill, the Essenes as absolute determinists, the Sadducees
as absolute deniers of the influence of fate on human affairs.[3] The
next mention of the Pharisees occurs in the reign of Hyrcanus,[4] when
he states that they were the king's worst enemies.

"They are one of the sects of the Jews, and they have so great a power
over the multitude that, when they say anything against the king or
against the high priest, they are presently believed.... Hyrcanus had
been a disciple of their teaching; but he was angered when one of them,
Eleazar, a man of ill temper and prone to seditious practices,
reproached him for holding the priesthood, because, it was alleged, his
mother had been a captive in the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, and he,
therefore, was disqualified."

[Footnote 1: Buechler, Sources of Josephus for the History of Syria,
J.Q.R. ix. 311.]

[Footnote 2: B.J. II. viii.]

[Footnote 3: Ant. XIII. v. 9.]

[Footnote 4: Ant. XIII. x. 5.]

This account is taken from a source unfriendly to the Pharisees. Though
the story is based apparently on an old Jewish tradition, since we find
it told of Alexander Jannaeus in the Talmud,[1] it looks as if Josephus
obtained his version from some author that shared the aristocratic
prejudices against the democratic leaders. The reign of Hyrcanus had
been described by a Hellenistic-Jewish chronicler or a non-Jewish
Hellenist, from whom Josephus borrowed a glowing eulogy,[2] with which
he sums it up: "He lived happily, administered the government in an
excellent way for thirty-one years, and was esteemed by God worthy of
the three greatest privileges, the principate, the high priesthood, and
prophecy." To the account of the Pharisees is appended a paragraph,
seemingly the historian's own work, where he explains that "the
Pharisees have delivered to the people the tradition of the fathers,
while the Sadducees have rejected it and claim that only the written
word is binding. And concerning these things great disputes have arisen
among them; the Sadducees are able to persuade none but the rich, while
the Pharisees have the multitude on their side." Again, in the account
of the reign of Queen Alexandra, he represents the Pharisees as powerful
but seditious, and causing constant friction, and ascribes the fall of
the royal house to the queen's compliance with those who bore ill-will
to the family.

[Footnote 1: Comp. I. Levi, Talmudic Sources of Jewish History, R.E.J.
xxxv. 219; I. Friedlaender, J.Q.R., n.s. iv. 443_ff_.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. XIII. x. 7.]

Whenever the opportunity offers, Josephus brings in references to Jewish
history from pagan sources. He quotes Timagenes' estimate of Aristobulus
as a good man who was of great service to the Jews and gained them the
country of Iturea; and he notes Strabo's agreement with Nicholas upon
the invasion of Judea by Ptolemy Lathyrus.[1] General history takes an
increasingly larger part in the account of the warlike Alexander
Jannaeus and the queen Alexandra, and reference is made to the consuls
of Rome contemporary with the reigns of Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, in
order to bring Jewish affairs into relation with those of the Power
which henceforth played a critical part in them.

[Footnote 1: Ant. XIII. xii. 6.]

Josephus marks the new era on which he was entering by a fresh preface
to book xiv. His aim, he says, is "to omit no facts either through
ignorance or laziness, because we are dealing with a history of events
with which most people are unacquainted on account of their distance
from our times; and we purpose to do it with appropriate beauty of
style, so that our readers may entertain the knowledge of what we write
with some agreeable satisfaction and pleasure. But the principal thing
to aim at is to speak truly."[1] It is not impossible that the prelude
is based on something in Nicholas; but it is turned against him; for in
the same chapter Josephus controverts his predecessor for the statement
that "the Idumean Antipater [the father of Herod] was sprung from the
principal Jews who returned to Judea from Babylon." The assertion, he
says, was made to gratify Herod, who by the revolution of fortune came
to be king of the Jews. He shows here some national feeling, but in
general he accepts Nicholas, and borrows doubtless from him the details
of Pompey's invasion of Judea and of the siege of Jerusalem. He appeals
as well to Strabo and the Latin historian Titus Livius.[2] But though it
is likely that he had made an independent study of parts of Strabo,
since he drags in several extracts from his history that are not quite
in place,[3] there is no reason to think he read Livy or any other Latin
author. He would have found reference to the work in the diligent
Nicholas. We may discern the hand of Nicholas, too, in the praise of
Pompey for his piety in not spoiling the Temple of the holy vessels.[4]
Josephus writes altogether in the tone of an admirer of Rome's
occupation, attributing the misery which came upon Jerusalem to Hyrcanus
and Aristobulus.

[Footnote 1: Ant. XIV. i. 1.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. XIV. iv. 3; vi. 4.]

[Footnote 3: Comp. Ant. XIV. vii. 2; viii. 3.]

[Footnote 4: Ant. XIV. iv. 5.]

Thanks to his copious sources, he is able to give a detailed account of
the relation of the Jews to Julius Caesar and of the decrees which were
made in their favor at his instance. It has been conjectured with much
probability that Josephus obtained his series of documents from
Nicholas, who had collected them for the purpose of defending the Jews
of Asia Minor in the inquiry which Marcus Agrippa conducted during the
reign of Herod.[1] He says that he will set down the decrees that are
treasured in the public places of the cities, and those which are still
extant in the Capitol of Rome, "so that all the rest of mankind may know
what regard the kings of Asia and Europe have had for the Jewish
people." In a subsequent book, when he is recounting the events of
Herod's reign,[2] Josephus sets forth a further series of decrees in
favor of the Jews, issued by Caesar Augustus and his lieutenant Marcus
Agrippa. These likewise he probably derived from Nicholas, who was the
court advocate and court chronicler at the time they were promulgated.
But he enlarges on his motive for giving them at length, pointing to
them with pride as a proof of the high respect in which the Jews were
held by the heads of the Roman Empire before the disaster of the war.
Though in his own day they were fallen to a low estate, at one time they
had enjoyed special favor:

"And I frequently mention these decrees in order to reconcile other
peoples to us and to take away the causes of that hatred which
unreasonable men bear us. As for our customs, he continues, each nation
has its own, and in almost every city we meet with differences; but
natural justice is most agreeable to the advantage of all men equally,
and to this our laws have the greatest regard, and thereby render us
benevolent and friendly to all men, so that we may expect the like
return from others, and we may remind them that they should not esteem
difference of institutions a sufficient cause of alienation, but join
with us in the pursuit of virtue and righteousness, for this belongs to
all men in common."[3]

[Footnote 1: Comp. Bloch, Die Quellen des Flavius Josephus.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. XVI. ii.]

[Footnote 3: Comp. below, p, 234.]

The Jewish rising and defeat had increased the odium of the Greco-Roman
world towards the peculiar people, and the captive in the gilded prison
was fain to dwell on their past glory in order to cover the wretchedness
of their present.

Josephus claims to have copied some of the decrees from the archives in
the Roman Capitol.[1] The library was destroyed with the Capitol itself
during the civil war in 69.[2] It was restored, it is true, during the
reign of Vespasian, and it is not impossible that the old decrees were
saved. But Josephus might have collected from the Jewish communities
those documents which he did not find ready to hand in Nicholas, if they
formed part of an apology for the Jews of Antioch in 70 C.E. At least
there is no good reason to doubt their authenticity, and they are in
quite a different class from the letters and decrees attributed to the
Hellenistic sovereigns, which lack all authority.

[Footnote 1: Ant. XIV. x. 20.]

[Footnote 2: Comp. Tac. Hist. iii. 71.]

The story of Herod's life, which is set out in great detail in these
books, has more dramatic unity than any other part of the _Antiquities_.
It bears to the whole work the relation which the story of the siege of
Jerusalem bears to the rest of the _Wars_. Josephus seems to manifest
suddenly a power of vivid narrative and psychological analysis, to which
he is elsewhere a stranger. But at the same time, where the story is
most vivid and dramatic, its framework is most pagan. The Greco-Roman
ideas of fate and nemesis, which dominate the shorter account of the
king's life in the _Wars_, are still the underlying motives. The reason
for the dramatic power and the pagan frame are one and the same:
Josephus uses here a full source, and that source is a pagan writer.

It is apparent at the same time that Josephus had a better acquaintance
with the historical literature about Herod than when he wrote the
_Wars_, and that he compared his various authorities and exercised some
judgment in composing his picture. For example, in relating the murder
of the Hasmonean Hyrcanus, he first gives the account which he found in
Herod's memoirs, designed of course to exculpate the king, and then sets
out the version of other historians, who allege that Herod laid a snare
for the last of the Maccabean princes. Josephus proudly contrasts his
own critical attitude towards Herod with the studied partisanship of
Nicholas,[1] who wrote in Herod's lifetime, and in order to please him
and his courtiers,

"touching on nothing but what tended to his glory, and openly excusing
many of his notorious crimes and diligently concealing them. We may,
indeed, say much by way of excuse for Nicholas, because he was not so
much writing a history for others as doing a service for the king. But
we, who come of a family closely connected with the Hasmonean kings, and
have an honorable rank, think it unbecoming to say anything that is
false about them, and have described their actions in an upright and
unvarnished manner. And though we reverence many of Herod's descendants,
who still bear rule, yet we pay greater regard to truth, though we may
incur their displeasure by so doing."

[Footnote 1: Ant. XIV. xvi. 7.]

It was not so difficult for the historian to write impartially of Herod
as to write impartially of Vespasian and Titus. At the same time
Josephus, though in these books more critical, seldom escapes the yoke
of facts, and says little of the inner conditions of the people. Of
Hillel we do not hear the name, and Shammai is only mentioned, if indeed
he, and not Shemaya, is disguised under the name of Sameas, as the
member of the Sanhedrin who denounced Herod.[1]

[Footnote 1: Ant. XV. i. 1. Schlatter ingeniously conjectures that
Pollio, who is mentioned as predicting to the Sanhedrin, that this Herod
would be their enemy if they acquitted him, is identical with Abtalion,
of whom the Talmud tells a similar story. [Greek: pollion] may be an
error for [Greek: Eudalion] as the Hebrew name would be transcribed in
Greek.]

The speeches, which are put into the mouth of the king on various
occasions, are rhetorical declamations in the Greek style, which must be
derived either from Nicholas or from Herod's Memoirs, to which the
historian had access through his intimacy with the royal family. Yet,
prosaic as the treatment is, it has provided the picture of the
"magnificent barbarian" which has inspired many writers and artists of
later ages. It is from the Jewish point of view that it is most wanting.
He does indeed say that Herod transgressed the laws of his country, and
violated the ancient tradition by the introduction of foreign practices,
which fostered great sins, through the neglect of the observances that
used to lead the multitude to piety. By the games, the theater, and the
amphitheater, which he instituted at Jerusalem, he offended Jewish
sentiment; "for while foreigners were amazed and delighted at the
vastness of his displays, to the native Jews all this amounted to a
dissolution of the traditions for which they had so great a
veneration."[1] And he points out that the Jewish conspiracy against him
in the middle of his reign arose because "in the eyes of the Jewish
leaders, he merely pretended to be their king, but was in fact the
manifest enemy of their nation." It has been suggested that Justus of
Tiberias supplied him with this Jewish view of Herod, which is
unparalleled in the _Wars_. But in another passage, where he must be
following an Herodian and anti-Pharisaic source, he makes some remarks
in quite an opposite spirit, as if the Pharisees were in the wrong, and
provoked the king. He says of them: "They were prone to offend
princes;[2] they claimed to foresee things, and were suddenly elated to
break out into open war." He calls them also Sophists,[3] the scornful
name which the Greeks gave to their popular lecturers of morality.

[Footnote 1: Ant. XV. viii. 1.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. XVII. ii. 8.]

[Footnote 3: Ant. XVII. vi. 2.]

In dealing with Herod's character, Josephus is more discriminating than
in the _Wars_. He sums him up as "cruel towards all men equally, a slave
to his passions, and claiming to be above the righteous law: yet was he
favored by fortune more than any man, for from a private station he was
raised to be a king."[1] One piece of characterization may he quoted,[2]
which is not the less interesting because we may suspect that it is
stolen:

"But this magnificent temper and that submissive behavior and liberality
which he exercised towards Caesar and the most powerful men at Rome,
obliged him to transgress the customs of his nation and to set aside
many of their laws, by building cities after an extravagant manner, and
erecting Temples, not in Judea indeed, for that would not have been
borne, since it is forbidden to pay any honors to images or
representations of animals after the manner of the Greeks, but in the
country beyond our boundaries and in the cities thereof. The apology
which he made to the Jews was this, that all was done not of his own
inclination, but at the bidding of others, in order to please Caesar and
the Romans, as though he set more store on the honor of the Romans than
the Jewish customs; while in fact he was considering his own glory, and
was very ambitious to leave great monuments of his government to
posterity: whence he was so zealous in building such splendid cities,
and spent vast sums of money in them."

[Footnote 1: Ant. XVII. viii. 1.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. XV. ix. 5.]

He bursts out, too, with unusual passion against Herod for his law
condemning thieves to exile, because it was a violation of the Biblical
law, "and involved the dissolution of our ancestral traditions."

If the account of the Jewish spiritual movement at a time of great
spiritual awakening is meager, the picture of Herod's great buildings,
despite occasional confusion and vagueness, is full and valuable. He
gives us an excellent description of Caesarea and Sebaste, the two
cities which the king established as a compliment to the Roman Emperor,
and an account of the Temple and the fortress of Antonia, which he
himself knew so well. Of the Temple we have another description, in the
Mishnah, which in the main agrees with Josephus. Where the two differ,
however, the preference cannot be given to the writer who had grown up
in the shadow of the building, and might have been expected to know its
every corner.[1] As we have seen in the _Wars_, he was in topography as
in other things under the influence of Greco-Roman models.

[Footnote 1: Comp. George A. Smith, Jerusalem, ii. 495 _ff_.]

Josephus did not enjoy the advantage of a full chronicle to guide him
much beyond the death of Herod. Nicholas died, or ceased to write, in
the reign of Antipater, who succeeded his father. Apparently he had no
successor who devoted himself to recording the affairs of the Jewish
court. Hence, though the events of the troubled beginning of Antipater's
reign are dealt with at the same length as those of Herod, and we have a
vivid story of the Jewish embassy that went to Rome to petition for the
deposition of the king, the history afterwards becomes fragmentary. Such
as it is, it manifests a Roman flavor. The nationalists are termed
robbers, and the pseudo-Messiahs are branded as self-seeking
impostors.[1] After an enumeration of various pretenders that sought to
make themselves independent rulers, there is a sudden jump from the
first to the tenth year of Archelaus, who was accused of barbarous and
tyrannical practices and banished by the Roman Emperor to Gaul. His
kingdom was then added to the province of Syria. Josephus dwells on the
story of two dreams which occurred to the king and his wife Glaphyra,
and justifies himself because his discourse is concerning kings, and
also because of the advantage to be drawn from it for the assurance both
of the immortality of the soul and the Providence of God in human
affairs. "And if anybody does not believe such stories, let him keep his
own opinion, but let him not stand in the way of another who finds in
them an encouragement to virtue."

[Footnote 1: Ant. XVII. xiii. 2.]

The last three books of the _Antiquities_ reveal the weaknesses of
Josephus as an historian: his disregard of accuracy, his tendency to
exaggeration, his lack of proportion, and his mental subservience. He
had no longer either the Scriptures or a Greek chronicler to guide him.
He depended in large part for his material on oral sources and scattered
memoirs, and he is not very successful in eking it out so as to produce
the semblance of a connected narrative. His chapters are in part a
miscellany of notes, and the construction is clumsy. The writer
confesses that he was weary of his task, but felt impelled to wind it
up. Yet, just because we are so ignorant of the events of Jewish history
at the period, and because the period itself is so critical and
momentous, these books (xviii-xx) are among the most important which he
has left, and on the whole they deal rather more closely than their
predecessors with the affairs of the Jewish people. The palace intrigues
do not fill the stage so exclusively, and some of the digressions carry
us into byways of Jewish history.

At the very outset[1] Josephus devotes a chapter to a fuller delineation
than he has given in any other place of the various sects that
flourished at the time. The account, ampler though it is than the
others, does not reveal the true inwardness of the different religious
positions. He repeats here what he says elsewhere about the Pharisaic
doctrine of predestination tempered by freewill, but he enlarges
especially on the difference between the parties in their ideas about
the future life.[2] The Pharisees believe that souls have an immortal
vigor, and that they will be rewarded or punished in the next world
accordingly as they have lived virtuously or wickedly in this life; the
wicked being bound in everlasting prisons, while the good have power to
live again. The Sadducees, on the other hand, assert that the souls die
with the bodies, and the Essenes teach the immortality of souls and set
great store on the rewards of righteousness. Their various ideas are
wrapped up in Greco-Roman dress, to suit his readers, and the doctrine
of resurrection ascribed to the Pharisees is almost identical with that
held by the neo-Pythagoreans of Rome.[3] But Josephus' account is more
reliable when he refers to the divergent attitudes of the sects to the
tradition.

"The Pharisees strive to observe reason's dictates in their conduct, and
at the same time they pay great respect to their ancestors; and they
have such influence over the people because of their virtuous lives and
their discourses that they are their friends in divine worship, prayers,
and sacrifice. The Sadducees do not regard the observance of anything
beyond what the law enjoins them, but since their doctrine is held by
the few, when they hold the judicial office, they are compelled to
addict themselves to the notions of the Pharisees, because the mass
would not otherwise tolerate them. The Essenes live apart from the
people in communistic groups, and exceed all other men in virtue and
righteousness. They send gifts to the Temple, but do not sacrifice, on
which account they are excluded from the common court of the Temple."

[Footnote 1: Ant. XVIII. i. 1.]

[Footnote 2: Comp. B.J. II. viii.]

[Footnote 3: Comp. Vergil, Aeneid, vi.]

Lastly, Josephus turns to the fourth sect, the Zealots, whose founder
was Judas the Galilean:

"These men agree in all other things with the Pharisees, but they have
an inviolable attachment to liberty, and they say that God is to be
their only Ruler and Lord. Moreover they do not fear any kind of death,
nor do they heed the death of their kinsmen and friends, nor can any
fear of the kind make them acknowledge anybody as sovereign."

Josephus, however, cannot refrain from imputing low motives to those who
belonged to the party opposed to himself and hated of the Romans. "They
planned robberies and murders of our principal men," he says, "in
pretense for the public welfare, but in reality in hopes of gain for
themselves." And he saddles them with the responsibility for all the
calamities that were to come. About the Messianic hope, which appears to
have inspired them, he is compulsorily silent.

The historical record that follows is very sketchy. We have a bare list
of procurators and high priests down to the time of Pontius Pilate, a
notice of the foundation of Tiberias by the tetrarch Herod, and an
irrelevant account of the death of Phraates, the king of the Parthians,
and of Antiochus of Commagene, who was connected by marriage with the
Herodian house. Still there is rather more detail than in the
corresponding summary in the second book of the _Wars_, and Josephus
must in the interval have lighted on a fuller source than he had
possessed in his first historical essay. It is not impossible that the
new authority was again Justus of Tiberias. Of the unrest in the
governorship of Pontius Pilate he has more to say, but the genuineness
of the passage referring to the trial and death of Jesus, which is dealt
with elsewhere,[1] has been doubted by modern critics. It is followed in
the text by a long account of a scandal connected with the Isis worship
at Rome, which led to the expulsion of Jews from the capital. In this
way the chronicler wanders on between bare chronology and digression,
until he reaches the reign of Agrippa, when he again finds written
sources to help him. The romance of Agrippa's rise from a bankrupt
courtier to the ruler of a kingdom is treated with something of the same
full detail as the events of Herod's career, and probably the historian
enjoyed here the use of royal memoirs. He may have obtained material
also from the historical works of Philo of Alexandria, which were partly
concerned with the same epoch. He refers explicitly to the embassy which
the Alexandrian Jews sent to the Roman Emperor to appeal for the
rescission of the order to set up in the synagogue the Imperial image,
at the head of which went Philo, "a man eminent on all accounts, brother
to Alexander the Alabarch, and not unskilled in philosophy." Bloch[2]
indeed is of the opinion that the later historian did not use his
Alexandrian predecessor, either in this or any other part of his
writings, and points out certain differences of fact between the two
accounts; but in view of the references to Philo and the fact that
Josephus subsequently wrote two books of apology, one of which was
expressly directed in answer to Philo's bitter opponent Apion, it is at
least probable that he was acquainted with Philo's narrative. He may,
however, have used it only to supplement the memoirs of the Herodian
house, which served him as a chief source. Josephus devotes less
attention to the Alexandrian embassy than to the efforts of the
Palestinian Jews to obtain a rescission of the similar decree which
Petronius, the governor of Syria, was sent to enforce in Jerusalem. His
account is devised to glorify the part which Agrippa played. The prince
appears as a kind of male Esther, endangering his own life to save his
people; and indeed higher critics have been found to suggest that the
Biblical book of Esther was written around the events of the reign of
Gaius.

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