Josephus by Norman Bentwich

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[Footnote 1: De Leg, 82.]

[Footnote 2: It is interesting that the wife of the first Roman governor
of Britain was accused, in 57 C.E., of "foreign superstition," and is
said to have lived a melancholy life (Tac. Ann. xiii. 32), which may
mean that she had adopted Jewish practices.]

[Footnote 3: C. Ap. i. 5.]

[Footnote 4: Sukkah, 22, quoted in Vogelstein and Rieger, Geschichte der
Juden in Rom, pp. 28 and 29.]

In the palace of the Caesars Josephus became a reputable Greco-Roman
chronicler, deliberately accommodating himself to the tastes of the
conquerors of his people, and deliberately seeking, as Renan said, "to
Hellenize his compatriots," i.e. to describe them from a Hellenized
point of view. He achieved his ambition, if such it was, to be the
classical authority upon the early history of the Jews. His record of
his people survived through the ages, and his works were included in the
public libraries of Rome, while among the Christians they had for
centuries a place next the Bible.

As a writer, Josephus has, by the side of some glaring defects,
considerable merits: immense industry, power of vivid narrative, an
ability for using authorities, and at times a certain eloquence. But as
a man he has few qualities to attract and nothing of the heroic. He was
mediocre in character and mind, and for such there is no admiration. It
may be admitted that he lived in hard times, when it required great
strength of character for a Jew born, as he was, in the aristocratic
Romanizing section of the nation, to stand true to the Jewish people and
devote his energies to their desperate cause. He may have honestly
believed that submission to Rome was the truest wisdom; but he placed
himself in a false position by associating himself with the
insurrection. And while his national feeling led him later to attempt to
defend his people against calumny and ignorance, the conditions under
which he labored made against the production of a true and spirited
history. Yet if he does not appear worthy of admiration, we must beware
of judging him harshly; and there is deep pathos in the fact that he was
compelled in writing to be his own worst detractor. The combination,
which the autobiographical account reveals, of egoism and self-seeking,
of cowardice and vanity, of pious profession and cringing
obsequiousness, of vaunted magnanimity and spiteful malice to his foes,
of religious scruples and selfish cunning, points to a meanness of
conduct which he was forced to assume by circumstances, but which, it is
suggested, was not an expression of his true character. The document of
shame was wrung from him by his past. He might have been a reliable
historian had he not been called on to play a part in action. But the
part he played was ignoble in itself, and it blasted the whole of his
future life and his literary credit. It made his work take the form of
apology, and part of it bear the stamp of deliberate falsehood. His
besetting weakness of egoism led him as a general to betray his
countrymen; as historian of their struggle with Rome, to misrepresent
their patriotism and give a false picture of their ideals. Yet, though
to the Jews of his own day he was a traitor in life and a traducer in
letters, to the Jews of later generations he appears rather as a tragic
figure, struggling to repair his fault of perfidy, and a victim to the
forces of a hostile civilization, which in every age assail his people
intellectually, and which in his day assailed them with crushing might
physically as well as intellectually.

IV

THE WORKS OF JOSEPHUS AND HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS

The Jews, though they are the most historical of peoples, and though
they have always regarded history as the surest revelation of God's
work, have produced remarkably few historians. It is true that a large
part of their sacred literature consists of the national annals, from
the earliest time to the restoration of the nation after its first
destruction, i.e. a period of more than two thousand years. The Book of
Chronicles, as its name suggests, is a systematic summary of the whole
of that period and proves the existence of the historical spirit. But
their very engrossment with the story of their ancestors checked in
later generations the impulse to write about their own times. They saw
contemporary affairs always in the light of the past, and they were more
concerned with revealing the hand of God in events than in depicting the
events themselves. Thus, during the whole Persian period, which extended
over two hundred years, we have but one historical document, the Book of
Esther, to acquaint us with the conditions of the main body of the
Jewish people. The fortunate find, a few years back, of a hoard of
Aramaic papyri at Elephantine has given us an unexpected acquaintance
with the conditions of the Jewish colony in Upper Egypt during the fifth
and fourth centuries, and furnished a new chapter in the history of the
Diaspora. But this is an archeological substitute for literary history.

The conquest of the East by Alexander the Great and the consequent
interchange of Hellenic and Oriental culture gave a great impulse to
historical writing among all peoples. Moved by a cosmopolitan
enthusiasm, each nation was anxious to make its past known to the
others, to assert its antiquity, and to prove that, if its present was
not very glorious, it had at one time played a brilliant part in
civilization. The Greek people, too, with their intense love of
knowledge, were eager to learn the ideas and experiences of the various
nations and races who had now come into their ken.

Hence, on the one hand, there appeared works on universal history by
Greek polymaths, such as Hecataeus of Abdera, Theophrastus, the pupil of
Aristotle, and Ptolemy, the comrade of Alexander; and, on the other
hand, a number of national histories were written, also in Greek, but by
Hellenized natives, such as the Chaldaica of Berosus, the Aegyptiaca of
Manetho, and the Phoenician chronicles of Dius and Menander. The people
of Israel figured incidentally in several of these works, and Manetho
went out of his way to include in the history of his country a lying
account of the Exodus, which was designed to hold up the ancestors of
the Jews to opprobrium. From the Hellenic and philosophical writers they
received more justice. Their remarkable loyalty to their religion and
their exalted conception of the Deity moved partly the admiration,
partly the amazement of these early encyclopedists, who regarded them as
a philosophical people devoted to a higher life. The Hellenistic Jews
were led later by the sympathetic attitude of Hecataeus to add to his
history spurious chapters, in which he was made to deal more
eulogistically with their beliefs and history, and they circulated
oracles and poems in the names of fabled seers of prehistoric
times--Orpheus and the Sibyl--which conveyed some of the religious and
moral teachings of Judaism. Nor were they slow to adapt their own
chronicles for the Greek world or to take their part in the literary
movement of the time. In Palestine, indeed, the Jews remained devoted to
religious thought, and never made history a serious interest. But in
Alexandria, after translating the Scriptures into Greek in the middle of
the third century, they began, in imitation of their neighbors, to
embellish their antiquities in the Greek style, and present them more
thoroughly according to Greek standards of history.

A collection of extracts from the works of the Hellenistic Jews was made
by a Gentile compiler of the first century B.C.E., Alexander, surnamed
Polyhistor. Though his book has perished, portions of it with fragments
of these extracts have been preserved in the chronicles of the
ecclesiastical historian Eusebius, who wrote in the fourth century C.E.
They prove the existence of a very considerable array of historical
writers, who would seem to have been poor scholars of Greek, but
ingenious chronologists and apologists. The earliest of the adapters, of
whose work fragments have been thus preserved to us, is one Demetrius,
who, in the reign of Ptolemy II, at the end of the third century B.C.E.,
wrote a book on the Jewish kings. It was rather a chronology than a
connected narrative, and Demetrius amended the dates given in the Bible
according to a system of his own. This does not appear to have been very
exact, but such as it was it appealed to Josephus, who in places follows
it without question. Chronology was a matter of deep import in that
epoch, because it was one of the most galling and frequent charges
against the Jews that their boasted antiquity was fictitious. To rebut
this attack, the Jewish chroniclers elaborated the chronological
indications of their long history, and brought them into relation with
the annals of their neighbors.

Demetrius is followed by Eupolemus and Artapanus, who treated the Bible
in a different fashion. They freely handled the Scripture narrative, and
methodically embellished it with fictitious additions, for the greater
glory, as they intended, of their people. They imitated the ways of
their opponents, and as these sought to decry their ancestors by
malicious invention, so they contrived to invest them with fictitious
greatness. Eupolemus represents Abraham as the discoverer of Chaldean
astrology, and identifies Enoch with the Greek hero Atlas, to whom the
angel of God revealed the celestial lore. Elsewhere he inserts into the
paraphrase of the Book of Kings a correspondence between Solomon and
Hiram (king of Tyre), in order to show the Jewish hegemony over the
Phoenicians. Artapanus, professing to be a pagan writer, shows how the
Egyptians were indebted to the founders of Israel for their scientific
knowledge and their most prized institutions: Abraham instructed King
Pharethothis in astrology; Joseph taught the Egyptian priests
hieroglyphics, and built the Pyramids; Moses (who is identified with the
Greek seer Musaeus) not only conquered the Ethiopians, and invented
ship-building and philosophy, but taught the Egyptian priests their
deeper wisdom, and was called by them Hermes, because of his skill in
interpreting ([Greek: Hermaeneia]) the holy documents. Fiction fostered
fiction, and the inventions of pagan foes stimulated the exaggerations
of Jewish apologists. The fictitious was mixed with the true, and the
legendary material which Artapanus added to his history passed into the
common stock of Jewish apologetics.

The great national revival that followed on the Maccabean victories
induced both within and without Palestine the composition of works of
contemporary national history. For a period the Jews were as proud of
their present as of their past. It was not only that their princes, like
the kings of other countries, desired to have their great deeds
celebrated, but the whole people was conscious of another God-sent
deliverance and of a clear manifestation of the Divine Power in their
affairs, which must be recorded for the benefit of posterity. The First
Book of the Maccabees, which was originally written in Hebrew, and the
Chronicles of King John Hyrcanus[1] bear witness to this outburst of
patriotic self-consciousness in Palestine; and the Talmud[2] contains a
few fragments of history about the reign of Alexander Jannaeus, which
may have formed part of a larger chronicle. The story of the Maccabean
wars was recorded also at great length by a Hellenistic Jew, Jason of
Cyrene, and it is generally assumed that an abridgment of it has come
down to us in the Second Book of the Maccabees.

[Footnote 1: They are referred to at the end of the book. Comp. I Macc.
xvi. 23f.]

[Footnote 2: Kiddushin, 66a.]

In Palestine, however, the historical spirit did not flourish for long.
The interest in the universal lesson prevailed over that in the
particular fact, and the tradition that was treasured was not of
political events but of ethical and legal teachings. Moral rather than
objective truth was the study of the schools, and when contemporary
events are described, it is in a poetical, rhapsodical form, such as we
find in the Psalms of Solomon, which recount Pompey's invasion of
Jerusalem.[1] The only historical records that appear to have been
regularly kept are the lists of the priests and their genealogy, and a
calendar of fasts and of days on which fasting was prohibited because of
some happy event to be commemorated.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 14.]

In the Diaspora, on the other hand, and especially at Alexandria, which
was the center of Hellenistic Jewry, history was made to serve a
practical purpose. It was a weapon in the struggle the Jews were
continually waging against their detractors, as well as in their
missionary efforts to spread their religion. It became consciously and
essentially apologetic, the end being persuasion rather than truth. Fact
and fiction were inextricably combined, and the difference between them
neglected.

The story of the translation of the Septuagint by the Jewish sages sent
to Alexandria at the invitation of King Ptolemy, which is recounted in
the Letter of Aristeas, is an excellent example of this kind of history.
It is decked out with digressions about the topography of Jerusalem and
the architecture of the Temple, and an imaginative display of Jewish wit
and wisdom at a royal symposium. The Third Book of the Maccabees, which
professes to describe a persecution of the Jews in Egypt under one of
the Ptolemies, is another early example of didactic fiction that has
been preserved to us. The one sober historical work produced by a Jewish
writer between the composition of the two Books of the Maccabees and of
the _Wars_ of Josephus was the account given by Philo of Alexandria of
the Jewish persecutions that took place in the reigns of Tiberius and
Gaius. It was originally contained in five books, of which only the
second and third have been preserved. They deal respectively with the
riots at Alexandria that took place when Flaccus was governor, and with
the Jewish embassy to Gaius when that Emperor issued his order that his
image should be set up in the Temple at Jerusalem and in the great
synagogue of Alexandria. Philo wrote a full account of the events in
which he himself had been called upon to play a part. He is always at
pains to point the moral and enforce the lesson, but his work has a
definite historical value, and contains many valuable details about
Jewish life in the Diaspora.

But if the Jews were somewhat careless of the exact record of their
history, many of the Greek and Roman historians paid attention to it,
some specifically for the purpose of attacking them, others incidentally
in the course of their comprehensive works. The fashion of universal
history continued for some centuries, and works of fifty volumes and
over were more the rule than the exception. These "elephantine books"
were rendered possible because it was the fashion for each succeeding
historian to compile the results of his predecessor's labors, and adopt
it as part of his own monumental work. Distinguished among this school
of writers were Apollodorus of Athens, who in 150 B.C.E. wrote
Chronicles containing the most important events of general history down
to his own time, and Polybius, who was brought as a prisoner from Greece
to Rome in 145 B.C.E., and in his exile wrote a history of the rise of
the Roman Republic, in the course of which he dealt with the early
Jewish relations with Rome. Then, in the first century, there flourished
Posidonius of Apamea (90-50 B.C.E.), a Stoic and a bitter enemy of the
Jews, who continued the work of Polybius down to the year 90, and,
besides, wrote a separate diatribe against Judaism, which he regarded as
a misanthropic atheism. The succession was carried on by Timagenes of
Alexandria, who wrote a very full history of the second and the first
part of the first century.

Among Roman writers of the period that dealt with general affairs were
Asinius Pollio, the friend of Herod, and Titus Livius, who, under the
name of Livy, has become the standard Latin historian for schoolboys.
Josephus refers to both of them as well as to Timagenes, Posidonius, and
Polybius; but as there is no reason to think that he ever tried to
master the earlier authorities, it is probable that he knew them only so
far as they were reproduced in his immediate sources and his immediate
predecessors. The two writers whom he quotes repeatedly and must have
studied are Strabo of Amasea (in Pontus) and Nicholas of Damascus.
Strabo was an author of remarkable versatility and industry. Besides his
geography, the standard work of ancient times on the subject, he wrote
in forty-seven books a large historical work on the period between 150
(where Polybius ended) and 30 B.C.E. Nearly the whole of it has
disappeared, but we can tell from Josephus' excerpts that he appreciated
the Jews and their religion as did few other pagans of the time. He
dealt, too, at considerable length with the wars of the Hasmonean kings
against the Seleucids, and he is one of the authorities cited by
Josephus for the period between the accession of John Hyrcanus and the
overthrow of Antigonus II by Herod. The Jewish historian follows still
more closely, and in many places probably reproduces, Nicholas, who was
the court historian of Herod. Nicholas was a man of remarkable
versatility. He played many parts at Herod's court, as diplomatist,
advocate, and minister. He was a poet and philosopher of some repute,
and he wrote a general history in forty-four books. In the first eight
books he dealt with the early annals of the Assyrians, the Greeks, the
Medes, and the Persians. Josephus, who took him for his chief guide
after the Bible, often reproduces from him comparative passages to the
Scripture story which he is paraphrasing. And for the later period of
the _Antiquities_, from the time of Antiochus the Great (ab. 200
B.C.E.), he depends on him largely for the comparative Hellenistic
history, which he brings into relation with the story of the Hasmoneans.
When he comes to the epoch of Herod, the disproportionate fulness, the
vivacity, and the dramatic power of the narrative in books XIV-XVI of
the _Antiquities_ are due in a large measure to the historical virtues
of the court chronicler. We can tell how far this is the case by the
immediate and marked deterioration of the narrative when Josephus
proceeds to the reigns of Archelaus and Agrippa--where Nicholas failed
him.

Among Roman writers of his own day whom Josephus used was the Emperor
Vespasian himself, who, to record his exploits, wrote _Commentaries on
the Jewish War_, which were placed at his client's disposal.[1] In the
competition of flattery that greeted the new Flavian dynasty, various
Roman writers described and celebrated the Jewish campaigns.[2] Among
them were Antonius Julianus, who was on the staff of Vespasian and Titus
throughout the war, and at the end of it was appointed procurator of
Judea; Valerius Flaccus, who burst into ecstatic hexameters over the
burning of the Temple; and Tacitus, the most brilliant of all Latin
historians. Besides these writers' works, which have come down to us
more or less complete, a number of memoirs and histories of the war
appeared, some by those who wrote on hearsay, others by men who had
taken some part in the campaigns. It was an age of literary
dilettantism, when nearly everybody wrote books who knew how to write;
and in the drab monotony of Roman supremacy, the triumph over the Jews,
which had placed the Flavian house on the throne, was a happy
opportunity for ambitious authors.

[Footnote 1: Vita, 68.]

[Footnote 2: C. Ap. 9-10.]

It has been suggested that the Roman point of view that pervades the
_Wars_ of Josephus, the frequent absence of sympathy with the Jewish
cause, and the incongruous pagan ideas, which surprise us, can be
explained by the fact that the Jewish writer founded his account on that
of Antonius Julianus, which is referred to by the Christian apologist
Minucius[1] as a standard authority on the destruction of Jerusalem.
Antonius is mentioned by Josephus as one of the Roman staff who gave his
opinion in favor of the burning of the Temple, and he has also been
ingeniously identified with the Roman general (called [Hebrew: Otaninus]
or [Hebrew: Ananitus]) who engaged in controversy with Rabbi Johanan ben
Zakkai.[2] The evidence in favor of the theory is examined more fully
later; but whether or not the history of Antonius was the main source of
the _Wars_, it is certain that Josephus had before him Gentile accounts
of the struggle, and he often slavishly adopted not only their record of
facts but their expressions of opinion. In point of time Tacitus might
have derived from Josephus his summary of the Jewish Wars, part of which
has come down to us, and on some points the Jewish and the Roman authors
agree; but the correspondence is to be explained more readily by the use
of a common source by both writers. It is unlikely that the haughty
patrician, who hated and despised the Jews, and who had no love of
research, turned to a Jewish chronicle for his information, when he had
a number of Roman and Greek authors to provide him with food for his
epigrams.

[Footnote 1: Epist. ad Octav. 33.]

[Footnote 2: Yer. Sanhedrin, i. 4. Comp. Schlatter, Zur Topographie und
Geschichte Palaestinas, pp. 97_ff_.]

One other writer on contemporary Jewish history to whom Josephus refers
as an author, not indeed in the _Wars_, but in his _Life_, was Justus of
Tiberias, Unfortunately we have to depend almost entirely on a hostile
rival's spitefulness and malice for our knowledge of Justus. He did not
produce his work on the wars till after Josephus had established his
reputation, and part of his object, it is alleged, was to blacken the
character and destroy the repute of his rival. The conduct of Justus in
the Galilean campaign had been little more creditable than that of
Josephus--that is, if the latter's account may be believed at all. He
had been a leader of the Zealot party in Tiberias, and had roused the
people of that city against the double-dealing commander; but on the
breakdown of the revolt he entered the service of Agrippa II. He fell
into disgrace, but was pardoned. Some twenty-four years after the war
was over he wrote a History of the Jewish Kings and a History of the
War. It is difficult to form any judgment of the work, because, apart
from the abuse of Josephus, the criticism we have comes merely from
ecclesiastical historians, who imbibed Josephus' personal enmity as
though it were the pure milk of truth. Eusebius and Jerome[1] accuse him
of having distorted Jewish affairs to suit his personal ends and of
having been convicted by Josephus of falsehood. His chief crime in their
eyes and the reason for the disappearance of his work are that he did
not mention any of the events connected with the foundation of the
Christian Church, and had not the good fortune to be interpolated, as
Josephus was, with a passage about Jesus.[2] Hence Photius says that he
passed over many of the most important occurrences.[3] We know of him
now only by the charges of Josephus and a few disconnected fragments.

[Footnote 1: Hist. Eccl. III. x. 8; De Viris Illustr, 14.]

[Footnote 2: See below, pp. 241 ff.]

[Footnote 3: Bibl. Cod. 33.]

Coming now to the works of Josephus, his prefaces give a full account of
his historical motives. He originally wrote seven books on the Wars with
Rome in Aramaic for the benefit of his own countrymen. He was induced to
translate them into Greek because his predecessors had given false
accounts, either out of a desire to flatter the Romans or out of hatred
to the Jews. He claims that his own work is a true and careful narrative
of the events that he had witnessed with his own eyes and had special
opportunities of studying accurately. "The writings of my predecessors
contain sometimes slanders, sometimes eulogies, but nowhere the accurate
truth of the facts." He goes on to complain of the way in which they
belittle the action of the Jews in order to aggrandize the Romans, which
defeats its own purpose; and he contrasts the merit of one who composes
by his own industry a history of events not hitherto faithfully
recorded, with the more popular and the easier fashion of writing a
fresh history of a period already fully treated, by changing the order
and disposition of other men's works. He iterates his determination to
record only historical facts, and says, "It is superfluous for me to
write about the Antiquities [i.e. the early history] of the Jews,
because many before me, both among my own people and the Greeks, have
composed the histories of our ancestors very exactly."[1] By the
Antiquities he means the Bible narrative. He proposes therefore to begin
where the Bible ends and, after a brief survey of the events before his
own age, to give a full account of the great Rebellion. Josephus falls
short of his promise. Many of the shortcomings he pointed to in his
predecessors are glaringly present in his work. Nor is it probable that
his profession of having taken notes on the spot is true. At the time of
the siege of Jerusalem he had no literary pretensions, and it is
unlikely that he contemplated the writing of a history. It has been
pointed out that his account is much more accurate in regard to events
in which he did not take part than in regard to those in which he
assisted.

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