Josephus by Norman Bentwich

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

[Footnote 1: B.J. I. v. 2.]

From this point the treatment is fuller. No doubt the Hellenistic
historians paid more attention to the Jews from the moment when they
came within the orbit of the Roman Empire; but while in the
_Antiquities_ Josephus refers several times to the statements of two or
three of the Greco-Roman writers, in the _Wars_ he quotes no authority.
From this it may be inferred that in the earlier work he is following
but one guide.

He gives an elaborate account of the rise of the Idumean family of
Antipater, and hence to the end of the book the history passes into a
biography of Herod. The first part of Herod's career, when he was
building up his power, is related in the most favorable light. His
activity in Galilee against the Zealots, his trial by the Sanhedrin, his
subsequent service to the Romans, his flight from Judea upon the
invasion of the Parthians, his reception by Antony, his triumphal return
to the kingdom that had been bestowed on him, his valiant exploits
against the Arabians of Perea and Nabatea, his capture of Jerusalem, his
splendid buildings, and his magnificence to foreigners--all these
incidents are set forth so as to enhance his greatness. The description
throughout has a Greek ring. There is scarcely a suggestion of a Jewish
point of view towards the semi-savage godless tyrant. And when Josephus
comes to the part of Herod's life which even an historian laureate could
not misrepresent to his credit, his family relations, he adopts a
fundamentally pagan outlook.

The foundation of the Greek drama was the idea that the fortunate
incurred the envy of the gods, and brought on themselves the "nemesis,"
the revenge, of the divine powers, which plunged them into ruin. This
conception, utterly opposed as it is to the Jewish doctrine of God's
goodness, is applied to Herod, on whom, says Josephus, fortune was
revenged for his external prosperity by raising him up domestic
troubles.[1] He introduces another pagan idea, when he suggests that
Antipater, the wicked son of the king, returned to Palestine, where he
was to meet his doom, at the instigation of the ghosts of his murdered
brothers, which stopped the mouths of those who would have warned him
against returning. The notion of the avenging spirits of the dead was
utterly opposed to Jewish teaching, but it was a commonplace of the
Hellenistic thought of the time.

[Footnote 1: B.J. I. xxii. 1.]

Of Hillel and Shammai, the great sages of the time, we have not a word;
but when he recounts how, in the last days of Herod, the people under
the lead of the Pharisees rose against the king in indignation at the
setting up of a golden eagle over the Temple gate, he speaks of the
sophists exhorting their followers, "that it was a glorious thing to die
for the laws of their country, because the soul was immortal, and an
eternal enjoyment of happiness did await such as died on that account;
while the mean-spirited, and those that were not wise enough to show a
right love of their souls, preferred death by disease to that which is a
sign of virtue." The sentiments here are not so objectionable, but the
description of the Pharisees as sophists, and the suggestion of a
Valhalla for those who died for their country and for no others--for
which there is no authority in Jewish tradition--betray again the
uncritical copying of a Hellenistic source.

Finally, in summing up the character of Herod, all he finds to say is,
"Above all other men he enjoyed the favor of fortune, since from a
private station he obtained a kingdom, and held it many years, and left
it to his sons; but yet in his domestic affairs he was a most
unfortunate man." Not a word of his wickedness and cruelty, not a breath
of the Hebrew spirit, but simply an estimate of his "fortune." This is
the way in which the Romanized Jew continued the historical record of
the Bible, substituting foreign superstitions about fate and fortune for
the Jewish idea that all human history is a manifestation of God.

Josephus ends the first book of the _Wars_ with an account of the
gorgeous pomp of Herod's funeral, and starts the second book with a
description of the costly funeral feast which his son Archelaus gave to
the multitude, adding a note--presumably also derived from Nicholas--
that many of the Jews ruin themselves owing to the need of giving such a
feast, because he who omits it is not esteemed pious. As his source
fails him for the period following on the banishment of Archelaus, the
treatment becomes fragmentary, but at the same time more original and
independent. An account of the various Jewish sects interrupts the
chronicle of the court intrigues and popular risings. Josephus
distinguishes here four sects, the Essenes, the Pharisees, the
Sadducees, and the Zealots, but his account is mainly confined to the
first.[1] He describes in some detail their practices, beliefs, and
organizations. Indeed, this passage and the account in Philo are our
chief Jewish authorities for the tenets of the Essenes. He is anxious to
establish their claim to be a philosophical community comparable with
the Greek schools. In particular he represents that their notions of
immortality correspond with the Greek ideas of the Isles of the Blessed
and of Hades. "The divine doctrines of the Essenes, as he calls them,
which consider the body as corruptible and the soul an immortal spirit,
which, when released from the bonds of the flesh as from a long slavery,
rejoices and mounts upwards, lay an irresistible bait for such as have
once tasted of their philosophy." The ideas which the sect cherished
were popular in a certain part of Greco-Roman society, which, sated with
the luxury of the age, turned to the ascetic life and to the pursuit of
mysticism. Pliny the Elder, who was on the staff of Titus at Jerusalem,
appears to have been especially interested in the Jewish communists, and
briefly described their doctrines in his books; and the circle for whom
Josephus wrote would have been glad to have a fuller account.

[Footnote 1: B. J. II. viii.]

Of the other two sects he says little here, and what he says is
superficial. He places the differentiation in their contrasted doctrines
of fate and immortality. The Pharisees ascribe all to fate, but yet
allow freewill--a Hellenizing version of the saying ascribed to Rabbi
Akiba, "All is foreseen, but freedom of will is given"[1]--and they say
all souls are immortal, but those of the good only pass into other
bodies, while those of the bad suffer eternal punishment. This
attribution of the doctrine of metempsychosis and eternal punishment is
another piece of Hellenization, or a reproduction of a Hellenistic
misunderstanding; for the Rabbinic records nowhere suggest that such
ideas were held by the Pharisees. "The Sadducees, on the other hand,
deny fate entirely, and hold that God is not concerned in man's conduct,
which is entirely in his own choice, and they likewise deny the
immortality of the soul or retribution after death." Here the attempt to
represent the Sadducees' position as parallel with Epicurean materialism
has probably induced an overstatement of their distrust of Providence.
Josephus adds that the Pharisees cultivate great friendships among
themselves and promote peace among the people; while the Sadducees are
somewhat gruff towards each other, and treat even members of their own
party as if they were strangers.

[Footnote 1: Comp. Abot, iii. 15.]

Of the fourth party, the Zealots, Josephus has only a few words, to the
effect that when Coponius was sent as the first procurator of Judea, a
Galilean named Judas prevailed on his countrymen to revolt, saying they
would be cowards if they would endure to pay any tax to the Romans or
submit to any mortal lord in place of God. This man, he says, was the
teacher of a peculiar sect of his own. While the other three sects are
treated as philosophical schools, Josephus does not attribute a
philosophy to the Zealots, and out of regard to Roman feelings he says
nothing of the Messianic hopes that dominated them.

After the digression about the sects, Josephus continues his narrative
of the Jewish relations with the Romans. He turns aside now and then to
detail the complicated family affairs of the Herodian family or to
describe some remarkable geographical phenomenon, such as the glassy
sands of the Ladder of Tyre.[1] The main theme is the growing irritation
of the Jews, and the strengthening of the feeling that led to the
outbreak of the great war. But Josephus, always under the spell of the
Romans, or writing with a desire to appeal to them, can recognize only
material, concrete causes. The deeper spiritual motives of the struggle
escape him altogether, as they escaped the Roman procurators. He
recounts the wanton insults of a Pontius Pilate, who brought into
Jerusalem Roman ensigns with the image of Caesar, and spoiled the sacred
treasures of the Korban for the purpose of building aqueducts; and he
dwells on the attempt of Gaius to set up his statue in the Temple, which
was frustrated only by the Emperor's murder. But about the attitude of
the different sections of the Jewish people to the Romans, of which his
record would have been so valuable, he is silent.

[Footnote 1: B.J. II. x. 2. The same phenomenon is recorded in Pliny and
Tacitus, and it was a commonplace of the geography of the age.]

After the brief interlude of Agrippa's happy reign, the irritation of
Roman procurators is renewed, and under Comanus tumult follows tumult,
as one outrage after another upon the Jewish feeling is countenanced or
abetted. The courtier of the Flavian house takes occasion to recount the
Emperor Nero's misdeeds and family murders; but he resists the desire to
treat in detail of these things, because his subject is Jewish
history.[1] He must have had before him a source which dealt with
general Roman history more fully, and he shows his independence, such as
it is, in confining his narrative to the Jewish story. But the reliance
on his source for his point of view leads him to write as a good Roman;
the national party are dubbed rebels and revolutionaries ([Greek:
stasiastai]). The Zealots are regularly termed robbers, and the origin
of war is attributed to the weakness of the governors in not putting
down these turbulent elements. All this was natural enough in a Roman,
but it comes strangely from the pen of a soi-disant Jewish apologist,
who had himself taken a part in the rebellion. Characteristic is his
account of the turbulent condition of Palestine in the time of Felix:

"Bands of Sicarii springing up in the chaos caused by the tyranny
infested the country, and another body of abandoned men, less villainous
in their actions, but more wicked in their designs, deluded the people
under pretense of divine inspiration, and persuaded them to rise. Felix
put down these bands, but, as with a diseased body, straightway the
inflammation burst out in another part. And the flame of revolt was
blown up every day more and more, till it came to a regular war."[2]

[Footnote 1: B.J. II. xiii. 1.]

[Footnote 2: B.J. II. xiii. 6.]

Josephus vents his full power of denunciation on the last procurator,
Floras, who goaded the people into war, and by his repeated outrages
compelled even the aristocratic party, to which the historian belonged,
to break their loyalty to Rome: "As though he had been sent as
executioner to punish condemned criminals, he omitted no sort of
spoliation or extortion. In the most pitiful cases he was most inhuman;
in the greatest turpitudes he was most impudent, nor could anyone outdo
him in perversion of the truth, or combine more subtle ways of deceit."
Josephus, not altogether consistently with what he has already said,
seeks to exculpate his countrymen for their rising, up to the point in
which he himself was involved in it; and though he admits that the high
priests and leading men were still anxious for peace at any price, and
he puts a long speech into Agrippa's mouth counseling submission, he is
yet anxious to show that his people were driven into war by the
wickedness of Nero's governors. His masters allowed him, and probably
invited him, to denounce the oppression of the ministers of their
predecessors, and the Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus likewise
state that the rapacity of the procurators drove the Jews into revolt.
He had authority, therefore, for this view in his contemporary sources.

The die was cast. Menahem, the son of Judas the Galilean and the head of
the Zealots, seized Jerusalem, drove the Romans and Romanizers into the
fortress of Antonia, and having armed his bands with the contents of
Herod's southern stronghold of Masada, overpowered the garrison and put
it to the sword. Menahem himself, indeed, was so barbarous that the more
moderate leader Eleazar turned against him and put him to death. But
Josephus sees in the massacre of the Roman garrison the pollution of the
city, which doomed it to destruction. In his belligerent ethics,
massacre of the Romans by the Jews is always a crime against God,
requiring His visitation; massacres of the Jews are a visitation of God,
revealing that the Romans were His chosen instrument.

With the history of the war, so far as the historian was involved in it,
we have already dealt. We are here concerned with the character and the
reliability of his account. Josephus is somewhat vague and confused
about the dispositions of the Jewish leaders, but when he is not
justifying his own treachery, or venting his spite on his rivals, he
shows many of the parts of a military historian. He surveys with
clearness and conciseness the nature of the country that the Romans had
to conquer, and he describes the Roman armies and Roman camp with
greater detail than any Roman historian, his design being "not so much
to praise the Romans as to comfort those who have been conquered and to
deter others from rising."[1] It has, however, been pointed out with
great force, in support of the theory that he is following closely and
almost paraphrasing a Roman authority on the war, that his geographical
and topographical lore is introduced not in its natural place, but on
the occasions when Vespasian is the actor in a particular district.[2]
Thus, he describes the Phoenician coast when Vespasian arrives at
Ptolemais, Galilee when Vespasian is besieging Tarichea, Jericho when
Vespasian makes his sally to the Jordan cities.[3]

[Footnote 1: B.J. III. v. This remark must clearly have appeared in the
original Aramaic.]

[Footnote 2: Schlatter, Zur Topographie und Geschichte Palastinas, pp.
99 _ff_.]

[Footnote 3: B.J. III. iii. 1 and x. 7.]

All this would be natural in a chronicler who was one of Vespasian's
staff, but it is odd in the Jewish commander of Galilee. Again, he makes
certain confusions about Hebrew names of places, which are easily
explained in a Roman, but are inexplicable in the learned priest he
represents himself to be. He says the town of Gamala was so called
because of its supposed resemblance to a camel (in Greek, Kamelos), and
the Jews corrupted the name.[1] A Roman writer no doubt would have
regarded the Hebrew [Hebrew: Namal] as a corruption of the Greek word: a
Jew should have known better.

[Footnote 1: B.J. III. iv. 2.]

Again, he explains Bezetha, the name of the northeastern quarter of
Jerusalem, as meaning the new house or city,[1] a mistake natural to a
Roman who was aware that it was in fact the new part of the city, and
alternatively called by the Greek name [Greek: kainopolis], but an
extraordinary blunder for a Jew, who would surely know that it meant the
House of Olives, while the Aramaic or popular name for "new city" would
be Bet-Hadta. He does not once refer to Mount Zion, but knows the hill
by its Greek name of Acra. Yet again it is significant that he inserts
in his geography pagan touches that are part of the common stock of
Greco-Roman notices of Palestine. At Joppa, he says, one may still see
on the rock the trace of the chains of Andromeda,[2] who in Hellenistic
legend was said to have been rescued there by the fictitious hero
Perseus. Describing the Dead Sea,[3] he mentions the destruction of the
cities of Sodom and Gomorrah as a myth, as a Greek or a Roman would have
done.[4] His very accuracy about some topographical details is
suspicious. Colonel Conder[5] points with surprise to the fact that his
description of the fortress of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea, the
siege of which he had not seen, is absolutely correct, while his account
of Jotapata, which he defended, is full of exaggeration. The probable
explanation is that in the one place he copied a skilled observer; in
the other, he trusted to his own inaccurate memory. We may infer that as
in the _Antiquities_ he mainly compiled the work of predecessors that
are known, so in the _Wars_ he compiled the works of predecessors that
are unknown, adding something from his personal experience and his
national pride.

[Footnote 1: B.J. V. v. 8.]

[Footnote 2: B.J. IV. ix. 3. Pliny says the same thing in Latin.]

[Footnote 3: B.J. IV. viii. 4.]

[Footnote 4: Tac. Hist. v. 7.]

[Footnote 5: Tent Work in Palestine, 1. 207.]

Apart from his dependence on others' work, his chronicle of the war is
marred by the need of justifying his own submission, his Roman
standpoint, and his ulterior purpose of pleasing and flattering his
patrons. Vespasian and Titus are the righteous ministers of God's wrath
against His people, His vicars on earth, and every action in their
ruthless process of extermination has to be represented as a just
retribution required to expiate the sin of Jewish resistance. Titus
especially is singled out for his unfailing deeds of bravery; and when
anything is amiss with the proceedings of the Romans, the Imperial
family is always exculpated. Characteristic is the palliation of
Vespasian's brutal treatment of the people of Tarichea. When they
surrendered, they were promised their lives, but twelve hundred old men
were butchered, and over three thousand men and women were sold as
slaves. Josephus cannot find the execution of the divine will in this,
and so he is driven to explain that Vespasian was overborne by his
council, and gave them an ambiguous liberty to do as seemed good to
them.

It is the pivot of the story of the wars, as has been stated, that the
internal strife of the Jews brought about the ruin of the nation, and
the testimony of Josephus has perpetuated that conception of the last
days of Jerusalem. Our other records of the struggle go to suggest that
civil strife did take place. Tacitus[1] states that there were three
leaders, each with his own army in the city, and the Rabbinical
authorities[2] speak of the three councils in Jerusalem. It is further
said that the second Temple was destroyed because of the unprovoked
hatred among the Jews, which was the equal of the sins of murder,
unchastity, and idolatry that brought about the fall of the first
Temple.[3] Yet the fact that the men who were the foremost agitators of
the Rebellion were its leaders to the end suggests that the people had
reliance on their leadership; and Josephus probably traded largely on
his prejudices for the particulars of the civil conflicts, and he placed
all the blame on the party that was least guilty. Adopting the Roman
standpoint, he denounced the whole Zealot policy, and for John of
Gischala, their leader, he entertained a special loathing. It is
therefore his purpose to show that all the sedition was of John's
making, while it would seem more probable that the disturbances arose
because the Romanizing aristocrats were planning surrender.

[Footnote 1: Hist. v. 12.]

[Footnote 2: Midr. Kohelet, vii. 11.]

[Footnote 3: Yoma, 9b.]

According to Josephus, the Zealots, who were masters of the greater part
of Jerusalem during the struggle, established a reign of terror. They
trampled upon the laws of man, and laughed at the laws of God. They
ridiculed the oracles of the prophets as the tricks of jugglers. "Yet
did they occasion the fulfilment of prophecies relating to their
country. For there was an ancient oracle that the city should be taken
and the sanctuary burnt when sedition should affect the Jews." Josephus
shares the pagan outlook of the Roman historian Tacitus, who is
horrified at the Jewish disregard of the omens and portents which
betokened the fall of their city, and speaks of them as a people prone
to superstition (what we would call faith) and deaf to divine warnings
(what we would call superstition).[1] Josephus and his friends were
looking for signs and prophecies of the ruin of the people as an excuse
for surrender; the Zealots, men of sterner stuff and of fuller faith,
were resolved to resist to the end, and would brook no parleying with
the enemy. They were in fact political nationalists of a different
school and leaning from the aristocrats and the priests. The latter
regarded political life and the Temple service as vital parts of the
national life, and believing that the legions were invincible were
anxious to keep peace with Rome. The Zealots regarded personal liberty
and national independence as vital, and, to vindicate them, fought to
the end with Rome. Both the extreme political parties lacked the
spiritual standpoint of the Pharisees, who believed that the Torah even
without political independence would hold the people together till a
better time was granted by Providence. The party conflicts induced
violence and civil tumult, and Josephus would have us believe that
"demoniac discord" was the main cause of the ruin of Jerusalem. During
the respite which the Jews enjoyed before the final siege of Jerusalem,
he alleges that a bitter feud was waged incessantly between Eleazar the
son of Simon, who held the Inner Court of the Temple, Simon, the son of
Gioras, who held the Upper and the greater part of the Lower city, and
John of Gischala, who occupied the outer part of the Temple. He
describes the situation rhetorically as "sedition begetting sedition,
like a wild beast gone mad, which, for want of other food, falls to
eating its own flesh." And he bursts into an apostrophe over the
fighting that went on within the Temple precincts:

"Most wretched city! What misery so great as this didst thou suffer from
the Romans, when they came to purify thee from thy internecine hatred!
Thou couldst no longer be a fit habitation for God, nor couldst thou
continue longer in being, after thou hadst been a sepulcher for the
corpses of thine own people, and thy holy house itself had been a burial
place in their civil strife."

[Footnote 1: Hist. v. 13. Gens superstitioni prona, religioni obnoxia.]

It is curious that a little later, when he resumes the narrative of the
Roman campaign, and returns presumably to a Roman source, he says that
the Jews, elated by their unexpected success, made incursions on the
Greek cities. The success referred to must be the defeat of Cestius
Gallus, and it looks as if this lurid account of the horrors of the
civil war in Jerusalem were not known to the Roman guide, and that at
the least Josephus has embroidered the story of the feud to suit his
thesis. The measure of the Jewish writer's dependence for the main part
of his narrative of the siege is singularly illustrated by a small
detail. Josephus throughout his account uses the Macedonian names of the
months, and equates them loosely with those of the Jewish calendar; but
it is notable that the three traditional Jewish dates in the siege which
he inserts, the fourteenth of Xanthicus (Nisan), when it began, the
seventeenth of Panemos (Tammuz), when the daily offering ceased, and the
ninth and tenth of Loos (Ab), when the Temple was destroyed, conflict
with the other dates he gives in his general account of the siege. So
far from being a proof of his independence, as has been claimed, his
Jewish dates show his want of skill in weaving his Jewish information
into his scheme. When he is original, he is apt to be unhistorical.
Josephus agrees with the Talmud that the fire lasted to the tenth of the
month,[1] but while the Rabbis cursed Titus, who burnt the Holy of
Holies and spread fire and slaughter, and Roman historians[2] declared
that Titus had deliberately fired the center of the Jewish cult in order
to destroy the national stronghold, Josephus is anxious to preserve his
patron's reputation for gentleness and invest him with the appearance of
piety and magnanimity. Voicing perhaps the conqueror's later regrets, he
declares that he protested against the Romans' avenging themselves on
inanimate things and against the destruction of so beautiful a work, but
failed despite all his efforts to stay the conflagration. The historian
writes a lurid description of the catastrophe, but he omits the simple
details that make the account in the Talmud so pathetic. "The Temple,"
runs the Talmudic account[3] "was destroyed on the eve of the ninth day
of Ab at the outgoing of Sabbath, at the end of the Sabbatic year; and
the watch of Jehoiarib was on service, and the Levites were chanting the
hymns and standing at their desks. And the hymn they chanted was, 'And
He shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off with
their own wickedness' (Ps. 94:23); and they could not finish to say,
'The Lord our God shall cut them off,' when the heathen came and
silenced them." This account may not be historically true, but it
represents the unquenchable spirit of Judaism in face of the disaster.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15