Josephus by Norman Bentwich

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[Footnote 1: Comp. Yer. Taanit, iv. 6.]

[Footnote 2: Comp. Sulpicius Severus, who used Tacitus (Chron. I. xxx.
6.); and the poet Valerius Flaccus acclaims the victor of Solymae, who
hurls fiery torches at the Temple. Dion Cassius (lxvi. 4.) declares that
when the Roman soldiers refused to attack the Temple in awe of its
holiness, Titus himself set fire to it; and this appears to be the true
account.]

[Footnote 3: Taanit, 29a.]

Josephus, on the other hand, regards the fall of the Temple as a
favorable opportunity to give a list of the prodigies and omens that
heralded it. For example, he finds a proof of Providence in the
fulfilment of the oracle, that the city and the holy house should be
taken when the Temple should become foursquare. By demolishing the tower
of Antonia the Jews had made the Temple area foursquare, and so brought
the doom upon themselves. He tells, too, the story of a prophet Jesus,
who for years had cried, "Woe, woe to Jerusalem," and in the end, struck
by a missile, fell, crying, "Woe, woe to me!" For any reflections,
however, on the immortality of the religion or for any utterances of
hope for the ultimate restoration of the Temple and the coming of the
Messiah, we must not look to the _Wars_. Such ideas would not have
pleased his patrons, had he entertained them himself. He pointed to the
fulfilment of prophecy only so far as it predicted and justified the
destruction and ruin of his people. The expression of the national agony
at the destruction of the national center is to be found in the
apocryphal book of Esdras II.

Over his account of the final acts of the tragedy we may pass quickly.
Undismayed by the fall of the sanctuary and still hoping for divine
intervention, John and Simon withdrew from the Temple to the upper city.
Driven from this, they took refuge in the underground caverns and caves
to be found everywhere beneath Jerusalem, and finally they stood their
ground in the towers, until these too were captured, a month after the
destruction of the Temple, on the eighth of Elul (Gorpiaeus, as the
Greek month was called).

"It was the fifth time that the city was captured; and 2179 years passed
between its first building and its last destruction. Yet neither its
great antiquity, nor its vast riches, nor the diffusion of the nation
over the whole earth, nor the greatness of the veneration paid to it on
religious grounds, was sufficient to preserve it from destruction. And
thus ended the siege of Jerusalem."

Though the war was not finished, the crisis of the drama was over, and
Josephus, doubtless following his source, relaxes the narrative to
digress about affairs in Rome and the East. The last book of the _Wars_
is episodic and disconnected. It is a kind of aftermath, in which the
historian gathers up scattered records, but does not preserve the
dramatic character of the history. He had apparently here to fall back
on his own feeble constructive power, and was hard put to it to eke out
his material to the proportions of a book.

So careless, too, is he that he abstracts references from his source
that are meaningless. In the excursion into general history, he refers
to "the German king Alaric, whom we have mentioned before,"[1] though he
is brought in for the first time; and in the account of the siege of the
Zealots' fortress Machaerus he records the death of one "Judas whom we
have mentioned before,"[2] though again there was no previous mention of
the warrior. In the same chapter he describes some magical plant,
"Baaras, possessing power to drive away demons, which are no other than
the spirits of the wicked that enter into living men and kill them,
unless they obtain some help against them." This apparently was a
commonplace of Palestinian natural science, as known to the Greco-Roman
world, and Josephus simply copied it.

[Footnote 1: B.J. VII. iv. 4.]

[Footnote 2: B.J. VII. vi. 4.]

The Zealots still maintained resistance in remote parts of the country,
and the legate Bassus was sent to take their three fortresses. He died
before the capture of Masada, the last stronghold, a natural fastness
overlooking the Dead Sea, which had been fortified by Herod. In this
region David and centuries later the Maccabean heroes had found a refuge
at their time of distress, and here the Jewish people were to show that
desperate heroism of their race which is evoked when all save honor is
lost. Masada had been occupied by Eleazar, a grandson of Judas of
Galilee, the leader of the most fanatical section of the Zealots; and it
fell to the procurator Flavius Silva to reduce it.

Josephus utters a final outburst against the hated nationalist party and
especially its two leaders, Simon of Gioras and John of Gischala, though
both had become victims of Roman revenge. "That was a time," he
exclaims, "most prolific in wicked practices, nor could anyone devise
any new evil, so deeply were they infected, striving with each other
individually and collectively who should run to the greatest lengths of
impiety towards God and in unjust actions towards their neighbors." The
more incongruous is it that after this invective he puts into Eleazar's
mouth two long speeches, calling on his men to kill themselves rather
than fall into the hands of the Romans, which sum up eloquently the
Zealot attitude.[1] Josephus indeed introduces in the speech the
Hellenized doctrine of immortality, which regards the soul as an
invisible spirit imprisoned in the mortal body and seeking relief from
its prison. He goes on, however, to make the Jewish commander point out
how preferable is death to life servitude to the Romans, in a way in
which Eleazar might himself have spoken.

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

"'And as for those who have died in the war, we should deem them
blessed, for they are dead in defending, and not in betraying, their
liberty: but as to the multitude of those that have submitted to the
Romans, who would not pity their condition? And who would not make haste
to die before he would suffer the same miseries? Where is now that great
city, the metropolis of the Jewish nation, which was fortified by so
many walls round about, which had so many fortresses and large towers to
defend it, which could hardly contain the instruments prepared for the
war, and which had so many myriads of men to fight for it? Where is this
city that God Himself inhabited? It is now demolished to the very
foundations; and hath nothing but that monument of it preserved, I mean
the camp of those that have destroyed it, which still dwells upon its
ruins; some unfortunate old men also lie upon the ashes of the Temple,
and a few women are there preserved alive by the enemy for our bitter
shame and reproach. Now, who is there that revolves these things in his
mind, and yet is able to bear the sight of the sun, though he might live
out of danger? Who is there so much his country's enemy, or so unmanly
and so desirous of living, as not to repent that he is still alive? And
I cannot but wish that we had all died before we had seen that holy city
demolished by the hands of our enemies, or the foundations of our holy
Temple dug up after so profane a manner. But since we had a generous
hope that deluded us, as if we might perhaps have been able to avenge
ourselves on our enemies, on that account, though it be now become
vanity, and hath left us alone in this distress, let us make haste to
die bravely. Let us pity ourselves, our children, and our wives, while
it is in our power to show pity to them; for we are born to die, as well
as those whom we have begotten; nor is it in the power of the most happy
of our race to avoid it. But for abuses and slavery and the sight of our
wives led away after an ignominious manner with their children, these
are not such evils as are natural and necessary among men; although such
as do not prefer death before those miseries, when it is in their power
to do so, must undergo even them on account of their own cowardice.'

"Responding to their leader's call, the defenders put their wives and
children to the sword, and then turned their hands on themselves: and
when the Romans entered the place, to their amazement and horror they
found not a living soul."

Eleazar's speech is one of the few patriotic outbursts in the seven
books of the Wars, and it reads like a cry of bitter regret wrung from
the unhappy author at the end of his work. Like Balaam he set out to
curse, and stayed to bless, his enemies, and cursed himself. Perhaps
this apostrophe hides the tragedy of Josephus' life. Perhaps he inwardly
repented of his cowardice, and rued the uneasy protection he had secured
for himself. Perhaps he had denounced the Zealots throughout the history
perforce, to please his taskmasters, and in his heart of hearts envied
the party that had preferred death to surrender. We could wish he had
ended with the story of Masada's noble fall, and left us at this
pathetic doubt. But he had not the dramatic sense, and he rounds off the
story of the wars with an account of the futile Jewish rising in
Alexandria and Cyrene, fomented by the surviving remnants of the
Zealots. The first led to the closing in Egypt of the Temple of Onias,
the last sanctuary of the Jews; the second to slanderous attacks on the
historian. Jonathan, who had stirred up the Cyrenaic rising and started
the slanders, was tortured and burnt alive. As to Catullus, the Roman
governor, who admitted the calumnies, though the Emperor spared him, he
fell into a terrible distemper and died miserably. "Thus he became a
signal instance of Divine Providence, and demonstrated that God punishes
the wicked."

Instead of concluding upon some national reflection, Josephus,
pathetically enough, disfigures the end of his work with a final
revelation of personal vanity and materialistic views of a Providence
intervening on his behalf. Egoism and incapacity to attain to the noble
and sublime either in action or thought were the two defects that
lowered Josephus as a man, and which mar him as an historian. In the
last paragraph of the work he insists that he has aimed alone at
agreement with the facts; but industrious as is the record of events,
the claim is shallow. His history of the Jewish wars lacks authority
because it is palpably designed to please the Roman taste, and because
also it has to serve as a personal apology for one who, when heroism was
called for, had failed to respond to the call, and who was thus rendered
incapable in letters as in life of being a faithful champion of his
people.

VI

JOSEPHUS AND THE BIBLE

In the preface to the _Antiquities_ Josephus draws a distinction between
his motives for the composition of that work and of the _Wars_. He wrote
the latter because he himself had played a large part in the war, and he
desired to correct the errors of other historians, who had perverted the
truth. On the other hand, he undertook to write the earlier history of
his people because of the great importance of the events themselves and
of his desire to reveal for the common benefit things that were buried
in ignorance. He was stimulated to the task by the fact that his
forefathers had been willing to communicate their antiquity to the
Greeks, and, moreover, several of the Greeks had been at pains to learn
of the affairs of the Jewish nation.

It would appear that he is here referring to the Septuagint translation of
the Bible, since he proceeds to summarize the well-known story of King
Ptolemy recounted in the Letter of Aristeas, which he afterwards sets out
more fully.[1] Josephus shares the aim of the Hellenistic-Jewish writers
to make the Jewish Scriptures known to the Gentile world, and he inherits
also, but in a much smaller degree, their method of presenting Judaism to
suit Greek or Greco-Roman tastes, as a philosophical, i.e. an ethical-
philosophical, religion. Perhaps he had become acquainted, either at
Alexandria or at Rome, with Philo's _Life of Moses_, which was a popular
text-book, so to speak, of universal Judaism. Certain it is that the
prelude to the _Antiquities_ is reminiscent of the earlier treatise.
Josephus reproduces Philo's idea that Moses began his legislation not as
other lawgivers, "with the detailed enactments, contracts, and other rites
between one man and another, but by raising men's minds upwards to regard
God and His creation." For Moses life was to be an imitation of the
divine. Contemplation of God's work is the best of all patterns for man to
follow. With Philo again, he points out the superiority of Moses over
other legislators in his attack upon false ideas of the divine nature;
"for there is nothing in the Scriptures inconsistent with the majesty of
God or with His love of mankind: and all things in it have reference to
the nature of the universe." He claims, too, that Moses explains some
things clearly and directly, but that he hints at others philosophically
under the form of allegory. And to these commonplaces of Alexandrian
exegesis he adds as the lesson of the history of his people that "it goes
well with those who follow God's will and observe His laws, and ill with
those who rebel against Him and neglect His laws." To exhibit to the
Greco-Roman world the power and majesty of the Jewish God and the
excellence of the Jewish law--these are the two main purposes which he
professes to set before himself in his rendering of the Bible story, which
occupies the first half of the _Antiquities_. No Jewish writer before him
had treated the Bible to suit Roman predilections, which attached supreme
importance to material strength and the concrete manifestation of
authority, and Josephus in order to carry out his aim had therefore to
proceed on new lines.

[Footnote 1: See below, p. 175.]

In effect, he rarely attempts to ethicize the Bible story. For the most
part he paraphrases it, cuts out its poetry, and reduces it to a prosaic
chronicle of facts. The exordium in fact has little relation to the
book, and looks as if it were borrowed without discrimination. Josephus
next, indeed, professes that he will accurately set out in chronological
order the incidents in the Jewish annals, "without adding anything to
what is therein contained or taking anything away from it." It may be
that he regarded the oral tradition as an inherent part of the law, and
therefore inserts selections of it in the narrative, but anyhow he does
not observe strictly the command of Deuteronomy (4:2) that prompted his
profession, "Ye shall not add unto the word I have spoken, neither shall
ye diminish aught from it." Not only does he freely paraphrase the
Septuagint version of the Bible, but, more especially in the earlier
part of the work, he incorporates pieces of Palestinian Haggadah and to
a smaller extent of Alexandrian interpretation, and he omits many
episodes that did not seem to him to redound to the glory of his people.
He seeks to improve the Bible, and though he did not invent new legends,
he accepted uncritically those which he found in Hellenistic sources or
in the oral tradition of his people. His work is, therefore, valuable as
a storehouse of early Haggadah. It is unnecessary to accept his
description of himself as one who had a profound knowledge of tradition,
but he was acquainted with the popular exegesis of the Palestinian
teachers; and twenty years of life at the Roman court had not entirely
eliminated his knowledge.

In the very first section of the first book, he notes that Moses sums up
the first day of Creation with the words, "and it was _one_ day";
whereas afterwards it is said, "it was the second, the third day, etc."
He does not indeed supply the interpretation, saying that he will give
the reason in a separate treatise which he proposes to write; but the
same point is discussed in the Rabbinic commentary. He gives the
traditional interpretation of the four rivers of the Garden of Eden.[1]
He derives the name Adam from the Hebrew word for red, because the first
man was formed out of red earth.[2] He states that the animals in the
Garden of Eden had one language, a piece of Midrash which occurs also in
the Book of Jubilees. He relates that Cain, after the murder of his
brother, was afraid of falling among wild beasts, agreeing with the
Midrash that all the animals assembled to avenge the blood of Abel,[3]
but God forbade them to destroy Cain on pain of their own destruction.
Seth he describes as the model of the virtuous, and of him the Rabbis
likewise say, "From Seth dates the stock of all generations of the
virtuous." He pictures him also as a great inventor and the discoverer
of astronomy, and tells how he set up pillars of brick and stone
recording these inventions, so that they might not be forgotten if the
world was destroyed either by fire or water: here again agreeing with
the Book of Jubilees, which relates that Cainan found an inscription in
which his forefathers had described their inventions. Examples might be
multiplied from the first chapters of the _Antiquities_ of the way in
which Josephus weaves into the Bible account traditional Midrashim, but
these instances will suffice.

[Footnote 1: Gen. R. ii. and iii., quoted in Bloch, Die Quellen des
Flavius Josephus, 1879. The rivers are the Ganges, Euphrates, Tigris,
and Nile.]

[Footnote 2: Yalkut Gen. 21, 22.]

[Footnote 3: Gen. R. xxii.]

Besides embroidering the Bible text with Haggadic legends, Josephus is
prone to place in the mouths of the characters rhetorical speeches in
the Greek style, either expanding a verse or two in the Bible or
composing them entirely. Thus God says to Adam and Eve in the Garden of
Eden after the fall:

"I had before determined about you that you might lead a happy life
without affliction and care and vexation of soul; and that all things
which might contribute to your enjoyment and pleasure should grow up by
My Providence of their own accord. And death would not overtake you at
any period. But now you have abused My good-will and disobeyed My
commands, for your silence is not the sign of your virtue but of your
guilty conscience."

Anticipating, moreover, the methods of latter-day Biblical apologists,
he loses no opportunity of adding any confirmation he can find for the
Bible story in pagan historians. He cites for the truth of the story of
the flood Berosus the Chaldean, Hieronymus the Egyptian, Menander the
Phoenician, and a great many others[1]; and he finds confirmation of the
early chapters of Genesis in general in Manetho, who wrote a famous
Egyptian history, and Mochus, and Hestiaeus, and in some of the earliest
Greek chroniclers, Hesiod and Hecataeus and Hellanicus and Acesilaus. In
later years he was to deal more elaborately with the question of the
authority of the Scriptural history,[2] and then he set out the pagan
testimony more accurately. In the _Antiquities_ he is usually content to
refer to it. It is significant that in the passages in which he adduces
pagan corroboration he refers to Nicholas of Damascus, and in the first
of them repeats his words about the remains of the Ark lying on a
mountain in Armenia. It is well-nigh certain that Josephus did not study
the writings of any of these chroniclers and historians at first hand,
for he shows no acquaintance with the substance of their works. They
were quoted by Nicholas, and where his source had given excerpts from
their writings that threw any light, or might be taken to throw light,
on the Hebrew text, Josephus, following the literary ethics of his day,
inserts them. His archeology extended only to the reading of one or more
writers of universal ancient history and taking from them whatever bore
upon his own subject. He finds authority for the story of the tower of
Babel in the oracles of the Sibyl, which we now know to be Jewish
forgeries, but which professed to be and were regarded by the less
educated of his day as being the utterances of an ancient seeress.
Josephus paraphrases the hexameters which described how, when all men
were of one tongue, some of them built a high tower, as if they would
thereby ascend to heaven; but the deity sent storms of wind and
overthrew the tower, and gave everyone his peculiar language.

[Footnote 1: Ant. I. iii. 3.]

[Footnote 2: Comp. below, p. 223.]

Josephus sets considerable store by the exact chronology of the Bible,
stopping continually to enumerate the number of years that had passed
from the Creation to some other point of reckoning. His habit in this
respect is marred by a singular inaccuracy in dealing with dates and
figures, varying as he often does from chapter to chapter, sometimes
from paragraph to paragraph, according to the source he happens to be
following. He gives the year of the flood as 2656, though the sum of the
years of the Patriarchs who lived before it in his reckoning totals only
2256. It has been conjectured[1] that he followed the Septuagint
chronology from the Creation to the flood and that of the Hebrew Bible
from Abraham onwards, and for the intermediate period he has his own
reckoning. The result is that his calculations are often inconsistent.
In his desire to impress the Greco-Roman reader, he dates an event by
the Macedonian as well as the Jewish month, whenever he knows it, i.e.
when he found it in his source. Thus the flood is said to have taken
place "in the month Dius, which is called by the Hebrews Marheshwan."
From the same motive he dwells on the table of the descendants of Noah,
identifying the various families mentioned in the Bible with peoples
known to the Greek world. The sons of Noah inhabited first the mountains
Taurus and Amanus, and proceeded along Asia to the river Tanais, and
along Europe to Cadiz, giving their names to nations in the lands they
inhabited.

[Footnote 1: Comp. Destinon, Die Chronologie des Josephus, 1880.]

What Josephus then insists on in his paraphrase of Scripture is the fact
and not the lesson, the letter and not the spirit; while Philo, who is
the true type of Jewish Hellenist, was always looking for deeper
meanings beneath the literal text. The Romans had no bent for such
interpretations, and Josephus Romanizes. He treats, for example, the
genealogies, the chronology, and the ethnology of Genesis as things of
supreme value, and though he occasionally inserts Haggadic tradition, he
misses the Haggadic spirit, which sought to draw new morals and new
spiritual value from the narrative. In his account of Abram, indeed, he
touches upon the patriarch's higher idea of God, which led him to leave
Chaldea. But here, too, he distorts the genuine Hebraic conception, and
presents Abram as a kind of Stoic philosopher.[1]

[Footnote 1: Ant. I. vii. 1.]

He was the first that ventured to publish this notion, that there was
but one God, the Creator of the Universe, and that, as to the other
gods, if they contributed to the happiness of men, they afforded it
according to their appointment and not according to their own power. His
opinion was derived from the study of the heavenly bodies and the
phenomena of the terrestrial world. If, said he, these bodies had power
of their own, they would certainly have regular motions. But since they
do not preserve such regularity, they show that in so far as they work
for our good, they do it not of their own strength but as they are
subservient to Him who commands them.

This is one of the few pieces of theology in the _Antiquities_, and we
are fain to believe that he borrowed it from Nicholas, who is quoted
immediately afterwards, or from pseudo-Hecataeus, a Jewish
pseudepigraphic historian, to whom a book on the patriarch was ascribed.
So, later, following the Hellenistic tradition, he represents Abraham as
the teacher of astronomy to the Egyptians.

Josephus was a wavering rationalist, as is shown by his acceptance of
the story of Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt, "I have seen
the pillar," he adds (though again he may be blindly copying), "and it
remains to this day." It is not the place here to enter into the details
of his version of the story of the patriarchs. He gives the facts, and
loses much of the spirit, often spoiling the beauty of the Biblical
narrative by a prosy paraphrase. Thus God assures Abraham after the
offering of Isaac,[1] that it was not out of desire for human blood that
he was commanded to slay his son; and Isaac says to Jacob, who comes to
receive the blessing: "Thy voice is like the voice of Jacob, yet because
of the thickness of thy hair thou seemest to be Esau." One is reminded
of Bowdler's improvements of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century.

[Footnote 1: Ant. I. xiii. 4.]

The first book of the _Antiquities_ ends with the death of Isaac. The
second deals with the story of Joseph and of the Exodus from Egypt. The
method is the same: partly Midrashic and partly rhetorical embellishment
of the Biblical text, conversion of the poetry into prose, and, where
occasion offers, correlation of the Scripture with Hellenistic history.
The chapters dealing with the life of Moses are particularly rich in
legendary additions: Amram is told in a vision that his son shall be the
savior of Israel;[1] the name of Pharaoh's daughter is given as
Thermuthis, in accordance with Hellenistic, but not Talmudic, tradition.
Moses in his childhood dons Pharaoh's crown, and is only saved from death
by the king's daughter.[2] Finally a whole chapter is devoted to an
account of the wars of Moses, as an Egyptian general fighting against the
Ethiopians, which is taken from the histories of pseudo-Artapanus.[3]
Josephus makes no attempt to rationalize the account of the plagues, but
on the contrary dilates on them, "both because no such plagues did ever
happen to any other nation, and because it is for the good of mankind,
that they may learn by this warning not to do anything which may displease
God, lest He be provoked to wrath and avenge their iniquity upon them." At
the same time, following a tradition reflected in the Apocalyptic and
Rabbinic literature, he modifies the Biblical statement, that the Jews
spoiled the Egyptians before leaving the country, by explaining that they
took their fair hire for their labor.[4] And after describing the drowning
of the Egyptians in the Red Sea--which Moses celebrates with a
thanksgiving song in hexameter verse[5]--he apologizes for the strangeness
of the narrative and its miraculous incidents. He explains that he has
recounted every part of the history as he found it in the sacred books,
and people are not to wonder "if such things happened, _whether by God's
will or by chance_, to the men of old, who were free from the wickedness
of modern times, seeing that even for those who accompanied Alexander the
Greek, who lived recently, when it was God's will to destroy the Persian
monarchy, the Pamphylian sea retired and afforded a passage." This homily
smacks of some Hellenistic-Jewish rationalist, whom he copied. But he
concludes the whole with a formula, which is regular when he has stated
something which he fears will be difficult of belief for his audience, "As
to these things, let everyone determine as he thinks best." He treats the
account of the Decalogue in a similar way. "I am bound," he says, "to
relate the history as it is described in the Holy Writ, but my readers may
accept or reject the story as they please." Josephus therein applied the
rule, "When at Rome, do as Rome does." For it is noteworthy that the Roman
historian Tacitus, who wrote a little later than Josephus, manifests the
same indecision about the interference of the divine agency in human
affairs, the relation of chance to human freedom, and the necessity of
fate; and in many cases he likewise places the rational and transcendental
explanations of an event side by side, without any attempt to reconcile
them.

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