V
THE JEWISH WARS
The first work of Josephus as man of letters was the history of the wars of the Jews against the Romans, for which, according to his own statement, he prepared from the time of his surrender by taking copious notes of the events which he witnessed. He completed it in the fortieth year of his life and dedicated it to Vespasian.[1] He seems originally to have designed the record of the struggle for the purpose of persuading his brethren in the East that it was useless to fight further against the Romans. He desired to prove to them that God was on the side of the big battalions, and that the Jews had forfeited His protection by their manifold transgressions. The Zealots were as wicked as they were misguided, and to follow them was to march to certain ruin. It is not unlikely that Josephus was commissioned by Titus to compose his version of the war for the "Upper Barbarians," whose rising in alliance with the Parthians might have troubled the conqueror of Jerusalem, as it afterwards troubled Trajan. But, save that it was written in Aramaic, we cannot tell the form of the original history, since it has entirely disappeared.
[Footnote 1: B.J. VII. xv. 8.]
Josephus says in the preface to the extant Greek books that he translated into Greek the account he had already written. But he certainly did much more than translate. The whole trend of the narrative and the purpose must have been changed when he came to present the events for a Greco-Roman audience. He was concerned less to instill respect for Rome in his countrymen than to inspire regard for his countrymen in the Romans, and at the same time to show that the Rebellion was not the deliberate work of the whole people, but due to the instigation of a band of desperate, unscrupulous fanatics. He was concerned also to show that God, the vanquished Jewish God, as the Romans would regard Him, had allowed the ruin of His people, not because He was powerless to preserve them, but because they had sinned against His law. Lastly, he was anxious to emphasize the military virtue and the magnanimity of his patrons Vespasian and Titus. He intersperses frequent protests in various parts of the seven books, and repeats them in the preface, to the effect that while his predecessors had written "sophistically," he was aiming only at the exact record of events. But it is obvious that, in the Wars as in his other works, he has a definite purpose to serve, and he colors his account of events to suit this purpose and to please his patrons.
He sets out to establish, in fact, that it was "a sedition of our own that destroyed Jerusalem, and that the tyrants among the Jews brought upon us the Romans, who unwillingly attacked us, and occasioned the burning of our Temple."[1] And he apologizes for the passion he shows against the tyrants and Zealots, which, he admits, is not consistent with the character of an historian; it was provoked because the unparalleled calamities of the Jews were not caused by strangers but by themselves, and "this makes it impossible for me to contain my lamentations."[2] The historian, therefore, in the work which has come down to us, is dominated by the conviction, whether sincere or feigned, that the war with Rome was a huge error, that those who fomented it were wicked, self-seeking men, and that the Jews brought their ruin on themselves. This being his temper, it is necessary to look very closely at his representation of events and examine how far partisan feeling and prejudices, and how far servility and the courtier spirit, have colored it. We have also to consider how far his reflections represent his own judgment, and how far they are the slavish adoption of opinions expressed by the victorious enemies of his people.
[Footnote 1: B.J., Preface.]
[Footnote 2: B.J., Preface, 4.]
The alternative title of the work is On the Destruction of the Temple, but its scope is larger than either name suggests. It is conjectured by the German scholar Niese that the author called it A History of the Jewish State in Its Relations with the Romans. It is in fact a history of the Jews under the Romans, beginning, as Josephus says, "where the earlier writers on Jewish affairs and our prophets leave off." He proposes to deal briefly with the events that preceded his own age, but fully with the events of the wars of his time. The history starts, accordingly, with the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes, and, save that he expatiates without any sense of proportion on the exploits of Herod the Great, Josephus is generally faithful to his program in the introductory portion of the work. For the Herodian period he found a very full source, and the temptation was too powerful for him, so that the greater part of the first book is taken up with the story of the court intrigues and family murders of the king. Very brief indeed is his treatment of the Maccabean brothers, and not very accurate. They are dismissed in two chapters, and it is probable that the historian had not before him either of the two good Jewish sources for the period, the First and the Second Book of the Maccabees. In his later work, in which he dealt with the same period at greater length, the account which he had abstracted from a Greek source, probably Nicholas of Damascus, is corrected by the Jewish work. The two records show a number of small discrepancies. Thus, in the Wars he states that Onias, the high priest who drove out the Tobiades from Jerusalem, fled to Ptolemy in Egypt, and founded a city resembling Jerusalem; whereas in the Antiquities he states that the Onias who fled to Egypt because Antiochus deprived him of office was the son of the high priest. Again, in the Wars he makes Mattathias kill the Syrian governor Bacchides; whereas, in the Antiquities, agreeing with the First Book of the Maccabees, he says that the Syrian officer who was slain at Modin was Appelles.
Josephus in the Wars follows his Hellenistic source for the history of the Hasmonean monarchy without introducing any Jewish knowledge and without criticism. His summary is of incidents, not of movements, and he has a liking for romantic color. The piercing of the king's elephant by the Maccabean Eleazar, the prediction by an Essene of the murder of Antigonus, the brother of King Aristobulus I, are detailed. The inner Jewish life is passed over in complete silence until he comes to the reign of Alexander. Then he describes the Pharisees as a sect of Jews that are held to be more religious than others and to interpret the laws more accurately.[1] The description is clearly derived from a Greek writer, who regards the Jewish people from the outside. It is quite out of harmony with the standpoint which Josephus himself later adopts. In this passage he presents the Pharisees as crafty politicians, insinuating themselves into the favor of the queen, and then ordering the country to suit their own ends. Without describing the other sects, he continues the narration of intrigues and wars till he reaches the intervention of Pompey in the affairs of Palestine.
[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.
[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.
[Footnote 1: Comp. Mekilta, ed. Weiss, p. 52. This and the following
Rabbinic parallels are collected by Bloch, op. cit.]
[Footnote 2: Comp. Tanhuma, xii. 4.]
[Footnote 3: Comp. Eusebius, Praep. vii. 2.]
[Footnote 4: Comp. Book of Jubilees, xlviii. 18, and Sanhedrin, 91a.]
[Footnote 5: He probably had in mind the Greek version of the Song of Moses made by the Jewish-Alexandrian dramatic poet Ezekiel, which was written in hexameter verse.]
Josephus deals summarily with the Mosaic Code in the Antiquities, but announces his intention to compose "another work concerning our laws." This work is, perhaps, represented by the second book Against Apion; or possibly the intention was never fulfilled. He does not set out the ten commandments at length, explaining that it was against tradition to translate them directly.[1] He refers probably to the rule that they were not to be recited in any language but Hebrew, though, of course, the Septuagint contained a full version. On the other hand, he describes the construction of the Tabernacle with some fulness, and dwells particularly on the robes of the priests and the pomp of the high priest. Ritual and ceremonial appealed to his public; and his account, which was based on the practice of his own day, supplements in some particulars the account in the Talmud. But unfortunately he does not describe the Temple service. He attaches marked importance to the Urim and Thummim, which formed a sort of oracle parallel with pagan institutions, and says that the breastplate and sardonyx, with which he identifies them, ceased to shine two hundred years before he wrote his book[2] (i.e. at the time of John Hyrcanus). The Talmud understands the mystic names of the Bible in a similar way,[3] but represents that the oracle ceased with the destruction of the first Temple, and was not known in the second Temple. Josephus enlarges, in a way common to the Hellenistic-Jewish apologists,[4] on the symbolism of the Temple service and furniture.
"One may wonder at the contempt men bear us, or which they profess to bear, on the ground that we despise the Deity, whom they pretend to honor: for if anyone do but consider the construction of the Temple, the Tabernacle, and the garments of the high priest, and the vessels we use in our service, he will find our lawgiver was inspired by God…. For if he regard these things without prejudice, he will find that everyone is made by way of imitation and representation of the Universe."[5]
[Footnote 1: Ant. III. vi. 4.]
[Footnote 2: Ant. III. vii. 7.]
[Footnote 3: Yer. Sotah, ix. 13.]
[Footnote 4: Comp. Philo, De V. Mos. iii. 6.]
[Footnote 5: Ant. III. vii. 7.]
The ritual, in brief, typifies the universal character of Judaism, which Josephus was anxious to emphasize in reply to the charge of Jewish aloofness and particularism. The three divisions of the Tabernacle symbolize heaven, earth, and sea; the twelve loaves stand for the twelve months of the year; the seventy parts of the candlestick for the seventy planets; the veils, which were composed of four materials, for the four elements; the linen of the high priest's vestment signified the earth, the blue betokened the sky; the breastplate resembled the shape of the earth, and so forth. We find similar reflections in Philo, but in his work they are part of a continuous allegorical exegesis, and in the other they are a sudden incursion of the symbolical into the long narrative of facts.
Following the account of the Tabernacle and the priestly vestments, Josephus describes the manner of offering sacrifices, the observance of the festivals, and the Levitical laws of cleanliness. In his account of these laws Josephus makes no attempt either to derive a universal value from the Biblical commands or to read a philosophical meaning into them by allegorical interpretation. He normally states the law as it stands in the text, and in the selection he makes he gives the preference, not to general ethical precepts, but to regulations about the priests. He had a pride of caste and a love of the pomp and circumstance of the Temple service; and the national ceremony could be more easily conveyed to the Gentile than an understanding of the spiritual value of Judaism. The Hellenistic apologists enlarged on the humanitarian character of the Mosaic social legislation; Josephus mentions without comment the laws of the seventh year release and the Jubilee, though in his later apology, which was addressed to the Greeks, in the books Against Apion,[1] he dwelt more carefully on them. His interpretation of the laws, so far as it goes, in places agrees with the Rabbinic Halakah, but he admits some modification of the accepted tradition. Thus he states that the high priest was forbidden to marry a slave, or a captive, or a woman who kept an inn. He translates the Hebrew [Hebrew: zonah], which probably here means a prostitute, by innkeeper, a meaning the word has in other passages;[2] but the Aramaic version of the Bible supports him. He gives, too, a rationalizing reason for the observance of Tabernacles, saying, "The Law enjoins us to pitch tabernacles so that we may preserve ourselves from the cold of the season of the year."[3] The Feast of Weeks he calls Asartha, perhaps a Grecized form of the Hebrew [Hebrew: Atzereth], which was its old name, and he does not regard it as the anniversary of the giving of the Law. He promises to explain afterwards why some animals are forbidden for food and some permitted, but he fails to fulfil his promise. Since, however, the interpretation of the dietary laws as a discipline of temperance was a commonplace of Hellenistic Judaism, which is very fully set forth in the so-called Fourth Book of the Maccabees,[4] the absence of his comments is not a great loss.
[Footnote 1: See below, p. 234.]
[Footnote 2: Judges, 4:1; Josh. 2; and Ezek. 23:44.]
[Footnote 3: Ant. IV. viii. 4.]
[Footnote 4: See above, p. 105.]
In the next book of the Antiquities, Josephus deals with other parts of the Mosaic Law, especially such as might appear striking to Roman readers. Thus he gives in detail the law as to the Nazarites, the Korban offering, and the red heifer, and he completes his account of the Mosaic Code by a summary description of the Jewish polity, in which he abstracts a large part of the laws of Deuteronomy together with some of the traditional amplifications.[1] Moses prefaces his farewell address with a number of moral platitudes. "Virtue is its own principal reward, and, besides, it bestows abundance of others."—"The practice of virtue towards other men will make your own lives happy," and so forth. Josephus again proclaims that he sets out the laws in the words of Moses, his only innovation being to arrange them in a regular system, "for they were left by him in writing as they were accidentally scattered." The influence of Roman law may have suggested the arranging and digesting of the Mosaic Code, as well as several of his variations from the letter of the Bible.
[Footnote 1: Ant. IV. viii.]
A few of his interpretations are noteworthy as comprising either Palestinian or Hellenistic tradition. He understands the command not to curse those in authority ([Hebrew: Elohim], Exod. 22:28) as referring to the gods worshiped in other cities, following Philo and a Hellenistic tradition based on a mistranslation of the Septuagint. A late passage in the Talmud, on the other hand, says that all abuse is forbidden save of idolatry.[1] With Philo again, he inserts into the code a law prohibiting the possession of poison on pain of death,[2] which is based on an erroneous interpretation of the law against witchcraft. Josephus follows the Hellenistic school also when he deduces from the prohibition against removing boundary stones the lesson that no infraction of the law and tradition[3] is to be permitted. Nothing is to be allowed the imitation of which might lead to the subversion of the constitution. He introduces a law about evidence, to the effect that the testimony of women should not be admitted "on account of the levity and boldness of their sex."[4] The rule has no place in the Code of the Pentateuch, but is supported in the oral law. He adopts another traditional interpretation when he limits the commands against women wearing men's habits to the donning of armor in times of war.[5] He misrepresents, on the other hand, the law of [Hebrew: shemitah] (seventh year release), stating that if a servant have a child by a bondwoman in his master's house, and if, on account of his good-will to his master, he prefers to remain a slave, he shall be set free only in the year of jubilee. The Bible says he shall be branded if he refuse the proffered liberty in the seventh year, and Philo in his interpretation has drawn a fine homily about the regard set on liberty. But Josephus may have thought that the institution would appear ridiculous to the legal minds of Romans. To accommodate the Jewish law again to the Roman standard, he moderates the lex talionis (the rule of an eye for an eye), by adding that it is applied only if he that is maimed will not accept money in compensation for his injury, a half-way position between the Sadducean doctrine, which understood the Biblical law literally, and the Pharisaic rule, which abrogated it. But in several instances he makes offenses punishable with death, which were not so according to the tradition, e.g. the insulting of parents by their children and the taking of bribes by judges.[6] Summing up the version of Deuteronomy, it may be said that Josephus, by omitting a law here, adding one there, now softening, now modifying, in some places broadening, in others narrowing the scope of the command, presents a code which lacks both the ruggedness of the Torah and the maturer humaneness of the Rabbinical Halakah, but was designed to show the reasonableness of the Jewish system according to Roman notions.
[Footnote 1: Sanhedrin, 63b.]
[Footnote 2: Comp. Philo, De Spec. Leg. ii. 815.]
[Footnote 3: Comp. Deut. 22:5, and Nazir, 59a, with Ant. IV. viii. 43.]
[Footnote 4: Shebuot, 30a.]
[Footnote 5: Comp. Philo, De Spec. Leg. ii.]
[Footnote 6: Comp. C. Ap. ii. 27. It has been suggested by Judge Mayer Sulzberger that he falsely interpreted the Hebrew [Hebrew: 'Arur] (cursed be!) to mean death punishment. Comp. J.Q.R., n.s., iii. 315.]
Josephus, from a different motive, is silent about the golden calf and the breaking of the tablets of stone. Those incidents, to his mind, did not reflect credit on his people; therefore they were not to be disclosed to Greek and Roman readers. He omits, for other reasons, the Messianic prophecies of Balaam, which would not be pleasing to the Flavians. At the same time one of the blessings in the prophecies of Balaam gives him the opportunity of asserting some universal humanitarian doctrines, to which Philo affords a parallel. The Moabite seer talks like a Hellenistic apologist of the second century B.C.E. or a Sibylline oracle: "Every land and every sea will be full of the praise of your name. Your offspring will dwell in every clime, and the whole world will be your dwelling-place for eternity."[1] He is at pains to extol Moses as of superhuman excellence, as is proved by the enduring force of his laws, which is such that "there is no Jew who does not act as if Moses were present and ready to punish him if he should offend in any way."[2] He quotes examples of the Jewish steadfastness in the Law, which would have impressed a Roman: the regular pilgrimage from Babylon to the Temple, the abstention of the Jewish priests from touching a crumb of flour during the Feast of Passover, at a time when, during a severe famine, abundance of wheat was brought to the Temple. But he somewhat mars the effect of his praise by adding a not very exalted motive for the piety of his people—the dread of the Law and of the wrath which God manifests against transgressors, even when no man can accuse the actor. Josephus is in a way a loyal supporter of the Law, and he had a sincere admiration for its hold on the people, but he was led by the conditions of his appeal to materialize the idea of Jewish religious intensity and to present it as a fear of punishment. Nor is it the humanity, the inherent excellence of the Law which he emphasizes, but its endurance and the widespread allegiance it commands. Looking at Judaism through Roman spectacles, he treats it as a positive force comparable with the sway of the Roman Emperor.
[Footnote 1: Comp. Orac. Sib. 111. 271: [Greek: pasa de gaia sethen plaeres kai pasa thalassa] and Philo, De V. Mos. ii. 126.]
[Footnote 2: Ant. IV. vi 4.]
In the description of the death of Moses the same habit of enfeebling the majesty of the Biblical text to suit the current taste is manifested. Moses weeps before he ascends the mountain to die. He exhorts the people not to lament over his departure. As he is about to embrace Joshua and Eleazar, he is covered with a cloud and disappears in a valley, although he piously wrote in the holy books that he died lest the people should say that, because of his marvelous virtue, he was taken up to God. For the last statement Josephus has the authority of some sages, who discussed whether the last verses of Deuteronomy were written by Moses himself.[1]
[Footnote 1: Baba Batra, 15a.]
Josephus continues the Biblical narrative in less detail in the fifth book, which covers the period of Joshua and the Judges and the first part of Samuel. The Book of Joshua is compressed into the limits of one chapter, but the exploits of each of the judges of Israel, with one or two omissions, are recounted in order, and the episode of Ruth is inserted after the story of Samson. He substitutes for the famous declaration of Ruth to Naomi the prosy statement: "Naomi took Ruth along with her, as she was not to be persuaded to stay behind, but was resolved to share her fortune with her mother-in-law, whatsoever it should prove." And he justifies his insertion of the episode by the reflection that he desires to demonstrate the power of God, who can raise those that are of common parentage to dignity and splendor, even as He advanced David, though he was born of mean parents.