[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.

With his fondness for royal history, and no doubt with an eye to his noble audience, he devotes a whole book to the account of Saul's reign, adhering closely to the narrative in Samuel, but occasionally adding a passage from the Book of Chronicles, or softening what seemed an asperity in Scripture. Samuel, for example, orders Agag to be killed, whereas in the Bible he puts him to death with his own hand.[1] The incident of Saul and the Witch of Endor is expanded and invested with further pathos.[2] The Witch devotes her only possession, a calf, for the king's meal, and the historian expatiates first on her kindness and then on Saul's courage in fighting, though he knew his approaching doom. We may suspect that this digression was induced by a supposed analogy in the king of Israel's lot to the author's conduct in Galilee, when, as he claimed, he fought on though knowing the hopelessness of resistance.

[Footnote 1: Ant. VI. viii. 5.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. VI. viii. 14.]

The next book is taken up entirely with the reign of David, and contains little that is noteworthy. On one point Josephus cites the authority of Nicholas of Damascus to support the Bible, and here and there he adopts a traditional interpretation. David's son by Abigail is said to be Daniel,[1] whereas the Book of Samuel gives the name as Kitab. Absalom's hair was so thick that it could be cut with difficulty every eight days.[2] David chose a pestilence as the punishment for his sin in numbering his people, because it was an affliction common to kings and their subjects.[3] The historian ascribes the Psalms to David, and says they were in several (Greek) meters, some in hexameters and others in pentameters. Lastly he enlarges on the wonderful wealth of David, which was greater than that of any other king either of the Hebrews or of other nations. Benjamin of Tudela relates, and the Mohammedans believe to this day, that vast treasure is buried with the king, and lies in his reputed sepulcher. The story must have been accepted in the days of Josephus, for he records how Hyrcanus, the son of Simon the Maccabee, being in straits for money to buy off the Seleucid invader, opened a room of David's sepulcher and took out three thousand talents, and how, many years later, King Herod opened another room, and took out great store of money; yet neither lighted on the body of the king. Such romantic tales pleased the readers of the Jewish historian, who lived amid the wonderful material splendor of Rome, and prized, above all things, material wealth.

[Footnote 1: Comp. Ant. VII. i. 4; Berakot, 4a.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. VII. viii.; comp. Nazir, 4b.]

[Footnote 3: Ant. VII. xiii.; comp. Yalkut, ii. 165.]

When he comes to the history of Solomon, he speaks of his proverbial writings, and inserts a long account of his miraculous magical powers, based no doubt on popular legend.[1]

"He composed books of odes and songs one thousand and five [here he follows Chronicles] and of parables and similitudes three thousand. For he spoke a parable on every sort of tree, from the hyssop to the cedar, and in like manner about every sort of living creature, whether on the earth or in the air or in the seas. He was not unacquainted with any of their natures, nor did he omit to study them, but he described them all in the manner of a philosopher. God also endowed him with skill in expelling demons, which is a science useful and health-giving to men."[2]

[Footnote 1: Comp. Yalkut, ii. 177. The apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon similarly credits the king with power over spirits (vii. 20).]

[Footnote 2: Ant. VIII. ii. 5.]

Josephus goes on to describe how, in the presence of Vespasian, a compatriot cured soldiers who were demoniacal. We know from the New Testament that the belief in possession by demons was widespread among the vulgar in the first century of the common era, and the Essenes specialized in the science of exorcism. As the belief was invested with respectability by the patronage which the Flavian court extended to all sorts of magic and witchcraft, Josephus enlarges on it. Solomon is therefore represented as a thaumaturgist, and while not a single example is given of the proverbs ascribed to him, his exploits as a miracle-monger are extolled. Josephus sets out at length the story of the building of the Temple, and dwells on Solomon's missions to King Hiram, of which, he says, copies remained in his day, and may be seen in the public records of Tyre. This he claims to be a signal testimony to the truthfulness of his history.[1] He modernizes elaborately Solomon's speech at the dedication of the sanctuary, and converts it into an apology for the Jews of his own day. Again he follows an Alexandrian model, and describes God in Platonic fashion: "Thou possessest an eternal house, and we know how, from what Thou hast created for Thyself, Heaven and Air and Earth and Sea have sprung, and how Thou fillest all things and yet canst not be contained by any of them."[2] Solomon is here a preacher of universalism; he prays that God shall help not the Hebrews alone when they are in distress, "but when any shall come hither from the ends of the earth and repent of their sins and implore Thy forgiveness, do Thou pardon them and hear their prayer. For thereby all shall know that Thou wast pleased with the building of this house, and that we are not of an unsociable nature, nor do we behave with enmity to such as are not of our people, but are willing that Thou shouldst bestow Thy help on all men in common, and that all alike may enjoy Thy benefits." Solomon's dream after the dedication service provides another occasion for pointing to the Jewish disaster of the historian's day. For he foresees that if Israel will transgress the Law, his miseries shall become a proverb, and his neighbors, when they hear of them, shall be amazed at their magnitude.

[Footnote 1: Comp. below, p. 223.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. VIII. iv. 2. Comp. Philo, De Confus. Ling. i. 425.]

The description of the Temple is followed by a glowing account of the king's palace, of which the roof was "according to the Corinthian order, and the decorations so vivid that the leaves seemed to be in motion." We are told, too, of the great cities which the king built, Tadmor in the wilderness of Syria, and Gezer, the Bible narrative being supplemented here with passages from Nicholas. The Queen of Sheba is represented as the Queen of Egypt and Ethiopia, and it is to her gift that Josephus attributes "the root of balsam which our country still bears." Reveling in the material greatness of the Jewish court during the golden age of the old kingdom, Josephus catalogues the wealth of Solomon, the number of his horses and chariots. He reproaches him not only for marrying foreign wives, but for making images of brazen oxen, which supported the brazen sea, and the images of lions about his throne. For these sins against the second commandment he died ingloriously.

With the death of Solomon the legendary and romancing character of this part of the Antiquities comes to an end. In the summary of the fortunes of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, Josephus adheres almost exclusively to the Biblical text, and allows himself few digressions. He moralizes a little about the decay of the people under Rehoboam, reflecting that the aggrandizement of a kingdom and its sudden attainment of prosperity often are the occasion of mischief; and he controverts Herodotus, who confused Sesostris with Shishak when relating the Egyptian king's conquests. It is, he claims, really Shishak's invasion of Jerusalem which the Greek historian narrates, as is proved by the fact that he speaks of circumcised Syrians, who can be no other than Jews. The fate of Omri and Zimri[1] moves him to moralize again about God's Providence in rewarding the good and punishing the wicked; and Ahab's death evokes some platitudes concerning fate, "which creeps on human souls and flatters them with pleasing hopes, till it brings them to the place where it will be too hard for them."[2] Artapanus, or one of the Jewish Hellenists masking as a pagan historian, may have provided him with this reflection.

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

[Footnote 2: Ant. IX. xv. 6.]

He spoils the grandeur of the scene on Mount Carmel, when Elijah turned the people from Baal-worship back to the service of God. In place of the dramatic description in the Book of Kings he states that the Israelites worshiped one God, and called Him the great and the only true God, while the other deities were names. He omits altogether the account of Elijah's ascent to Heaven, probably from a desire not to appear to entertain any Messianic ideas with which the prophet was associated. He says simply that Elijah disappeared from among men. But he gives in detail the miraculous stories of Elisha, which were not subject to the same objection. Occasionally his statements seem in direct conflict with the Hebrew Bible, as when he says that Jehu drove slowly and in good order, whereas the Hebrew is that "he driveth furiously."[1] Or that Joash, king of Israel, was a good man, whereas in the Book of Kings it is written, "he did evil in the sight of the Lord."[2] But these discrepancies may be due, not to a different Bible text, but to aberrations of the copyists.

[Footnote 1: Ant. IX. vi. 3; II Kings, 9:20.]

[Footnote 2: II Kings, 13:11.]

The story of dynastic struggles and foreign wars is varied with a short summary of the life of Jonah, introduced at what, according to the Bible, is its proper chronological place,[1] in the reign of Jeroboam II, king of Israel. The picturesque and miraculous character of the prophet's adventures secured him this distinction, for in general Josephus does not pay much regard to the lives or writings of the prophets. It is only where they foretold concrete events that their testimony is deemed worthy of mention. Of the other minor prophets he mentions Nahum, and paraphrases part of his prophecy of the fall of Nineveh, cutting it short with the remark that he does not think it necessary to repeat the rest,[2] so that he may not appear troublesome to his readers. In the account of Hezekiah he mentions that the king depended on Isaiah the prophet, by whom he inquired and knew of all future events,[3] and he recounts also the miracle of putting back the sun-dial. For the rest, he says that, by common consent, Isaiah was a divine and wonderful man in foretelling the truth, "and in the assurance that he had never written what was false, he wrote down his prophecies and left them in books, that their accomplishment might be judged of by posterity from the events.[4] Nor was he alone, but the other prophets [i.e. the minor prophets presumably], who were twelve in number, did the same." It is notable that this phrase of the Antiquities about the prophets bears a resemblance to the "praise of famous men" contained in the apocryphal book of Ben Sira, which Josephus probably used in the Greek translation.

[Footnote 1: Ant. IX. x. 1.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. IX. xi. 3.]

[Footnote 3: Ant. IX. xiii.]

[Footnote 4: Ant. X. ii. 2. Comp. Is. 30:8f.]

While he thus cursorily disposes of the prophetical writers, he seizes on any scrap of Hellenistic authors which he could find to confirm the Bible story, or rather to confirm the existence of the personages mentioned in the Bible. Thus he quotes the Phoenician historian Menander, who confirms the existence and exploits of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser. So, too, he brings forward Herodotus and Berosus to confirm the existence and doings of Sennacherib.[1] He refutes Herodotus again, doubtless on the authority of a predecessor, for saying that Sennacherib was king of the Arabs instead of king of the Assyrians.

[Footnote 1: Ant. X. ii. 4.]

As with Ahab, so with Josiah, Josephus sees the power of fate impelling him to his death, and substitutes the Hellenistic conception of a blind and jealous power for the Hebrew idea of a just Providence. He ascribes to Jeremiah "an elegy on the death of the king, which is still extant,"[1] apparently following a statement in the Book of Chronicles, which does not refer to our Book of Lamentations. Jeremiah is treated rather more fully than Isaiah. Besides a notice of his writings we have an account of his imprisonment. He ascribes to Ezekiel two books foretelling the Babylonian captivity. Possibly the difference between the last nine and the first forty chapters of the exile prophet suggested the idea of the two books, unless these words apply rather to Jeremiah,

"The two prophets agreed [he remarks] on all other things as to the capture of the city and King Zedekiah, but Ezekiel declared that Zedekiah should not see Babylon, while Jeremiah said the king of Babylon should carry him thither in bonds. Because of this discrepancy, the Jewish prince disbelieved them both, and condemned them for false tidings.[2] Both prophets, however, were justified, because Zedekiah came to Babylon, but he came blind, so that, as Ezekiel had predicted, he did not see the city."

[Footnote 1: Ant. X. v. 2. Comp. II Chron. 35:25.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. X. vii. 2.]

The episode is possibly based on some apocryphal book that has disappeared, and the historian extracts from it the lesson, which he is never weary of repeating, that God's nature is various and acts in diverse ways, and men are blind and cannot see the future, so that they are exposed to calamities and cannot avoid their incidence.[1]

[Footnote 1: Ant. X. viii. 3.]

Following on the account of the fall of the last of the Davidic line and the destruction of the Temple, Josephus gives a chronological summary of the history of Israel from the Creation, together with an incomplete list of all the high priests who held office. The latter may be compared with the list of high priests with which he closes the Antiquities.[1] These chronological calculations were dear to him, but perhaps he borrowed them from one of the earlier Hellenistic Jewish chroniclers. He takes an especial pride throughout the Antiquities as well as in the Wars in recording the priestly succession, which served to emphasize the antiquity not only of his people, but of his own personal lineage, and was moreover congenial to the ideas of the Romans, who paid great heed to the records of their priests.

[Footnote 1: See below, p. 202.]

As might be expected, he dwells at some length on Daniel,[1] whose book was full of the miraculous legends and exact prophecies loved by his audience, and he recommends his book to those who are anxious about the future. He elaborates the interpretation of the vision of the image (ch. 3:7), but finds himself in a difficulty when he comes to the explanation of the stone broken off from the mountain that fell on the image and shattered it. According to the traditional interpretation, it portended the downfall of Rome, or maybe the coming of the Messiah, an idea equally hateful to the Roman conquerors. He excuses himself by saying that he has only undertaken to describe things past and present, and not things that are future. Later he disclaims responsibility for the story of Nebuchadnezzar's madness, on the plea that he has translated what was in the Hebrew book, and has neither added nor taken away. The story probably looked too much like an implied reproach on a mad Caesar. He adds a new chapter to the Biblical account of the prophet: Daniel is carried by Darius to Persia, and is there signally honored by the king. He builds a tower at Ecbatana,[2] which is still extant, says the historian, "and seems to be but lately built. Here the kings of Persia and Media are buried, and a Jewish priest is the custodian." Josephus borrowed this addition from some apocalyptic book recounting Daniel's deeds, and he speaks of "several books the prophet wrote and left behind him, which are still read by us." The short story in the Apocrypha of Bel and the Dragon, with its apologue about Susannah, affords an example of the post-Biblical additions to Daniel, and in the first century, when Messianic hopes were rife among the people, such apocryphal books had a great vogue. Daniel is in fact elevated to the rank of one of the greatest of the prophets, because he not only prophesied generally of future events like the others, but fixed the actual time of their accomplishment. It is claimed for him that he foretold explicitly the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes and the Roman conquest of Judea. Anticipating the theological controversialists of later times, Josephus sets special store on the Bible book that is most miraculous, because miracle and exact prognostication of the future are for his audience the clearest testimony of God. Hence the predictions of Daniel are the best refutation of the Epicureans, who cast Providence out of life, and do not believe that God has care of human affairs, but say that things move of their own accord, without a ruler and guide.

[Footnote 1: Ant. X. x.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. X. xi. 7.]

When he comes to the history of the Restoration from Babylon, Josephus follows what is now known as the apocryphal Book of Esdras, in preference to the Biblical Ezra and Nehemiah, probably because a Hellenistic guide whom he had before him did likewise. It is clear that he based his paraphrase on the Greek text. His chronicle therefore differs considerably from that given in our Scripture, and on one point he differs from his guide. For while Esdras represents Artaxerxes as the king under whom the Temple was rebuilt, Josephus, relying on a fuller knowledge of Persian history, derived probably from Nicholas of Damascus, substitutes Cambyses.[1] Our Greek version of Esdras I is unfortunately not complete, but the book, differing from that included in the Bible, must have originally comprised an account of Nehemiah. According to Josephus, Ezra dies before Nehemiah[2] arrives in Judea, whereas in the canonical books they appear for a time together. He states also that Nehemiah built houses for the poor in Jerusalem out of his own means, an incident which has not the authority of the Bible, but which may well have reposed on an ancient tradition. The account of the marriage of Sanballat with the daughter of Manasseh the high Priest, which is touched on in our Book of Nehemiah, is described more fully by Josephus,[3] who based this account on some uncanonical source. And following the Rabbis, who shortened the Persian epoch in order to eke out the Jewish history over the whole period of the Persian kingdom till the conquest of Alexander, he makes the marriage synchronize with the reign of Philip of Macedon. Josephus was anxious to avoid a vacuum, and by a little vague chronology and the aid of the fragmentary records of Ezra and Nehemiah and a priestly chronicle, the few Jewish incidents known in that tranquil, unruffled epoch are spread over three centuries.

[Footnote 1: Ant. XI. ii.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. XI. v.]

[Footnote 3: Ant. XI. vii. 2.]

The episode of Esther is treated elaborately, and, following the apocryphal version, is placed in the reign of Artaxerxes. The Greek Book of Esther, which embroidered the Hebrew story, and is generally attributed to the second century B.C.E., is laid under contribution as well as the Canonical book; from it Josephus extracted long decrees of the king and elaborate anti-Semitic denunciations of a Hellenized Haman. He omits the incident of casting lots, and contrives to explain Purim, by means of a Greek etymology, as derived from [Greek: phroureai], which denotes protection. Here and there the Biblical simplicity is elaborated: Mordecai moves from Babylon to Shushan in order to be near Esther, and soldiers with bared axes stand round the king to secure the observance of the law that he shall not be approached. We have some moralizing on Haman's fall and the working of Providence ([Greek: to theion]), which teaches that "what mischief anyone prepares against another, he unconsciously contrives against himself." Less edifying is the addition that "God laughed to scorn the wicked expectations of Haman, and as He knew what the event would be, He was pleased at it, and that night He took away the king's sleep." The Book of Esther does not mention God: Josephus calls in directly the operation of the Divine Power, but represents it unworthily.

With the completion of the eleventh book of the Antiquities, we definitely pass away from the region of sacred history and miracles, and find ourselves in the more spacious but more misty area of the Hellenistic kingdom, in which Jewish affairs are only a detail set in a larger background. Though Josephus himself does not explicitly mark the break, the character of his work materially changes. He has come to the end of the period when the Bible was his chief guide; he has now to depend for the main thread on Hellenistic sources, filling in the details when he can from some Jewish record. His function becomes henceforth more completely that of compiler, less of translator, and his work becomes much more valuable for us, because in great part he has the field to himself. Although, however, the Bible paraphrase, with the embroidery of a little tradition and comparative history and its Romanizing reflections, which constitutes the first part of the Antiquities, had not a great permanent value, for a very long period it was accepted as the standard history of the Jewish people; and in the pagan Greco-Roman world it appealed to a public to which both the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint translation were sealed books. It was written for a special purpose and served it, doing for the Jewish early history what Livy did for the hoary past of the Romans. If it was not a worthy record in many parts, it was yet of great value as an antidote to the crude fictions of the anti-Semites about the origin and the institutions of the people of Israel, which had for some two centuries been allowed to poison the minds of the Greek-speaking world, and had fanned the prejudices of the Roman people against a nationality of whose history they were ignorant and of whose laws they were contemptuous.



VII

JOSEPHUS AND POST-BIBLICAL JEWISH HISTORY

(THE ANTIQUITIES, BOOKS XII-XX)

Josephus is the sole writer of the ancient world who has left a connected account of the Jewish people during the post-Biblical period, and the meagerness of his historical information is not due so much to his own deficiencies as to the difficulty of the material. From the period when the Scriptures closed, the affairs of the Jews had to be extracted, for the most part, out of works dealing with the annals of the whole of civilized humanity. With the conquest of Alexander the Great, the Jewish people enter into the Hellenistic world, and begin to command the attention of Hellenistic historians. They are an element in the cosmopolis which was the ideal of the world-conqueror. At the same time the nature of the history of their affairs vitally changes. The continuous chronicle of their doings, which had been kept from the Exodus out of Egypt to the Restoration from Babylon, and which was designed to impress a religious lesson and illustrate God's working, comes to an end; and their scribes are concerned to draw fresh lessons from that chronicle. The religious philosophy of history is not extended to the present. The Jews, on the other hand, chiefly engage the interest of the Gentiles when they come into violent collision with the governing power, or when they are involved in some war between rival Hellenistic sovereigns. Hence their history during the two centuries following Alexander's conquests, i.e. until the time when we again have adequate Jewish sources, is singularly shadowy and incoherent.

Josephus was not the man to pierce the obscurity by his intuition or by his research. Yet we must not be too critical of the want of proportion in his writing when we remember that he was a pioneer; for it was an original idea to piece together the stray fragments of history that referred to his people. It has been shown that in his attempt to stretch out the Biblical history till it can join on to the Hellenistic sources, Josephus interposes between the account of Esther and the fall of the Persian Empire a story of intrigue among the high priests. He there describes the crime of the high priest John in killing his brother in the Temple as more cruel and impious than anything done by the Greeks or Barbarians—an expression which must have originated in a Jewish, probably a Palestinian, authority, to whom Greek connoted cruelty. And in the next chapter Josephus inserts the story of the Samaritan Sanballat and the building of the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim,[1] as though these events happened at the time of Alexander's invasion of Persia. Rabbinical chronology interposes only one generation between Cyrus and Alexander. The Sanballat who appears in the Book of Nehemiah is represented as anticipating the part played by the Hellenists of a later century, and calling in the foreign invader against Judea and Jerusalem in order to set up his own son-in-law Manasseh as high priest. Probably, in the fashion of Jewish history, the events of a later time were placed in the popular Midrash a few generations back and repeated. Jewish legendary tradition is more certainly the basis of the account of Alexander's treatment of the Jews. The Talmud has preserved similar stories.[2] According to both records, the Macedonian conqueror did obeisance before the high priest, who came out to ask for mercy, because he recognized in the Jewish dignitary a figure that had appeared to him in a dream. And when Alexander is made to revere the prophecies of Daniel and to prefer the Jews to the Samaritans and bestow on them equal rights with the Macedonians, the historian is simply crystallizing the floating stories of his nation, which are parallel with those invented by every other nation of antiquity about the Greek hero.

[Footnote 1: Comp. Neh. 13: 23.]

[Footnote 2: Comp. Megillat Taanit, 3, and Yoma, 69a.]

Passing on to Alexander's successors, he has scarcely fuller or more reliable sources. For Ptolemy's capture of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day, when the Jews would not resist, he calls in the confirmation of a Greek authority, Agatharchides of Cnidus. But he has to gloss over a period of nearly a hundred years, till he can introduce the story of the translation of the Scriptures into Greek,[1] for which he found a copious source in the romantic history, or rather the historical romance, now known as the Letter of Aristeas. This Hellenistic production has come down to us intact, and therefore we can gather how closely Josephus paraphrases his authorities. Not that he refrained altogether from embellishment and improvement. The Aristeas of his version, as of the original, professes that he is not a Jew, but he adds that nevertheless he desires favor to be done to the Jews, because all men are the work of God, and "I am sensible that He is well pleased with all those that do good." Josephus states a large part of the story as if it were his own narrative, but in fact it is a paraphrase throughout. He reproduces less than half of the Letter, omitting the account of the visit of the royal envoy to Jerusalem and the discourse of Eleazar the high priest. For the seventy-two questions and answers, which form the last part, he refers curious readers to his source. But he sets out at length the description of the presents which Ptolemy sent to Jerusalem, rejoicing in the opportunity of showing at once the splendor of the Temple vessels and the honor paid by a Hellenistic monarch to his people.

[Footnote 1: Ant. XII. ii.]

From his own knowledge also, he adds a glowing eulogy, which Menedemus, the Greek philosopher, passed on the Jewish faith. The Letter of Aristeas says that the authors of the Septuagint translation uttered an imprecation on any one who should alter a word of their work; Josephus makes them invite correction,[1] adding inconsequently—if our text is correct—that this was a wise action, "so that, when the thing was judged to have been well done, it might continue forever."

[Footnote 1: Josephus may have used a different text of Aristeas from that which has come down to us. Or the passage in our Aristeas may be a later insertion introduced as a protest against Christian interpolations in the LXX.]

Having disposed of the Aristeas incident, Josephus has to fill in the blank between the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus (250 B.C.E.) and the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes, nearly one hundred years later, which was the next period for which he had Jewish authority. He returns then to his Hellenistic guides and extracts the few scattered incidents which he could find there referring to the Jewish people. But until he comes to the reign of Antiochus, he can only snatch up some "unconsidered trifles" of doubtful validity. Seleucus Nicator, he says, made the Jews citizens of the cities which he built in Asia, and gave them equal rights with the Macedonians and Greeks in Antioch. This information he would seem to have derived from the petition which the Jews of Antioch presented to Titus when, after the fall of Jerusalem, the victor made his progress through Syria. The people of Antioch then sought to obtain the curtailment of Jewish rights in the town, but Titus refused their suit.[1] Josephus takes this opportunity of extolling the magnanimity of the Roman conqueror, and likewise of inserting a reference to the friendliness of Marcus Agrippa, who, on his progress through Asia a hundred years before, had upheld the Jewish privileges.[2] He derived this incident from Nicholas' history, and thus contrived to eke out the obscurity of the third century B.C.E. with a few irrelevancies.

[Footnote 1: Comp. B.J. VII. v. 3.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. XIII. iii. 2.]

His material becomes a little ampler from the reign of Antiochus the Great, because from this point the Greek historians serve him better. Several of the modern commentators of Josephus have thought that his authorities were Polybius and Posidonius, who wrote in Greek on the events of the period. He cites Polybius explicitly as the author of the statement about Ptolemy's conquest of Judea, and then reproduces two letters of Antiochus to his generals, directing them to grant certain privileges to his Jewish subjects as a reward for their loyal service. We know that Polybius gave in his history an account of Jerusalem and its Temple, and his character-sketch of Antiochus Epiphanes has been preserved in an epitome. Josephus, however, be it noted, has only these scanty extracts from his work. The letters are clearly derived, not from him, but from some Hellenistic-Jewish apologist, and the passages from Polybius, it is very probable, are extracted from some larger work.[1] Here, as elsewhere, both facts and authorities were found in Nicholas of Damascus.

[Footnote 1: Dr. Buechler (J.Q.R. iv. and R.E.J. xxxii. 179) has argued convincingly that Josephus had not gone far afield. For the genuineness of the Letter, comp. Willrich, Judaica, p. 51, and Buechler, Oniaden und Tobiaden, p. 143.]

We know from Josephus himself that Nicholas had included a history of the Seleucid Empire in his magnum opus. He is quoted in reference to the sacking of the Temple by Antiochus Epiphanes and the victory of Ptolemy Lathyrus over Alexander Jannaeus.[1] Josephus, indeed, several times appends to his paragraphs about the general history a note, "as we have elsewhere described." Some have inferred from this that he had himself written a general history of the Seleucid epoch, but a more critical study has shown that the tag belongs to the note of his authority, which he embodied carelessly in his paraphrase.[2]

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

[Footnote 2: Comp. Ant. XIV. I. 2-3; xi. I.]

Josephus supplements the Jewish references in the Seleucid history of Nicholas by an account of the intrigues of the Tobiades and Oniades, which reveals a Hellenistic-Jewish origin.[1] Possibly he found it in a special chronicle of the high-priestly family, which was written by one friendly to it, for Joseph ben Tobias is praised as "a good man and of great magnanimity, who brought the Jews out of poverty and low condition to one that was more splendid." The chronology here is at fault, since at the time at which the incidents are placed both Syria and Palestine were included in the dominion of the Seleucids; yet Tobias is represented at the court of the Ptolemies. Josephus follows the story of these exploits with the letters which passed between Areas, king of the Lacedemonians, and the high priest Onias, as recorded in the First Book of the Maccabees (ch. 12). The letters are taken out of their true place, in order to bridge the gap between the fall of the Tobiad house and the Maccabean rising. Areas reigned from 307-265, so that he must have corresponded to Onias I, but Josephus places him in the time of Onias III.

[Footnote 1: Ant. XII. iv.]

For his account of the Maccabean struggle he depends here primarily upon the First Book of the Maccabees, which in many parts he does little more than paraphrase. Neither the Second Book of the Maccabees nor the larger work of Jason of Cyrene, of which it is an epitome, appears to have been known to him. It is well-nigh certain that in writing the Wars he had no acquaintance with the Jewish historical book, but was dependent on the less accurate and complete statement of a Hellenistic chronicle; and in the later work, though he bases his narrative on the Greek version of the Maccabees, and says he will give a fresh account with great accuracy, he yet incorporates pieces of non-Jewish history from the Greek guide without much art or skill or consistency. Thus, in the Wars he says that Antiochus Epiphanes captured Jerusalem by assault, while in the Antiquities he speaks of two captures: the first time the city fell without fighting, the second by treachery. And while in the Book of the Maccabees the year given for the fall of the city is 143 of the Seleucid era, in the Antiquities the final capture is dated 145[1] of the era. He no doubt found this date in the Greek authority he was following for the general history of Antiochus—he gives the corresponding Greek Olympiad—and applied it to the pillage of Jerusalem. For the story of Mattathias at Modin, which is much more detailed than in the Wars, he closely follows the Book of the Maccabees, though in the speeches he takes certain liberties, inserting, for example, an appeal to the hope of immortality in Mattathias' address to his sons.[2] He turns to his Greek authority for the death of Antiochus, and controverts Polybius, who ascribes the king's distemper to his sacrilegious desire to plunder a temple of Diana in Persia. Josephus, with a touch of patriotism and an unusual disregard of the feelings of his patrons, who can hardly have liked the implied parallel, says it is surely more probable that he lost his life because of his pillage of the Jewish Temple. In confirmation of his theory he appeals to the materialistic morality of his audience, arguing that the king surely would not be punished for a wicked intention that was not successful. He states also that Judas was high priest for three years, which is not supported by the Jewish record;[3] and he passes over the miracle of the oil at the dedication of the Temple, and ascribes the name of the feast to the fact that light appeared to the Jews. The celebration of Hanukkah as the feast of lights is of Babylonian-Jewish origin, and was only instituted shortly before the destruction of the Temple.[4]

[Footnote 1: Ant. XII. v. 3.]

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

[Footnote 3: In his own list of high priests at the end of the work, the name of Judas does not appear.]

[Footnote 4: Comp. Krauss, R.E.J. xxx. 32.]

His use of the Book of the Maccabees stops short at the end of chapter xii. He presumably did not know of the last two chapters of our text, which contain the history of Simon, and probably were translated later. Otherwise we cannot explain his dismissal, in one line, of the league that Simon made with the Romans.[1] The incident is dwelt on in the extant version of the First Book of the Maccabees, and Josephus would surely not have omitted a syllable of so propitious an event, had he possessed knowledge of it. On the other hand, he inserts into the history of the Maccabean brothers an account of the foundation of a Temple by Onias V in Leontopolis,[2] in the Delta of Egypt, and describes at length the negotiations that led up to it;[3] and in the same connection he narrates a feud between the Jewish and Samaritan communities at Alexandria in the days of Ptolemy Philometor. From these indications it has been inferred that he had before him the work of a Hellenistic-Jewish historian interested in Egypt—the collection of Alexander Polyhistor suggests that there were several such at the time—while for the exploits of the later Maccabees he relied on the chronicle of John Hyrcanus the son of Simon, which is referred to in the Book of the Maccabees,[4] but has not come down to us,

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

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

[Footnote 3: Ant. XIII. iii.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Footnote 2: Ant. XVI. ii.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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