Josephus

by Norman Bentwich

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. Büchler (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 Büchler, 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: Büchler, 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. Lévi, Talmudic Sources of Jewish History, R.E.J. xxxv. 219; I. Friedlaender, J.Q.R., n.s. iv. 443_ff_.]

[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."

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

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

[Footnote 3: Comp. Vergil, Aeneid, vi.]

Lastly, Josephus turns to the fourth sect, the Zealots, whose founder was Judas the Galilean:

"These men agree in all other things with the Pharisees, but they have an inviolable attachment to liberty, and they say that God is to be their only Ruler and Lord. Moreover they do not fear any kind of death, nor do they heed the death of their kinsmen and friends, nor can any fear of the kind make them acknowledge anybody as sovereign."

Josephus, however, cannot refrain from imputing low motives to those who belonged to the party opposed to himself and hated of the Romans. "They planned robberies and murders of our principal men," he says, "in pretense for the public welfare, but in reality in hopes of gain for themselves." And he saddles them with the responsibility for all the calamities that were to come. About the Messianic hope, which appears to have inspired them, he is compulsorily silent.

The historical record that follows is very sketchy. We have a bare list of procurators and high priests down to the time of Pontius Pilate, a notice of the foundation of Tiberias by the tetrarch Herod, and an irrelevant account of the death of Phraates, the king of the Parthians, and of Antiochus of Commagene, who was connected by marriage with the Herodian house. Still there is rather more detail than in the corresponding summary in the second book of the Wars, and Josephus must in the interval have lighted on a fuller source than he had possessed in his first historical essay. It is not impossible that the new authority was again Justus of Tiberias. Of the unrest in the governorship of Pontius Pilate he has more to say, but the genuineness of the passage referring to the trial and death of Jesus, which is dealt with elsewhere,[1] has been doubted by modern critics. It is followed in the text by a long account of a scandal connected with the Isis worship at Rome, which led to the expulsion of Jews from the capital. In this way the chronicler wanders on between bare chronology and digression, until he reaches the reign of Agrippa, when he again finds written sources to help him. The romance of Agrippa's rise from a bankrupt courtier to the ruler of a kingdom is treated with something of the same full detail as the events of Herod's career, and probably the historian enjoyed here the use of royal memoirs. He may have obtained material also from the historical works of Philo of Alexandria, which were partly concerned with the same epoch. He refers explicitly to the embassy which the Alexandrian Jews sent to the Roman Emperor to appeal for the rescission of the order to set up in the synagogue the Imperial image, at the head of which went Philo, "a man eminent on all accounts, brother to Alexander the Alabarch, and not unskilled in philosophy." Bloch[2] indeed is of the opinion that the later historian did not use his Alexandrian predecessor, either in this or any other part of his writings, and points out certain differences of fact between the two accounts; but in view of the references to Philo and the fact that Josephus subsequently wrote two books of apology, one of which was expressly directed in answer to Philo's bitter opponent Apion, it is at least probable that he was acquainted with Philo's narrative. He may, however, have used it only to supplement the memoirs of the Herodian house, which served him as a chief source. Josephus devotes less attention to the Alexandrian embassy than to the efforts of the Palestinian Jews to obtain a rescission of the similar decree which Petronius, the governor of Syria, was sent to enforce in Jerusalem. His account is devised to glorify the part which Agrippa played. The prince appears as a kind of male Esther, endangering his own life to save his people; and indeed higher critics have been found to suggest that the Biblical book of Esther was written around the events of the reign of Gaius.

[Footnote 1: Ant. XVIII. iii. Comp. below, p. 241.]

[Footnote 2: Die Quellen des Flavius Josephus.]

The story of Agrippa is interrupted by a chapter about the Jews of Babylon, which has the air of a moral tale on the evils of intermarriage, and may have formed part of the popular Jewish literature of the day. Another long digression marks the beginning of the nineteenth book of the Antiquities, where Josephus leaves Jewish scenes and inserts an account of Caligula's murder and the election of Claudius as Emperor. This narrative, while of great interest for students of the Roman constitution, is out of all proportion to its place in the Jewish chronicle. Josephus, it has been surmised, based it on the work of one Cluvius (referred to in the book as an intimate friend of Claudius), who wrote a history about 70 C.E.; he may besides have received hitherto unpublished information from Agrippa II, whose father had been an important actor in the drama, or from his friend Aliturius, the actor at Rome, who had mixed in affairs of state. Anyhow, he took advantage of this chance of making a literary sensation. Doubtless also, the recital, which threw not a little discredit on the house of the earlier Caesars, was for that reason not unwelcome to the upstart Flavians, and may have been inserted at the Imperial wish.

Agrippa I is the most attractive figure in the second part of the Antiquities. He is contrasted with Herod,

"who was cruel and severe in his punishments, and had no mercy on those he hated, and everyone perceived that he had more love for the Greeks than for the Jews…. But Agrippa's temper was mild and equally liberal to all men. He was kind to foreigners and was of agreeable and compassionate feeling. He loved to reside at Jerusalem, and was scrupulously careful in his observance of the Law of his people. On his death he expressed his submission to Providence; for that he had by no means lived ill, but in a splendid and happy manner."

His peaceful reign, however, was only the lull before the storm, and the last book of the Antiquities is mainly taken up with the succession of wicked procurators, who, by their extortions and cruelties and flagrant disregard of the Jewish Law and Jewish feeling, goaded the Jews into the final rebellion. It contains, however, a digression on the conversion of the royal house of Adiabene to Judaism, which is tricked out with examples of God's Providence. Yet another digression records the villainies of Nero (which no doubt was pleasing to his patrons) and the amours of Drusilia, the daughter of Agrippa I. But of the rising discontent of the Jewish people in Palestine we have no clear picture. Josephus fails as in the Wars to bring out the inner incompatibility of the Roman and the Jewish outlook, and represents, in an unimaginative, matter-of-fact, Romanizing way, that it was simply particular excesses—the rapacity of a Felix, the knavery of a Florus—which were the cause of the Rebellion. This is just what a Roman would have said, and when the Jewish writer deals at all with the Jewish position, it is usually to drag in his political feud. He especially singles out the sacrilege of the Zealots in assassinating their opponents within the Temple precincts as the reason of God's rejecting the city; "and as for the Temple, He no longer deemed it sufficiently pure to be His habitation, but brought the Romans upon us and threw a fire on the city to purge it, and brought slavery on us, our wives, and our children, to make us wiser by our calamities." Thus the priestly apologist, accepting Roman canons, finds in the ritual offense of a section of the people the ground for the destruction of the national center. He is torn, indeed, between two conflicting views about the origin of the rebellion: whether he shall lay the whole blame on the Jewish irreconcilables, or whether he shall divide it between them and the wicked Roman governors; and in the end he exaggerates both these motives, and leaves out the deeper causes.

The penultimate chapter contains a list of the high priests, about whom the historian had throughout made great pretensions of accuracy. He enumerates but eighty-three from the time of Aaron to the end of the line, of whom no less than twenty-eight were appointed after Herod's accession to his kingdom; whereas the Talmud records that three hundred held office during the existence of the second Temple alone.[1] That number is probably hyperbolical, but the statement in other parts of the Rabbinical literature, that there were eighty high priests in that period,[2] throws doubt on this list, which besides is manifestly patched in several places.

[Footnote 1: Yoma, 9a.]

[Footnote 2: Yer. Yoma, ix., and Lev. R. xx.]

With the procuratorship of Florus, Josephus brings his chronicle to an end, the later events having been treated in detail in the Wars; and in conclusion he commends himself for his accuracy in giving the succession of priests and kings and political administrators:

"And I make bold to say, now I have so completely perfected the work which I set out to do, that no other person, be he Jew or foreigner, and had he ever so great an inclination to it, could so accurately deliver these accounts to the Greeks as is done in these books. For members of my own people acknowledge that I far exceed them in Jewish learning, and I have taken great pains to obtain the learning of the Greeks and understand stand the elements of the Greek language, though I have so long accustomed myself to speak our own tongue that I cannot speak Greek with exactness."

He makes explicit his standpoint with this envoi, which shows that he was writing for a Greek-speaking public and in competition with Greeks, and this helps to explain why he sets special store on the record of priests and kings and political changes, and why he so often disguises the genuine Jewish outlook. As an account of the Jewish people for the prejudiced society of Rome, the Antiquities undoubtedly possessed merit. History, indeed, at the time, was far from being an exact science, nor was accuracy esteemed necessary to it. Cicero had said a hundred years earlier, that it was legitimate to lie in narratives; and this was the characteristic outlook of the Greco-Roman writers. The most brilliant literary documents of the age, the Annals and Histories of Tacitus, are rather pieces of sparkling journalism than sober and philosophical records of facts; and therefore we must not judge Josephus by too high a standard.

Weighed in his own balance, he had done a great service to his people by setting out the main heads of their history over three thousand years, so that it should be intelligible to the cultured Roman society; and had he been reproached with misrepresenting and distorting many of their religious ideas, he would have replied, with some justice, that it was necessary to do so in, order to make the Romans understand. On the same ground he would have justified the omission of much that was characteristic and the exaggeration of much that was normal. He shows throughout some measure of national pride. To-day, however, we cannot but regret that he weakly adopted much of the spiritual outlook of his Gentile contemporaries, and that he did not seek to convey to his readers the fundamental spiritual conceptions of the Jews, which might have endowed his history with an unique distinction. His record of two thousand years of Israel's history gives but the shadow of the glory of his people.