JOSEPHUS BY NORMAN BENTWICH Author of "Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria" PHILADELPHIA THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA 1914 PREFACE Josephus hardly merits a place on his own account in a series of JewishWorthies, since neither as man of action nor as man of letters did hedeserve particularly well of his nation. It is not his personalworthiness, but the worth of his work, that recommends him to theattention of the Jewish people. He was not a loyal general, and he wasnot a faithful chronicler of the struggle with Rome; but he had themerit of writing a number of books on the Jews and Judaism, which notonly met the desire for knowledge of his nation in his own day, butwhich have been preserved through the ages and still remain one of thechief authorities for Jewish history. He lived at the great crisis ofhis people, when it stood at the parting of the ways. And while in hislife he was patronized by those who had destroyed the national center, after his death he found favor with that larger religious communitywhich was beginning to carry part of the Jewish mission to the Gentiles. For centuries Josephus was regarded by the Christians as the standardhistorian of the Jews, and, though for long he was forgotten andneglected by his own people, in modern times he has been carefullystudied also by them, and his merits and demerits both as patriot and aswriter have been critically examined. It has been my especial aim in this book to consider Josephus from theJewish point of view. I have made no attempt to extenuate his personalconduct or his literary faults. My judgment may appear somewhat severe, but it is when tried by the test of faithfulness to his nation thatJosephus is found most wanting; and I hope that while extenuatingnothing I have not set down aught in malice. Of the extensive literature bearing on the subject, the books to which Iam under the greatest obligation are Niese's text of the collected worksand Schürer's _History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus_. Ihave given in an Appendix a Bibliography, which contains the names ofmost of the works I have referred to. I would mention in particularSchlatter's _Zur Topographie und Geschichte Palästinas_, which is aremarkably stimulating and suggestive book, and which confirmed a view Ihad formed independently, that in the _Wars_, as in the _Antiquities_, Josephus is normally a compiler of other men's writings, and constantlyexpresses opinions not his own. My greatest debt of thanks, however, is due to the spoken rather thanthe written word. Doctor Büchler, the Principal of Jews' College, London, has constantly assisted me with advice, directed me to sourcesof information, and let me draw plentifully from his own large stores ofknowledge about Josephus; and Doctor Friedlaender, Sabato MoraisProfessor at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, has done me thebrotherly service of reading my manuscript and making many valuablesuggestions on it. To their generous help this book owes more than I canacknowledge. NORMAN BENTWICH. _Cairo, February, 1914_. CONTENTS I. THE JEWS AND THE ROMANS II. THE LIFE OF JOSEPHUS TO THE FALL OF JOTAPATA III. THE LIFE OF JOSEPHUS FROM THE TIME OF HIS SURRENDER IV. THE WORKS OF JOSEPHUS AND HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS V. THE JEWISH WARS VI. JOSEPHUS AND THE BIBLE VII. JOSEPHUS AND POST-BIBLICAL JEWISH HISTORY VIII. THE APOLOGY FOR JUDAISM IX. CONCLUSION BIBLIOGRAPHY ABBREVIATIONS USED IN REFERRING TO THE WORKS OF JOSEPHUS INDEX ILLUSTRATIONS BAS-RELIEF FROM THE ARCH OF TITUS AT ROME _Frontispiece_ COINS CURRENT IN PALESTINE (34 B. C. E. To 98 C. E. ) RUINS OF AN ANCIENT SYNAGOGUE AT KAFR BIR'IM, UPPER GALILEE JOSEPHUS I THE JEWS AND THE ROMANS The life and works of Flavius Josephus are bound up with the struggle ofthe Jews against the Romans, and in order to appreciate them it isnecessary to summarize the relations of the two peoples that led up tothat struggle. It is related in the Midrash that the city of Rome was founded on theday Solomon married an Egyptian princess. The Rabbis doubtless meant bythis legend that the power of Rome was created to be a scourge forIsrael's backslidings. They identified Rome with the Edom of the Bible, representing thus that the struggle between Esau and Jacob was carriedon by their descendants, the Romans and the Jews, and would continuethroughout history. [1] Yet the earliest relations of the two peopleswere friendly and peaceful. They arose out of the war of independencethat the Maccabean brothers waged against the Syrian Empire in themiddle of the second century B. C. E. , when the loyal among the peoplewere roused to stand up for their faith. Antiochus Epiphanes, anxious tostrengthen his tottering empire, which had been shaken by its struggleswith Rome, sought to force violently on the Jews a pagan Hellenism thatwas already making its way among them. He succeeded only in evoking thelatent force of their national consciousness. Rome was already thegreatest power in the world: she had conquered the whole of Italy; shehad destroyed her chief rival in the West, the Phoenician colony ofCarthage; she had made her will supreme in Greece and Macedonia. Hersenate was the arbiter of the destinies of kingdoms, and though for thetime it refrained from extending Roman sway over Egypt and Asia, itsword there was law. Its policy was "divide and rule, " to hold supremesway by encouraging small nationalities to maintain their independenceagainst the unwieldy empires which the Hellenistic successors ofAlexander had carved out for themselves in the Orient. [Footnote 1: Lev. R. Xiii. (5), quoted in Schechter, Aspects of RabbinicTheology, p. 100. ] At the bidding of the Roman envoy, Antiochus Epiphanes himself, immediately before his incursion into Jerusalem, had slunk away fromAlexandria; and hence it was natural that Judas Maccabaeus, when he hadvindicated the liberty of his nation, should look to Rome for support inmaintaining that liberty. In the year 161 B. C. E. He sent Eupolemus theson of Johanan and Jason the son of Eleazar, "to make a league of amityand confederacy with the Romans"[1]: and the Jews were received asfriends, and enrolled in the class of Socii. His brother Jonathanrenewed the alliance in 146 B. C. E. ; Simon renewed it again five yearslater, and John Hyrcanus, when he succeeded to the high priesthood, madea fresh treaty. [2] Supported by the friendship, and occasionally by thediplomatic interference, of the Western Power, the Jews did not requirethe intervention of her arms to uphold their independence against theSeleucid monarchs, whose power was rapidly falling into ruin. At thebeginning of the first century B. C. E. , however, Rome, having emergedtriumphant from a series of civil struggles in her own dominions, foundherself compelled to take an active part in the affairs of the East. During her temporary eclipse there had been violent upheavals in Asia. The semi-barbarous kings of Pontus and Armenia took advantage of theopportunity to overrun the Hellenized provinces and put all the Greekand Roman inhabitants to the sword. To avenge this outrage, Rome sent tothe East, in 73 B. C. E. , her most distinguished soldier, Pompeius, orPompey, who, in two campaigns, laid the whole of Asia Minor and Syria athis feet. [Footnote 1: I Macc. Viii. 7. It is interesting to note that the sonshad Greek names, while their fathers had Hebrew names. ] [Footnote 2: I Macc. Xii. 3; xiv. 24. ] Unfortunately civil strife was waging in Palestine between the twoHasmonean brothers, Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, who fought for the throneon the death of the queen Alexandra Salome. Both in turn appealed toPompey to come to their aid, on terms of becoming subject to the Romanoverlord. At the same time, a deputation from the Jewish nation appearedbefore the general, to declare that they did not desire to be ruled bykings: "for what was handed down to them from their fathers was thatthey should obey the priests of God; but these two princes, though thedescendants of priests, sought to transfer the nation to another form ofgovernment, that it might he enslaved. " Pompey, who had resolved to establish a strong government immediatelysubject to Rome over the whole of the near Orient, finally interfered onbehalf of Hyrcanus. Aristobulus resisted, at first somewhathalf-heartedly, but afterwards, when the Roman armies laid siege toJerusalem, with fierce determination. The struggle was in vain. On aSabbath, it is recorded, when the Jews desisted from their defense, theRoman general forced his way into the city, and, regardless of Jewishfeeling, entered the Holy of Holies. The intrigues of the Jewish royalhouse had brought about the subjection of the nation. As it is said inthe apocryphal Psalms of Solomon, which were written about this time: "Apowerful smiter has God brought from the ends of the earth. He decreedwar upon the Jews and the land. The princes of the land went out withjoy to meet him, and said to him, 'Blessed be thy way; draw near andenter in peace. '" Yet Pompey did not venture, or did not care, todestroy or rob the Temple, according to Cicero and Josephus, [1] becauseof his innate moderation, but really, one may suspect, from less noblemotives. It was the custom of the Roman conquerors to demand thesurrender, not only of the earthly possessions of the conquered, but oftheir gods, and to carry the vanquished images in the triumph which theycelebrated. But Pompey may have recognized the difference between theJewish religion and that of other peoples, or he realized the widespreadpower of the Jewish people, which would rise as a single body in defenseof its religion; for he made no attempt to interfere either with Jewishreligious liberties, or with a worship that Cicero declared to be"incompatible with the majesty of the Empire. " [Footnote 1: Cicero, Pro Flacco, 69, and Ant. XVI. Iv, 4. ] The Jews, however, were henceforth the clients, instead of the allies, of Rome. Though Hyrcanus was recognized by Pompey as the high priest andethnarch of Judea, and his wily counselor, the Idumean Antipater, wasgiven a general power of administering the country, they were alikesubject to the governor of Syria, which was now constituted a Romanprovince. Moreover, the Hellenistic cities along the coast of Palestineand on the other side of Jordan, which had been subjugated by JohnHyrcanus and Alexander Jannaeus, were restored to independence, andplaced under special Roman protection, and the Jewish territory itselfwas shortly thereafter split by the Roman governor Gabinius into fivetoparchies, or provinces, each with a separate administration. The guiding aim of the conqueror was to weaken the Oriental power (asthe Jews were regarded) and strengthen the Hellenistic element in thecountry. The Jews were soon to feel the heavy hand and suffer theinsatiate greed of Rome. National risings were put down with mercilesscruelty, the Temple treasury was spoiled in 56 B. C. E. By the avariciousCrassus, one of the triumvirate that divided the Roman Empire, when hepassed Jerusalem on his way to fight against the Parthians; even theannual offering contributed voluntarily by the Jews of the Diaspora tothe Temple was seized by a profligate governor of Asia. The Romanaristocrats during the last years of the Republic were a degeneratebody; they regarded a governorship as the opportunity of unlimitedextortion, the means of recouping themselves for all the gross expensesincurred on attaining office, and of making themselves and their friendsaffluent for the rest of their lives. And Judea was a fresh quarry. A happier era seemed to be dawning for the Jews when Julius Caesarbecame dictator. At the beginning of the civil war between him andPompey, Hyrcanus, at the instance of Antipater, prepared to support theman to whom he owed his position; but when Pompey was murdered, Antipater led the Jewish forces to the help of Caesar, who was hardpressed at Alexandria. His timely help and his influence over theEgyptian Jews recommended him to Caesar's favor, and secured for him anextension of his authority in Palestine, and for Hyrcanus theconfirmation of his ethnarchy. Joppa was restored to the Hasmoneandomain, Judea was granted freedom from all tribute and taxes to Rome, and the independence of the internal administration was guaranteed. Caesar, too, whatever may have been his motive, showed favor to the Jewsthroughout his Empire. Mommsen thinks that he saw in them an effectiveleaven of cosmopolitanism and national decomposition, and to that intentgave them special privileges; but this seems a perverse reason to assignfor the grant of the right to maintain in all its thoroughness theirnational life, and for their exemption from all Imperial or municipalburdens that would conflict with it. It is more reasonable to supposethat, taking in this as in many other things a broader view than that ofhis countrymen, Caesar recognized the weakness of a world-state whosemembers were so denationalized as to have no strong feeling for anycommon purpose, no passion of loyalty to any community, and he favoredJudaism as a counteracting force to this peril. His various enactments constituted, as it were, a Magna Charta of theJews in the Empire; Judaism was a favored cult in the provinces, a_licita religio_ in the capital. At Alexandria Caesar confirmed andextended the religious and political privileges of the Jews, and orderedhis decree to be inscribed on pillars of brass and set up in a publicplace. At Rome, though the devotees of Bacchus were forbidden to meet, he permitted the Jews to hold their assemblies and celebrate theirceremonials. At his instance the Hellenistic cities of Asia passedsimilar favorable decrees for the benefit of the Jewish congregations intheir midst, which invested them with a kind of local autonomy. Theproclamation of the Sardians is typical. "This decree, " it runs, "wasmade by the senate and people, upon the representation of the praetors: "Whereas those Jews who are our fellow-citizens, and live with us inthis city, have ever had great benefits heaped upon them by the people, and have come now into the senate, and desired of the people that, uponthe restitution of their law and their liberty by the senate and peopleof Rome, they may assemble together according to their ancient legalcustom, and that we will not bring any suit against them about it; andthat a place may be given them where they may hold their congregationswith their wives and children, and may offer, as did their forefathers, their prayers and sacrifices to God:--now the senate and people havedecreed to permit them to assemble together on the days formerlyappointed, and to act according to their own laws; and that such a placebe set apart for them by the praetors for the building and inhabitingthe same as they shall esteem fit for that purpose, and that those whohave control of the provisions of the city shall take care that suchsorts of food as they esteem fit for their eating may be imported intothe city. "[1] [Footnote 1: Ant. XIV. X. 24. ] Caesar's decrees marked the culmination of Roman tolerance, and the Jewsenjoyed their privileges for but a short time. It is related by thehistorian Suetonius that they lamented his death more bitterly than anyother class. [1] And they had good reason. The Republicans, who hadmurdered him, and his ministers, who avenged him, vied with each otherfor the support of the Jewish princes; but the people in Palestinesuffered from the burden that the rivals imposed on the provinces intheir efforts to raise armies. Antipater and his ambitious sons Herodand Phasael contrived to maintain their tyranny amid the constantshifting of power; and when the hardy mountaineers of Galilee stroveunder the lead of one Hezekiah (Ezekias), the founder of the party ofthe Zealots, to shake off the Roman yoke, Herod ruthlessly put down therevolt. But when Antigonus, the son of that Aristobulus who had beendeprived of his kingdom by Hyrcanus and Pompey, roused the Parthians toinvade Syria and Palestine, the Jews eagerly rose in support of thescion of the Maccabean house, and drove out the hated Idumeans withtheir puppet Jewish king. The struggle between the people and the Romanshad begun in earnest, and though Antigonus, when placed on the throne bythe Parthians, proceeded to spoil and harry the Jews, rejoicing at therestoration of the Hasmonean line, thought a new era of independence hadcome. [Footnote 1: Suetonius, Caesar, lxxxiv. 7. ] The infatuation of Mark Antony for Cleopatra enabled Antigonus to holdhis kingdom for three years (40-37 B. C. E. ). Then Herod, who had escapedto Rome, returned to Syria to conquer the kingdom that Antony hadbestowed on him. He brought with him the Roman legions, and for twoyears a fierce struggle was waged between the Idumeans, Romans, andRomanizing Jews on the one hand, and the national Jews and Parthianmercenaries of Antigonus on the other. The struggle culminated in asiege of Jerusalem. As happened in all the contests for the city, thepower of trained force in the end prevailed over the enthusiasm offervent patriots. Herod stormed the walls, put to death Antigonus andhis party, and established a harsher tyranny than even the Romanconqueror had imposed. For over thirty years he held the people downwith the aid of Rome and his body-guard of mercenary barbarians. Hisconstitution was an autocracy, supplemented by assassination. In thecivil war between Antony and Octavian, he was first on the losing side, as his father had been in the struggle between Pompey and Caesar; but, like his father, he knew when to go over to the victor. The master ofthe Roman Empire, henceforth known as Augustus, was so impressed withhis carriage and resolution that he not only confirmed him in hiskingdom, but added to it the territories of Chalcis and Perea to thenorth and east of the Jordan. Throughout his reign Herod contrived topreserve the friendship of Rome as effectually as he contrived to arousethe hatred of his Jewish subjects. "The Imperial Eagle and somedistinguished Roman or other, " says George Adam Smith, [1] "were alwaysfixed in Herod's heaven. " He ruled with a strong but merciless hand. Heinsured peace, and while he turned his own home into a slaughter-house, he glorified the Jewish dominion outwardly to a height and magnificenceit had never before attained. Yet the Jewish deputation that went toplead before Augustus on his death declared that "Herod had put suchabuses on them as a wild beast would not have done, and no calamity theyhad suffered was comparable with that which he had brought on thenation. "[2] Beneath the fine show of peace, splendor, and expansion, thepassions of the nation were being aroused to the breaking-point. [Footnote 1: Jerusalem, ii. 504. ] [Footnote 2: Ant. XVII. Xi. 2. ] Augustus himself, following the example of his uncle Julius Caesar, yetlacking the same large tolerance, held towards Judaism an ambiguousattitude of impartiality rather than of favor. He caused sacrifices tobe offered for himself at the Temple at Jerusalem, [1] but he praised hisnephew Gaius for having refrained from doing likewise during his Easterntravels. [2] He was anxious that the national laws and customs of eachnation should be preserved, and he issued a decree in favor of the Jewsof Cyrene; but he initiated the worship of the Emperors, whichnecessitated a conflict between the kingdom of God and the kingdom ofCaesar, and in the end destroyed the religious liberty that JuliusCaesar had given to the Empire. His aim was at once to foster theveneration of the Imperial power and establish an Imperial worship thatshould replace the effete paganism of his subjects. He made no attemptto force this worship on the Jews, but its existence fanned theprejudice against the one nation that refused to participate. And theJews could not but look with distrust on a government that "derived itsauthority from the deification of might, whereof the Emperor was theincarnate principle. "[3] [Footnote 1: Philo, De Leg. Ii. 507. ] [Footnote 2: Suetonius, Aug. 93. ] [Footnote 3: Schechter, Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, p. 108. ] Marcus Agrippa, the trusted minister of Augustus, was also an intimatefriend of Herod, and served to link the two courts. But on the death ofHerod, in 4 C. E. , the friendship of Rome for the Idumean royal house wasmodified. Archelaus, who claimed the whole succession, was appointedsimply as ethnarch of Judea, while Herod's two other sons, Philip andHerod Antipas, divided the rest of his dominions. The Zealots, rid ofthe powerful tyrant who had held them down, sought again to throw offthe hated yoke of Idumea, which, not without reason, they identifiedwith the yoke of Rome. With their watchword, "No king but God, " theyattempted to make Judea independent, and a fierce struggle, known as theWar of Varus, ensued. Jerusalem was stormed once again by Roman legionsbefore the Zealots were subdued. Archelaus was deposed by his mastersafter a few years, and the province of Judea was placed under directRoman administration. The Roman procurator was at first less detestedthan the Idumean tyrant, since he interfered less with the legalinstitutions, such as the Sanhedrin and the Bet Din; but his presencewith the legionaries in the Holy City and his constant, though ofteninvoluntary, affronts to the religious sentiments of the people rousedthe hostility of the nationalist party, who looked forward to the daywhen Israel should "tread on the neck of the Eagle. " The Pharisees, whowere anxious for the spiritual rather than the political independence ofthe Jews, counseled submission to Rome, and were willing "to render untoCaesar the things that are Caesar's, " so long as they were not compelledto give up the Torah. But the Zealots desired political as well asreligious freedom, and they fomented rebellion. They have been comparedby Merivale to the Montagnards of the French Revolution, driven by theirown indomitable passion to assert the truths that possessed them with aferocity that no possession could justify. They were continually rousingthe people to expel the foreign rulers, and in the northern province ofGalilee, where they found shelter amid the wild tracts of heath andmountain, they maintained a constant state of insurrection. [1] [Footnote 1: It is important to notice that much of our knowledge of theZealots is derived from Josephus, who, as will be seen, set himself tomisrepresent them, and repeated the calumnies of hostile Roman writersagainst them. The Talmud contains several references to them, describingthem as Kannaim (the Hebrew equivalent of Zealots), and it would appearthat they were in their outlook successors of the former Hasidim, distinguished as much for their religious rigidity as their patrioticfervor. See Jewish Encyclopedia, s. V. Zealots. ] The Romans, on their side, accustomed to the ready submission of all thepeoples under their sway, could not understand or tolerate the Jews. Tothem this people with its dour manners, its refusal to participate inthe religious ideas, the social life, and the pleasures of itsneighbors, its eruptions of passion and violence on account of abstractideas, and its rigid exclusion of the insignia of Roman majesty from thecapital, seemed the enemies of the human race. In their own religionthey had freely found a place for Greek and Egyptian deities, but theJewish faith, in its uncompromising opposition to all pagan worship, seemed, in the words that Anatole France has put into the mouth of oneof the Roman procurators, to be rather an _ab_ligion than a _re_ligion, an institution designed rather to sever the bond that united peoples, than bind them together. Every other civilized people had accepted theirdominion; the Jews and the Parthians alone stood in the way of universalpeace. The near-Eastern question, which, then as now, continuallythreatened war and violence, irritated the Romans beyond measure, andthey came to feel towards Jerusalem as their ancestors had felt twohundred years before towards Carthage, the great Semitic power of theWest, _delenda est Hierosolyma_. As time went on they realized that thisstubborn nation was resolved to dispute with them for the mastery, andevery agitation was regarded as an outrage on the Roman power, whichmust be wiped out in blood. It was the inevitable conflict, not onlybetween the Imperial and the national principle, but between the ideasof the kingdom of righteousness and the ideas of the kingdom of might. During the reign of Tiberius, however, the Roman governors were held incheck to some extent by strong central control from Rome, and theirextortion was comparatively moderate. The worst of them was PontiusPilate, and the _odium theologicum_ has, perhaps, had its part inblackening his reputation. Nevertheless, the broad religious toleranceinitiated by the first Caesar was being continually impaired. The Jewishpublic worship was prohibited in Rome, and the Jews were expelled fromthe city in 19 C. E. ; while at Alexandria an anti-Jewish persecution wasinstigated by Sejanus, the upstart freedman, who became the chiefminister of Tiberius. In Palestine, though we hear of no definitemovement, it is clear from after-events that the bitterness of feelingbetween the Hellenized Syrians and the Jewish population was steadilyfomented. The Romans were naturally on the side of the Greek-speakingpeople, whom they understood, and whose religion they could appreciate. The situation may best be paralleled by the condition of Ireland in thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when England supported theProtestant population of Ulster against the hated Roman Catholics, whoformed the majority of the people. It had been the aim of Tiberius to consolidate the unwieldy mass of theEmpire by the gradual absorption of the independent kingdoms inclosedwithin its limits. In pursuance of this policy, Judea, Chalcis, andAbilene, all parts of Herod's kingdom, had been placed under Romangovernors. But when Gaius Caligula succeeded Tiberius in 32 C. E. , andbrought to the Imperial throne a capricious irresponsibility, hereverted to the older policy of encouraging client-princes, and doledout territories to his Oriental favorites. Prominent among them wasAgrippa, a grandson of Herod, who had passed his youth in the company ofthe Roman prince in Italy. He received as the reward of his loyalextravagance not only Judea but Galilee and Perea, together with thetitle of king. He was not, however, given permission to repair to hiskingdom, since his patron desired his attentions at Rome. Later he wasdetained by a sterner call. Gaius, who had passed from folly to lunacy, was not content with the customary voluntary worship paid to theEmperors, but imagined himself the supreme deity, and demandedveneration from all his subjects. He ordered his image to be set up inall temples, and, irritated by the petition of the Jews to be exemptedfrom what would be an offense against the first principle of theirreligion, he insisted upon their immediate submission. In Alexandria theGreek population made a violent attempt to carry out the Imperial order;a sharp conflict took place, and the Jews in their dire need sent adeputation, with Philo at its head, to supplicate the Emperor. In theEast the governor of Syria, Petronius, was directed to march onJerusalem and set up the Imperial statue in the Holy of Holies, whateverit might cost. Petronius understood, and it seems respected, thefaithfulness of the Jews to their creed, and he hesitated to carry outthe command. From East and West the Jews gathered to resist the decree;the multitude, says Philo, covered Phoenicia like a cloud. Meantime KingAgrippa at Rome interceded with the Emperor for his people, and inducedhim to relent for a little. But the infatuation again came over Gaius;he ordered Petronius peremptorily to do his will, and, when the legatestill dallied, sent to remove him from his office. But, as Philo says, God heard the prayer of His people: Gaius was assassinated by a Romanwhom he had wantonly insulted, and the death-struggle with Rome, whichhad threatened in Judea, was postponed. The year of trial, however, hadbrought home to the whole of the Jewish people that the incessant moralconflict with Rome might at any moment be resolved into a desperatephysical struggle for the preservation of their religion. And thewarlike party gained in strength. The date of the death of Gaius (Shebat 22) was appointed as a day ofmemorial in the Jewish calendar; and for a little time the Jews had arespite from tyranny. Agrippa, who, after the murder of Gaius, played alarge part in securing for Claudius the succession to the Imperialthrone, was confirmed in the grant of his kingdom, and, despite hisantecedents and his upbringing, proved himself a model national king. Perhaps he had seen through the rottenness of Rome, perhaps the trial ofGaius' mad escapades had deepened his nature, and led him to honor theburning faith of the Jews. Whatever the reason, while remaining dutifulto Rome, he devoted himself to the care of his people, to themaintenance of their full religious and national life, and to thestrengthening of the Holy City against the struggle he foresaw. To theJews of the Diaspora, moreover, the succession of Claudius brought arenewal of privileges. An edict of tolerance was promulgated, first tothe Alexandrians, and afterwards to the communities in all parts of thehabitable globe, by which liberty of conscience and internal autonomywere restored, with a notable caution against Jewish missionaryenterprise. "We think it fitting, " runs the decree, "to permit the Jewseverywhere under our sway to observe their ancient customs withouthindrance; and we hereby charge them to use our graciousness withmoderation and not to show contempt of the religious observances ofother people, but to keep their own laws quietly. "[1] Nevertheless thetolerant principle on which Caesar and Augustus had sought to found theEmpire was surely giving way to a more tyrannical policy, which viewedwith suspicion all bodies that fostered a corporate life separate fromthat of the State, whether Jewish synagogue, Stoic school, or religiouscollege. [Footnote 1: Ant. XIX, v. 2. ] The conflict between Rome and Jerusalem entered on a bitterer stage whenAgrippa died in 44 C. E. Influenced by his self-seeking band offreedmen-counselors, who saw in office in Palestine a golden opportunityfor spoliation, Claudius placed the vacant kingdom again under thedirect administration of Roman procurators, and appointed to the officea string of the basest creatures of the court, who revived theinjustices of the worst days of the Republic. From 48-52 C. E. Palestine was under the governorship of VentidiusCumanus, who seemed deliberately to egg on the Jews to insurrection. When a Roman soldier outraged the Jewish conscience by indecent conductin the Temple during the Passover, Cumanus refused all redress, calledon the soldiers to put down the clamoring people, and slew thousands ofthem in the holy precincts. [1] A little later, when an Imperial officerwas attacked on the road and robbed, Cumanus set loose the legionarieson the villages around, and ordered a general pillage. When a GalileanJew was murdered in a Samaritan village, and the Jewish Zealots, failingto get redress, attacked Samaria, Cumanus fell on them and crucifiedwhomever he captured. Then, indeed, the Roman governor of Syria, not soreckless as his subordinate, or, it may be, corrupted by the man anxiousto step into the procurator's place, summoned Cumanus before him, andsent him to Rome to stand his trial for maladministration. [Footnote 1: Ant. XX. V. 3. ] But this act of belated justice brought the Jews small comfort; Cumanuswas succeeded by Felix, an even worse creature. He was the brother ofthe Emperor's favorite Narcissus, "by badness raised to that proudeminence, " and the husband of the Herodian princess Drusilia, who hadbecome a pagan in order to marry him. Tacitus, the Roman historian, says[1] that "with all manner of cruelty he exercised royal functions inthe spirit of a slave. " Under his rapacious tyranny the people weregoaded to fury. Bands of assassins, Sicarii (so called by both Romansand Jews because of the short dagger, sica, which they used), sprang upover the country. Now they struck down Romans and Romanizers, and nowthey were employed by the governor himself to put out of the way richJewish nobles whose possessions he coveted. From time to time there weremore serious risings, some purely political, others led by apseudo-Messiah, and all alike put down with cruelty. Roman governorswere habitually corrupt, grasping, and cruel, but Mommsen declares thatthose of Judea in the reigns of Claudius and Nero, who were chosen fromthe upstart equestrians, exceeded the usual measure of worthlessness andoppressiveness. The Jews believed that they had drunk to the dregs thecup of misery, and that God must send them a Redeemer. There were noprophets to preach as at the time of the struggle with Babylon andAssyria, that the oppression was God's chastisement for their sins. Andit was inconceivable to them that the power of wickedness should beallowed to triumph to the end. [Footnote 1: Hist. V. 9. ] Steadily the party that clamored for war gained in strength, and theapprehensions of the Pharisees who viewed the political struggle withmisgiving, lest it should end in the loss of the national center and thedestruction of religious independence, were overborne by the fury of themasses. The oppression by Roman governors and Romanizing high priestsdid not diminish when Nero succeeded Claudius. For the rest of theEmpire the first five years of his reign (the _quinquennium Neronis_)were a period of peace and good government, but for the Jews theybrought little or no relief. The harsh Roman policy toward the Jews mayhave been specially instigated by Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, who wasNero's counselor during his saner years, and who entertained a stronghatred of Judaism. But we need not look for such special causes. It hadbeen the fixed habit of Republican Rome to crush out the national spiritof a subject people, "to war down the proud, " as her greatest poeteuphemistically expressed it; and now that spirit was adopted by theImperial Caesars in dealing with the one and only people resolved topreserve inviolate its national life and its national religion. Neroindeed recalled Felix, and Festus, who was appointed in his place, madean attempt to mend affairs, but he died within a year, and was succeededby two procurators that were worthy followers of Felix. The first ofthem was Albinus (62-64), of whom Josephus says that there was no sortof wickedness in which he had not a hand. The same authority says thatcompared with Gessius Florus, the governor under whom the Rebellionburst out, he was "most just. " Florus owed his appointment to Poppaea, the profligate wife of Nero, and his conduct bears the interpretationthat he was deliberately anxious to fill the measure of persecution tothe brim and drive the nation to war. The very forms of privilege which had been left to the Jews were turnedto their hurt. The Herodian tetrarchs of Chalcis, to whom the Romansgranted the power of appointing the high priests, true to the traditionof their house, appointed only such as were confirmed Romanizers, andthe most unscrupulous at that. When Felix was governor, the high priestwas the notorious Ananias, of whom the Talmud says, "Woe to the House ofAnanias; woe for their cursings, woe for their serpent-likehissings. "[1] Herod Agrippa II, the son of Agrippa, who held theprincipate from 50-100 C. E. , and was the faithful creature of Romethroughout the period of his people's stress, proclaiming himself on hiscoins "lover of Caesar and lover of Rome, " deposed and created highpriests with unparalleled frequency as a means of extorting money andrewarding the leading informers. There were seven holders of the officeduring the last twenty years of Roman rule, and "he who carried furthestservility and national abnegation received the prize. " The high prieststhus formed a kind of anti-national oligarchy; they robbed the otherpriests of their dues, and reduced them to poverty, and were the willingtools of Roman tyranny. Together with the Herodian princes, who indulgedevery lust and wicked passion, they undermined the strength of thepeople like some fatal canker, much as the priests and nobles had doneat the first fall of Jerusalem, or, again, in the days of the SeleucidEmperors. Apart from governors, tax-collectors, and high priests, theRomans had an instrument of oppression in the Greek-speaking populationof Palestine and Syria, which maintained an inveterate hostility to theJews. The immediate cause of the great Rebellion actually arose out of afeud between the Jewish and the Gentile inhabitants of Caesarea. TheHellenistic population outnumbered the Jews in the Herodian foundationsof Caesarea, Sepphoris, Tiberias, Paneas, etc. , as well as in the oldGreek cities of Doris, Scythopolis, Gerasa, Gadara, and the rest of theDecapolis. This population regarded religion only as the pretext forpublic ceremonials and entertainments; it was scornful of the Jewishabstention from these things, and was aroused to the bitterest hatred bythe social aloofness of their neighbors. Violent riots between Jew andGentile were constantly taking place, and whether they were theaggressors or merely fighting in self-defense, the Jews were thescapegoats for the breaking of the peace. Stung by constant outrage onthe part of their neighbors, the Jews turned upon them at Caesarea, anddrove them out of the town. Thereupon Florus called them to reckoning, marched on Jerusalem, and plundered the Temple treasury. This eventhappened on the tenth day of Iyar in the year 66 C. E. The war-partydetermined to force the struggle to a final issue. Hitherto they hadonly been able to arouse a section to venture desperate sporadicinsurrection against the might of Rome. Now they carried the people withthem to engage in a national rebellion. [Footnote 1: Pesahim, 57a. ] Agrippa II, who was amusing himself at Alexandria when the firstoutbreak occurred, hurried back to Jerusalem, and sought to quiet thepeople by impressing upon them the invincible power of Rome. But hefailed, and the Romanizing priests' party failed, and the peacefulleaders of the Pharisees failed, to shake their determination. Messianichopes were rife among the masses, and were invested with a materialisticinterpretation. The Zealots, it is alleged by the pagan as well as theJewish authorities for the period, believed that the destined time wascome when the Jews should rule the world. The people looked for therealization of the prophecy of Isaiah (41:2), "He shall raise up therighteous one from the East, give the nations before Israel, and makehim rule over kings. " The belief in the approach of the Messianic kingdom was undoubtedly oneof the mainsprings of the revolt. There had been a series of popularleaders claiming to be Messiahs, but in the final struggle it was notthe claim of any individual, but the passionate faith of the wholepeople, that inspired a belief in the coming of a perfect deliverance. Some events appeared to favor the fulfilment of their hopes of temporalsovereignty, bred though they were of despair. Rome under the corruptinginfluence of Nero seemed to be passing her zenith; national movementswere stirring in the West, in Gaul and in Germany; in the East theParthians were again threatening the security of the Roman provinces. The Jewish cause, on the other hand, seemed to be gaining groundeverywhere. Its converts, numerous in the West, were still more numerousand important in the East. Among those recently brought over to the truefaith as full proselytes were Helena, the queen of Adiabene, a kingdomsituate in Mesopotamia, and her son Izates, who built themselvessplendid palaces at Jerusalem. In Babylon the Jews had made themselvesalmost independent, and waged open war on the Parthian satraps. A largesection of the people cherished a somewhat simple theodicy. How couldGod allow the wicked and dissolute Romans to prosper and the chosenpeople to be oppressed? The Hellenistic writers of Sibylline oracles andthe Hebrew writers of Apocalypses, imitating the doom-songs of Isaiahand Ezekiel, announced the coming overthrow of evil and the triumph ofgood. Evil had reached its acme in Nero, and the time had come when Godwould break the "fourth horn" of Daniel's vision (ch. 8), and exalt hischosen people. The fight for national independence was bound to have come, for nothingcould have prevented the Romans from their attempt to crush the spiritof the Jews, and nothing could have held back the Jews from making asupreme effort to obtain their freedom from the hated yoke. For onehundred and twenty years Palestine had been ground beneath the iron heelof Roman governors and Romanizing tyrants. The conditions of the foreignrule had steadily grown more intolerable. At first the oppression wasmainly fiscal; then it had sought to crush all political liberty, andfinally it had come to outrage the deepest religious feeling and menacethe Temple-worship. As Graetz says, "The Jewish people was like acaptive, who, continually visited by his jailer, rattles at his fetterswith the strength of despair, till he wrenches them asunder. " It was notonly the freedom of the Jew, but the safety of Judaism that wasimperiled by the misrule of a Claudius and a Nero. The war against theRomans was then not merely a struggle for national liberty, but, equallywith the wars of the Maccabees against the Seleucids, an episode in themore vital conflict between Hebraism and paganism, between materialforce and the ardent passion for religious freedom. II THE LIFE OF JOSEPHUS TO THE FALL OF JOTAPATA Josephus was essentially an apologist, and his writings include not onlyan apology for his people, but an apology for his own life. In contrastwith the greater Jewish writers, he was given to vaunting his own deeds. We have therefore abundant, if not always reliable, information aboutthe chief events of his career. It must always be borne in mind that hehad to color the narrative of his own as well as his people's history tosuit the tastes and prejudices of the Roman conqueror. He was born in 37C. E. , the first year of the reign of Gaius Caesar, the lunatic Emperor, who nearly provoked the Jews to the final struggle. Though he is knownto history as Josephus Flavius, his proper name was Joseph benMattathias, Josephus being the Latinized form of the Hebrew [Hebrew:Yosef] and his patronymic being exchanged, when he went over to theRomans, for the family name of his patrons, Flavius. His father was apriest of the first of the twenty-four orders, named Jehoiarib, and onhis mother's side he was connected with the royal house of theHasmoneans. His genealogy, which he traces back to the time of theMaccabean princes, is a little vague, and we may suspect that he was notabove improving it. But his family was without doubt among the priestlyaristocracy of Jerusalem, and his father, he says, was "eminent not onlyon account of his nobility, but even more for his virtue. "[1] [Footnote 1: Vita, 2. ] He was brought up with his brother Matthias to fit himself for thepriestly office, and he received the regular course of Jewish educationin the Torah and the tradition. He says in the _Antiquities_ that "onlythose who know the laws and can interpret the practices of ourancestors, are called educated among the Jews;" and it is likely that heattended in his boyhood one of the numerous schools that existed inJerusalem at the time. According to the Talmud there were four hundredand eighty synagogues each with a Bet Sefer for teaching the written lawand a Bet Talmud for the study of the oral law. [1] From his silence wemay infer that he did not study Greek at this period, and Aramaic washis natural tongue. He was never able to speak Greek fluently or withsufficient exactness, because, as he says in the _Antiquities_, "Our ownnation does not encourage those who learn the language of many peoples, and so color their discourses with the smoothness of their periods: forthey look upon this sort of accomplishment as common, not only tofreemen, but to any slave that pleases to learn it. "[2] When, in hismiddle age, he set himself to write the history of his people in Greek, he was compelled to get the help of friends to correct his compositionand syntax. [Footnote 1: Yer. Meg. Iii. 1. ] [Footnote 2: Ant. XX. Xi. 2. ] As to his Hebrew accomplishments, he tells us, with his nativeimmodesty, that he acquired marvelous proficiency in learning, and wasfamous for his great memory and understanding. When he was fourteenyears of age, he continues, such was his fame that the high priests andprincipal men of the city frequently came to consult him about difficultpoints of the law. His mature works do not show any profound knowledgeeither of the Halakah or of the Haggadah, so that the statement is notto be taken strictly. It is probably nothing more than a grandiloquentway of saying that he was a precocious child, who impressed his elders. Paul, too, claimed that he was "a Pharisee of the Pharisees, and zealousbeyond those of his own age in the Jews' religion, " and yet he canhardly be regarded as an authority on the tradition. The autobiographyof Josephus, it is pertinent to remember, was designed to impress theRomans with the greatness of the writer, and its readers were notequipped with the means of criticising his Jewish accomplishments. Withthe same object of impressing the Romans, Josephus recounts that, whenabout the age of sixteen, he had a mind to imbue himself with the tenetsof the three Jewish parties, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and theEssenes. Elsewhere he describes the teaching of these sects for the benefit ofhis Roman readers according to a technical classification borrowed fromhis environment, i. E. He represents them as three philosophical schoolsof the Greek type, each holding different views about fate andProvidence and the nature of the soul and its immortality. But just asthis is demonstrably a misleading coloring of the difference between thesections of the Jewish people, so is his attempt to represent that heattended, as a cultured Greek or Roman of the time would have done, three philosophical colleges. He was compelled by the needs of hisaudience to present Jewish life in the form of Greco-Roman institutions, however ill it fits the mould, and his remarks about sects and schoolsmust always be taken with caution. It is as though a modern writershould describe Judaism as a Church, and express its ideas andobservances in the language of Christian theology. There is, however, no reason to doubt that Josephus made himselfacquainted with the tenets of the chief teachers of the time, and he mayconceivably have sat at the feet of Rabbi Gamaliel, then the chief sageat Jerusalem. But, anxious to exhibit his catholicity, after professinghimself a Pharisee, he says that, not content with these studies, hebecame for three years a faithful disciple of one Banus, who lived inthe desert, and used no other clothing than grew upon trees, ate noother food than that which grew wild, and bathed frequently in coldwater both night and day. [1] The extreme hermit form of the religiouslife was more fashionable in the first century of the Christian eraamong Gentiles than among Jews, and it is not unlikely that Josephus isembroidering his idea of life in an Essene community, rather thansetting down his actual experience. An Essene he never became, but heremained throughout his life very partial to certain forms of the Essenebelief, more especially those which coincided with the Greco-Romansuperstitions of the time, such as the literal prediction of futureevents, the meaning of dreams, the significance of omens. [2] Theseideas, handed down from primitive Israel, had lived on among the massesof the people, though discarded by the learned teachers, and Josephus, finding them in vogue among his masters, readily professed acceptance ofthem. [Footnote 1: Vita, 2. ] [Footnote 2: Comp. B. J. II. Viii. 12; III. Viii. 3; VI. V. 4. ] Abandoning apparently the idea of being a hermit, Josephus at the age ofnineteen returned to Jerusalem, and began to conduct himself accordingto the rules of the Pharisee sect, which is akin, he says, to the schoolof the Stoics. The comparison of the Pharisees with the Stoics is againmisleading, and based on nothing more than the formal likeness of theirdoctrines about Providence. The Pharisees were essentially the partythat upheld the whole tradition and the separateness of Israel. Theynumbered in their ranks the most popular teachers, and politically, though opposed to Rome and all its ways, they counseled submission solong as religious liberty was not infringed. It may be that Josephusonly professed his attachment to them after his surrender, because, aspacifists and believers in moral as against physical force, they werefavorably regarded by the Romans; but even if as a young and ambitiouspriest he attached himself to their body early in life in order to gaininfluence among the people, he was not a representative Pharisee. Heobtained a certain acquaintance with the teaching of the Pharisees, andpartly shared their political views, though not from the same motives astheir true leaders. Yet the very next step in his life that hechronicles marks his outlook as fundamentally different. At the age of twenty-six, after seven years in Jerusalem, during whichhe exercised his priestly functions, he journeyed to Rome. The cause ofhis voyage, on which he was picturesquely wrecked and had to swim forhis life through the night, was the deliverance from prison of certainpriests closely related to him, who had been sent there as prisoners byFelix, the tyrannical Roman governor. At Rome, through his acquaintancewith Aliturius, an actor of plays, a favorite of Nero, and by birth aJew, he came into touch with the profligate court. To the genuinePharisee a Jewish play-actor would have been an abomination. Josephusused his acquaintance to obtain an introduction to Poppaea Sabina, theEmperor's wife for the time. Though a by-word for shamelessness of life, she was herself one of "the fearers of the Lord" ([Greek: sebomenoi]), who professed adherence to the Jewish creed without accepting the Jewishlaw. Josephus won her favor, and through it procured the liberation ofthe priests. The Imperial city was then at the height of its materialmagnificence, and must have made an immense impression of power upon theyoung Jewish aristocrat. Having acquired a lasting admiration for Romeand a desire to enter her society and a conviction of her invincibility, he returned to Palestine in triumph--and with the spirit of anopportunist. This at least is the picture he draws of himself, but amore kindly interpretation might see in the moment of his return theindication of a genuine patriotic feeling. When he arrived in Jerusalem, in the year 65 C. E. , he found his countryseething with rebellion. The crisis soon came to a head. Gessius Florus, who owed his governorship, as Josephus owed the success of his errand, to the favor of the "God-fearing" Poppaea, roused the people to fury byhis pillage of the Temple, and the moderates could no longer hold themasses in check. The Zealots seized the fortress of Antonia, whichoverlooked the Temple, and, having become masters of the city, murderedthe high priest Ananias. Eleazar, whom Josephus, perhaps confusedly, describes as his son, an intense nationalist among the priests, becamethe leader in counsel, and sealed the rebellion by persuading the peopleto discontinue the daily sacrifice offered in the name of the RomanEmperor. At the same time the extermination of the Jews in the Hellenisticcities, Caesarea, Scythopolis, and Damascus, by the infuriated Syrians, who organized a kind of Palestinian Vespers, convinced the people thatthey were engaged in a war to the death. The Herodian party, as theroyal house and its supporters were called, endeavored to preservepeace, by dwelling on the overpowering might of Rome and the inevitableend of the insurrection, but in vain. In fear the priests withdrew totheir duties in the Temple, and did not venture out till the Zealotswere for a time dislodged. The Roman legate of Syria, Cestius Gallus, after the defeat of the Romanizing party by the Zealots, himself marchedon Jerusalem in the autumn of 68 C. E. With two legions. But he failedignominiously to quell the revolt. The Roman garrison in the city wasput to the sword, and the legate, while beating a hasty retreat, wasrouted in the defiles of Beth-Horon, where two centuries before theSyrian hosts had been decimated by Judas the Maccabee. The two legionswere cut to pieces. The fierce valor of the untrained national levieshad broken the serried cohorts of the Roman veterans, and in theunexpectedness of this deliverance the party of rebellion for a time wastriumphant among all sections of the Jewish people. Even those who had been the most determined Romanizers, such as thehigh-priestly circle, were induced, either by a belief in the chances ofsuccess or from a desire to protect themselves by a seeming adherence tothe national cause, to throw in their lot with the war party. It mighthave been better for their people, had they, like Agrippa, joined theRomans. Half-hearted at best in their support of the struggle, yet bytheir wealth and position able at first to obtain a commanding part inthe conduct of the war, they used it to temporize with the foe and todull the edge of the popular feeling. Josephus unfortunately does notenlighten us as to the inner movements in Judea at this crisis. Hemerely relates that the Sanhedrin became a council of war, and Palestinewas divided into seven military districts, over most of which commandersof the Herodian faction were placed. Joseph the son of Gorion andAnanias the high priest, both members of the moderate party, were chosenas governors of Jerusalem, with a particular charge to repair the walls, and the Zealot leader Eleazar the son of Simon was passed over. Josephus himself, though he possessed no military experience, and hadapparently taken no part in the opening campaign, was made governor ofLower and Upper Galilee, the most important military post of all; forGalilee was the bulwark of Judea, and if the Romans could besuccessfully resisted there, the rebellion might hope for victory. Itlay in a strategic position between the Roman outposts, Ptolemais (themodern Acre) on the coast and Agrippa's kingdom in the east. It was acountry made for defense, a country of rugged mountains and naturalfastnesses, and inhabited by a hardy and warlike population, which, forhalf a century, had been in constant insurrection. Thence had come thefounders of the Zealots and the still more violent band of the Sicarii, and each town in the region had its popular leader. Josephus wasexpected to hold it with its own resources, for little help could bespared from the center of Palestine. Guerrilla fighting was the naturalresource of an insurgent people, which had to win its freedom againstwell-trained and veteran armies. It had been the method of JudasMaccabaeus against Antiochus amid the hills of Judea. Josephus, however, made no attempt to practise it, and showed no vestige of appreciation ofthe needs of the case. It is difficult to gather the reason of his appointment, unless it bethat in his writings he deliberately kept back from the Romans the moreenthusiastic part he had played at the outset of the struggle. So far ashis own account goes, neither devotion to the national cause, norexperience, nor prestige, nor power of leadership, nor knowledge of thecountry recommended him. His distinguished birth and his friendship forRome were hardly sufficient qualifications for the post. The influenceof his friend, the ex-high priest Joshua ben Gamala, may have prevailed, and one is fain to surmise that those who sent him, as well as hehimself, were anxious to pretend resistance to Rome, but really to workfor resistance to the rebellion. At all events, at the end of the autumn of 67, Josephus repaired to hiscommand, taking with him two priests, Joazar and Judas, asrepresentatives of the Sanhedrin at Jerusalem. In the record which hegives of his exploits in the _Wars_, he says that his first care was togain the good-will of the people, drill his troops, and prepare thecountry to meet the threatened invasion. In the _Life_, which he wrotesome twenty years later, when he had perforce to cultivate a morecomplete servility of mind, and was anxious to convince the Romans thathe was a double-dealing traitor to his country, he represents that heset himself from the beginning to betray the province. The record of hisactions points to the conclusion that he fell between the stools ofcovert treachery and half-hearted loyalty, that he was neither asvillainous in design nor as heroic in action as he makes himself out tobe. He made some show of preparation at the beginning, but from themoment the Roman army arrived under Vespasian, and he realized that Romewas in earnest, he abandoned all hope of success, and set himself tomake his own position secure with the conqueror. The chief cities of Galilee were Sepphoris, situated on the lower spursof the hills near the plain of Esdraelon, which divides the country fromSamaria and Judea; Tiberias, a city founded by Herod Antipas on thewestern borders of the Lake of Gennesareth, and Tarichea, also anHerodian foundation, situate probably at the southeast corner of thelake. All these Josephus fortified; and he strengthened with walls othersmaller towns and natural fortresses, such as Jotapata, Salamis, andGamala. [1] He says also that he appointed a Sanhedrin of seventy membersfor the province, and in each town established a court of seven judges, as though he were come to exercise a civil government. He did, however, get together an army of more than a hundred thousand young men, andarmed them with the old weapons which he had collected. Though hedespaired of their standing up against the Romans, he ordered them inthe Roman style, appointing a large number of subordinate officers andteaching them the use of signals and a few elementary militarymovements. His army ultimately consisted of 60, 000 footmen, 4, 500mercenaries, in whom he put greatest trust, and 600 picked men as hisbody-guard. He had little cavalry, but as Galilee was a country ofhills, this deficiency need not have proved fatal, had he been astrategist or even a loyalist. During the eight months' respite that heenjoyed before the appearance of the Roman army, he spent most of histime in civil feud, and succeeded in dividing the population into twohostile parties. He boasts that, though he took up his command at an agewhen, if a man has happily escaped sin, he can scarcely guard himselfagainst slander, he was perfectly honest, and refrained from stealingand peculation[2]; but he is at pains to prove that he threw everyobstacle in the way of the patriotic party, and did all that an openenemy of the Jews could have done to undermine the defense of theprovince. [Footnote 1: B. J. II. Xx. 6. His account of his actions in Galilee is, however, from beginning to end, open to question; and the contemporaryaccount of Justus has unfortunately disappeared entirely. It is likelythat his rival's narrative would have shown him in a better light thanhis own. ] [Footnote 2: Vita, 15. ] Before his arrival in the north, the leader of the national party wasJohn the son of Levi, a man of Gischala, which was one of the mountainfastnesses in Northern Galilee, now known as Jish, near the town ofSafed. [1] Josephus heaps every variety of violent abuse upon him inorder, no doubt, to please his patrons. When he introduces him on thescene, he describes him as "a very knavish and cunning rogue, outdoingall other rogues, and without his fellow for wicked practices. He was aready liar, and yet very sharp in gaining credit for his fictions. Hethought it a point of virtue to deceive, and would delude even thosenearest to him. He had an aptitude for thieving, " and so forth. Wheneverthe historian mentions the name of his rival, he rattles his box ofabusive epithets until the reader is wearied by the image of the monsterconjured up before him. But, unfortunately for his credit, Josephus alsorecords John's deeds, and these reveal him as one who, if at times crueland intriguing, yet lived and died for his country, while his enemy wasthinking of saving himself. [Footnote 1: The Hebrew name of the fortress was [Hebrew: Nosh Halav], meaning "clot of cream"; the place was so called because of thefertility of the soil on which it stands. ] It is not surprising then that John, having eyes only for the defense ofthe land, was not blind to the double-dealing of the priestly governor, who had been sent by the Romanizing party to organize resistance. Thefirst event that brought about a collision between them was thesuspicious conduct of Josephus in the matter of some spoil seized fromthe steward of King Agrippa and brought to Tarichea. Agrippa hadentirely turned his back on the national rising, and was the faithfulally of the Romans. He was therefore an open enemy, and Tiberias, whichhad been under his dominion, had revolted from him. Josephus upbraidedthe captors for the violence they had offered to the king, and declaredhis intention to return the spoil to the owner. A little later heprevented John from destroying the corn in the province stored by theRomans for themselves. The people were naturally indignant at thisconduct, and led by John and another Zealot, Jesus the son of Sapphias, the governor of Tiberias, and by Justus of the same city, who wasafterwards to be a rival historian, they rose against Josephus. Withstratagems worthy of a better cause he evaded this onslaught. More briefly in the _Wars_, and in the _Life_ at wearisome length, Josephus tells a tale of intrigue and counter-intrigue, mutual attemptsat assassination, wiles and stratagems to undermine the power of eachother, which took place between him and John. The city of Tarichea washis stronghold, Tiberias the hot-bed of the movement against him. Thepart he professes to have played is so extraordinary in its meannessthat we are fain to believe that it is largely fiction, composed to showthat he was only driven in the end by danger of his life to fightagainst the sacred power of Rome. However that may be, John reported hisdoings to the Sanhedrin at Jerusalem, and that body, which was now, itseems, in the control of the Pharisees and Zealots, sent a deputation torecall him. Simon, the celebrated head of the Sanhedrin and leader ofthe national party, had pressed for the dismissal of Josephus. [1]Ananias, the ex-high priest and Sadducee, had at first been hischampion, but he had been overborne. The deputation consisted of twoPharisees, Jonathan and Ananias, and two priests, Joazar and Simon. Warned by his friends in Jerusalem of their coming, Josephus had all thepasses watched, seized the embassy, and recaptured the four cities thathad revolted from him: Sepphoris, Gamala, Gischala, and Tiberias. According to the account in the _Wars_, the cities revolted again, andwere recaptured by similar stratagems; and when the disturbances inGalilee were quieted in this way, the people, ceasing to prosecute theircivil dissensions, betook themselves to make preparations for the waragainst the Romans. The invasion had begun in earnest, and Josephus, fortified, as he said, by a dream, which told him not to be afraid, because he was to fight with the Romans, and would live happilythereafter, decided for the time not to abandon his post. [Footnote 1: It is notable that this is the only reference in the workof Josephus to the great Rabbi; the name of his successor in theheadship of the Sanhedrin, Johanan ben Zakkai, does not occur evenonce. ] Josephus had displayed his administrative talents in these eight monthsof peaceful government by losing all that had been gained in the fourmonths of the successful rebellion at Jerusalem. He now had anopportunity of displaying his military abilities. In the spring of 67C. E. , Flavius Vespasian, the veteran commander of the legions in Germanyand Britain, who, on the defeat of Cestius Gallus, had been chosen byNero to conduct the Jewish campaign, brought his army of four legionsfrom Antioch to Ptolemais. He was met there by King Agrippa, who broughta large force of auxiliaries, and by a deputation of citizens fromSepphoris, the chief city of Galilee, who tendered their submission andinvited him to send a garrison. Josephus, though he knew of the city'sRomanizing leanings, had negligently or deliberately failed to occupyit, so that the place was lost without a blow. He made a feeble effortto recapture it, for appearance sake it would seem, and then, though hehad an unlimited choice of favorable positions, and the Roman forceswere not very large at the time, he abandoned the attempt of meeting theenemy in the field. Titus arrived from Alexandria, with two morelegions, the fifth and the tenth, and then the Roman army, numberingwith auxiliaries 60, 000 men, set out from Ptolemais, and proceeded tooccupy Galilee. The Jewish forces were encamped on the hills above Sepphoris. Josephusdescribes the wonderful array and order of the Roman army on the march. The sight seems to have led a large part of his army to run away. Hehimself, when he saw that he had not an army sufficient to engage theenemy, despaired of the success of the war, and determined to placehimself as far as he could out of danger. In this inspiring mood heabandoned the rest of the country, sent a dispatch to Jerusalemdemanding help, and threw himself into the fortress of Jotapata, situated on the crest of a mountain in Northern Galilee, which he choseas the most fit for his security. Vespasian, hearing of this step, and, as Josephus modestly suggests, "supposing that, could he only getJosephus into his power, he would have conquered all Judea, " straightwaylaid siege to the town (Iyar 16). For forty-two days the place wasbesieged, and during that period every resource that heroic resistancecould suggest, according to the narrative of its commandant, wasexhausted. The height of the wall was raised to meet the Romanembankments, provisions were brought in by soldiers disguised insheep-skins, the Roman works were destroyed by fire, boiling oil waspoured on the assailants, and finally the city was not stormed till thegarrison was worn out with famine and fatigue. But, as has been pointedout, the details recorded are "the commonplaces of poliorcetics, " andmay have been borrowed by Josephus from some military text-book andneatly applied. Jotapata fell on the first day of Tammuz, and whateverthe heroism of his army, the general did not shine in the last days ofhis command or in the manner of his surrender. Suspected by his men andthreatened by them with death, he was unable to give himself up openly. He took refuge with some of his comrades in a deep pit, where they werediscovered by an old woman, who informed the Romans. Vespasian, who, weare again told, believed that, if he captured Josephus, the greater partof the war would be over, sent one Nicanor, well known to the Jewishcommandant, to take him. Josephus, professing prophetical powers, offered to surrender, and quieted his conscience by a secret prayer toGod, which is a sad compound of cant and cowardice: "Since it pleaseth Thee, who hast created the Jewish nation, now tobring them low, and since their good fortune is gone over to the Romans, and since Thou hast chosen my soul to foretell what is to come to passhereafter, I willingly surrender, and am content to live. I solemnlyprotest that I do not go over to the Romans as a deserter, but as Thyminister. " It may be that Josephus really believed he had prophetic powers, andthought he was imitating the great prophets of Israel and Judah who hadproclaimed the uselessness of resistance to Assyria and Babylon. Butthey, while denouncing the wickedness of the people, had shared theirlot with them. And Josephus, who weakly sought a refuge for himselfafter defeat, resembles rather the prophets whom Jeremiah denounced:"They speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of theLord. They say still unto them that despise me, The Lord hath said, Yeshall have peace; and they say unto everyone that walketh after theimagination of his own heart, No evil shall come upon you. "[1] Hiscomrades however prevented him from giving himself up, and called on himto play a braver part and die with them, each by his own hand. He putthem off by talking philosophically, as he has it, about the sin ofsuicide, a euphemism for a collection of commonplaces on the duty ofpreserving their lives. But when this enraged them, he bethought him ofanother device, and proposed that they should cast lots to kill eachother. They assented, and by Divine Providence he was left to the lastwith one other, whom he persuaded to break his oath and livelikewise. [2] Having thus escaped, he was led by Nicanor to Vespasian, the whole Roman army gathering around to gaze on the hero. Continuinghis prophetical function, when he found that he was like to be sent toNero, he announced to Vespasian, "Thou art Caesar and Emperor, thou, andthis thy son. .. . Thou art not only lord over me, but over the land andthe sea and all mankind. " The Roman general was incredulous, till, hearing that his prisoner had foretold the length of the siege ofJotapata--a prophecy which, of course, he had the ability to fulfil--andfurther, on the report of the death of Nero, having conceived thepossibility of becoming Emperor, he had regard to the Jewish prophet, and, without setting him at liberty, bestowed favors on him, and madehim easy about his future. Such was the end of the military career ofJosephus. [Footnote 1: Jer. 23: 16-17. ] [Footnote 2: A charitable explanation of this self-debasing account ofJosephus is that he was driven to invent some story to extenuate hisresistance to the Romans, and had to blacken his reputation as a patriotto save his skin. The fact that he was kept prisoner some time byVespasian suggests that he was not so big a traitor as he pretends. ] The Talmud relates that Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, the head of thePharisees, was carried in a coffin outside the walls of Jerusalem by hisdisciples, and was brought to the Roman camp, where he hailed Vespasianas Emperor and Caesar, and thereby gained his favor. If not apocryphal, the event must have happened in 69 C. E. , when the Roman commander wasgenerally expected to aim at the Imperial throne, then the object ofstrife between rival commanders. The rabbi belonged to the peace party, and from the beginning had opposed the war. And though his action wasdisapproved by the later generations, it was justified by his subsequentconduct; for it was he who, by founding the famous college at Jabneh, kept alive the Jewish spirit after the fall of the nation. For himsurrender was a valid means to the preservation of the nation. Theaction of Josephus hardly bears the same justification. His desire forself-preservation was natural enough, but his manner of effecting it wasnot honorable. He was a general who, having taken a lead in the strugglefor independence, had seen all his men fall, and had at the end invitedthe last of his comrades to kill each other, and he saved his life bysacrificing his honor. His mind was from the beginning of the strugglesubjugated to Rome, but unhappily he accepted the most responsible postin the national defense and betrayed it. His address to Vespasian wasmere flattery, designed to impose on a superstitious man's credulity;for the ear of Vespasian, says Merivale, "was always open to pretendersto supernatural knowledge. " Lastly Josephus used his safety, not for thepurpose of preserving the Jewish heritage, but for personal ends. Hebecame a flunkey of the Flavian house, and straightway started on thetransformation from a Jewish priest and soldier into a Roman courtierand literary hireling. Hard circumstances compelled him to choosebetween a noble and an ignoble part, between heroic action and weaksubmission. He was a mediocre man, and chose the way that was not heroicand glorious. Posterity gained something by his choice; his ownreputation was fatally marred by it. III THE LIFE OF JOSEPHUS FROM THE TIME OF HIS SURRENDER Josephus was little more than thirty years old at the time of hissurrender. At an age when men usually begin to realize their ambitionand ideal, his whole life's course was changed: he had to abandon allhis old associations, and accommodate himself to a different and indeeda hostile society. Henceforth he was a liege of the Roman conqueror, andhad to submit to be Romanized not only in name but in spirit. Hiscondition was indeed a thinly-disguised servitude. The Romans were animperious as well as an Imperial people, and though in somecircumstances they were ready to spare the lives of those who yielded, they required of them a surrender of opinion and an abasement of soul. For the rest of his years, which comprehended the whole of his literaryactivity, Josephus was not therefore a free man. He acted, spoke, andwrote to order, compelled, whenever called upon, to do the will of hismasters. His legal condition was first that of a _libertus_ (a freedman)of Vespasian, and as such he owed by law certain definite obligations tohis patron's family. But the moral subservience of the favored prisonerof a subjugated people must have been a far profounder thing than thelegal obligation arising from his status; and this enforced moral andmental subservience is a cardinal point to be remembered in forming ajudgment upon Josephus. His expressed opinions are often not therevelation of his own mind, but the galling tribute which he wascompelled to pay for his life. And apart from the involuntary andundeliberate adoption of Roman standards, which, living isolated fromJewish life in Rome, he could not escape, he had in writing, and nodoubt in conversation, deliberately and consciously to assume thedeepest-seated of the Roman prejudices towards his own people. Libertyhas been defined as the power of a man to call his soul his own. And inthat sense Josephus emphatically did not possess liberty. We must be onour guard, therefore, against regarding him as an independent historian, much less as writing from an independent Jewish point of view. From thetime of his surrender till his death he lived and wrote as the client ofthe Flavian house, and all his works had to pass the Imperialcensorship. His domestic life is characteristic of his subservience. At the biddingof Vespasian, when in the Roman camp at Caesarea, he divorced his firstwife, who was locked up in Jerusalem during the siege. Though by Jewishlaw it was forbidden to a priest to marry a captive woman, he took ashis second wife a Jewess that had been brought into the Roman camp. Having no children by her, he divorced her after a year, and marriedagain at Alexandria. By his third wife he had three sons, but with aRoman's carelessness of the marriage bond he divorced her late in life, and married finally a noble Jewess of Crete, by whom he had two moresons, Justus and Simon Agrippa. His last two wives, be it noted, camefrom Hellenistic-Jewish communities, and were doubtless able to assisthim in acquiring Greek. The public as well as the domestic life of Josephus was controlled bythe Roman commander. Till the end of the Jewish struggle it followed theprogress of the Roman arms. He continued to play an active part in thewar, not, however, as a leader of the Jews, but as the adviser of theirenemies. He was attached to the staff of Titus, and after witnessing thefall of the two fortresses of Galilee, Gamala and Gischala, which heldout bravely under John after the capture of Jotapata, he accompanied theRoman at the end of the year 68 to Alexandria. There he spent a year, till a change of fortune came to him. During the year 68, Vespasian captured the two chief cities which theJewish national party held to the east side of the Jordan, Gadara andGerasa. He then prepared to lay siege to Jerusalem. But hearing of thedeath of Nero and of the chaos at Rome that followed it, he stayedoperations to await events in Italy. In the following year, largely bythe aid of the Jewish apostate Tiberius Alexander, he secured theallegiance of all the Eastern legions, and was proclaimed Emperor. Threeother generals laid claim to the same dignity, under the same title ofarmed force, but in the end Vespasian's friends in Italy made themselvesmasters of Rome, and he repaired himself to the capital and donned thepurple. Josephus was rewarded with his complete freedom, and assumedhenceforth the family name of his Imperial patrons. When, at the end ofthe year 69, Titus was appointed by his father to finish the war, heaccompanied him back to Palestine. In the eighteen months' respite thathad been vouchsafed to them, the Jews had spent their energy andundermined their powers of resistance by internecine strife. Accordingto the account in the _Wars_, which unfortunately is the only fullrecord we have of events, John of Gischala, fleeing to Jerusalem afterthe fall of the Galilean fortresses, roused the Zealots against the highpriest Ananias, who was directing the Jewish policy towards submissionto Rome. Ananias, who was of the same party as Josephus, seems to havecome to the conclusion that resistance was hopeless, and he was anxiousto make terms. John called in to his aid the half-savage Idumeans, whohad joined the Jewish rebellion against Rome. They entered the city, and, possessing themselves of the Temple mount, spread havoc. The Templeitself ran with blood, and 8500 dead bodies, among them that of the highpriest, defiled its precincts. [1] Josephus, who, to suit the Romantaste, identifies religion and ritual, declares that the fall of thecity and the ruin of the nation are to be dated from that day, and uponAnanias he passes a eulogy that is likewise written with an eye to Romanpredilections: "He was a prodigious lover of liberty and of democracy; he everpreferred the public welfare before his own advantage, and he wasthoroughly sensible that the Romans were invincible. And I cannot butthink that it was because God had doomed the city to destruction onaccount of its pollution, and was resolved to purge His sanctuary withfire, that He cut off thus its great protector. " [Footnote 1: B. J. IV. Vi. 1. ] For the better part of a year, according to our historian, the Zealotsmaintained a reign of terror, and the various parties fought against oneanother in the Holy City as fiercely as the Girondists and Jacobins ofthe French Revolution. But on the approach of Titus they abandoned theirstrife and united to resist the foe. The Roman general brought with himfour legions, the fifth, tenth, twelfth, and fifteenth, besides a largefollowing of auxiliaries, and his whole force amounted to 80, 000 men. Ashead of his staff came Tiberius Alexander, the renegade nephew of Philoand formerly procurator of Judea. Josephus also was on the besieger'sstaff--possibly he was an officer of the body-guard (_praefectuspraetorio_)--and was employed to bring his countrymen to reason. Himselfconvinced, almost from the moment when he took up arms, of the certaintyof Rome's ultimate victory, and doubly convinced now, partly fromsuperstitious fatalism, partly from a need for extenuating his ownsubmission, he wasted his eloquence in efforts to make them surrender. He knew that within the besieged city there was a considerableRomanizing faction (including his own father), and either he believed, or he had to pretend to believe, that he could bring over the mass totheir way of thinking. On various occasions during the siege he was sentto the walls to summon the defenders to lay down their arms. He enlargedeach time on the invincible power of Rome, on the hopelessness ofresistance, on the clemency of Titus if they would yield, and on theterrible fate which would befall them and the Temple if they fought tothe bitter end. What must have specially aroused the fury of the Zealotswas his insistence that the Divine Providence was now on the side of theRomans, and that in resisting they were sinning against God. It islittle wonder that on one occasion when making these harangues he wasstruck by a dart, and that his father was placed in prison by theZealots. Indeed it says much for the tolerance of those whom heconstantly reviles as the most abandoned scoundrels and the most crueltyrants that they did not do him and his family greater hurt. Titus, after beating back desperate attacks by the Jews, fixed his campon Mount Scopas, by the side of the Mount of Olives, to the north of thecity, and, abandoning the idea of taking the city fortress by storm, prepared to beleaguer it in regular form. The Jews were not prepared fora siege. Josephus and the Rabbis[1] agree that the supplies of corn hadbeen burnt by the Zealots during the civil disturbances; and as thearrival of Titus coincided with the Passover, myriads of people, who hadcome up from all parts of the country and the Diaspora to celebrate thefestival, were crowded within its walls. It is estimated that theirnumber exceeded two and a half million. The capital was a hard place tocapture. Josephus, following probably a Roman authority, gives anaccount of the fortifications of Jerusalem from the point of view of thebesieger, which is confirmed in large part by modern research. [2] On thesoutheast and west the city was unapproachable by reason of the sheerravines of Kedron and Hinnom, overlooked by almost perpendicularprecipices, which surrounded it. It was vulnerable therefore only on thenorth, where the two heights on which it was built were connected withthe main ridge of the Judean hills; and here it was fortified with threewalls. The outermost, which was built by Agrippa I, encompassed the newquarter of Bezetha, which lay outside the Temple mount to the northeast. The second wall encompassed the part of the city on the Temple Mount andreached as far as the Tower of Antonia, which overlooked and protectedthe Temple. The third or innermost wall was the oldest, and encompassedthe whole of the ancient city where it was open, including the hill Acraor Zion on the southeast, which was divided from Mount Moriah by thecleft known as the Tyropoeon, or cheese-market. Beyond this hill therewas another eminence sloping gradually to the north, till it droppedinto the valley of Jehoshaphat with an escarpment of two hundred feet. [Footnote 1: Comp. Abot de Rabbi Nathan, vi. , ed. Schechter, p. 32. ] [Footnote 2: B. J. V. Iv. 1. ] Thus the rampart surrounded the two hills with a continuous line ofdefense, and the three quarters of the city were separated from eachother by distinct walls, so that each could hold out when the other hadfallen. The walls were strengthened with several towers, of which themost important were Psephinus, on the third wall at the northwestcorner, Hippicus, on the old wall, which was opposite Phasaelus, andMariamne. But the strongest, largest, and most beautiful fortress inJerusalem was the Temple itself. It was not merely the visible center ofJudaism, it was the citadel of Judea. As each successive court rosehigher than the last, the "Mountain of the House" itself stood on thehighest point of the inclosure. The Temple was guarded by the tower ofAntonia, situated at the corner of the two cloisters, upon a rock fiftycubits high, overlooking a precipice. Like the other towers, Antonia wasbuilt by Herod, and manifested his love of largeness and strength. Within these fortifications there were eleven thousand men under Simon, and not more than thirty thousand trained soldiers under John, to pitagainst eighty thousand Roman veterans; but of the two and a halfmillion people who, it is calculated, were shut up in the city, thousands were ready at any moment to sally upon the besiegers and laydown their lives for their beloved sanctuary. Within the city, however, there were also a number of persons waveringin their desire for resistance and anxious to find a favorableopportunity of going over to the Romans. The leaders of thehigh-priestly party had been killed by the Zealots, but their followersremained to hamper the defense of the city. If Josephus is to bebelieved, during the respite of the Passover festival at the beginningof the siege, while the Romans were preparing their approaches and siegeworks, the party strife again broke out. Eleazar opened the gates of theTemple to admit the people for the festival, but John, takingtreacherous advantage of the opportunity, led his men in with armsconcealed beneath their garments, put his opponents to the sword, andseized the sanctuary. Josephus further represents that throughout thesiege Simon and John, while resisting the Romans and defending differentparts of the walls, were still engaged in their internecine strife, "anddid everything that the besiegers could desire them to do. "[1] [Footnote 1: B. J. V. Vi. ] The story has not the stamp of probability, and it is more likely thatJosephus is distorting the jealousies of the two commanders into thedimensions of civil strife. Anyhow, the resistance which the Jewsoffered to the Romans showed the stubbornness of despair, or what thehistorian calls "their natural endurance in misfortune. " At every stepthe legionaries were checked; in pitching their camp, in making theirearthworks, in bringing up their machines; and frequently desperatesallies were made by the defenders upon the Roman entrenchments. Nevertheless, after fifteen days the first wall was captured, and infive days more the second was taken. By a desperate sally the besiegedrecovered it for a little, but were again driven back by superiornumbers and force. Josephus is fond of contrasting the different tempersof the two armies: on the one side power and skill, on the otherboldness and the courage born of despair; here the habit of conquering, there intense national ardor. After the capture of the second wall, he was sent to parley with thebesieged, and urged, as he had done before, the invincible power of hismasters. [1] "And evident it is, " he added with his renegade's theology, "that fortune is on all hands gone over to them, and that God, who hasshifted dominion from nation to nation, is now settled in Italy. "[2]When his address was received with scorn, he proceeded, according to hisaccount, to lecture the people from their ancient history, in order toprove that they had never been successful in aggressive warfare. "Armswere never given to our nation, but we are always given up to be foughtagainst and taken. " The Zealots' desecration of the Temple deprived themof Divine help, and it was madness to suppose that God would bewell-disposed to the wicked. Had He not shown favor to Titus andperformed miracles in his aid? Did not the springs of Siloam run moreplentifully for the Roman general? All his appeals had no effect, andthough some faint-hearted persons deserted, the multitude held firm, andthe siege was pressed on more vigorously than ever. A wall ofcircumvallation was built round the city, and the horrors of starvationincreased daily. Between the months of Nisan and Tammuz one hundred andfifty thousand corpses were carried out of the town. [3] Josephusexpatiates on the terrible suffering, and again and again he denouncesthe iniquity of the Zealots, who continued the resistance. "No age had ageneration more fruitful in wickedness; they confessed that they werethe slaves, the scum, the spurious and abortive offspring of ournation. " John committed the heinous sacrilege of using the oil preservedin the Temple vessels for the starving soldiers. "I suppose, " says theex-priest writing in the Roman palace, "that had the Romans made anylonger delay in attacking these abandoned men, the city would eitherhave been swallowed up by the ground opening on them, or been swept awayby a deluge, or destroyed as Sodom was destroyed, since it had broughtforth a generation even more godless than those that suffered suchpunishments. "[4] [Footnote 1: B. J. V. Ix. 3. ] [Footnote 2: We are reminded of the saying of Rabbi Akiba somehalf-century later. When asked where God was to be sought now that theTemple was destroyed, he replied, "In the great city of Rome" (Yer. Taanit, 69a). But the Rabbinical utterance had a very different meaningfrom the plea of Josephus. ] [Footnote 3: B. J. V. Xiii. 7. ] [Footnote 4: B. J. V. X. And xiii. ] Famine and weariness were breaking down the strength of the Jews, and, after fierce resistance, the tower of Antonia was captured and razed tothe ground. Josephus adds another chapter to detail the horrors of thefamine, in which he recounts the story of the mother eating her child, which occurs also in the Midrash. [1] The Romans, he tells us, werefilled with a religious loathing of their foes on account of their sinsin violating the Temple and eating forbidden food, and Titus excusedhimself for the sufferings he caused, on the ground that, as he hadgiven the Jews the chance of securing peace and liberty, they hadbrought the evil on themselves. Slowly but surely the Romans gained afooting within the Temple precinct; inch by inch John was driven back, and on the Ninth of Ab the sanctuary was stormed. A torch, hurledprobably by the hand of Titus (see below, p. 128), set the cloistersalight, and the fire spread till the whole house was involved. Thecrowning catastrophe, the burning of the Holy of Holies, happened on thefollowing day. [Footnote 1: Ekah R. 65a. ] Josephus remained in the Roman camp throughout the siege, advising Titusat each step how he might proceed. After the fall of the Temple hewitnessed the last desperate struggle, when a half-starved remnant ofthe defenders "looked straight into death without flinching. " A greatmodern writer sees in this unquenchable passion of the Zealots forliberty a sublime type of steadfastness[1]; but Josephus, who after thefall of the Temple had made another unavailing effort to persuade themto lay down their arms, again pours forth his abuse upon those whofought against the sacred might of Rome. Over a million had perished inthe siege, and less than one hundred thousand were captured, of whomonly forty thousand were preserved. His favor with Titus enabled him toredeem from captivity his brother and a large number of his friends andacquaintances and one hundred and ninety women and children. [2] His ownestates near Jerusalem having been taken for a military colony, hereceived liberal compensation in another part of Judea. From the victorhe also obtained a scroll of the law. [Footnote 1: George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such. ] [Footnote 2: Vita, 75. ] It is not certain whether he accompanied "the gentle Titus" throughSyria after the fall of the city and the razing of its walls. Thevictor's progress was marked at each stopping-place by the celebrationof games, where thousands of young Jewish captives were made to killeach other, "butchered to make a Roman holiday" and feast the eyes ofthe conqueror and the Herodian ally and his spouse. But he certainlywitnessed at Rome the triumph of the Flavii, father and son, and gazedon the shame of his country, when its most holy monuments were carriedby the noblest of the captives through the streets amid the applause andribald jeers of a Roman crowd. Josephus enlarges with apparent apathy onthe procession, which is commemorated and made vivid down to our own dayby the arch in the Roman Forum, through which no Jew in the Middle Ageswould pass. He records, too, that Vespasian built a Temple of Peace, inwhich he stored the golden vessels taken from the Jewish sanctuary, andput up the whole of Judea for sale as his private property. [1] Josephushimself was housed in the royal palace, and it does not appear that heever returned to Palestine. The tenth legion had been left on the siteof Jerusalem as a permanent Roman garrison, and a fortified camp wasbuilt for it on the northern hill. "The legions swallowed her up andidolaters possessed her. " _A chacun selon ses oeuvres_ is the comment ofSalvador, the Franco-Jewish historian (fl. 1850), comparing the gildedservitude of Josephus with the fate of the patriots of Jerusalem; andanother recent historian, Graetz, has contrasted the picture of Jeremiahuttering his touching laments over the ruins at the fall of the firstTemple with the position of Josephus pouring out his fulsome adulationof the destroyer at the fall of the second. [Footnote 1: B. J. VII. Vi. 6. ] Henceforth Josephus lived, an exile from his country and his countrymen, in the retinue of the Caesars, and entered on his career as his people'shistorian. But he was never allowed to forget his dependence. His firstwork was an account of the Roman war, in which he vilified the patriotsto extenuate his own surrender and his master's cruelty. It is true thathe afterwards composed an elaborate apology for his people in the formof a history in twenty volumes, which may be considered as a kind ofpalliation for the evil he had done them in action. It was more possibleto refute the Roman prejudices based on utter ignorance of Jewishhistory, than the prejudices based on their narrowness of mind. But evenhere the writer has often to accommodate himself to a pagan standpoint, which could not appreciate Hebrew sublimity. When he wrote the_Antiquities_, his mind was already molded in Greco-Roman form, andwhere he seeks to glorify, he not seldom contrives to degrade. His worksare a striking example of inward slavery in outward freedom, for by dintof breathing the foreign atmosphere and imbibing foreign notions he hadbecome incapable of presenting his people's history in its true light. He had been granted full Roman citizenship, and received a literarypension. Still he was not loved by other courtiers as worthy as himself, and he had frequently to defend himself against the charges of hisenemies. In the reign of Vespasian, after the Zealot rising in Cyrenehad been put down, the leader, Jonathan, who was brought as a prisonerto Rome, charged Josephus before the Emperor with having sent him bothweapons and money. The story was not believed, and the informer was putto death. After that, Josephus relates, "when they that envied my goodfortune did frequently bring censure against me, by God's Providence Iescaped them all. " He remained in favor under Titus and Domitian, who in turn succeededtheir father in the purple. Domitian indeed, though he persecuted theJews, and laid new fiscal burdens upon them, punished the accusers ofJosephus, and made his estate in Judea tax-free, and the Emperor's wife, Domitia, also showed him kindness. But perhaps the amazing and patheticservility of the _Life_ is to be explained by fear of the vaingloriousdespot, whose hand was heavy on all intellectual work. Historicalwriters suffered most under his oppression, and it may have beennecessary to Josephus to make out that he had been a traitor. It mayappear more to his credit as a courtier than as a Jew that the enemy ofhis people was friendly towards him. But his position must have beenperilous during the black reign of the tyrant, who rivaled Nero formaniac cruelty. His chief patron was one Epaphroditus, by his name aGreek, perhaps to be identified with a celebrated librarian and scholar, to whom he dedicated his _Antiquities_ and the books _Against Apion_. Helived on probably[1] till the beginning of the second century, throughthe short but tranquil rule of Nerva, when there was a brief interludeof tolerance and intellectual freedom, into the reign of Trajan, who wasto deal his people injuries as deep as those Titus had inflicted. It isuncertain whether he survived to witness the horrors of the desperaterising of the Jews, which sealed their national doom throughout theDiaspora. At least he did not survive to describe it. His last work thathas come down to us is the _Life_, which is an apologetic pamphlet, perversely self-vilifying, in which he sought to refute the accusationof his rival Justus of Tiberias, that he had taken a commanding part inthe war against the Romans in Galilee, and had been the guiding spiritof the Rebellion. [Footnote 1: It has, however, been suggested that the date of Agrippa'sdeath, which is recorded in the _Life_, was really 95 C. E. , instead of103 C. E. , as is usually accepted; if that is so, Josephus may not haveoutlived the black reign of Domitian, which lasted till 97 C. E. See J. H. Hart, s. V. Josephus, in Encycl. Brit. 11th ed. ] The _Life_ is the least creditable of Josephus' works; but, as we haveseen, it was wrung from him under duress, and cannot be taken as agenuine revelation of his mind. It is not a full autobiography; save fora short Prologue and a short Epilogue, it deals exclusively with theauthor's conduct in Galilee prior to the campaign of Vespasian, and itdiffers materially in political color as well as in the narrative offacts from the account of the same period in the _Wars_. In the earlierwork his object had been to excuse his countrymen for their revolt, andat the same time to show the ability with which he had served their trueinterests, as the representative of the party that sought to preservethe nation at the sacrifice of its independence. But in the later workhe is writing not a partisan but a personal apology, composed when hislife was in danger, and when he no longer was anxious to saveappearances with his countrymen. And he devoted his ingenuity to showingthat throughout the events in Galilee he was the friend of Rome, seekingunder the guise of resistance to smooth the way for the invaders anddeliver the gates of Palestine into their hands. That he had so todemean himself is the most pathetic commentary on the bitter positionwhich he was called on to endure after twenty years of servile life. Thework was published or reissued after the death of King Agrippa, whichtook place in 103 C. E. , and is recorded in it. [1] Agrippa was the lastof the Herodians to rule, and with his death the last part of Palestinethat had the outward show of independence was absorbed into the RomanEmpire. But though the whole of the Jewish temporal sovereignty wasshattered before his last days, Josephus may have consoled himself withthe progressive march of Judaism in the capital city of the conqueror. [Footnote 1: See note above, p. 73. ] It may be put down to the credit of Josephus that amid the court societyat Rome he to the end professed loyalty to his religion, and that he didnot complete his political desertion by religious apostasy. His loyaltyindeed is less meritorious than might seem at first sight. The Romansgenerally were tolerant of creeds and cults, and the ceremonial ofJudaism, especially its Sabbath, appealed to many of them. Within the_pomoerium_ (limits), of the ancient city none but the city gods mightbe worshiped, but in Greater Rome there were numerous synagogues. In thetime of Pompey, an important Jewish community existed in thecosmopolitan capital of the Empire, and later we have records of anumber of congregations. Philo expressly mentions the religiousprivileges his brethren enjoyed at the heart of the Empire, [1] and savefor an occasional expulsion the Jews appear to have been unmolested. TheFlavian Emperors, satisfied with the destruction of the sanctuary andthe razing of Jerusalem, did not attempt to persecute the communities ofthe Diaspora. For the old offering by all Jews to the Temple, theysubstituted a tax of two drachmas (the equivalent of the shekelvoluntarily given hitherto to Jerusalem), which went towards themaintenance of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Later the fiscusJudaicus, to which every Jew and proselyte had to pay, became aninstrument of oppression, but in the reigns of Vespasian and Titus itwas not harshly administered. Domitian indeed vented his indignation onthe people which he had not had the honor of conquering, and instituteda kind of inquisition, to ferret out the early Maranos, who dissembledtheir Judaism and sought to evade the tax. But his gentle successorNerva (96-98) restored the habit of tolerance, and struck special coins, with the legend calumnia Judaica sublata (on the abolition ofinformation against the Jews), in order to mark his clemency. Save, therefore, for the short persecution under Domitian, Judaism remained a_licita religio_ (legalized denomination) at Rome. More than that, itbecame a powerful missionary faith among the lower classes, and in smalldoses almost fashionable at the court. A near relative of the Emperor, Flavius Clemens, outraged Roman opinion by adopting its tenets. [2] Ithas been suggested, and it is likely, that the chief historical work ofJosephus was written primarily for a group of fashionable proselytes toJudaism, to whom he ministered. He mentions members of the royal housethat commended his work. [3] Some scholars have sought to associate himwith the philosopher at Rome that was visited by the four rabbis of theSanhedrin, the Patriarch Rabban Gamaliel, Rabbi Joshua, Rabbi Eleazarben Arach, and Rabbi Akiba, when they came to Rome in the reign ofDomitian. [4] But apart from the fact that he would hardly be describedas a philosopher--a term usually reserved in the Talmud for a paganscholar--it is as unlikely that the leaders of the Pharisaic nationalparty would have had interviews with the renegade, as that the renegadewould have befriended them. At Jotapata he deserted his people, and hepassed thenceforth out of their life. It is significant that, while thehistory of the war was originally written in Aramaic for the benefit ofthe Eastern Jews, none of his later works was either written in hisnative language or translated into it, nor were they designed to be readby Jews. [Footnote 1: De Leg, 82. ] [Footnote 2: It is interesting that the wife of the first Roman governorof Britain was accused, in 57 C. E. , of "foreign superstition, " and issaid to have lived a melancholy life (Tac. Ann. Xiii. 32), which maymean that she had adopted Jewish practices. ] [Footnote 3: C. Ap. I. 5. ] [Footnote 4: Sukkah, 22, quoted in Vogelstein and Rieger, Geschichte derJuden in Rom, pp. 28 and 29. ] In the palace of the Caesars Josephus became a reputable Greco-Romanchronicler, deliberately accommodating himself to the tastes of theconquerors of his people, and deliberately seeking, as Renan said, "toHellenize his compatriots, " i. E. To describe them from a Hellenizedpoint of view. He achieved his ambition, if such it was, to be theclassical authority upon the early history of the Jews. His record ofhis people survived through the ages, and his works were included in thepublic libraries of Rome, while among the Christians they had forcenturies a place next the Bible. As a writer, Josephus has, by the side of some glaring defects, considerable merits: immense industry, power of vivid narrative, anability for using authorities, and at times a certain eloquence. But asa man he has few qualities to attract and nothing of the heroic. He wasmediocre in character and mind, and for such there is no admiration. Itmay be admitted that he lived in hard times, when it required greatstrength of character for a Jew born, as he was, in the aristocraticRomanizing section of the nation, to stand true to the Jewish people anddevote his energies to their desperate cause. He may have honestlybelieved that submission to Rome was the truest wisdom; but he placedhimself in a false position by associating himself with theinsurrection. And while his national feeling led him later to attempt todefend his people against calumny and ignorance, the conditions underwhich he labored made against the production of a true and spiritedhistory. Yet if he does not appear worthy of admiration, we must bewareof judging him harshly; and there is deep pathos in the fact that he wascompelled in writing to be his own worst detractor. The combination, which the autobiographical account reveals, of egoism and self-seeking, of cowardice and vanity, of pious profession and cringingobsequiousness, of vaunted magnanimity and spiteful malice to his foes, of religious scruples and selfish cunning, points to a meanness ofconduct which he was forced to assume by circumstances, but which, it issuggested, was not an expression of his true character. The document ofshame was wrung from him by his past. He might have been a reliablehistorian had he not been called on to play a part in action. But thepart he played was ignoble in itself, and it blasted the whole of hisfuture life and his literary credit. It made his work take the form ofapology, and part of it bear the stamp of deliberate falsehood. Hisbesetting weakness of egoism led him as a general to betray hiscountrymen; as historian of their struggle with Rome, to misrepresenttheir patriotism and give a false picture of their ideals. Yet, thoughto the Jews of his own day he was a traitor in life and a traducer inletters, to the Jews of later generations he appears rather as a tragicfigure, struggling to repair his fault of perfidy, and a victim to theforces of a hostile civilization, which in every age assail his peopleintellectually, and which in his day assailed them with crushing mightphysically as well as intellectually. IV THE WORKS OF JOSEPHUS AND HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS The Jews, though they are the most historical of peoples, and thoughthey have always regarded history as the surest revelation of God'swork, have produced remarkably few historians. It is true that a largepart of their sacred literature consists of the national annals, fromthe earliest time to the restoration of the nation after its firstdestruction, i. E. A period of more than two thousand years. The Book ofChronicles, as its name suggests, is a systematic summary of the wholeof that period and proves the existence of the historical spirit. Buttheir very engrossment with the story of their ancestors checked inlater generations the impulse to write about their own times. They sawcontemporary affairs always in the light of the past, and they were moreconcerned with revealing the hand of God in events than in depicting theevents themselves. Thus, during the whole Persian period, which extendedover two hundred years, we have but one historical document, the Book ofEsther, to acquaint us with the conditions of the main body of theJewish people. The fortunate find, a few years back, of a hoard ofAramaic papyri at Elephantine has given us an unexpected acquaintancewith the conditions of the Jewish colony in Upper Egypt during the fifthand fourth centuries, and furnished a new chapter in the history of theDiaspora. But this is an archeological substitute for literary history. The conquest of the East by Alexander the Great and the consequentinterchange of Hellenic and Oriental culture gave a great impulse tohistorical writing among all peoples. Moved by a cosmopolitanenthusiasm, each nation was anxious to make its past known to theothers, to assert its antiquity, and to prove that, if its present wasnot very glorious, it had at one time played a brilliant part incivilization. The Greek people, too, with their intense love ofknowledge, were eager to learn the ideas and experiences of the variousnations and races who had now come into their ken. Hence, on the one hand, there appeared works on universal history byGreek polymaths, such as Hecataeus of Abdera, Theophrastus, the pupil ofAristotle, and Ptolemy, the comrade of Alexander; and, on the otherhand, a number of national histories were written, also in Greek, but byHellenized natives, such as the Chaldaica of Berosus, the Aegyptiaca ofManetho, and the Phoenician chronicles of Dius and Menander. The peopleof Israel figured incidentally in several of these works, and Manethowent out of his way to include in the history of his country a lyingaccount of the Exodus, which was designed to hold up the ancestors ofthe Jews to opprobrium. From the Hellenic and philosophical writers theyreceived more justice. Their remarkable loyalty to their religion andtheir exalted conception of the Deity moved partly the admiration, partly the amazement of these early encyclopedists, who regarded them asa philosophical people devoted to a higher life. The Hellenistic Jewswere led later by the sympathetic attitude of Hecataeus to add to hishistory spurious chapters, in which he was made to deal moreeulogistically with their beliefs and history, and they circulatedoracles and poems in the names of fabled seers of prehistorictimes--Orpheus and the Sibyl--which conveyed some of the religious andmoral teachings of Judaism. Nor were they slow to adapt their ownchronicles for the Greek world or to take their part in the literarymovement of the time. In Palestine, indeed, the Jews remained devoted toreligious thought, and never made history a serious interest. But inAlexandria, after translating the Scriptures into Greek in the middle ofthe third century, they began, in imitation of their neighbors, toembellish their antiquities in the Greek style, and present them morethoroughly according to Greek standards of history. A collection of extracts from the works of the Hellenistic Jews was madeby a Gentile compiler of the first century B. C. E. , Alexander, surnamedPolyhistor. Though his book has perished, portions of it with fragmentsof these extracts have been preserved in the chronicles of theecclesiastical historian Eusebius, who wrote in the fourth century C. E. They prove the existence of a very considerable array of historicalwriters, who would seem to have been poor scholars of Greek, butingenious chronologists and apologists. The earliest of the adapters, ofwhose work fragments have been thus preserved to us, is one Demetrius, who, in the reign of Ptolemy II, at the end of the third century B. C. E. , wrote a book on the Jewish kings. It was rather a chronology than aconnected narrative, and Demetrius amended the dates given in the Bibleaccording to a system of his own. This does not appear to have been veryexact, but such as it was it appealed to Josephus, who in places followsit without question. Chronology was a matter of deep import in thatepoch, because it was one of the most galling and frequent chargesagainst the Jews that their boasted antiquity was fictitious. To rebutthis attack, the Jewish chroniclers elaborated the chronologicalindications of their long history, and brought them into relation withthe annals of their neighbors. Demetrius is followed by Eupolemus and Artapanus, who treated the Biblein a different fashion. They freely handled the Scripture narrative, andmethodically embellished it with fictitious additions, for the greaterglory, as they intended, of their people. They imitated the ways oftheir opponents, and as these sought to decry their ancestors bymalicious invention, so they contrived to invest them with fictitiousgreatness. Eupolemus represents Abraham as the discoverer of Chaldeanastrology, and identifies Enoch with the Greek hero Atlas, to whom theangel of God revealed the celestial lore. Elsewhere he inserts into theparaphrase of the Book of Kings a correspondence between Solomon andHiram (king of Tyre), in order to show the Jewish hegemony over thePhoenicians. Artapanus, professing to be a pagan writer, shows how theEgyptians were indebted to the founders of Israel for their scientificknowledge and their most prized institutions: Abraham instructed KingPharethothis in astrology; Joseph taught the Egyptian priestshieroglyphics, and built the Pyramids; Moses (who is identified with theGreek seer Musaeus) not only conquered the Ethiopians, and inventedship-building and philosophy, but taught the Egyptian priests theirdeeper wisdom, and was called by them Hermes, because of his skill ininterpreting ([Greek: Hermaeneia]) the holy documents. Fiction fosteredfiction, and the inventions of pagan foes stimulated the exaggerationsof Jewish apologists. The fictitious was mixed with the true, and thelegendary material which Artapanus added to his history passed into thecommon stock of Jewish apologetics. The great national revival that followed on the Maccabean victoriesinduced both within and without Palestine the composition of works ofcontemporary national history. For a period the Jews were as proud oftheir present as of their past. It was not only that their princes, likethe kings of other countries, desired to have their great deedscelebrated, but the whole people was conscious of another God-sentdeliverance and of a clear manifestation of the Divine Power in theiraffairs, which must be recorded for the benefit of posterity. The FirstBook of the Maccabees, which was originally written in Hebrew, and theChronicles of King John Hyrcanus[1] bear witness to this outburst ofpatriotic self-consciousness in Palestine; and the Talmud[2] contains afew fragments of history about the reign of Alexander Jannaeus, whichmay have formed part of a larger chronicle. The story of the Maccabeanwars was recorded also at great length by a Hellenistic Jew, Jason ofCyrene, and it is generally assumed that an abridgment of it has comedown to us in the Second Book of the Maccabees. [Footnote 1: They are referred to at the end of the book. Comp. I Macc. Xvi. 23f. ] [Footnote 2: Kiddushin, 66a. ] In Palestine, however, the historical spirit did not flourish for long. The interest in the universal lesson prevailed over that in theparticular fact, and the tradition that was treasured was not ofpolitical events but of ethical and legal teachings. Moral rather thanobjective truth was the study of the schools, and when contemporaryevents are described, it is in a poetical, rhapsodical form, such as wefind in the Psalms of Solomon, which recount Pompey's invasion ofJerusalem. [1] The only historical records that appear to have beenregularly kept are the lists of the priests and their genealogy, and acalendar of fasts and of days on which fasting was prohibited because ofsome happy event to be commemorated. [Footnote 1: See above, p. 14. ] In the Diaspora, on the other hand, and especially at Alexandria, whichwas the center of Hellenistic Jewry, history was made to serve apractical purpose. It was a weapon in the struggle the Jews werecontinually waging against their detractors, as well as in theirmissionary efforts to spread their religion. It became consciously andessentially apologetic, the end being persuasion rather than truth. Factand fiction were inextricably combined, and the difference between themneglected. The story of the translation of the Septuagint by the Jewish sages sentto Alexandria at the invitation of King Ptolemy, which is recounted inthe Letter of Aristeas, is an excellent example of this kind of history. It is decked out with digressions about the topography of Jerusalem andthe architecture of the Temple, and an imaginative display of Jewish witand wisdom at a royal symposium. The Third Book of the Maccabees, whichprofesses to describe a persecution of the Jews in Egypt under one ofthe Ptolemies, is another early example of didactic fiction that hasbeen preserved to us. The one sober historical work produced by a Jewishwriter between the composition of the two Books of the Maccabees and ofthe _Wars_ of Josephus was the account given by Philo of Alexandria ofthe Jewish persecutions that took place in the reigns of Tiberius andGaius. It was originally contained in five books, of which only thesecond and third have been preserved. They deal respectively with theriots at Alexandria that took place when Flaccus was governor, and withthe Jewish embassy to Gaius when that Emperor issued his order that hisimage should be set up in the Temple at Jerusalem and in the greatsynagogue of Alexandria. Philo wrote a full account of the events inwhich he himself had been called upon to play a part. He is always atpains to point the moral and enforce the lesson, but his work has adefinite historical value, and contains many valuable details aboutJewish life in the Diaspora. But if the Jews were somewhat careless of the exact record of theirhistory, many of the Greek and Roman historians paid attention to it, some specifically for the purpose of attacking them, others incidentallyin the course of their comprehensive works. The fashion of universalhistory continued for some centuries, and works of fifty volumes andover were more the rule than the exception. These "elephantine books"were rendered possible because it was the fashion for each succeedinghistorian to compile the results of his predecessor's labors, and adoptit as part of his own monumental work. Distinguished among this schoolof writers were Apollodorus of Athens, who in 150 B. C. E. WroteChronicles containing the most important events of general history downto his own time, and Polybius, who was brought as a prisoner from Greeceto Rome in 145 B. C. E. , and in his exile wrote a history of the rise ofthe Roman Republic, in the course of which he dealt with the earlyJewish relations with Rome. Then, in the first century, there flourishedPosidonius of Apamea (90-50 B. C. E. ), a Stoic and a bitter enemy of theJews, who continued the work of Polybius down to the year 90, and, besides, wrote a separate diatribe against Judaism, which he regarded asa misanthropic atheism. The succession was carried on by Timagenes ofAlexandria, who wrote a very full history of the second and the firstpart of the first century. Among Roman writers of the period that dealt with general affairs wereAsinius Pollio, the friend of Herod, and Titus Livius, who, under thename of Livy, has become the standard Latin historian for schoolboys. Josephus refers to both of them as well as to Timagenes, Posidonius, andPolybius; but as there is no reason to think that he ever tried tomaster the earlier authorities, it is probable that he knew them only sofar as they were reproduced in his immediate sources and his immediatepredecessors. The two writers whom he quotes repeatedly and must havestudied are Strabo of Amasea (in Pontus) and Nicholas of Damascus. Strabo was an author of remarkable versatility and industry. Besides hisgeography, the standard work of ancient times on the subject, he wrotein forty-seven books a large historical work on the period between 150(where Polybius ended) and 30 B. C. E. Nearly the whole of it hasdisappeared, but we can tell from Josephus' excerpts that he appreciatedthe Jews and their religion as did few other pagans of the time. Hedealt, too, at considerable length with the wars of the Hasmonean kingsagainst the Seleucids, and he is one of the authorities cited byJosephus for the period between the accession of John Hyrcanus and theoverthrow of Antigonus II by Herod. The Jewish historian follows stillmore closely, and in many places probably reproduces, Nicholas, who wasthe court historian of Herod. Nicholas was a man of remarkableversatility. He played many parts at Herod's court, as diplomatist, advocate, and minister. He was a poet and philosopher of some repute, and he wrote a general history in forty-four books. In the first eightbooks he dealt with the early annals of the Assyrians, the Greeks, theMedes, and the Persians. Josephus, who took him for his chief guideafter the Bible, often reproduces from him comparative passages to theScripture story which he is paraphrasing. And for the later period ofthe _Antiquities_, from the time of Antiochus the Great (ab. 200B. C. E. ), he depends on him largely for the comparative Hellenistichistory, which he brings into relation with the story of the Hasmoneans. When he comes to the epoch of Herod, the disproportionate fulness, thevivacity, and the dramatic power of the narrative in books XIV-XVI ofthe _Antiquities_ are due in a large measure to the historical virtuesof the court chronicler. We can tell how far this is the case by theimmediate and marked deterioration of the narrative when Josephusproceeds to the reigns of Archelaus and Agrippa--where Nicholas failedhim. Among Roman writers of his own day whom Josephus used was the EmperorVespasian himself, who, to record his exploits, wrote _Commentaries onthe Jewish War_, which were placed at his client's disposal. [1] In thecompetition of flattery that greeted the new Flavian dynasty, variousRoman writers described and celebrated the Jewish campaigns. [2] Amongthem were Antonius Julianus, who was on the staff of Vespasian and Titusthroughout the war, and at the end of it was appointed procurator ofJudea; Valerius Flaccus, who burst into ecstatic hexameters over theburning of the Temple; and Tacitus, the most brilliant of all Latinhistorians. Besides these writers' works, which have come down to usmore or less complete, a number of memoirs and histories of the warappeared, some by those who wrote on hearsay, others by men who hadtaken some part in the campaigns. It was an age of literarydilettantism, when nearly everybody wrote books who knew how to write;and in the drab monotony of Roman supremacy, the triumph over the Jews, which had placed the Flavian house on the throne, was a happyopportunity for ambitious authors. [Footnote 1: Vita, 68. ] [Footnote 2: C. Ap. 9-10. ] It has been suggested that the Roman point of view that pervades the_Wars_ of Josephus, the frequent absence of sympathy with the Jewishcause, and the incongruous pagan ideas, which surprise us, can beexplained by the fact that the Jewish writer founded his account on thatof Antonius Julianus, which is referred to by the Christian apologistMinucius[1] as a standard authority on the destruction of Jerusalem. Antonius is mentioned by Josephus as one of the Roman staff who gave hisopinion in favor of the burning of the Temple, and he has also beeningeniously identified with the Roman general (called [Hebrew: Otaninus]or [Hebrew: Ananitus]) who engaged in controversy with Rabbi Johanan benZakkai. [2] The evidence in favor of the theory is examined more fullylater; but whether or not the history of Antonius was the main source ofthe _Wars_, it is certain that Josephus had before him Gentile accountsof the struggle, and he often slavishly adopted not only their record offacts but their expressions of opinion. In point of time Tacitus mighthave derived from Josephus his summary of the Jewish Wars, part of whichhas come down to us, and on some points the Jewish and the Roman authorsagree; but the correspondence is to be explained more readily by the useof a common source by both writers. It is unlikely that the haughtypatrician, who hated and despised the Jews, and who had no love ofresearch, turned to a Jewish chronicle for his information, when he hada number of Roman and Greek authors to provide him with food for hisepigrams. [Footnote 1: Epist. Ad Octav. 33. ] [Footnote 2: Yer. Sanhedrin, i. 4. Comp. Schlatter, Zur Topographie undGeschichte Palästinas, pp. 97_ff_. ] One other writer on contemporary Jewish history to whom Josephus refersas an author, not indeed in the _Wars_, but in his _Life_, was Justus ofTiberias, Unfortunately we have to depend almost entirely on a hostilerival's spitefulness and malice for our knowledge of Justus. He did notproduce his work on the wars till after Josephus had established hisreputation, and part of his object, it is alleged, was to blacken thecharacter and destroy the repute of his rival. The conduct of Justus inthe Galilean campaign had been little more creditable than that ofJosephus--that is, if the latter's account may be believed at all. Hehad been a leader of the Zealot party in Tiberias, and had roused thepeople of that city against the double-dealing commander; but on thebreakdown of the revolt he entered the service of Agrippa II. He fellinto disgrace, but was pardoned. Some twenty-four years after the warwas over he wrote a History of the Jewish Kings and a History of theWar. It is difficult to form any judgment of the work, because, apartfrom the abuse of Josephus, the criticism we have comes merely fromecclesiastical historians, who imbibed Josephus' personal enmity asthough it were the pure milk of truth. Eusebius and Jerome[1] accuse himof having distorted Jewish affairs to suit his personal ends and ofhaving been convicted by Josephus of falsehood. His chief crime in theireyes and the reason for the disappearance of his work are that he didnot mention any of the events connected with the foundation of theChristian Church, and had not the good fortune to be interpolated, asJosephus was, with a passage about Jesus. [2] Hence Photius says that hepassed over many of the most important occurrences. [3] We know of himnow only by the charges of Josephus and a few disconnected fragments. [Footnote 1: Hist. Eccl. III. X. 8; De Viris Illustr, 14. ] [Footnote 2: See below, pp. 241 ff. ] [Footnote 3: Bibl. Cod. 33. ] Coming now to the works of Josephus, his prefaces give a full account ofhis historical motives. He originally wrote seven books on the Wars withRome in Aramaic for the benefit of his own countrymen. He was induced totranslate them into Greek because his predecessors had given falseaccounts, either out of a desire to flatter the Romans or out of hatredto the Jews. He claims that his own work is a true and careful narrativeof the events that he had witnessed with his own eyes and had specialopportunities of studying accurately. "The writings of my predecessorscontain sometimes slanders, sometimes eulogies, but nowhere the accuratetruth of the facts. " He goes on to complain of the way in which theybelittle the action of the Jews in order to aggrandize the Romans, whichdefeats its own purpose; and he contrasts the merit of one who composesby his own industry a history of events not hitherto faithfullyrecorded, with the more popular and the easier fashion of writing afresh history of a period already fully treated, by changing the orderand disposition of other men's works. He iterates his determination torecord only historical facts, and says, "It is superfluous for me towrite about the Antiquities [i. E. The early history] of the Jews, because many before me, both among my own people and the Greeks, havecomposed the histories of our ancestors very exactly. "[1] By theAntiquities he means the Bible narrative. He proposes therefore to beginwhere the Bible ends and, after a brief survey of the events before hisown age, to give a full account of the great Rebellion. Josephus fallsshort of his promise. Many of the shortcomings he pointed to in hispredecessors are glaringly present in his work. Nor is it probable thathis profession of having taken notes on the spot is true. At the time ofthe siege of Jerusalem he had no literary pretensions, and it isunlikely that he contemplated the writing of a history. It has beenpointed out that his account is much more accurate in regard to eventsin which he did not take part than in regard to those in which heassisted. [Footnote 1: B. J. , Preface. The Greek name _Archaeologia_ is regularlyrendered by _Antiquities_, but it means simply the early history. ] In the first book and the greater part of the second, where he is takenup with the preliminary introduction, he had ample sources before him, and his functions were only to abstract and compile; but when he comesto the final struggle with Rome, he would have us believe that hedepended mainly on his independent knowledge. Recent investigation hasthrown grave doubts on his claim, and has suggested that with Josephusit is true that "once a compiler, always a compiler. " The habit ofdirect copying from the works of predecessors was fixed in the literaryethics of the day. In company with most of the historians of antiquityhe introduces his general ideas upon the march of events in the form ofaddresses, which he puts into the mouth of the chief characters atcritical moments. Here he is free to invent and intrude his ownopinions, and here he almost unfailingly adopts a Roman attitude. Thework, in fact, bears the character of official history, and has all thepartiality of that form of literature. Titus, as the author proudlyrecalls, subscribed his own hand to it, and ordered that it should bepublished, and King Agrippa wrote a glowing testimonial to it in themost approved style. [1] It was accepted in Rome as the standard workupon the Jewish struggle. Patronage may have saved literature at certainepochs, but it always undermines the feeling of truth. It is notimprobable that a juster appreciation of events was contained in theoriginal writings of Josephus, but was corrected at the order of theroyal traitor or the Imperial master, to whom he perforce submittedthem. [Footnote 1: C. Ap. 8. See below, p. 221. ] If in the _Wars_ Josephus assumes the air of a scientific historian, inthe _Antiquities_ he is more openly the apologist. Despite hisprofessions in the preface of the earlier work, he seems to have foundit necessary or expedient to give to Greco-Roman society a fresh accountof the ancestry and the early history of his people and of theconstitution of their government. The Roman _Archaeologia_ of Dionysiusof Halicarnassus, who fifty years earlier had written in twenty booksthe early events of Rome, probably suggested the division and the nameof the work. He issued it after the death of his protector, in thethirteenth year of the reign of Domitian and in the fifty-sixth year ofhis own life. [1] In the preface, inconsistently with the statement inthe earlier work, he declares that he intended from the beginning towrite this apology of his people, but was deterred for a time by themagnitude of the labor of translating the history into an unaccustomedtongue. He ascribes the impulse to carry out the task to theencouragement of his patron Epaphroditus and of his other friends atRome. It probably came also from his circumstances at Rome and thenecessity of refuting calumnies made against him on account of his raceand religion. And with all his weaknesses and failings he was notlacking in a feeling of national pride, which must have moved him todefend his people. [Footnote 1: Ant. XX. Xi. 3. ] Following on the destruction of Jerusalem, a passion of mixed hatred andcontempt against the Jews moved the Roman nobility and the Roman masses. The Flavian court, representing the middle classes, by no means sharedthe feeling, and indeed the infatuation of Titus for the Jewish princessBerenice, the sister of Agrippa, was one of the scandals that moststirred the anger of the Romans. But the nobles hated those who hadobstinately fought against the Roman armies for four years, and scornedthose whose God had not saved them from ruin. At the same time Jewishpersistence after defeat and the continuance of Jewish missionaryactivity offended the majesty of Rome, which, though tolerant of foreignreligious ideas, was accustomed not merely to the physical submission ofher enemies, but to their cultural and intellectual abasement. Thehatred and scorn were fanned by a tribe of scribblers, who heapeddistortion on the history and practices of the Jewish people. On theother hand, the proselytes to Judaism, "the fearers of God, " whoaccepted part of its teaching--and in the utter collapse of paganreligion and morality they were many--desired to know something of thepast grandeur of the nation, and doubtless were anxious to justifythemselves to those who regarded their adoption of Jewish customs as anutter degradation. For those who mocked at him as a renegade member of awretched people, which consisted of the scum of the earth, whichharbored all kinds of low superstition, and which fostered inhumanityand misanthropy, and for those who looked to him as the accreditedexponent of Judaism and the writer most able to set it in a favorablelight, Josephus wrote the twenty books of his _Antiquities_. The work differed from all previous apologies for Judaism in itscompleteness and its historical character. Philo had sought to recommendJudaism as a philosophical religion, and had interpreted the Torah asthe law of Nature. Josephus was concerned not so much with Judaism aswith the Jews. He seeks to show, by his abstract of historical records, that his people had a long and honorable past, and that they had hadintercourse with ancient empires, and had been esteemed even by theRomans. The _Antiquities_ comprised a summary of the whole of Jewishhistory, as well that which was set out in the books of the Bible asthat which had taken place in the post-Biblical period down to his ownday. Some of his predecessors had elaborated only the former part of thestory, and that, it is probable, not nearly so fully as Josephus. Heclaims not to have added to or diminished from the record of Scripture. Though neither part of the claim can be upheld, he does undoubtedly givea tolerable account of the Bible so far as it is an historicalnarrative. The finer spirit of the Bible, even in its narrative parts, its deep spiritual teaching, its simple grandeur, its arrestingsincerity, he was utterly unable to impart. In style, too, his Greekfalls immeasurably below the original. We feel as we read his abstractwith its omissions and additions: The little more and how much it is; The little less and what miles away. His is a mediocre transcription, which replaces the naïveté, therapidity, the unaffected beauty of the Hebrew, with the rhetoric, thesophistication, and the exaggerated overstatement of the Greek writingof his own time. Impressiveness for him is regularly enhanced byinaccuracy. His own or his assumed materialistic fatalism lowers the Godof the Bible to a Power which materially rewards the righteous andpunishes the wicked. In this immediate retribution he finds the surestsign of Divine Providence, and it is this lesson which he is mostanxious to assert throughout his work. But he is at pains to dispel theidea of a special Providence for Israel. The material power of Rome madehim desert in life the Jewish cause; the material thought of Rome madehim dissimulate in literature the full creed of Judaism. The second part of the _Antiquities_ is a more ambitious piece of work. The compiler brings together all that he could find, in Jewish andGentile sources, about Jewish history from the time of the Babyloniancaptivity to the outbreak of the war against Rome. And he was apparentlythe first of his people to utilize the Greek historians systematicallyin this fashion. There are long periods as to the incidents of which hewas at a loss. Without possessing the ability or desire for research, heis not above confounding the chronology and perverting the succession ofevents to cover up a gap. But he does contrive to produce a connectednarrative and to provide some kind of continuous chronicle. And for thisservice he is not lightly to be esteemed. Without him we should knowscarcely anything of the external history of the Jewish people for threecenturies. In style the last ten books vary remarkably. It dependsalmost entirely on his source whether the narrative is dull andmonotonous or lively and dramatic. Where, for example, he istranscribing Nicholas and another historian of the period, he succeedsin presenting a picture of Herod that has a certain psychological value. Where, on the other hand, he has had to trust largely to scatterednotes, as in the record of Herod's successors, his history is littlebetter than a miscellany of disjointed passages. He lacks throughout atrue sense of proportion, and for the deeper aspects of history he hasno perception. He does not show in spite of his Jewish training theslightest appreciation of the spiritual power of Judaism or of thedivine purpose illustrating itself in the rise and fall of nations. Hisconception of history is a biography of might, tempered by occasionalmanifestations of divine retribution. The concrete event is theimportant thing, and of culture and literature he says scarcely a word. His occasional moral reflections are on a mediocre plane and not true tothe finer spirit of Judaism. He is consciously or unconsciously obsessedby the power of Rome, and makes little attempt to inculcate the highermoral outlook of his people. In soul, too, he is Romanized. He admiresabove all material power; he exhibits material conceptions ofProvidence; he looks always for material causes. Altogether the_Antiquities_ is a work invaluable for its material, but a somewhatsoulless book. Josephus conveys more of the spirit of Judaism in his two books commonlyentitled _Against Apion_, which are professedly apologetic. They werewritten after the _Antiquities_, and further emphasize two points onwhich he had dwelt in that work: the great age of the Jewish people andthe excellence of the Jewish law. He was anxious to refute thosedetractors who, despite the publication of his history, still continuedto spread grotesquely false accounts of Israel's origin and Israel'sreligious teachings; and he wrote here with more spirit and with moreconviction than in his earlier elaborate works. He has no longer toaccommodate himself to the vanity of a Roman Emperor, or to distortevents so as to glorify his nation or to excuse his own conduct. He isable for once to set out his idea wholeheartedly, and he shows that, ifhe had few of the qualities required for a great historian, he hadseveral of the talents of an apologist. His own calculatedmisrepresentation of his people in their last struggle would haveafforded an opponent the best reply to his apology. In itself thatapology was an effective summary of Judaism for his own times, and partsof it have a permanent value. For seventeen centuries it remained thesole direct answer from the Jewish side to the calumnies of the enemiesof the Jews. The last extant work of Josephus was the _Life_, of which we havealready treated, and it were better to say little more. It was provokedby the publication of the History of Justus, which had accused Josephusand the Galileans of having been the authors of the sedition against theRomans. [1] Josephus retorts that, before he was appointed governor, Justus and the people of Tiberias had attacked the Greek cities of theDecapolis and the dominions of Agrippa, as was witnessed in theCommentaries of Vespasian. Not content with this crime, Justus hadfailed to surrender to the Romans till they appeared before Tiberias. Having charged his rival with being a better patriot than himself, [2]Josephus proceeds to argue that he was a worse historian: Justus couldnot describe the Galilean campaign, because during the war he was atBerytus; he took no part in the siege of Jerusalem, and, less privilegedthan his rival, he had not read the Commentaries of Caesar, and in factoften contradicted them. Conscious of this weakness, he had not venturedto publish his account till the chief actors in the story, Vespasian, Titus, and Agrippa, had died, though his books had been written sometwenty years before they were issued. But in his pains to gainsay Justusand his own patriotism, such as it was, Josephus, as has been noticed, gives an account of his doings in Galilee that is often at completevariance with his statements in the _Wars_. The _Life_, in fact, isuntrustworthy history and unsuccessful apology. [Footnote 1: Vita, 65. ] [Footnote 2: Justus, no doubt, had done the converse, representinghimself as a thorough Romanizer and Josephus as an ardent rebel. ] At the end of the _Antiquities_ Josephus declares his intention to writethree books concerning the Jewish doctrines "about God and His essence, and concerning the laws, why some things are permitted, and others areprohibited. " In the preface to the same work, as well as in variouspassages in its course, he refers to his intention to write on thephilosophical meaning of the Mosaic legislation. The books entitled_Against Apion_ correspond neither in number nor in content to thisplan, and we must therefore assume that he never carried it out. He mayhave intended to abstract the commentary of Philo upon the Law, which hehad doubtless come to know. Certainly he shows no traces of deeperallegorical lore in the extant works, and his mind was hardly given tosuch speculations. But a humanitarian and universalistic explanation ofthe Mosaic code, such as his predecessor had composed, notably in hisLife of Moses, would have been quite in his way, and would have roundedoff his presentation of the past and present history of the Jews. Theneed of replying to his personal enemies and the detractors of hisnation deterred him perhaps from achieving this part of his scheme. Or, if it was written, the Christian scribes, who preserved his other works, may have suppressed it because it did not harmonize with their ideas. Photius ascribes to Josephus a work on _The Universe_, or _The Cause ofthe Universe_ ([Greek: peri taes tou pantos aitias]), which is extant, but which is demonstrably of Christian origin, and was probably writtenby Hippolytus, an ecclesiastical writer of the third century and theauthor of _Philosophumena_. Another work attributed to Josephus in theDark and Middle Ages, and often attached to manuscripts of the_Antiquities_, is the sermon on _The Sovereignty of Reason_, which iscommonly known as the Fourth Book of the Maccabees. The book is aremarkable example of the use of Greek philosophical ideas to confirmthe Jewish religion. That the Mosaic law is the rule of written reasonis the main theme, and it is illustrated by the story of the martyrsduring the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes, whence the book takes itstitle. In particular, the author points to the ethical significanceunderlying the dietary laws, of which he says in a remarkable passage: When we long for fishes and fowls and fourfooted animals and every kindof food that is forbidden to us by the Law, it is through the mastery ofpious reason that we abstain from them. For the affections and appetitesare restrained and turned into another direction by the sobriety of themind, and all the movements of the body are kept in check by piousreason. Again, of the Law as a whole he says: It teaches us temperance, so that we master our pleasures and desires, and it exercises us in fortitude, so that we willingly undergo everytoil. And it instructs us in justice, so that in all our behavior wegive what is due, and it teaches us to be pious, so that we worship theonly living God in the manner becoming His greatness. Freudenthal has conclusively disposed of the theory that Josephus wasthe author of this work. [1] Neither in language, nor in style, nor inthought, has it a resemblance to his authentic works. Nor was he the manto write anonymously. It reveals, indeed, a mastery of the arts of Greekrhetoric, such as the Palestinian soldier who learnt Greek only late inlife, and who required the help of friends to correct his syntax, couldnever have acquired. It reveals, too, a knowledge of the technical termsof the Stoic philosophy and a general grasp of Greek philosophy quitebeyond the writer of the _Antiquities_ and the _Wars_. Lastly, itbreathes a wholehearted love for Judaism and a national ardor to whichthe double-dealing defender of Galilee and the client of the Roman courtcould hardly have aspired. [Footnote 1: Freudenthal, Die Flavius Josephus beigelegte Schrift überdie Herrschaft der Vernunft, 1879. ] The genuine works of Josephus reveal him not as a philosopher or sturdypreacher of Judaism, but as an apologetic historian and apologist, distinguished in either field rather for his industry and his ingenuityin using others' works than by any original excellence. He learnt fromthe Greeks and Romans the external manner of systematic history, and inthis he stood above his Jewish predecessors. He learnt from them alsothe arts of mixing false with true, of invention, of exaggeration, ofthe suggestion of the bad and the suppression of the good motive. He wasa sophist rather than a sage, and circumstances compelled him to be acourt chronicler rather than a national historian. And while he acquiredsomething of the art of historical writing from his models, he lost theintuitive synthesis of the Jewish attitude, which saw the working ofGod's moral law in all human affairs. On the other hand, certain defectsof his history may be ascribed to lack of training and to the spirit ofthe age. He had scant notion of accuracy, he made no independentresearch into past events, and he was unconscionable in chronology. Inhis larger works he is for the most part a translator and compiler ofthe work of others, but he has some claim to originality of design andindependence of mind in the books against Apion. The times were out ofjoint for a writer of his caliber. For the greater part of his literarylife, perhaps for the whole, he was not free to write what he thoughtand felt, and he wrote for an alien public, which could not rise to anunderstanding of the deeper ideas of his people's history. But this muchat least may be put down to his credit, that he lived to atone for themisrepresentation of the heroic struggle of the Jews with the Romans bypreserving some record of many dark pages in their history and byrefuting the calumnies of the Hellenistic vituperators about theirorigin and their religious teachings. V THE JEWISH WARS The first work of Josephus as man of letters was the history of the warsof the Jews against the Romans, for which, according to his ownstatement, he prepared from the time of his surrender by taking copiousnotes of the events which he witnessed. He completed it in the fortiethyear of his life and dedicated it to Vespasian. [1] He seems originallyto have designed the record of the struggle for the purpose ofpersuading his brethren in the East that it was useless to fight furtheragainst the Romans. He desired to prove to them that God was on the sideof the big battalions, and that the Jews had forfeited His protection bytheir manifold transgressions. The Zealots were as wicked as they weremisguided, and to follow them was to march to certain ruin. It is notunlikely that Josephus was commissioned by Titus to compose his versionof the war for the "Upper Barbarians, " whose rising in alliance with theParthians might have troubled the conqueror of Jerusalem, as itafterwards troubled Trajan. But, save that it was written in Aramaic, wecannot tell the form of the original history, since it has entirelydisappeared. [Footnote 1: B. J. VII. Xv. 8. ] Josephus says in the preface to the extant Greek books that hetranslated into Greek the account he had already written. But hecertainly did much more than translate. The whole trend of the narrativeand the purpose must have been changed when he came to present theevents for a Greco-Roman audience. He was concerned less to instillrespect for Rome in his countrymen than to inspire regard for hiscountrymen in the Romans, and at the same time to show that theRebellion was not the deliberate work of the whole people, but due tothe instigation of a band of desperate, unscrupulous fanatics. He wasconcerned also to show that God, the vanquished Jewish God, as theRomans would regard Him, had allowed the ruin of His people, not becauseHe was powerless to preserve them, but because they had sinned againstHis law. Lastly, he was anxious to emphasize the military virtue and themagnanimity of his patrons Vespasian and Titus. He intersperses frequentprotests in various parts of the seven books, and repeats them in thepreface, to the effect that while his predecessors had written"sophistically, " he was aiming only at the exact record of events. Butit is obvious that, in the _Wars_ as in his other works, he has adefinite purpose to serve, and he colors his account of events to suitthis purpose and to please his patrons. He sets out to establish, in fact, that it was "a sedition of our ownthat destroyed Jerusalem, and that the tyrants among the Jews broughtupon us the Romans, who unwillingly attacked us, and occasioned theburning of our Temple. "[1] And he apologizes for the passion he showsagainst the tyrants and Zealots, which, he admits, is not consistentwith the character of an historian; it was provoked because theunparalleled calamities of the Jews were not caused by strangers but bythemselves, and "this makes it impossible for me to contain mylamentations. "[2] The historian, therefore, in the work which has comedown to us, is dominated by the conviction, whether sincere or feigned, that the war with Rome was a huge error, that those who fomented it werewicked, self-seeking men, and that the Jews brought their ruin onthemselves. This being his temper, it is necessary to look very closelyat his representation of events and examine how far partisan feeling andprejudices, and how far servility and the courtier spirit, have coloredit. We have also to consider how far his reflections represent his ownjudgment, and how far they are the slavish adoption of opinionsexpressed by the victorious enemies of his people. [Footnote 1: B. J. , Preface. ] [Footnote 2: B. J. , Preface, 4. ] The alternative title of the work is _On the Destruction of the Temple_, but its scope is larger than either name suggests. It is conjectured bythe German scholar Niese that the author called it _A History of theJewish State in Its Relations with the Romans_. It is in fact a historyof the Jews under the Romans, beginning, as Josephus says, "where theearlier writers on Jewish affairs and our prophets leave off. " Heproposes to deal briefly with the events that preceded his own age, butfully with the events of the wars of his time. The history starts, accordingly, with the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes, and, save thathe expatiates without any sense of proportion on the exploits of Herodthe Great, Josephus is generally faithful to his program in theintroductory portion of the work. For the Herodian period he found avery full source, and the temptation was too powerful for him, so thatthe greater part of the first book is taken up with the story of thecourt intrigues and family murders of the king. Very brief indeed is histreatment of the Maccabean brothers, and not very accurate. They aredismissed in two chapters, and it is probable that the historian had notbefore him either of the two good Jewish sources for the period, theFirst and the Second Book of the Maccabees. In his later work, in whichhe dealt with the same period at greater length, the account which hehad abstracted from a Greek source, probably Nicholas of Damascus, iscorrected by the Jewish work. The two records show a number of smalldiscrepancies. Thus, in the _Wars_ he states that Onias, the high priestwho drove out the Tobiades from Jerusalem, fled to Ptolemy in Egypt, andfounded a city resembling Jerusalem; whereas in the _Antiquities_ hestates that the Onias who fled to Egypt because Antiochus deprived himof office was the son of the high priest. Again, in the _Wars_ he makesMattathias kill the Syrian governor Bacchides; whereas, in the_Antiquities_, agreeing with the First Book of the Maccabees, he saysthat the Syrian officer who was slain at Modin was Appelles. Josephus in the _Wars_ follows his Hellenistic source for the history ofthe Hasmonean monarchy without introducing any Jewish knowledge andwithout criticism. His summary is of incidents, not of movements, and hehas a liking for romantic color. The piercing of the king's elephant bythe Maccabean Eleazar, the prediction by an Essene of the murder ofAntigonus, the brother of King Aristobulus I, are detailed. The innerJewish life is passed over in complete silence until he comes to thereign of Alexander. Then he describes the Pharisees as a sect of Jewsthat are held to be more religious than others and to interpret the lawsmore accurately. [1] The description is clearly derived from a Greekwriter, who regards the Jewish people from the outside. It is quite outof harmony with the standpoint which Josephus himself later adopts. Inthis passage he presents the Pharisees as crafty politicians, insinuating themselves into the favor of the queen, and then orderingthe country to suit their own ends. Without describing the other sects, he continues the narration of intrigues and wars till he reaches theintervention of Pompey in the affairs of Palestine. [Footnote 1: B. J. I. V. 2. ] From this point the treatment is fuller. No doubt the Hellenistichistorians paid more attention to the Jews from the moment when theycame within the orbit of the Roman Empire; but while in the_Antiquities_ Josephus refers several times to the statements of two orthree of the Greco-Roman writers, in the _Wars_ he quotes no authority. From this it may be inferred that in the earlier work he is followingbut one guide. He gives an elaborate account of the rise of the Idumean family ofAntipater, and hence to the end of the book the history passes into abiography of Herod. The first part of Herod's career, when he wasbuilding up his power, is related in the most favorable light. Hisactivity in Galilee against the Zealots, his trial by the Sanhedrin, hissubsequent service to the Romans, his flight from Judea upon theinvasion of the Parthians, his reception by Antony, his triumphal returnto the kingdom that had been bestowed on him, his valiant exploitsagainst the Arabians of Perea and Nabatea, his capture of Jerusalem, hissplendid buildings, and his magnificence to foreigners--all theseincidents are set forth so as to enhance his greatness. The descriptionthroughout has a Greek ring. There is scarcely a suggestion of a Jewishpoint of view towards the semi-savage godless tyrant. And when Josephuscomes to the part of Herod's life which even an historian laureate couldnot misrepresent to his credit, his family relations, he adopts afundamentally pagan outlook. The foundation of the Greek drama was the idea that the fortunateincurred the envy of the gods, and brought on themselves the "nemesis, "the revenge, of the divine powers, which plunged them into ruin. Thisconception, utterly opposed as it is to the Jewish doctrine of God'sgoodness, is applied to Herod, on whom, says Josephus, fortune wasrevenged for his external prosperity by raising him up domestictroubles. [1] He introduces another pagan idea, when he suggests thatAntipater, the wicked son of the king, returned to Palestine, where hewas to meet his doom, at the instigation of the ghosts of his murderedbrothers, which stopped the mouths of those who would have warned himagainst returning. The notion of the avenging spirits of the dead wasutterly opposed to Jewish teaching, but it was a commonplace of theHellenistic thought of the time. [Footnote 1: B. J. I. Xxii. 1. ] Of Hillel and Shammai, the great sages of the time, we have not a word;but when he recounts how, in the last days of Herod, the people underthe lead of the Pharisees rose against the king in indignation at thesetting up of a golden eagle over the Temple gate, he speaks of thesophists exhorting their followers, "that it was a glorious thing to diefor the laws of their country, because the soul was immortal, and aneternal enjoyment of happiness did await such as died on that account;while the mean-spirited, and those that were not wise enough to show aright love of their souls, preferred death by disease to that which is asign of virtue. " The sentiments here are not so objectionable, but thedescription of the Pharisees as sophists, and the suggestion of aValhalla for those who died for their country and for no others--forwhich there is no authority in Jewish tradition--betray again theuncritical copying of a Hellenistic source. Finally, in summing up the character of Herod, all he finds to say is, "Above all other men he enjoyed the favor of fortune, since from aprivate station he obtained a kingdom, and held it many years, and leftit to his sons; but yet in his domestic affairs he was a mostunfortunate man. " Not a word of his wickedness and cruelty, not a breathof the Hebrew spirit, but simply an estimate of his "fortune. " This isthe way in which the Romanized Jew continued the historical record ofthe Bible, substituting foreign superstitions about fate and fortune forthe Jewish idea that all human history is a manifestation of God. Josephus ends the first book of the _Wars_ with an account of thegorgeous pomp of Herod's funeral, and starts the second book with adescription of the costly funeral feast which his son Archelaus gave tothe multitude, adding a note--presumably also derived from Nicholas--that many of the Jews ruin themselves owing to the need of giving such afeast, because he who omits it is not esteemed pious. As his sourcefails him for the period following on the banishment of Archelaus, thetreatment becomes fragmentary, but at the same time more original andindependent. An account of the various Jewish sects interrupts thechronicle of the court intrigues and popular risings. Josephusdistinguishes here four sects, the Essenes, the Pharisees, theSadducees, and the Zealots, but his account is mainly confined to thefirst. [1] He describes in some detail their practices, beliefs, andorganizations. Indeed, this passage and the account in Philo are ourchief Jewish authorities for the tenets of the Essenes. He is anxious toestablish their claim to be a philosophical community comparable withthe Greek schools. In particular he represents that their notions ofimmortality correspond with the Greek ideas of the Isles of the Blessedand of Hades. "The divine doctrines of the Essenes, as he calls them, which consider the body as corruptible and the soul an immortal spirit, which, when released from the bonds of the flesh as from a long slavery, rejoices and mounts upwards, lay an irresistible bait for such as haveonce tasted of their philosophy. " The ideas which the sect cherishedwere popular in a certain part of Greco-Roman society, which, sated withthe luxury of the age, turned to the ascetic life and to the pursuit ofmysticism. Pliny the Elder, who was on the staff of Titus at Jerusalem, appears to have been especially interested in the Jewish communists, andbriefly described their doctrines in his books; and the circle for whomJosephus wrote would have been glad to have a fuller account. [Footnote 1: B. J. II. Viii. ] Of the other two sects he says little here, and what he says issuperficial. He places the differentiation in their contrasted doctrinesof fate and immortality. The Pharisees ascribe all to fate, but yetallow freewill--a Hellenizing version of the saying ascribed to RabbiAkiba, "All is foreseen, but freedom of will is given"[1]--and they sayall souls are immortal, but those of the good only pass into otherbodies, while those of the bad suffer eternal punishment. Thisattribution of the doctrine of metempsychosis and eternal punishment isanother piece of Hellenization, or a reproduction of a Hellenisticmisunderstanding; for the Rabbinic records nowhere suggest that suchideas were held by the Pharisees. "The Sadducees, on the other hand, deny fate entirely, and hold that God is not concerned in man's conduct, which is entirely in his own choice, and they likewise deny theimmortality of the soul or retribution after death. " Here the attempt torepresent the Sadducees' position as parallel with Epicurean materialismhas probably induced an overstatement of their distrust of Providence. Josephus adds that the Pharisees cultivate great friendships amongthemselves and promote peace among the people; while the Sadducees aresomewhat gruff towards each other, and treat even members of their ownparty as if they were strangers. [Footnote 1: Comp. Abot, iii. 15. ] Of the fourth party, the Zealots, Josephus has only a few words, to theeffect that when Coponius was sent as the first procurator of Judea, aGalilean named Judas prevailed on his countrymen to revolt, saying theywould be cowards if they would endure to pay any tax to the Romans orsubmit to any mortal lord in place of God. This man, he says, was theteacher of a peculiar sect of his own. While the other three sects aretreated as philosophical schools, Josephus does not attribute aphilosophy to the Zealots, and out of regard to Roman feelings he saysnothing of the Messianic hopes that dominated them. After the digression about the sects, Josephus continues his narrativeof the Jewish relations with the Romans. He turns aside now and then todetail the complicated family affairs of the Herodian family or todescribe some remarkable geographical phenomenon, such as the glassysands of the Ladder of Tyre. [1] The main theme is the growing irritationof the Jews, and the strengthening of the feeling that led to theoutbreak of the great war. But Josephus, always under the spell of theRomans, or writing with a desire to appeal to them, can recognize onlymaterial, concrete causes. The deeper spiritual motives of the struggleescape him altogether, as they escaped the Roman procurators. Herecounts the wanton insults of a Pontius Pilate, who brought intoJerusalem Roman ensigns with the image of Caesar, and spoiled the sacredtreasures of the Korban for the purpose of building aqueducts; and hedwells on the attempt of Gaius to set up his statue in the Temple, whichwas frustrated only by the Emperor's murder. But about the attitude ofthe different sections of the Jewish people to the Romans, of which hisrecord would have been so valuable, he is silent. [Footnote 1: B. J. II. X. 2. The same phenomenon is recorded in Pliny andTacitus, and it was a commonplace of the geography of the age. ] After the brief interlude of Agrippa's happy reign, the irritation ofRoman procurators is renewed, and under Comanus tumult follows tumult, as one outrage after another upon the Jewish feeling is countenanced orabetted. The courtier of the Flavian house takes occasion to recount theEmperor Nero's misdeeds and family murders; but he resists the desire totreat in detail of these things, because his subject is Jewishhistory. [1] He must have had before him a source which dealt withgeneral Roman history more fully, and he shows his independence, such asit is, in confining his narrative to the Jewish story. But the relianceon his source for his point of view leads him to write as a good Roman;the national party are dubbed rebels and revolutionaries ([Greek:stasiastai]). The Zealots are regularly termed robbers, and the originof war is attributed to the weakness of the governors in not puttingdown these turbulent elements. All this was natural enough in a Roman, but it comes strangely from the pen of a soi-disant Jewish apologist, who had himself taken a part in the rebellion. Characteristic is hisaccount of the turbulent condition of Palestine in the time of Felix: "Bands of Sicarii springing up in the chaos caused by the tyrannyinfested the country, and another body of abandoned men, less villainousin their actions, but more wicked in their designs, deluded the peopleunder pretense of divine inspiration, and persuaded them to rise. Felixput down these bands, but, as with a diseased body, straightway theinflammation burst out in another part. And the flame of revolt wasblown up every day more and more, till it came to a regular war. "[2] [Footnote 1: B. J. II. Xiii. 1. ] [Footnote 2: B. J. II. Xiii. 6. ] Josephus vents his full power of denunciation on the last procurator, Floras, who goaded the people into war, and by his repeated outragescompelled even the aristocratic party, to which the historian belonged, to break their loyalty to Rome: "As though he had been sent asexecutioner to punish condemned criminals, he omitted no sort ofspoliation or extortion. In the most pitiful cases he was most inhuman;in the greatest turpitudes he was most impudent, nor could anyone outdohim in perversion of the truth, or combine more subtle ways of deceit. "Josephus, not altogether consistently with what he has already said, seeks to exculpate his countrymen for their rising, up to the point inwhich he himself was involved in it; and though he admits that the highpriests and leading men were still anxious for peace at any price, andhe puts a long speech into Agrippa's mouth counseling submission, he isyet anxious to show that his people were driven into war by thewickedness of Nero's governors. His masters allowed him, and probablyinvited him, to denounce the oppression of the ministers of theirpredecessors, and the Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus likewisestate that the rapacity of the procurators drove the Jews into revolt. He had authority, therefore, for this view in his contemporary sources. The die was cast. Menahem, the son of Judas the Galilean and the head ofthe Zealots, seized Jerusalem, drove the Romans and Romanizers into thefortress of Antonia, and having armed his bands with the contents ofHerod's southern stronghold of Masada, overpowered the garrison and putit to the sword. Menahem himself, indeed, was so barbarous that the moremoderate leader Eleazar turned against him and put him to death. ButJosephus sees in the massacre of the Roman garrison the pollution of thecity, which doomed it to destruction. In his belligerent ethics, massacre of the Romans by the Jews is always a crime against God, requiring His visitation; massacres of the Jews are a visitation of God, revealing that the Romans were His chosen instrument. With the history of the war, so far as the historian was involved in it, we have already dealt. We are here concerned with the character and thereliability of his account. Josephus is somewhat vague and confusedabout the dispositions of the Jewish leaders, but when he is notjustifying his own treachery, or venting his spite on his rivals, heshows many of the parts of a military historian. He surveys withclearness and conciseness the nature of the country that the Romans hadto conquer, and he describes the Roman armies and Roman camp withgreater detail than any Roman historian, his design being "not so muchto praise the Romans as to comfort those who have been conquered and todeter others from rising. "[1] It has, however, been pointed out withgreat force, in support of the theory that he is following closely andalmost paraphrasing a Roman authority on the war, that his geographicaland topographical lore is introduced not in its natural place, but onthe occasions when Vespasian is the actor in a particular district. [2]Thus, he describes the Phoenician coast when Vespasian arrives atPtolemais, Galilee when Vespasian is besieging Tarichea, Jericho whenVespasian makes his sally to the Jordan cities. [3] [Footnote 1: B. J. III. V. This remark must clearly have appeared in theoriginal Aramaic. ] [Footnote 2: Schlatter, Zur Topographie und Geschichte Palastinas, pp. 99 _ff_. ] [Footnote 3: B. J. III. Iii. 1 and x. 7. ] All this would be natural in a chronicler who was one of Vespasian'sstaff, but it is odd in the Jewish commander of Galilee. Again, he makescertain confusions about Hebrew names of places, which are easilyexplained in a Roman, but are inexplicable in the learned priest herepresents himself to be. He says the town of Gamala was so calledbecause of its supposed resemblance to a camel (in Greek, Kamelos), andthe Jews corrupted the name. [1] A Roman writer no doubt would haveregarded the Hebrew [Hebrew: Namal] as a corruption of the Greek word: aJew should have known better. [Footnote 1: B. J. III. Iv. 2. ] Again, he explains Bezetha, the name of the northeastern quarter ofJerusalem, as meaning the new house or city, [1] a mistake natural to aRoman who was aware that it was in fact the new part of the city, andalternatively called by the Greek name [Greek: kainopolis], but anextraordinary blunder for a Jew, who would surely know that it meant theHouse of Olives, while the Aramaic or popular name for "new city" wouldbe Bet-Hadta. He does not once refer to Mount Zion, but knows the hillby its Greek name of Acra. Yet again it is significant that he insertsin his geography pagan touches that are part of the common stock ofGreco-Roman notices of Palestine. At Joppa, he says, one may still seeon the rock the trace of the chains of Andromeda, [2] who in Hellenisticlegend was said to have been rescued there by the fictitious heroPerseus. Describing the Dead Sea, [3] he mentions the destruction of thecities of Sodom and Gomorrah as a myth, as a Greek or a Roman would havedone. [4] His very accuracy about some topographical details issuspicious. Colonel Conder[5] points with surprise to the fact that hisdescription of the fortress of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea, thesiege of which he had not seen, is absolutely correct, while his accountof Jotapata, which he defended, is full of exaggeration. The probableexplanation is that in the one place he copied a skilled observer; inthe other, he trusted to his own inaccurate memory. We may infer that asin the _Antiquities_ he mainly compiled the work of predecessors thatare known, so in the _Wars_ he compiled the works of predecessors thatare unknown, adding something from his personal experience and hisnational pride. [Footnote 1: B. J. V. V. 8. ] [Footnote 2: B. J. IV. Ix. 3. Pliny says the same thing in Latin. ] [Footnote 3: B. J. IV. Viii. 4. ] [Footnote 4: Tac. Hist. V. 7. ] [Footnote 5: Tent Work in Palestine, 1. 207. ] Apart from his dependence on others' work, his chronicle of the war ismarred by the need of justifying his own submission, his Romanstandpoint, and his ulterior purpose of pleasing and flattering hispatrons. Vespasian and Titus are the righteous ministers of God's wrathagainst His people, His vicars on earth, and every action in theirruthless process of extermination has to be represented as a justretribution required to expiate the sin of Jewish resistance. Titusespecially is singled out for his unfailing deeds of bravery; and whenanything is amiss with the proceedings of the Romans, the Imperialfamily is always exculpated. Characteristic is the palliation ofVespasian's brutal treatment of the people of Tarichea. When theysurrendered, they were promised their lives, but twelve hundred old menwere butchered, and over three thousand men and women were sold asslaves. Josephus cannot find the execution of the divine will in this, and so he is driven to explain that Vespasian was overborne by hiscouncil, and gave them an ambiguous liberty to do as seemed good tothem. It is the pivot of the story of the wars, as has been stated, that theinternal strife of the Jews brought about the ruin of the nation, andthe testimony of Josephus has perpetuated that conception of the lastdays of Jerusalem. Our other records of the struggle go to suggest thatcivil strife did take place. Tacitus[1] states that there were threeleaders, each with his own army in the city, and the Rabbinicalauthorities[2] speak of the three councils in Jerusalem. It is furthersaid that the second Temple was destroyed because of the unprovokedhatred among the Jews, which was the equal of the sins of murder, unchastity, and idolatry that brought about the fall of the firstTemple. [3] Yet the fact that the men who were the foremost agitators ofthe Rebellion were its leaders to the end suggests that the people hadreliance on their leadership; and Josephus probably traded largely onhis prejudices for the particulars of the civil conflicts, and he placedall the blame on the party that was least guilty. Adopting the Romanstandpoint, he denounced the whole Zealot policy, and for John ofGischala, their leader, he entertained a special loathing. It istherefore his purpose to show that all the sedition was of John'smaking, while it would seem more probable that the disturbances arosebecause the Romanizing aristocrats were planning surrender. [Footnote 1: Hist. V. 12. ] [Footnote 2: Midr. Kohelet, vii. 11. ] [Footnote 3: Yoma, 9b. ] According to Josephus, the Zealots, who were masters of the greater partof Jerusalem during the struggle, established a reign of terror. Theytrampled upon the laws of man, and laughed at the laws of God. Theyridiculed the oracles of the prophets as the tricks of jugglers. "Yetdid they occasion the fulfilment of prophecies relating to theircountry. For there was an ancient oracle that the city should be takenand the sanctuary burnt when sedition should affect the Jews. " Josephusshares the pagan outlook of the Roman historian Tacitus, who ishorrified at the Jewish disregard of the omens and portents whichbetokened the fall of their city, and speaks of them as a people proneto superstition (what we would call faith) and deaf to divine warnings(what we would call superstition). [1] Josephus and his friends werelooking for signs and prophecies of the ruin of the people as an excusefor surrender; the Zealots, men of sterner stuff and of fuller faith, were resolved to resist to the end, and would brook no parleying withthe enemy. They were in fact political nationalists of a differentschool and leaning from the aristocrats and the priests. The latterregarded political life and the Temple service as vital parts of thenational life, and believing that the legions were invincible wereanxious to keep peace with Rome. The Zealots regarded personal libertyand national independence as vital, and, to vindicate them, fought tothe end with Rome. Both the extreme political parties lacked thespiritual standpoint of the Pharisees, who believed that the Torah evenwithout political independence would hold the people together till abetter time was granted by Providence. The party conflicts inducedviolence and civil tumult, and Josephus would have us believe that"demoniac discord" was the main cause of the ruin of Jerusalem. Duringthe respite which the Jews enjoyed before the final siege of Jerusalem, he alleges that a bitter feud was waged incessantly between Eleazar theson of Simon, who held the Inner Court of the Temple, Simon, the son ofGioras, who held the Upper and the greater part of the Lower city, andJohn of Gischala, who occupied the outer part of the Temple. Hedescribes the situation rhetorically as "sedition begetting sedition, like a wild beast gone mad, which, for want of other food, falls toeating its own flesh. " And he bursts into an apostrophe over thefighting that went on within the Temple precincts: "Most wretched city! What misery so great as this didst thou suffer fromthe Romans, when they came to purify thee from thy internecine hatred!Thou couldst no longer be a fit habitation for God, nor couldst thoucontinue longer in being, after thou hadst been a sepulcher for thecorpses of thine own people, and thy holy house itself had been a burialplace in their civil strife. " [Footnote 1: Hist. V. 13. Gens superstitioni prona, religioni obnoxia. ] It is curious that a little later, when he resumes the narrative of theRoman campaign, and returns presumably to a Roman source, he says thatthe Jews, elated by their unexpected success, made incursions on theGreek cities. The success referred to must be the defeat of CestiusGallus, and it looks as if this lurid account of the horrors of thecivil war in Jerusalem were not known to the Roman guide, and that atthe least Josephus has embroidered the story of the feud to suit histhesis. The measure of the Jewish writer's dependence for the main partof his narrative of the siege is singularly illustrated by a smalldetail. Josephus throughout his account uses the Macedonian names of themonths, and equates them loosely with those of the Jewish calendar; butit is notable that the three traditional Jewish dates in the siege whichhe inserts, the fourteenth of Xanthicus (Nisan), when it began, theseventeenth of Panemos (Tammuz), when the daily offering ceased, and theninth and tenth of Loos (Ab), when the Temple was destroyed, conflictwith the other dates he gives in his general account of the siege. Sofar from being a proof of his independence, as has been claimed, hisJewish dates show his want of skill in weaving his Jewish informationinto his scheme. When he is original, he is apt to be unhistorical. Josephus agrees with the Talmud that the fire lasted to the tenth of themonth, [1] but while the Rabbis cursed Titus, who burnt the Holy ofHolies and spread fire and slaughter, and Roman historians[2] declaredthat Titus had deliberately fired the center of the Jewish cult in orderto destroy the national stronghold, Josephus is anxious to preserve hispatron's reputation for gentleness and invest him with the appearance ofpiety and magnanimity. Voicing perhaps the conqueror's later regrets, hedeclares that he protested against the Romans' avenging themselves oninanimate things and against the destruction of so beautiful a work, butfailed despite all his efforts to stay the conflagration. The historianwrites a lurid description of the catastrophe, but he omits the simpledetails that make the account in the Talmud so pathetic. "The Temple, "runs the Talmudic account[3] "was destroyed on the eve of the ninth dayof Ab at the outgoing of Sabbath, at the end of the Sabbatic year; andthe watch of Jehoiarib was on service, and the Levites were chanting thehymns and standing at their desks. And the hymn they chanted was, 'AndHe shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off withtheir own wickedness' (Ps. 94:23); and they could not finish to say, 'The Lord our God shall cut them off, ' when the heathen came andsilenced them. " This account may not be historically true, but itrepresents the unquenchable spirit of Judaism in face of the disaster. [Footnote 1: Comp. Yer. Taanit, iv. 6. ] [Footnote 2: Comp. Sulpicius Severus, who used Tacitus (Chron. I. Xxx. 6. ); and the poet Valerius Flaccus acclaims the victor of Solymae, whohurls fiery torches at the Temple. Dion Cassius (lxvi. 4. ) declares thatwhen the Roman soldiers refused to attack the Temple in awe of itsholiness, Titus himself set fire to it; and this appears to be the trueaccount. ] [Footnote 3: Taanit, 29a. ] Josephus, on the other hand, regards the fall of the Temple as afavorable opportunity to give a list of the prodigies and omens thatheralded it. For example, he finds a proof of Providence in thefulfilment of the oracle, that the city and the holy house should betaken when the Temple should become foursquare. By demolishing the towerof Antonia the Jews had made the Temple area foursquare, and so broughtthe doom upon themselves. He tells, too, the story of a prophet Jesus, who for years had cried, "Woe, woe to Jerusalem, " and in the end, struckby a missile, fell, crying, "Woe, woe to me!" For any reflections, however, on the immortality of the religion or for any utterances ofhope for the ultimate restoration of the Temple and the coming of theMessiah, we must not look to the _Wars_. Such ideas would not havepleased his patrons, had he entertained them himself. He pointed to thefulfilment of prophecy only so far as it predicted and justified thedestruction and ruin of his people. The expression of the national agonyat the destruction of the national center is to be found in theapocryphal book of Esdras II. Over his account of the final acts of the tragedy we may pass quickly. Undismayed by the fall of the sanctuary and still hoping for divineintervention, John and Simon withdrew from the Temple to the upper city. Driven from this, they took refuge in the underground caverns and cavesto be found everywhere beneath Jerusalem, and finally they stood theirground in the towers, until these too were captured, a month after thedestruction of the Temple, on the eighth of Elul (Gorpiaeus, as theGreek month was called). "It was the fifth time that the city was captured; and 2179 years passedbetween its first building and its last destruction. Yet neither itsgreat antiquity, nor its vast riches, nor the diffusion of the nationover the whole earth, nor the greatness of the veneration paid to it onreligious grounds, was sufficient to preserve it from destruction. Andthus ended the siege of Jerusalem. " Though the war was not finished, the crisis of the drama was over, andJosephus, doubtless following his source, relaxes the narrative todigress about affairs in Rome and the East. The last book of the _Wars_is episodic and disconnected. It is a kind of aftermath, in which thehistorian gathers up scattered records, but does not preserve thedramatic character of the history. He had apparently here to fall backon his own feeble constructive power, and was hard put to it to eke outhis material to the proportions of a book. So careless, too, is he that he abstracts references from his sourcethat are meaningless. In the excursion into general history, he refersto "the German king Alaric, whom we have mentioned before, "[1] though heis brought in for the first time; and in the account of the siege of theZealots' fortress Machaerus he records the death of one "Judas whom wehave mentioned before, "[2] though again there was no previous mention ofthe warrior. In the same chapter he describes some magical plant, "Baaras, possessing power to drive away demons, which are no other thanthe spirits of the wicked that enter into living men and kill them, unless they obtain some help against them. " This apparently was acommonplace of Palestinian natural science, as known to the Greco-Romanworld, and Josephus simply copied it. [Footnote 1: B. J. VII. Iv. 4. ] [Footnote 2: B. J. VII. Vi. 4. ] The Zealots still maintained resistance in remote parts of the country, and the legate Bassus was sent to take their three fortresses. He diedbefore the capture of Masada, the last stronghold, a natural fastnessoverlooking the Dead Sea, which had been fortified by Herod. In thisregion David and centuries later the Maccabean heroes had found a refugeat their time of distress, and here the Jewish people were to show thatdesperate heroism of their race which is evoked when all save honor islost. Masada had been occupied by Eleazar, a grandson of Judas ofGalilee, the leader of the most fanatical section of the Zealots; and itfell to the procurator Flavius Silva to reduce it. Josephus utters a final outburst against the hated nationalist party andespecially its two leaders, Simon of Gioras and John of Gischala, thoughboth had become victims of Roman revenge. "That was a time, " heexclaims, "most prolific in wicked practices, nor could anyone deviseany new evil, so deeply were they infected, striving with each otherindividually and collectively who should run to the greatest lengths ofimpiety towards God and in unjust actions towards their neighbors. " Themore incongruous is it that after this invective he puts into Eleazar'smouth two long speeches, calling on his men to kill themselves ratherthan fall into the hands of the Romans, which sum up eloquently theZealot attitude. [1] Josephus indeed introduces in the speech theHellenized doctrine of immortality, which regards the soul as aninvisible spirit imprisoned in the mortal body and seeking relief fromits prison. He goes on, however, to make the Jewish commander point outhow preferable is death to life servitude to the Romans, in a way inwhich Eleazar might himself have spoken. [Footnote 1: B. J. VII. Viii. ] "'And as for those who have died in the war, we should deem themblessed, for they are dead in defending, and not in betraying, theirliberty: but as to the multitude of those that have submitted to theRomans, who would not pity their condition? And who would not make hasteto die before he would suffer the same miseries? Where is now that greatcity, the metropolis of the Jewish nation, which was fortified by somany walls round about, which had so many fortresses and large towers todefend it, which could hardly contain the instruments prepared for thewar, and which had so many myriads of men to fight for it? Where is thiscity that God Himself inhabited? It is now demolished to the veryfoundations; and hath nothing but that monument of it preserved, I meanthe camp of those that have destroyed it, which still dwells upon itsruins; 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 bittershame and reproach. Now, who is there that revolves these things in hismind, and yet is able to bear the sight of the sun, though he might liveout of danger? Who is there so much his country's enemy, or so unmanlyand so desirous of living, as not to repent that he is still alive? AndI cannot but wish that we had all died before we had seen that holy citydemolished by the hands of our enemies, or the foundations of our holyTemple dug up after so profane a manner. But since we had a generoushope that deluded us, as if we might perhaps have been able to avengeourselves on our enemies, on that account, though it be now becomevanity, and hath left us alone in this distress, let us make haste todie bravely. Let us pity ourselves, our children, and our wives, whileit is in our power to show pity to them; for we are born to die, as wellas those whom we have begotten; nor is it in the power of the most happyof our race to avoid it. But for abuses and slavery and the sight of ourwives led away after an ignominious manner with their children, theseare not such evils as are natural and necessary among men; although suchas do not prefer death before those miseries, when it is in their powerto do so, must undergo even them on account of their own cowardice. ' "Responding to their leader's call, the defenders put their wives andchildren to the sword, and then turned their hands on themselves: andwhen the Romans entered the place, to their amazement and horror theyfound not a living soul. " Eleazar's speech is one of the few patriotic outbursts in the sevenbooks of the Wars, and it reads like a cry of bitter regret wrung fromthe unhappy author at the end of his work. Like Balaam he set out tocurse, and stayed to bless, his enemies, and cursed himself. Perhapsthis apostrophe hides the tragedy of Josephus' life. Perhaps he inwardlyrepented of his cowardice, and rued the uneasy protection he had securedfor himself. Perhaps he had denounced the Zealots throughout the historyperforce, to please his taskmasters, and in his heart of hearts enviedthe party that had preferred death to surrender. We could wish he hadended with the story of Masada's noble fall, and left us at thispathetic doubt. But he had not the dramatic sense, and he rounds off thestory of the wars with an account of the futile Jewish rising inAlexandria and Cyrene, fomented by the surviving remnants of theZealots. 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 thehistorian. Jonathan, who had stirred up the Cyrenaic rising and startedthe slanders, was tortured and burnt alive. As to Catullus, the Romangovernor, who admitted the calumnies, though the Emperor spared him, hefell into a terrible distemper and died miserably. "Thus he became asignal instance of Divine Providence, and demonstrated that God punishesthe wicked. " Instead of concluding upon some national reflection, Josephus, pathetically enough, disfigures the end of his work with a finalrevelation of personal vanity and materialistic views of a Providenceintervening on his behalf. Egoism and incapacity to attain to the nobleand sublime either in action or thought were the two defects thatlowered Josephus as a man, and which mar him as an historian. In thelast paragraph of the work he insists that he has aimed alone atagreement with the facts; but industrious as is the record of events, the claim is shallow. His history of the Jewish wars lacks authoritybecause it is palpably designed to please the Roman taste, and becausealso it has to serve as a personal apology for one who, when heroism wascalled for, had failed to respond to the call, and who was thus renderedincapable in letters as in life of being a faithful champion of hispeople. VI JOSEPHUS AND THE BIBLE In the preface to the _Antiquities_ Josephus draws a distinction betweenhis motives for the composition of that work and of the _Wars_. He wrotethe latter because he himself had played a large part in the war, and hedesired to correct the errors of other historians, who had perverted thetruth. On the other hand, he undertook to write the earlier history ofhis people because of the great importance of the events themselves andof his desire to reveal for the common benefit things that were buriedin ignorance. He was stimulated to the task by the fact that hisforefathers had been willing to communicate their antiquity to theGreeks, and, moreover, several of the Greeks had been at pains to learnof the affairs of the Jewish nation. It would appear that he is here referring to the Septuagint translation ofthe Bible, since he proceeds to summarize the well-known story of KingPtolemy recounted in the Letter of Aristeas, which he afterwards sets outmore fully. [1] Josephus shares the aim of the Hellenistic-Jewish writersto make the Jewish Scriptures known to the Gentile world, and he inheritsalso, but in a much smaller degree, their method of presenting Judaism tosuit Greek or Greco-Roman tastes, as a philosophical, i. E. An ethical-philosophical, religion. Perhaps he had become acquainted, either atAlexandria or at Rome, with Philo's _Life of Moses_, which was a populartext-book, so to speak, of universal Judaism. Certain it is that theprelude to the _Antiquities_ is reminiscent of the earlier treatise. Josephus reproduces Philo's idea that Moses began his legislation not asother lawgivers, "with the detailed enactments, contracts, and other ritesbetween one man and another, but by raising men's minds upwards to regardGod and His creation. " For Moses life was to be an imitation of thedivine. Contemplation of God's work is the best of all patterns for man tofollow. With Philo again, he points out the superiority of Moses overother legislators in his attack upon false ideas of the divine nature;"for there is nothing in the Scriptures inconsistent with the majesty ofGod or with His love of mankind: and all things in it have reference tothe nature of the universe. " He claims, too, that Moses explains somethings clearly and directly, but that he hints at others philosophicallyunder the form of allegory. And to these commonplaces of Alexandrianexegesis he adds as the lesson of the history of his people that "it goeswell with those who follow God's will and observe His laws, and ill withthose who rebel against Him and neglect His laws. " To exhibit to theGreco-Roman world the power and majesty of the Jewish God and theexcellence of the Jewish law--these are the two main purposes which heprofesses to set before himself in his rendering of the Bible story, whichoccupies the first half of the _Antiquities_. No Jewish writer before himhad treated the Bible to suit Roman predilections, which attached supremeimportance to material strength and the concrete manifestation ofauthority, and Josephus in order to carry out his aim had therefore toproceed on new lines. [Footnote 1: See below, p. 175. ] In effect, he rarely attempts to ethicize the Bible story. For the mostpart he paraphrases it, cuts out its poetry, and reduces it to a prosaicchronicle of facts. The exordium in fact has little relation to thebook, and looks as if it were borrowed without discrimination. Josephusnext, indeed, professes that he will accurately set out in chronologicalorder the incidents in the Jewish annals, "without adding anything towhat is therein contained or taking anything away from it. " It may bethat he regarded the oral tradition as an inherent part of the law, andtherefore inserts selections of it in the narrative, but anyhow he doesnot observe strictly the command of Deuteronomy (4:2) that prompted hisprofession, "Ye shall not add unto the word I have spoken, neither shallye diminish aught from it. " Not only does he freely paraphrase theSeptuagint version of the Bible, but, more especially in the earlierpart of the work, he incorporates pieces of Palestinian Haggadah and toa smaller extent of Alexandrian interpretation, and he omits manyepisodes 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 orin the oral tradition of his people. His work is, therefore, valuable asa storehouse of early Haggadah. It is unnecessary to accept hisdescription of himself as one who had a profound knowledge of tradition, but he was acquainted with the popular exegesis of the Palestinianteachers; and twenty years of life at the Roman court had not entirelyeliminated his knowledge. In the very first section of the first book, he notes that Moses sums upthe 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 givethe reason in a separate treatise which he proposes to write; but thesame point is discussed in the Rabbinic commentary. He gives thetraditional interpretation of the four rivers of the Garden of Eden. [1]He derives the name Adam from the Hebrew word for red, because the firstman was formed out of red earth. [2] He states that the animals in theGarden of Eden had one language, a piece of Midrash which occurs also inthe Book of Jubilees. He relates that Cain, after the murder of hisbrother, was afraid of falling among wild beasts, agreeing with theMidrash 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 Rabbislikewise say, "From Seth dates the stock of all generations of thevirtuous. " He pictures him also as a great inventor and the discovererof astronomy, and tells how he set up pillars of brick and stonerecording these inventions, so that they might not be forgotten if theworld was destroyed either by fire or water: here again agreeing withthe Book of Jubilees, which relates that Cainan found an inscription inwhich his forefathers had described their inventions. Examples might bemultiplied from the first chapters of the _Antiquities_ of the way inwhich Josephus weaves into the Bible account traditional Midrashim, butthese instances will suffice. [Footnote 1: Gen. R. Ii. And iii. , quoted in Bloch, Die Quellen desFlavius 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 isprone to place in the mouths of the characters rhetorical speeches inthe Greek style, either expanding a verse or two in the Bible orcomposing them entirely. Thus God says to Adam and Eve in the Garden ofEden after the fall: "I had before determined about you that you might lead a happy lifewithout affliction and care and vexation of soul; and that all thingswhich might contribute to your enjoyment and pleasure should grow up byMy Providence of their own accord. And death would not overtake you atany period. But now you have abused My good-will and disobeyed Mycommands, for your silence is not the sign of your virtue but of yourguilty conscience. " Anticipating, moreover, the methods of latter-day Biblical apologists, he loses no opportunity of adding any confirmation he can find for theBible story in pagan historians. He cites for the truth of the story ofthe flood Berosus the Chaldean, Hieronymus the Egyptian, Menander thePhoenician, and a great many others[1]; and he finds confirmation of theearly chapters of Genesis in general in Manetho, who wrote a famousEgyptian history, and Mochus, and Hestiaeus, and in some of the earliestGreek chroniclers, Hesiod and Hecataeus and Hellanicus and Acesilaus. Inlater years he was to deal more elaborately with the question of theauthority of the Scriptural history, [2] and then he set out the pagantestimony more accurately. In the _Antiquities_ he is usually content torefer to it. It is significant that in the passages in which he adducespagan corroboration he refers to Nicholas of Damascus, and in the firstof them repeats his words about the remains of the Ark lying on amountain in Armenia. It is well-nigh certain that Josephus did not studythe writings of any of these chroniclers and historians at first hand, for he shows no acquaintance with the substance of their works. Theywere quoted by Nicholas, and where his source had given excerpts fromtheir 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 morewriters of universal ancient history and taking from them whatever boreupon his own subject. He finds authority for the story of the tower ofBabel in the oracles of the Sibyl, which we now know to be Jewishforgeries, but which professed to be and were regarded by the lesseducated of his day as being the utterances of an ancient seeress. Josephus paraphrases the hexameters which described how, when all menwere of one tongue, some of them built a high tower, as if they wouldthereby ascend to heaven; but the deity sent storms of wind andoverthrew 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 passedfrom the Creation to some other point of reckoning. His habit in thisrespect is marred by a singular inaccuracy in dealing with dates andfigures, varying as he often does from chapter to chapter, sometimesfrom paragraph to paragraph, according to the source he happens to befollowing. He gives the year of the flood as 2656, though the sum of theyears of the Patriarchs who lived before it in his reckoning totals only2256. It has been conjectured[1] that he followed the Septuagintchronology from the Creation to the flood and that of the Hebrew Biblefrom Abraham onwards, and for the intermediate period he has his ownreckoning. The result is that his calculations are often inconsistent. In his desire to impress the Greco-Roman reader, he dates an event bythe 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 takenplace "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 peoplesknown to the Greek world. The sons of Noah inhabited first the mountainsTaurus and Amanus, and proceeded along Asia to the river Tanais, andalong Europe to Cadiz, giving their names to nations in the lands theyinhabited. [Footnote 1: Comp. Destinon, Die Chronologie des Josephus, 1880. ] What Josephus then insists on in his paraphrase of Scripture is the factand not the lesson, the letter and not the spirit; while Philo, who isthe true type of Jewish Hellenist, was always looking for deepermeanings beneath the literal text. The Romans had no bent for suchinterpretations, and Josephus Romanizes. He treats, for example, thegenealogies, the chronology, and the ethnology of Genesis as things ofsupreme value, and though he occasionally inserts Haggadic tradition, hemisses the Haggadic spirit, which sought to draw new morals and newspiritual value from the narrative. In his account of Abram, indeed, hetouches upon the patriarch's higher idea of God, which led him to leaveChaldea. But here, too, he distorts the genuine Hebraic conception, andpresents 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 wasbut one God, the Creator of the Universe, and that, as to the othergods, if they contributed to the happiness of men, they afforded itaccording to their appointment and not according to their own power. Hisopinion was derived from the study of the heavenly bodies and thephenomena of the terrestrial world. If, said he, these bodies had powerof their own, they would certainly have regular motions. But since theydo not preserve such regularity, they show that in so far as they workfor our good, they do it not of their own strength but as they aresubservient to Him who commands them. This is one of the few pieces of theology in the _Antiquities_, and weare fain to believe that he borrowed it from Nicholas, who is quotedimmediately afterwards, or from pseudo-Hecataeus, a Jewishpseudepigraphic historian, to whom a book on the patriarch was ascribed. So, later, following the Hellenistic tradition, he represents Abraham asthe teacher of astronomy to the Egyptians. Josephus was a wavering rationalist, as is shown by his acceptance ofthe story of Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt, "I have seenthe pillar, " he adds (though again he may be blindly copying), "and itremains to this day. " It is not the place here to enter into the detailsof his version of the story of the patriarchs. He gives the facts, andloses much of the spirit, often spoiling the beauty of the Biblicalnarrative by a prosy paraphrase. Thus God assures Abraham after theoffering of Isaac, [1] that it was not out of desire for human blood thathe was commanded to slay his son; and Isaac says to Jacob, who comes toreceive the blessing: "Thy voice is like the voice of Jacob, yet becauseof the thickness of thy hair thou seemest to be Esau. " One is remindedof 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. Thesecond deals with the story of Joseph and of the Exodus from Egypt. Themethod is the same: partly Midrashic and partly rhetorical embellishmentof the Biblical text, conversion of the poetry into prose, and, whereoccasion offers, correlation of the Scripture with Hellenistic history. The chapters dealing with the life of Moses are particularly rich inlegendary additions: Amram is told in a vision that his son shall be thesavior of Israel;[1] the name of Pharaoh's daughter is given asThermuthis, in accordance with Hellenistic, but not Talmudic, tradition. Moses in his childhood dons Pharaoh's crown, and is only saved from deathby the king's daughter. [2] Finally a whole chapter is devoted to anaccount of the wars of Moses, as an Egyptian general fighting against theEthiopians, which is taken from the histories of pseudo-Artapanus. [3]Josephus makes no attempt to rationalize the account of the plagues, buton the contrary dilates on them, "both because no such plagues did everhappen 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 displeaseGod, lest He be provoked to wrath and avenge their iniquity upon them. " Atthe same time, following a tradition reflected in the Apocalyptic andRabbinic literature, he modifies the Biblical statement, that the Jewsspoiled the Egyptians before leaving the country, by explaining that theytook their fair hire for their labor. [4] And after describing the drowningof the Egyptians in the Red Sea--which Moses celebrates with athanksgiving song in hexameter verse[5]--he apologizes for the strangenessof the narrative and its miraculous incidents. He explains that he hasrecounted 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'swill or by chance_, to the men of old, who were free from the wickednessof modern times, seeing that even for those who accompanied Alexander theGreek, who lived recently, when it was God's will to destroy the Persianmonarchy, the Pamphylian sea retired and afforded a passage. " This homilysmacks of some Hellenistic-Jewish rationalist, whom he copied. But heconcludes the whole with a formula, which is regular when he has statedsomething which he fears will be difficult of belief for his audience, "Asto these things, let everyone determine as he thinks best. " He treats theaccount of the Decalogue in a similar way. "I am bound, " he says, "torelate the history as it is described in the Holy Writ, but my readers mayaccept or reject the story as they please. " Josephus therein applied therule, "When at Rome, do as Rome does. " For it is noteworthy that the Romanhistorian Tacitus, who wrote a little later than Josephus, manifests thesame indecision about the interference of the divine agency in humanaffairs, the relation of chance to human freedom, and the necessity offate; and in many cases he likewise places the rational and transcendentalexplanations of an event side by side, without any attempt to reconcilethem. [Footnote 1: Comp. Mekilta, ed. Weiss, p. 52. This and the followingRabbinic 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 ofMoses made by the Jewish-Alexandrian dramatic poet Ezekiel, which waswritten in hexameter verse. ] Josephus deals summarily with the Mosaic Code in the _Antiquities_, butannounces 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 theten commandments at length, explaining that it was against tradition totranslate them directly. [1] He refers probably to the rule that theywere not to be recited in any language but Hebrew, though, of course, the Septuagint contained a full version. On the other hand, he describesthe construction of the Tabernacle with some fulness, and dwellsparticularly on the robes of the priests and the pomp of the highpriest. Ritual and ceremonial appealed to his public; and his account, which was based on the practice of his own day, supplements in someparticulars the account in the Talmud. But unfortunately he does notdescribe the Temple service. He attaches marked importance to the Urimand Thummim, which formed a sort of oracle parallel with paganinstitutions, and says that the breastplate and sardonyx, with which heidentifies them, ceased to shine two hundred years before he wrote hisbook[2] (i. E. At the time of John Hyrcanus). The Talmud understands themystic names of the Bible in a similar way, [3] but represents that theoracle ceased with the destruction of the first Temple, and was notknown in the second Temple. Josephus enlarges, in a way common to theHellenistic-Jewish apologists, [4] on the symbolism of the Temple serviceand furniture. "One may wonder at the contempt men bear us, or which they profess tobear, on the ground that we despise the Deity, whom they pretend tohonor: for if anyone do but consider the construction of the Temple, theTabernacle, and the garments of the high priest, and the vessels we usein our service, he will find our lawgiver was inspired by God. .. . For ifhe regard these things without prejudice, he will find that everyone ismade 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, whichJosephus was anxious to emphasize in reply to the charge of Jewishaloofness and particularism. The three divisions of the Tabernaclesymbolize heaven, earth, and sea; the twelve loaves stand for the twelvemonths of the year; the seventy parts of the candlestick for the seventyplanets; the veils, which were composed of four materials, for the fourelements; the linen of the high priest's vestment signified the earth, the blue betokened the sky; the breastplate resembled the shape of theearth, and so forth. We find similar reflections in Philo, but in hiswork they are part of a continuous allegorical exegesis, and in theother they are a sudden incursion of the symbolical into the longnarrative of facts. Following the account of the Tabernacle and the priestly vestments, Josephus describes the manner of offering sacrifices, the observance ofthe festivals, and the Levitical laws of cleanliness. In his account ofthese laws Josephus makes no attempt either to derive a universal valuefrom the Biblical commands or to read a philosophical meaning into themby allegorical interpretation. He normally states the law as it standsin the text, and in the selection he makes he gives the preference, notto general ethical precepts, but to regulations about the priests. Hehad a pride of caste and a love of the pomp and circumstance of theTemple service; and the national ceremony could be more easily conveyedto the Gentile than an understanding of the spiritual value of Judaism. The Hellenistic apologists enlarged on the humanitarian character of theMosaic social legislation; Josephus mentions without comment the laws ofthe seventh year release and the Jubilee, though in his later apology, which was addressed to the Greeks, in the books _Against Apion_, [1] hedwelt more carefully on them. His interpretation of the laws, so far asit goes, in places agrees with the Rabbinic Halakah, but he admits somemodification of the accepted tradition. Thus he states that the highpriest was forbidden to marry a slave, or a captive, or a woman who keptan inn. He translates the Hebrew [Hebrew: zonah], which probably heremeans a prostitute, by innkeeper, a meaning the word has in otherpassages;[2] but the Aramaic version of the Bible supports him. Hegives, too, a rationalizing reason for the observance of Tabernacles, saying, "The Law enjoins us to pitch tabernacles so that we may preserveourselves from the cold of the season of the year. "[3] The Feast ofWeeks he calls Asartha, perhaps a Grecized form of the Hebrew [Hebrew:Atzereth], which was its old name, and he does not regard it as theanniversary of the giving of the Law. He promises to explain afterwardswhy some animals are forbidden for food and some permitted, but he failsto fulfil his promise. Since, however, the interpretation of the dietarylaws as a discipline of temperance was a commonplace of HellenisticJudaism, which is very fully set forth in the so-called Fourth Book ofthe 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 partsof the Mosaic Law, especially such as might appear striking to Romanreaders. Thus he gives in detail the law as to the Nazarites, the Korbanoffering, and the red heifer, and he completes his account of the MosaicCode by a summary description of the Jewish polity, in which heabstracts a large part of the laws of Deuteronomy together with some ofthe traditional amplifications. [1] Moses prefaces his farewell addresswith a number of moral platitudes. "Virtue is its own principal reward, and, besides, it bestows abundance of others. "--"The practice of virtuetowards other men will make your own lives happy, " and so forth. Josephus again proclaims that he sets out the laws in the words ofMoses, his only innovation being to arrange them in a regular system, "for they were left by him in writing as they were accidentallyscattered. " The influence of Roman law may have suggested the arrangingand digesting of the Mosaic Code, as well as several of his variationsfrom the letter of the Bible. [Footnote 1: Ant. IV. Viii. ] A few of his interpretations are noteworthy as comprising eitherPalestinian or Hellenistic tradition. He understands the command not tocurse those in authority ([Hebrew: Elohim], Exod. 22:28) as referring tothe gods worshiped in other cities, following Philo and a Hellenistictradition based on a mistranslation of the Septuagint. A late passage inthe Talmud, on the other hand, says that all abuse is forbidden save ofidolatry. [1] With Philo again, he inserts into the code a lawprohibiting the possession of poison on pain of death, [2] which is basedon an erroneous interpretation of the law against witchcraft. Josephusfollows the Hellenistic school also when he deduces from the prohibitionagainst removing boundary stones the lesson that no infraction of thelaw and tradition[3] is to be permitted. Nothing is to be allowed theimitation of which might lead to the subversion of the constitution. Heintroduces a law about evidence, to the effect that the testimony ofwomen should not be admitted "on account of the levity and boldness oftheir sex. "[4] The rule has no place in the Code of the Pentateuch, butis supported in the oral law. He adopts another traditionalinterpretation when he limits the commands against women wearing men'shabits to the donning of armor in times of war. [5] He misrepresents, onthe other hand, the law of [Hebrew: shemitah] (seventh year release), stating that if a servant have a child by a bondwoman in his master'shouse, and if, on account of his good-will to his master, he prefers toremain a slave, he shall be set free only in the year of jubilee. TheBible says he shall be branded if he refuse the proffered liberty in theseventh year, and Philo in his interpretation has drawn a fine homilyabout the regard set on liberty. But Josephus may have thought that theinstitution would appear ridiculous to the legal minds of Romans. Toaccommodate 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 isapplied only if he that is maimed will not accept money in compensationfor 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 offensespunishable with death, which were not so according to the tradition, _e. G. _ the insulting of parents by their children and the taking ofbribes by judges. [6] Summing up the version of Deuteronomy, it may besaid that Josephus, by omitting a law here, adding one there, nowsoftening, now modifying, in some places broadening, in others narrowingthe scope of the command, presents a code which lacks both theruggedness of the Torah and the maturer humaneness of the RabbinicalHalakah, but was designed to show the reasonableness of the Jewishsystem 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 MayerSulzberger 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 andthe breaking of the tablets of stone. Those incidents, to his mind, didnot reflect credit on his people; therefore they were not to bedisclosed to Greek and Roman readers. He omits, for other reasons, theMessianic prophecies of Balaam, which would not be pleasing to theFlavians. At the same time one of the blessings in the prophecies ofBalaam gives him the opportunity of asserting some universalhumanitarian doctrines, to which Philo affords a parallel. The Moabiteseer talks like a Hellenistic apologist of the second century B. C. E. Ora Sibylline oracle: "Every land and every sea will be full of the praiseof your name. Your offspring will dwell in every clime, and the wholeworld will be your dwelling-place for eternity. "[1] He is at pains toextol Moses as of superhuman excellence, as is proved by the enduringforce of his laws, which is such that "there is no Jew who does not actas if Moses were present and ready to punish him if he should offend inany way. "[2] He quotes examples of the Jewish steadfastness in the Law, which would have impressed a Roman: the regular pilgrimage from Babylonto the Temple, the abstention of the Jewish priests from touching acrumb of flour during the Feast of Passover, at a time when, during asevere famine, abundance of wheat was brought to the Temple. But hesomewhat mars the effect of his praise by adding a not very exaltedmotive for the piety of his people--the dread of the Law and of thewrath which God manifests against transgressors, even when no man canaccuse the actor. Josephus is in a way a loyal supporter of the Law, andhe had a sincere admiration for its hold on the people, but he was ledby the conditions of his appeal to materialize the idea of Jewishreligious intensity and to present it as a fear of punishment. Nor is itthe humanity, the inherent excellence of the Law which he emphasizes, but its endurance and the widespread allegiance it commands. Looking atJudaism through Roman spectacles, he treats it as a positive forcecomparable with the sway of the Roman Emperor. [Footnote 1: Comp. Orac. Sib. 111. 271: [Greek: pasa de gaia sethenplaeres 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 enfeeblingthe majesty of the Biblical text to suit the current taste ismanifested. Moses weeps before he ascends the mountain to die. Heexhorts the people not to lament over his departure. As he is about toembrace Joshua and Eleazar, he is covered with a cloud and disappears ina valley, although he piously wrote in the holy books that he died lestthe people should say that, because of his marvelous virtue, he wastaken up to God. For the last statement Josephus has the authority ofsome sages, who discussed whether the last verses of Deuteronomy werewritten by Moses himself. [1] [Footnote 1: Baba Batra, 15a. ] Josephus continues the Biblical narrative in less detail in the fifthbook, which covers the period of Joshua and the Judges and the firstpart of Samuel. The Book of Joshua is compressed into the limits of onechapter, but the exploits of each of the judges of Israel, with one ortwo omissions, are recounted in order, and the episode of Ruth isinserted after the story of Samson. He substitutes for the famousdeclaration of Ruth to Naomi the prosy statement: "Naomi took Ruth alongwith her, as she was not to be persuaded to stay behind, but wasresolved to share her fortune with her mother-in-law, whatsoever itshould prove. " And he justifies his insertion of the episode by thereflection that he desires to demonstrate the power of God, who canraise those that are of common parentage to dignity and splendor, evenas He advanced David, though he was born of mean parents. With his fondness for royal history, and no doubt with an eye to hisnoble audience, he devotes a whole book to the account of Saul's reign, adhering closely to the narrative in Samuel, but occasionally adding apassage from the Book of Chronicles, or softening what seemed anasperity in Scripture. Samuel, for example, orders Agag to be killed, whereas in the Bible he puts him to death with his own hand. [1] Theincident of Saul and the Witch of Endor is expanded and invested withfurther pathos. [2] The Witch devotes her only possession, a calf, forthe king's meal, and the historian expatiates first on her kindness andthen on Saul's courage in fighting, though he knew his approaching doom. We may suspect that this digression was induced by a supposed analogy inthe king of Israel's lot to the author's conduct in Galilee, when, as heclaimed, 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 containslittle that is noteworthy. On one point Josephus cites the authority ofNicholas of Damascus to support the Bible, and here and there he adoptsa traditional interpretation. David's son by Abigail is said to beDaniel, [1] whereas the Book of Samuel gives the name as Kitab. Absalom'shair was so thick that it could be cut with difficulty every eightdays. [2] David chose a pestilence as the punishment for his sin innumbering his people, because it was an affliction common to kings andtheir subjects. [3] The historian ascribes the Psalms to David, and saysthey were in several (Greek) meters, some in hexameters and others inpentameters. Lastly he enlarges on the wonderful wealth of David, whichwas greater than that of any other king either of the Hebrews or ofother nations. Benjamin of Tudela relates, and the Mohammedans believeto this day, that vast treasure is buried with the king, and lies in hisreputed sepulcher. The story must have been accepted in the days ofJosephus, for he records how Hyrcanus, the son of Simon the Maccabee, being in straits for money to buy off the Seleucid invader, opened aroom of David's sepulcher and took out three thousand talents, and how, many years later, King Herod opened another room, and took out greatstore of money; yet neither lighted on the body of the king. Suchromantic tales pleased the readers of the Jewish historian, who livedamid the wonderful material splendor of Rome, and prized, above allthings, 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 proverbialwritings, 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 hefollows Chronicles] and of parables and similitudes three thousand. Forhe 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 theearth or in the air or in the seas. He was not unacquainted with any oftheir natures, nor did he omit to study them, but he described them allin the manner of a philosopher. God also endowed him with skill inexpelling demons, which is a science useful and health-giving tomen. "[2] [Footnote 1: Comp. Yalkut, ii. 177. The apocryphal Wisdom of Solomonsimilarly 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, acompatriot cured soldiers who were demoniacal. We know from the NewTestament that the belief in possession by demons was widespread amongthe vulgar in the first century of the common era, and the Essenesspecialized in the science of exorcism. As the belief was invested withrespectability by the patronage which the Flavian court extended to allsorts of magic and witchcraft, Josephus enlarges on it. Solomon istherefore represented as a thaumaturgist, and while not a single exampleis given of the proverbs ascribed to him, his exploits as amiracle-monger are extolled. Josephus sets out at length the story ofthe building of the Temple, and dwells on Solomon's missions to KingHiram, of which, he says, copies remained in his day, and may be seen inthe public records of Tyre. This he claims to be a signal testimony tothe truthfulness of his history. [1] He modernizes elaborately Solomon'sspeech at the dedication of the sanctuary, and converts it into anapology for the Jews of his own day. Again he follows an Alexandrianmodel, and describes God in Platonic fashion: "Thou possessest aneternal 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 allthings and yet canst not be contained by any of them. "[2] Solomon ishere a preacher of universalism; he prays that God shall help not theHebrews alone when they are in distress, "but when any shall come hitherfrom the ends of the earth and repent of their sins and implore Thyforgiveness, do Thou pardon them and hear their prayer. For thereby allshall know that Thou wast pleased with the building of this house, andthat we are not of an unsociable nature, nor do we behave with enmity tosuch as are not of our people, but are willing that Thou shouldst bestowThy help on all men in common, and that all alike may enjoy Thybenefits. " Solomon's dream after the dedication service provides anotheroccasion for pointing to the Jewish disaster of the historian's day. Forhe foresees that if Israel will transgress the Law, his miseries shallbecome a proverb, and his neighbors, when they hear of them, shall beamazed 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 theking'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. " Weare told, too, of the great cities which the king built, Tadmor in thewilderness of Syria, and Gezer, the Bible narrative being supplementedhere with passages from Nicholas. The Queen of Sheba is represented asthe Queen of Egypt and Ethiopia, and it is to her gift that Josephusattributes "the root of balsam which our country still bears. " Revelingin the material greatness of the Jewish court during the golden age ofthe old kingdom, Josephus catalogues the wealth of Solomon, the numberof his horses and chariots. He reproaches him not only for marryingforeign wives, but for making images of brazen oxen, which supported thebrazen sea, and the images of lions about his throne. For these sinsagainst the second commandment he died ingloriously. With the death of Solomon the legendary and romancing character of thispart of the _Antiquities_ comes to an end. In the summary of thefortunes of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, Josephus adheres almostexclusively to the Biblical text, and allows himself few digressions. Hemoralizes a little about the decay of the people under Rehoboam, reflecting that the aggrandizement of a kingdom and its suddenattainment of prosperity often are the occasion of mischief; and hecontroverts Herodotus, who confused Sesostris with Shishak when relatingthe Egyptian king's conquests. It is, he claims, really Shishak'sinvasion of Jerusalem which the Greek historian narrates, as is provedby the fact that he speaks of circumcised Syrians, who can be no otherthan Jews. The fate of Omri and Zimri[1] moves him to moralize againabout God's Providence in rewarding the good and punishing the wicked;and Ahab's death evokes some platitudes concerning fate, "which creepson human souls and flatters them with pleasing hopes, till it bringsthem to the place where it will be too hard for them. "[2] Artapanus, orone of the Jewish Hellenists masking as a pagan historian, may haveprovided 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 turnedthe people from Baal-worship back to the service of God. In place of thedramatic description in the Book of Kings he states that the Israelitesworshiped one God, and called Him the great and the only true God, whilethe other deities were names. He omits altogether the account ofElijah's ascent to Heaven, probably from a desire not to appear toentertain any Messianic ideas with which the prophet was associated. Hesays simply that Elijah disappeared from among men. But he gives indetail the miraculous stories of Elisha, which were not subject to thesame objection. Occasionally his statements seem in direct conflict withthe Hebrew Bible, as when he says that Jehu drove slowly and in goodorder, whereas the Hebrew is that "he driveth furiously. "[1] Or thatJoash, king of Israel, was a good man, whereas in the Book of Kings itis written, "he did evil in the sight of the Lord. "[2] But thesediscrepancies may be due, not to a different Bible text, but toaberrations 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 shortsummary of the life of Jonah, introduced at what, according to theBible, is its proper chronological place, [1] in the reign of JeroboamII, king of Israel. The picturesque and miraculous character of theprophet's adventures secured him this distinction, for in generalJosephus does not pay much regard to the lives or writings of theprophets. It is only where they foretold concrete events that theirtestimony is deemed worthy of mention. Of the other minor prophets hementions Nahum, and paraphrases part of his prophecy of the fall ofNineveh, cutting it short with the remark that he does not think itnecessary to repeat the rest, [2] so that he may not appear troublesometo his readers. In the account of Hezekiah he mentions that the kingdepended on Isaiah the prophet, by whom he inquired and knew of allfuture events, [3] and he recounts also the miracle of putting back thesun-dial. For the rest, he says that, by common consent, Isaiah was adivine and wonderful man in foretelling the truth, "and in the assurancethat he had never written what was false, he wrote down his propheciesand left them in books, that their accomplishment might be judged of byposterity from the events. [4] Nor was he alone, but the other prophets[i. E. The minor prophets presumably], who were twelve in number, did thesame. " It is notable that this phrase of the _Antiquities_ about theprophets bears a resemblance to the "praise of famous men" contained inthe apocryphal book of Ben Sira, which Josephus probably used in theGreek 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. 30:8_f_. ] While he thus cursorily disposes of the prophetical writers, he seizeson any scrap of Hellenistic authors which he could find to confirm theBible story, or rather to confirm the existence of the personagesmentioned in the Bible. Thus he quotes the Phoenician historianMenander, who confirms the existence and exploits of the Assyrian kingShalmaneser. So, too, he brings forward Herodotus and Berosus to confirmthe existence and doings of Sennacherib. [1] He refutes Herodotus again, doubtless on the authority of a predecessor, for saying that Sennacheribwas 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 impellinghim to his death, and substitutes the Hellenistic conception of a blindand jealous power for the Hebrew idea of a just Providence. He ascribesto Jeremiah "an elegy on the death of the king, which is stillextant, "[1] apparently following a statement in the Book of Chronicles, which does not refer to our Book of Lamentations. Jeremiah is treatedrather more fully than Isaiah. Besides a notice of his writings we havean account of his imprisonment. He ascribes to Ezekiel two booksforetelling the Babylonian captivity. Possibly the difference betweenthe last nine and the first forty chapters of the exile prophetsuggested the idea of the two books, unless these words apply rather toJeremiah, "The two prophets agreed [he remarks] on all other things as to thecapture of the city and King Zedekiah, but Ezekiel declared thatZedekiah should not see Babylon, while Jeremiah said the king of Babylonshould carry him thither in bonds. Because of this discrepancy, theJewish prince disbelieved them both, and condemned them for falsetidings. [2] Both prophets, however, were justified, because Zedekiahcame 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 hasdisappeared, and the historian extracts from it the lesson, which he isnever weary of repeating, that God's nature is various and acts indiverse ways, and men are blind and cannot see the future, so that theyare 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 andthe destruction of the Temple, Josephus gives a chronological summary ofthe history of Israel from the Creation, together with an incompletelist of all the high priests who held office. The latter may be comparedwith the list of high priests with which he closes the _Antiquities_. [1]These chronological calculations were dear to him, but perhaps heborrowed them from one of the earlier Hellenistic Jewish chroniclers. Hetakes an especial pride throughout the _Antiquities_ as well as in the_Wars_ in recording the priestly succession, which served to emphasizethe antiquity not only of his people, but of his own personal lineage, and was moreover congenial to the ideas of the Romans, who paid greatheed 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 bookwas full of the miraculous legends and exact prophecies loved by hisaudience, and he recommends his book to those who are anxious about thefuture. He elaborates the interpretation of the vision of the image (ch. 3:7), but finds himself in a difficulty when he comes to the explanationof the stone broken off from the mountain that fell on the image andshattered it. According to the traditional interpretation, it portendedthe downfall of Rome, or maybe the coming of the Messiah, an ideaequally hateful to the Roman conquerors. He excuses himself by sayingthat he has only undertaken to describe things past and present, and notthings that are future. Later he disclaims responsibility for the storyof Nebuchadnezzar's madness, on the plea that he has translated what wasin the Hebrew book, and has neither added nor taken away. The storyprobably looked too much like an implied reproach on a mad Caesar. Headds a new chapter to the Biblical account of the prophet: Daniel iscarried by Darius to Persia, and is there signally honored by the king. He builds a tower at Ecbatana, [2] which is still extant, says thehistorian, "and seems to be but lately built. Here the kings of Persiaand Media are buried, and a Jewish priest is the custodian. " Josephusborrowed this addition from some apocalyptic book recounting Daniel'sdeeds, and he speaks of "several books the prophet wrote and left behindhim, which are still read by us. " The short story in the Apocrypha of_Bel and the Dragon_, with its apologue about Susannah, affords anexample of the post-Biblical additions to Daniel, and in the firstcentury, when Messianic hopes were rife among the people, suchapocryphal books had a great vogue. Daniel is in fact elevated to therank of one of the greatest of the prophets, because he not onlyprophesied generally of future events like the others, but fixed theactual time of their accomplishment. It is claimed for him that heforetold explicitly the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes and the Romanconquest of Judea. Anticipating the theological controversialists oflater times, Josephus sets special store on the Bible book that is mostmiraculous, because miracle and exact prognostication of the future arefor his audience the clearest testimony of God. Hence the predictions ofDaniel are the best refutation of the Epicureans, who cast Providenceout of life, and do not believe that God has care of human affairs, butsay 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, Josephusfollows what is now known as the apocryphal Book of Esdras, inpreference to the Biblical Ezra and Nehemiah, probably because aHellenistic guide whom he had before him did likewise. It is clear thathe based his paraphrase on the Greek text. His chronicle thereforediffers considerably from that given in our Scripture, and on one pointhe differs from his guide. For while Esdras represents Artaxerxes as theking under whom the Temple was rebuilt, Josephus, relying on a fullerknowledge of Persian history, derived probably from Nicholas ofDamascus, substitutes Cambyses. [1] Our Greek version of Esdras I isunfortunately not complete, but the book, differing from that includedin 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. Hestates also that Nehemiah built houses for the poor in Jerusalem out ofhis own means, an incident which has not the authority of the Bible, butwhich may well have reposed on an ancient tradition. The account of themarriage of Sanballat with the daughter of Manasseh the high Priest, which is touched on in our Book of Nehemiah, is described more fully byJosephus, [3] who based this account on some uncanonical source. Andfollowing the Rabbis, who shortened the Persian epoch in order to ekeout the Jewish history over the whole period of the Persian kingdom tillthe conquest of Alexander, he makes the marriage synchronize with thereign of Philip of Macedon. Josephus was anxious to avoid a vacuum, andby a little vague chronology and the aid of the fragmentary records ofEzra and Nehemiah and a priestly chronicle, the few Jewish incidentsknown 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 theapocryphal version, is placed in the reign of Artaxerxes. The Greek Bookof Esther, which embroidered the Hebrew story, and is generallyattributed to the second century B. C. E. , is laid under contribution aswell as the Canonical book; from it Josephus extracted long decrees ofthe 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], whichdenotes protection. Here and there the Biblical simplicity iselaborated: Mordecai moves from Babylon to Shushan in order to be nearEsther, and soldiers with bared axes stand round the king to secure theobservance of the law that he shall not be approached. We have somemoralizing on Haman's fall and the working of Providence ([Greek: totheion]), which teaches that "what mischief anyone prepares againstanother, he unconsciously contrives against himself. " Less edifying isthe addition that "God laughed to scorn the wicked expectations ofHaman, and as He knew what the event would be, He was pleased at it, andthat night He took away the king's sleep. " The Book of Esther does notmention God: Josephus calls in directly the operation of the DivinePower, but represents it unworthily. With the completion of the eleventh book of the _Antiquities_, wedefinitely pass away from the region of sacred history and miracles, andfind ourselves in the more spacious but more misty area of theHellenistic kingdom, in which Jewish affairs are only a detail set in alarger background. Though Josephus himself does not explicitly mark thebreak, the character of his work materially changes. He has come to theend of the period when the Bible was his chief guide; he has now todepend for the main thread on Hellenistic sources, filling in thedetails when he can from some Jewish record. His function becomeshenceforth more completely that of compiler, less of translator, and hiswork becomes much more valuable for us, because in great part he has thefield to himself. Although, however, the Bible paraphrase, with theembroidery of a little tradition and comparative history and itsRomanizing reflections, which constitutes the first part of the_Antiquities_, had not a great permanent value, for a very long periodit was accepted as the standard history of the Jewish people; and in thepagan Greco-Roman world it appealed to a public to which both the HebrewBible and the Septuagint translation were sealed books. It was writtenfor a special purpose and served it, doing for the Jewish early historywhat Livy did for the hoary past of the Romans. If it was not a worthyrecord in many parts, it was yet of great value as an antidote to thecrude fictions of the anti-Semites about the origin and the institutionsof the people of Israel, which had for some two centuries been allowedto poison the minds of the Greek-speaking world, and had fanned theprejudices of the Roman people against a nationality of whose historythey 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 aconnected account of the Jewish people during the post-Biblical period, and the meagerness of his historical information is not due so much tohis own deficiencies as to the difficulty of the material. From theperiod when the Scriptures closed, the affairs of the Jews had to beextracted, for the most part, out of works dealing with the annals ofthe whole of civilized humanity. With the conquest of Alexander theGreat, the Jewish people enter into the Hellenistic world, and begin tocommand the attention of Hellenistic historians. They are an element inthe cosmopolis which was the ideal of the world-conqueror. At the sametime the nature of the history of their affairs vitally changes. Thecontinuous chronicle of their doings, which had been kept from theExodus out of Egypt to the Restoration from Babylon, and which wasdesigned to impress a religious lesson and illustrate God's working, comes to an end; and their scribes are concerned to draw fresh lessonsfrom that chronicle. The religious philosophy of history is not extendedto the present. The Jews, on the other hand, chiefly engage the interestof the Gentiles when they come into violent collision with the governingpower, or when they are involved in some war between rival Hellenisticsovereigns. Hence their history during the two centuries followingAlexander's conquests, i. E. Until the time when we again have adequateJewish sources, is singularly shadowy and incoherent. Josephus was not the man to pierce the obscurity by his intuition or byhis research. Yet we must not be too critical of the want of proportionin his writing when we remember that he was a pioneer; for it was anoriginal idea to piece together the stray fragments of history thatreferred to his people. It has been shown that in his attempt to stretchout the Biblical history till it can join on to the Hellenistic sources, Josephus interposes between the account of Esther and the fall of thePersian Empire a story of intrigue among the high priests. He theredescribes the crime of the high priest John in killing his brother inthe Temple as more cruel and impious than anything done by the Greeks orBarbarians--an expression which must have originated in a Jewish, probably a Palestinian, authority, to whom Greek connoted cruelty. Andin the next chapter Josephus inserts the story of the SamaritanSanballat and the building of the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim, [1]as though these events happened at the time of Alexander's invasion ofPersia. Rabbinical chronology interposes only one generation betweenCyrus and Alexander. The Sanballat who appears in the Book of Nehemiahis represented as anticipating the part played by the Hellenists of alater century, and calling in the foreign invader against Judea andJerusalem 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 timewere placed in the popular Midrash a few generations back and repeated. Jewish legendary tradition is more certainly the basis of the account ofAlexander's treatment of the Jews. The Talmud has preserved similarstories. [2] According to both records, the Macedonian conqueror didobeisance before the high priest, who came out to ask for mercy, becausehe recognized in the Jewish dignitary a figure that had appeared to himin a dream. And when Alexander is made to revere the prophecies ofDaniel and to prefer the Jews to the Samaritans and bestow on them equalrights with the Macedonians, the historian is simply crystallizing thefloating stories of his nation, which are parallel with those inventedby 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 morereliable sources. For Ptolemy's capture of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day, when the Jews would not resist, he calls in the confirmation of a Greekauthority, Agatharchides of Cnidus. But he has to gloss over a period ofnearly a hundred years, till he can introduce the story of thetranslation of the Scriptures into Greek, [1] for which he found acopious source in the romantic history, or rather the historicalromance, now known as the Letter of Aristeas. This Hellenisticproduction has come down to us intact, and therefore we can gather howclosely Josephus paraphrases his authorities. Not that he refrainedaltogether from embellishment and improvement. The Aristeas of hisversion, as of the original, professes that he is not a Jew, but he addsthat nevertheless he desires favor to be done to the Jews, because allmen are the work of God, and "I am sensible that He is well pleased withall those that do good. " Josephus states a large part of the story as ifit were his own narrative, but in fact it is a paraphrase throughout. Hereproduces less than half of the Letter, omitting the account of thevisit of the royal envoy to Jerusalem and the discourse of Eleazar thehigh priest. For the seventy-two questions and answers, which form thelast part, he refers curious readers to his source. But he sets out atlength the description of the presents which Ptolemy sent to Jerusalem, rejoicing in the opportunity of showing at once the splendor of theTemple vessels and the honor paid by a Hellenistic monarch to hispeople. [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 ofAristeas says that the authors of the Septuagint translation uttered animprecation on any one who should alter a word of their work; Josephusmakes them invite correction, [1] adding inconsequently--if our text iscorrect--that this was a wise action, "so that, when the thing wasjudged to have been well done, it might continue forever. " [Footnote 1: Josephus may have used a different text of Aristeas fromthat which has come down to us. Or the passage in our Aristeas may be alater insertion introduced as a protest against Christian interpolationsin the LXX. ] Having disposed of the Aristeas incident, Josephus has to fill in theblank between the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus (250 B. C. E. ) and theMaccabean revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes, nearly one hundred yearslater, which was the next period for which he had Jewish authority. Hereturns then to his Hellenistic guides and extracts the few scatteredincidents which he could find there referring to the Jewish people. Butuntil 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 gavethem equal rights with the Macedonians and Greeks in Antioch. Thisinformation he would seem to have derived from the petition which theJews of Antioch presented to Titus when, after the fall of Jerusalem, the victor made his progress through Syria. The people of Antioch thensought to obtain the curtailment of Jewish rights in the town, but Titusrefused their suit. [1] Josephus takes this opportunity of extolling themagnanimity of the Roman conqueror, and likewise of inserting areference to the friendliness of Marcus Agrippa, who, on his progressthrough Asia a hundred years before, had upheld the Jewishprivileges. [2] He derived this incident from Nicholas' history, and thuscontrived to eke out the obscurity of the third century B. C. E. With afew 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 theGreat, because from this point the Greek historians serve him better. Several of the modern commentators of Josephus have thought that hisauthorities were Polybius and Posidonius, who wrote in Greek on theevents of the period. He cites Polybius explicitly as the author of thestatement about Ptolemy's conquest of Judea, and then reproduces twoletters of Antiochus to his generals, directing them to grant certainprivileges to his Jewish subjects as a reward for their loyal service. We know that Polybius gave in his history an account of Jerusalem andits Temple, and his character-sketch of Antiochus Epiphanes has beenpreserved in an epitome. Josephus, however, be it noted, has only thesescanty extracts from his work. The letters are clearly derived, not fromhim, but from some Hellenistic-Jewish apologist, and the passages fromPolybius, it is very probable, are extracted from some larger work. [1]Here, as elsewhere, both facts and authorities were found in Nicholas ofDamascus. [Footnote 1: Dr. Büchler (J. Q. R. Iv. And R. E. J. Xxxii. 179) has arguedconvincingly that Josephus had not gone far afield. For the genuinenessof the Letter, comp. Willrich, Judaica, p. 51, and Büchler, Oniaden undTobiaden, p. 143. ] We know from Josephus himself that Nicholas had included a history ofthe Seleucid Empire in his _magnum opus_. He is quoted in reference tothe sacking of the Temple by Antiochus Epiphanes and the victory ofPtolemy Lathyrus over Alexander Jannaeus. [1] Josephus, indeed, severaltimes appends to his paragraphs about the general history a note, "as wehave elsewhere described. " Some have inferred from this that he hadhimself written a general history of the Seleucid epoch, but a morecritical study has shown that the tag belongs to the note of hisauthority, 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 ofNicholas by an account of the intrigues of the Tobiades and Oniades, which reveals a Hellenistic-Jewish origin. [1] Possibly he found it in aspecial chronicle of the high-priestly family, which was written by onefriendly to it, for Joseph ben Tobias is praised as "a good man and ofgreat magnanimity, who brought the Jews out of poverty and low conditionto one that was more splendid. " The chronology here is at fault, sinceat the time at which the incidents are placed both Syria and Palestinewere included in the dominion of the Seleucids; yet Tobias isrepresented at the court of the Ptolemies. Josephus follows the story ofthese exploits with the letters which passed between Areas, king of theLacedemonians, and the high priest Onias, as recorded in the First Bookof the Maccabees (ch. 12). The letters are taken out of their trueplace, in order to bridge the gap between the fall of the Tobiad houseand the Maccabean rising. Areas reigned from 307-265, so that he musthave corresponded to Onias I, but Josephus places him in the time ofOnias III. [Footnote 1: Ant. XII. Iv. ] For his account of the Maccabean struggle he depends here primarily uponthe First Book of the Maccabees, which in many parts he does little morethan paraphrase. Neither the Second Book of the Maccabees nor the largerwork of Jason of Cyrene, of which it is an epitome, appears to have beenknown to him. It is well-nigh certain that in writing the _Wars_ he hadno acquaintance with the Jewish historical book, but was dependent onthe less accurate and complete statement of a Hellenistic chronicle; andin the later work, though he bases his narrative on the Greek version ofthe Maccabees, and says he will give a fresh account with greataccuracy, he yet incorporates pieces of non-Jewish history from theGreek 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 thecity fell without fighting, the second by treachery. And while in theBook of the Maccabees the year given for the fall of the city is 143 ofthe 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 wasfollowing for the general history of Antiochus--he gives thecorresponding Greek Olympiad--and applied it to the pillage ofJerusalem. For the story of Mattathias at Modin, which is much moredetailed than in the _Wars_, he closely follows the Book of theMaccabees, though in the speeches he takes certain liberties, inserting, for example, an appeal to the hope of immortality in Mattathias' addressto his sons. [2] He turns to his Greek authority for the death ofAntiochus, and controverts Polybius, who ascribes the king's distemperto his sacrilegious desire to plunder a temple of Diana in Persia. Josephus, with a touch of patriotism and an unusual disregard of thefeelings of his patrons, who can hardly have liked the implied parallel, says it is surely more probable that he lost his life because of hispillage of the Jewish Temple. In confirmation of his theory he appealsto the materialistic morality of his audience, arguing that the kingsurely would not be punished for a wicked intention that was notsuccessful. He states also that Judas was high priest for three years, which is not supported by the Jewish record;[3] and he passes over themiracle of the oil at the dedication of the Temple, and ascribes thename of the feast to the fact that light appeared to the Jews. Thecelebration of Hanukkah as the feast of lights is of Babylonian-Jewishorigin, and was only instituted shortly before the destruction of theTemple. [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, thename 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 chapterxii. 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 leaguethat Simon made with the Romans. [1] The incident is dwelt on in theextant version of the First Book of the Maccabees, and Josephus wouldsurely not have omitted a syllable of so propitious an event, had hepossessed knowledge of it. On the other hand, he inserts into thehistory of the Maccabean brothers an account of the foundation of aTemple by Onias V in Leontopolis, [2] in the Delta of Egypt, anddescribes at length the negotiations that led up to it;[3] and in thesame connection he narrates a feud between the Jewish and Samaritancommunities at Alexandria in the days of Ptolemy Philometor. From theseindications it has been inferred that he had before him the work of aHellenistic-Jewish historian interested in Egypt--the collection ofAlexander Polyhistor suggests that there were several such at thetime--while for the exploits of the later Maccabees he relied on thechronicle of John Hyrcanus the son of Simon, which is referred to in theBook 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 afew 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 hadno longer any considerable Jewish document to guide him, nor have we anyJewish history by which to check him. For an era of two hundred years hewas more completely dependent on Greek sources, and it is just in thispart 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 thetime. It is, therefore, the more unfortunate that he makes noindependent research, and takes up no independent attitude. For the mostpart he transcribes the pagan writer before him, unable or unwilling tolook any deeper. And he tells us only of the outward events of Jewishhistory, of the court intrigues and murders, of the wars against thetottering empires of Egypt and Syria, of the ignoble feuds within thepalace. Of the more vital and, did we but know it, the profoundlyinteresting social and religious history of the time, of the developmentof the Pharisee and Sadducee sects, we hear little, and that little isunreliable and superficial. Josephus reproduces the deficiencies of hissources in their dealings with Jewish events. He brings no originalvirtue compensating for the careful study which they made of the largerhistory in which the affairs of Judea were a small incident. The foundation of his work in the latter half of book xiii andthroughout books xiv-xvii is Nicholas, who had devoted two special booksto the life of Herod, and by way of introduction to this had dealt morefully with the preceding Jewish princes. [1] We must therefore be wary ofimputing to Josephus the opinions he expresses upon the different Jewishsects in this part of the _Antiquities_. He introduces them first duringthe reign of Jonathan, with the classification which had already beenmade in the _Wars_:[2] the Pharisees as the upholders of Providence orfate and freewill, the Essenes as absolute determinists, the Sadduceesas absolute deniers of the influence of fate on human affairs. [3] Thenext mention of the Pharisees occurs in the reign of Hyrcanus, [4] whenhe states that they were the king's worst enemies. "They are one of the sects of the Jews, and they have so great a powerover the multitude that, when they say anything against the king oragainst the high priest, they are presently believed. .. . Hyrcanus hadbeen 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, hismother 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. Thoughthe story is based apparently on an old Jewish tradition, since we findit told of Alexander Jannaeus in the Talmud, [1] it looks as if Josephusobtained his version from some author that shared the aristocraticprejudices against the democratic leaders. The reign of Hyrcanus hadbeen described by a Hellenistic-Jewish chronicler or a non-JewishHellenist, from whom Josephus borrowed a glowing eulogy, [2] with whichhe sums it up: "He lived happily, administered the government in anexcellent way for thirty-one years, and was esteemed by God worthy ofthe three greatest privileges, the principate, the high priesthood, andprophecy. " To the account of the Pharisees is appended a paragraph, seemingly the historian's own work, where he explains that "thePharisees have delivered to the people the tradition of the fathers, while the Sadducees have rejected it and claim that only the writtenword is binding. And concerning these things great disputes have arisenamong them; the Sadducees are able to persuade none but the rich, whilethe Pharisees have the multitude on their side. " Again, in the accountof the reign of Queen Alexandra, he represents the Pharisees as powerfulbut seditious, and causing constant friction, and ascribes the fall ofthe royal house to the queen's compliance with those who bore ill-willto 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 Jewishhistory from pagan sources. He quotes Timagenes' estimate of Aristobulusas a good man who was of great service to the Jews and gained them thecountry of Iturea; and he notes Strabo's agreement with Nicholas uponthe invasion of Judea by Ptolemy Lathyrus. [1] General history takes anincreasingly larger part in the account of the warlike AlexanderJannaeus and the queen Alexandra, and reference is made to the consulsof Rome contemporary with the reigns of Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, inorder to bring Jewish affairs into relation with those of the Powerwhich 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 prefaceto book xiv. His aim, he says, is "to omit no facts either throughignorance or laziness, because we are dealing with a history of eventswith which most people are unacquainted on account of their distancefrom our times; and we purpose to do it with appropriate beauty ofstyle, so that our readers may entertain the knowledge of what we writewith some agreeable satisfaction and pleasure. But the principal thingto aim at is to speak truly. "[1] It is not impossible that the preludeis based on something in Nicholas; but it is turned against him; for inthe same chapter Josephus controverts his predecessor for the statementthat "the Idumean Antipater [the father of Herod] was sprung from theprincipal Jews who returned to Judea from Babylon. " The assertion, hesays, was made to gratify Herod, who by the revolution of fortune cameto be king of the Jews. He shows here some national feeling, but ingeneral he accepts Nicholas, and borrows doubtless from him the detailsof Pompey's invasion of Judea and of the siege of Jerusalem. He appealsas well to Strabo and the Latin historian Titus Livius. [2] But though itis likely that he had made an independent study of parts of Strabo, since he drags in several extracts from his history that are not quitein place, [3] there is no reason to think he read Livy or any other Latinauthor. He would have found reference to the work in the diligentNicholas. We may discern the hand of Nicholas, too, in the praise ofPompey for his piety in not spoiling the Temple of the holy vessels. [4]Josephus writes altogether in the tone of an admirer of Rome'soccupation, attributing the misery which came upon Jerusalem to Hyrcanusand 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 ofthe relation of the Jews to Julius Caesar and of the decrees which weremade in their favor at his instance. It has been conjectured with muchprobability that Josephus obtained his series of documents fromNicholas, who had collected them for the purpose of defending the Jewsof Asia Minor in the inquiry which Marcus Agrippa conducted during thereign of Herod. [1] He says that he will set down the decrees that aretreasured in the public places of the cities, and those which are stillextant in the Capitol of Rome, "so that all the rest of mankind may knowwhat regard the kings of Asia and Europe have had for the Jewishpeople. " In a subsequent book, when he is recounting the events ofHerod's reign, [2] Josephus sets forth a further series of decrees infavor of the Jews, issued by Caesar Augustus and his lieutenant MarcusAgrippa. These likewise he probably derived from Nicholas, who was thecourt advocate and court chronicler at the time they were promulgated. But he enlarges on his motive for giving them at length, pointing tothem with pride as a proof of the high respect in which the Jews wereheld 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 theyhad enjoyed special favor: "And I frequently mention these decrees in order to reconcile otherpeoples to us and to take away the causes of that hatred whichunreasonable men bear us. As for our customs, he continues, each nationhas its own, and in almost every city we meet with differences; butnatural justice is most agreeable to the advantage of all men equally, and to this our laws have the greatest regard, and thereby render usbenevolent and friendly to all men, so that we may expect the likereturn from others, and we may remind them that they should not esteemdifference of institutions a sufficient cause of alienation, but joinwith us in the pursuit of virtue and righteousness, for this belongs toall 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-Romanworld towards the peculiar people, and the captive in the gilded prisonwas fain to dwell on their past glory in order to cover the wretchednessof their present. Josephus claims to have copied some of the decrees from the archives inthe Roman Capitol. [1] The library was destroyed with the Capitol itselfduring the civil war in 69. [2] It was restored, it is true, during thereign of Vespasian, and it is not impossible that the old decrees weresaved. But Josephus might have collected from the Jewish communitiesthose documents which he did not find ready to hand in Nicholas, if theyformed part of an apology for the Jews of Antioch in 70 C. E. At leastthere is no good reason to doubt their authenticity, and they are inquite a different class from the letters and decrees attributed to theHellenistic 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 thesebooks, 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 ofJerusalem bears to the rest of the _Wars_. Josephus seems to manifestsuddenly a power of vivid narrative and psychological analysis, to whichhe is elsewhere a stranger. But at the same time, where the story ismost vivid and dramatic, its framework is most pagan. The Greco-Romanideas of fate and nemesis, which dominate the shorter account of theking's life in the _Wars_, are still the underlying motives. The reasonfor 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 acquaintancewith the historical literature about Herod than when he wrote the_Wars_, and that he compared his various authorities and exercised somejudgment in composing his picture. For example, in relating the murderof the Hasmonean Hyrcanus, he first gives the account which he found inHerod's memoirs, designed of course to exculpate the king, and then setsout the version of other historians, who allege that Herod laid a snarefor the last of the Maccabean princes. Josephus proudly contrasts hisown critical attitude towards Herod with the studied partisanship ofNicholas, [1] who wrote in Herod's lifetime, and in order to please himand his courtiers, "touching on nothing but what tended to his glory, and openly excusingmany of his notorious crimes and diligently concealing them. We may, indeed, say much by way of excuse for Nicholas, because he was not somuch writing a history for others as doing a service for the king. Butwe, who come of a family closely connected with the Hasmonean kings, andhave an honorable rank, think it unbecoming to say anything that isfalse about them, and have described their actions in an upright andunvarnished manner. And though we reverence many of Herod's descendants, who still bear rule, yet we pay greater regard to truth, though we mayincur their displeasure by so doing. " [Footnote 1: Ant. XIV. Xvi. 7. ] It was not so difficult for the historian to write impartially of Herodas to write impartially of Vespasian and Titus. At the same timeJosephus, though in these books more critical, seldom escapes the yokeof facts, and says little of the inner conditions of the people. OfHillel we do not hear the name, and Shammai is only mentioned, if indeedhe, and not Shemaya, is disguised under the name of Sameas, as themember of the Sanhedrin who denounced Herod. [1] [Footnote 1: Ant. XV. I. 1. Schlatter ingeniously conjectures thatPollio, who is mentioned as predicting to the Sanhedrin, that this Herodwould be their enemy if they acquitted him, is identical with Abtalion, of whom the Talmud tells a similar story. [Greek: pollion] may be anerror for [Greek: Eudalion] as the Hebrew name would be transcribed inGreek. ] The speeches, which are put into the mouth of the king on variousoccasions, are rhetorical declamations in the Greek style, which must bederived either from Nicholas or from Herod's Memoirs, to which thehistorian 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 oflater 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, andviolated the ancient tradition by the introduction of foreign practices, which fostered great sins, through the neglect of the observances thatused to lead the multitude to piety. By the games, the theater, and theamphitheater, which he instituted at Jerusalem, he offended Jewishsentiment; "for while foreigners were amazed and delighted at thevastness of his displays, to the native Jews all this amounted to adissolution of the traditions for which they had so great aveneration. "[1] And he points out that the Jewish conspiracy against himin the middle of his reign arose because "in the eyes of the Jewishleaders, he merely pretended to be their king, but was in fact themanifest enemy of their nation. " It has been suggested that Justus ofTiberias supplied him with this Jewish view of Herod, which isunparalleled in the _Wars_. But in another passage, where he must befollowing an Herodian and anti-Pharisaic source, he makes some remarksin quite an opposite spirit, as if the Pharisees were in the wrong, andprovoked the king. He says of them: "They were prone to offendprinces;[2] they claimed to foresee things, and were suddenly elated tobreak out into open war. " He calls them also Sophists, [3] the scornfulname 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 thanin the _Wars_. He sums him up as "cruel towards all men equally, a slaveto his passions, and claiming to be above the righteous law: yet was hefavored by fortune more than any man, for from a private station he wasraised 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 isstolen: "But this magnificent temper and that submissive behavior and liberalitywhich he exercised towards Caesar and the most powerful men at Rome, obliged him to transgress the customs of his nation and to set asidemany of their laws, by building cities after an extravagant manner, anderecting Temples, not in Judea indeed, for that would not have beenborne, since it is forbidden to pay any honors to images orrepresentations of animals after the manner of the Greeks, but in thecountry beyond our boundaries and in the cities thereof. The apologywhich he made to the Jews was this, that all was done not of his owninclination, but at the bidding of others, in order to please Caesar andthe Romans, as though he set more store on the honor of the Romans thanthe Jewish customs; while in fact he was considering his own glory, andwas very ambitious to leave great monuments of his government toposterity: 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 lawcondemning thieves to exile, because it was a violation of the Biblicallaw, "and involved the dissolution of our ancestral traditions. " If the account of the Jewish spiritual movement at a time of greatspiritual awakening is meager, the picture of Herod's great buildings, despite occasional confusion and vagueness, is full and valuable. Hegives us an excellent description of Caesarea and Sebaste, the twocities which the king established as a compliment to the Roman Emperor, and an account of the Temple and the fortress of Antonia, which hehimself knew so well. Of the Temple we have another description, in theMishnah, which in the main agrees with Josephus. Where the two differ, however, the preference cannot be given to the writer who had grown upin the shadow of the building, and might have been expected to know itsevery corner. [1] As we have seen in the _Wars_, he was in topography asin 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 himmuch beyond the death of Herod. Nicholas died, or ceased to write, inthe reign of Antipater, who succeeded his father. Apparently he had nosuccessor who devoted himself to recording the affairs of the Jewishcourt. Hence, though the events of the troubled beginning of Antipater'sreign are dealt with at the same length as those of Herod, and we have avivid story of the Jewish embassy that went to Rome to petition for thedeposition of the king, the history afterwards becomes fragmentary. Suchas it is, it manifests a Roman flavor. The nationalists are termedrobbers, and the pseudo-Messiahs are branded as self-seekingimpostors. [1] After an enumeration of various pretenders that sought tomake themselves independent rulers, there is a sudden jump from thefirst to the tenth year of Archelaus, who was accused of barbarous andtyrannical practices and banished by the Roman Emperor to Gaul. Hiskingdom was then added to the province of Syria. Josephus dwells on thestory of two dreams which occurred to the king and his wife Glaphyra, and justifies himself because his discourse is concerning kings, andalso because of the advantage to be drawn from it for the assurance bothof the immortality of the soul and the Providence of God in humanaffairs. "And if anybody does not believe such stories, let him keep hisown opinion, but let him not stand in the way of another who finds inthem an encouragement to virtue. " [Footnote 1: Ant. XVII. Xiii. 2. ] The last three books of the _Antiquities_ reveal the weaknesses ofJosephus as an historian: his disregard of accuracy, his tendency toexaggeration, his lack of proportion, and his mental subservience. Hehad no longer either the Scriptures or a Greek chronicler to guide him. He depended in large part for his material on oral sources and scatteredmemoirs, and he is not very successful in eking it out so as to producethe semblance of a connected narrative. His chapters are in part amiscellany of notes, and the construction is clumsy. The writerconfesses that he was weary of his task, but felt impelled to wind itup. Yet, just because we are so ignorant of the events of Jewish historyat the period, and because the period itself is so critical andmomentous, these books (xviii-xx) are among the most important which hehas left, and on the whole they deal rather more closely than theirpredecessors with the affairs of the Jewish people. The palace intriguesdo not fill the stage so exclusively, and some of the digressions carryus into byways of Jewish history. At the very outset[1] Josephus devotes a chapter to a fuller delineationthan he has given in any other place of the various sects thatflourished at the time. The account, ampler though it is than theothers, does not reveal the true inwardness of the different religiouspositions. He repeats here what he says elsewhere about the Pharisaicdoctrine of predestination tempered by freewill, but he enlargesespecially on the difference between the parties in their ideas aboutthe future life. [2] The Pharisees believe that souls have an immortalvigor, and that they will be rewarded or punished in the next worldaccordingly as they have lived virtuously or wickedly in this life; thewicked being bound in everlasting prisons, while the good have power tolive again. The Sadducees, on the other hand, assert that the souls diewith the bodies, and the Essenes teach the immortality of souls and setgreat store on the rewards of righteousness. Their various ideas arewrapped up in Greco-Roman dress, to suit his readers, and the doctrineof resurrection ascribed to the Pharisees is almost identical with thatheld by the neo-Pythagoreans of Rome. [3] But Josephus' account is morereliable when he refers to the divergent attitudes of the sects to thetradition. "The Pharisees strive to observe reason's dictates in their conduct, andat the same time they pay great respect to their ancestors; and theyhave such influence over the people because of their virtuous lives andtheir discourses that they are their friends in divine worship, prayers, and sacrifice. The Sadducees do not regard the observance of anythingbeyond what the law enjoins them, but since their doctrine is held bythe few, when they hold the judicial office, they are compelled toaddict themselves to the notions of the Pharisees, because the masswould not otherwise tolerate them. The Essenes live apart from thepeople in communistic groups, and exceed all other men in virtue andrighteousness. They send gifts to the Temple, but do not sacrifice, onwhich 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 founderwas Judas the Galilean: "These men agree in all other things with the Pharisees, but they havean inviolable attachment to liberty, and they say that God is to betheir 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 anyfear of the kind make them acknowledge anybody as sovereign. " Josephus, however, cannot refrain from imputing low motives to those whobelonged to the party opposed to himself and hated of the Romans. "Theyplanned robberies and murders of our principal men, " he says, "inpretense for the public welfare, but in reality in hopes of gain forthemselves. " And he saddles them with the responsibility for all thecalamities that were to come. About the Messianic hope, which appears tohave inspired them, he is compulsorily silent. The historical record that follows is very sketchy. We have a bare listof procurators and high priests down to the time of Pontius Pilate, anotice of the foundation of Tiberias by the tetrarch Herod, and anirrelevant account of the death of Phraates, the king of the Parthians, and of Antiochus of Commagene, who was connected by marriage with theHerodian house. Still there is rather more detail than in thecorresponding summary in the second book of the _Wars_, and Josephusmust in the interval have lighted on a fuller source than he hadpossessed in his first historical essay. It is not impossible that thenew authority was again Justus of Tiberias. Of the unrest in thegovernorship of Pontius Pilate he has more to say, but the genuinenessof the passage referring to the trial and death of Jesus, which is dealtwith elsewhere, [1] has been doubted by modern critics. It is followed inthe text by a long account of a scandal connected with the Isis worshipat Rome, which led to the expulsion of Jews from the capital. In thisway the chronicler wanders on between bare chronology and digression, until he reaches the reign of Agrippa, when he again finds writtensources to help him. The romance of Agrippa's rise from a bankruptcourtier to the ruler of a kingdom is treated with something of the samefull detail as the events of Herod's career, and probably the historianenjoyed here the use of royal memoirs. He may have obtained materialalso from the historical works of Philo of Alexandria, which were partlyconcerned with the same epoch. He refers explicitly to the embassy whichthe Alexandrian Jews sent to the Roman Emperor to appeal for therescission 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, brotherto Alexander the Alabarch, and not unskilled in philosophy. " Bloch[2]indeed is of the opinion that the later historian did not use hisAlexandrian predecessor, either in this or any other part of hiswritings, and points out certain differences of fact between the twoaccounts; but in view of the references to Philo and the fact thatJosephus subsequently wrote two books of apology, one of which wasexpressly directed in answer to Philo's bitter opponent Apion, it is atleast probable that he was acquainted with Philo's narrative. He may, however, have used it only to supplement the memoirs of the Herodianhouse, which served him as a chief source. Josephus devotes lessattention to the Alexandrian embassy than to the efforts of thePalestinian Jews to obtain a rescission of the similar decree whichPetronius, the governor of Syria, was sent to enforce in Jerusalem. Hisaccount is devised to glorify the part which Agrippa played. The princeappears as a kind of male Esther, endangering his own life to save hispeople; and indeed higher critics have been found to suggest that theBiblical book of Esther was written around the events of the reign ofGaius. [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 ofBabylon, which has the air of a moral tale on the evils ofintermarriage, and may have formed part of the popular Jewish literatureof the day. Another long digression marks the beginning of thenineteenth book of the _Antiquities_, where Josephus leaves Jewishscenes and inserts an account of Caligula's murder and the election ofClaudius as Emperor. This narrative, while of great interest forstudents of the Roman constitution, is out of all proportion to itsplace in the Jewish chronicle. Josephus, it has been surmised, based iton the work of one Cluvius (referred to in the book as an intimatefriend of Claudius), who wrote a history about 70 C. E. ; he may besideshave received hitherto unpublished information from Agrippa II, whosefather had been an important actor in the drama, or from his friendAliturius, 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 thehouse of the earlier Caesars, was for that reason not unwelcome to theupstart 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 thosehe hated, and everyone perceived that he had more love for the Greeksthan for the Jews. .. . But Agrippa's temper was mild and equally liberalto all men. He was kind to foreigners and was of agreeable andcompassionate feeling. He loved to reside at Jerusalem, and wasscrupulously careful in his observance of the Law of his people. On hisdeath he expressed his submission to Providence; for that he had by nomeans lived ill, but in a splendid and happy manner. " His peaceful reign, however, was only the lull before the storm, and thelast book of the _Antiquities_ is mainly taken up with the succession ofwicked procurators, who, by their extortions and cruelties and flagrantdisregard of the Jewish Law and Jewish feeling, goaded the Jews into thefinal rebellion. It contains, however, a digression on the conversion ofthe royal house of Adiabene to Judaism, which is tricked out withexamples of God's Providence. Yet another digression records thevillainies of Nero (which no doubt was pleasing to his patrons) and theamours of Drusilia, the daughter of Agrippa I. But of the risingdiscontent of the Jewish people in Palestine we have no clear picture. Josephus fails as in the _Wars_ to bring out the inner incompatibilityof the Roman and the Jewish outlook, and represents, in anunimaginative, matter-of-fact, Romanizing way, that it was simplyparticular excesses--the rapacity of a Felix, the knavery of aFlorus--which were the cause of the Rebellion. This is just what a Romanwould have said, and when the Jewish writer deals at all with the Jewishposition, it is usually to drag in his political feud. He especiallysingles out the sacrilege of the Zealots in assassinating theiropponents within the Temple precincts as the reason of God's rejectingthe city; "and as for the Temple, He no longer deemed it sufficientlypure to be His habitation, but brought the Romans upon us and threw afire on the city to purge it, and brought slavery on us, our wives, andour children, to make us wiser by our calamities. " Thus the priestlyapologist, accepting Roman canons, finds in the ritual offense of asection of the people the ground for the destruction of the nationalcenter. He is torn, indeed, between two conflicting views about theorigin of the rebellion: whether he shall lay the whole blame on theJewish irreconcilables, or whether he shall divide it between them andthe wicked Roman governors; and in the end he exaggerates both thesemotives, and leaves out the deeper causes. The penultimate chapter contains a list of the high priests, about whomthe historian had throughout made great pretensions of accuracy. Heenumerates but eighty-three from the time of Aaron to the end of theline, of whom no less than twenty-eight were appointed after Herod'saccession to his kingdom; whereas the Talmud records that three hundredheld office during the existence of the second Temple alone. [1] Thatnumber is probably hyperbolical, but the statement in other parts of theRabbinical literature, that there were eighty high priests in thatperiod, [2] throws doubt on this list, which besides is manifestlypatched 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 anend, the later events having been treated in detail in the _Wars;_ andin conclusion he commends himself for his accuracy in giving thesuccession of priests and kings and political administrators: "And I make bold to say, now I have so completely perfected the workwhich I set out to do, that no other person, be he Jew or foreigner, andhad he ever so great an inclination to it, could so accurately deliverthese accounts to the Greeks as is done in these books. For members ofmy own people acknowledge that I far exceed them in Jewish learning, andI have taken great pains to obtain the learning of the Greeks andunderstand stand the elements of the Greek language, though I have solong accustomed myself to speak our own tongue that I cannot speak Greekwith exactness. " He makes explicit his standpoint with this _envoi_, which shows that hewas writing for a Greek-speaking public and in competition with Greeks, and this helps to explain why he sets special store on the record ofpriests and kings and political changes, and why he so often disguisesthe genuine Jewish outlook. As an account of the Jewish people for theprejudiced society of Rome, the _Antiquities_ undoubtedly possessedmerit. History, indeed, at the time, was far from being an exactscience, nor was accuracy esteemed necessary to it. Cicero had said ahundred years earlier, that it was legitimate to lie in narratives; andthis was the characteristic outlook of the Greco-Roman writers. The mostbrilliant literary documents of the age, the _Annals_ and _Histories_ ofTacitus, are rather pieces of sparkling journalism than sober andphilosophical records of facts; and therefore we must not judge Josephusby too high a standard. Weighed in his own balance, he had done a great service to his people bysetting out the main heads of their history over three thousand years, so that it should be intelligible to the cultured Roman society; and hadhe been reproached with misrepresenting and distorting many of theirreligious ideas, he would have replied, with some justice, that it wasnecessary to do so in, order to make the Romans understand. On the sameground he would have justified the omission of much that wascharacteristic and the exaggeration of much that was normal. He showsthroughout some measure of national pride. To-day, however, we cannotbut regret that he weakly adopted much of the spiritual outlook of hisGentile contemporaries, and that he did not seek to convey to hisreaders the fundamental spiritual conceptions of the Jews, which mighthave endowed his history with an unique distinction. His record of twothousand years of Israel's history gives but the shadow of the glory ofhis people. VIII THE APOLOGY FOR JUDAISM In every age since the dispersion began, the Jews have appeared to theirneighbors as a curious anomaly. Their abstract idea of God, theirpeculiar religious observances, their refusal to intermarry with theirneighbors, their serious habits of life--all have served to mark themout and attract the wonder of the philosophical, the vituperation of thevulgar, and the dislike of the ignorant. Their enemies in every epochhave repeated with slight variation the charge which Haman brought inhis petition to King Ahasuerus, "There is a people scattered abroad anddispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of thy kingdom; andtheir laws are diverse from those of every people, neither keep they theking's laws" (Esther 3:8). In the cosmopolitan society that arose in theHellenistic kingdoms, it was their especial offense that they retained anational cohesion, and refused to indulge in the free trade in religiousideas and social habits adopted by civilized peoples. The popularfeeling was fanned by a party that had a more particular grievanceagainst them. Though certain philosophical sects, notably the schools ofPythagoras and Aristotle, were struck with admiration for the loftyspiritual ideas and the strict discipline of Judaism, another school, and that the most powerful of the time, was smitten with envy andhatred. The Stoics, who aspired to establish a religious philosophy for allmankind, and pursued a vigorous missionary propaganda, particularly inthe East, saw in the Jews not only obstinate opponents but dangerousrivals, who carried on a competing mission with provoking success. Thechildren of Israel were spread over the whole of the civilized world, and everywhere they vigorously propagated their teaching. Of allenmities, the enmity of contending creeds is the bitterest. The Stoicsbecame the first professional Jew-haters, and set themselves at the headof those who resented Jewish particularism, either from jealousy or fromthat unreasoning dislike which is universally felt against minoritiesthat live differently from the mass about them. The ill-will and sectarian hatred were most prevalent at Alexandria, where the powerful Jewish community excited the attacks of thehalf-Hellenized natives. The campaign was fought mainly as a battle ofbooks. The Hebrew Scriptures represented the early Egyptians in nofavorable light. The Greco-Egyptian historians retaliated by amalevolent account of the origin and history of the Hebrew people, ofwhich Manetho's story is the prototype. In this work of the thirdcentury B. C. E. The children of Israel were represented as sprung from apack of lepers, who were expelled from Egypt because of their fouldisease. A still more virulent attack on the Jewish teaching is found intwo Stoic writers of the first century B. C. E. , Posidonius of Apamea, atown of Phrygia, and Molon, [1] who taught at Rhodes. The former raisedthe charge that the Jews alone of all peoples refused to have anycommunication with other nations, but regarded them as their enemies. Molon, besides a general travesty of their early history, wrote aspecial diatribe against them--the first document of the kind whichhistory records--accusing them of atheism and misanthropy, cowardice andstupidity. These remained the stock charges for centuries, and theyassumed an added bitterness after the Roman conquest, when to thepeculiarity of Jewish customs was added the stigma of being a subjectpeople. The hatred of Greek and Jew, despite all the ostentatiousfriendliness of a Herod for Greek things, became deeper, and it showeditself as well without as within Palestine. At Alexandria, in thebeginning of the first century, the antagonism developed into openriots, and the leaders of the anti-Jewish party were again two Stoics, Apion and Chaeremon, the one orator and grammarian, the other priest andastrologer. There is nothing very original in their libels, which aremodeled upon those of Posidonius and Molon; but some fresh detail isadded. It was said that the deity worshiped at Jerusalem was the head ofan ass, to which human sacrifices were offered, and that the Jews tookan oath to do no service for any Gentile. Apion, a man of some repute, was the head of the Alexandrian Stoic school, and called "the toiler, "because of his industry. He was, however, also known as "thequarrelsome"[2] ([Greek: ho pleistonikeas]). Another critic of ancienttimes says he was notorious for advertising his ideas (_in doctrinissuis praedicandis venditator_)[3], and the Emperor Augustus declaresthat he was the drum of his own fame (i. E. The blower of his owntrumpet). He was in fact a mixture of scholar and charlatan, as many ofhis successors have been, the Houston Chamberlain of the first century. [Footnote 1: Schürer (iii. 503_ff_) has brought cogent reasons to showthat Molon is not the same as Apollonius, another Jew-baiter, with whomhe has often been identified. ] [Footnote 2: Clemens, Strom. I. 21, 101. ] [Footnote 3: Gallus, Noctes Atticae, v. 2. ] Apion wrote a history of Egypt in which his attack upon the Jews appearsto have been an episode, [1] but his prominence as an anti-Semite isshown by the fact that he went as the spokesman of the Greek embassy toCaligula on the memorable occasion when Philo was the champion of theJewish cause. In that capacity Philo prepared an elaborate apology forhis people, which he had not the opportunity to deliver; but itcontained in part an account of the religious sects, designed to showtheir philosophical excellence, and it was known to the Church fathersof the early centuries of the Christian era. Only small fragments of itare preserved by Eusebius, and the rest of the apologetic writing ofAlexandria, which was in all probability very extensive, hasdisappeared. Yet the Hellenistic-Jewish literature is colored throughoutby an apologetic purpose. Whether the work is a professedly historicalor ethical or philosophical treatise, the idea is always present ofrepresenting Judaism as a sublime and a humanitarian doctrine, and ofrefuting the calumnies of the Greek scribes. Thus, besides his elaborateapology prepared for the Roman Emperor, Philo had written a popularpresentation of Judaism in the form of a Life of Moses, with appendedtreatises on Humanity and Nobility, which was but a thinly-veiled workof apologetics. Another part of the defensive literature took the formof missionary propaganda under a heathen mask. The oracles of the Sibyland Orpheus, a forged history of Hecataeus, and monotheistic versesfoisted on the Greek poets, were but attempts to carry the war into theenemy's territory. Further, there must have been a more directpresentation of the Jewish cause by way of public lectures and popularaddresses in the synagogues. Nevertheless, the specific answers to thecharges advanced by the anti-Jewish scribblers are now to be found mostfully stated in Josephus. In his day the literary campaign against theJewish name was as remorseless as the military campaign that haddestroyed their political independence. The Romans, tolerant themselvesin religion, had long been intolerant of Jewish separatism and nationalexclusiveness, and Cicero, [2] shortly after the capture of Jerusalem byPompey, had denounced their "barbarian superstition" in language that istypical of the outlook of the Roman aristocracy. "Even when Jerusalemwas untouched, and the Jews were at peace with us, their religiousceremonies ill accorded with the splendor of our Empire; still lesstolerable are they to-day, when the nation has shown, by taking up arms, its attitude towards us, while the fact that it has been conquered andreduced to servitude proves how much the gods care for it. " [Footnote 1: The idea, which is derived from the Church fathers, that hewrote a separate [Greek: logos] against the Jews, appears to be based bythem on a misunderstanding of Ant. XVIII. Viii. 1. Comp. Schürer, _op. Cit. _ iii. 541. ] [Footnote 2: Pro Flacco, 68. ] The later poets of the Augustan age, Horace, Tibullus, and Ovid, expressed a supercilious disdain for the Jewish customs ofSabbath-keeping, etc. , which were spreading even in the politestcircles. As the political conflict between the Romans and their stubbornsubjects became more pronounced, the Roman impatience of their obstinacyincreased. Seneca, writing after Palestine had been placed under a Romangovernor, speaks bitterly of "the accursed race whose practices have sofar prevailed that they have been received all over the world. " Hatingthe Jews as he did with the double hatred of a Roman aristocrat and aStoic philosopher, he is yet fain to admit that their religion isdiffused over the Empire, and anxious as he is to decry theirsuperstition, he reveals part of the reason of their success. "They atleast can give an explanation of their religious ceremonies, whereas thepagan masses cannot say why they carry out their practices. " The pagancults were languishing because of the frigidity of their forms and theirincapacity for providing men with an ideal or a discipline or a solace;and the people turned to a living religion. The day had come that wasforetold by the prophet, when men shall catch hold of the skirts of aJew, saying, "We will go with you, because we have heard that God iswith you" (Zech. 8:23). The bitterest and the most envenomed attacks on the Jews were writtenafter the destruction of Jerusalem, when the failure of Rome to breakthe stubborn spirit of her conquered foe became apparent. The legionscould destroy Jerusalem; they could not uproot Judaism or even stay itsprogress. The presence of thousands of Jewish captive slaves at Romeaccelerated indeed the march of conversion. Vespasian and Titus foreboreto take the title "Judaicus" after their triumph, lest it should betaken to mean that they had Judaized. The speedy defection of Romancitizens to the superstition of a conquered people was an insult, which, added to the injury of their obstinate resistance, roused to fury theremnants of the Roman conservatives. The entanglement of Titus with theJewish princess Berenice was the final outrage. The satiric poetsMartial and Juvenal inserted frequent ribald references to Jewishcustoms; but the nature of their works precluded a serious criticism. Martial was a master of flouts, jeers, and gibes, and Juvenal was asoured and disappointed provincial, who delighted to hurl wildreproaches. He declaimed against the passing away of the old manners ofRepublican Rome, and for him the spread of Jewish habits was among thesurest signs of degeneracy. The poets, however, did not so much endeavorto misrepresent as to ridicule the Jews and their converts. But theclassical exponent of Roman anti-Semitism is Tacitus, the historian whowrote in the time of Nerva and Trajan, i. E. Just after Josephus, and whotreated of the Jews both in his _Annals_, which were a history of thelast century, and in his _Histories_, which dealt with his own times. Hesurpassed all his predecessors, Greek or Roman, in distortion and abuse, and he combined the charges invented by the jealousy and rancor of Greeksophists with the abuse of Jewish character induced by Imperial Romanpassion. His account cannot be mistaken for a sober judgment. By thetransparent combination of earlier, discredited sources, by blatantinconsistencies, and by neglect of the authorities that would haveprovided him with reliable information, he shows himself the partisanpamphleteer. But the indictment is none the less illuminating. Mommsenspeaks of the solemn enmity which Tacitus cherishes to the section ofthe human race "to whom everything pure is impure, and everything impureis pure. " Doubtless his hatred was founded on intense national pride, but it was fed by his tendency to blacken and exaggerate. His audiencewas composed, as Renan says, of "aristocrats of the race of EnglishTories, who derived their strength from their very prejudices. " Theirideas about the Jewish people were as vague as those of the ordinary manof to-day about the people of Thibet, and they were willing to believeanything of them. Tacitus gives several alternative accounts of the origin of the Jews. [1]According to some they were fugitives from the Isle of Crete (derivingtheir name from Mount Ida), who settled on the coast of Libya. Accordingto others they sprang from Egypt, and were driven out under theircaptains Hierosolymus and Judas; while others stated that they wereEthiopians whom fear and hatred obliged to change their habitation. Hesupplies himself a fanciful account of the Exodus, tricked out with avariety of misrepresentations of their observances, which areludicrously inconsistent with each other: "They bless the image of that animal [the ass], by whose indication theyhad escaped from their vagrant condition in the wilderness and quenchedtheir thirst. They abstain from swine's flesh as a memorial of themiserable destruction which the mange brought on them. That they stolethe fruits of the earth, we have a proof in their unleavened bread. Theyrest on the seventh day, because that day gave them rest from theirlabors, and, affecting a lazy life, they are idle during every seventhyear. These rites, whatever their origin, are at least supported bytheir antiquity. [2] Their other institutions are depraved and impure, and prevailed by reason of their viciousness; for every vile fellowdespising the rites of his ancestors brought to them his contribution, so that the Jewish commonwealth was augmented. The first lesson taughtto converts is to despise their gods, to renounce their country, and tohold their parents, children, and brethren in utmost contempt: but stillthey are at pains to increase and multiply, and esteem it unlawful tokill any of their children. They regard as immortal the souls of thosewho die in battle, or are put to death for their crimes. [3] Hence theirlove of posterity and their contempt of death. They have no notion ofmore than one Divine Being, who is only grasped by the mind. They deemit profane to fashion images of gods out of perishable matter, and teachthat their Being is supreme and eternal, immutable and imperishable. Accordingly, they erect no images in their cities, much less in theirtemples, and they refuse to grant this kind of honor to kings oremperors. " [Footnote 1: Hist. V. 2_ff_. ] [Footnote 2: Ch. Lvii. ] [Footnote 3: This statement agrees remarkably with what Josephus putsinto the mouth of several of his speakers. See above, p. 114. ] The sage Pliny, who himself laughed at the crude paganism of his time, could also point the finger of scorn at the Jews as "a people notoriousby their contempt of divine images. " To the genuine Roman, the statereligion might not be true, but it was part of the civic life, andtherefore its rejection was unsocial and disloyal. Yet the account ofTacitus contains several remarks which, in their author's despite, reveal the moral superiority of the conquered over the conquerors. Henotes their national tenacity, their ready charity, their freedom frominfanticide, their conviction of the immortality of the soul, theirpurely spiritual and monotheistic cult. Tacitus certainly wrote afterthe works of Josephus had been published, so that the apology is not ananswer to him; but his methods of misstatement were anticipated at Romeby a host of anti-Semitic writers. Though Josephus never mentions asingle Roman detractor of his people, and confines his reply to Greekswho were long buried, it was doubtless against this class that he wasanxious to defend himself and his faith. He declared at the end of the _Antiquities_ his intention to write threebooks about "God and His essence, and about our laws, " proposing, perhaps, to imitate Philo's apology for Judaism, which was in threeparts. But the virulence of the calumny against Judaism induced him tomodify his plan and write a specific reply to the charges made againstthe Jews. It was necessary to refute more concisely and more definitelythan he had done in his long historical works the false tales about theJewish past and the Jewish law that were circulated and believed in thehostile Greco-Roman world. He directed himself more particularly touphold the antiquity of the Jews against those who denied theirhistorical claims and to disprove the charges leveled against the Jewishreligious ideas and legislation. These two subjects form the content ofthe two books commonly known to us as _Against Apion_. Only the second, however, deals with Apion's diatribe, and the current title is certainlyunauthentic. Origen, [1] Eusebius, and Hieronymus[2] refer to the firstbook as _About the Antiquity of the Jews_, and Hieronymus adds thedescription [Greek: antirraetikos logos], _A Refutation_. Eusebiussimilarly[3] speaks of the second book as the Refutation of Apion thegrammarian. Porphyry calls it simply [Greek: pros tous Hellaenas], _TheAddress to the Greeks_, and it is possible that Josephus so entitled hiswork. It is noteworthy that he directed his pleading to theGreek-speaking and not to the Latin public; the Greeks, he recognized, were the source of the misrepresentations of his people, and, as Greekwas read by all cultured people in his day, in refuting them he wouldincur less obloquy and attain his end equally well. [Footnote 1: Orig. C. Cels. I. 14. ] [Footnote 2: De Viris Illustr. 13. ] [Footnote 3: H. E. III. Viii. 2. ] The first point that Josephus seeks to make good in his apology is theantiquity of the Hebrew people and the historical character of theirScriptures. In the Greco-Roman world, which had lost confidence initself, and looked for inspiration to the past, age was a title torespectability, and it was the aim of the Jewish apologist to explainaway the silence of the Greeks. For the certificate of the Hellenichistorians was in the Hellenistic world the most convincing mark ofgenuineness. "By my works on the Antiquity of the Jews--thus Josephus begins--I haveproved that our Jewish nation is of very great antiquity and had adistinct existence. Those Antiquities contain the history of fivethousand years, and are derived from our sacred books, but aretranslated by me into the Greek tongue. " Josephus loosely represents that the whole of the _Antiquities_ is basedon the Bible, and reckons the period of history at nearly a thousandyears more than it covered. "But since I observe that many people give ear to the reproaches thatare laid against us by those who bear us ill-will, and will not believewhat I have written concerning the antiquity of our nation, while theytake it for a plain sign that our nation is of late date because it isnot so much as vouchsafed a bare mention by the most famous historiansamong the Greeks, I therefore have thought myself under an obligation towrite somewhat briefly about these subjects, in order to convict thosewho reproach us of spite and deliberate falsehood and to correct theignorance of others, and withal to instruct all those who are desirousof knowing the truth of what great antiquity we really are. As for thewitnesses whom I shall produce for the proof of what I say, they shallbe such as are esteemed by the Greeks themselves to be of the greatestreputation for truth and the most skilful in the knowledge of allantiquity. I will also show that those who have written so reproachfullyand falsely about us are to be convicted by what they have themselveswritten to the contrary, and I shall endeavor to give an account of thereasons why it has happened that a great number of Greeks have not mademention of our nation in their histories. " Acting on the principle that the best defense is attack, Josephus startsby turning on the Greeks themselves and discrediting their antiquity. They were a mushroom people, or at least their records were modern, andnot to be compared in age with the records of the Phoenicians, theHebrews, or the Babylonians. Comparative sciences had flourished in thecosmopolitan city of Alexandria, and in the light of them the Greekclaim to exclusive wisdom had been shattered. Josephus had made himselfmaster of the current knowledge of the subject. The Greeks learnt theirletters from the Phoenicians, they have no record more ancient than theHomeric poems, and even Homer did not leave his poems in writing, [1]while their earliest historians lived but shortly before the Persianexpedition into Greece, and their earliest philosophers, Pythagoras andThales, learnt what they knew from Egyptians and Chaldeans. Having shownthe lateness and Oriental origin of Greek culture, Josephus accusesGreek writers of unreliability, as is manifest by their mutualdisagreement. He makes a great show of learning on the subject and useshis material effectively. Doubtless he found the topic ready to hand insome predecessor, and it is somewhat ironical that a Josephus shouldthrow stones at a Thucydides on the score of inaccuracy. [Footnote 1: It is interesting that this casual statement of Josephuswas one of the starting points of modern Homeric criticism. ] The reason for the want of authority in the Greek historians--continuesJosephus--is to be found in the fact that the Greeks in early times tookno care to preserve public records of their transactions, which affordedthose who afterwards would write about them scope for making mistakesand displaying invention: conditions which favored literary art, butmarred historical accuracy. Those who were the most zealous to writehistory were more anxious to demonstrate that they could write well thanto discover the truth. The contrast between the individual creative impulse of the Hellene andthe respect for tradition of the Hebrew, which anticipates in a wayMatthew Arnold's contrast between Hellenic "spontaneity ofconsciousness" and Hebraic "strictness of conscience, " is pointedly madeby the apologist:[1] "We Jews must yield to the Greek writers as to style and eloquence ofcomposition, but we concede them no such superiority in regard to theverity of ancient history, and least of all as to that part whichconcerns the affairs of our country. The reliability of the Hebrewrecords is vouched for by the unbroken succession of official annalshanded down by priests and prophets. The purity of the priestly castewas strictly maintained by the law of marriage, which impelled everypriest to make a scrutiny into the genealogy of his wife and forward aregister of it to Jerusalem, where it was duly recorded in the archives. And we possess the names of our high priests from father to son for aperiod of two thousand years. Nor is there individual liberty of writingamong us: only the prophets (i. E. Inspired persons) have written theearliest accounts of things as they learned them of God Himself byinspiration, and others have written about what happened in their owntimes, and that too in a very distinct manner. We have no mass of booksdisagreeing with each other, but only twenty-two books containing therecords of all our past, which are rightly believed to be inspired. " [Footnote 1: C. Ap. 6_ff_. ] The reckoning of the Canon is interesting:[1] there are five books ofMoses, thirteen books of the prophets, recording the history from thedeath of Moses to the reign of Artaxerxes, and the remaining four books, the Ketubim, contain hymns to God and precepts for the conduct of humanlife. The books written since the time of Artaxerxes have not the sametrustworthiness, because the exact succession of prophets has not beenmaintained. The intense sentiment which the Jews feel for theirScriptures is proved by their willingness to die for them. [Footnote 1: The accepted number of books in the Jewish Canon istwenty-four, and this number is found in the Book of II Esdras, xiv. 41, which is probably contemporaneous with Josephus. The number 22 is to beexplained by the fact that Josephus must have linked Ruth with Judgesand Lamentations with Jeremiah. See J. E. , s. V. Canon. ] Again a contrast is pointed between the seriousness of the Hebraic andthe levity of the Greek attitude towards literature. Josephusegotistically draws an example from the record of the recent war. TheGreeklings who wrote about it "put a few things together by hearsay, and, abusing the word, call theirwritings by the name of histories. But I have composed a true history ofthe whole war and of all the events that occurred, having been concernedin all its transactions; for I acted as general of those among us thatare named Galileans, as long as it was possible for us to make anyresistance. I was then seized by the Romans, and became a captive. Vespasian and Titus kept me under guard, and forced me to attend on themcontinually. At the first I was put into bonds, but later was set atliberty and sent to accompany Titus when he came from Alexandria to thesiege of Jerusalem, during which time nothing was done that escaped myknowledge. For what happened in the Roman camp I saw, and wrote downcarefully; and what information the deserters brought out of the city, Iwas the only man to understand. Afterwards, when I had gotten leisure atRome, and when all my material was prepared for the work, I obtainedsome persons to assist me in learning the Greek tongue, and by thesemeans I composed the history of the events, and I was so well assured ofthe truth of what I related, that I first of all appealed to those thathad the supreme command in that war, Vespasian and Titus, as witnessesfor me. For to them first of all I presented my books, and after them tomany of the Romans that had been engaged in the war. I also recited themto many of my own race that understood Greek philosophy, among whom wereJulius Archelaus, Herod, king of Chalcis, a person of great authority, and King Agrippa himself, a person that deserved the greatest respect. Now all these bore their testimony to me that I had the strictest regardto truth; who yet would not have dissembled the matter, nor been silent, if I, out of ignorance, or out of favor to any side, either had given afalse color to the events, or omitted any of them. " Josephus here indignantly replies to his Roman detractors, who accusedhim of having composed a mere partisan thesis. As a priest he had aspecial knowledge of the Scriptures, which were the basis of his_Antiquities_, and as an important actor in the drama of the Roman war, he wrote of its events with the knowledge of an eye-witness. He excuseshis digression as being made in self-defense, and claims to have provedthat historical writing is indigenous rather to those called Barbariansthan to the Greeks. He then returns to the task of refuting those whosay that the Jewish polity is of late origin because the Greek authorsare silent about it. One main cause of the silence was the isolation ofJudea and the character of the Jewish people, who did not delight inmerchandise and commerce, but devoted themselves to the cultivation ofthe soil. This, of course, is a picture of the Bible times, because inthe writer's days they were beginning their mercantile development. Hence the Jews were in quite a different condition from the Phoenicians, the Thracians, the Persians, and the Medes, with all of whom theHellenes came into contact. They are rather to be compared with theRomans, who only entered into the Greek sphere of interest later intheir history. Josephus makes the point that it would be as reasonable for the Jews todeny the antiquity of the Greeks because there is no mention of them inHebrew records, as for the Greeks to deny the antiquity of the Jews forthe converse reason. And if the Greeks are ignorant of the Hebrews, heargues that there is abundant testimony in the histories of otherpeoples. He starts with the Egyptian evidence, and quotes from Manetho, the anti-Jewish historian, giving extracts about the Hyksos tribes andHyksos kings, whom he identifies with Joseph and his brethren. Theidentification was popular till recent times, but modern historicalcriticism has rejected it. Josephus dates the invasion of the Hyksos atthree hundred and ninety-three years before Danaus came to Argos, whichin turn was five hundred and twenty years before the Trojan war. Thus heputs the Bible story far ahead in age of Greek myth. Passing on to thetestimony in the Phoenician records, he derives from the public archivesof Tyre, to which reference was made also in the _Antiquities_, [1]evidence of the relations between Solomon and Hiram, and further quotesthe account given by the Hellenistic historian Alexander of Ephesus, whomentions the same incident. This Alexander had written a world-history, and had collected the chronicles of the various peoples that formed partof Alexander's empire. Josephus, who probably knew of his work throughNicholas or some other chronicler, cites him to confirm the Bible. Collections of extracts about the Jewish people and references to theBible in Greek literature were already in vogue, for it was an agesimilar to our own in its love of encyclopedias. Josephus uses with nota little skill these foreign sources, and supplements the comparativematerial which he had introduced in the _Antiquities_. Confirmation ofthe account of the flood, as also of the rebuilding of the Temple afterthe return of the Jews from Babylon, is found in the Chaldean history ofBerosus; and other long extracts from Babylonian history are insertedthat furnish a casual mention of Judea or Jerusalem. Josephus attempts, too, with doubtful success, to combine the Phoenician and Babylonianrecords in order to prove that they agree about the date of therebuilding of the Temple. The only justifiable inference from thepassages, however, appears to be that both sources agreed on theexistence of Cyrus, king of Persia. [Footnote 1: Comp. Above, p. 159. ] Finally he adduces passages from various Greek writers, to show that theJews were not entirely unknown to the Hellenes before Alexander'sconquests. Josephus had no doubt predecessors among the HellenisticJewish litterateurs in the search for testimony, as well as successorsamong the Christian apologists; but his collection has alone survived, and has become invaluable to modern scholars, who have ploughed the samefield for a different purpose. Authority is brought forward to show thatPythagoras had connection with the Hebrews, and Herodotus, it is argued, referred to the Jews as circumcised Syrians. [1] More apposite is apassage quoted from Clearchus, a pupil of Aristotle, about a discussionwhich his master had with a Jew of Soli, "who was Greek not only inlanguage but in thought. " The genuineness of this excerpt has beenquestioned, but without good reason. Aristotle's school had a scientificinterest in the Jews as in other peoples that had come under Greek swaythrough Alexander's conquests. [Footnote 1: Comp. Ant. VIII. X. 3. ] Josephus then sets out some very eulogistic passages about his people, purporting to be from Hecataeus of Abdera, which are very much to histaste and his purpose. Unfortunately, however, they are too good to betrue, and modern criticism has established that, while the genuineHecataeus, an historian who wrote at the end of the fourth centuryB. C. E. , did insert in his work an account of Jerusalem and the Jews, theglowing testimonials which Josephus adduces are from forged booksdevised by Jews to their own glory. A passage of a less favorable tone, and of which the genuineness is therefore not open to suspicion, isquoted from Agatharchides, a Seleucid historian. Finally, with anincidental mention of a half-dozen Hellenistic writers that have madedistinct reference to the Jewish people, and of three Jewish writers, Demetrius, the elder Philo, and Eupolemus, "who have not greatly missedthe truth about our affairs, " Josephus closes his evidence as to theantiquity of his nation. [1] Possibly he did not realize that his lastthree witnesses were of his own race, and it is not improbable that thisstring of names was to him also a string of names culled from AlexanderPolyhistor or a similar authority. [Footnote 1: C. Ap. 23. ] The latter part of the first book is devoted to the refutation of theanti-Jewish diatribes of several Greeks, and starts off with a fewcommonplaces upon the topic, to the effect that every great nationincurs the jealousy and ill-will of others. "The Egyptians, " saysJosephus, "were the first to cast reproaches upon us, and in order toplease them, some others undertook to pervert the truth. The causes oftheir enmity are their chagrin at the events of the Exodus and thedifference of their religious ideas. "[1] Josephus deals with Manetho'sdescription of the going-out from Egypt, and undertakes to demonstratethat "he trifles and tells arrant lies. " He dissects the charge that theHebrews were a pack of lepers exiled from the country, and insists uponits absurdity and the lack of consistency in the details. He offersingenuously as a proof of the falsity of the allegation that Moses was aleper the Mosaic legislation about lepers. "How could it be supposed, "he asks, "that Moses should ordain such laws against himself, to his ownreproach and damage?" Chaeremon is unworthy of reply, because hisaccount, though equally scurrilous, is inconsistent with that ofManetho. But the story of Lysimachus, a writer of the same genus, ismore critically examined and found wanting, because it gives noexplanation of the origin of the Hebrews. Lysimachus derived the nameJerusalem from the Greek Hierosylen--to commit sacrilege--the Hebrews, according to his story, owing their settlement to the plunder oftemples; and Josephus points out triumphantly that that idea is notexpressed by the same word and name among the Jews and Greeks. But, tovary a saying of Doctor Johnson, this section of Josephus must be readfor the quotations, for if one reads it for the argument of eitherassailant or apologist, one would shoot oneself. [Footnote 1: C. Ap. 24. ] The second book of the apology, which is a continuation of the first, opens with an elaborate refutation of Apion. Josephus questions whetherhe should take the trouble to confute the scurrilous stories of theAlexandrian grammarian, "which are all abuse and vulgarity"; but becausemany are pleased to pick up mendacious fictions, he thinks it better notto leave the charges without an answer. He disposes first of Apion'stales about Moses and the Exodus, which are of the same character asthose of Manetho and Chaeremon. Loaded abuse and unmeasured invectivecolor the refutation, but Apion apparently deserved it. We may take, asa fair specimen of his veracity, the statement that the Hebrews reachedPalestine six days after they left Egypt and rested on the seventh day, which they called Sabbath, because of some disease from which theysuffered, and of which the Egyptian name was Sabbaton. Apion had inparticular attacked the Alexandrian Jews, and Josephus takes theopportunity of enlarging on the privileged position of his people, notonly in the Egyptian capital, but in the other Hellenistic cities wherethey had been settled. [1] He elaborates and amplifies what he had statedon this subject in the _Antiquities_, and adds a short account of themiraculous delivery of the Egyptian Jews during the short-livedpersecution of Ptolemy Physcon, which is recorded more fully and withsome variation of detail in the so-called Third Book of the Maccabees. In reply to Apion's charge, that the Jews show a lack of civic spiritbecause they do not worship the same gods as the Alexandrians, Josephuslaunches out into an explanation of their conception of God, describestheir abhorrence of idolatry, and deals also with their refusal to setup in their temples the image of the Emperor. "But at the same time theyare willing, " he says, "to pay honors to great men and to offersacrifices in their name. " He deals also, in a digression, withcalumnies derived from Posidonius and Melon about the worship of an assin the sanctuary at Jerusalem. [Footnote 1: This part of the book, it may be noted, has only beenpreserved in the Latin version; the Greek original has been lost. ] Apion had invented a detailed story of ritual murder to justifyAntiochus Epiphanes for his spoliation of the Temple. The origin of thischarge is instructive of the methods of a classical anti-Semite. Therewas, in the innermost sanctuary, a stone[1] on which the blood of theburnt offering was sprinkled by the high priest on the Day of Atonement. It was known as the [Hebrew: Even Shtiah] and tradition said that theark of the covenant had rested on it. Mystery centered around it, andthe Greek scribes imagined that it was the object of worship. Now, theGreek word for a stone was Onos, which likewise meant an ass, and it wasprobably on the strength of this blunder that prejudice for centuriesaccused Jews and Christians of worshiping an ass' head. Josephus bringsproof of the emptiness of the charge, and retorts that Apion had himselfthe heart of an ass; and then, describing the ritual of the Temple, insists that there was no secret mystery about it. It gives a touch ofpathos that he speaks as if the Temple services were still being carriedout, whether because he was copying a source written before thedestruction, or because he deliberately disregarded that event. Apion, like Cicero, had taunted the Jews on account of their politicalsubjection, which proved, he argued, that their laws were not just northeir religion true. Josephus meets the charge--which in thematerialistic thinking of the Roman world was hard to answer--by the notvery happy plea that the Egyptians and Greeks had suffered a likefortune. So, too, he meets the gibe that the Jews do not eat pork, bysaying that the Egyptian priests abstain likewise. He omits in bothcases the true religious answer, which would probably not have appealedto his public. [Footnote 1: Yer. Yoma, v. 2. ] At this point the reply to the Alexandrian anti-Semite comes to an end, and the rest of the book comprises a defense of the Jewish legislation, "which is intended not as an eulogy but as an apology. " The broad aim isto show that the Law inculcates humanity and piety; but Josephus, beforesetting himself to this, again labors to point out that it ispre-eminent in antiquity over any of the Greek codes. This done, hegives a summary of the principles of Judaism, which is unlike anythingelse he wrote in its masterly grasp of the spirit of the religion and inits philosophical attitude. So great indeed is the contrast between thisepilogue and the bald summary of the Mosaic laws in the _Antiquities_that it is safe to say that Josephus had for his later work lighted on afresh and more inspired source. His presentation has the regularcharacteristic of the Alexandrian school, an insistence on the universaland philanthropic elements of the Mosaic law; and it is likely that hehad before him either Philo's work on the Life of Moses, or anotherwork, which his predecessor had used. It matters little that there aredifferences of detail between his and Philo's interpretations: themanner and the general purport are the same, and the manner is not theusual manner of Josephus, and altogether different from the treatment inthe _Antiquities_. He lays down with great clearness the dominant features of the Mosaicconstitution. It is a theocracy, i. E. The state depends on God. Thepassage in which he makes good this principle is a striking piece ofreasoning in comparative religion, worthy to be quoted in full: "Now there are innumerable differences in the particular customs andlaws that hold among all mankind, which a man may briefly reduce underthe following heads: Some legislators have permitted their governmentsto be under monarchies, others put them under oligarchies, and othersunder a republican form; but our legislator had no regard to any ofthese forms, but he ordained our government to be what, by a strainedexpression, may be termed a Theocracy, by ascribing the authority andthe power to God, and by persuading all the people to have a regard toHim as the Author of all the good things enjoyed either in common by allmankind or by each one in particular, and of all that they themselvesobtain by praying to Him in their greatest difficulties. He informedthem that it was impossible to escape God's observation, either in anyof our outward actions or in any of our inward thoughts. Moreover herepresented God as un-begotten and immutable through all eternity, superior to all mortal conceptions in form, and though known to us byHis power, yet unknown to us as to His essence. I do not now explain howthese notions of God are in harmony with the sentiments of the wisestamong the Greeks. However, their sages testify with great assurance thatthese notions are just and agreeable to the divine nature; forPythagoras and Anaxagoras and Plato and the Stoic philosophers thatsucceeded them, and almost all the rest profess the same sentiments, andhad the same notions of the nature of God; yet durst not these mendisclose those true notions to more than a few, because the body of thepeople were prejudiced beforehand with other opinions. But ourlegislator, whose actions harmonized with his laws, did not only prevailwith those who were his contemporaries to accept these notions, but sofirmly imprinted this faith in God upon all their posterity that itcould never be removed. The reason why the constitution of ourlegislation was ever better directed than other legislations to theutility of all is this: that Moses did not make religion a part ofvirtue, but he ordained other virtues to be a part of religion--I meanjustice, and fortitude, and temperance, and a universal agreement of themembers of the community with one another. All our actions and studieshave a reference to piety towards God, for he hath left none of these insuspense or undetermined. There are two ways of coming at any sort oflearning and a moral conduct of life: the one is by instruction inwords, the other by practical exercises. Now, other lawgivers haveseparated these two ways in their opinions, and, choosing the one whichbest pleased each of them, neglected the other. Thus did theLacedemonians and the Cretans teach by practical exercises, but not bywords; while the Athenians and almost all the other Greeks made lawsabout what was to be done, or left undone, but had no regard toexercising them thereto in practice. "But our legislator very carefully joined these two methods ofinstruction together; for he neither left these practical exercises tobe performed without verbal instruction, nor did he permit the learningof the law to proceed without the exercises for practice; but beginningimmediately from the earliest infancy and the regulation of our diet, heleft nothing of the very smallest consequence to be done at the pleasureand disposal of the individual. Accordingly, he made a fixed rule oflaw, what sorts of food they should abstain from, and what sorts theyshould use; as also what communion they should have with others, whatgreat diligence they should use in their occupations, and what times ofrest should be interposed, in order that, by living under that law asunder a father and a master, we might be guilty of no sin, neithervoluntary nor out of ignorance. For he did not suffer the guilt ofignorance to go without punishment, but demonstrated the law to be thebest and the most necessary instruction of all, directing the people tocease from their other employments and to assemble together for thehearing and the exact learning of the law, --and this not once or twiceor oftener, but every week; which all the other legislators seem to haveneglected. " This passage contains, in many ways, an admirable explanation of Judaismas a law of conduct, inculcating morality by good habit; it lacks, indeed, any deep spiritual note or mystical exaltation, but it waslikely for that reason to appeal to the practical, material-mindedRoman. Josephus corroborates what Seneca had grudgingly remarked, thatthe Jews understood their laws; and it is this, he says, which made sucha wonderful accord among us, to which no other nation can show aparallel. The eloquent insistence on the harmony uniting the Jewishpeople is another proof that Josephus is here reproducing the ideas ofothers, for it is in complete and glaring contrast with what he hadrepeatedly written in his _Antiquities_ and his _Wars_ about the strifeof different sects. His books would have supplied the best argument toany pagan criticising his apology. Josephus further ascribes to thesingleness of the tradition the absence of original genius among thepeople. The excellence of the Law produces a conservative outlook, whereas the Greeks, lacking a fixed law, love a new thing. S. D. Luzzatto, the Hebraist of the middle of the nineteenth century, emphasized the same contrast between Hellenism and Hebraism. Turning in detail to the precepts of the Law, Josephus gives eloquentexpression in the Hellenistic fashion to the idea of the divine unity. "God, " he says, "contains all: He is a being altogether perfect, happy, and self-sufficient, the beginning, the middle, and the end of allthings; God's aim is reflected in human institutions. Rightly He has butone Temple, which should be common to all men, even as He is the commonGod of all men. " He develops, too, the humanitarian aspect of Judaism inthe manner of the Hellenistic school. "And for our duty at thesacrifices, we ought in the first place to pray for the common welfareof all and after that for ourselves, for we were made for fellowship, one with another, and he who prefers the common good before his own isabove all dear to God. " He points to the excellence of the Jewishconception of marriage, another commonplace of the Hellenisticapologist, as we know from the Sibylline oracles; to the respect forparents and to the friendliness for the stranger. He insists withPhilo[1] that kinship is to be measured not by blood, but by the conductof life. He dwells, likewise in company with the Hellenists, on a lawthat lacks Bible authority: that the Israelites should give, to all whoneeded it, fire and water, food and guidance. [2] The impulse to thisinterpretation of the Torah is found in the charge made by the Jews'enemies, that they were to assist only members of their own race. [3]Josephus appears to be original, and, as is quite pardonable, he may bewriting with a view to Roman proclivities, when he praises the law forthe number of offenses to which it attaches the capital penalty. Likemany a later Jewish apologist living amid an alien and dominant culture, Josephus accepts foreign standards, and he is silent about the Pharisaicteaching which softened the literal prescripts of the Bible. [4] [Footnote 1: Comp. De Nobilitate. ] [Footnote 2: Comp. Philo, II. 639. ] [Footnote 3: Comp. Juvenal, Sat. Xiv. 102. ] [Footnote 4: It has been noticed above (note, p. 153) that Josephusappears to misunderstand or deliberately misinterpret the Hebrew[Hebrew: aror] (cursed be!), which precedes many prohibitions of theMosaic law, to mean "he shall be put to death. "] In a peroration Josephus returns to a general eulogy of the Jewish Law, on account of the faithful allegiance which it commands, and denouncesthe pagan idolatry in the manner of the Greek rationalists, who had madeplay with the Olympian hierarchy. While the inherent excellence of theJewish Law is dependent on the sublime conception of God, the inherentdefect of the Greek religion is that the Greek legislators entertained alow conception of God, and did not make the religious creed a part ofthe state law, but left it to the poets to invent what they chose. Thegreatest of the Greek philosophers, indeed, agreed with the Jews as tothe true notions about God: "Plato especially imitated our legislationin enjoining on all citizens that they should know the laws accurately. "A later generation made bold to declare that Plato had listened toJeremiah in Egypt and learnt his wisdom from the Jewish prophet. Josephus compares with the Jewish separateness the nationalexclusiveness of the Lacedemonians, and claims that the Jews show agreater humanity in that they admit converts from other peoples. Theyhave, moreover, shown their bravery not in wars for the purpose ofamassing wealth, but in observing their laws in spite of every attemptto wean them away. The Mosaic law is being spread over the civilizedworld: "For there is not any city of the Greeks, nor any of the barbarians, norany nation whatsoever whither our custom of resting on the seventh dayhas not come, and by which our fasts and lighting up of lamps and diversregulations as to food are not observed. They also endeavor to imitateour mutual accord with one another, and the charitable distribution ofour goods, and our diligence in our trades, and our fortitude in bearingthe distresses that befall us; and what is here matter of the greatestadmiration, our Law hath no bait of pleasure to allure men to it, but itprevails by its own force; and as God Himself pervades all the world, sohath our Law passed through all the world also. " The task of the apologist is completed; "for whereas our accusers havepretended that our nation are a people of late origin, I havedemonstrated that they are exceedingly ancient, and whereas they havereproached our lawgiver as a vile man, God of old bare witness to hisvirtues, and time itself hath been proved to bear witness to the samething. "[1] In a final appreciation he concludes: "As to the laws themselves, more words are unnecessary, for they arevisible in their own nature, and are seen to teach not impiety, but thetruest piety in the world. They do not make men hate one another, butencourage people to communicate what they have to one another freely. They are enemies to injustice, they foster righteousness, they banishidleness and expensive living, and instruct men to be content with whatthey have and to be diligent in their callings. They forbid men to makewar from a desire of gain, but make them courageous in defending thelaws. They are inexorable in punishing malefactors. They admit nosophistry of words, but are always established by actions, which we everpropose as surer demonstrations than what is contained in writing only;on which account I am so bold as to say that we are become the teachersof other men in the greatest number of things, and those of the mostexcellent nature only. For what is more excellent than inviolable piety?What is more just than submission to laws? And what is more advantageousthan mutual love and concord? And this prevails so far that we are to beneither divided by calamities nor to become oppressive and factious inprosperity, but to contemn death when we are in war, and in peace toapply ourselves to our handicrafts or to the tilling of the ground;while in all things and in all ways we are satisfied that God is theJudge and Governor of our actions. " [Footnote 1: C. Ap. Ii. 41. ] As we read this final outburst of the Jewish apologist and think of whathe had himself written to gainsay it, and what he was yet to write inhis autobiography, we are fain to exclaim, _o si sic omnia_! One wouldlike to believe that in the defense of the Jewish Law we have the trueJosephus, driven in his old age by the goading of enemies to throw offthe mask of Greco-Roman culture, and standing out boldly as a lover ofhis people and his people's law. Such latter-day repentance has beenknown among the Flavii of other generations. And the two books _AgainstApion_ show that when Josephus had not to qualify his own weakness norto flatter his patrons, he could rise to an appreciation and even to aneloquent exposition of Jewish ideals. Yet it was not the Greek-writinghistorian, but the Palestinian Rabbis, that were to prove to the worldthe undying vigor, the unquenchable power of resistance of the JewishLaw. The Vineyard of Jabneh founded by Johanan ben Zakkai was thesufficient refutation of Roman scoffers, while the apology of Josephusbecame the guide of the early Church fathers in their replies to heathencalumniators who repeated against them the charges that had beeninvented against the Jews. It is significant that Tacitus, who wrote hishistory some few years after the defense of Josephus was published, repeated with added virulence the fables which the Jewish writer hadrefuted. The charges of anti-Semites have in every age borne a charmedlife: they are hydra-headed, and can be refuted, not by literature, butby life. Nevertheless literary libels, if unanswered in literature, tend tobecome fixed popular beliefs, and in the Dark and Middle Ages the Jewishpeople were to suffer bitterly from the lack of apologists who couldobtain a hearing before the peoples of Europe. In the early centuries ofthe Christian era, before the Christian Church was allied with the RomanEmpire, tolerance ruled in the Greco-Roman world, and the narrow Romanhatred of Judaism was in large part broken down. Celsus, Numenius, andDion Cassius, three of the most notable authors of the second century, speak of the Jewish people and Jewish Scriptures in a very differenttone from that of a Tacitus and an Apion. And as it has been said, "Whoshall know how many cultured pagans were led by the books of Josephus toread the Bible and to look on Judaism with other eyes?"[1] If theapologies of Philo and Josephus could not pierce the armor of prejudiceand hatred which enwrapped a Tacitus or a Christian ecclesiastic, theyat least found their way through the lighter coating of ignorance andmisunderstanding which had been fabricated by Hellenistic Egyptians, butwhich had not fatally warped the minds of the general Greco-Romansociety. [Footnote 1: Comp. Joel, Blicke in die Religionsgeschichte, ii. 118. ] IX CONCLUSION The works of Josephus early passed into the category of standardliterature. It is recorded that they were placed by order of the FlavianEmperors in the public library of Rome; and though Suetonius, thebiographer of the Caesars, who wrote in the second century, andDiogenes, the biographer of the philosophers, who wrote a century later, do not apparently hold them of any account, it is certain that they werecarefully preserved till the triumph of the Christian Church gave them anew importance. For centuries henceforth they were the prime authorityfor Jewish history of post-Biblical times, and were treasured as a kindof introduction to the Gospels, illuminating the period in whichChristianity had its birth. The traitor-historian was soon forgotten byhis own people, if they ever had regard for him, and with the rest ofthe Hellenistic writers he dropped out of the Rabbinical tradition. Possibly the Aramaic version of the _Wars_ survived for a time in theEastern schools, but while the Jews were struggling to preserve theirreligious existence, they had little thought for such a history of theirpast. The Christians, on the other hand, had a special interest in the worksof Josephus, since they found in them not only the model of theirdefense against pagan calumnies, but the earliest external testimony tosupport the Gospels. Josephus was venerated as the Jew who had recordedthe fate of Jesus of Nazareth. The _Antiquities_ contain two referencesto John the Baptist and an account of the execution of James, thebrother of Jesus; but the most celebrated of the "evidential" passagesoccurs in book xviii of the _Antiquities_, where in our text, followingon the account of Pilate's persecution, occurs this paragraph: "Now, there lived about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful tocall him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of suchmen as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many ofthe Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him tothe cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for heappeared alive to them again the third day, as the divine prophets hadforetold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at thisday (ch. 3). " An enormous literature has been provoked by these lines, and the weightof modern opinion is that they are altogether spurious. The passage isfirst quoted by Eusebius, [1] the historian of Caesarea, who wrote aboutthe beginning of the fourth century C. E. ;[2] but Origen, his predecessorby a hundred years, significantly enough does not know of it. Josephus, he says simply, did not acknowledge the Christ. [3] At the same timeOrigen quotes a passage from the same book of the _Antiquities_, [4] toshow that the Jews ascribed the defeat of the Tetrarch Herod to hismurder of John the Baptist. The earliest of the Patristic writers, Clement of Alexandria, quotes Josephus as to chronology, but it isfairly certain that he did not know the works at first hand, since theera he refers to runs from Moses to the tenth year of Antoninus, [5] i. E. Till the better part of a century after the death of Josephus. Origenlikewise probably knew Josephus only at second hand, and the inferenceis that both the Alexandrian ecclesiastics derived their citations andtheir interpolation in the text of Josephus from a pious Christianabstract and improvement. The uncompromisingly Christian character ofthe text, the discrepancy between Origen and Eusebius, and the notoriousaptitude of early Christian scribes for interpolating manuscripts, andespecially the manuscripts of Hellenistic Jewish writers, withChristological passages make it well nigh certain that the paragraph wasfoisted in between the second and third century. That was a period when, as has been said, "faith was more vivid than good-faith. " The will tobelieve its genuineness, however, persisted to our own day, and somehave made a compromise between their sentiment and their criticalfaculty, by arguing that the passage, though partly corrupt, is foundedon something Josephus wrote. [6] [Footnote 1: Comp. Schlatter, _op. Cit. _ 403. ] [Footnote 2: H. E. I. 41; Comp. Freimann, Wie verhielt sich das Judenthumzu Jesus? (Monatsschrift fur die Geschichte und Wissenschaft desJudenthums, 1911, p. 296). ] [Footnote 3: Comm. In Matth. Ch. Xvii. ] [Footnote 4: Ant. XVIII. V. 5. ] [Footnote 5: Strom. I. Xxi. 409. ] [Footnote 6: Among those who uphold this view is the Franco-Jewishsavant Théodore Reinach, whose opinion is that the Christian scribechanged a _testimonium de Christo_ into a _testimonium pro Christo_(R. E. J. Xxxv. 6). Both Renan and Ewald hold that our passage is acorrupted fragment of a much fuller account of Jesus in the_Antiquities_. See Joel. _op. Cit_. P. 52. ] It is alleged that many of the words are such as Josephus might haveused, but, apart from the fact that this is contested by otherauthorities, it is unreasonable to suppose that the interpolator wouldgo out of his way to stamp the insertion as a forgery by usingextraordinary words. It is urged again that the passages about John andJames in the _Antiquities_ support the likelihood of Josephus' havingmentioned Jesus. But these passages are themselves open to very gravesuspicions. There is no reference to them in the epitome of the chaptersfurnished at the head of each book, which according to Niese dates fromthe age of the Antonines, or the end of the second century. Nor does theSlavonic version of Josephus contain the passage about James, and whileOrigen refers to that passage, he had a different version of it fromthat which appears in our manuscripts. It seems that he has incorporatedthe gloss of a Christian believer. And again, while our text imputes theblame of the stoning of James to the Sadducees, and gives credit to thePharisees for endeavoring to prevent it, Hegesippus, the Christianwriter of the second century, uses the alleged account of the incidentby Josephus to gird at the Pharisees. The probability is then thatdifferent Christological insertions were made in the manuscripts ofJosephus according to the leaning of the scribe, but that none of thesupposed evidences are genuine, or based on a genuine narrative. Theabsence of any reference to Jesus and the apostles in Josephus wouldhave seemed damaging to the truth of the Christian testament, andtherefore the passages were supplied. Nevertheless we may be grateful to the interpolators, because, on thestrength of these passages, Josephus was especially treasured throughthe Dark and Middle Ages, and he alone survived of the Hellenisticapologists. When Christianity established its center at Rome, Josephuswas soon translated into Latin, and in the Vulgate version (if we may socall it) he was best known for centuries. The seven books of the _Wars_were rendered into Latin by one Tyrannus Rufinus of Aquilea, who was acontemporary of Jerome (Hieronymus, 345-410 C. E. ), and a veryindustrious translator of the works of the Greek Patristic writers. Thetranslation of the _Antiquities_, though ascribed to the same author, was made later. Jerome apparently was invited to undertake the task, forin one of his letters he writes:[1] "The rumor that the works ofJosephus and Papian and Polycarp have been translated by me is false. Ihave neither the leisure nor the strength to render his writings intoanother tongue with the same elegance" [as those already done]. It isuncertain who the translator was, but the work was carried out at theinstigation of Cassiodorus (480-575), who lived in the time ofJustinian, and was a versatile historian. He wrote himself a chronicleof events from Adam to his own day as well as a history of the Goths. Inhis book on the Institutions of Holy Literature he says: "As to Josephus, who is almost a second Livy, and is widely known by hisbooks on the _Antiquities of the Jews_, Jerome declared that he wasunable to translate his works because of their great volume. But one ofmy friends has translated the twenty-two books [i. E. The _Antiquities_and the two books of the _Apology_], in spite of their difficulty andcomplexity, into the Latin tongue. He also wrote seven books of extremebrilliancy on the Conquest of the Jews, the translation of which someascribe to Jerome, others to Ambrose, and others to Rufinus. " [Footnote 1: Epist. Ad Lucrinum, 5. ] The autobiography of Josephus, alone of his writings, does not appear tohave been done into the language of the Western Church. Perhaps itsworthlessness was apparent even in the dark days. More ancient, however, and even more popular than the complete Latin version of Josephus, wasan abridgment of his works which passed under the name of Hegesippus. The name is not found till the ninth century, but it is likely that thework was written in the time of Ambrosius, the famous bishop of Milan(C. E. 350). In this form the seven books of the _Wars_ are compressedinto five, and the words and phrases of the original are modifiedthroughout. The writer in his preface explicitly declares that it is akind of revised version, and he improves the original by Christologicalinsertions, explaining, for example, the destruction of Jerusalem as ajudgment upon the Jews for the murder of Christ. Josephus, he says, aimsat the careful unraveling of events and at sobriety of speech, but helacks faith (_religio_) and truth; "and so we have been at pains, relying not on intellectual force but on the promptings of faith, toprobe for the inner meaning of Jewish history and to extract from itmore of value to our posterity. " Josephus is often mentioned by name asauthority for the statements, but at the same time considerableadditions are made from other Roman sources. Some have thought thatthere was a compiler named Hegesippus, others that the word is but acorruption of the Latinized form of the Jewish historian's name:Josippus, formed from [Greek: Io saepos], would become Egesippus, andfinally Hegesippus. A Greek epitome of Josephus also existed. We find it used by a Byzantinehistorian, John Zonaras, during the tenth and the eleventh century, inthe composition of his chronicles. It omitted the speeches andhistorical evidences of the fuller work and pruned its excessivegarrulousness. By the uncritical scholiasts and the prolix chroniclersof the Byzantine and Papal courts, Josephus was esteemed as adistinguished and godlike historian, and as a truthloving man ([Greek:philalaethaes anaer]). He was dubbed by Jerome "the Greek Livy, " and toTertullian and his followers he was an unfailing guide. Choice passagesin his writings are frequently extracted, often with a little purposivemodification, to emphasize some Christological design. Eustathius ofAntioch in the sixth century, Syncellus in the eighth, and Cedrenus andGlycas some three or four hundred years later, are among those whoseextant fragments prove a frequent use of Josephus. And the neo-Platonistphilosopher Porphyry (ab. 300 C. E. ), who was well acquainted with Jewishliterature, reproduces in his treatise on Abstinence the variouspassages about the Essenes from the _Wars_ and the _Antiquities_. TheEmperor Constantine later ordered extracts from the _Wars_ to be puttogether for his edification in a selection bearing the title _AboutVirtue and Vice_. Owing to this popularity, we have abundant manuscripts of Josephus. Theoldest of the Latin is as early as the sixth century; the Greek datefrom the tenth century and later. Niese, the most authoritative editorof Josephus in modern times, thinks that our manuscript families go backto one archetype of the second century in the epoch of the Antonines. The earliest printed copy like the earliest manuscript of his workcontains the Latin version, being a part of the _Antiquities_, which wasissued in 1470 at Augsburg. The whole corpus was printed in 1499, and, after a number of Latin editions, the first Greek edition was publishedat Basel by Arten, in 1544, together with the Fourth Book of theMaccabees, which was ascribed to the historian. In the days of vast but undiscriminating scholarship that followed theRenaissance, Josephus still enjoyed a great repute, and Scaliger, princeof polymaths, regarded him as superior to any pagan historian. The greatDutch scholar Havercamp made a special study of the manuscripts, andproduced, in 1726, a repertory of everything discovered about hisauthor. A little later Whiston, professor of mathematics at Cambridge, published an English translation of all the works, which is stillserviceable, but not critical, together with some dissertations, whichare neither serviceable nor critical. Later translations into Englishand almost every other language were made, but the greatest work ofmodern times on Josephus is the edition of Niese. Lastly, it may bementioned that we have a Slavonic version, which goes back to the eighthor the ninth century, and a Syriac version of the sixth book of the_Wars_, which is included, immediately after the Fourth Book of theMaccabees, in a manuscript of the Syriac version of the Bible datingfrom the sixth century, and is entitled the Fifth Book of the Maccabees. It has been suggested that the Syriac was based on the work whichJosephus published in Aramaic before he wrote the Greek; but ProfessorNöldeke has shown that the theory is not probable, since the translatorclearly used the Greek text. [1] Somewhat late in the day a Hebrewtranslation of the books _Against Apion_, which were regarded as themost Jewish part of his work, was made in the Middle Ages, and printed, together with Abraham Zacuto's Yuhasin, at Constantinople, in 1506, bySamuel Shullam. The Hebrew translation is very free, and is marred byseveral large omissions. It was very probably made with the help of theLatin version. [Footnote 1: Literarisches Centralblatt, 1880, no. 20, p. 881. ] While Josephus enjoyed great honor among Christian scholars, forcenturies he passed out of the knowledge of his own people. The Talmudhas no reference to him, for the surmise that he is the "philosopher"visited by the four sages who journeyed from Palestine to Rome[1] is nomore than a vague possibility. Nor has the supposed identification withthe Joseph Hakohen that is mentioned in the Midrash anything more solidto uphold it. [2] In the Middle Ages, however, when Spain, Italy, andNorth Africa witnessed a remarkable revival of Jewish literature, bothsecular and religious, and when scientific studies again interested thepeople, the historical literature of other peoples became known to theirscholars, and several Jewish writers mention the chronicles of oneYosippon, or "little Joseph. " The text of the chronicle itself is widelyknown from the eleventh century onwards. The first author to mention itis David ben Tammum (ab. 950), and an extract from the book is foundabout a century later. Four manuscripts of it have come down to us: twoin the Vatican, one in Paris, and one in Turin, and it was among theearliest Hebrew books printed. Professing to be the work of Joseph benGorion, one of the Jewish commanders in the war with Rome and a prefectof Jerusalem, it is written in a Rabbinical Hebrew that is nearer theclassical language than most medieval compositions. It was indeed arguedon the ground of its pure classical idiom that it dated from the fourthcentury, but Zunz[3] showed that this was impossible. It bears all thetraces of the pseudepigraphic tendency of a period that produced thefirst works of the Cabala, the Seder Olam Zutta of Rabbi Joshua, and theneo-Hebraic apocalypses. The attempt to write an archaic Hebrew ismarred by the presence of Rabbinical and novel terms. Reference toevents or things only known to later times is combined with thepretension of an ancient chronicle. The country and the date of theauthor are uncertain, but probabilities point to Italy, where in theninth and tenth centuries Jewish culture flourished, and where bothArabic and Latin works were well known in the Ghettos. The transcriptionof foreign names, the frequent introduction of the names of places inItaly, the acquaintance with Roman history, and the fact that ItalianJews are among the first to recognize Yosippon favor this theory. It isfitting that the country where Josephus wrote his history should alsohave produced a Jewish imitation of his work. Yosippon indeed was soontranslated into Arabic, and its narratives and legends passed into thecurrent stock of Ghetto history. The book was swollen by lateradditions, which Zunz has proved to belong to the twelfth century. OneYerahmeel ben Shelomoh who flourished in that epoch is mentioned in anearly manuscript as a compiler of Yosippon and other histories; and itis possible that he was himself responsible for parts of the work in itspresent form. [Footnote 1: Derek Erez, ed. Goldberg, iii. 10. ] [Footnote 2: Moëd Katon, 23a. See above, p. 177. ] [Footnote 3: Comp. Zunz, Gottesdienstliche Vorträge, pp. 154_ff_. ] The chronicle of Yosippon is a summary of Jewish history, withconsiderable digressions--many of them later interpolations--about thehistory of the nations with whom the Hebrew people came into contact, Babylon, Greece, and Rome. Like the Book of Chronicles, it begins withAdam and genealogies, explains the roll of the nations in Genesis, andthen springs suddenly from the legendary origin of Babel and Rome to therelation of the Jews with Babylon. The history proper contains therecord of the Jews from the first to the second captivity, but is brokenby a mass of legendary material about Alexander the Great--reproducingmuch of what is found in pseudo-Callisthenes--and by a short account ofthe Carthaginian general Hannibal and several incidents of Romanhistory. These include a description of a coronation of the Emperor, which, it is suggested, applies to the medieval and not the classicalperiod of the Empire. The book was known throughout the later part of the Middle Ages and downto the eighteenth century as the Hebrew Josephus, and contrasted withthe [Hebrew: Yosifon la-Romim], or "Latin Josephus. " When the genuineworks of our worthy became known to the Jews, Yosippon was regarded asthe true representative of the Jewish point of view against thepaganizing traitor. Its author had not a first-hand acquaintance withour Josephus. He knew him only through the Latin versions, which weremixed with much later material. Possibly he meant to pass off his workas the Hebrew original of the Jewish history, and confused Joseph benGorion with Joseph ben Mattathias; for in the introduction to onemanuscript we read, "I am Joseph, called Josephus the Jew, of whom it iswritten that he wrote the book of the wars of the Lord, and this is thesixth part. " This, however, may be the gloss of a later scribe, whofound an anonymous book, and thought fit to supply the omission. Inplaces the Hebrew translator reproduces, though with some blunders, theLatin Hegesippus, but he sought to give charm to his work by legendaryadditions, which more often show Arabic and other foreign influencesthan traces of the Jewish Haggadah. Interpolations have served toincrease the legendary element, and take away from the historical value. But it is this element, reflecting the ideas of the age, that gives thecomposition a peculiar literary interest. Though only to a small extent representing Jewish tradition, the bookremained very popular among the Jews both of the West and the East, andwas long regarded as authoritative. The first printed edition was issuedat Mantua, in 1476, and was followed by the edition of Constantinople, in 1520, arranged in chapters and enlarged, and an edition of Basel, in1541, containing a Latin preface and a Latin translation of the greaterpart. In 1546 a printed Yiddish edition appeared in Zurich, and in theGhetto it retains its popularity to the present day. Other editions andtranslations have followed. Steinschneider has noted that as late as1873 an abstract of the Arabic translation together with the Arabicversion of the Book of the Maccabees was published at Beirut. [1] Thespuriousness of the work has now been established, and of modernscholars Wellhausen[2] is almost alone in ascribing to it anyindependent historical worth. In the Spanish period of Jewish culturethe real as well as the spurious Josephus was read by many of his race, and some hard things were said of him. Thus Rabbi Isaac Abrabanel, thestatesman and apologist (1457-1508), regarded him as a common sycophantand wrote, "In many things he perverted the truth, even where we havethe Scriptures before us, in order to court favor with the Romans, as aslave submits himself to the will of his master. " Azariah de Rossi (ab. 1850), anticipating the ideas of a later age, alone balanced his meritsagainst his demerits. Among the great Christian scholars of theRenaissance, however, he enjoyed great fame. Joseph Scaliger, the mosteminent of the seventeenth century critics, could write of him, "Josephus was the most diligent and the most truthloving of all writers, and one can better believe him, not only as to the affairs of the Jews, but also as to the Gentiles, than all the Greek and Latin writers, because his fidelity and his learning are everywhere conspicuous. "[3] Itis illustrative of his popularity that Rembrandt named one of his greatJewish pictures after him. Whiston's English translation of his worksbecame a household book, found side by side with the Bible and _ThePilgrim's Progress_. [4] [Footnote 1: J. Q. R. Xvi. 393. ] [Footnote 2: Der arabische Josippus; see J. E. , s. V. Joseph ben Gorion. ] [Footnote 3: De Emend. Temp. Proleg. 17. ] [Footnote 4: Readers of Rudyard Kipling may recall that in _CaptainsCourageous_ one of the seamen on board the "We're Here" Schooner readsaloud on Sunday from a book called Josephus: "It was an oldleather-bound volume very solid and very like a Bible, but enlivenedwith accounts of battles and sieges. "] In modern times his reputation as a trustworthy authority hasdepreciated considerably, and it is still depreciating. More accuratestudy and wider knowledge have exposed his grave defects as anhistorian, and the critical standpoint has dissipated the halo withwhich his supposed Christian sympathies had invested him, and laid barehis weakness and his essential unreliability. Yet with all his glaringfaults and unlovable qualities he has certain solid merits. The greatestcertainly is that his works so appealed to later generations as to havebeen preserved, and thereby posterity has been enabled to get someknowledge, however inadequate, of the history of the Jewish polityduring its last two hundred years--between the time of the Maccabees andthe fall of the nation--which would otherwise have been buried in almostunrelieved darkness. And at the same time he has preserved a record ofsome interesting pieces of Egyptian, Syrian, and Roman history. Justbecause he was so little original, he has a special usefulness; for hereproduces the statements of more capable writers than himself, who havedisappeared, and he has embodied an aspect of the Hellenistic-Jewishliterature which had otherwise been lost. We can estimate his value tous as an historian from our ignorance of what was happening in Judeaduring the fifty years after his account comes to an end. It is true that he brings before us, for the most part, but the externalfacts and the court scandals in place of the vital movements and theunderlying principles; and in dealing with contemporary events he has aperverted view, borrowed largely from Roman foes and feebly corrected. But it is something to have preserved even these facts, and in theaccount of the _Wars_ he often draws a vivid picture. The siege ofJerusalem has passed into the roll of the world's heroic events, and itowes its place there largely to the narrative of Josephus. Moreover, inspite of his pusillanimity and his subservience to his Roman patrons, Josephus did possess a distinct pride of race and a love of his people. It led him at times to glorify them in a gross way, but notably in thebooks _Against Apion_ it could inspire a certain eloquence; and manyhostile outsiders must have learnt from his pages to appreciate some ofthe great qualities of the Jewish people. To appraise him fairly is difficult. He has few of the qualities, eitherpersonal or literary, that attract sympathy and many of the defects thatrepel. He is at once vain and obsequious, servile and spiteful, professing candor and practising adulation, prolix and prosaic. As ageneral he proved himself a traitor; as apologist of the Jews, afunction which he asserted for himself, he marred by a lack ofindependence the service which he sought to render his people. In hisaccount of their past he was often false to their fundamental ideas ofGod and history. Whether he was really under the influence of thedebased Greco-Roman culture of the day, which consigned mankind to thedominion of fatality, or whether he deliberately masked his ownstandpoint to please his audience, he presented the history of theHebrew nationality in the light of ideas of fate strange to it. He hasperpetuated a false picture of the Zealots, whose avowed enemy he was, and he reveals an inadequate understanding of the deeper ideas anddeeper principles of the Pharisees, whose champion he professed to be. Generally, in dealing with the struggle against Rome, his dominatingdesire to justify his own submission and please the Romans led him todistort the facts, and rendered him blind to the real heroism of hiscountrymen. The client in him prevails over the historian: we can neverbe sure whether he is expressing his own opinion or only what heconceives will be pleasing to his patrons and masters. This dependenceaffects his presentation of Judaism as well as of the Jewish people. Hedissembled his theological opinions in his larger historical works, andit is only in his last apologetic composition that he assertsconfidently a Jewish point of view. Yet it is but fair to Josephus to consider the times and circumstancesin which he wrote. It was an age when the love of truth was almost dead, extinguished partly by the crushing tyranny of omnipotent Emperors, partly by the intellectual and moral degeneration of pagan society. TheFlavian house soon showed the same characteristics of a vaingloriousdespotism as the line of Caesars which it had supplanted. Under Domitian"the only course possible for a writer without the risk of outlawry orthe sacrifice of personal honor was that followed by Juvenal and Tacitusduring his reign, viz. , silence. " It was an age when, in the words ofMazzini, "a hollow sound as of dissolution was heard in the world. Manseemed in a hideous case: placed between two infinities, he knewneither. He knew not past nor future. All belief was dead; dead thebelief in the gods, dead the belief in the Republic. " The material powerof Rome, while it dazzled by its splendor, seemed invincible, and itcrushed, in all save the strongest, independence of thought andindependence of national life. Unfortunately it fell to Josephus towrite amid these surroundings his account of the Jewish wars and thehistory of the Jews, and he may have been driven to distortion to keephis perilous position at court. The moral environment, too, was such asto contaminate those who had not a deep faith and a strong Hebrewconsciousness. At Alexandria it was possible to achieve a harmonybetween Judaism and the spiritual teaching of Greek philosophy; but thebasic conceptions of Roman Imperialism were not to be brought intoaccord with Jewish ideas. Josephus had no conception of the moral weakness, he felt only theinvincible power, of the conqueror. He was a Jew, isolated in Rome, estranged from his own people, and not at home in his environment, afavored captive in a splendid court, a member of a subject people livingin the halls of the mighty. Did ever situation more strongly conduce tomoral servility and mental dependence! It was well nigh impossible forhim, even had he possessed the ability, to write an honest andindependent history of the Jews. It required some courage andsteadfastness to write of the Jews at all. In such circumstances hemight well have become an apostate, as his contemporary TiberiusAlexander had done, and it is a tribute to his Jewish feeling that heremained in profession and in heart true to his people, that he was notamong those who with the fall of the second Temple exclaimed, "Our hopeis perished: we are cut off. " He had indeed chosen the easier and lessnoble way on the destruction of the national life of his people; hepreferred the palace of the Palatine with its pomp to the Vineyard atJabneh with its wise men. While Johanan ben Zakkai was saving Judaism, Josephus was apologizing for it. Yet he too has done some service: hepreserved some knowledge of his people and their religion for theGentiles, and became one of the permanent authorities for that hereticalbody of Jewish proselytes who in his own day were beginning to markthemselves off as a separate sect, and who carried on to some extent thework of Hellenistic Judaism. Perhaps the true judgment about him is thathe was neither noble nor villainous, neither champion nor coward, butone of those mediocre men of talent but of weak character andconflicting impulses struggling against adversity who succumb to thedifficulties of the time in which their life is passed, and sacrificetheir individuality to comfort. But he wrote something that has lived;and for what he wrote, if not for what he was, he has a niche in theliterary treasure house of the Jewish people as well as in the annals ofgeneral history. As a man, if he cannot inspire, he may at least standas a warning against that facile subservience to external powers andthat fatal assimilation of foreign thought which at once destroy theindividuality of the Jew and deprive him of his full humanity. BIBLIOGRAPHY The best Greek text of Josephus is that edited by Niese (Berlin, 1887-1894), but the editions of Bekker (Leipzig, 1855) and Dindorf(Paris, 1845) are still serviceable. The standard English translation of the complete works is that made byWilliam Whiston, of Cambridge, a century ago. It has been revised inmodern times--not very thoroughly--by Shilleto (London, 1890) and byMargoliouth (London, 1909). A French translation, which contains excellent notes to the text, is inthe course of publication under the general editorship of M. ThéodoreReinach; and there are German translations of the whole works, by Demme, and of the _Antiquities_, by Martin (Köln, 1852) and Clementz (Halle, 1900). The _Life_ and the books _Against Apion_ were translated by M. Jost (Leipzig, 1867) and books xi-xiii of the _Antiquities_ byHorschitzky. And there is another elaborately annotated edition of thebooks _Against Apion_ by J. G. Müller. The best modern works on the Roman history of the period are Mommsen's_Roman Provinces_, and Merivale's _History of the Roman Empire_; and ofthe literature of the contemporaries of Josephus, the _Annals_ and_Histories_ of Tacitus and the _Lives of the Caesars_ by Suetonius arethe most valuable historical sources. For Jewish history, the fullest account is provided by Schürer's_Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu_ (fourth edition), which contains a thorough criticism of Josephus and the best generalinvestigation into his sources. The work has been translated intoEnglish. Joel's _Blicke in die Religionsgeschichte_ is suggestive uponcertain aspects of the period. Graetz, of course, deals with the events, and in the _Stories of theNations Series_ (Putnam) there is a volume on _The Jews under theRomans_ by Hosmer, which is readable. The opening chapters of Berliner's _Die Juden in Rom_, and of Vogelsteinand Rieger's _Geschichte der Juden in Rom_ (Berlin, 1895) are concernedwith the relations of Jews and Romans in the first century; and a seriesof articles on the same subject by Hils, in the _Revue des étudesjuives_ (vols. Viii and xi), is noteworthy. Anatole France has writtentwo very vivid sketches of the Roman attitude to the Jews, which give abetter impression of the inner conflict between the two peoples than anystrictly historical work, "Gallion" in _Sur la pierre blanche_, and "LeProcurateur de Judée" in _L'étui de nacre_. Among critical studies of Josephus as an historian the most strikingworks are: Schlatter, _Zur Topographie und Geschichte Palästinas_ (Stuttgart, 1893). Bloch, _Die Quellen des Flavius Josephus_ (Leipzig, 1879). Nussbaum, _Observationen in Flavius Josephus_ (Göttingen, 1875). Destinon, _Die Chronologie des Josephus_ (Kiel, 1880) and _Die Quellendes Josephus_ (1882). Büchler, A. , _Les Sources de Josèphe_, R. E. J. Xxii. And xxiv. , and _TheSources of Josephus for the History of Syria_, J. Q. R. Ix. Holscher, G. , _Die Quellen des Josephus_, etc. (Leipzig, 1904). For the relation of Josephus to the Bible and Jewish tradition, thefollowing monographs may be consulted: Duschak, _Josephus und die Tradition_ (Vienna, 1864). Olitzki, _Flavius Josephus und die Halacha_ (Berlin, 1885). Schlatter, _Die hebräischen Namen bei Josephus_ (Gütersloh, 1913). Grünbaum, _Die Priester-Gesetze bei Fl. Josephus_ (1887). Poznanski, _Ueber die religionsphilosophischen Anschauungen des Fl. Josephus_ (Berlin, 1887). The apologetic works of Josephus are especially dealt with by: Friedlaender, M. , _Die Geschichte der jüdischen Apologetik_ (Vienna, 1906). Müller, J. G. , _Des Fl. Josephus Schrift gegen den Apion_ (Basel, 1877). Gutschmid, _Kleine Schriften_, iv. (Leipzig, 1893). The work of M. Théodore Reinach, _Textes des auteurs grecs et romainsrélatifs au judaisme_, is a very useful collection of the pagan accountsof Jewish life which Josephus was seeking to refute. Among general appreciations of Josephus, there may be mentioned thoseof: Edersheim, in Smith and Wace's Dictionary of Christian Biography. Foakes-Jackson, in the Jewish Review, iv. Margoliouth, in his edition of Whiston's translation. Niese, in the Historische Zeitschrift, lxxvi. ABBREVIATIONS USED IN REFERRING TO THE WORKS OF JOSEPHUS Ant. : _The Antiquities of the Jews_. B. J. : _The Wars_ (Bellum Judaicum)C. Ap. : _Against Apion_ (Contra Apionem)