Josephus

• 1. Introduction

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  Flavius Josephus surrendered to the Roman army in AD 67, then told his captor a prophecy that would save his life. Trapped in a cave with forty companions after the six-week siege of Yodfat, he proposed that the group kill one another by lot rather than fall into Roman hands. By his own account, he was one of the last two men left alive, and he chose to surrender. He was born Yosef ben Mattityahu around AD 37 in Jerusalem, then part of the Roman province of Judea. His father came from priestly descent. His mother claimed Hasmonean royal ancestry. He began the First Jewish-Roman War as general of the Jewish forces in Galilee. He ended it as a freedman who took the family name of a Roman emperor. How does a man cross from one side of a war to the other and become its most important chronicler? What did he see in the destruction of Jerusalem, and why have readers argued about his honesty for nearly two thousand years?

• 2. A Cave At Yodfat

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  In July of AD 67, the Roman army under Vespasian and his son Titus reached the village of Yodfat, also called Jotapata, and Josephus held out against the siege until the town fell. When the garrison collapsed, the Romans invaded and killed thousands; the survivors took their own lives. Josephus wrote that he was confined in a cave with forty of his companions when the Romans asked the group to surrender, and they refused. By his account, he suggested a method of collective suicide. The men drew lots and killed each other one by one. Josephus happened to be one of the two who remained, and he surrendered to the Roman forces and became a prisoner. The siege of Yodfat ended in the lunar month of Tammuz, in the thirteenth year of Nero's reign. Josephus's critics were never satisfied as to why his suicide attempt did not kill him in Galilee. After his capture, he accepted the patronage of Romans, which deepened their suspicion. Author Joseph Raymond would later call him the Jewish Benedict Arnold for betraying his own troops at Jotapata. The next test of his survival came not from a sword but from a prediction.

• 3. The Prophecy Of An Emperor

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  While confined at Yodfat, Josephus claimed to have experienced a divine revelation that led to a speech predicting Vespasian would become Roman emperor. Vespasian responded by keeping him as a slave and presumably an interpreter rather than executing him. When Vespasian became emperor in AD 69, the prediction came true, and he granted Josephus his freedom. He considered the gift of prophecy to be divine. At that moment Josephus assumed the emperor's family name of Flavius, as was the custom amongst freedmen. Josephus wrote that his revelation had taught him three things: that God, the creator of the Jewish people, had decided to punish them; that fortune had been given to the Romans; and that God had chosen him to announce the things that are to come. To many Jews, such claims were simply self-serving. He interpreted the destruction of the Temple as a sign that God had turned to the Romans because of Jewish sins, and he urged submission to Roman authority. Yet he also believed the covenant between God and Israel remained intact, with restoration dependent on Jewish repentance. He then became an advisor and close associate of Titus, serving as his translator during the protracted siege of Jerusalem in AD 70.

• 4. Governor Of Galilee

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  At around 26 years old, Josephus had traveled to Rome to negotiate the release of Jewish priests imprisoned there by Nero. With the help of Nero's wife Poppaea and a Jewish actor, he secured their freedom. Upon his return to Jerusalem, at the outbreak of the First Jewish-Roman War, he was appointed military governor of Galilee, and he trained 65,000 troops in the region. His arrival was fraught with internal division. The inhabitants of Sepphoris and Tiberias wanted to keep peace with the Romans. The people of Sepphoris enlisted the Roman army to protect their city, while the people of Tiberias appealed to King Agrippa's forces for protection from the insurgents. Josephus also contended with John of Gischala, who had set his sights on control of Galilee. Like Josephus, John had gathered a large band of supporters from Gischala, also called Gush Halab, and Gabara, including the support of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem. Josephus fortified towns across Lower Galilee, among them Tiberias, Bersabe, Selamin, Japha, and Tarichaea. In Upper Galilee he fortified Jamnith, Seph, Mero, and Achabare, among other places. He brought both Sepphoris and Tiberias into subjection, but was forced to give up Sepphoris when Roman forces arrived under Placidus the tribune and later under Vespasian himself. He first engaged the Roman army at a village called Garis, attacking Sepphoris a second time before being repulsed.

• 5. A New Life In Rome

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  In AD 71, Josephus went to Rome as part of the entourage of Titus, and there he became a Roman citizen and a client of the ruling Flavian dynasty. Along with citizenship he received accommodation in conquered Judaea and a pension. While in Rome and under Flavian patronage, he wrote all of his known works. Although he only ever calls himself Josephus in his writings, later historians refer to him as Flavius Josephus, confirming that he took the nomen Flavius from his patrons. His family life was reshaped by his change of fortune. Vespasian arranged for Josephus to marry a captured Jewish woman, whom he later divorced. Around the year 71, he married an Alexandrian Jewish woman as his third wife, and they had three sons, of whom only Flavius Hyrcanus survived childhood. He later divorced her too. Around 75, he married his fourth wife, a Greek Jewish woman from Crete who belonged to a distinguished family, and they had two sons, Flavius Justus and Flavius Simonides Agrippa. During the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70, Josephus said he acted as a negotiator with the defenders, while his parents were held as hostages by Simon bar Giora.

• 6. The Books He Left Behind

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  In AD 78 Josephus finished a seven-volume account written in Greek, known as The Jewish War. His first work in Rome had been an account addressed to certain upper barbarians, usually thought to be the Jewish community in Mesopotamia, in his paternal tongue, arguably the Western Aramaic language. The history begins with the period of the Maccabees and concludes with the fall of Jerusalem and the later fall of the fortresses of Herodion, Macharont, and Masada. He blames the war on what he calls unrepresentative and over-zealous fanatics among the Jews, who led the masses away from their traditional aristocratic leaders. He wrote that Simon bar Giora was a greater terror to the people than the Romans themselves, and he also blamed some Roman governors of Judea as corrupt and incompetent. His next work was the 21-volume Antiquities of the Jews, completed around AD 93 or 94, during the last year of the reign of the Emperor Flavius Domitian. It recounts the history of the world from a Jewish perspective for an ostensibly Greek and Roman audience, beginning with the creation. In it, Abraham taught science to the Egyptians, who taught the Greeks, and Moses set up a priestly aristocracy that, like Rome's, resisted monarchy. He also wrote Against Apion around AD 97, a two-volume defence of Judaism stressing its antiquity, and the Life of Josephus around AD 94 to 99, an autobiography revisiting his tenure in Galilee in response to allegations by Justus of Tiberias.

• 7. History Or Distortion

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  In the Preface to The Jewish War, Josephus criticized historians who misrepresent the events of the Jewish-Roman War, writing that they have a mind to demonstrate the greatness of the Romans while they still diminish and lessen the actions of the Jews. He said his intention was to correct this method, but that he would not go to the other extreme and would prosecute the actions of both parties with accuracy. He admitted he could not contain his sadness in transcribing these events. He suggested that a critic should attribute the facts to the historical part and the lamentations to the writer himself only. In the preface to Antiquities he offered a different attitude, saying a man who reads the history may learn that all events succeed well, even to an incredible degree, and the reward of felicity is proposed by God. Louis H. Feldman notes that in The Jewish War, Josephus commits to critical historiography, but in Antiquities he shifts to rhetorical historiography, the norm of his time. Feldman points out that Josephus called his later work Antiquities, literally archaeology, rather than history. In the Hellenistic period, archaeology meant history from the origins, and antiquarians wrote in a systematic order, ranging beyond political history into institutions and religious and private life.

• 8. The Long Afterlife

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  Carl Ritter, writing in his Erdkunde in the 1840s, judged that outside of the Scriptures, Josephus holds the first and only place among the native authors of Judaea. Ritter added that he is to be used with great care, because his great purpose was to bring the despised Jewish race into honour with the Greeks and Romans, filling his history with distortions and exaggerations. Josephus mentioned that in his day there were 240 towns and villages scattered across Upper and Lower Galilee. His works are the chief source next to the Bible for the history of ancient Israel, and they give an independent account of Pontius Pilate, Herod the Great, John the Baptist, James the brother of Jesus, and Jesus of Nazareth. Christians embraced him from the 4th century onward, and his works were translated into Latin, often in abbreviated form such as Pseudo-Hegesippus's version of The Jewish War. The 1544 Greek edition, edited by the Dutch humanist Arnoldus Arlenius, formed the basis of the 1732 English translation by William Whiston, which became, after the Bible, the book Christians most frequently owned. On the Jewish side he was far more obscure, perceived as a traitor, until an Italian Jew in the 10th century wrote the Yosippon, a paraphrase that brought him back to prominence. Kalman Schulman finally created a Hebrew translation of the Greek text in 1863. A careful reading of his writings helped the archaeologist Ehud Netzer of Hebrew University search for 35 years before identifying what he believed to be Herod's Tomb, 12 km south of Jerusalem, an identification still debated after October 2013.