Table of Contents
Praise
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
PREFACE
Introduction
Chapter 1 - A Young Nobleman
Chapter 2 - An Occupied Country
Chapter 3 - Rome and Poppaea
Chapter 4 - The Jew Baiter
Chapter 5 - War
Chapter 6 - Governor of Galilee
Chapter 7 - The Return of the Legions
Chapter 8 - The Siege of Jotapata
Chapter 9 - The Cave and the Prophecy
Chapter 10 - Josephus the Prisoner
Chapter 11 - John of Gischala Comes to Jerusalem
Chapter 12 - The Zealot Revolution
Chapter 13 - The Reconquest of Judea
Chapter 14 - Simon bar Giora
Chapter 15 - The Year of the Four Emperors
Chapter 16 - Titus Takes Command
Chapter 17 - The Siege Begins
Chapter 18 - Inside Jerusalem
Chapter 19 - The Wooden Wall
Chapter 20 - The Destruction of the Temple
Chapter 21 - A Holocaust
Chapter 22 - The Propagandist
Chapter 23 - Masada and the Last Zealots
Chapter 24 - A Roman Citizen
Chapter 25 - History’s Verdict
NOTES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Copyright Page
“I will bring evil from the north and a great destruction”
JEREMIAH, IV, 6
For James and Claire Heagerty
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My interest in Josephus is a legacy from my father, who served in Palestine during the First World War. He always believed that he had been the first man to fly over Masada, having lost his way while returning from an attempt to intercept two German aircraft in 1916. During his time in the Sinai Desert, William Whiston’s translation of The Jewish War became one of his favorite books, and he developed a respect for the fighting qualities of the Jews in both ancient and modern times, which he shared with me. He also instilled an admiration for Josephus’s history of the Jewish struggle against Rome, together with a keen interest in its author’s personality. My interest became fascination after reading the novels of Lion Feuchtwanger, based on Josephus’s life.
As I hope will become clear, this book is intended to be an introduction to Josephus for general readers, not for academics. However, I must record a great debt to the scholars whose work made it possible for me to understand him and whose names are listed in the bibliography.
In addition, I owe a special debt to Edgar Feuchtwanger, Lion’s nephew, for much encouragement and for drawing my attention to Andra Bunzel’s recent study of his uncle’s novels. I would particularly like to thank those who found the time to read the manuscript or part of it or who gave me helpful criticism or encouragement: André Ciechanowiecki, Annabel Hervey-Bathurst, Stella Lesser (who read the proofs), Margot Lovell, Jaqueline Mitchell, Aidan Nichols, Charles Sebag-Montefiore, John Sterling (who explained to me the meaning of the word Khittim), and Damian Thompson. I am also indebted to Sarah Ayed and to David Price-Hughes of AKG, who helped me to find the illustrations.
As so often before, I am grateful to the staffs of the British Library, the Cambridge University Library, and the London Library for all their patient assistance.
PREFACE
“Masada Shall Not Fall Again”
On a tall hill flanked by deep ravines, the fortress of Masada, commanding a promontory near the western shore of the Dead Sea, was one of the strongest in all Judea. It had been a refuge of King Herod, who had added a palace, a synagogue, and an arsenal. Cisterns in the rock caught an ample supply of rain water. After Jerusalem fell to the Romans in 70 CE, Masada held out for three years, defended by several hundred Jewish revolutionaries known as Zealots under the command of Eleazar ben Yair, who was convinced that it could never be captured. However, not only did the Roman legionaries come and besiege Masada, but within a few months they built a ramp 400 feet high, from which they were finally able to breach the previously impenetrable walls with their siege engines.
On the night before the Romans’ final assault, Eleazar, in an impassioned speech, ordered his troops to kill themselves and their families. When the enemy broke in the next morning, they found nearly a thousand bodies lying in neat rows. Only two women and some children, who had hidden in a cistern, were left alive to explain what had happened. Instead of feeling jubilant, the legionaries were awestricken.
One of the mottoes of the modern Israeli army is “Masada shall not fall again!” and recruits spend their last night of training trekking through the desert to see dawn break over the great fortress.
Our sole source for the story is Flavius Josephus—Yossef ben Mattityahu ha-Kohen, to give him his true name—who was not present at the siege and who despised Zealots as lowborn fanatics. Even so, he was deeply moved by what the legionaries told him of Masada. As a Jewish general, and then as a Roman prisoner, he had already witnessed the campaign of 66-70 CE, which turned out to be the worst disaster suffered by his people between the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BCE and the Nazi Holocaust in the twentieth century CE. In The Jewish War and in his Life, written at Rome, he gives us an eyewitness account of the First Jewish-Roman War. The story of Masada restored Josephus’s pride in his nation, inspiring him to write two more books—one a historical study of Jewish religion and civilization, the other a defense of Judaism.
Often the narrative of The Jewish War reads like an adventure story, and it has the immediacy of a first-person historical novel (such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius). Besides being related by a member of the old aristocracy who somehow escaped the twofold menace of foreign invasion and revolution, it paints an astonishingly vivid, if not always entirely frank, self-portrait of the author. It is easy to understand why over the centuries his Jewish War has been the most widely read book by an ancient Jewish author other than those of the Bible. It is the only surviving contemporary history of Palestine in the days of Herod, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Jesus of Nazareth.
“The war between the Romans and the Jews was the greatest of our time, in its own way greater than any war in history,” he claims. “For the sake of everybody governed by Rome I decided to translate into Greek a book that I had written about it in my native tongue for the benefit of distant barbarians.” He adds proudly, “I am a Hebrew myself, a priest from Jerusalem.”
The Jewish War recreates the war as he experienced it, seen through his eyes, the Jews’ fight against an overwhelmingly superior enemy—a war that ended in genocide. It describes the destruction of a nation driven into rebellion by Roman brutality. The climax of the Jews’ struggle against the Roman legions was not Masada, however magnificent, but the siege of Jerusalem, during which the defenders’ rival factions slaughtered each other between Roman assaults. When the end came, Jerusalem lay in smoking ruins—a million people had died, the survivors being crucified or sent to the arena or to the slave market. Yet Josephus believed that the war might have been avoided, while he also insisted that it was possible to be both Jewish and Roman. Coupled with nostalgia for a beloved Jerusalem that had vanished forever, this gives his account great poignancy.
No other ancient writer reveals so much about himself, and we know more about him as a human being than about any Jew of his time, however much he boasts or tries to portray himself in a favorable light. By any standards, he seems to have had a difficult personality, yet critics too easily forget the pride he took in his
nation—he could not bear his readers to think that Jews could ever be cowards. The Jewish War, his most famous book, is supplemented by the short Vita, his so-called autobiography, which is largely a piece of special pleading in defense of his behavior when he was military governor of Galilee. There is also some information about both himself and the war in his lengthy Antiquities of the Jews, while a few further details are given in the Contra Apionem, his passionate defense of Jewish religion and culture. All of them provide glimpses into his mind.
Since Josephus’s description of the siege is the only one to survive, apart from a few pages in Tacitus and Dio Cassius, it is impossible to check what he says. Occasionally, however, we can identify distortions that are obviously due to prejudice. This applies particularly to his enemies, the Zealots, whom he constantly denigrates and slanders, although sometimes he cannot deny their bravery. We know about them solely from his hostile account—which is rather as if we knew about the Russian revolutionaries of 1917 only from the memoirs of some White Russian general. He plays down the fact that a substantial number came from his own class. At the end of The Jewish War, however, when pride in his faith and his nation overcomes his dislike of the Zealots, he gives us a fairer picture in describing their refusal to surrender at Masada and admits that they included more than a few heroes.
Similarly, his figures for casualties are all too often unconvincing and usually must be questioned. Almost invariably, he seems to exaggerate when stating the number of those who were killed or wounded, died of starvation, or were sent to the slave market. His motive appears to have been a desire to impress his readers.
Those who have written about Josephus over the centuries have had vastly differing perceptions of him. Some imply that he was a quisling, in the twentieth-century sense of the term, although such a view does not stand up to examination. Others suggest that in his own way he was very much a patriot. The problem is that while one may question his account, there is nothing to put in its place. All we can say is that when he is talking about himself or about the Zealots, he is not always to be trusted, but that when writing about the war, he usually, if not invariably, seems to be telling the truth.
To produce as rounded a portrait as possible, I have used not only what he says about himself in The Jewish War and in the Vita but also what he reveals, sometimes inadvertently, in his other books. I have tried to set him in context during the second half of his life, as scholar, writer, and Roman citizen. Yet what tells us most about him is his behavior during the war with Rome, which needs careful investigation and constant questioning.
In recent years, the texts of Josephus’s books, especially those of The Jewish War and of his so-called autobiography, have been examined and re-examined by distinguished scholars, who have produced subtle new interpretations of what he must have really meant, in volumes intended for a purely academic readership. What has been lacking is a straightforward narrative account of the man for ordinary readers who would like to learn more about him. Here is a modest and, I hope, readable attempt to fill the gap and to introduce to a wider public a remarkable figure, together with the war that he made so much his own.
THE HOLY LAND IN THE TIME OF JOSEPHUS
GALILEE
JUDEA
JERUSALEM
THE TEMPLE
Introduction
The Land Where Josephus Was Born
“Eastward their land is hemmed in by Arabia which forms the frontier, Egypt is on their southern border, Phoenicia and the sea lie to the west, while on the Syrian border to the north is a long range of mountains.”
TACITUS, THE HISTORIES, V
WHAT TACITUS FORGETS to mention to his readers is that a Roman visitor would have been astonished at finding it was such a small country.1 In modern terms, it was no bigger than Wales and about an eighth the size of Illinois, but its importance was always out of all proportion to its size. During Josephus’s time it had long ceased to be Israel while it was not yet Palestine. However, even if many of the inhabitants were “Greeks”—Greek-speaking Syrians—the Romans still thought of it as the land of the Jews. Although the name was also that of one of its provinces, they called it “Judea.”
The astonishingly varied landscape of Judea “from Dan to Beersheba”—the traditional boundaries—was an awe-inspiring mixture of fertile plains and arid desert, of stony hills and green forest. The population was equally varied. The coast was largely “Greek,” while the south was Idumean (Arab). The actual province of Judea was wholly Jewish, but neighboring Samaria was peopled by a mixed race who had adopted a heretical form of Judaism. The inhabitants of Galilee were also of indeterminate origin, although they professed genuine Judaism.
What complicated matters was the presence of so many “Greeks” in the inland cities as well as in those on the coast, especially in Galilee, where Tiberias and even Sepphoris, the capital, were almost entirely Greek-speaking. In addition, there was the “Decapolis,” the league of the ten Greek cities, most of which lay on the far side of the Jordan River, although Scythopolis was on the west, between Galilee and Samaria.
The provinces that Josephus came to know best were Galilee and Judea. “There are two Galilees, called upper and lower, bounded by Phoenicia and Syria,” he writes. “On the west is the border of Ptolemais and Mount Carmel, once belonging to the Galileans but now belonging to Tyre, and nearby is Gaba, ‘the horsemen’s city,’ which takes its name from being founded as a colony of cavalrymen paid off [with farms] by King Herod. On the south are Samaria and Scythopolis, reaching as far as the river Jordan. On the east are Hippene, Gadaris, Gaulonitis and the frontiers of Agrippa’s realm. On the north is Tyre and the Tyrians’ country. Lengthwise, lower Galilee extends from Tiberias to Zabulon (which adjoins Ptolemais on the coast), in breadth from the village of Xaloth in the Great Plain to Bersabe. Upper Galilee begins here, stretching across to the village of Baca on the Tyrian frontier—lengthwise, it runs from Melloth to Thella, a village near the Jordan.”
“Despite their small size and the threat from powerful nations on their borders, the two Galilees have always survived any attempt at conquest by neighbors, since Galileans are warriors from the cradle and there are plenty of them, while they have never lacked courage or gallant leaders. Everywhere the soil is rich, providing excellent pasture and good for planting all kinds of trees, so that even the laziest peasants are keen to work hard. As a result, the land is very carefully farmed by the inhabitants—not a single bit has been left uncultivated. There are many towns here and because of the region’s fertility its countless villages contain such large populations that the smallest holds at least 15,000 inhabitants.”2
Josephus is wrong about the number of people in the villages, however, because the entire population of the province—seventy miles from north to south and less than forty across—has been reliably estimated at no more than 300,000. He does not mention that there was not a single truly large city, nor does he note the contrast between mountainous upper Galilee and the gentler landscape of lower Galilee, with its hills and its lake. But he is right about the province’s fertility and the energy of its peasantry. Good farmers and fishermen, they were, by all accounts, a tough, hard-working race. He might have added, too, that the landscape of the province was often breathtakingly beautiful, the loveliest in all Judea, especially in spring when it was carpeted with flowers, full of orchards and vineyards that produced excellent fruit and wine.
He does not refer to the unfortunate reputation of the Galileans, whom other Jews looked down on. In addition to big concentrations of Syrians and Arabs, the majority of those in the province who called themselves Jews were largely of foreign immigrant stock, very mixed in origin, easily identifiable by their uncouth accent, and belonging to a despised group, the ’am ha-arez—“people of the land.” Most were the lowest type of laborer, men whose ignorance resulted in a lax observance of the religious law and ritual uncleanliness. Some of them even kept large herds of pigs, like that encountered at Gada
ra by Jesus of Nazarus. Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes saw the ’am ha-arez as brutish semi-pagans; even the gentle Rabban Hillel, the leading Jewish teacher in the years before Josephus was born, regarded them as criminals who were little better than animals. The class war was at its strongest here, the inhabitants well aware of their superiors’ contempt, which they bitterly resented. Galilee was always a hotbed of social and political unrest.3
Although Perea—ancient Gilead—to the east of Galilee on the other side of the Jordan, was larger, much of it was mountainous, a stony, desert land where no crops would grow, although there were plenty of sheep. A few areas were extremely fertile, however, and good for growing olives, vines, or palms. In addition, there were numerous springs flowing down from the hills that never failed, not even in the dog days. “The land of Moab is its southern frontier, Arabia, Silbonitis, Philadelphia and Gerasa its eastern.”4
“In character Samaria is just like Judea,” Josephus explains. “Both regions have hills and plains, with fine soil that richly repays farming. There are large numbers of trees, wild and cultivated, which bear an abundance of fruit. Although rivers are lacking, the rainfall is sufficient while what streams they have provide sweet water. Good grass ensures that the cows yield better milk than anywhere else. The best proof of the two regions’ fertility is their teeming population.”
Jerusalem's Traitor: Josephus, Masada, and the Fall of Judea Page 1
