Jerusalem's Traitor: Josephus, Masada, and the Fall of Judea

by Seward, Desmond

  Clearly, Mattathias and his wife took pains to educate Josephus and his elder brother, also named Mattathias. Josephus specifically says “both parents,” which is surprising since Jewish women had no right to education and no religious function.5 Some rabbis were keen that girls should be taught the Torah by their fathers, but other rabbis thought that to do so was blasphemy. The fact that his mother had some scriptural knowledge and joined in educating her sons indicates that Josephus belonged to an unusually imaginative family. If one can believe Josephus, both parents had a gift for teaching.

  Even so, it is not impossible that he attended a school of the sort advocated by Rabbi Joshua. Attached to a local synagogue, such a school was called a beth hasefer (house of the book) where, under the direction of the hassan or master of the synagogue, pupils learned the Torah by heart and were taught how to interpret the Holy Law that it enshrined. The Torah, which consisted of the first five books of the Old Testament, contained the meaning of life, explaining to Jewish men and women why they were the Chosen People of God and telling them how they should live. (The process of understanding the Torah was aided by Aramaic translations of key texts, known as Targums.) They also learned the Psalms by heart. In addition, they studied less seminal writings, notably commentaries on the Torah—in particular the pesherim, explanations of scriptural texts. Among other books studied were a collection of unofficial psalms and the uncanonical scriptural writings—the Apocalypse of Baruch and the Book of Jonah being the best known. Finally, there were such Jewish apocrypha as the Life of Adam and Eve, the Assumption of Isaiah, and the Assumption of Moses. In an otherwise exclusively religious syllabus, pupils were taught how to read and write Hebrew, as well as some history and geography.

  It is worth stressing that at this period Jews differed to a bewildering extent in their understanding of the Hebrew Bible. Even if all accepted that the Law should govern every one of their actions, they did not follow it to the letter—each man or woman worked out what God wanted him or her to do. Not until the emergence of Reform and Liberal Judaism in Europe in the nineteenth century would Jews vary so widely in their interpretation of scripture.6

  “I made remarkable progress with my education, acquiring a name for my unusually good memory and intellect,” Josephus remembers. “When I was still only a boy of fourteen my enthusiasm for learning was so much admired that chief priests and important citizens began to ask my opinion.” (This claim may well be true, since rabbis frequently consulted precocious children, on the chance they might have stumbled on insights denied to mature minds.) “When I was about sixteen, I made up my mind to find out about the various [religious] sects into which our nation is divided,” he recalls. “There are three of these . . . The first are the Pharisees, the second the Sadducees and the third the Essenes. My object was to get to know them all and discover which was the best.”7

  The Essenes were Jewish monks, who are best known from the Dead Sea Scrolls and their monastery at Qumran on the Dead Sea. Living in the desert, they shared possessions, shunned women, gave up meat and wine, engaged in ritual baths, and practiced meditation. Josephus thought highly of them. “They deserve to be admired for leading better lives than any other men,” he comments.8 “Some can foretell the future, by careful reading of the scriptures, special forms of purification, and constantly reflecting on what the Prophets say,” he tells us. “They are seldom wrong.”9 Throughout his life he believed that it was possible to see into the future if one knew the scriptures well enough and that to some extent he himself possessed this gift.

  Another Essene tenet he always retained was a belief in fate. According to his way of thinking, no prophecy could ever have been accurate if the world were governed by chance. “The sect of the Essenes affirms that fate governs all things, and that nothing can befall men that is not decided by it,” he was to write later.10 “There is no way of avoiding it, even when we know what it is,” he comments. He regarded it as almost sinister, even malevolent. “It creeps up on human souls and flatters them with pleasing hopes until it leads them into a situation from where there is no escape.”11 Nevertheless, it has been suggested that he regarded Essene theology as unsound, distorted by an apocalyptic outlook, that he had little interest in giving God any more than the minimum of worship due to him, and that he did not have much taste for prayer. Nor did he share the Essenes’ fascination with angels and demons.12

  “I put up with starvation and discomfort to investigate these three sects, obeying all the various disciplines they demanded,” he informs us in his autobiography. 13 “Then I heard of a man called Bannus who lived in the desert, dressing only in what grew on trees and eating only what grew without being planted, who day and night took constant ablutions of cold water in order to check the lusts of the flesh. In order to purify myself too, I became his enthusiastic disciple, spending [most of] the three years with him.”

  “Having done what I had set out to do, I went back to living in the city. At nineteen I started to follow the way of life laid down by the Pharisees, a sect with certain resemblances to the people whom the Greek call Stoics.”14 Josephus states that “the Pharisees are considered the most accurate interpreters of our laws. They attribute everything to fate and to God’s providence, although they accept it is in men’s power to act rightly or wrongly provided fate co-operates.”15 One reason that he was attracted to them was that his father was probably a Pharisee. However, he never claimed to have been entirely committed to the sect, let alone to its leaders.

  “Pharisee” (perushim) means those set apart, but their own name for themselves was “companions” (haberim), and Josephus admired their friendliness toward each other. Their fundamental tenet was that the Jewish faith must dictate every action performed by men and women, one consequence being that they considered Roman ways and contact with Romans impure, which was why they refused to enter Roman buildings. They claimed to be the only true interpreters of the Law, always seeking fresh meanings. There cannot have been more than 6,000 at any one time, many from the lower classes, but they wielded remarkable influence. They were more concerned with teaching in the synagogues than making sacrifices at the Temple—though several high priests were Pharisees—and they concentrated on explaining the Torah. At the same time, they tried to help the poor.

  Like all puritans, they included a fair number of self-seekers and professional hypocrites of the sort attacked by Jesus of Nazareth, and they were frequently accused of insincerity. What has so often been overlooked is that Jesus was attacking only unworthy Pharisees, men who were denounced even in the Talmud, not the Pharisees as a whole, and that he was on friendly terms with more than a few of them. Even the uncompromisingly Catholic historian Henri Daniel-Rops admits that the great Pharisaic doctors of the Law were “virtuous, profoundly religious men and formed an elite without whom the Chosen People could never have been what it was in the years that were to come.”16

  Despite its formalism and hairsplitting, theirs was an optimistic creed, hopeful and consoling. They were convinced that religion should provide the true believer with reassurance and happiness, fear or gloom being alien to their outlook. Nor did they believe in a Last Day or a Last Judgment. “They rejoice at the prospect of being freed from the bonds of the flesh almost as if they were going to be released from a long spell in prison,” is how Josephus describes the Pharisee belief in the survival of souls after death. “Like the Greeks, they teach that virtuous souls eventually find a dwelling beyond the ocean, in a land that suffers neither rain, snow or heat but is refreshed by gentle sea breezes. On the other hand, the wicked are imprisoned in a dark and terrifying cave, to undergo everlasting punishment.” By “loving God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might, and your neighbor as yourself,” those precepts from the Shema that he recognized as the bedrock of the Law, every Pharisee expected to end up soothed by the breezes. In another passage, however, he implies that they believed in reincarnation into another body.17

  Like the
Essenes, some Pharisees were attracted by neo-Pythagorism, a belief that each soul was a fragment of the one great, divine soul with which it would eventually be rejoined. Philo of Alexandria, a Pharisee, was a neo-Platonist influenced by neo-Pythagorism, who taught that this was why human souls could hope for union with God and transcend the body through the raptures of prayer. No doubt, Philo held unusual opinions, yet nothing in them was objectionable to Pharisees.

  Pharisees regarded Sadducees as men lacking in true faith, traitors who welcomed the Roman invaders. Josephus could not avoid meeting these “Sons of Zadok,” rich patricians who were often members of the Temple establishment, but he rejected their approach. Concentrating on an arid observance of the Law, Sadducees had little time for fatalism or an afterlife; there was no heaven, no hell. “They think God cannot be interested in whether we do evil or not,” he tells us.18 Nor did Josephus care for the way the Sadducees squabbled among themselves, unlike the Pharisees. The thought of a messiah arriving to upset their comfortable world made the Sadducees queasy; they viewed the Pharisees as religious maniacs and saw the Romans as a bulwark against social upheaval. With its built-in aversion to speculation or enthusiasm, the Sadducee creed held small appeal for an idealistic young man.

  In practice, the distinction between Sadducees and Pharisees was blurred, even if their members sometimes quarreled about doctrine, to the extent of coming to blows. On the whole, most Jews seem to have been inconsistent, taking what they wanted from either approach, and it looks as if this was Josephus’s position. Nor did the Sadducees monopolize the high priesthood; Rabban Joshua ben Gamala, for example, seems to have been a Pharisee. It is also likely that some of the Perushim were influenced by certain Essene practices, such as celebrating the Passover without roast meat.

  Josephus’s attitude toward Pharisees who were involved in politics was often antagonistic; we know that some leading members of the sect became his enemies. Even so, he continued to profess their creed in later life, perhaps partly because their self-discipline and fatalism had superficial resemblances to the stoicism fashionable among Roman patricians. To what extent he really was a Pharisee has been hotly debated by historians.19 As for the Sadducees, he may have agreed with their approach to politics while rejecting their religious views. According to their way of thinking, Judaism was a world religion so there could be nothing wrong in collaborating with the Roman occupiers—provided the basics of the faith revealed by Moses were retained. Ultimately, they were universalists, an attitude that would attract the mature Josephus.

  In addition, there were the followers of what Josephus calls the “Fourth Philosophy,” founded by Judas the Galilean, whom Josephus describes as “a very clever teacher.”20 Their creed seems to have been a fundamentalist form of Phariseeism, with the difference that Judas and his Zealots (in Hebrew, Kannaim) refused to accept any ruler but God or call any man “lord,” however great he might be. Fervent believers in an afterlife, they preached contempt for death, never mourning when their family or friends died, and were unshaken by torture.

  Their movement had begun early in the century when, during the disorder after Herod the Great’s death, Judas, a charismatic figure from the Golan, together with a Pharisee named Zaddok (in no way a Sadducee), led a revolt over taxes and the census, the most resented features of Roman occupation. Although he lost his life, his sons spread his message, and for three decades before Josephus was born, Zealot knifemen (sicarii) terrorized Jerusalem, slipping into the city disguised as pilgrims and killing collaborators. Their message appealed to those who regarded Roman imperial rule as a national humiliation and yearned for an upheaval that would drive out the hated Khittim—the Romans. With its largely “have-not” membership, fanaticism, readiness for holy war, and suicidal assassins, it was tailor-made for a popular revolution.21

  Predictably, the Fourth Philosophy was detested by Josephus. Tempera-mentally averse to extremism, he found no difficulty in getting along with Romans. “All sorts of misfortunes came from these men, the nation being infected by their doctrine to an incredible extent,” he says of the Zealots in his Jewish Antiquities. “Judas and Zaddok spread a fourth sect of philosophy among us that attracted a great many followers, first plaguing the government with affrays and laying the foundations of all our future miseries.” 22 Yet, judging from the appeal of the Zealot message, there must have been much more than he admits to Judas and his ideas.

  Josephus’s everyday language was Aramaic, the tongue in which he thought until early middle age. (A Semitic language closely related to Hebrew and used throughout the Middle East, Aramaic had been adopted by the Jews in place of Hebrew after their return from Babylon.) He also spoke Hebrew, which was enjoying a revival among learned men as a spoken tongue. And he knew a third language.

  This was the “koine,” the Roman Empire’s lingua franca, which was spoken and written by most prosperous Jews, however devout, and not merely by the large “Greek” population of Judea. East of what is now the Balkan peninsula, it served as an official language, for dealing with Roman officials or foreigners. Scarcely the language of Thucydides, the koine’s grammar had become less complicated and its vocabulary smaller than those of Attic Greek, despite incorporating loan words from other tongues, while its pronunciation seems to have been noticeably un-Hellenic. Nevertheless, a working knowledge of the koine enabled one to read classical Greek, though with some difficulty. It is reasonable to assume that as an ambitious young man, Josephus worked hard at polishing his command of the language, and there are indications that by his mid-twenties he spoke it quite well. An ability to speak fluent Greek, however inelegantly, would provide the opportunity that began his career.

  On the other hand, it is unlikely that he had any acquaintance with Hellenist learning at this stage. “The Jewish scholar, proud of the pedantic knowledge which cost him so much grinding toil, had the same contempt for Greek culture that the learned Moslem of the present day has for European civilization,” was Renan’s not inaccurate comment in the nineteenth century.23 Almost certainly, the young Josephus, being a devout Pharisee, had never read the Greek classics before he traveled outside Palestine. Yet it appears that there were a handful of Jews in the capital who studied Greek literature and that he knew men who did read the classics, though he probably thought they risked betraying Judaism. These books possessed the allure of the forbidden for someone with such a powerful and inquiring mind.

  2

  An Occupied Country

  “And every day the flames were blown higher and higher, until finally they turned into full-scale war.”

  JOSEPHUS, THE JEWISH WAR, 2, 265

  CALLED THE “PROVINCE OF JUDEA” by its Roman masters, the Jewish homeland was governed by a procurator appointed by the emperor, but it was not a colony in the twentieth-century sense of the word, for there were few, if any, Roman settlers. A better description is a protectorate, even if the land and people were under the rapacious heel of Rome. Procurators had absolute judicial powers, including those of life and death, their decisions being subject only to the emperor on the far side of the Mediterranean.

  After returning from Babylon in the sixth century BCE, the Jews had been under Persian suzerainty, and then part of Alexander the Great’s empire and its successors, until the Maccabees led a revolt in the second century BCE against a Seleucid attempt to force the Jews to adopt Greek culture and subsequently reestablished the kingdom of Judea. But during a civil war a century before Josephus was born, the Jews invited Pompey to restore order, and he had turned Judea into a Roman client state, minus its coastline and the Greek cities inland. It enjoyed a brief period of semi-independence under the Idumean Herod the Great, an Arab Jew. The last Idumean king of Judea, Agrippa I, died when Josephus was about seven—although his son, Agrippa II, ruled a little foreign kingdom across the northeastern border—and was regarded by the Romans in much the same way that the nineteenth-century British would see an Anglophile rajah.

  Most of the procura
tors in Josephus’s time were mediocrities, second-rate men of obscure background, who lacked any sort of imagination or flexibility. All they knew was that it was Rome’s mission to rule the world. Incapable of appreciating the grandeur of the Israelite religion, they regarded Jews as an inferior race of oriental barbarians who stupidly refused to worship those pillars of civilization, the gods and goddesses of Rome.

  Rome was very far away, and the imperial courier took several weeks to reach the port of Caesarea Maritima on Judea’s Mediterranean coast. This pleasant, newly built city was the residence of the procurator. Founded by King Herod for his Greek-speaking Syrian subjects, it was noticeably un-Jewish, with an amphitheater and pagan temples, including the one that Herod had erected in honor of his great patron, Emperor Augustus, who had, of course, been officially deified and ranked as a god. There were pagan statues throughout the city—of Pan, of the Nymphs, of the Echo of the Grotto. Yet while predominantly Greek, the city was also home to a thriving Jewish minority.

  The procurator spent most of his time at Caesarea, preferring it to the royal palace in dangerous, up-country Jerusalem. The old capital was magnificent, but it was the center of the natives’ strange religion, and its inhabitants were prone to riot if they thought the procurator was trying to interfere with their customs or when they were quarrelling among themselves—which was far from infrequent. Nor was it unknown for a mob from Jerusalem to arrive at Caesarea and demonstrate outside the palace. Whenever the procurator visited Jerusalem, which he did as little as possible, he took a strong bodyguard and, if he had any sense, used the utmost tact.