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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 Jewish
Worthies, since neither as man of action nor as man of letters did he
deserve particularly well of his nation. It is not his personal
worthiness, but the worth of his work, that recommends him to the
attention of the Jewish people. He was not a loyal general, and he was
not a faithful chronicler of the struggle with Rome; but he had the
merit of writing a number of books on the Jews and Judaism, which not
only met the desire for knowledge of his nation in his own day, but
which have been preserved through the ages and still remain one of the
chief authorities for Jewish history. He lived at the great crisis of
his people, when it stood at the parting of the ways. And while in his
life he was patronized by those who had destroyed the national center,
after his death he found favor with that larger religious community
which was beginning to carry part of the Jewish mission to the Gentiles.
For centuries Josephus was regarded by the Christians as the standard
historian of the Jews, and, though for long he was forgotten and
neglected by his own people, in modern times he has been carefully
studied also by them, and his merits and demerits both as patriot and as
writer have been critically examined.
It has been my especial aim in this book to consider Josephus from the
Jewish point of view. I have made no attempt to extenuate his personal
conduct or his literary faults. My judgment may appear somewhat severe,
but it is when tried by the test of faithfulness to his nation that
Josephus is found most wanting; and I hope that while extenuating
nothing I have not set down aught in malice.
Of the extensive literature bearing on the subject, the books to which I
am under the greatest obligation are Niese's text of the collected works
and Schürer's _History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus_. I
have given in an Appendix a Bibliography, which contains the names of
most of the works I have referred to. I would mention in particular
Schlatter's _Zur Topographie und Geschichte Palästinas_, which is a
remarkably stimulating and suggestive book, and which confirmed a view I
had formed independently, that in the _Wars_, as in the _Antiquities_,
Josephus is normally a compiler of other men's writings, and constantly
expresses opinions not his own.
My greatest debt of thanks, however, is due to the spoken rather than
the written word. Doctor Büchler, the Principal of Jews' College,
London, has constantly assisted me with advice, directed me to sources
of information, and let me draw plentifully from his own large stores of
knowledge about Josephus; and Doctor Friedlaender, Sabato Morais
Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, has done me the
brotherly service of reading my manuscript and making many valuable
suggestions on it. To their generous help this book owes more than I can
acknowledge.
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 of
the Jews against the Romans, and in order to appreciate them it is
necessary to summarize the relations of the two peoples that led up to
that struggle.
It is related in the Midrash that the city of Rome was founded on the
day Solomon married an Egyptian princess. The Rabbis doubtless meant by
this legend that the power of Rome was created to be a scourge for
Israel's backslidings. They identified Rome with the Edom of the Bible,
representing thus that the struggle between Esau and Jacob was carried
on by their descendants, the Romans and the Jews, and would continue
throughout history.[1] Yet the earliest relations of the two peoples
were friendly and peaceful. They arose out of the war of independence
that the Maccabean brothers waged against the Syrian Empire in the
middle of the second century B.C.E., when the loyal among the people
were roused to stand up for their faith. Antiochus Epiphanes, anxious to
strengthen his tottering empire, which had been shaken by its struggles
with Rome, sought to force violently on the Jews a pagan Hellenism that
was already making its way among them. He succeeded only in evoking the
latent force of their national consciousness. Rome was already the
greatest power in the world: she had conquered the whole of Italy; she
had destroyed her chief rival in the West, the Phoenician colony of
Carthage; she had made her will supreme in Greece and Macedonia. Her
senate was the arbiter of the destinies of kingdoms, and though for the
time it refrained from extending Roman sway over Egypt and Asia, its
word there was law. Its policy was "divide and rule," to hold supreme
sway by encouraging small nationalities to maintain their independence
against the unwieldy empires which the Hellenistic successors of
Alexander had carved out for themselves in the Orient.
[Footnote 1: Lev. R. xiii. (5), quoted in Schechter, Aspects of Rabbinic
Theology, p. 100.]
At the bidding of the Roman envoy, Antiochus Epiphanes himself,
immediately before his incursion into Jerusalem, had slunk away from
Alexandria; and hence it was natural that Judas Maccabaeus, when he had
vindicated the liberty of his nation, should look to Rome for support in
maintaining that liberty. In the year 161 B.C.E. he sent Eupolemus the
son of Johanan and Jason the son of Eleazar, "to make a league of amity
and confederacy with the Romans"[1]: and the Jews were received as
friends, and enrolled in the class of Socii. His brother Jonathan
renewed the alliance in 146 B.C.E.; Simon renewed it again five years
later, and John Hyrcanus, when he succeeded to the high priesthood, made
a fresh treaty.[2] Supported by the friendship, and occasionally by the
diplomatic interference, of the Western Power, the Jews did not require
the intervention of her arms to uphold their independence against the
Seleucid monarchs, whose power was rapidly falling into ruin. At the
beginning of the first century B.C.E., however, Rome, having emerged
triumphant from a series of civil struggles in her own dominions, found
herself 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 the
opportunity to overrun the Hellenized provinces and put all the Greek
and Roman inhabitants to the sword. To avenge this outrage, Rome sent to
the East, in 73 B.C.E., her most distinguished soldier, Pompeius, or
Pompey, who, in two campaigns, laid the whole of Asia Minor and Syria at
his feet.
[Footnote 1: I Macc. viii. 7. It is interesting to note that the sons
had 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 two
Hasmonean brothers, Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, who fought for the throne
on the death of the queen Alexandra Salome. Both in turn appealed to
Pompey to come to their aid, on terms of becoming subject to the Roman
overlord. At the same time, a deputation from the Jewish nation appeared
before the general, to declare that they did not desire to be ruled by
kings: "for what was handed down to them from their fathers was that
they should obey the priests of God; but these two princes, though the
descendants of priests, sought to transfer the nation to another form of
government, that it might he enslaved."
Pompey, who had resolved to establish a strong government immediately
subject to Rome over the whole of the near Orient, finally interfered on
behalf of Hyrcanus. Aristobulus resisted, at first somewhat
half-heartedly, but afterwards, when the Roman armies laid siege to
Jerusalem, with fierce determination. The struggle was in vain. On a
Sabbath, it is recorded, when the Jews desisted from their defense, the
Roman general forced his way into the city, and, regardless of Jewish
feeling, entered the Holy of Holies. The intrigues of the Jewish royal
house had brought about the subjection of the nation. As it is said in
the apocryphal Psalms of Solomon, which were written about this time: "A
powerful smiter has God brought from the ends of the earth. He decreed
war upon the Jews and the land. The princes of the land went out with
joy to meet him, and said to him, 'Blessed be thy way; draw near and
enter in peace.'" Yet Pompey did not venture, or did not care, to
destroy or rob the Temple, according to Cicero and Josephus,[1] because
of his innate moderation, but really, one may suspect, from less noble
motives. It was the custom of the Roman conquerors to demand the
surrender, not only of the earthly possessions of the conquered, but of
their gods, and to carry the vanquished images in the triumph which they
celebrated. But Pompey may have recognized the difference between the
Jewish religion and that of other peoples, or he realized the widespread
power of the Jewish people, which would rise as a single body in defense
of its religion; for he made no attempt to interfere either with Jewish
religious 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 and
ethnarch of Judea, and his wily counselor, the Idumean Antipater, was
given a general power of administering the country, they were alike
subject to the governor of Syria, which was now constituted a Roman
province. Moreover, the Hellenistic cities along the coast of Palestine
and on the other side of Jordan, which had been subjugated by John
Hyrcanus and Alexander Jannaeus, were restored to independence, and
placed under special Roman protection, and the Jewish territory itself
was shortly thereafter split by the Roman governor Gabinius into five
toparchies, or provinces, each with a separate administration.
The guiding aim of the conqueror was to weaken the Oriental power (as
the Jews were regarded) and strengthen the Hellenistic element in the
country. The Jews were soon to feel the heavy hand and suffer the
insatiate greed of Rome. National risings were put down with merciless
cruelty, the Temple treasury was spoiled in 56 B.C.E. by the avaricious
Crassus, one of the triumvirate that divided the Roman Empire, when he
passed Jerusalem on his way to fight against the Parthians; even the
annual offering contributed voluntarily by the Jews of the Diaspora to
the Temple was seized by a profligate governor of Asia. The Roman
aristocrats during the last years of the Republic were a degenerate
body; they regarded a governorship as the opportunity of unlimited
extortion, the means of recouping themselves for all the gross expenses
incurred on attaining office, and of making themselves and their friends
affluent for the rest of their lives. And Judea was a fresh quarry.
A happier era seemed to be dawning for the Jews when Julius Caesar
became dictator. At the beginning of the civil war between him and
Pompey, Hyrcanus, at the instance of Antipater, prepared to support the
man to whom he owed his position; but when Pompey was murdered,
Antipater led the Jewish forces to the help of Caesar, who was hard
pressed at Alexandria. His timely help and his influence over the
Egyptian Jews recommended him to Caesar's favor, and secured for him an
extension of his authority in Palestine, and for Hyrcanus the
confirmation of his ethnarchy. Joppa was restored to the Hasmonean
domain, 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 Jews
throughout his Empire. Mommsen thinks that he saw in them an effective
leaven of cosmopolitanism and national decomposition, and to that intent
gave them special privileges; but this seems a perverse reason to assign
for the grant of the right to maintain in all its thoroughness their
national life, and for their exemption from all Imperial or municipal
burdens that would conflict with it. It is more reasonable to suppose
that, taking in this as in many other things a broader view than that of
his countrymen, Caesar recognized the weakness of a world-state whose
members were so denationalized as to have no strong feeling for any
common purpose, no passion of loyalty to any community, and he favored
Judaism as a counteracting force to this peril.
His various enactments constituted, as it were, a Magna Charta of the
Jews in the Empire; Judaism was a favored cult in the provinces, a
_licita religio_ in the capital. At Alexandria Caesar confirmed and
extended the religious and political privileges of the Jews, and ordered
his decree to be inscribed on pillars of brass and set up in a public
place. At Rome, though the devotees of Bacchus were forbidden to meet,
he permitted the Jews to hold their assemblies and celebrate their
ceremonials. At his instance the Hellenistic cities of Asia passed
similar favorable decrees for the benefit of the Jewish congregations in
their midst, which invested them with a kind of local autonomy. The
proclamation of the Sardians is typical. "This decree," it runs, "was
made by the senate and people, upon the representation of the praetors:
"Whereas those Jews who are our fellow-citizens, and live with us in
this 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, upon
the restitution of their law and their liberty by the senate and people
of Rome, they may assemble together according to their ancient legal
custom, and that we will not bring any suit against them about it; and
that a place may be given them where they may hold their congregations
with their wives and children, and may offer, as did their forefathers,
their prayers and sacrifices to God:--now the senate and people have
decreed to permit them to assemble together on the days formerly
appointed, and to act according to their own laws; and that such a place
be set apart for them by the praetors for the building and inhabiting
the same as they shall esteem fit for that purpose, and that those who
have control of the provisions of the city shall take care that such
sorts of food as they esteem fit for their eating may be imported into
the city."[1]
[Footnote 1: Ant. XIV. x. 24.]
Caesar's decrees marked the culmination of Roman tolerance, and the Jews
enjoyed their privileges for but a short time. It is related by the
historian Suetonius that they lamented his death more bitterly than any
other class.[1] And they had good reason. The Republicans, who had
murdered him, and his ministers, who avenged him, vied with each other
for the support of the Jewish princes; but the people in Palestine
suffered from the burden that the rivals imposed on the provinces in
their efforts to raise armies. Antipater and his ambitious sons Herod
and Phasael contrived to maintain their tyranny amid the constant
shifting of power; and when the hardy mountaineers of Galilee strove
under the lead of one Hezekiah (Ezekias), the founder of the party of
the Zealots, to shake off the Roman yoke, Herod ruthlessly put down the
revolt. But when Antigonus, the son of that Aristobulus who had been
deprived of his kingdom by Hyrcanus and Pompey, roused the Parthians to
invade Syria and Palestine, the Jews eagerly rose in support of the
scion of the Maccabean house, and drove out the hated Idumeans with
their puppet Jewish king. The struggle between the people and the Romans
had begun in earnest, and though Antigonus, when placed on the throne by
the Parthians, proceeded to spoil and harry the Jews, rejoicing at the
restoration of the Hasmonean line, thought a new era of independence had
come.
[Footnote 1: Suetonius, Caesar, lxxxiv. 7.]
The infatuation of Mark Antony for Cleopatra enabled Antigonus to hold
his kingdom for three years (40-37 B.C.E.). Then Herod, who had escaped
to Rome, returned to Syria to conquer the kingdom that Antony had
bestowed on him. He brought with him the Roman legions, and for two
years a fierce struggle was waged between the Idumeans, Romans, and
Romanizing Jews on the one hand, and the national Jews and Parthian
mercenaries of Antigonus on the other. The struggle culminated in a
siege of Jerusalem. As happened in all the contests for the city, the
power of trained force in the end prevailed over the enthusiasm of
fervent patriots. Herod stormed the walls, put to death Antigonus and
his party, and established a harsher tyranny than even the Roman
conqueror had imposed. For over thirty years he held the people down
with the aid of Rome and his body-guard of mercenary barbarians. His
constitution was an autocracy, supplemented by assassination. In the
civil 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 of
the Roman Empire, henceforth known as Augustus, was so impressed with
his carriage and resolution that he not only confirmed him in his
kingdom, but added to it the territories of Chalcis and Perea to the
north and east of the Jordan. Throughout his reign Herod contrived to
preserve the friendship of Rome as effectually as he contrived to arouse
the hatred of his Jewish subjects. "The Imperial Eagle and some
distinguished Roman or other," says George Adam Smith,[1] "were always
fixed in Herod's heaven." He ruled with a strong but merciless hand. He
insured peace, and while he turned his own home into a slaughter-house,
he glorified the Jewish dominion outwardly to a height and magnificence
it had never before attained. Yet the Jewish deputation that went to
plead before Augustus on his death declared that "Herod had put such
abuses on them as a wild beast would not have done, and no calamity they
had suffered was comparable with that which he had brought on the
nation."[2] Beneath the fine show of peace, splendor, and expansion, the
passions 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, yet
lacking the same large tolerance, held towards Judaism an ambiguous
attitude of impartiality rather than of favor. He caused sacrifices to
be offered for himself at the Temple at Jerusalem,[1] but he praised his
nephew Gaius for having refrained from doing likewise during his Eastern
travels.[2] He was anxious that the national laws and customs of each
nation should be preserved, and he issued a decree in favor of the Jews
of Cyrene; but he initiated the worship of the Emperors, which
necessitated a conflict between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of
Caesar, and in the end destroyed the religious liberty that Julius
Caesar had given to the Empire. His aim was at once to foster the
veneration of the Imperial power and establish an Imperial worship that
should replace the effete paganism of his subjects. He made no attempt
to force this worship on the Jews, but its existence fanned the
prejudice against the one nation that refused to participate. And the
Jews could not but look with distrust on a government that "derived its
authority from the deification of might, whereof the Emperor was the
incarnate 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 intimate
friend of Herod, and served to link the two courts. But on the death of
Herod, in 4 C.E., the friendship of Rome for the Idumean royal house was
modified. Archelaus, who claimed the whole succession, was appointed
simply as ethnarch of Judea, while Herod's two other sons, Philip and
Herod Antipas, divided the rest of his dominions. The Zealots, rid of
the powerful tyrant who had held them down, sought again to throw off
the hated yoke of Idumea, which, not without reason, they identified
with the yoke of Rome. With their watchword, "No king but God," they
attempted to make Judea independent, and a fierce struggle, known as the
War of Varus, ensued. Jerusalem was stormed once again by Roman legions
before the Zealots were subdued. Archelaus was deposed by his masters
after a few years, and the province of Judea was placed under direct
Roman administration. The Roman procurator was at first less detested
than the Idumean tyrant, since he interfered less with the legal
institutions, such as the Sanhedrin and the Bet Din; but his presence
with the legionaries in the Holy City and his constant, though often
involuntary, affronts to the religious sentiments of the people roused
the hostility of the nationalist party, who looked forward to the day
when Israel should "tread on the neck of the Eagle." The Pharisees, who
were anxious for the spiritual rather than the political independence of
the Jews, counseled submission to Rome, and were willing "to render unto
Caesar the things that are Caesar's," so long as they were not compelled
to give up the Torah. But the Zealots desired political as well as
religious freedom, and they fomented rebellion. They have been compared
by Merivale to the Montagnards of the French Revolution, driven by their
own indomitable passion to assert the truths that possessed them with a
ferocity that no possession could justify. They were continually rousing
the people to expel the foreign rulers, and in the northern province of
Galilee, where they found shelter amid the wild tracts of heath and
mountain, they maintained a constant state of insurrection.[1]
[Footnote 1: It is important to notice that much of our knowledge of the
Zealots is derived from Josephus, who, as will be seen, set himself to
misrepresent them, and repeated the calumnies of hostile Roman writers
against them. The Talmud contains several references to them, describing
them as Kannaim (the Hebrew equivalent of Zealots), and it would appear
that they were in their outlook successors of the former Hasidim,
distinguished as much for their religious rigidity as their patriotic
fervor. See Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. Zealots.]
The Romans, on their side, accustomed to the ready submission of all the
peoples under their sway, could not understand or tolerate the Jews. To
them this people with its dour manners, its refusal to participate in
the religious ideas, the social life, and the pleasures of its
neighbors, its eruptions of passion and violence on account of abstract
ideas, and its rigid exclusion of the insignia of Roman majesty from the
capital, seemed the enemies of the human race. In their own religion
they had freely found a place for Greek and Egyptian deities, but the
Jewish faith, in its uncompromising opposition to all pagan worship,
seemed, in the words that Anatole France has put into the mouth of one
of 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 their
dominion; the Jews and the Parthians alone stood in the way of universal
peace. The near-Eastern question, which, then as now, continually
threatened war and violence, irritated the Romans beyond measure, and
they came to feel towards Jerusalem as their ancestors had felt two
hundred years before towards Carthage, the great Semitic power of the
West, _delenda est Hierosolyma_. As time went on they realized that this
stubborn nation was resolved to dispute with them for the mastery, and
every agitation was regarded as an outrage on the Roman power, which
must be wiped out in blood. It was the inevitable conflict, not only
between the Imperial and the national principle, but between the ideas
of the kingdom of righteousness and the ideas of the kingdom of might.
During the reign of Tiberius, however, the Roman governors were held in
check to some extent by strong central control from Rome, and their
extortion was comparatively moderate. The worst of them was Pontius
Pilate, and the _odium theologicum_ has, perhaps, had its part in
blackening his reputation. Nevertheless, the broad religious tolerance
initiated by the first Caesar was being continually impaired. The Jewish
public worship was prohibited in Rome, and the Jews were expelled from
the city in 19 C.E.; while at Alexandria an anti-Jewish persecution was
instigated by Sejanus, the upstart freedman, who became the chief
minister of Tiberius. In Palestine, though we hear of no definite
movement, it is clear from after-events that the bitterness of feeling
between the Hellenized Syrians and the Jewish population was steadily
fomented. The Romans were naturally on the side of the Greek-speaking
people, whom they understood, and whose religion they could appreciate.
The situation may best be paralleled by the condition of Ireland in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when England supported the
Protestant population of Ulster against the hated Roman Catholics, who
formed the majority of the people.
It had been the aim of Tiberius to consolidate the unwieldy mass of the
Empire by the gradual absorption of the independent kingdoms inclosed
within its limits. In pursuance of this policy, Judea, Chalcis, and
Abilene, all parts of Herod's kingdom, had been placed under Roman
governors. But when Gaius Caligula succeeded Tiberius in 32 C.E., and
brought to the Imperial throne a capricious irresponsibility, he
reverted to the older policy of encouraging client-princes, and doled
out territories to his Oriental favorites. Prominent among them was
Agrippa, a grandson of Herod, who had passed his youth in the company of
the Roman prince in Italy. He received as the reward of his loyal
extravagance not only Judea but Galilee and Perea, together with the
title of king. He was not, however, given permission to repair to his
kingdom, since his patron desired his attentions at Rome. Later he was
detained by a sterner call. Gaius, who had passed from folly to lunacy,
was not content with the customary voluntary worship paid to the
Emperors, but imagined himself the supreme deity, and demanded
veneration from all his subjects. He ordered his image to be set up in
all temples, and, irritated by the petition of the Jews to be exempted
from what would be an offense against the first principle of their
religion, he insisted upon their immediate submission. In Alexandria the
Greek population made a violent attempt to carry out the Imperial order;
a sharp conflict took place, and the Jews in their dire need sent a
deputation, with Philo at its head, to supplicate the Emperor. In the
East the governor of Syria, Petronius, was directed to march on
Jerusalem and set up the Imperial statue in the Holy of Holies, whatever
it might cost. Petronius understood, and it seems respected, the
faithfulness of the Jews to their creed, and he hesitated to carry out
the command. From East and West the Jews gathered to resist the decree;
the multitude, says Philo, covered Phoenicia like a cloud. Meantime King
Agrippa at Rome interceded with the Emperor for his people, and induced
him to relent for a little. But the infatuation again came over Gaius;
he ordered Petronius peremptorily to do his will, and, when the legate
still dallied, sent to remove him from his office. But, as Philo says,
God heard the prayer of His people: Gaius was assassinated by a Roman
whom he had wantonly insulted, and the death-struggle with Rome, which
had threatened in Judea, was postponed. The year of trial, however, had
brought home to the whole of the Jewish people that the incessant moral
conflict with Rome might at any moment be resolved into a desperate
physical struggle for the preservation of their religion. And the
warlike party gained in strength.
The date of the death of Gaius (Shebat 22) was appointed as a day of
memorial in the Jewish calendar; and for a little time the Jews had a
respite from tyranny. Agrippa, who, after the murder of Gaius, played a
large part in securing for Claudius the succession to the Imperial
throne, was confirmed in the grant of his kingdom, and, despite his
antecedents and his upbringing, proved himself a model national king.
Perhaps he had seen through the rottenness of Rome, perhaps the trial of
Gaius' mad escapades had deepened his nature, and led him to honor the
burning faith of the Jews. Whatever the reason, while remaining dutiful
to Rome, he devoted himself to the care of his people, to the
maintenance of their full religious and national life, and to the
strengthening of the Holy City against the struggle he foresaw. To the
Jews of the Diaspora, moreover, the succession of Claudius brought a
renewal of privileges. An edict of tolerance was promulgated, first to
the Alexandrians, and afterwards to the communities in all parts of the
habitable globe, by which liberty of conscience and internal autonomy
were restored, with a notable caution against Jewish missionary
enterprise. "We think it fitting," runs the decree, "to permit the Jews
everywhere under our sway to observe their ancient customs without
hindrance; and we hereby charge them to use our graciousness with
moderation and not to show contempt of the religious observances of
other people, but to keep their own laws quietly."[1] Nevertheless the
tolerant principle on which Caesar and Augustus had sought to found the
Empire was surely giving way to a more tyrannical policy, which viewed
with suspicion all bodies that fostered a corporate life separate from
that of the State, whether Jewish synagogue, Stoic school, or religious
college.
[Footnote 1: Ant. XIX, v. 2.]
The conflict between Rome and Jerusalem entered on a bitterer stage when
Agrippa died in 44 C.E. Influenced by his self-seeking band of
freedmen-counselors, who saw in office in Palestine a golden opportunity
for spoliation, Claudius placed the vacant kingdom again under the
direct administration of Roman procurators, and appointed to the office
a string of the basest creatures of the court, who revived the
injustices of the worst days of the Republic.
From 48-52 C.E. Palestine was under the governorship of Ventidius
Cumanus, who seemed deliberately to egg on the Jews to insurrection.
When a Roman soldier outraged the Jewish conscience by indecent conduct
in the Temple during the Passover, Cumanus refused all redress, called
on the soldiers to put down the clamoring people, and slew thousands of
them in the holy precincts.[1] A little later, when an Imperial officer
was attacked on the road and robbed, Cumanus set loose the legionaries
on the villages around, and ordered a general pillage. When a Galilean
Jew was murdered in a Samaritan village, and the Jewish Zealots, failing
to get redress, attacked Samaria, Cumanus fell on them and crucified
whomever he captured. Then, indeed, the Roman governor of Syria, not so
reckless as his subordinate, or, it may be, corrupted by the man anxious
to step into the procurator's place, summoned Cumanus before him, and
sent 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; Cumanus
was succeeded by Felix, an even worse creature. He was the brother of
the Emperor's favorite Narcissus, "by badness raised to that proud
eminence," and the husband of the Herodian princess Drusilia, who had
become a pagan in order to marry him. Tacitus, the Roman historian,
says[1] that "with all manner of cruelty he exercised royal functions in
the spirit of a slave." Under his rapacious tyranny the people were
goaded to fury. Bands of assassins, Sicarii (so called by both Romans
and Jews because of the short dagger, sica, which they used), sprang up
over the country. Now they struck down Romans and Romanizers, and now
they were employed by the governor himself to put out of the way rich
Jewish nobles whose possessions he coveted. From time to time there were
more serious risings, some purely political, others led by a
pseudo-Messiah, and all alike put down with cruelty. Roman governors
were habitually corrupt, grasping, and cruel, but Mommsen declares that
those of Judea in the reigns of Claudius and Nero, who were chosen from
the upstart equestrians, exceeded the usual measure of worthlessness and
oppressiveness. The Jews believed that they had drunk to the dregs the
cup of misery, and that God must send them a Redeemer. There were no
prophets to preach as at the time of the struggle with Babylon and
Assyria, that the oppression was God's chastisement for their sins. And
it was inconceivable to them that the power of wickedness should be
allowed to triumph to the end.
[Footnote 1: Hist. v. 9.]
Steadily the party that clamored for war gained in strength, and the
apprehensions of the Pharisees who viewed the political struggle with
misgiving, lest it should end in the loss of the national center and the
destruction of religious independence, were overborne by the fury of the
masses. The oppression by Roman governors and Romanizing high priests
did not diminish when Nero succeeded Claudius. For the rest of the
Empire the first five years of his reign (the _quinquennium Neronis_)
were a period of peace and good government, but for the Jews they
brought little or no relief. The harsh Roman policy toward the Jews may
have been specially instigated by Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, who was
Nero's counselor during his saner years, and who entertained a strong
hatred of Judaism. But we need not look for such special causes. It had
been the fixed habit of Republican Rome to crush out the national spirit
of a subject people, "to war down the proud," as her greatest poet
euphemistically expressed it; and now that spirit was adopted by the
Imperial Caesars in dealing with the one and only people resolved to
preserve inviolate its national life and its national religion. Nero
indeed recalled Felix, and Festus, who was appointed in his place, made
an attempt to mend affairs, but he died within a year, and was succeeded
by two procurators that were worthy followers of Felix. The first of
them was Albinus (62-64), of whom Josephus says that there was no sort
of wickedness in which he had not a hand. The same authority says that
compared with Gessius Florus, the governor under whom the Rebellion
burst out, he was "most just." Florus owed his appointment to Poppaea,
the profligate wife of Nero, and his conduct bears the interpretation
that he was deliberately anxious to fill the measure of persecution to
the brim and drive the nation to war.
The very forms of privilege which had been left to the Jews were turned
to their hurt. The Herodian tetrarchs of Chalcis, to whom the Romans
granted the power of appointing the high priests, true to the tradition
of their house, appointed only such as were confirmed Romanizers, and
the most unscrupulous at that. When Felix was governor, the high priest
was the notorious Ananias, of whom the Talmud says, "Woe to the House of
Ananias; woe for their cursings, woe for their serpent-like
hissings."[1] Herod Agrippa II, the son of Agrippa, who held the
principate from 50-100 C.E., and was the faithful creature of Rome
throughout the period of his people's stress, proclaiming himself on his
coins "lover of Caesar and lover of Rome," deposed and created high
priests with unparalleled frequency as a means of extorting money and
rewarding the leading informers. There were seven holders of the office
during the last twenty years of Roman rule, and "he who carried furthest
servility and national abnegation received the prize." The high priests
thus formed a kind of anti-national oligarchy; they robbed the other
priests of their dues, and reduced them to poverty, and were the willing
tools of Roman tyranny. Together with the Herodian princes, who indulged
every lust and wicked passion, they undermined the strength of the
people like some fatal canker, much as the priests and nobles had done
at the first fall of Jerusalem, or, again, in the days of the Seleucid
Emperors. Apart from governors, tax-collectors, and high priests, the
Romans had an instrument of oppression in the Greek-speaking population
of Palestine and Syria, which maintained an inveterate hostility to the
Jews. The immediate cause of the great Rebellion actually arose out of a
feud between the Jewish and the Gentile inhabitants of Caesarea. The
Hellenistic population outnumbered the Jews in the Herodian foundations
of Caesarea, Sepphoris, Tiberias, Paneas, etc., as well as in the old
Greek cities of Doris, Scythopolis, Gerasa, Gadara, and the rest of the
Decapolis. This population regarded religion only as the pretext for
public ceremonials and entertainments; it was scornful of the Jewish
abstention from these things, and was aroused to the bitterest hatred by
the social aloofness of their neighbors. Violent riots between Jew and
Gentile were constantly taking place, and whether they were the
aggressors or merely fighting in self-defense, the Jews were the
scapegoats for the breaking of the peace. Stung by constant outrage on
the part of their neighbors, the Jews turned upon them at Caesarea, and
drove them out of the town. Thereupon Florus called them to reckoning,
marched on Jerusalem, and plundered the Temple treasury. This event
happened on the tenth day of Iyar in the year 66 C.E. The war-party
determined to force the struggle to a final issue. Hitherto they had
only been able to arouse a section to venture desperate sporadic
insurrection against the might of Rome. Now they carried the people with
them to engage in a national rebellion.
[Footnote 1: Pesahim, 57a.]
Agrippa II, who was amusing himself at Alexandria when the first
outbreak occurred, hurried back to Jerusalem, and sought to quiet the
people by impressing upon them the invincible power of Rome. But he
failed, and the Romanizing priests' party failed, and the peaceful
leaders of the Pharisees failed, to shake their determination. Messianic
hopes were rife among the masses, and were invested with a materialistic
interpretation. The Zealots, it is alleged by the pagan as well as the
Jewish authorities for the period, believed that the destined time was
come when the Jews should rule the world. The people looked for the
realization of the prophecy of Isaiah (41:2), "He shall raise up the
righteous one from the East, give the nations before Israel, and make
him rule over kings."
The belief in the approach of the Messianic kingdom was undoubtedly one
of the mainsprings of the revolt. There had been a series of popular
leaders claiming to be Messiahs, but in the final struggle it was not
the claim of any individual, but the passionate faith of the whole
people, that inspired a belief in the coming of a perfect deliverance.
Some events appeared to favor the fulfilment of their hopes of temporal
sovereignty, bred though they were of despair. Rome under the corrupting
influence of Nero seemed to be passing her zenith; national movements
were stirring in the West, in Gaul and in Germany; in the East the
Parthians were again threatening the security of the Roman provinces.
The Jewish cause, on the other hand, seemed to be gaining ground
everywhere. Its converts, numerous in the West, were still more numerous
and important in the East. Among those recently brought over to the true
faith as full proselytes were Helena, the queen of Adiabene, a kingdom
situate in Mesopotamia, and her son Izates, who built themselves
splendid palaces at Jerusalem. In Babylon the Jews had made themselves
almost independent, and waged open war on the Parthian satraps. A large
section of the people cherished a somewhat simple theodicy. How could
God allow the wicked and dissolute Romans to prosper and the chosen
people to be oppressed? The Hellenistic writers of Sibylline oracles and
the Hebrew writers of Apocalypses, imitating the doom-songs of Isaiah
and Ezekiel, announced the coming overthrow of evil and the triumph of
good. Evil had reached its acme in Nero, and the time had come when God
would break the "fourth horn" of Daniel's vision (ch. 8), and exalt his
chosen people.
The fight for national independence was bound to have come, for nothing
could have prevented the Romans from their attempt to crush the spirit
of the Jews, and nothing could have held back the Jews from making a
supreme effort to obtain their freedom from the hated yoke. For one
hundred and twenty years Palestine had been ground beneath the iron heel
of Roman governors and Romanizing tyrants. The conditions of the foreign
rule had steadily grown more intolerable. At first the oppression was
mainly fiscal; then it had sought to crush all political liberty, and
finally it had come to outrage the deepest religious feeling and menace
the Temple-worship. As Graetz says, "The Jewish people was like a
captive, who, continually visited by his jailer, rattles at his fetters
with the strength of despair, till he wrenches them asunder." It was not
only the freedom of the Jew, but the safety of Judaism that was
imperiled by the misrule of a Claudius and a Nero. The war against the
Romans was then not merely a struggle for national liberty, but, equally
with the wars of the Maccabees against the Seleucids, an episode in the
more vital conflict between Hebraism and paganism, between material
force 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 only
an apology for his people, but an apology for his own life. In contrast
with the greater Jewish writers, he was given to vaunting his own deeds.
We have therefore abundant, if not always reliable, information about
the chief events of his career. It must always be borne in mind that he
had to color the narrative of his own as well as his people's history to
suit the tastes and prejudices of the Roman conqueror. He was born in 37
C.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 known
to history as Josephus Flavius, his proper name was Joseph ben
Mattathias, Josephus being the Latinized form of the Hebrew [Hebrew:
Yosef] and his patronymic being exchanged, when he went over to the
Romans, for the family name of his patrons, Flavius. His father was a
priest of the first of the twenty-four orders, named Jehoiarib, and on
his mother's side he was connected with the royal house of the
Hasmoneans. His genealogy, which he traces back to the time of the
Maccabean princes, is a little vague, and we may suspect that he was not
above improving it. But his family was without doubt among the priestly
aristocracy of Jerusalem, and his father, he says, was "eminent not only
on 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 the
priestly office, and he received the regular course of Jewish education
in the Torah and the tradition. He says in the _Antiquities_ that "only
those who know the laws and can interpret the practices of our
ancestors, are called educated among the Jews;" and it is likely that he
attended in his boyhood one of the numerous schools that existed in
Jerusalem at the time. According to the Talmud there were four hundred
and eighty synagogues each with a Bet Sefer for teaching the written law
and a Bet Talmud for the study of the oral law.[1] From his silence we
may infer that he did not study Greek at this period, and Aramaic was
his natural tongue. He was never able to speak Greek fluently or with
sufficient exactness, because, as he says in the _Antiquities_, "Our own
nation does not encourage those who learn the language of many peoples,
and so color their discourses with the smoothness of their periods: for
they look upon this sort of accomplishment as common, not only to
freemen, but to any slave that pleases to learn it."[2] When, in his
middle 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 composition
and syntax.
[Footnote 1: Yer. Meg. iii. 1.]
[Footnote 2: Ant. XX. xi. 2.]
As to his Hebrew accomplishments, he tells us, with his native
immodesty, that he acquired marvelous proficiency in learning, and was
famous for his great memory and understanding. When he was fourteen
years of age, he continues, such was his fame that the high priests and
principal men of the city frequently came to consult him about difficult
points of the law. His mature works do not show any profound knowledge
either of the Halakah or of the Haggadah, so that the statement is not
to be taken strictly. It is probably nothing more than a grandiloquent
way of saying that he was a precocious child, who impressed his elders.
Paul, too, claimed that he was "a Pharisee of the Pharisees, and zealous
beyond those of his own age in the Jews' religion," and yet he can
hardly be regarded as an authority on the tradition. The autobiography
of Josephus, it is pertinent to remember, was designed to impress the
Romans with the greatness of the writer, and its readers were not
equipped with the means of criticising his Jewish accomplishments. With
the same object of impressing the Romans, Josephus recounts that, when
about the age of sixteen, he had a mind to imbue himself with the tenets
of the three Jewish parties, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the
Essenes.
Elsewhere he describes the teaching of these sects for the benefit of
his Roman readers according to a technical classification borrowed from
his environment, i.e. he represents them as three philosophical schools
of the Greek type, each holding different views about fate and
Providence and the nature of the soul and its immortality. But just as
this is demonstrably a misleading coloring of the difference between the
sections of the Jewish people, so is his attempt to represent that he
attended, as a cultured Greek or Roman of the time would have done,
three philosophical colleges. He was compelled by the needs of his
audience to present Jewish life in the form of Greco-Roman institutions,
however ill it fits the mould, and his remarks about sects and schools
must always be taken with caution. It is as though a modern writer
should describe Judaism as a Church, and express its ideas and
observances in the language of Christian theology.