staff, but it is odd in the Jewish commander of Galilee. Again, he makes
certain confusions about Hebrew names of places, which are easily
explained in a Roman, but are inexplicable in the learned priest he
represents himself to be. He says the town of Gamala was so called
because of its supposed resemblance to a camel (in Greek, Kamelos), and
the Jews corrupted the name.[1] A Roman writer no doubt would have
regarded the Hebrew [Hebrew: Namal] as a corruption of the Greek word: a
Jew should have known better.
[Footnote 1: B.J. III. iv. 2.]
Again, he explains Bezetha, the name of the northeastern quarter of
Jerusalem, as meaning the new house or city,[1] a mistake natural to a
Roman who was aware that it was in fact the new part of the city, and
alternatively called by the Greek name [Greek: kainopolis], but an
extraordinary blunder for a Jew, who would surely know that it meant the
House of Olives, while the Aramaic or popular name for "new city" would
be Bet-Hadta. He does not once refer to Mount Zion, but knows the hill
by its Greek name of Acra. Yet again it is significant that he inserts
in his geography pagan touches that are part of the common stock of
Greco-Roman notices of Palestine. At Joppa, he says, one may still see
on the rock the trace of the chains of Andromeda,[2] who in Hellenistic
legend was said to have been rescued there by the fictitious hero
Perseus. Describing the Dead Sea,[3] he mentions the destruction of the
cities of Sodom and Gomorrah as a myth, as a Greek or a Roman would have
done.[4] His very accuracy about some topographical details is
suspicious. Colonel Conder[5] points with surprise to the fact that his
description of the fortress of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea, the
siege of which he had not seen, is absolutely correct, while his account
of Jotapata, which he defended, is full of exaggeration. The probable
explanation is that in the one place he copied a skilled observer; in
the other, he trusted to his own inaccurate memory. We may infer that as
in the _Antiquities_ he mainly compiled the work of predecessors that
are known, so in the _Wars_ he compiled the works of predecessors that
are unknown, adding something from his personal experience and his
national pride.
[Footnote 1: B.J. V. v. 8.]
[Footnote 2: B.J. IV. ix. 3. Pliny says the same thing in Latin.]
[Footnote 3: B.J. IV. viii. 4.]
[Footnote 4: Tac. Hist. v. 7.]
[Footnote 5: Tent Work in Palestine, 1. 207.]
Apart from his dependence on others' work, his chronicle of the war is
marred by the need of justifying his own submission, his Roman
standpoint, and his ulterior purpose of pleasing and flattering his
patrons. Vespasian and Titus are the righteous ministers of God's wrath
against His people, His vicars on earth, and every action in their
ruthless process of extermination has to be represented as a just
retribution required to expiate the sin of Jewish resistance. Titus
especially is singled out for his unfailing deeds of bravery; and when
anything is amiss with the proceedings of the Romans, the Imperial
family is always exculpated. Characteristic is the palliation of
Vespasian's brutal treatment of the people of Tarichea. When they
surrendered, they were promised their lives, but twelve hundred old men
were butchered, and over three thousand men and women were sold as
slaves. Josephus cannot find the execution of the divine will in this,
and so he is driven to explain that Vespasian was overborne by his
council, and gave them an ambiguous liberty to do as seemed good to
them.
It is the pivot of the story of the wars, as has been stated, that the
internal strife of the Jews brought about the ruin of the nation, and
the testimony of Josephus has perpetuated that conception of the last
days of Jerusalem. Our other records of the struggle go to suggest that
civil strife did take place. Tacitus[1] states that there were three
leaders, each with his own army in the city, and the Rabbinical
authorities[2] speak of the three councils in Jerusalem. It is further
said that the second Temple was destroyed because of the unprovoked
hatred among the Jews, which was the equal of the sins of murder,
unchastity, and idolatry that brought about the fall of the first
Temple.[3] Yet the fact that the men who were the foremost agitators of
the Rebellion were its leaders to the end suggests that the people had
reliance on their leadership; and Josephus probably traded largely on
his prejudices for the particulars of the civil conflicts, and he placed
all the blame on the party that was least guilty. Adopting the Roman
standpoint, he denounced the whole Zealot policy, and for John of
Gischala, their leader, he entertained a special loathing. It is
therefore his purpose to show that all the sedition was of John's
making, while it would seem more probable that the disturbances arose
because the Romanizing aristocrats were planning surrender.
[Footnote 1: Hist. v. 12.]
[Footnote 2: Midr. Kohelet, vii. 11.]
[Footnote 3: Yoma, 9b.]
According to Josephus, the Zealots, who were masters of the greater part
of Jerusalem during the struggle, established a reign of terror. They
trampled upon the laws of man, and laughed at the laws of God. They
ridiculed the oracles of the prophets as the tricks of jugglers. "Yet
did they occasion the fulfilment of prophecies relating to their
country. For there was an ancient oracle that the city should be taken
and the sanctuary burnt when sedition should affect the Jews." Josephus
shares the pagan outlook of the Roman historian Tacitus, who is
horrified at the Jewish disregard of the omens and portents which
betokened the fall of their city, and speaks of them as a people prone
to superstition (what we would call faith) and deaf to divine warnings
(what we would call superstition).[1] Josephus and his friends were
looking for signs and prophecies of the ruin of the people as an excuse
for surrender; the Zealots, men of sterner stuff and of fuller faith,
were resolved to resist to the end, and would brook no parleying with
the enemy. They were in fact political nationalists of a different
school and leaning from the aristocrats and the priests. The latter
regarded political life and the Temple service as vital parts of the
national life, and believing that the legions were invincible were
anxious to keep peace with Rome. The Zealots regarded personal liberty
and national independence as vital, and, to vindicate them, fought to
the end with Rome. Both the extreme political parties lacked the
spiritual standpoint of the Pharisees, who believed that the Torah even
without political independence would hold the people together till a
better time was granted by Providence. The party conflicts induced
violence and civil tumult, and Josephus would have us believe that
"demoniac discord" was the main cause of the ruin of Jerusalem. During
the respite which the Jews enjoyed before the final siege of Jerusalem,
he alleges that a bitter feud was waged incessantly between Eleazar the
son of Simon, who held the Inner Court of the Temple, Simon, the son of
Gioras, who held the Upper and the greater part of the Lower city, and
John of Gischala, who occupied the outer part of the Temple. He
describes the situation rhetorically as "sedition begetting sedition,
like a wild beast gone mad, which, for want of other food, falls to
eating its own flesh." And he bursts into an apostrophe over the
fighting that went on within the Temple precincts:
"Most wretched city! What misery so great as this didst thou suffer from
the Romans, when they came to purify thee from thy internecine hatred!
Thou couldst no longer be a fit habitation for God, nor couldst thou
continue longer in being, after thou hadst been a sepulcher for the
corpses of thine own people, and thy holy house itself had been a burial
place in their civil strife."
[Footnote 1: Hist. v. 13. Gens superstitioni prona, religioni obnoxia.]
It is curious that a little later, when he resumes the narrative of the
Roman campaign, and returns presumably to a Roman source, he says that
the Jews, elated by their unexpected success, made incursions on the
Greek cities. The success referred to must be the defeat of Cestius
Gallus, and it looks as if this lurid account of the horrors of the
civil war in Jerusalem were not known to the Roman guide, and that at
the least Josephus has embroidered the story of the feud to suit his
thesis. The measure of the Jewish writer's dependence for the main part
of his narrative of the siege is singularly illustrated by a small
detail. Josephus throughout his account uses the Macedonian names of the
months, and equates them loosely with those of the Jewish calendar; but
it is notable that the three traditional Jewish dates in the siege which
he inserts, the fourteenth of Xanthicus (Nisan), when it began, the
seventeenth of Panemos (Tammuz), when the daily offering ceased, and the
ninth and tenth of Loos (Ab), when the Temple was destroyed, conflict
with the other dates he gives in his general account of the siege. So
far from being a proof of his independence, as has been claimed, his
Jewish dates show his want of skill in weaving his Jewish information
into his scheme. When he is original, he is apt to be unhistorical.
Josephus agrees with the Talmud that the fire lasted to the tenth of the
month,[1] but while the Rabbis cursed Titus, who burnt the Holy of
Holies and spread fire and slaughter, and Roman historians[2] declared
that Titus had deliberately fired the center of the Jewish cult in order
to destroy the national stronghold, Josephus is anxious to preserve his
patron's reputation for gentleness and invest him with the appearance of
piety and magnanimity. Voicing perhaps the conqueror's later regrets, he
declares that he protested against the Romans' avenging themselves on
inanimate things and against the destruction of so beautiful a work, but
failed despite all his efforts to stay the conflagration. The historian
writes a lurid description of the catastrophe, but he omits the simple
details that make the account in the Talmud so pathetic. "The Temple,"
runs the Talmudic account[3] "was destroyed on the eve of the ninth day
of Ab at the outgoing of Sabbath, at the end of the Sabbatic year; and
the watch of Jehoiarib was on service, and the Levites were chanting the
hymns and standing at their desks. And the hymn they chanted was, 'And
He shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off with
their own wickedness' (Ps. 94:23); and they could not finish to say,
'The Lord our God shall cut them off,' when the heathen came and
silenced them." This account may not be historically true, but it
represents the unquenchable spirit of Judaism in face of the disaster.
[Footnote 1: Comp. Yer. Taanit, iv. 6.]
[Footnote 2: Comp. Sulpicius Severus, who used Tacitus (Chron. I. xxx.
6.); and the poet Valerius Flaccus acclaims the victor of Solymae, who
hurls fiery torches at the Temple. Dion Cassius (lxvi. 4.) declares that
when the Roman soldiers refused to attack the Temple in awe of its
holiness, Titus himself set fire to it; and this appears to be the true
account.]
[Footnote 3: Taanit, 29a.]
Josephus, on the other hand, regards the fall of the Temple as a
favorable opportunity to give a list of the prodigies and omens that
heralded it. For example, he finds a proof of Providence in the
fulfilment of the oracle, that the city and the holy house should be
taken when the Temple should become foursquare. By demolishing the tower
of Antonia the Jews had made the Temple area foursquare, and so brought
the doom upon themselves. He tells, too, the story of a prophet Jesus,
who for years had cried, "Woe, woe to Jerusalem," and in the end, struck
by a missile, fell, crying, "Woe, woe to me!" For any reflections,
however, on the immortality of the religion or for any utterances of
hope for the ultimate restoration of the Temple and the coming of the
Messiah, we must not look to the _Wars_. Such ideas would not have
pleased his patrons, had he entertained them himself. He pointed to the
fulfilment of prophecy only so far as it predicted and justified the
destruction and ruin of his people. The expression of the national agony
at the destruction of the national center is to be found in the
apocryphal book of Esdras II.
Over his account of the final acts of the tragedy we may pass quickly.
Undismayed by the fall of the sanctuary and still hoping for divine
intervention, John and Simon withdrew from the Temple to the upper city.
Driven from this, they took refuge in the underground caverns and caves
to be found everywhere beneath Jerusalem, and finally they stood their
ground in the towers, until these too were captured, a month after the
destruction of the Temple, on the eighth of Elul (Gorpiaeus, as the
Greek month was called).
"It was the fifth time that the city was captured; and 2179 years passed
between its first building and its last destruction. Yet neither its
great antiquity, nor its vast riches, nor the diffusion of the nation
over the whole earth, nor the greatness of the veneration paid to it on
religious grounds, was sufficient to preserve it from destruction. And
thus ended the siege of Jerusalem."
Though the war was not finished, the crisis of the drama was over, and
Josephus, doubtless following his source, relaxes the narrative to
digress about affairs in Rome and the East. The last book of the _Wars_
is episodic and disconnected. It is a kind of aftermath, in which the
historian gathers up scattered records, but does not preserve the
dramatic character of the history. He had apparently here to fall back
on his own feeble constructive power, and was hard put to it to eke out
his material to the proportions of a book.
So careless, too, is he that he abstracts references from his source
that are meaningless. In the excursion into general history, he refers
to "the German king Alaric, whom we have mentioned before,"[1] though he
is brought in for the first time; and in the account of the siege of the
Zealots' fortress Machaerus he records the death of one "Judas whom we
have mentioned before,"[2] though again there was no previous mention of
the warrior. In the same chapter he describes some magical plant,
"Baaras, possessing power to drive away demons, which are no other than
the spirits of the wicked that enter into living men and kill them,
unless they obtain some help against them." This apparently was a
commonplace of Palestinian natural science, as known to the Greco-Roman
world, and Josephus simply copied it.
[Footnote 1: B.J. VII. iv. 4.]
[Footnote 2: B.J. VII. vi. 4.]
The Zealots still maintained resistance in remote parts of the country,
and the legate Bassus was sent to take their three fortresses. He died
before the capture of Masada, the last stronghold, a natural fastness
overlooking the Dead Sea, which had been fortified by Herod. In this
region David and centuries later the Maccabean heroes had found a refuge
at their time of distress, and here the Jewish people were to show that
desperate heroism of their race which is evoked when all save honor is
lost. Masada had been occupied by Eleazar, a grandson of Judas of
Galilee, the leader of the most fanatical section of the Zealots; and it
fell to the procurator Flavius Silva to reduce it.
Josephus utters a final outburst against the hated nationalist party and
especially its two leaders, Simon of Gioras and John of Gischala, though
both had become victims of Roman revenge. "That was a time," he
exclaims, "most prolific in wicked practices, nor could anyone devise
any new evil, so deeply were they infected, striving with each other
individually and collectively who should run to the greatest lengths of
impiety towards God and in unjust actions towards their neighbors." The
more incongruous is it that after this invective he puts into Eleazar's
mouth two long speeches, calling on his men to kill themselves rather
than fall into the hands of the Romans, which sum up eloquently the
Zealot attitude.[1] Josephus indeed introduces in the speech the
Hellenized doctrine of immortality, which regards the soul as an
invisible spirit imprisoned in the mortal body and seeking relief from
its prison. He goes on, however, to make the Jewish commander point out
how preferable is death to life servitude to the Romans, in a way in
which Eleazar might himself have spoken.
[Footnote 1: B.J. VII. viii.]
"'And as for those who have died in the war, we should deem them
blessed, for they are dead in defending, and not in betraying, their
liberty: but as to the multitude of those that have submitted to the
Romans, who would not pity their condition? And who would not make haste
to die before he would suffer the same miseries? Where is now that great
city, the metropolis of the Jewish nation, which was fortified by so
many walls round about, which had so many fortresses and large towers to
defend it, which could hardly contain the instruments prepared for the
war, and which had so many myriads of men to fight for it? Where is this
city that God Himself inhabited? It is now demolished to the very
foundations; and hath nothing but that monument of it preserved, I mean
the camp of those that have destroyed it, which still dwells upon its
ruins; some unfortunate old men also lie upon the ashes of the Temple,
and a few women are there preserved alive by the enemy for our bitter
shame and reproach. Now, who is there that revolves these things in his
mind, and yet is able to bear the sight of the sun, though he might live
out of danger? Who is there so much his country's enemy, or so unmanly
and so desirous of living, as not to repent that he is still alive? And
I cannot but wish that we had all died before we had seen that holy city
demolished by the hands of our enemies, or the foundations of our holy
Temple dug up after so profane a manner. But since we had a generous
hope that deluded us, as if we might perhaps have been able to avenge
ourselves on our enemies, on that account, though it be now become
vanity, and hath left us alone in this distress, let us make haste to
die bravely. Let us pity ourselves, our children, and our wives, while
it is in our power to show pity to them; for we are born to die, as well
as those whom we have begotten; nor is it in the power of the most happy
of our race to avoid it. But for abuses and slavery and the sight of our
wives led away after an ignominious manner with their children, these
are not such evils as are natural and necessary among men; although such
as do not prefer death before those miseries, when it is in their power
to do so, must undergo even them on account of their own cowardice.'
"Responding to their leader's call, the defenders put their wives and
children to the sword, and then turned their hands on themselves: and
when the Romans entered the place, to their amazement and horror they
found not a living soul."
Eleazar's speech is one of the few patriotic outbursts in the seven
books of the Wars, and it reads like a cry of bitter regret wrung from
the unhappy author at the end of his work. Like Balaam he set out to
curse, and stayed to bless, his enemies, and cursed himself. Perhaps
this apostrophe hides the tragedy of Josephus' life. Perhaps he inwardly
repented of his cowardice, and rued the uneasy protection he had secured
for himself. Perhaps he had denounced the Zealots throughout the history
perforce, to please his taskmasters, and in his heart of hearts envied
the party that had preferred death to surrender. We could wish he had
ended with the story of Masada's noble fall, and left us at this
pathetic doubt. But he had not the dramatic sense, and he rounds off the
story of the wars with an account of the futile Jewish rising in
Alexandria and Cyrene, fomented by the surviving remnants of the
Zealots. The first led to the closing in Egypt of the Temple of Onias,
the last sanctuary of the Jews; the second to slanderous attacks on the
historian. Jonathan, who had stirred up the Cyrenaic rising and started
the slanders, was tortured and burnt alive. As to Catullus, the Roman
governor, who admitted the calumnies, though the Emperor spared him, he
fell into a terrible distemper and died miserably. "Thus he became a
signal instance of Divine Providence, and demonstrated that God punishes
the wicked."
Instead of concluding upon some national reflection, Josephus,
pathetically enough, disfigures the end of his work with a final
revelation of personal vanity and materialistic views of a Providence
intervening on his behalf. Egoism and incapacity to attain to the noble
and sublime either in action or thought were the two defects that
lowered Josephus as a man, and which mar him as an historian. In the
last paragraph of the work he insists that he has aimed alone at
agreement with the facts; but industrious as is the record of events,
the claim is shallow. His history of the Jewish wars lacks authority
because it is palpably designed to please the Roman taste, and because
also it has to serve as a personal apology for one who, when heroism was
called for, had failed to respond to the call, and who was thus rendered
incapable in letters as in life of being a faithful champion of his
people.
VI
JOSEPHUS AND THE BIBLE
In the preface to the _Antiquities_ Josephus draws a distinction between
his motives for the composition of that work and of the _Wars_. He wrote
the latter because he himself had played a large part in the war, and he
desired to correct the errors of other historians, who had perverted the
truth. On the other hand, he undertook to write the earlier history of
his people because of the great importance of the events themselves and
of his desire to reveal for the common benefit things that were buried
in ignorance. He was stimulated to the task by the fact that his
forefathers had been willing to communicate their antiquity to the
Greeks, and, moreover, several of the Greeks had been at pains to learn
of the affairs of the Jewish nation.