Steven B. Bowman - Sepher Yosippon: A Tenth-Century History of Ancient Israel

Praise for Sepher Yosippon

Bowmans work is a wonderful achievement of producing an English version of David Flussers pioneering critical edition of the medieval anonymous Sepher Yosippon, merged with new breathtaking notes. This is an absolutely innovative and challenging accomplishment of a great connoisseur of medieval Hebrew Literature.

Robert Bonfil, Emeritus Professor of Jewish History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Sepher Yosippon is the major Hebrew source for Jewish Second Temple history. The translation by Steven Bowman enables everybody interested to delve into this highly important work that shaped Jewish self-understanding from the Middle Ages until the modern time.

Saskia Dnitz, author of berlieferung und Rezeption des Sefer Yosippon

The book known as Sepher Yosippon is probably the very first book written in Hebrew on the continent of Europe, and it soon became one of the most popular and widely read Hebrew books. Surprisingly, it has never before been made available to English readers. Steven Bowman has done a great service to the wider public, as well as to students interested in Jewish history and literature, by producing this fluent and readable translation.

Nicholas de Lange, University of Cambridge

Steven Bowman has given us a readable and erudite annotated translation of the tenth-century Hebrew classic, Sepher Yosippon. Popular among Jews all over the world into the nineteenth century, Sepher Yosippon relates a consecutive narrative of Jewish history in the Persian and Greco-Roman periods, especially the Great Jewish Revolt against Rome. Bowman traces the variety of classical and early medieval sources; versions of the first-century Jewish historian, Josephus Flavius, and the Latin Apocrypha; and the ambiance of Byzantine Southern Italy, where this pseudonymous work was composed. It is a welcome contribution to our knowledge of this foundational text of Jewish historiography.

Rivkah Fishman-Duker, lecturer emerita, Rothberg International School, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology

General Editor

Dan Ben-Amos

University of Pennsylvania

Translated and Introduced by

Steven Bowman

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

Copyright 2023 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan, 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

ISBN 978-0-8143-4943-4 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-8143-4944-1 (case)

ISBN 978-0-8143-4945-8 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging Number: 2021951020

Published with support from the fund for the Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology.

Volume 1 of The Josippon [Josephus Gorionides], edited with introduction, commentary, and notes, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 198081), by David Flusser. First published in Hebrew by the Bialik Institute, Jerusalem. English translation published by arrangement with The Bialik Institute.

On cover: Page from Leiden 1 Maccabees manuscript / Codex PER F 17. Wikimedia Commons. Cover design by Genna Blackburn.

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References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Wayne State University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

I first met David Flusser as a Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 197879. In our telephone conversation, I congratulated him on his forty-year effort to present a scholarly edition of Sepher Yosippon, thus superseding the fourteenth-century edition of the text by Yehudah ibn Mosqoni, which I was then researching. He immediately invited me to his home along with my dissertation. We continued to discuss my work for the next twenty years, during which I enjoyed an intellectual feast of his vast knowledge. Rav todot to my companion and counterpart ezer kenegdi Yael Feldman, whose control of Hebrew language and literature as well as editorial experience has made many of my projects and this particular text more comprehensible. My thanks too to Aviad Kleinberg, who read through the entire text, applying his medieval expertise. Special thanks to Dan Ben Amos for his comments and mostly for shepherding the text through the press as part of his Raphael Patai Series. Many thanks to the many scholars with whom I have discussed the text, as mentioned in the notes. I am grateful to the libraries, institutions, and staffs whose hospitality and support over the decades have facilitated my research and study: the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Ben Zvi Institute, Hebrew Union College, the John Miller Burnam Classics Library of the University of Cincinnati, Indiana University, New York University, the University of California at Berkeley, the Jewish Museum of Greece, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection at Cambridge University, and Wolfson College. Special thanks to the Judaic Studies Department at the University of Cincinnati, which succored me for over three decades, and to the Charles Philip Taft Memorial Fund at UC, which graciously supported much of my research and publications. Finally, I am most grateful to the Fulbright Foundation for its continued support of my career.

Steven Bowman

Cincinnati, New York, Jerusalem

Sepher Yosippon (The Book of Yosippon, alt. Josippon, Yosifun) has been for over a millennium one of the most popular and influential books for Jews and non-Jews alike who consider it the lost work of Josephus Flavius on the Roman-Jewish war, a work that he claimed to have written for his own people in their language. The earliest date we have for this Hebrew masterpiece, 953 CE, is in an internal colophon by a copyist in a fifteenth-century manuscript of Yosippon, read over a millennium after Josephuss Bellum Iudaicum appeared at the court of Domitian, son of the emperor Vespasian, and his brother Titus, the conquerors of Jerusalem who destroyed the Temple in 70 CE (or 68, as medieval Jews calculated it).

The anonymous author of Sepher Yosippon had access, perhaps in Naples and other Italian locales, to a decent library of ancient and medieval material that he and his later editors gathered and translated and cobbled together in this first history of the Second Temple period since Josephus Flavius. The authors main sources were 1 and 2 Maccabees, found in Jeromes Latin Apocrypha to the Bible, Josephuss