Goodman Martin - Josephuss the Jewish war: a biography

LIVES OF GREAT RELIGIOUS BOOKS

Josephuss The Jewish War

LIVES OF GREAT RELIGIOUS BOOKS

Josephuss The Jewish War, Martin Goodman

The Song of Songs, Ilana Pardes

The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila, Carlos Eire

The Book of Exodus, Joel S. Baden

The Book of Revelation, Timothy Beal

The Talmud, Barry Scott Wimpfheimer

The Koran in English, Bruce B. Lawrence

The Lotus Stra, Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

John Calvins Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bruce Gordon

C. S. Lewiss Mere Christianity, George M. Marsden

The Bhagavad Gita, Richard H. Davis

The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, David Gordon White

Thomas Aquinass Summa theologiae, Bernard McGinn

The Book of Common Prayer, Alan Jacobs

The Book of Job, Mark Larrimore

The Dead Sea Scrolls, John J. Collins

The Book of Genesis, Ronald Hendel

The Book of Mormon, Paul C. Gutjahr

The I Ching, Richard J. Smith

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

Augustines Confessions, Garry Wills

Dietrich Bonhoeffers Letters and Papers from Prison, Martin E. Marty

Josephuss The Jewish War

A BIOGRAPHY

Martin Goodman

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright 2019 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019937985

ISBN 978-0-691-13739-1

ISBN (e-book) 978-0-691-19419-6

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Fred Appel, Thalia Leaf and Jenny Tan

Production Editorial: Jenny Wolkowicki

Text design: Lorraine Doneker

Jacket design: Lorraine Doneker

Production: Erin Suydam

Publicity: Nathalie Levine and Kathryn Stevens

Copyeditor: Joseph Dahm

Jacket credit: The Arch of Titus, depicting the Spoils of Jerusalem. Constructed in c. 82 AD by the emperor Domitian to commemorate Tituss victories. Lanmas / Alamy

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CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

In many Jewish and Christian homes in England or America in the nineteenth century, a beautifully bound copy of William Whistons translation of Josephus could be found on the shelf next to a copy of the Bible. The name of the author was sufficiently recognized for casual allusions to be dropped into the writings of Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy. The writings of Josephus were included in the select library of forty works donated to the Collegiate School of Connecticut on the foundation of what was to become Yale University. It was widely known that he had described the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in the Jewish War. How many owners of these bound volumes found their way actually to read what Josephus wrote is another question.

The life of the Jewish War will include not only the copying, printing, distribution, editing, translating, and adapting of Josephuss history, but also fluctuations in the reputation of the author and his book over two thousand years. In the modern world, attitudes toward the Jewish War are deeply ambivalent, with some passages, such as the description of the defense of Masada, treated as if they were eyewitness reportage (even though Josephus was not there) and others, such as the account of Tituss council of war before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, often dismissed as imperial propaganda (even though, according to his own account, Josephus was in the Roman military headquarters at the time and in a position to know what actually happened). Attitudes toward the Jewish War have owed as much to the changing fortunes of Jews in the centuries after the book was completed as they do to the contents of the work itself. But Josephuss history was a remarkable work in its own rightand, as we shall see, at least occasionally it was actually read.

This biography owes its birth to Fred Appel in Princeton University Press, on whose initiative Josephuss Jewish War has been included in the Princeton Lives of Great Religious Books series. It was not an obvious choice, since the Jewish War was not in origin a sacred text, but it was inspired, since investigation into its reception has been bound up in the developments of both Judaism and Christianity since antiquity. The story culminates in the passionate debates about Josephus and his book among Jews since the early nineteenth century. My extended treatment of this topic in reflects both the interest of these debates and their reverberations to the present day.

Reception history benefits hugely from collaboration, since no one scholar can hope to know everything about the disparate cultures within which a book has been passed down and read over the centuries, and I have been exceptionally fortunate to have benefited from the wisdom and knowledge of a wide range of colleagues. In 2014 the Oxford Seminar in Advanced Jewish Studies at the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies brought together a galaxy of scholars over six months to investigate the reception of Josephus in the early modern period. Between 2012 and 2015 a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council convened four workshops in Oxford to study the Jewish reception of Josephus from 1750 to the present. I am deeply grateful to Joanna Weinberg, my colleague in leading the Oxford Seminar, and to Tessa Rajak and Andrea Schatz, who were co-investigators on the AHRC project, as well as to the many scholars (more than fifty) who contributed their knowledge to the sessions organized under the auspices of one or another of these immensely valuable collaborative ventures. Panel discussions at the conferences of the Association of Jewish Studies, the World Union of Jewish Studies, and the European Association of Jewish Studies, and responses to a conference presentation at Johns Hopkins University, elicited yet more ideas. It has been exhilarating to discover how many colleagues, with expertise from antiquity to the present, have proven to have discovered at least one curious reference to Josephus in the material they study.

I am much indebted to Anthony Ellis, Theofili Kampianaki, Tessa Rajak, Daniel Schwartz, and Joanna Weinberg for reading earlier drafts of this book and providing immensely helpful comments. They have saved me from many errors. Any that remain are my responsibility alone.

My acquaintance with Josephuss original text has been greatly enriched by working with Martin Hammond on the Oxford Worlds Classics edition, published by Oxford University Press in 2017, and I am very grateful to him for permission to use his translation in the passages cited in the appendix. I am also very grateful to Zur Shalev and Eyal Ben Eliyahu for permission to quote the translation of Josephus by Yitzhak Shalev, and to Neelum Ali for her patience in turning my handwriting into typescript.

LIVES OF GREAT RELIGIOUS BOOKS

Josephuss The Jewish War

Beginnings

CHAPTER 1

Josephus the Man

Josephus began his life as a scion of a priestly Jewish family in Judaea and ended it, probably in Rome, as a Roman citizen who could boast a personal acquaintance with at least two emperors. The vicissitudes of his career can be attributed directly to the revolt of the Jews against Roman rule that culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem and its famous Temple in 70 CE. That conflict was the subject of the