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Interpreting Ancient Israelite History, Prophecy, and Law. John H. Hayes
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isbn 9781630874407
Автор произведения John H. Hayes
Жанр Религия: прочее
Издательство Ingram
Justus of Tiberias, a contemporary and antagonist of Josephus and like him apparently an unenthusiastic supporter of the revolt against Rome, produced not only a history of the Jewish War but also a chronicle of the Jewish kings extending from Moses to the time of Agrippa II. Justus seems to have made extensive use of Hellenistic universal chronicles, synchronizing the date of the exodus with the assumed contemporary Attic and Egyptian rulers. Justus’s extensive chronological synchronization, through the work of Julius Africanus, exercised a significant influence upon Christian biblical chronography.
Pride of place among Greco-Roman Jewish historians must be assigned to Flavius Josephus, although this may be as much due to the accident of historical preservation as to the excellence of historical presentation in his works. In the last quarter of the first century BCE, Josephus produced four major writings: Bellum judaicum, a history of the Jewish War in seven books; Antiquitates Judaicae, a history of the Jewish people from earliest times down to the outbreak of the Jewish–Roman War in 66 BCE in twenty books; Vita, an autobiographical work primarily describing Josephus’s role in the war; and Contra Apionem, a treatise on the antiquity of the Jewish people in two books. All of Josephus’s works were written for apologetic or polemical purposes, a factor that exercised significant influence and perhaps frequently produced distortions in his presentations. Whether Josephus was a traitor to his own people or a nationalist with loyalties that transcended the passion of Zealotism has been much debated, but that he was a sagacious opportunist has seldom been doubted.
In spite of Josephus’s argument that “the industrious writer is not one who merely remodels the scheme and arrangement of another’s work, but one who uses fresh materials and makes the framework of the history his own” (War 1.15), much of his historical work relied heavily upon previous authors, a factor sometimes acknowledged,sometimes not.25 Josephus was consciously aware of his interest, apologetic concerns, and the need to justify his presentations, and he commented briefly on his historiographic method. The account of the Jewish war, his finest work, was written to demonstrate that the Jewish revolutionary party was the dominant factor in the Jewish–Roman strife and the cause of the destruction of the temple and to correct previously published non-Jewish versions of the conflict (War 1.1–18). As to the first purpose, Josephus informed his Greek and Roman readers that, in spite of his desire to “recount faithfully the actions of both combatants” (War 1.9), his own reflections and private sentiments held that his country “owed its ruin to civil strife, and that it was the Jewish tyrants who drew down upon the holy temple the unwilling hands of the Romans” (War 1.10). As to the second purpose, Josephus felt that he had to correct the view that the Romans were “the conquerors of a puny people” (War 1.8) and to combat ill-informed historians: “As for the native Greeks, where personal profit or a lawsuit is concerned, their mouths are at once agape and their tongues loosed; but in the matter of history, where veracity and laborious collection of the facts are essential, they are mute, leaving to inferior and ill-informed writers the task of describing the exploits of their rulers.Let us at least hold historical truth in honour, since by the Greeks it is disregarded” (War 1.16).
In the War, Josephus’s interpretation of the events of his day is presented, in Thucydidean fashion, in three speeches attributed to Agrippa (2.345–401), Josephus himself (5.362–419), and Eleazar, the leader of the Masada rebels (7.323–36, 341–88).26 The central elements in Josephus’s interpretations were twofold. (1) As in Polybius, Roman dominance was understood as the work of providence or God. Josephus has Agrippa declare: “Divine assistance . . . is ranged on the side of the Romans, for, without God’s aid, so vast an empire could never have been built up” (2.391). Josephus reports that in his speech to the defenders of Jerusalem, he, after surveying the history of Israel’s suffering, sought to convince the Jews that “the Deity has fled from the holy places and taken His stand on the side of those with whom you are now at war” (5.412). Thus, like the prophets of old, Josephus applied a theological rationalization to explain the conditions of history. (2) The decimation of the nation and the trauma of the temple’s destruction were interpreted by Josephus as divine recompense (5.413–19). Josephus has Eleazar declare: “We have been deprived, manifestly by God Himself, of all hope of deliverance,” for God was expressing his “wrath at the many wrongs which we madly dared to inflict upon our countrymen.” He even has Eleazar interpret the rebels’ suicidal death as a form of payment to God: “The penalty for those crimes let us pay not to our bitterest foes, the Romans, but to God through the act of our own hands” (7.331–33). With good Deuteronomistic theology, Josephus explained the calamity that befell the Jews as divine punishment for the sins of the people, though as the sins of a minor element in the population.
Josephus’s other major historical work, his magnum opus, was titled Jewish Antiquities (or, literally translated, Jewish Archaeologies). Involved in Josephus’s presentation of the “ancient history and political constitution” of the Jews to the Greek-speaking world (Ant. 1.5) were two subsidiary influences, one clearly expressed and the second clearly deducible. In the first place, the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek in Alexandria, as reported in the Letter of Aristeas, and the assumed Greco-Roman interest in this work on Jewish history led Josephus to hope that a widespread interest in Jewish history in its entirety existed among non-Jews (1.10–14). The curiosity and encouragement of his patron, Epaphroditus, reinforced his hope. Josephus’s model led him to approach the topic in terms of translating the Hebrew records (1.5), although his work can in no way be classified as a translation and even to designate it a paraphrase is misleading.
Secondly, in 7 BCE, Dionysius of Halicarnassus had published in twenty books a work on Roman archaeologies (Antiquitates Romanae), written in Greek, in which he utilized various types of source material in order to demonstrate the great antiquity of Rome in line with the general interest in antiquity reflected in Hellenistic writers who, however, stressed Babylonian, Greek, Egyptian, or Jewish antiquity rather than Roman. Josephus seems to have adopted consciously the pattern and interest of Dionysius in the general structure of his work in order to demonstrate that Jewish history was able to stand on an equal footing with that of any other culture in terms of both antiquity and intrinsic interest.
In the present discussions, only a few general characteristics of Josephus’s history can be noted:
1. Although Josephus declares that his aim is to set forth “the precise details of our Scripture records neither adding nor omitting anything” (Ant. 1.17), he did deliberately omit some traditions as well as supplement the biblical materials. Some of his conscious omissions were clearly calculated to avoid providing anti-Jewish protagonists with any material that might be used to support the scurrilous claims that the Jews worshipped God in animal form, specifically the ass. One of the prominent concerns in his Contra Apionem is the refutation of this accusation. Noteworthy in this regard is his omission of any reference to the story of the Israelite worship of the golden calf (Exodus 32) in his history. Numerous non-biblical legends, many with parallels in rabbinic and Hellenistic haggadah, were added to his presentation. Among these are the stories of Moses’s command of the Egyptian army in expelling the Ethiopians (Ant. 2.238–53; a similar but not identical version appears in the second-century BCE writings of the Alexandrian Artapanus), the worship of Alexander the Great in the Jerusalem temple and his special favors to the Jews (Ant. 11.329–45; a very popular theme in later rabbinic tradition), and numerous less significant stories. Josephus does not explicitly differentiate between the biblical and the haggadic non-biblical traditions; the two seem to stand on an equal footing in his work.
2. In his discussion of Abraham and Moses, Josephus glorifies both characters, but at the same time he stops short of portraying them as immortals. Abraham is depicted as the first monotheist whose monotheism was derived from his speculation on the irregularity of natural and astronomical phenomena and was responsible for his persecution in Mesopotamia and subsequent settlement in Canaan (Ant. 1.154–57). In Egypt, Abraham taught astronomy (already discovered by the antediluvian ancients; Ant. 1.69–71) and arithmetic to the ignorant Egyptians, who subsequently passed along this learning to the Greeks (Ant. 1.166–68; somewhat similarly Artapanus, see Eusebius, Praeparatio