The first work of Josephus as man of letters was the history of the wars of the Jews against the Romans, for which, according to his own statement, he prepared from the time of his surrender by taking copious notes of the events which he witnessed. He completed it in the fortieth year of his life and dedicated it to Vespasian.[1] He seems originally to have designed the record of the struggle for the purpose of persuading his brethren in the East that it was useless to fight further against the Romans. He desired to prove to them that God was on the side of the big battalions, and that the Jews had forfeited His protection by their manifold transgressions. The Zealots were as wicked as they were misguided, and to follow them was to march to certain ruin. It is not unlikely that Josephus was commissioned by Titus to compose his version of the war for the "Upper Barbarians," whose rising in alliance with the Parthians might have troubled the conqueror of Jerusalem, as it afterwards troubled Trajan. But, save that it was written in Aramaic, we cannot tell the form of the original history, since it has entirely disappeared.

[Footnote 1: B.J. VII. xv. 8.]

Josephus says in the preface to the extant Greek books that he translated into Greek the account he had already written. But he certainly did much more than translate. The whole trend of the narrative and the purpose must have been changed when he came to present the events for a Greco-Roman audience. He was concerned less to instill respect for Rome in his countrymen than to inspire regard for his countrymen in the Romans, and at the same time to show that the Rebellion was not the deliberate work of the whole people, but due to the instigation of a band of desperate, unscrupulous fanatics. He was concerned also to show that God, the vanquished Jewish God, as the Romans would regard Him, had allowed the ruin of His people, not because He was powerless to preserve them, but because they had sinned against His law. Lastly, he was anxious to emphasize the military virtue and the magnanimity of his patrons Vespasian and Titus. He intersperses frequent protests in various parts of the seven books, and repeats them in the preface, to the effect that while his predecessors had written "sophistically," he was aiming only at the exact record of events. But it is obvious that, in the Wars as in his other works, he has a definite purpose to serve, and he colors his account of events to suit this purpose and to please his patrons.

He sets out to establish, in fact, that it was "a sedition of our own that destroyed Jerusalem, and that the tyrants among the Jews brought upon us the Romans, who unwillingly attacked us, and occasioned the burning of our Temple."[1] And he apologizes for the passion he shows against the tyrants and Zealots, which, he admits, is not consistent with the character of an historian; it was provoked because the unparalleled calamities of the Jews were not caused by strangers but by themselves, and "this makes it impossible for me to contain my lamentations."[2] The historian, therefore, in the work which has come down to us, is dominated by the conviction, whether sincere or feigned, that the war with Rome was a huge error, that those who fomented it were wicked, self-seeking men, and that the Jews brought their ruin on themselves. This being his temper, it is necessary to look very closely at his representation of events and examine how far partisan feeling and prejudices, and how far servility and the courtier spirit, have colored it. We have also to consider how far his reflections represent his own judgment, and how far they are the slavish adoption of opinions expressed by the victorious enemies of his people.

[Footnote 1: B.J., Preface.]

[Footnote 2: B.J., Preface, 4.]

The alternative title of the work is On the Destruction of the Temple, but its scope is larger than either name suggests. It is conjectured by the German scholar Niese that the author called it A History of the Jewish State in Its Relations with the Romans. It is in fact a history of the Jews under the Romans, beginning, as Josephus says, "where the earlier writers on Jewish affairs and our prophets leave off." He proposes to deal briefly with the events that preceded his own age, but fully with the events of the wars of his time. The history starts, accordingly, with the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes, and, save that he expatiates without any sense of proportion on the exploits of Herod the Great, Josephus is generally faithful to his program in the introductory portion of the work. For the Herodian period he found a very full source, and the temptation was too powerful for him, so that the greater part of the first book is taken up with the story of the court intrigues and family murders of the king. Very brief indeed is his treatment of the Maccabean brothers, and not very accurate. They are dismissed in two chapters, and it is probable that the historian had not before him either of the two good Jewish sources for the period, the First and the Second Book of the Maccabees. In his later work, in which he dealt with the same period at greater length, the account which he had abstracted from a Greek source, probably Nicholas of Damascus, is corrected by the Jewish work. The two records show a number of small discrepancies. Thus, in the Wars he states that Onias, the high priest who drove out the Tobiades from Jerusalem, fled to Ptolemy in Egypt, and founded a city resembling Jerusalem; whereas in the Antiquities he states that the Onias who fled to Egypt because Antiochus deprived him of office was the son of the high priest. Again, in the Wars he makes Mattathias kill the Syrian governor Bacchides; whereas, in the Antiquities, agreeing with the First Book of the Maccabees, he says that the Syrian officer who was slain at Modin was Appelles.

Josephus in the Wars follows his Hellenistic source for the history of the Hasmonean monarchy without introducing any Jewish knowledge and without criticism. His summary is of incidents, not of movements, and he has a liking for romantic color. The piercing of the king's elephant by the Maccabean Eleazar, the prediction by an Essene of the murder of Antigonus, the brother of King Aristobulus I, are detailed. The inner Jewish life is passed over in complete silence until he comes to the reign of Alexander. Then he describes the Pharisees as a sect of Jews that are held to be more religious than others and to interpret the laws more accurately.[1] The description is clearly derived from a Greek writer, who regards the Jewish people from the outside. It is quite out of harmony with the standpoint which Josephus himself later adopts. In this passage he presents the Pharisees as crafty politicians, insinuating themselves into the favor of the queen, and then ordering the country to suit their own ends. Without describing the other sects, he continues the narration of intrigues and wars till he reaches the intervention of Pompey in the affairs of Palestine.

[Footnote 1: B.J. I. v. 2.]

From this point the treatment is fuller. No doubt the Hellenistic historians paid more attention to the Jews from the moment when they came within the orbit of the Roman Empire; but while in the Antiquities Josephus refers several times to the statements of two or three of the Greco-Roman writers, in the Wars he quotes no authority. From this it may be inferred that in the earlier work he is following but one guide.

He gives an elaborate account of the rise of the Idumean family of Antipater, and hence to the end of the book the history passes into a biography of Herod. The first part of Herod's career, when he was building up his power, is related in the most favorable light. His activity in Galilee against the Zealots, his trial by the Sanhedrin, his subsequent service to the Romans, his flight from Judea upon the invasion of the Parthians, his reception by Antony, his triumphal return to the kingdom that had been bestowed on him, his valiant exploits against the Arabians of Perea and Nabatea, his capture of Jerusalem, his splendid buildings, and his magnificence to foreigners—all these incidents are set forth so as to enhance his greatness. The description throughout has a Greek ring. There is scarcely a suggestion of a Jewish point of view towards the semi-savage godless tyrant. And when Josephus comes to the part of Herod's life which even an historian laureate could not misrepresent to his credit, his family relations, he adopts a fundamentally pagan outlook.

The foundation of the Greek drama was the idea that the fortunate incurred the envy of the gods, and brought on themselves the "nemesis," the revenge, of the divine powers, which plunged them into ruin. This conception, utterly opposed as it is to the Jewish doctrine of God's goodness, is applied to Herod, on whom, says Josephus, fortune was revenged for his external prosperity by raising him up domestic troubles.[1] He introduces another pagan idea, when he suggests that Antipater, the wicked son of the king, returned to Palestine, where he was to meet his doom, at the instigation of the ghosts of his murdered brothers, which stopped the mouths of those who would have warned him against returning. The notion of the avenging spirits of the dead was utterly opposed to Jewish teaching, but it was a commonplace of the Hellenistic thought of the time.

[Footnote 1: B.J. I. xxii. 1.]

Of Hillel and Shammai, the great sages of the time, we have not a word; but when he recounts how, in the last days of Herod, the people under the lead of the Pharisees rose against the king in indignation at the setting up of a golden eagle over the Temple gate, he speaks of the sophists exhorting their followers, "that it was a glorious thing to die for the laws of their country, because the soul was immortal, and an eternal enjoyment of happiness did await such as died on that account; while the mean-spirited, and those that were not wise enough to show a right love of their souls, preferred death by disease to that which is a sign of virtue." The sentiments here are not so objectionable, but the description of the Pharisees as sophists, and the suggestion of a Valhalla for those who died for their country and for no others—for which there is no authority in Jewish tradition—betray again the uncritical copying of a Hellenistic source.

Finally, in summing up the character of Herod, all he finds to say is, "Above all other men he enjoyed the favor of fortune, since from a private station he obtained a kingdom, and held it many years, and left it to his sons; but yet in his domestic affairs he was a most unfortunate man." Not a word of his wickedness and cruelty, not a breath of the Hebrew spirit, but simply an estimate of his "fortune." This is the way in which the Romanized Jew continued the historical record of the Bible, substituting foreign superstitions about fate and fortune for the Jewish idea that all human history is a manifestation of God.

Josephus ends the first book of the Wars with an account of the gorgeous pomp of Herod's funeral, and starts the second book with a description of the costly funeral feast which his son Archelaus gave to the multitude, adding a note—presumably also derived from Nicholas— that many of the Jews ruin themselves owing to the need of giving such a feast, because he who omits it is not esteemed pious. As his source fails him for the period following on the banishment of Archelaus, the treatment becomes fragmentary, but at the same time more original and independent. An account of the various Jewish sects interrupts the chronicle of the court intrigues and popular risings. Josephus distinguishes here four sects, the Essenes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Zealots, but his account is mainly confined to the first.[1] He describes in some detail their practices, beliefs, and organizations. Indeed, this passage and the account in Philo are our chief Jewish authorities for the tenets of the Essenes. He is anxious to establish their claim to be a philosophical community comparable with the Greek schools. In particular he represents that their notions of immortality correspond with the Greek ideas of the Isles of the Blessed and of Hades. "The divine doctrines of the Essenes, as he calls them, which consider the body as corruptible and the soul an immortal spirit, which, when released from the bonds of the flesh as from a long slavery, rejoices and mounts upwards, lay an irresistible bait for such as have once tasted of their philosophy." The ideas which the sect cherished were popular in a certain part of Greco-Roman society, which, sated with the luxury of the age, turned to the ascetic life and to the pursuit of mysticism. Pliny the Elder, who was on the staff of Titus at Jerusalem, appears to have been especially interested in the Jewish communists, and briefly described their doctrines in his books; and the circle for whom Josephus wrote would have been glad to have a fuller account.

[Footnote 1: B. J. II. viii.]

Of the other two sects he says little here, and what he says is superficial. He places the differentiation in their contrasted doctrines of fate and immortality. The Pharisees ascribe all to fate, but yet allow freewill—a Hellenizing version of the saying ascribed to Rabbi Akiba, "All is foreseen, but freedom of will is given"[1]—and they say all souls are immortal, but those of the good only pass into other bodies, while those of the bad suffer eternal punishment. This attribution of the doctrine of metempsychosis and eternal punishment is another piece of Hellenization, or a reproduction of a Hellenistic misunderstanding; for the Rabbinic records nowhere suggest that such ideas were held by the Pharisees. "The Sadducees, on the other hand, deny fate entirely, and hold that God is not concerned in man's conduct, which is entirely in his own choice, and they likewise deny the immortality of the soul or retribution after death." Here the attempt to represent the Sadducees' position as parallel with Epicurean materialism has probably induced an overstatement of their distrust of Providence. Josephus adds that the Pharisees cultivate great friendships among themselves and promote peace among the people; while the Sadducees are somewhat gruff towards each other, and treat even members of their own party as if they were strangers.

[Footnote 1: Comp. Abot, iii. 15.]

Of the fourth party, the Zealots, Josephus has only a few words, to the effect that when Coponius was sent as the first procurator of Judea, a Galilean named Judas prevailed on his countrymen to revolt, saying they would be cowards if they would endure to pay any tax to the Romans or submit to any mortal lord in place of God. This man, he says, was the teacher of a peculiar sect of his own. While the other three sects are treated as philosophical schools, Josephus does not attribute a philosophy to the Zealots, and out of regard to Roman feelings he says nothing of the Messianic hopes that dominated them.

After the digression about the sects, Josephus continues his narrative of the Jewish relations with the Romans. He turns aside now and then to detail the complicated family affairs of the Herodian family or to describe some remarkable geographical phenomenon, such as the glassy sands of the Ladder of Tyre.[1] The main theme is the growing irritation of the Jews, and the strengthening of the feeling that led to the outbreak of the great war. But Josephus, always under the spell of the Romans, or writing with a desire to appeal to them, can recognize only material, concrete causes. The deeper spiritual motives of the struggle escape him altogether, as they escaped the Roman procurators. He recounts the wanton insults of a Pontius Pilate, who brought into Jerusalem Roman ensigns with the image of Caesar, and spoiled the sacred treasures of the Korban for the purpose of building aqueducts; and he dwells on the attempt of Gaius to set up his statue in the Temple, which was frustrated only by the Emperor's murder. But about the attitude of the different sections of the Jewish people to the Romans, of which his record would have been so valuable, he is silent.

[Footnote 1: B.J. II. x. 2. The same phenomenon is recorded in Pliny and
Tacitus, and it was a commonplace of the geography of the age.]

After the brief interlude of Agrippa's happy reign, the irritation of Roman procurators is renewed, and under Comanus tumult follows tumult, as one outrage after another upon the Jewish feeling is countenanced or abetted. The courtier of the Flavian house takes occasion to recount the Emperor Nero's misdeeds and family murders; but he resists the desire to treat in detail of these things, because his subject is Jewish history.[1] He must have had before him a source which dealt with general Roman history more fully, and he shows his independence, such as it is, in confining his narrative to the Jewish story. But the reliance on his source for his point of view leads him to write as a good Roman; the national party are dubbed rebels and revolutionaries ([Greek: stasiastai]). The Zealots are regularly termed robbers, and the origin of war is attributed to the weakness of the governors in not putting down these turbulent elements. All this was natural enough in a Roman, but it comes strangely from the pen of a soi-disant Jewish apologist, who had himself taken a part in the rebellion. Characteristic is his account of the turbulent condition of Palestine in the time of Felix:

"Bands of Sicarii springing up in the chaos caused by the tyranny infested the country, and another body of abandoned men, less villainous in their actions, but more wicked in their designs, deluded the people under pretense of divine inspiration, and persuaded them to rise. Felix put down these bands, but, as with a diseased body, straightway the inflammation burst out in another part. And the flame of revolt was blown up every day more and more, till it came to a regular war."[2]

[Footnote 1: B.J. II. xiii. 1.]

[Footnote 2: B.J. II. xiii. 6.]

Josephus vents his full power of denunciation on the last procurator, Floras, who goaded the people into war, and by his repeated outrages compelled even the aristocratic party, to which the historian belonged, to break their loyalty to Rome: "As though he had been sent as executioner to punish condemned criminals, he omitted no sort of spoliation or extortion. In the most pitiful cases he was most inhuman; in the greatest turpitudes he was most impudent, nor could anyone outdo him in perversion of the truth, or combine more subtle ways of deceit." Josephus, not altogether consistently with what he has already said, seeks to exculpate his countrymen for their rising, up to the point in which he himself was involved in it; and though he admits that the high priests and leading men were still anxious for peace at any price, and he puts a long speech into Agrippa's mouth counseling submission, he is yet anxious to show that his people were driven into war by the wickedness of Nero's governors. His masters allowed him, and probably invited him, to denounce the oppression of the ministers of their predecessors, and the Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus likewise state that the rapacity of the procurators drove the Jews into revolt. He had authority, therefore, for this view in his contemporary sources.

The die was cast. Menahem, the son of Judas the Galilean and the head of the Zealots, seized Jerusalem, drove the Romans and Romanizers into the fortress of Antonia, and having armed his bands with the contents of Herod's southern stronghold of Masada, overpowered the garrison and put it to the sword. Menahem himself, indeed, was so barbarous that the more moderate leader Eleazar turned against him and put him to death. But Josephus sees in the massacre of the Roman garrison the pollution of the city, which doomed it to destruction. In his belligerent ethics, massacre of the Romans by the Jews is always a crime against God, requiring His visitation; massacres of the Jews are a visitation of God, revealing that the Romans were His chosen instrument.

With the history of the war, so far as the historian was involved in it, we have already dealt. We are here concerned with the character and the reliability of his account. Josephus is somewhat vague and confused about the dispositions of the Jewish leaders, but when he is not justifying his own treachery, or venting his spite on his rivals, he shows many of the parts of a military historian. He surveys with clearness and conciseness the nature of the country that the Romans had to conquer, and he describes the Roman armies and Roman camp with greater detail than any Roman historian, his design being "not so much to praise the Romans as to comfort those who have been conquered and to deter others from rising."[1] It has, however, been pointed out with great force, in support of the theory that he is following closely and almost paraphrasing a Roman authority on the war, that his geographical and topographical lore is introduced not in its natural place, but on the occasions when Vespasian is the actor in a particular district.[2] Thus, he describes the Phoenician coast when Vespasian arrives at Ptolemais, Galilee when Vespasian is besieging Tarichea, Jericho when Vespasian makes his sally to the Jordan cities.[3]

[Footnote 1: B.J. III. v. This remark must clearly have appeared in the original Aramaic.]

[Footnote 2: Schlatter, Zur Topographie und Geschichte Palastinas, pp. 99 ff.]

[Footnote 3: B.J. III. iii. 1 and x. 7.]

All this would be natural in a chronicler who was one of Vespasian's 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.