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Josephus

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During the year 68, Vespasian captured the two chief cities which the
Jewish national party held to the east side of the Jordan, Gadara and
Gerasa. He then prepared to lay siege to Jerusalem. But hearing of the
death of Nero and of the chaos at Rome that followed it, he stayed
operations to await events in Italy. In the following year, largely by
the aid of the Jewish apostate Tiberius Alexander, he secured the
allegiance of all the Eastern legions, and was proclaimed Emperor. Three
other generals laid claim to the same dignity, under the same title of
armed force, but in the end Vespasian's friends in Italy made themselves
masters of Rome, and he repaired himself to the capital and donned the
purple. Josephus was rewarded with his complete freedom, and assumed
henceforth the family name of his Imperial patrons. When, at the end of
the year 69, Titus was appointed by his father to finish the war, he
accompanied him back to Palestine. In the eighteen months' respite that
had been vouchsafed to them, the Jews had spent their energy and
undermined their powers of resistance by internecine strife. According
to the account in the _Wars_, which unfortunately is the only full
record we have of events, John of Gischala, fleeing to Jerusalem after
the fall of the Galilean fortresses, roused the Zealots against the high
priest Ananias, who was directing the Jewish policy towards submission
to Rome. Ananias, who was of the same party as Josephus, seems to have
come to the conclusion that resistance was hopeless, and he was anxious
to make terms. John called in to his aid the half-savage Idumeans, who
had joined the Jewish rebellion against Rome. They entered the city,
and, possessing themselves of the Temple mount, spread havoc. The Temple
itself ran with blood, and 8500 dead bodies, among them that of the high
priest, defiled its precincts.[1] Josephus, who, to suit the Roman
taste, identifies religion and ritual, declares that the fall of the
city and the ruin of the nation are to be dated from that day, and upon
Ananias he passes a eulogy that is likewise written with an eye to Roman
predilections:

"He was a prodigious lover of liberty and of democracy; he ever
preferred the public welfare before his own advantage, and he was
thoroughly sensible that the Romans were invincible. And I cannot but
think that it was because God had doomed the city to destruction on
account of its pollution, and was resolved to purge His sanctuary with
fire, that He cut off thus its great protector."

[Footnote 1: B.J. IV. vi. 1.]

For the better part of a year, according to our historian, the Zealots
maintained a reign of terror, and the various parties fought against one
another in the Holy City as fiercely as the Girondists and Jacobins of
the French Revolution. But on the approach of Titus they abandoned their
strife and united to resist the foe. The Roman general brought with him
four legions, the fifth, tenth, twelfth, and fifteenth, besides a large
following of auxiliaries, and his whole force amounted to 80,000 men. As
head of his staff came Tiberius Alexander, the renegade nephew of Philo
and formerly procurator of Judea. Josephus also was on the besieger's
staff--possibly he was an officer of the body-guard (_praefectus
praetorio_)--and was employed to bring his countrymen to reason. Himself
convinced, almost from the moment when he took up arms, of the certainty
of Rome's ultimate victory, and doubly convinced now, partly from
superstitious fatalism, partly from a need for extenuating his own
submission, he wasted his eloquence in efforts to make them surrender.
He knew that within the besieged city there was a considerable
Romanizing faction (including his own father), and either he believed,
or he had to pretend to believe, that he could bring over the mass to
their way of thinking. On various occasions during the siege he was sent
to the walls to summon the defenders to lay down their arms. He enlarged
each time on the invincible power of Rome, on the hopelessness of
resistance, on the clemency of Titus if they would yield, and on the
terrible fate which would befall them and the Temple if they fought to
the bitter end. What must have specially aroused the fury of the Zealots
was his insistence that the Divine Providence was now on the side of the
Romans, and that in resisting they were sinning against God. It is
little wonder that on one occasion when making these harangues he was
struck by a dart, and that his father was placed in prison by the
Zealots. Indeed it says much for the tolerance of those whom he
constantly reviles as the most abandoned scoundrels and the most cruel
tyrants that they did not do him and his family greater hurt.

Titus, after beating back desperate attacks by the Jews, fixed his camp
on Mount Scopas, by the side of the Mount of Olives, to the north of the
city, and, abandoning the idea of taking the city fortress by storm,
prepared to beleaguer it in regular form. The Jews were not prepared for
a siege. Josephus and the Rabbis[1] agree that the supplies of corn had
been burnt by the Zealots during the civil disturbances; and as the
arrival of Titus coincided with the Passover, myriads of people, who had
come up from all parts of the country and the Diaspora to celebrate the
festival, were crowded within its walls. It is estimated that their
number exceeded two and a half million. The capital was a hard place to
capture. Josephus, following probably a Roman authority, gives an
account of the fortifications of Jerusalem from the point of view of the
besieger, which is confirmed in large part by modern research.[2] On the
southeast and west the city was unapproachable by reason of the sheer
ravines of Kedron and Hinnom, overlooked by almost perpendicular
precipices, which surrounded it. It was vulnerable therefore only on the
north, where the two heights on which it was built were connected with
the main ridge of the Judean hills; and here it was fortified with three
walls. The outermost, which was built by Agrippa I, encompassed the new
quarter of Bezetha, which lay outside the Temple mount to the northeast.
The second wall encompassed the part of the city on the Temple Mount and
reached as far as the Tower of Antonia, which overlooked and protected
the Temple. The third or innermost wall was the oldest, and encompassed
the whole of the ancient city where it was open, including the hill Acra
or Zion on the southeast, which was divided from Mount Moriah by the
cleft known as the Tyropoeon, or cheese-market. Beyond this hill there
was another eminence sloping gradually to the north, till it dropped
into the valley of Jehoshaphat with an escarpment of two hundred feet.

[Footnote 1: Comp. Abot de Rabbi Nathan, vi., ed. Schechter, p. 32.]

[Footnote 2: B.J. V. iv. 1.]

Thus the rampart surrounded the two hills with a continuous line of
defense, and the three quarters of the city were separated from each
other by distinct walls, so that each could hold out when the other had
fallen. The walls were strengthened with several towers, of which the
most important were Psephinus, on the third wall at the northwest
corner, Hippicus, on the old wall, which was opposite Phasaelus, and
Mariamne. But the strongest, largest, and most beautiful fortress in
Jerusalem was the Temple itself. It was not merely the visible center of
Judaism, it was the citadel of Judea. As each successive court rose
higher than the last, the "Mountain of the House" itself stood on the
highest point of the inclosure. The Temple was guarded by the tower of
Antonia, situated at the corner of the two cloisters, upon a rock fifty
cubits high, overlooking a precipice. Like the other towers, Antonia was
built by Herod, and manifested his love of largeness and strength.
Within these fortifications there were eleven thousand men under Simon,
and not more than thirty thousand trained soldiers under John, to pit
against eighty thousand Roman veterans; but of the two and a half
million people who, it is calculated, were shut up in the city,
thousands were ready at any moment to sally upon the besiegers and lay
down their lives for their beloved sanctuary.

Within the city, however, there were also a number of persons wavering
in their desire for resistance and anxious to find a favorable
opportunity of going over to the Romans. The leaders of the
high-priestly party had been killed by the Zealots, but their followers
remained to hamper the defense of the city. If Josephus is to be
believed, during the respite of the Passover festival at the beginning
of the siege, while the Romans were preparing their approaches and siege
works, the party strife again broke out. Eleazar opened the gates of the
Temple to admit the people for the festival, but John, taking
treacherous advantage of the opportunity, led his men in with arms
concealed beneath their garments, put his opponents to the sword, and
seized the sanctuary. Josephus further represents that throughout the
siege Simon and John, while resisting the Romans and defending different
parts of the walls, were still engaged in their internecine strife, "and
did everything that the besiegers could desire them to do."[1]

[Footnote 1: B.J. V. vi.]

The story has not the stamp of probability, and it is more likely that
Josephus is distorting the jealousies of the two commanders into the
dimensions of civil strife. Anyhow, the resistance which the Jews
offered to the Romans showed the stubbornness of despair, or what the
historian calls "their natural endurance in misfortune." At every step
the legionaries were checked; in pitching their camp, in making their
earthworks, in bringing up their machines; and frequently desperate
sallies were made by the defenders upon the Roman entrenchments.
Nevertheless, after fifteen days the first wall was captured, and in
five days more the second was taken. By a desperate sally the besieged
recovered it for a little, but were again driven back by superior
numbers and force. Josephus is fond of contrasting the different tempers
of the two armies: on the one side power and skill, on the other
boldness and the courage born of despair; here the habit of conquering,
there intense national ardor.

After the capture of the second wall, he was sent to parley with the
besieged, and urged, as he had done before, the invincible power of his
masters.[1] "And evident it is," he added with his renegade's theology,
"that fortune is on all hands gone over to them, and that God, who has
shifted dominion from nation to nation, is now settled in Italy."[2]
When his address was received with scorn, he proceeded, according to his
account, to lecture the people from their ancient history, in order to
prove that they had never been successful in aggressive warfare. "Arms
were never given to our nation, but we are always given up to be fought
against and taken." The Zealots' desecration of the Temple deprived them
of Divine help, and it was madness to suppose that God would be
well-disposed to the wicked. Had He not shown favor to Titus and
performed miracles in his aid? Did not the springs of Siloam run more
plentifully for the Roman general? All his appeals had no effect, and
though some faint-hearted persons deserted, the multitude held firm, and
the siege was pressed on more vigorously than ever. A wall of
circumvallation was built round the city, and the horrors of starvation
increased daily. Between the months of Nisan and Tammuz one hundred and
fifty thousand corpses were carried out of the town.[3] Josephus
expatiates on the terrible suffering, and again and again he denounces
the iniquity of the Zealots, who continued the resistance. "No age had a
generation more fruitful in wickedness; they confessed that they were
the slaves, the scum, the spurious and abortive offspring of our
nation." John committed the heinous sacrilege of using the oil preserved
in the Temple vessels for the starving soldiers. "I suppose," says the
ex-priest writing in the Roman palace, "that had the Romans made any
longer delay in attacking these abandoned men, the city would either
have been swallowed up by the ground opening on them, or been swept away
by a deluge, or destroyed as Sodom was destroyed, since it had brought
forth a generation even more godless than those that suffered such
punishments."[4]

[Footnote 1: B.J. V. ix. 3.]

[Footnote 2: We are reminded of the saying of Rabbi Akiba some
half-century later. When asked where God was to be sought now that the
Temple was destroyed, he replied, "In the great city of Rome" (Yer.
Taanit, 69a). But the Rabbinical utterance had a very different meaning
from the plea of Josephus.]

[Footnote 3: B.J. V. xiii. 7.]

[Footnote 4: B.J. V. x. and xiii.]

Famine and weariness were breaking down the strength of the Jews, and,
after fierce resistance, the tower of Antonia was captured and razed to
the ground. Josephus adds another chapter to detail the horrors of the
famine, in which he recounts the story of the mother eating her child,
which occurs also in the Midrash.[1] The Romans, he tells us, were
filled with a religious loathing of their foes on account of their sins
in violating the Temple and eating forbidden food, and Titus excused
himself for the sufferings he caused, on the ground that, as he had
given the Jews the chance of securing peace and liberty, they had
brought the evil on themselves. Slowly but surely the Romans gained a
footing within the Temple precinct; inch by inch John was driven back,
and on the Ninth of Ab the sanctuary was stormed. A torch, hurled
probably by the hand of Titus (see below, p. 128), set the cloisters
alight, and the fire spread till the whole house was involved. The
crowning catastrophe, the burning of the Holy of Holies, happened on the
following day.

[Footnote 1: Ekah R. 65a.]

Josephus remained in the Roman camp throughout the siege, advising Titus
at each step how he might proceed. After the fall of the Temple he
witnessed the last desperate struggle, when a half-starved remnant of
the defenders "looked straight into death without flinching." A great
modern writer sees in this unquenchable passion of the Zealots for
liberty a sublime type of steadfastness[1]; but Josephus, who after the
fall of the Temple had made another unavailing effort to persuade them
to lay down their arms, again pours forth his abuse upon those who
fought against the sacred might of Rome. Over a million had perished in
the siege, and less than one hundred thousand were captured, of whom
only forty thousand were preserved. His favor with Titus enabled him to
redeem from captivity his brother and a large number of his friends and
acquaintances and one hundred and ninety women and children.[2] His own
estates near Jerusalem having been taken for a military colony, he
received liberal compensation in another part of Judea. From the victor
he also obtained a scroll of the law.

[Footnote 1: George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such.]

[Footnote 2: Vita, 75.]

It is not certain whether he accompanied "the gentle Titus" through
Syria after the fall of the city and the razing of its walls. The
victor's progress was marked at each stopping-place by the celebration
of games, where thousands of young Jewish captives were made to kill
each other, "butchered to make a Roman holiday" and feast the eyes of
the conqueror and the Herodian ally and his spouse. But he certainly
witnessed at Rome the triumph of the Flavii, father and son, and gazed
on the shame of his country, when its most holy monuments were carried
by the noblest of the captives through the streets amid the applause and
ribald jeers of a Roman crowd. Josephus enlarges with apparent apathy on
the procession, which is commemorated and made vivid down to our own day
by the arch in the Roman Forum, through which no Jew in the Middle Ages
would pass. He records, too, that Vespasian built a Temple of Peace, in
which he stored the golden vessels taken from the Jewish sanctuary, and
put up the whole of Judea for sale as his private property.[1] Josephus
himself was housed in the royal palace, and it does not appear that he
ever returned to Palestine. The tenth legion had been left on the site
of Jerusalem as a permanent Roman garrison, and a fortified camp was
built for it on the northern hill. "The legions swallowed her up and
idolaters possessed her." _A chacun selon ses oeuvres_ is the comment of
Salvador, the Franco-Jewish historian (fl. 1850), comparing the gilded
servitude of Josephus with the fate of the patriots of Jerusalem; and
another recent historian, Graetz, has contrasted the picture of Jeremiah
uttering his touching laments over the ruins at the fall of the first
Temple with the position of Josephus pouring out his fulsome adulation
of the destroyer at the fall of the second.

[Footnote 1: B.J. VII. vi. 6.]

Henceforth Josephus lived, an exile from his country and his countrymen,
in the retinue of the Caesars, and entered on his career as his people's
historian. But he was never allowed to forget his dependence. His first
work was an account of the Roman war, in which he vilified the patriots
to extenuate his own surrender and his master's cruelty. It is true that
he afterwards composed an elaborate apology for his people in the form
of a history in twenty volumes, which may be considered as a kind of
palliation for the evil he had done them in action. It was more possible
to refute the Roman prejudices based on utter ignorance of Jewish
history, than the prejudices based on their narrowness of mind. But even
here the writer has often to accommodate himself to a pagan standpoint,
which could not appreciate Hebrew sublimity. When he wrote the
_Antiquities_, his mind was already molded in Greco-Roman form, and
where he seeks to glorify, he not seldom contrives to degrade. His works
are a striking example of inward slavery in outward freedom, for by dint
of breathing the foreign atmosphere and imbibing foreign notions he had
become incapable of presenting his people's history in its true light.
He had been granted full Roman citizenship, and received a literary
pension. Still he was not loved by other courtiers as worthy as himself,
and he had frequently to defend himself against the charges of his
enemies. In the reign of Vespasian, after the Zealot rising in Cyrene
had been put down, the leader, Jonathan, who was brought as a prisoner
to Rome, charged Josephus before the Emperor with having sent him both
weapons and money. The story was not believed, and the informer was put
to death. After that, Josephus relates, "when they that envied my good
fortune did frequently bring censure against me, by God's Providence I
escaped them all."

He remained in favor under Titus and Domitian, who in turn succeeded
their father in the purple. Domitian indeed, though he persecuted the
Jews, and laid new fiscal burdens upon them, punished the accusers of
Josephus, and made his estate in Judea tax-free, and the Emperor's wife,
Domitia, also showed him kindness. But perhaps the amazing and pathetic
servility of the _Life_ is to be explained by fear of the vainglorious
despot, whose hand was heavy on all intellectual work. Historical
writers suffered most under his oppression, and it may have been
necessary to Josephus to make out that he had been a traitor. It may
appear more to his credit as a courtier than as a Jew that the enemy of
his people was friendly towards him. But his position must have been
perilous during the black reign of the tyrant, who rivaled Nero for
maniac cruelty. His chief patron was one Epaphroditus, by his name a
Greek, perhaps to be identified with a celebrated librarian and scholar,
to whom he dedicated his _Antiquities_ and the books _Against Apion_. He
lived on probably[1] till the beginning of the second century, through
the short but tranquil rule of Nerva, when there was a brief interlude
of tolerance and intellectual freedom, into the reign of Trajan, who was
to deal his people injuries as deep as those Titus had inflicted. It is
uncertain whether he survived to witness the horrors of the desperate
rising of the Jews, which sealed their national doom throughout the
Diaspora. At least he did not survive to describe it. His last work that
has come down to us is the _Life_, which is an apologetic pamphlet,
perversely self-vilifying, in which he sought to refute the accusation
of his rival Justus of Tiberias, that he had taken a commanding part in
the war against the Romans in Galilee, and had been the guiding spirit
of the Rebellion.

[Footnote 1: It has, however, been suggested that the date of Agrippa's
death, which is recorded in the _Life_, was really 95 C.E., instead of
103 C.E., as is usually accepted; if that is so, Josephus may not have
outlived the black reign of Domitian, which lasted till 97 C.E. See J.H.
Hart, s.v. Josephus, in Encycl. Brit. 11th ed.]

The _Life_ is the least creditable of Josephus' works; but, as we have
seen, it was wrung from him under duress, and cannot be taken as a
genuine revelation of his mind. It is not a full autobiography; save for
a short Prologue and a short Epilogue, it deals exclusively with the
author's conduct in Galilee prior to the campaign of Vespasian, and it
differs materially in political color as well as in the narrative of
facts from the account of the same period in the _Wars_. In the earlier
work his object had been to excuse his countrymen for their revolt, and
at the same time to show the ability with which he had served their true
interests, as the representative of the party that sought to preserve
the nation at the sacrifice of its independence. But in the later work
he is writing not a partisan but a personal apology, composed when his
life was in danger, and when he no longer was anxious to save
appearances with his countrymen. And he devoted his ingenuity to showing
that throughout the events in Galilee he was the friend of Rome, seeking
under the guise of resistance to smooth the way for the invaders and
deliver the gates of Palestine into their hands. That he had so to
demean himself is the most pathetic commentary on the bitter position
which he was called on to endure after twenty years of servile life. The
work was published or reissued after the death of King Agrippa, which
took place in 103 C.E., and is recorded in it.[1] Agrippa was the last
of the Herodians to rule, and with his death the last part of Palestine
that had the outward show of independence was absorbed into the Roman
Empire. But though the whole of the Jewish temporal sovereignty was
shattered before his last days, Josephus may have consoled himself with
the progressive march of Judaism in the capital city of the conqueror.

[Footnote 1: See note above, p. 73.]

It may be put down to the credit of Josephus that amid the court society
at Rome he to the end professed loyalty to his religion, and that he did
not complete his political desertion by religious apostasy. His loyalty
indeed is less meritorious than might seem at first sight. The Romans
generally were tolerant of creeds and cults, and the ceremonial of
Judaism, especially its Sabbath, appealed to many of them. Within the
_pomoerium_ (limits), of the ancient city none but the city gods might
be worshiped, but in Greater Rome there were numerous synagogues. In the
time of Pompey, an important Jewish community existed in the
cosmopolitan capital of the Empire, and later we have records of a
number of congregations. Philo expressly mentions the religious
privileges his brethren enjoyed at the heart of the Empire,[1] and save
for an occasional expulsion the Jews appear to have been unmolested. The
Flavian Emperors, satisfied with the destruction of the sanctuary and
the razing of Jerusalem, did not attempt to persecute the communities of
the Diaspora. For the old offering by all Jews to the Temple, they
substituted a tax of two drachmas (the equivalent of the shekel
voluntarily given hitherto to Jerusalem), which went towards the
maintenance of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Later the fiscus
Judaicus, to which every Jew and proselyte had to pay, became an
instrument of oppression, but in the reigns of Vespasian and Titus it
was not harshly administered. Domitian indeed vented his indignation on
the people which he had not had the honor of conquering, and instituted
a kind of inquisition, to ferret out the early Maranos, who dissembled
their Judaism and sought to evade the tax. But his gentle successor
Nerva (96-98) restored the habit of tolerance, and struck special coins,
with the legend calumnia Judaica sublata (on the abolition of
information against the Jews), in order to mark his clemency. Save,
therefore, for the short persecution under Domitian, Judaism remained a
_licita religio_ (legalized denomination) at Rome. More than that, it
became a powerful missionary faith among the lower classes, and in small
doses almost fashionable at the court. A near relative of the Emperor,
Flavius Clemens, outraged Roman opinion by adopting its tenets.[2] It
has been suggested, and it is likely, that the chief historical work of
Josephus was written primarily for a group of fashionable proselytes to
Judaism, to whom he ministered. He mentions members of the royal house
that commended his work.[3] Some scholars have sought to associate him
with the philosopher at Rome that was visited by the four rabbis of the
Sanhedrin, the Patriarch Rabban Gamaliel, Rabbi Joshua, Rabbi Eleazar
ben Arach, and Rabbi Akiba, when they came to Rome in the reign of
Domitian.[4] But apart from the fact that he would hardly be described
as a philosopher--a term usually reserved in the Talmud for a pagan
scholar--it is as unlikely that the leaders of the Pharisaic national
party would have had interviews with the renegade, as that the renegade
would have befriended them. At Jotapata he deserted his people, and he
passed thenceforth out of their life. It is significant that, while the
history of the war was originally written in Aramaic for the benefit of
the Eastern Jews, none of his later works was either written in his
native language or translated into it, nor were they designed to be read
by Jews.

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