(no subject)

Well, that's the first time I've ever been reminded to pump up my (rather flat) tyres by dreaming I'd had a puncture the previous night. (And I hadn't even been cycling at all yesterday; yesterday was a Tube day.)

Book review: The Jewish War (part 2 of 2)

When I mentioned to my father I was reading Josephus, his instant reaction was "He was a turncoat!" Williamson says:

'The traitor of Jerusalem', as Dr Cecil Roth calls him, has damned himself for all time by his own accounts of what he did at Jotapata—surely the most appalling story of cowardice, duplicity and treason ever penned.

Williamson continues further in that vein, so I was expecting the sympathy for Josephus I had built up as a reader of his to evaporate when I got to the point when he went over to the Romans. To my surprise, it did not. Indeed, I would go so far as to say I would have done what he did! It's true that he did suggest defecting during the siege of Jotapata, but he was talked out of this, and continued trying to defend the city until the bitter end.

After the city had fallen and the Romans were destroying it, Josephus hid along with forty VIPs in a cave, where the Romans found him when his location was given away. They offered him safe conduct if he surrendered; Josephus, sceptical about their intent, was reassured when they sent a friend of his to talk him out, and was about to surrender when the others hiding with him raised a stink, demanding he kill himself instead. When Josephus lectured them about Judaism's abhorrence of suicide, they all bar killed him themselves. Eventually he persuaded them to draw lots to kill each other, and somehow managed ("shall we put it down to divine providence or just to luck?" he says, though many suspect he fiddled the lots) to be one of the last two, at which point he persuaded the other survivor to surrender with him.

Choosing to die rather than surrender at this stage would have achieved nothing: the battle was already lost. As for being a traitor, Josephus did not go on to become a military commander for the enemy; his role for the Romans was limited to trying to persuade his countrymen to surrender. In that how was he any different from, say, King Agrippa II, who delivered a speech trying to talk the Judaeans out of war immediately before its start, and continued doing so on the Romans' side throughout the war?

If only the Jews had done as Agrippa urged! There was no way the Jews were going to hold off the might of the Roman Empire^* in the best of circumstances—but these were not the best of circumstances: Rather like in Iraq in the last decade,^† the political instability led to religious fundamentalists trying to take over society. As I mentioned in my last Josephus post, at this point the Romans could almost have stood back and let the Jews get on with destroying their own society.

It's heartbreaking to read. The Talmud talks about the Second Temple being destroyed through שִׂנְאַת חִינָם, baseless hatred, and that's certainly the case. The fundamentalists took over the government in Jerusalem by means of killing the moderates, forced those that would have waited out the Roman siege to fight by burning all the supplies, leading to conditions of appalling deprivation, then waged a civil war against each other whilst the rest of the country was falling to the Romans city by city.

"Because of our sins, we were exiled from our land", the festival Mussaf Amidah says; and you don't even need to believe in God to see how true that is. Every Jew should read this account, as a indication of what lack of unity amongst the Jewish people can lead to, so that we pull back from the brink and never let anything like this happen to us again.

* King Agrippa II's abovementioned speech on this subject (II.18.376) amusingly references both my nationality and aviva_m's:

Who is there among you that hath not heard of the great number of the Germans? You have, to be sure, yourselves seen them to be strong and tall, and that frequently, since the Romans have them among their captives everywhere; yet these Germans, who dwell in an immense country, who have minds greater than their bodies, and a soul that despises death, and who are in rage more fierce than wild beasts, have the Rhine for the boundary of their enterprises, and are tamed by eight Roman legions. Such of them as were taken captive became their servants; and the rest of the entire nation were obliged to save themselves by flight. Do you also, who depend on the walls of Jerusalem, consider what a wall the Britons had; for the Romans sailed away to them, and subdued them while they were encompassed by the ocean, and inhabited an island that is not less than the [continent of this] habitable earth; and four legions are a sufficient guard to so large an island.

† Indeed, the culture in first century Judaea had more in common with that of contemporary Arab society than that of the Israel of today: the images we see in our media of large crowds of vocal protesters liable to turn rowdy at the drop of a hat recur again and again in Josephus. No orderly camping in Tel Aviv city centre here to try and sort out society's problems!

Josephus notes

Hardware on my desk at work

In increasing order of age:

• A keyboard (provenance: 2009)
• A monitor (2009)
• A spare monitor and keyboard for use with a laptop (2009ish)
• An IP-driven telephone (2009)
• A plasma screen television (≤ 2009)
• Four set-top boxes, and associated remote controls (2007–2010)
• An OnDigital smart card (1998)
• A BBC Micro (mid 1980s)
• A Donkey Kong (1984)
• A timeclock that used to live inside a street light (pre-1980s?)
• A cardboard cutout of a valve (2010), replacing the actual valve which I sadly knocked over and smashed a year or two ago (mid-twentieth century)

Bush House

Slideshow of where I used to work. Nostalgic for me, probably meaningless to you. (And the article underneath resonates with my year off, in which I used to listen to the BBC World Service. By contrast, though, when I move to Germany for a bit shortly I'll be listening to Radio 4 on iPlayer...)