lethargic_man | Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

In II.16, King Agrippa II delivers a lengthy speech to try and dissuade the Judaeans from revolting against Rome. I had assumed it to be another case of Josephus putting his own words into other people's mouths; this commentator suggests it was actually Agrippa's own words, given by him to Josephus, with whom he was friends. In the middle of this I was amused to discover a reference in Williamson's translation to "Britain, that land of mystery"; Whitson's translation is more prosaic: "such British islands as were never known before".

Not only did Agrippa argue against revolting, but (II.17) he lent help to try and put the revolt down in its earliest stages, after the insurgents had persuaded the priests to discontinue the sacrifices for Rome and the Emperor, which, amounting as it did to sedition, made a Roman response inevitable.

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II.17 gives us a minor Jewish festival, of which few I suspect have heard nowadays:

The next day [the fourteenth of Av]^* was the festival of Xylophory [Williamson: Feast of Wood-carrying]; upon which the custom was for every one to bring wood for the altar (that there might never be a want of fuel for that fire which was unquenchable and always burning).

* This Thursday, this year.

Funnily enough, I came across a reference to this somewhere completely elsewhere at around this time, probably in Eliyahu Kitov's The Book Of Our Heritage, but I can't check as my copy of Volume III is now six hundred miles away.

The Romans having sent Cestius Gallus to put the revolt down, he got as far as the gates of Jerusalem, then, strangely, retreated (II.19):

When Cestius was come into the city, he set the part called Bezetha, which is called Cenopolis, [or the new city,] on fire; as he did also to the timber market; after which he came into the upper city, and pitched his camp over against the royal palace; and had he but at this very time attempted to get within the walls by force, he had won the city presently, and the war had been put an end to at once; but Tyrannius Priscus, the muster-master of the army, and a great number of the officers of the horse, had been corrupted by Florus, and diverted him from that his attempt; and that was the occasion that this war lasted so very long, and thereby the Jews were involved in such incurable calamities.

See my previous post for why Florus wanted war. Florus and Priscus have a hell of a lot to answer for, then; had it not been for them, the revolt would have been put down, the Temple remained standing, and hundreds of thousands of Jews not killed, enslaved or driven into exile.

Josephus says:

And now it was that a horrible fear seized upon the seditious, insomuch that many of them ran out of the city, as though it were to be taken immediately; but the people upon this took courage, and where the wicked part of the city gave ground, thither did they come, in order to set open the gates, and to admit Cestius as their benefactor, who, had he but continued the siege a little longer, had certainly taken the city; but it was, I suppose, owing to the aversion God had already at the city and the sanctuary, that he was hindered from putting an end to the war that very day.

Williamson's translation is stronger:

I think that because of those scoundrels God had already turned His back even on the Sanctuary, and would not permit that day to witness the end of the war.

As it happens, Priscus got his due punishment: He was killed by the Jews during the Romans' retreat, even before their subsequent massacre at Beth-Horon.

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