Lethargic Man (anag.)

As is well-known, early in the revolt against Rome, El`azar ben Ya'ir led a band of Sicarii to occupy the fortress and rock of Masada in the Judaean desert, from which he led raids on the surrounding countryside. The Romans came and besieged this fortress, which was regarded as pretty much unconquerable—it's located on a fragment of rock splintered off the western wall of the East African Rift Valley, with sheer sides, and inhospitable desert at its foot—but the Romans conquered it anyway by building a ramp up to reach it. When El`azar ben Ya'ir saw that defeat was imminent, he made a long speech in which he talked his followers into mass suicide, in which he makes the following interesting comment upon suicide in contemporary Indian religion (VII.8):

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I wonder what religion he's referring to. A glance at Wikipedia does not indicate any of the major Indian religions with a positive attitude towards suicide nowadays. I wonder whether what we have here is a slightly garbled account, rather, of suttee (though Wikipedia states "few reliable records exist of the practice before the time of the Gupta empire, approximately 400 AD").

The Torah is very strong on the theme that G-d rewards and punishes. By the time of the Mishna, however, the fact that bad things happen to good people, and vice versa, was troubling Jewish theologians, and they wrestled with the issue. In some places in the Talmud and Midrash the problem is stated in stark terms but left unsolved; in others the solution is given that reward and punishment does not occur in this world but is deferred to the World to Come.

Nowadays only the most dyed-in-the-wool Orthodox would claim reward and punishment happens in this world: the idea that all of the five million six hundred thousand murdered by the Nazis—including the children, including the babies—were morally responsible for the "punishment" that was brought upon them is morally repugnant to most people. However, less than a century before R. Akiva stated the doctrine of deferred reward and punishment, you still had one man, at least, firmly believing in the concept of reward and punishment in this world:

After spending an entire book describing the horrors of war and all the people justly or unjustly killed, enslaved and exiled, Josephus concludes his work by telling of a Jew and a Roman who conspired to blame a late Sicarian revolt upon upright citizens, and then went on to have anyone who might put the lie to this accused and peremptorily executed. Eventually Vespasian smelled a rat (as Williamson puts it) and has the Jew executed. The Roman, Catullus (not the poet!)

for the time being profited by the lenience of [Vespasian and Titus] and received no more than a reprimand; but soon afterwards he succumbed to a complicated sickness beyond remedy and died miserably, not only chastened in body but suffering from a much more terrible disease of the mind. He was tormented by terrors, constantly calling out that he saw the ghosts of those he had murdered standing before him; and losing control of himself he would spring from his bed as if he himself was being tortured and burnt. His malady grew rapidly worse and worse, and his bowels were eaten through and fell out. Such was his end—proof, if ever there was one, of the providence of God, who executed judgement on the wicked.

Josephus notes         Jewish learning notes index

Moving temporarily out of chronological sequence, I mentioned earlier that there are passages pertaining to Jesus in Josephus that bear evidence of later, Christian tampering. There's also longer passages in the Slavonic version of War, which are now thought to be ninth-century interpolations. However, they're interesting to read anyway, given that they're the product of a Christian arguing pro-Christianity but supposedly from the pen of a Jew:

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Half of this reads convincingly as an intelligent and sceptical but not prejudiced observer; the other half is blatant Christian apologetic. Why on earth would a Jew even consider the possibility of G-d taking human form, especially given that the Torah takes pains (Deut. 4:12) to say that G-d did not have form (albeit that it also uses some anthropomorphic imagery)? And why on earth would the Romans and Jews both have posted so many guards around his tomb? It's to counter the anti-Christian argument that the body was spirited away by his friends... though Williamson, ever the believer, and who considers these passages to be genuine, comments here (adducing it as evidence of Josephan authorship), "The exaggerated numbers are in the best Josephan style".

I was surprised to see in VII.5 an early version of the mystical river Sambatyon, beyond which the ten lost tribes were exiled, and which is impassable on account of the ferocity of its waters and the boulders they carry with them, except on Shabbos, when it is calm but the Israelites may not travel. In Josephus's version, the river's behaviour is the other way around:

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( The fruits of Sodom have a colour as if they were fit to be eaten, but if you pluck them with your hands, they dissolve into smoke and ashes. )

This sounds like something from Sir John de Mandeville, but I've actually seen this fruit growing near the Dead Sea. It's called a Sodom apple, and looks vaguely apple-shaped from the outside, but if you open it up, it's like dandelions seeds inside.

About missiles from Roman catapults, Josephus writes (V.6):

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For "THE STONE COMETH", Williamson translates rather, "Baby on the way!" Turns out the original Greek (i.e. the translation Josephus had made of his original Aramaic) reads "ὁ υἱὸς ἔρχεται", meaning "the son cometh". The online commentary, which seems perhaps to have been written by Samuel Burder (1773–1836) has a rather impenetrable footnote caused by OCR of Greek characters (ΥΙΟΣ, ΥΙΟΣ and ΠΕΤΡΟΣ), as Latin (you can view a scan here) that suggests it does indeed say "son" in the original. I rather like Williamson's creative handling of it, then.

When the Romans came to besiege Jerusalem, they brought Josephus to try and negotiate a settlement. Josephus tries to argue the people are fighting not the Romans but the will of God, and gives a long list of how with God on their side, their ancestors had always prevailed, at one point saying (V.9):

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We know Josephus is (or at any rate, would be by the time he wrote Antiquities) knowledgeable in Jewish history; I can only assume here he's playing on the people's ignorance. Sarai was taken by Pharaoh (with no mention of any armies) when Abram had gone down into Egypt; this did not happen in Jerusalem at all, which had no significance as yet for Abram. Nor would it yet until after the war of the four kings and the five kings, when he met its king Melchi-Ṣedeq, and later on when God called on him to sacrifice his son on the mountain then above Jerusalem, and now at its heart. It's also not until the war of the four kings and the five kings that we learn he had three hundred and eighteen servants (not captains of armies!), and from the lack of mention of them anywhere else, the Midrash concludes that these three hundred and eighteen were but one person, Dammeseq Eliezer (the gematria of whose name reaches that figure). The description of Sarah as "queen", however is not literal; it refers to her name, which means "princess".

Josephus notes         Jewish learning notes index

he was also a man that had long ago pacified the west, and made it subject to the Romans, when it had been put into disorder by the Germans; he had also recovered to them Britain by his arms, which had been little known before whereby he procured to his father Claudius to have a triumph bestowed on him without any sweat or labour of his own.

I'd associated Claudius himself with the conquest of Britain; as we see here, Claudius was already at the time taking credit for Vespasian's work.

The Romans have a reputation for making their roads dead straight, going straight over any hill in the way, rather than round them for easier travelling as other road-making cultures do. Amusingly, III.6 says (in Williamson's wording):

After them came the pioneeers to straighten out bends in the highway, level rough surfaces, and cut down obstructive woods, so that the army would not be exhausted by laborious marching.

(Whitston simply says "to make the road even and straight" rather than to straighten out bends; but I found Williamson's wording amusing.)

Skipping a good deal, after the Romans had retaken Galilee and the siege of Yotapata, from which the Romans had prevented Josephus escaping, had ended with the city's conquest and destruction, Josephus took refuge in a cave with some others, but a woman from his party was captured and gave away his location to the Romans. Those with him urge them all to commit suicide; in his argument against this, Josephus says some interesting things about the contemporary views on the afterlife, resurrection and suicide (III.8):

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When Josephus is taken prisoner, and brought before Vespasian, he says (III.9):

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Given that R. Yoḥānān ben Zakkai would later say something similar to him when he too was taken before Vespasian, one wonders how much these two put the idea into Vespasian's head of proclaiming himself emperor, or of accepting it when his men tried to proclaim him such.

Josephus notes         Jewish learning notes index

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.

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.

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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Josephus notes         Jewish learning notes index

(No, you haven't missed two installments; I'm counting my book review as the first two posts, and I'm not covering Book I and the first half of Book II, because they repeat material from Antiquities.)

In War II.8.163, Josephus attributes to the Pharisees the belief that only good people get to be reincarnated:

They say that all souls are incorruptible, but that the souls of good men only are removed into other bodies, - but that the souls of bad men are subject to eternal punishment.

This is, of course, completely the opposite way around to Indian religions today!

As for Judaism today, it is mostly not so hot on reincarnation, but there are some who say that there are only a certain number of souls going around, which have to be reused after they run out. The question is: as the Earth's population increases, what happens when the living outnumber the dead? And, indeed, has this already happened? ( Find out )

War makes use of the term "rabbi", as do the Gospels, which were written at the same time. I have heard that this is anachronistic, though: the term "rabbi" was not in use at the time of Jesus—and is not used of any of the Sages of that time—but only came into use in the mid first century.

I had vaguely heard before I started reading this work of the kings Agrippa I and Agrippa II. What I hadn't realised was that Agrippa II wasn't actually king of Judaea! II.11:

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Upon the whole, nobody durst speak their minds, but tyranny was generally tolerated; and at this time were those seeds sown which brought the city to destruction.

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One should be absolutely appalled by this.

(As for the figure of three million, Josephus is given to exaggeration, and Williamson comments "Josephus has surpassed himself this time!" However, the Talmud (IIRC, though possibly it was Antiquities—the book I'd check this in is six hundred miles away!) talks about the priests setting aside, one year, one kidney from every Paschal sacrifice, which, on counting afterwards, they discovered there was something like a hundred thousand. Given the size of the typical family group for the Paschal meal (which had to be large enough to consume the entire animal), this meant there would indeed have been over a million pilgrims in Jerusalem at the time.)

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.

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.

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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Josephus is at the time in Tarichaeae, and has no soldiers with him, having sent them all out in search of food; but he still manages to retake the city through an amazing tactic:

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Josephus notes         Jewish learning notes index

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

We have now entered into the three weeks leading up to the ninth of Av, on which date both the First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, and the Second Temple by the Romans. Conventionally it is explained the First Temple was destroyed as punishment for the Jews' idolatry, and the Second Temple through שנאת חינם, baseless hatred—which last didn't need G-d's intervention to lead to the Destruction of the Temple; as The Jewish War makes clear, the Romans could pretty much have stood back and let the Jews destroy themselves. Anyhow, here's why Josephus thought G-d brought the Destruction of the Temple upon the Jews (XX.8.165): (Jonathan was the High Priest.)

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"Ḥanniba`al" means the Ba`al [the Master] is gracious, referring to the ancient pagan gods of the Phoenicians. One does not expect to see a Jew bearing that name, any more than today a name like Christopher. (As an aside, in papersky's books The King's Peace and The King's Name, the Phoenicians were at an early stage converted to Judaism (this is all well off-screen); at my suggestion she gave the name Elḥanan (G-d is gracious) to the Hannibal equivalent in that world.)

Ch. 2 tells the story, which I had previously come across in Ancient Jewish Novels and elsewhere, of the royal family of Adiabene, a kingdom in present-day Iraq, which (royal family) converted to Judaism, and bestowed a large amount of money towards the Temple in Jerusalem.

XX.2.20:

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How can Izates be his only begotten son when you've just told us about his elder brother Monobazus! The online commentary explains:

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The pyramids of Jerusalem!? Apparently so: the online commentary says:

These pyramids or pillars, erected by Helena, queen of Adiabene, near Jerusalem, three in number, are mentioned by Eusebius, in his Eccles. Hist. B. II. ch. 12, for which Dr. Hudson refers us to Valesius's notes upon that place.—They are also mentioned by Pausanias, as hath been already noted, ch. 2. sect. 6. Reland guesses that that now called Absalom's Pillar may be one of them.

Jewish tradition says that in the last century of the Second Temple, the office of High Priest was corrupt, and was bought for money. These high priests were not spritually worthy of the office, the story goes, and when they went into the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur, G-d would strike them dead, and they would have to be pulled out by the rope attached to them.

According to Josephus, the office of High Priest was indeed, transferred to man to man during the Second Temple period, rather than bequeathed from father to son; and he is incensed at the cause of this (XIV.2-3):

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* This is Hyrcanus II, who had been High Priest, but had had his ears cut off by his nephew, Antigonus, rendering him ineligible to serve as High Priest.

However, though the high priesthood was often transferred from person to person afterwards, it was always for political reasons, not money; e.g. (XX.1):

Herod also, the brother of the deceased Agrippa, who was then possessed of the royal authority over Chalcis, petitioned Claudius Caesar for the authority over the temple, and the money of the sacred treasure, and the choice of the high priests, and obtained all that he petitioned for. So that after that time this authority continued among all his descendants till the end of the war Accordingly, Herod removed the last high priest, called Cimtheras, and bestowed that dignity on his successor Joseph, the son of Cantos.

XX.5.115 tells of an incident which is mentioned in the Jerusalem Talmud (where the perpetrator is named Apustumus), is deemed to have happened on the seventeen of Tammuz and is still counted amongst the incidents mourned on that day (which falls this year this Saturday, though it will be commemorated on Sunday instead):

( A Sefer Torah was ripped up by a Roman soldier )

We have now entered into the three weeks leading up to the ninth of Av, on which date both the First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, and the Second Temple by the Romans. Conventionally it is explained the First Temple was destroyed as punishment for the Jews' idolatry, and the Second Temple through שנאת חינם, baseless hatred—which last didn't need G-d's intervention to lead to the Destruction of the Temple; as The Jewish War makes clear, the Romans could pretty much have stood back and let the Jews destroy themselves. Anyhow, here's why Josephus thought G-d brought the Destruction of the Temple upon the Jews (XX.8.165): (Jonathan was the High Priest.)

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