was taken late in life by Judean born historian Yosef ben Matityahu, Josephus was of priestly and royal heritage, and he describes his own precocious Torah learning gleaned at the feet of Pharisaic sages.10 He was born in Jerusalem and came of age with the war itself, experiencing life in Judea under Roman procuratorial rule first-hand. He would have had intimate knowledge of the political opinions of the Judean elite. He tells us he was widely Jewishly educated, not only in Torah and its laws. He was a sort of ethnographer of his people, embedding himself in the major Jewish religious parties (sects, philosophies)—Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, as well as what he describes an extremist group that he calls »the fourth philosophy.« His writings, among other things, sought to teach Jewish history to and translate Jewish belief for a Roman readership.
Josephus was an unapologetically pro-Roman Jewish patriot. In other words, he was a proud Jew who thought Roman rule was divinely ordained; acquiescence was thus the best political course for the nation. As the war erupted, Josephus reports that he was swept up in it. In 66 CE he became a general of the Judean troops mustering in the Galilee (War 2.568). As the northern-most region of the land, the Galilee was the first to face the Roman armies who came overland to quell the rebellion in 66 under Nero’s general Vespasian. Josephus was quick to surrender (War 3.355–91). Vespasian took the Greek-speaking aristocrat prisoner, then, thanks to his prophecy of Vespasian’s accession to the Roman throne (War 3.399–402), Josephus was upgraded to guest of the soon-to-be emperor. As such, Josephus had a front row seat for the war. After the war Josephus settled in Rome where he wrote The Jewish War. This work was written (in Aramaic then Greek, in which it is preserved11) under Titus Flavius Vespasianus’s patronage (so explaining Josephus’s pen name: when Vespasian emancipates him, he becomes a citizen and member of the Flavian gens).12
Josephus is a remarkable and important Roman historian, but like the rest of his guild he has a strong agenda and needs to be read critically. He believed in Rome’s rightful dominion over the Jews and understood it to be God’s will—although just whose god he keeps strategically vague. Josephus, for example, puts in Agrippa II’s mouth a speech to the Jewish rebels that argues that Rome’s dominion is her destiny and that »God« is fighting on the Roman side (cf. War 2.380)—a discourse intended to resonate with right-thinking Jewish and Roman readers both. Josephus believed that Rome and Judaism can get along brilliantly, to each’s benefit and in accord with the divine plan. However, as he sees it, perversions on each side combined tragically to incite the devastating rebellion.
In order to understand what Josephus thought the ideal essence of each civilization, we can look to the depictions of and several speeches delivered by the characters of Agrippa II or Josephus himself to exemplify Judaism. On the Roman side, the speeches of Vespasian and Titus are exemplary in this regard. Yet the virtues embodied by these men, as Josephus describes it, were polluted by two groups to whom responsibility for the war can be attributed: Roman procurators and Jewish extremists (Zealots).
5 Roman Administration and the Run-up to the War
Though Josephus places much of the blame for the war on Jewish extremists, he does not exempt the Romans, despite the fact that he was on the Roman payroll. Though a defender of Rome’s right to rule, and a champion of the Flavian dynasty and aristocratic Romanitas in general, Josephus identifies a group of »false Romans« analogous to his zealous »false Jews«: the procurators.13 In the second half of the first century, Josephus opines, Judea had the devastating misfortune of being ruled by crooks.
From 63 BCE, when Pompey set siege to Jerusalem marking an end to Judean political independence, the region had in one way or another been under Roman authority. Herod and Agrippa I as client kings had the widest freedoms and autonomy, but even these powerful Herodians served Rome. Rome applied a range of governing structures over the territories ruled by Herod’s offspring, from local tetrarchs to direct rule. After the death of Agrippa I in 44 CE, Rome seemed to lose interest in outsourcing control of the central parts of Judea to Jewish intermediaries: instead seven Roman procurators ruled between 44 and 66.14
In the run up to the war, Judea and environs fell under the aegis of the imperial province of Syria, whose capital was in Antioch. Imperial provinces were ruled de jure by the emperor, but de facto by a »legate,« of senatorial rank, someone from the highest circles of the Roman aristocracy and with a distinguished record of public service. Legates had legions under their command and reported directly to the emperor. Since Judea held a lower status, it was ruled by a procurator. This was an officer drawn from Rome’s equestrian class—wealthy Romans not among the highest aristocratic-senatorial families. The procurator had limited auxiliary forces under his control but no legions.
Under the best of circumstances, procuratorial rule in Judea faced structural challenges. Procurators served short terms, often only two years. This meant that office holders had little time or incentive to learn about the people under their rule, and often acted insensitively in the face of Jewish custom. One exception to this perhaps was the rule of Tiberias Julius Alexander, procurator from 46 to 48 CE. He was a Jew by birth, being a relative of the Alexandrian philosopher-statesman Philo of Alexandria. Josephus describes him as sensitive to Jewish mores and as a scourge of Jewish zealots (War 2.220; Ant. 20.100–102).
In addition to being prone to religious and cultural gaffes, Roman procurators were responsible for tax collection—never a popular way to ingratiate oneself with the people. Another challenge was that the troops at their disposal were but a handful of auxiliary units drawn mainly from non-Jewish local Syrian populations. This meant that local ethnic tensions often exaggerated what might have been simple law enforcement (War 2.268–69). Additionally, the number of auxiliary soldiers was inadequate to control the region. A pervasive sense of lawlessness spread across the land, with a range of effects. It demoralized the local populations and undoubtedly radicalized some. It emboldened political extremist groups, who could operate without check, and probably reinforced the sense that they were living in the end of days. Finally, the chaos of the era seems to have provoked a malignant culture of corruption.
Yet the chasm that opened between the procurators and the Jews was partly the fault of events set in motion earlier in the century. Herod, in an attempt to insulate himself from Jewish detractors among Hasmonean loyalists, dismantled and destabilized not only the Judean hierocracy but related institutions representing indigenous order, such as the Sanhedrin. The priestly establishment had been a vital buffer between imperial rule and the Jews for centuries. Direct Roman control continued the erosion of the social and economic elite of Judea. Their influence dwindled in the eyes of the ruling Romans and the disillusioned masses, with dire consequences.
The political situation in Judea was structurally friable and procuratorial intentions were far from noble. Even discounting Josephan exaggeration, the later procurators used their time in Judea to enrich themselves through a mixture of heavy taxation and graft. The economy was in shambles, the tax burden high, banditry was on the rise, as was apocalyptic rhetoric. »Terrorists« and »charlatans« says Josephus, »threatened with death anyone who kowtowed to the dictates of Roman rule.« To the point of class warfare, they fanned out over the country and »ransacked the estates of the powerful [and] murdered the owners« (War 2.264–65). Ignoring the input and plight of Judean elites, often manipulating and humiliating them, the Romans further diminished any cultural capital these moderates may have possessed, and pushed some even among them to radicalize. Yet Josephus did not blame Roman procurators alone for the deterioration of Judea’s politics. While corrupt Roman rule played a central role, certain Jews, he makes clear, were equally culpable for the region’s descent into violence.
6 Jewish Identity and Jewish Extremism
No one set of beliefs and ideas constituted »Judaism« in antiquity. A range of ideologies were in circulation and in flux. The canon itself was not yet fixed early in the first century CE and various Jewish groups cleaved to different constellations of practices, texts, and oral traditions. Jewishness was not a religion of the book in the years before the war but was based primarily on a set of non-textual pillars. Jewishness had a few core elements. One was ethnicity. Religious