Antiquities of the Jews

The latter ten volumes continue the history of the Jewish people beyond the biblical text and up to the First Jewish–Roman War (66–73 CE). This work, along with Josephus's other major work, The Jewish War (De Bello Iudaico), provides valuable background material for historians wishing to understand 1st-century CE Judaism and the early Christian period.

Content

Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews is a vital source for the history of the intertestamental period and the Jewish war against Rome. Antiquities of the Jews is separated into twenty volumes:

In the preface of Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus provides his motivation for composing such a large work. He writes:

Now I have undertaken the present work, as thinking it will appear to all the Greeks worthy of their study; for it will contain all our antiquities, and the constitution of our government, as interpreted out of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Josephan scholar Louis Feldman highlights several of the misconceptions about the Jewish people that were being circulated in Josephus's time. In particular, the Jews were thought to lack great historical figures and a credible history of their people. They were also accused of harboring hostility toward non-Jews, and were thought to be generally lacking in loyalty, respect for authority, and charity. With these harsh accusations against the Jews fluttering about the Roman empire, Josephus, set out to provide a Hellenized version of the Jewish history. Such a work is often called an "apologia," as it pleads the case of a group of people or set of beliefs to a larger audience.

In order to accomplish this goal, Josephus omitted certain accounts in the Jewish narrative and even added a Hellenistic "glaze" to his work. For example, the "Song of the Sea" sung by Moses and the people of Israel after their deliverance at the Red Sea is completely omitted in Josephus's text. He does mention, however, that Moses composed a song to God in hexameter—a rather unusual (and Greek) metrical scheme for ancient Hebrew. Josephus also writes that Abraham taught science to the Egyptians, who in turn taught the Greeks, and that Moses set up a senatorial priestly aristocracy, which like Rome resisted monarchy. Thus, in an attempt to make the Jewish history more palatable to his Greco-Roman audience, the great figures of the biblical stories are presented as ideal philosopher-leaders.

In another example, apparently due to his concern with pagan antisemitism, Josephus omitted the entire episode of the golden calf from his account of the Israelites at Mount Sinai. It has been suggested that he was afraid that the biblical account might be employed by Alexandrian antisemites to lend credence to their allegation that the Jews worshiped an ass's head in the Temple (cf. Apion 2:80, 114, 120; Tacitus, Histories 5:4). He also stated that the Ancient Egyptians forced the Jewish slaves to build the pyramids, writing "They [the Egyptian taskmasters] set them also to build pyramids."

Josephus also adds a short account of his personal life, Vita, as an appendix to the Judean Antiquities.

Antiquities of the Jews contains a good deal of valuable, sometimes unique, historical material. This applies, for example, to the history of the Hellenistic states, Parthia, Armenia, the Nabatean kingdom, and the Roman Empire. In the Middle Ages and up to modern times the book was considered one of the most important sources in ancient Roman history, along with the works of Titus Livius, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Jerome. Because of this, Josephus is sometimes called the "Titus Livius of the Greeks".

The Jewish Encyclopedia speculates that much of Josephus's writings on Herod the Great and his sons draw from the work of Nicolaus of Damascus, a personal friend of Herod's, whose writings remain largely missing; once Nicolaus's narrative on Herod Archelaus ends, Josephus's narrative becomes less detailed. Josephus admitted being familiar with Nicolaus's work but also rebuked Nicolaus for exaggerating Herod's royal claims and benevolence, where Josephus treated Herod as a tyrant.

The extant copies of this work contain two passages about Jesus and James the Just. The long one has come to be known as the Testimonium Flavianum. Scholars usually agree on the authenticity of the second passage, while the first one is considered to be authentic, but to have been subjected to Christian interpolation.