Introduction

By means of these and other signs and portents, related just before his account of the destruction of the Temple, Josephus indicates both the importance of the events he is describing and the fact that the hand of a higher power was directing affairs. The passage comes from the Jewish War, his earliest extant work, produced (at least for the most part) less than a decade after the calamitous event which it commemorates. Despite being his earliest surviving text, it could be considered his most mature historical work: a brilliantly structured, tightly focused, and grippingly written narrative of national trauma, characterized by both Thucydidean political realism and Deuteronomistic grandeur of vision. It engages in apologia on several fronts: justifying Rome to the Jews, justifying Judaism to Rome, justifying the Flavians to their critics, and justifying Josephus to everybody. However, none of these apologetic tendencies impair the working out, by Josephus, of a distinctive and developed understanding of events. Despite its reputation in some quarters, the Jewish War is not propaganda. The vision which it articulates is always and entirely Josephus’ own.

One of several reasons for this work's importance is its status as the earliest surviving Jewish response to the destruction of the Temple. In Against Apion, Josephus states that the Jewish War was presented to Vespasian and Titus, meaning that a version of the work, if not the final one, was complete by 79 ce, the year in which Vespasian died (C.Ap 1.50–1).Footnote ¹ The date of the final part, Book 7, has been subject to significant scholarly disagreement. There is strong closure at the end of Book 6, a marked change in prose style in the final book, some seeming discrepancies between details provided in Book 7 and elsewhere, and some very conspicuous flattery of Domitian, a rather marginal figure in the rest of the work. This has led some scholars to conclude that Book 7 is a later addition, appended to the rest of the work in a ‘second edition’ of the Jewish War which dates to the reign of Domitian, although others have argued against this conclusion.Footnote ² I have stated my position on this at length elsewhere.Footnote ³ In my view, it is eminently plausible – but not provable – that Book 7 is later. Here, I will not insist on a later date, though I will mention the possibility where relevant.

The Jewish War is tightly focused and clearly structured. Books 1 and 2 cover the background to the Revolt, as well as its outbreak and the early stages prior to the arrival of Vespasian. After the preface, Book 1 begins with the Maccabean Revolt and offers, in the first half, a brisk account of the Hasmonaean rulers, the rise of Roman power in the region, and the establishment of Herod as king (BJ 1.31–363). The second half of Book 1 is devoted to a detailed account of Herod's reign, which reads like a biography inserted into a narrative history (1.364–673). After the death of the king, Book 2 begins with an overview of the succession struggles that followed (2.1–100), a very brief sketch of the period when Judaea was divided between three of Herod's sons (2.101–68), and then an account of the sixty years of procuratorial government preceding the Revolt (2.169–276). The second half of Book 2 concerns the outbreak of the Revolt itself, covering the abuses of the Roman governor Gessius Florus, the violent response in Jerusalem, and the rebel victory over a Roman army commanded by Cestius Gallus, the legate of Syria (2.277–654).

With these preliminary matters out of the way, Books 3–6 turn their attention to the Flavian campaigns against the rebels, with Books 3 and 4 concentrating on the period when Vespasian was in charge, and Books 5 and 6 chronicling Titus’ command and the siege of Jerusalem itself. Book 3 concentrates mostly on Vespasian's campaigns in Galilee in 67 ce, with a particular focus on the activities of Josephus himself and the siege of Jotapata. Book 4 begins by narrating Vespasian's final battles in the north (4.1–490), before the focus shifts and the book becomes a study in στάσις (civil war), providing interwoven narratives of Vespasian's civil war in Italy and the spiralling conflict between the rebel groups in Jerusalem (4.491–663). At the end of Book 4, Vespasian leaves the region to take up his position as princeps, and Titus prepares to lead the final push against Jerusalem. Books 5 and 6 chronicle that final push, and are extremely tightly focused and very violent. They weave together narratives of Titus’ progress with vivid accounts of the suffering of those within the walls, and they follow Titus’ progressive capture of the city's three walls, the burning of the Temple ‘against Caesar's will’, and the final fall of the Upper City, the last rebel stronghold. Book 7 charts the aftermath, outlining a somewhat miscellaneous array of post-70 events which illustrate the restoration of order by the Flavian dynasty throughout the Roman world, as well as the final defeat of any remaining militant Jewish rebels.

Following the allusive authorial practices common in Graeco-Roman historiography, Josephus is very clear about his literary models and his self-positioning within the canon, right at the beginning of the preface to Book 1 (1.1–3):

This is a very efficient opening, which justifies the work's subject matter with regards to its importance, introduces the author and his affiliations, and even manages to incorporate some denigration of predecessors, suggesting why a new account was needed of a war which had, apparently, already been extensively chronicled.

What is most likely to have jumped out to a reader familiar with Graeco-Roman historiography, however, is the clear Thucydidean posturing: both the authorial introduction and the specific claim that this war was the among the greatest of all time are clear nods to the opening of the History of the Peloponnesian War.Footnote ⁴ Thucydides was not Josephus’ only model: Polybius was important, too. There are numerous parallels between Josephus’ and Polybius’ lives and literary projects, parallels of which Josephus seems conscious, and he signals this affiliation in Book 3, where his description of the operations of a Roman army is clearly modelled on Polybius’ presentation of the same subject.Footnote ⁵ Thucydides and Polybius belonged to a recognizable tradition in classical historiography, as writers of mostly contemporary histories with a strong political and military focus, and also as authors who had personal involvement in the events they describe. Such histories had a reputation for intellectual rigour and ‘objectivity’; by marking his affiliation to these forerunners, Josephus is indicating what kind of history his readers can expect from him. The impression created is that what we are reading is fundamentally Thucydidean, a sober, serious-minded contemporary war monograph, a possession for all time.

One way in which Josephus sticks close to Thucydidean precedent is in his lack of transparency about his sources. Like his model (and unlike his own later practice in the Antiquities), Josephus has very little to say in the War about where his information comes from. In the preface, he insists upon the importance of experience and eyewitness testimony to accurate historiography, creating the impression that these are chiefly the sources upon which he relies (BJ 1.1–6).Footnote ⁶ Certainly some sections of the War are highly likely to have been substantially based on Josephus’ recollections, above all Book 3, with its strong focus on his own conduct of his command in Galilee. Moreover, he had access to numerous individuals on the Roman side who were involved in events, and even to some people who had been in Jerusalem during the siege (he mentions that his parents, wife, and some friends of his were in the city).Footnote ⁷ However, this clearly cannot be the full story, as there are significant portions of the text where Josephus’ own recollections, and those of his immediate friends or family, simply cannot have been of use to him. Most of Books 1 and 2 concern events from before he was born, and the description of the Flavian campaign in Italy in Book 4 would seem to be another section where personal recollection would have been of limited value.

In later works, Josephus mentions consulting the commentarii of Vespasian and Titus when writing the War: commentarii usually designated brief narratives of military actions written in a non-literary style.Footnote ⁸ It is conceivable that, despite his denigration, he may have made use of some of those pre-Jewish War literary accounts of the Revolt which he mentions in the preface. For the earlier material in Books 1 and 2, we can look at the sources which he used in the later Antiquities accounts of the same events and wonder whether he was already using these same sources for the War, although that is often speculative. In the Antiquities, when writing about the Hasmonaean and Herodian period, he clearly used 1 Maccabees, and he further cites on multiple occasions Polybius, Strabo's lost History, and the Syrian-Greek intellectual Nicolaus of Damascus’ universal history (the last likely to have been especially useful to him for the reign of Herod, at whose court Nicolaus lived for a time).Footnote ⁹ Although the details are hazy, it is clear that written sources of one kind or another supplemented Josephus’ own recollections and the testimony of other participants as sources for the Jewish War.

The road to revolt

Josephus’ account of the background to the revolt in Judaea begins in the 160s bce, with the Maccabean Revolt against Seleucid rule. At the beginning of the programmatic survey of the Jewish War's contents which concludes the preface, he offers a rationale for beginning there. There would be no point, he claims, in relating the remote history of the Jews, since that is accurately related in existing Jewish texts. He had therefore decided to begin where those pre-existing records of earlier times ended (BJ 1.17–18). However, this explanation is not wholly satisfactory. It does not explain why any account of pre-66 ce Jewish history would be necessary in a work with the stated aims of the Jewish War; it also ignores the fact that a substantial period elapsed between the latest biblical narratives, which concern the Persian period, and the Maccabean Revolt.

Literary considerations perhaps account better for this choice of starting point. As an introduction to his narration of a major Jewish rising during a difficult period of foreign rule, Josephus directs the readers’ attention to the last comparable scenario in Jewish history. But, on examination, the differences seem clearer than the similarities. The Maccabean Revolt was a glorious success from a Judaean perspective, while the Jewish Revolt was a costly and crushing failure. Indeed, everything about the earlier revolt as depicted by Josephus is the inverse of 70 ce. In the Maccabean case, a Temple violation provokes a revolt, for which the Gentile colonial power is unambiguously responsible; the Jews, with God on their side, respond violently and are gloriously successful; the climax of the event is the rededication of the Temple. Two hundred years later, a revolt which Josephus substantially blames on the Jewish rebels precedes and provokes a Temple desecration in 70; the Jews, who have lost God's favour, are comprehensively crushed; the climax of the sequence is the destruction of the Temple. The Maccabean Revolt is a mirror-inverted version of the Jewish Revolt here, and the stark differences between the episodes illustrate something fundamental to Josephus’ reconstruction: that possessing the favour of God is essential for the Jewish people's success, and that losing it leads to catastrophe.Footnote ¹⁰ Beginning his narrative in this way reminds readers of something of vital importance: that, for all the mundane causes which Josephus will delineate in the ensuing narrative, underneath it all is the theological dimension, the divine providence guiding events and determining the rises and falls of nations and the successes and setbacks of the Jewish people.

Josephus’ bleak introduction of Roman hegemony through the intervention of Pompey in the Antiquities has been quoted in the previous chapter.Footnote ¹¹ There is no comparable lament for the death of Judaean freedom in the Pompey narrative in War 1; nonetheless, at several points throughout the War, Josephus identifies Pompey's intervention as the beginning of Judaean subservience to Rome, which is often expressed in the language of slavery (BJ 2.356–7; 5.396; 6.329). In the War, as in the Antiquities, Roman rule begins with a shocking transgression of Judaean customs, although Pompey's restraint in not looting the Temple's treasures and the steps which he takes to re-establish its sanctity ameliorate this somewhat (1.153).

Josephus’ brief overview of Judaea between Pompey and Herod highlights numerous moments of tension and unrest: Gabinius’ and Cassius’ suppressions of multiple revolts, Crassus’ looting of the Temple, Cassius’ heavy burdens on the people, Antony's fierce repression of anyone who opposed his administrative arrangements (1.160–82, 218–22, 243–7). Josephus strengthens the credibility of his account by alluding to and invoking the established images of a number of these Late Republican dignitaries in Greek and Roman historiography. Crassus’ looting of the Temple evokes the standard portrait of the triumvir's greed. Antony's openness to bribery and expressed enslavement to Cleopatra strongly echo the influential strand of anti-Antony messaging promulgated by Octavian's circle during the climactic civil wars of the Republic. We can see the same strategy later, in Book 2, in Caligula's mad insistence on receiving worship at the Jerusalem Temple, which echoes Roman traditions of the emperor's divine pretensions. By evoking well-worn tropes about such figures, Josephus makes his narrative more credible to Greek and Roman readers, illustrating how these people's conduct with regard to Judaea was in keeping with their general characters as widely understood at the time. All of this, plus the numerous abuses of Herod related in the latter half of Book 1, effectively creates a tense background for Josephus’ depiction of the procuratorial period in the sixty years prior to the outbreak of revolt.

Some scholars read Josephus’ sketch of the Roman period as a depiction of escalating tension between Romans and many of their Jewish subjects, and of steadily worsening Roman governance.Footnote ¹² This does not seem, to me, to be quite right. That impression may be suggested by Josephus’ depiction of the last two governors before revolt broke out, Albinus and Gessius Florus: he tells us that Albinus was a monster of corruption, but that Florus, who succeeded him, made him look like a paragon of virtue (2.271–7).Footnote ¹³ This certainly suggests deterioration in the quality of governance, but this is not a consistent picture throughout Josephus’ account of the sixty years, which saw relatively good administrators like Festus (2.271, explicitly contrasted with the wicked Albinus) and Tiberius Julius Alexander (2.220) interspersed periodically amid violent, insensitive, and corrupt thugs like Pontius Pilate (2.169–77). Nor do the numerous crises which Josephus depicts erupting in the period of Roman dominance seem to follow a clear and consistent trajectory of spiralling emergency: indeed, some of the most acute crises happened long before 66 ce, such as the multiple revolts crushed by Gabinius (1.162–78), the risings which broke out in several locations after the death of Herod and which were suppressed by Quinctilius Varus (2.35–79), Judas the Galilean's rebellion against the imposition of direct Roman governance in 6 ce (2.117–18), and the emergency surrounding Caligula's attempt to instal a statue in Jerusalem (2.184–203). Thus Josephus is not depicting a scenario of gradually escalating tension so much as one of constant tension, punctuated by periodic flashpoints of major discontent.Footnote ¹⁴ For the most part, a fragile peace is maintained; periodically, the conduct of a specific individual (Caligula, Judas the Galilean, Gessius Florus) will lead to violence or widespread protest; crisis is generally averted – until 66, when it is not.

But even with this being said, the portrait of Roman governance in Jewish War 2 is not, by any stretch, positive – so much so that it strikes this reader as remarkable that Josephus was ever seen as a pro-Roman propagandist. Roman abuse happens at all levels. Certainly, the procurators themselves can be guilty of astonishingly venal, brutal, and insensitive conduct, as the careers of Pilate, Albinus, and Florus amply illustrate. But common soldiers can be just as inflammatory: witness mocking legionaries indecently exposing themselves to festival crowds and provoking a riot, or burning Torah scrolls as they scour villages for bandits (2.223–31). In the case of Caligula and that notorious statue, even the emperor can be guilty of pointlessly inflaming the situation.

What seems to be at stake here is innovation. On Josephus’ reckoning, there is an established system which, broadly speaking, works in Judaea. The Romans make certain reasonable concessions to their Jewish subjects which allow them to live according to their ancestral religious laws. They also provide avenues of petition and response through which the Judaean leaders can appeal any decisions of the governor with which they are unhappy, either to the Syrian legate or to the emperor. In return, the Judaeans maintain their obedience.Footnote ¹⁵ However, when this status quo is disregarded, problems flare up.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, the innovation of raising direct taxation in Judaea proper inspires Judas’ revolt, while Caligula's disregard for the tradition set by his predecessors by insisting on receiving cult worship at Jerusalem leads to widespread protests. On the other side, hard-line priests seize control of the Temple in 66 ce and discontinue offering the twice-daily sacrifices to God on behalf of the emperor (2.409–10), a key part of previously established practice which enabled the Temple to show its respect for the emperor within acceptable bounds; this, too, is a break with what has gone before and exacerbates the situation. To Josephus, Roman rule in Judaea had not been easy, but it did not need to lead to widespread revolt, so long as the status quo was maintained by both sides. Breaches of this status quo, by either Romans or Jews, lead to flashpoints and outbreaks of violence, which are usually crushed or averted until the outrageous conduct of Florus in 66 incites passions which cannot be contained.

The power and the glory: Rome and the Flavian dynasty

The latter part of the year 66 ce saw some significant successes for the Jewish rebels according to Josephus’ account. Florus and the Herodian king Agrippa II were chased out of Jerusalem; the Roman garrison was isolated, besieged, and massacred; and when Cestius Gallus, legate of Syria, brought an army to Jerusalem, it failed to breach the walls and was cut to pieces as it tried to withdraw back to the province (BJ 2.405–653). But in 67 ce, at the very beginning of Jewish War 3, Fortune tilts in favour of the Romans. Nero, dismayed by (as Josephus puts it) the ‘carelessness’ of the previous Roman military leaders, decides to send in a new army under more competent commanders. It is at this moment that the Flavian family are introduced to the narrative, in the person of Vespasian, briefly and efficiently sketched as a highly competent military commander with distinguished experience in Germany and Britain (3.1–8).

Josephus’ presentation of this family, the ruling dynasty at the time when the Jewish War was composed, has underpinned one of the most damaging aspects of his reputation in modernity, the once widespread accusation that he was a ‘Flavian propagandist’; more broadly, his representation of Rome's imperial claims in Judaea have led to him being characterized as a pro-Roman sycophant.Footnote ¹⁷ More recent scholarship has taken a radically different approach, at times conceptualizing Josephus as something like a dissident, filling the Jewish War with figured critique of Roman rule in general and of his Flavian patrons specifically.Footnote ¹⁸ Elsewhere, I have argued at length that both of these approaches are too stark, and that Josephus’ engagement with Flavian and Roman power is a negotiation, taking account of Flavian and Roman interests on the one hand, while simultaneously using the Flavians to advance his own narrative agenda, which could, at times, be markedly different from imperial needs.Footnote ¹⁹ Whichever reading we prefer, however, it is clear that the way in which Josephus depicts Vespasian, Titus, and Rome more broadly has been of extraordinary importance to his modern reputation.

Vespasian mostly lives up to his strong initial billing. He is depicted throughout as a competent general, decisive in action (indeed, Josephus obscures the fact that Vespasian's Galilean campaign was rather slow and cautious).Footnote ²⁰ He generally avoids fighting in person, although on the one occasion when he does come under personal attack, during Josephus’ outstandingly vivid description of the assault on Gamala, he acquits himself creditably (4.31–5).Footnote ²¹ By comparison with his son, he might be said to be somewhat lacking in more humane qualities, though never to a problematic extent, and we are shown that he is capable of mercy when appropriate.Footnote ²² A more convincing criticism may be that his honesty is somewhat lacking: he mendaciously promises Josephus himself his safety when Vespasian intends to kill him upon capture, and he offers a false amnesty to the rebel defenders of Tarichaeae before executing or enslaving them (3.346–9; 3.397; 3.532–40).Footnote ²³

Josephus is very careful when depicting Vespasian's entrance into the Roman civil war of 69 ce which elevated him to the Principate: according to the Jewish War, Vespasian was reluctant to declare his candidacy, only yielding after protracted resistance thanks to the coercion of his soldiers and his own patriotic concern for Rome under the tyrant Vitellius.Footnote ²⁴ He is repeatedly shown as the recipient of the favour of God. On the one hand, this chimes nicely with Vespasian's own political messaging (he seems to have been keen to present himself as the favoured candidate of the divine); on the other hand, it reattributes responsibility for the rise of Vespasian from ‘the gods’ to the Jewish God, a move which the emperor may not have appreciated given the denigration of Judaism which was characteristic of Flavian self-promotion.Footnote ²⁵ Furthermore, as Steve Mason has noted, Josephus’ eagerness to credit God for Flavian success, both in the civil war and at Jerusalem, could be seen to deprive the Flavians of the glory of their own achievements and present them as little more than puppets in a divine plan.Footnote ²⁶ Overall, Josephus’ Vespasian is a fairly rounded portrait, which is broadly complimentary and sensitive to the emperor's needs (as all contemporary representations of Vespasian needed to be, given the limitations on political speech at Rome), while also allowing space for failings and shortcomings, and using Vespasian and his career to advance Josephus’ own theological reading of the Revolt.

Titus is a much more commanding and charismatic presence in the Jewish War. Unlike his father, he leads from the front, frequently displaying reckless bravery and eagerness to be at the heart of the action. His personal battlefield interventions are often decisive, tilting the fortunes of war.Footnote ²⁷ In addition to this outstanding physical courage, Titus’ second major characteristic is his remarkable kindness: time and again, he shows compassion and clemency, often seeking to minimize losses and sparing whomever he can.Footnote ²⁸ These central character traits of Josephus’ Titus do not always suggest a positive reading. His courage can shade into recklessness, as his own officers recognize. His clemency can seem like weakness or naivety, and he can, at times, appear an ineffective leader, perhaps due to his indulgence of his troops (his failure to prevent the burning of the Temple in Book 6 is the clearest example of this).Footnote ²⁹ As Zvi Yavetz noted, this depiction of Titus’ clemency seems attuned to his needs late in the reign of his father, as Suetonius informs us that, at that time, Titus suffered from a terrible reputation at Rome, in part for thuggishness.Footnote ³⁰ But Josephus does not shy away from acknowledging the problems that this awkward combination of recklessness and kindness can present: as with Vespasian, the portrait of Titus is not uniformly positive, and is in fact rather rounded and realistic, conscious of Titus’ importance and the respect which he was due as Josephus’ patron, but a long way from propaganda or panegyric.

As for Rome in general, Josephus’ somewhat unflattering depiction of Roman rule during the procuratorial period has already been considered. During the narrative of the Revolt, too, there seems little here in the way of propaganda. Even Rome's agents and apologists are remarkably clear-eyed about Roman rule. When urging the people to abandon rebellion in 66, King Agrippa II fully acknowledges the brutality of procuratorial government (2.352), and even compares Roman occupation to slavery (2.355–6):

The same slavery metaphor recurs in later speeches too: by Josephus at the walls of Jerusalem, urging the rebels to lay down their arms (5.395); and by Titus himself in a chillingly contemptuous oration delivered to the last remaining Jerusalem rebels after the destruction of the Temple (6.331; 6.350). As Myles Lavan has noted, the use of slavery language is common in Graeco-Roman historiographical accounts of provincial revolts, but elsewhere it is usually put in the mouths of critics of empire, not apologists.Footnote ³¹ In Josephus, the spokesmen of empire are honest about what Roman imperial rule is: enslavement and exploitation.

What is missing from all this, as Menahem Stern noted long ago, is any of the usual cant put about by proponents of Roman imperialism.Footnote ³² Here we find no paternalistic presentations of Romans as liberators or ‘saviours and benefactors’; no notion that Rome rules because of the extravagant piety of the Romans; no celebration of Rome as the bringer of universal peace. Similarly, the account of the rise of Roman power over the region in Books 1 and 2 does not indulge in Livian fantasies of defensive imperialism, another ancient justification for colonialism.Footnote ³³ Far from propaganda, the Jewish War gives us Roman imperialism in its naked form, shorn of all pretence, exposed for what it is without any of the consolations of specious laus imperii.

Bandits, tyrants, and ‘terrorists’: the opposition

Josephus’ characterization of Rome is less than flattering, but the same can certainly be said for his depiction of Rome's enemy in the war, the multitude of distinct factions and movements which made up the belligerent parties of the Jewish Revolt. He sets the tone early, with an important paragraph in the Book 1 preface which establishes the terminology that he will deploy concerning these groups (1.10–11):

This is the lexical field to which Josephus will return repeatedly when delineating the Jewish rebels, largely regardless of their specific faction or allegiance. The term στασιασταί, participants in stasis, connects the Jewish War to one of the central concerns of his great model, Thucydides, while also illustrating Josephus’ economy of blame. In Thucydides, στάσις was almost a pandemic, consuming whole communities; in Josephus, it is one particular kind of figure, the militant rebel unaffiliated with the early ‘rebel government’, who is consistently blamed for στάσις, which is a significant marker of blame, as στάσις itself is, as we can see in the quotation above, sometimes cited as responsible for the disaster of 70 ce.Footnote ³⁴

Rebel leaders are commonly labelled τύραννοι, a term which, in Greek, could denote either illegitimate leaders who acquire power extra-constitutionally or simply bad monarchs. Josephus’ τύραννοι are both: people from outside the traditional leadership who become leaders of specific factions, and who proceed to rule badly and irresponsibly, primarily in their own interests, demonstrating the lack of self-control which was the hallmark of the classic tyrant in Greek literature.Footnote ³⁵ Terminology connected to λῃσταί, or bandits, is also very common throughout the work, reflecting an easy association between criminality and anti-imperial activity.Footnote ³⁶ One final term, which does not feature in the quoted paragraph but is also frequently applied by Josephus to these figures, is νεωτερίζοντες and related terminology, ‘revolutionaries’ or ‘seekers after innovation’. Often a pejorative term in classical historiography, this word connects to another feature of Josephus’ presentation: that rebels were more likely to be poor and young, with the qualities of youth and poverty supposedly inclining people more towards reckless innovation.Footnote ³⁷ This, then, is the general picture of a militant rebel according to Josephus’ presentation: most likely poor, young, engaged in criminal activities, hankering after innovation, engaging enthusiastically in ruinous στάσις, and in thrall to a demagogic and self-interested tyrant.

The details of the struggles between different rebel groups and leaders are labyrinthine, and too complex to be summarized here in anything but the broadest outline. To modern readers, these factional feuds can carry unfortunate echoes of the People's Front of Judaea and the Judaean People's Front. The first of the rebel groups to receive a name from Josephus are called zealots, which he cites as a self-designation (4.160–1):

Thus, with biting irony, does Josephus explain this name to his Graeco-Roman readers. His Jewish readers would likely spot a biblical allusion here, too, as terminology related to ‘zeal’ (qanah in Hebrew, ζῆλος in Greek) was marked in Judaism in this period. These terms tended to be connected to the story of the priest Phinehas in Numbers 25, who, motivated by ‘zeal’, slew an Israelite man and his Midianite concubine in defence of his interpretation of Torah. Thus, the term denoted a willingness to use violence in defence of Jewish law. Josephus initially uses the word to denote a group of militant priests who seize control of the Temple; later, it comes to be extended to cover a group of Galilean rebels who have coalesced under the leadership of John of Gischala, a personal enemy of Josephus.Footnote ³⁸

Another important rebel category, the sicarii, apparently traces its origins to the reign of Nero. Their emergence is described by Josephus as follows (2.254–6):

The methods of the sicarii as sketched here have struck some modern readers as reminiscent of modern-style terror groups, leading to a surprising amount of scholarship on them by academics who work on twentieth- and twenty-first-century terrorism.Footnote ⁴⁰ Josephus does not specify whether sicarius was a self-chosen name or an outside label; however, the term is interesting. A Latin word which originally denoted a knifeman (appropriately enough, given the tactics elaborated by Josephus above), sicarius evolved to mean both a general murderer and a violent political troublemaker in an urban context (note the distinction made by Josephus between the sicarii and the rural bandits). The sicarii were present in Jerusalem to assist with the early rebel movements; however, after their leaders were treacherously killed by a different rebel faction, they withdrew to Masada and spent the rest of the war sheltering there, not participating in the Jerusalem revolt.Footnote ⁴¹

Another major element in the Jerusalem rebellion is a reminder of the importance of regionality to the politics of this period. Josephus depicts a significant contingent of Idumaeans travelling to Jerusalem to assist in the Revolt. When he introduces them, at a time when the zealots decided to summon the Idumaeans to assist them in their struggles against another faction, he characterizes them ethnographically as a typical ‘barbarian’ people, eager for turbulence and conflict (4.231):

These Idumaeans eventually leave Jerusalem (4.305–52), alienated from the zealots, before falling in with the final major component of the Revolt, a gang of ‘bandits’ under the command of Josephus’ other principal ‘tyrant’, Simon bar Gioras.

A veteran of the battle at which Cestius Gallus had been defeated, Simon had subsequently been shut out of the leadership by the elite self-proclaimed ‘rebel government’ in 67.Footnote ⁴² After a period with the sicarii on Masada, Simon gathered his own gang of ‘bandits’ together, before uniting with the Idumaeans and heading for Jerusalem to press his own claim to leadership (4.503–13). He is characterized very differently from the other pre-eminent ‘tyrant’, John of Gischala. While John is a γόης, a trickster and manipulator who gets his way with stratagems (for examples, see 4.92–116, 208–24), Simon is a creature of unrestrained violence and wrath, more beast than man, as illustrated by the following episode, after the zealots have abducted his wife to use as leverage during negotiations (4.540–4):

These multiple factions, each characterized distinctly but all presented negatively by Josephus, jostle incessantly, murderously, and ruinously with each other in dizzying, kaleidoscopic configurations, betrayal upon betrayal and massacre upon massacre, until they reach the situation which Titus finds when he approaches the walls in 70 ce, with John and the zealots in command of the Temple and parts of the Lower City, Simon and the Idumaeans controlling the Upper City, and the sicarii sitting secure on their rock at Masada.

For Josephus, perhaps the most significant moment in these internecine struggles comes in Book 4, when the zealots treacherously murder Ananus ben Ananus, the head of the elite faction which appointed Josephus to his Galilean command, and which Josephus presents far more positively than any of the other groups. He affords Ananus a fulsome obituary notice, modelled in part on that which Thucydides supplies for Pericles, which concludes with personified Virtue herself lamenting the murder (4.324–5):

Had Ananus lived and stayed in control, Josephus opines, agreement with the Romans might still have been possible. His murder, and the removal of any reasonable leadership from the rebel side, was a clear sign that God had doomed the Temple to destruction. The parallels with the Thucydidean intertext are clear and revealing. After Pericles’ death, Athenian leadership passed to inferior parties, demagogues whose poor stewardship doomed Athens to defeat. Similarly, Ananus was supplanted by demagogic τύραννοι, and the result was ruin for Jerusalem. How could it have been otherwise, Josephus suggests, with people such as these in charge?

The destruction of the Jerusalem Temple

The destruction of the Jerusalem Temple as related in Book 6 is not the end point of the Jewish War, yet it is, in many ways, the most significant episode in the work. At the beginning of this chapter, we saw how Josephus describes some of the portents which predicted the fall of the Temple. Throughout the work, he repeatedly stresses that God doomed the Temple, largely because of the excesses and transgressions of the rebels, and he does so both in the narrative voice and in the voices of several prominent speakers, including Titus, Eleazar ben Yair, and Josephus himself (e.g. BJ 5.412–14; 6.250; 6.346–7; 7.328–33). First-time readers of the Jewish War in Flavian Rome would, of course, have been well aware of the fate of the Temple long before reaching the relevant portion of Book 6: they lived in a city where the ruling Flavian dynasty had intensively commemorated that event in a wide range of media, usually in triumphalist terms. The Flavians, indeed, presented the fall of Jerusalem as the cornerstone of their upstart dynasty's legitimacy.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus, Josephus’ first readers will have known from the outset that this was coming, and will have surely understood that it was a significant event, whether viewed from a Jewish or a Roman perspective. So, when the terrible moment arrives, how does Josephus handle the responsibility of depicting such a significant and topical event?

According to Josephus’ account (BJ 6.220–315), the destruction of the Temple was a terrible failure of Roman command. After his army reaches the Temple's walls and sets fire to the gates into the complex, Titus holds a council of war to debate the sanctuary's future. His officers suggest several possible courses of action but Titus, in keeping with the extraordinary clemency which Josephus has stressed throughout, opts for the most merciful option possible: the Temple is to be destroyed under no circumstances, even if the Jewish rebels continue to use it as a fortress. However, this is not to be. When his soldiers breach the gates, during fighting in the courtyard a soldier hurls a firebrand into the structure and flames take hold. As the fighting intensifies, more soldiers take up the bombardment, and soon the Temple is burning. Titus rushes to the scene in person and attempts to restrain his soldiers, but they ignore his threats and commands. Admitting defeat, Titus briefly inspects the interior of the building before withdrawing, unwillingly giving up the Temple to its fate.

The strong stress here on Titus’ innocence is clear; when combined with Josephus’ long-standing reputation as a Flavian propagandist, this narrative has predictably elicited scholarly suspicion. Most of the copious scholarship which this episode has generated has been solidly historicist in orientation, focused less on Josephus’ text than on ‘what really happened’ in 70 ce, and concerned, above all, with assessing the plausibility of Josephus’ claim that Titus opposed the destruction of the Temple. Most such scholarship has concluded that Josephus is probably lying, that Titus ordered the Temple to be destroyed, and that Josephus supplied his mendacious account to burnish his patron's reputation.Footnote ⁴⁵ Very few scholars have been prepared to argue that Josephus’ account is probably true.Footnote ⁴⁶ Such a strong consensus in favour of mendacity may seem persuasive; however, the mendacity thesis raises severe and unaddressed problems. Above all, why would a supposed pro-Flavian propaganda narrative deviate so strongly from the way in which the Flavians themselves were commemorating the event, not as a regrettable and grievous error or a failure of command but as a glorious capstone achievement of the dynasty? Only in Josephus, amid his Flavian contemporaries, do we find any sense that the destruction of the Temple is something that should be pitied or regretted. It is probably impossible to ascertain Titus’ actual stance towards the fate of the Temple in 70 ce. Moreover, the question is not especially interesting. It is more productive to think less about what actually happened in 70 and more about how Josephus’ contested narrative functions as literature.

Titus’ attitude to the Temple and his response to its destruction can productively be seen as exemplary for readers, guiding their expected response. He admires the Temple, is eager to save it, and is saddened when he cannot. Josephus’ focus on Titus’ response heightens the emotionality of this narrative, something which Josephus himself underlines in a fascinating sentence back in the Book 1 preface (partially quoted earlier in this chapter; 1.9–12):

Thus, Josephus is aware of the ‘rules of history’, but he asks the reader to excuse him, particularly concerning the destruction of the city and the Temple.Footnote ⁴⁷ This reinforces Titus’ grief on the ground, emphasizes the historian's own close connection to the events being described, and serves to elevate the destruction of the Temple above other episodes in the work: this sequence cannot be expected to adhere to the Thucydidean detachment which supposedly characterizes the rest of the text. In so powerfully activating the language of pity and emotionality, Josephus moves his account of the Temple's destruction into the generic field of tragedy, something also suggested by the inevitability of these events. Even Titus, for all his power, cannot avert the foreordained disaster. Josephus’ narrative duly evokes pity and terror, Aristotle's two key drivers of tragedy.Footnote ⁴⁸ And, in the Jewish War's context of production, this was revolutionary. The Flavians celebrated the destruction of Jerusalem as a great triumph of Rome over hateful and intransigent barbarians. Josephus tries to prompt his Roman readers towards a different response, more in tune with the victims’ perspective, to see the dynasty's glorious triumph as profoundly regrettable, and to lament what is lost, even in a justifiable and necessary war.

But other elements are also at play in the Temple destruction sequence. We have already intuited the hand of God behind these events from the prodigies which Josephus reports. Elsewhere, at the end of the account of the destruction, our author relates a remarkable calendrical coincidence (6.250):

Josephus exploits this coincidence to prove the intentionality of history, the presence of a divine hand guiding these events. The correlation also creates a strong parallelism between the destruction of the Second Temple and the destruction of the First by Nebuchadnezzar, related at the end of the Deuteronomistic History, mourned in the book of Lamentations, and foreseen by the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel. And indeed, throughout the Jewish War, Josephus recurrently evokes these parallels, weaving a dense web of connections between the two catastrophes. He describes how the same miracle (the sudden abundance, when the conqueror approaches the city, of springs which had previously dried up for the defenders) occurs to both Titus and Nebuchadnezzar (5.409–412).Footnote ⁴⁹ Josephus himself plays the role of Jeremiah, the prophet despised by his own people, who attempts in vain to urge the people to surrender to avoid disaster, when he restages Jeremiah's Temple Sermon for the rebels in the city, even comparing himself to the prophet in the middle of the speech where he assumes the prophet's role (5.391–3).Footnote ⁵⁰ His description of the Temple gate miraculously opening and God departing the holy precinct ahead of the Roman siege (6.293–7) alludes to the departure of the glory of God from the Temple ahead of the Babylonian siege in the book of Ezekiel (Ezek 10).Footnote ⁵¹

Most strikingly of all, such parallelism is strongly suggested by Josephus’ grotesque narrative of the cannibalism of Maria of Bethezuba. Coming at the climax of a long description of the agonies suffered by the population of Jerusalem during the siege, Josephus relates how one woman, a wealthy refugee from Transjordan, was driven to such straits that she killed, cooked, and ate half of her own infant son (6.201–19).Footnote ⁵² This passage, a grisly highlight of the Jewish War, can and should be read in the light of biblical precedent. Among the curses which God pronounces against future disobedient Israelites at the end of Deuteronomy is the specific claim that a siege will afflict the city in which mothers will eat their own offspring (Deut 28:53–7). The books of Jeremiah and Lamentations both specifically apply this prophecy to the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar (Jer 19:9; Lam 2:20, 4:10). So, once again, the two Temple destructions parallel each other, as Josephus depicts Deuteronomic curses which came to fulfilment at the destruction of the First Temple recurring in 70 ce. Some of his Babylonian parallels are transparent and explicit, perceptible even to non-Jewish readers; others are more covert, likely to be noticeable only to readers with expertise in the Hebrew Bible. But, taken together, there can be no doubt that Josephus wants his readers to understand that this is recurrent history, and that, however tragic and bleak 70 may have seemed, it was not unprecedented. This had all happened before.

This all has implications for the force of Josephus’ conception. Just like the Deuteronomistic History can plant a seed of hope amid the desolation of its ending thanks to God's eternal covenant, so too Josephus is able to leaven the bleakness of Jewish War 6 by alluding to that precedent. He reaches back deep into Jewish history to find the tools to understand and process the calamity of 70 ce. His Jewish readers would be keenly aware that the terrible events under Nebuchadnezzar had a hopeful sequel: the Temple and city restored, the people returned. If this truly is recurrent history, and if God's covenant remains eternal, then Judaea post-70 must surely also be able to look forward to a return of God's favour. As Josephus’ Jewish readers would certainly have recognized, despite the Babylonian disaster, Judaism still existed in their time, and the Neo-Babylonian Empire, Rome's analogue, did not. Josephus’ insistence on reading the events of 70 in the light of this remote-past history must surely have raised hopes, and questions, and those questions concerned not only the implied future of Judaism but also the implied future of Rome.

Happily ever after?

Book 7, which concludes the work, thus picks up amid devastation, with the Temple destroyed, the Upper City taken, and the villainous tyrants Simon and John both apprehended amid the ruins. The concluding book has puzzling moments: the very tight focus of the preceding work, especially Books 5 and 6, breaks down, and numerous episodes with no close connection to the Revolt or even Jewish history are included. However, its basic structure is clear enough: the first major section concerns the post-70 fate of the Flavian dynasty, recounting the movements and activities of the individual dynasts (7.1–120), then describing their reunion at Rome and acts of joint commemoration of the war (7.121–62). The second major section focuses above all on the fates of those few militant rebel Jewish groups and individuals who persisted in arms after the fall of Jerusalem, first in Judaea itself (7.163–406), and then in the Diaspora (7.407–53). The two outstanding narratives of the book are the account of the Flavian triumph, in the Flavian section of the work, and, in the rebels section, the story of the collective suicide of the sicarian defenders of Masada.

The travels of the Flavians, recounted early in the book, emphasize the salvific nature of the new dynasty, bringing the blessings of peace and order to the whole Roman world. Rome and Italy show no signs of the recent civil war, described by Josephus himself back in Book 4: instead of division and ruin, we witness the Roman people, of all classes, coming together around the figure of the new princeps and affording him a universal welcome (7.21–2, 63–7). Titus tours the cities of the east as far as the Euphrates, bringing largesse and dispensing justice as he goes (7.1–20, 23–42, 96–119). Domitian heads west, supposedly on an expedition to quell rebellion in Gaul (7.75–88). Thus the Flavians, the salvific terminators of στάσις in both Judaea and Rome, bring order to a troubled world. Finally, in 71, they reunite in Rome for Josephus’ dizzyingly sensory and remarkably vivid, if coldly unemotional, representation of the triumphal procession of Vespasian and Titus.Footnote ⁵³ His readers look on as Vespasian and Titus restage the conflict which Josephus has already restaged in the preceding books, in a vivid narrative which emphasizes the procession's artificiality, richness, and spectacle (7.134–5):

Some scholars have argued that the number of discrepancies between the Flavian representation of the war (as narrated by Josephus) and Josephus’ own earlier narrative is designed to expose the artificiality of Flavian commemoration of the war.Footnote ⁵⁴ Be this as it may, it is hard to deny that the vivid representation of all this splendour serves to depict the Flavians as strongly established masters of the empire, and as generous benefactors to the imperial capital.

In the rebel section of the book, Josephus begins by describing the successful Roman capture of four strongholds still in rebel hands outside Jerusalem, by far the most famous of which is Madasa, the remarkable and dramatic Herodian palace on a ship-shaped rock near the Dead Sea, which had earlier been captured by the sicarii. He narrates how a Roman army commanded by Flavius Silva invest the rock, building a ring of camps around it, before constructing a vast ramp for their siege engines. On the night after the Roman ram penetrates the walls, the sicarian leader, Eleazar ben Yair, gathers the defenders and urges them to collective suicide, arguing that God has abandoned the Jewish people, as evidenced by the destruction of Jerusalem, and that death would be preferable to slavery. His rhetoric eventually persuades them. When the Roman forces enter the plateau on the following morning, they are astonished to find the defenders dead, with the exception of two women and five children, who hid in a cistern rather than joining the suicide pact and so lived to tell the tale (7.252–406).

The account of the siege of Masada has attracted a good amount of scholarship. The focus of most of that scholarship has been on questions of the accuracy and historicity of Josephus’ narrative, principally assessed by comparing his account to the details of the extensive archaeological work on the Masada site.Footnote ⁵⁵ There is no strong consensus overall, but some agreement exists that he seems to get many of the details of the siege itself basically right, but there is no unambiguous evidence for the mass suicide (although this does not necessarily mean that it did not happen).Footnote ⁵⁶ Some scholars who have taken a more literary approach have explored the possible political resonances of Josephus’ account of this episode in Flavian Rome, a context in which suicide as an assertion of freedom had some bite, thanks to the activities of the so-called Stoic Opposition, involving the suicides of prominent figures as a form of protest against Flavian autocracy.Footnote ⁵⁷ Suicide is also a major theme in Flavian literature, and some contemporary parallel texts (especially Silius Italicus’ account of the mass suicide of the defenders of Saguntum) resonate powerfully with Josephus’ account.Footnote ⁵⁸

But the greatest disagreements centre on the question of Josephus’ tone. The traditional reading is that Josephus holds up the sicarii as paradigms of courage, having no choice but to admire their courageous last stand despite his general distaste for this faction. However, some scholars have questioned this.Footnote ⁵⁹ Josephus’ tone, when recounting the actual suicide, hardly seems admiring (7.389–90):

The language of possession and urges and intense passions and butchery scarcely seems to express approval: elsewhere, this is terminology which Josephus deploys when describing the transgressions of the rebels. In his speech, Eleazar himself vituperates the sicarii as the first to introduce στάσις and the murder of their countrymen to Roman Judaea: it seems wholly appropriate, then, that they should end their time murdering their fellow Jews. Yet, however we read Josephus’ ambivalent tone, one feature of his Masada narrative which must have leaped out at his Jewish readers is the shocking claim of Eleazar that the ruin of Jerusalem demonstrated that God had permanently abandoned the Jewish people. This nihilistic theology effectively amounts to the end of Judaism, and urgently required correction before the close of the book.

Indeed, it gets correction. In the final episode of Book 7, Josephus re-enters his narrative as a character (7.437–53). A refugee sicarius called Jonathan makes his way to Cyrene, where he agitates the local Jewish population. Catullus, the Roman governor, apprehends him but then, desiring to increase his reputation by waging his own Jewish war, he colludes with the prisoner to execute local Jews after falsely accusing them of being Jonathan's accomplices, before mendaciously claiming that a number of Alexandrian and Roman Jews were also involved. Josephus himself was among the accused. When Catullus arrives in Rome, Vespasian and Titus see straight through the plot: they dismiss the charges against Josephus and execute Jonathan, scourging him and then burning him alive, but they allow Catullus to get off with a reprimand. However, God intervenes to correct this miscarriage of justice. He strikes Catullus with a terrible terminal illness, in the final stages of which he hallucinates that he is suffering the exact same punishments as the wicked Jonathan. Thus Josephus shows us that, contrary to Eleazar's pessimistic theology of God's final abandonment of the Jewish people, God still cares for righteous Jews, and will still intervene in history to protect them. As in Book 6, Josephus ends by sowing a seed of hope for his Jewish readers: God is still there, still watching and listening, still caring for Israel. Those who state otherwise stand refuted. All this will pass.

What is remarkable about Book 7 is how reassuring it is. General readers are shown first of all that the Flavians have restored peace, order, and good governance to Rome itself and to the wider world; later, they see that the final embers of Jewish rebel ideology have been fully extinguished. Jewish readers, too, will find consolation in that closing anecdote about Catullus and Jonathan – clear witness that God's covenant still holds and that pessimists like Eleazar are misguided. Every kind of reader of the Jewish War can find a happy ending in Book 7. And this starkly distinguishes it from Book 6, which, despite its (implicit) seed of hope, ends in ruin, catastrophe, and defeat for the Jewish people.

I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter the contested possibility that Book 7 was a later addition to an earlier version of the work which concluded at the end of Book 6.Footnote ⁶⁰ The implications of that possibility are perhaps more serious than is often realized. The way that a work of historical narrative ends is extremely important, often retrospectively determining the character of the entire work. To borrow Hayden White's categories of types of emplotment of historical narrative, a Jewish War which ends at the conclusion of Book 6 would be fundamentally tragic, ending in ruin but incorporating the possibility of growth and progress through suffering for those who survived the cataclysm. A Jewish War which ends at the conclusion of Book 7 has been fundamentally transformed into a comic history, a narrative in which order has been restored after its interruption, the wicked have been punished and the innocent vindicated, and all is well with the world.Footnote ⁶¹