Steve Mason has rightly emerged as the leading Josephus scholar of our time, and this massive volume—occupying the footprint of a collegiate dictionary—will surely serve as the benchmark book on the First Jewish Revolt against Rome for the foreseeable future. Indeed, it is difficult to believe that anyone will write a more thorough treatment of the revolt, and one can safely wonder when, or whether, another publisher will wager on such an expansive—and expensive—undertaking. Without a doubt, the volume proposes many important correctives to prior approaches to Josephus and the Jewish War. But as the discussion shifts back to reviews, articles, and even monographs, there will remain much to ponder.

The volume is divided into two parts and nine chapters. Part 1, “Contexts,” includes three chapters of roughly equal length, comprising nearly two hundred pages. Chapter 1, “A Famous and Unknown War,” cuts through Roman boasting of a great victory (the Arch of Titus, Judea Capta coins) and Christian supersessionistic blaming of Jews (that the temple was destroyed for Jewish sins) to point out that the conflict's oversized reputation rests largely not on the Jews who lost the war, but on the Romans and Christians who had their own reasons to make the very most of the Jewish defeat. This clears the way for chapter 2, “Understanding Historical Evidence: Josephus' Judean War in Context.” The bulk of this chapter explains—and justifies—Mason's largely literary approach to Josephus. Deep in this chapter—on page 90 to be exact—Mason shifts from the title's religious-sounding “Jewish” to his preferred ethnogeographic “Judean,” used from here on both for the people involved, and for the conflict with Rome (the book's title notwithstanding). Chapter 3, “Parthian Saviours, Sieges, and Morale: Ancient Warfare in Human Perspective,” provides further important background to ancient warfare in general and the Jewish War in particular. While the Judeans had (all too high) hopes for a Parthian alliance, they nevertheless successfully leveraged the benefits of asymmetrical warfare, and even had some rational reasons for continued hope after the sieges began.

Part 2, “Investigations” brings us to the heart of the matter. In chapter 4, entitled “Why Did They Do It? Antecedents, Circumstances, and ‘Causes' of the Revolt,” Mason presents one of the central arguments of the book: that the revolt's causes were largely local and recent. The revolt was not some long-awaited eruption of religionationalist fervor, but the result of local disputes gone awry. In chapter 5, “Nero's War I: The Blunder of Cestius Gallus?,” he reconsiders the Jewish ambush of Roman forces in 66 CE, again in light of local factors and the likeliest practical assumptions of those involved. Chapter 6, “Nero's War II: Flavians in Galilee,” brings the Jewish War down to size. There were a few key battles here and there (Jotapata, Gamla). Yet for the Romans, the “war” was mostly a low-risk conflict with plenty of time for rest and recreation (391). While Josephus, the Flavians, and later Christians will exaggerate the conflict for a variety of reasons, we should not be fooled.

Chapters 7 and 8 are a single chapter cut into two (“for the reader's well-being,” p. 404). Chapter 7, “Jerusalem I: Josephus and the Education of Titus,” presents a strikingly revisionist reading of Jewish War books 4 to 6, downplaying religious motivations at every turn. For instance, in Mason's eyes the “Zealot” faction is to be understood as neither fundamentally anti-Roman nor essentially freedom-loving. Rather, their name connotes their zealous following of their leaders; they should more properly be known as the “Disciples” (444–50). Chapter 8, “Jerusalem II: Coins, Councils, and Constructions,” highlights what we do not know about the coins minted during the revolt. Noting that we really cannot be sure what was conveyed by those cups and flowers on the famed silver shekels and half-shekels (images on p. 473), Mason points out that with the supply of Tyrian shekels cut off, there were practical purposes behind the coinage. Downplaying any significant religious or nationalistic meaning in the coins' slogans (“Freedom of Zion,” “Jerusalem the Holy”), Mason suggests that the real message of the coinage was more prosaic: “Keep calm and carry on” (486).

The ninth and final chapter, “A Tale of Two Eleazars: Machaerus and Masada,” recasts the final episodes of Josephus's War into Mason's revisionist mold: “Whatever happened … is easier to conceive of in the ordinary terms of fear, pride, and miscommunication between people of a very different culture than by resort to extraordinary visions or feats of heroism” (575). In other words, religious motivation is an explanation of last resort, and Mason prefers to stop short. The end matter includes a conclusion (helpfully summarizing the key findings), an appendix (treating Josephus's distances in stadia), an extensive bibliography, and three indices: one of modern authors, another of historical persons, groups, and places; and a third on texts, inscriptions, and papyri. Despite the tome's heft, Mason alludes here and there to his hopes to have included even more (e.g., p. 61). While I would hesitate to suggest the book should have been larger than it is, many readers may find themselves wishing for two additional crutches: (1) a detailed table of contents breaking the seventy-page chapters into subsections and (2) a subject index.

There is also something larger missing from the book's ending: Mason's narrative basically stops with Masada. Almost no space is devoted to exploring the conflict's immediate and longer-term aftermath. We do learn a great deal about how the revolt was exploited by the Flavians and later Christians (the focus of chap. 1). But Mason does not explore what we can meaningfully say about the repercussions of the war on the impacted populations, in their original or displaced locations.

As for what is in the book, one debate certain to continue concerns the roles of apocalypticism and other religious motivations for the Jewish side in this conflict. In Mason's mind those who view the revolt as an expression of Jewish religious-nationalistic sentiment are sorely mistaken. Mason does everything he can to dismantle such approaches in the name of historical method: “Our aim is to imagine real-life scenarios that would best explain the surviving evidence with as few needless assumptions as possible” (508). The needless assumptions, it becomes clear, are religious motivations: apocalyptic expectations or other hopes for divine intervention (510). After all, despite the title, for Mason the conflict was Judean, not Jewish (90). Those who believe that religious and/or ideological motivations—whatever we may call them—play a significant role in human history in general and Jewish history in particular may wonder whether ignoring the evidence pointing in this direction (e.g., apocalypses) in favor of “real-life scenarios” constitutes a methodological achievement. Still, those who will respond to Mason's work by pulling religion back in will nevertheless need to attend carefully to the local and recent causes that Mason has investigated in this volume.

Another compelling aspect of the work emerges from the modern analogies Mason brings in throughout, ranging from Napoleon's 1799 siege of Akko (178), Kaiser Willhelm II's 1898 entry to Jerusalem (127–28), the 1943 uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibor (537–38, 573), and the Allies' 1944 bombing of the monastery at Monte Cassino (502–8). Prudent readers will be enlightened by these comparisons, especially if they take up the implied challenge to learn more about these events. Yet some readers may be inspired to consider other modern analogies, like Jonestown, Waco, or even 9/11.