Chapter 8

[Footnote 1: B.J. II. x. 2. The same phenomenon is recorded in Pliny and Tacitus, and it was a commonplace of the geography of the age.]

After the brief interlude of Agrippa's happy reign, the irritation of Roman procurators is renewed, and under Comanus tumult follows tumult, as one outrage after another upon the Jewish feeling is countenanced or abetted. The courtier of the Flavian house takes occasion to recount the Emperor Nero's misdeeds and family murders; but he resists the desire to treat in detail of these things, because his subject is Jewish history.[1] He must have had before him a source which dealt with general Roman history more fully, and he shows his independence, such as it is, in confining his narrative to the Jewish story. But the reliance on his source for his point of view leads him to write as a good Roman; the national party are dubbed rebels and revolutionaries ([Greek: stasiastai]). The Zealots are regularly termed robbers, and the origin of war is attributed to the weakness of the governors in not putting down these turbulent elements. All this was natural enough in a Roman, but it comes strangely from the pen of a soi-disant Jewish apologist, who had himself taken a part in the rebellion. Characteristic is his account of the turbulent condition of Palestine in the time of Felix:

"Bands of Sicarii springing up in the chaos caused by the tyranny infested the country, and another body of abandoned men, less villainous in their actions, but more wicked in their designs, deluded the people under pretense of divine inspiration, and persuaded them to rise. Felix put down these bands, but, as with a diseased body, straightway the inflammation burst out in another part. And the flame of revolt was blown up every day more and more, till it came to a regular war."[2]

[Footnote 1: B.J. II. xiii. 1.]

[Footnote 2: B.J. II. xiii. 6.]

Josephus vents his full power of denunciation on the last procurator, Floras, who goaded the people into war, and by his repeated outrages compelled even the aristocratic party, to which the historian belonged, to break their loyalty to Rome: "As though he had been sent as executioner to punish condemned criminals, he omitted no sort of spoliation or extortion. In the most pitiful cases he was most inhuman; in the greatest turpitudes he was most impudent, nor could anyone outdo him in perversion of the truth, or combine more subtle ways of deceit." Josephus, not altogether consistently with what he has already said, seeks to exculpate his countrymen for their rising, up to the point in which he himself was involved in it; and though he admits that the high priests and leading men were still anxious for peace at any price, and he puts a long speech into Agrippa's mouth counseling submission, he is yet anxious to show that his people were driven into war by the wickedness of Nero's governors. His masters allowed him, and probably invited him, to denounce the oppression of the ministers of their predecessors, and the Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus likewise state that the rapacity of the procurators drove the Jews into revolt. He had authority, therefore, for this view in his contemporary sources.

The die was cast. Menahem, the son of Judas the Galilean and the head of the Zealots, seized Jerusalem, drove the Romans and Romanizers into the fortress of Antonia, and having armed his bands with the contents of Herod's southern stronghold of Masada, overpowered the garrison and put it to the sword. Menahem himself, indeed, was so barbarous that the more moderate leader Eleazar turned against him and put him to death. But Josephus sees in the massacre of the Roman garrison the pollution of the city, which doomed it to destruction. In his belligerent ethics, massacre of the Romans by the Jews is always a crime against God, requiring His visitation; massacres of the Jews are a visitation of God, revealing that the Romans were His chosen instrument.

With the history of the war, so far as the historian was involved in it, we have already dealt. We are here concerned with the character and the reliability of his account. Josephus is somewhat vague and confused about the dispositions of the Jewish leaders, but when he is not justifying his own treachery, or venting his spite on his rivals, he shows many of the parts of a military historian. He surveys with clearness and conciseness the nature of the country that the Romans had to conquer, and he describes the Roman armies and Roman camp with greater detail than any Roman historian, his design being "not so much to praise the Romans as to comfort those who have been conquered and to deter others from rising."[1] It has, however, been pointed out with great force, in support of the theory that he is following closely and almost paraphrasing a Roman authority on the war, that his geographical and topographical lore is introduced not in its natural place, but on the occasions when Vespasian is the actor in a particular district.[2] Thus, he describes the Phoenician coast when Vespasian arrives at Ptolemais, Galilee when Vespasian is besieging Tarichea, Jericho when Vespasian makes his sally to the Jordan cities.[3]

[Footnote 1: B.J. III. v. This remark must clearly have appeared in the original Aramaic.]

[Footnote 2: Schlatter, Zur Topographie und Geschichte Palastinas, pp. 99 _ff_.]

[Footnote 3: B.J. III. iii. 1 and x. 7.]

All this would be natural in a chronicler who was one of Vespasian's staff, but it is odd in the Jewish commander of Galilee. Again, he makes certain confusions about Hebrew names of places, which are easily explained in a Roman, but are inexplicable in the learned priest he represents himself to be. He says the town of Gamala was so called because of its supposed resemblance to a camel (in Greek, Kamelos), and the Jews corrupted the name.[1] A Roman writer no doubt would have regarded the Hebrew [Hebrew: Namal] as a corruption of the Greek word: a Jew should have known better.

[Footnote 1: B.J. III. iv. 2.]

Again, he explains Bezetha, the name of the northeastern quarter of Jerusalem, as meaning the new house or city,[1] a mistake natural to a Roman who was aware that it was in fact the new part of the city, and alternatively called by the Greek name [Greek: kainopolis], but an extraordinary blunder for a Jew, who would surely know that it meant the House of Olives, while the Aramaic or popular name for "new city" would be Bet-Hadta. He does not once refer to Mount Zion, but knows the hill by its Greek name of Acra. Yet again it is significant that he inserts in his geography pagan touches that are part of the common stock of Greco-Roman notices of Palestine. At Joppa, he says, one may still see on the rock the trace of the chains of Andromeda,[2] who in Hellenistic legend was said to have been rescued there by the fictitious hero Perseus. Describing the Dead Sea,[3] he mentions the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah as a myth, as a Greek or a Roman would have done.[4] His very accuracy about some topographical details is suspicious. Colonel Conder[5] points with surprise to the fact that his description of the fortress of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea, the siege of which he had not seen, is absolutely correct, while his account of Jotapata, which he defended, is full of exaggeration. The probable explanation is that in the one place he copied a skilled observer; in the other, he trusted to his own inaccurate memory. We may infer that as in the _Antiquities_ he mainly compiled the work of predecessors that are known, so in the _Wars_ he compiled the works of predecessors that are unknown, adding something from his personal experience and his national pride.

[Footnote 1: B.J. V. v. 8.]

[Footnote 2: B.J. IV. ix. 3. Pliny says the same thing in Latin.]

[Footnote 3: B.J. IV. viii. 4.]

[Footnote 4: Tac. Hist. v. 7.]

[Footnote 5: Tent Work in Palestine, 1. 207.]

Apart from his dependence on others' work, his chronicle of the war is marred by the need of justifying his own submission, his Roman standpoint, and his ulterior purpose of pleasing and flattering his patrons. Vespasian and Titus are the righteous ministers of God's wrath against His people, His vicars on earth, and every action in their ruthless process of extermination has to be represented as a just retribution required to expiate the sin of Jewish resistance. Titus especially is singled out for his unfailing deeds of bravery; and when anything is amiss with the proceedings of the Romans, the Imperial family is always exculpated. Characteristic is the palliation of Vespasian's brutal treatment of the people of Tarichea. When they surrendered, they were promised their lives, but twelve hundred old men were butchered, and over three thousand men and women were sold as slaves. Josephus cannot find the execution of the divine will in this, and so he is driven to explain that Vespasian was overborne by his council, and gave them an ambiguous liberty to do as seemed good to them.

It is the pivot of the story of the wars, as has been stated, that the internal strife of the Jews brought about the ruin of the nation, and the testimony of Josephus has perpetuated that conception of the last days of Jerusalem. Our other records of the struggle go to suggest that civil strife did take place. Tacitus[1] states that there were three leaders, each with his own army in the city, and the Rabbinical authorities[2] speak of the three councils in Jerusalem. It is further said that the second Temple was destroyed because of the unprovoked hatred among the Jews, which was the equal of the sins of murder, unchastity, and idolatry that brought about the fall of the first Temple.[3] Yet the fact that the men who were the foremost agitators of the Rebellion were its leaders to the end suggests that the people had reliance on their leadership; and Josephus probably traded largely on his prejudices for the particulars of the civil conflicts, and he placed all the blame on the party that was least guilty. Adopting the Roman standpoint, he denounced the whole Zealot policy, and for John of Gischala, their leader, he entertained a special loathing. It is therefore his purpose to show that all the sedition was of John's making, while it would seem more probable that the disturbances arose because the Romanizing aristocrats were planning surrender.

[Footnote 1: Hist. v. 12.]

[Footnote 2: Midr. Kohelet, vii. 11.]

[Footnote 3: Yoma, 9b.]

According to Josephus, the Zealots, who were masters of the greater part of Jerusalem during the struggle, established a reign of terror. They trampled upon the laws of man, and laughed at the laws of God. They ridiculed the oracles of the prophets as the tricks of jugglers. "Yet did they occasion the fulfilment of prophecies relating to their country. For there was an ancient oracle that the city should be taken and the sanctuary burnt when sedition should affect the Jews." Josephus shares the pagan outlook of the Roman historian Tacitus, who is horrified at the Jewish disregard of the omens and portents which betokened the fall of their city, and speaks of them as a people prone to superstition (what we would call faith) and deaf to divine warnings (what we would call superstition).[1] Josephus and his friends were looking for signs and prophecies of the ruin of the people as an excuse for surrender; the Zealots, men of sterner stuff and of fuller faith, were resolved to resist to the end, and would brook no parleying with the enemy. They were in fact political nationalists of a different school and leaning from the aristocrats and the priests. The latter regarded political life and the Temple service as vital parts of the national life, and believing that the legions were invincible were anxious to keep peace with Rome. The Zealots regarded personal liberty and national independence as vital, and, to vindicate them, fought to the end with Rome. Both the extreme political parties lacked the spiritual standpoint of the Pharisees, who believed that the Torah even without political independence would hold the people together till a better time was granted by Providence. The party conflicts induced violence and civil tumult, and Josephus would have us believe that "demoniac discord" was the main cause of the ruin of Jerusalem. During the respite which the Jews enjoyed before the final siege of Jerusalem, he alleges that a bitter feud was waged incessantly between Eleazar the son of Simon, who held the Inner Court of the Temple, Simon, the son of Gioras, who held the Upper and the greater part of the Lower city, and John of Gischala, who occupied the outer part of the Temple. He describes the situation rhetorically as "sedition begetting sedition, like a wild beast gone mad, which, for want of other food, falls to eating its own flesh." And he bursts into an apostrophe over the fighting that went on within the Temple precincts:

"Most wretched city! What misery so great as this didst thou suffer from the Romans, when they came to purify thee from thy internecine hatred! Thou couldst no longer be a fit habitation for God, nor couldst thou continue longer in being, after thou hadst been a sepulcher for the corpses of thine own people, and thy holy house itself had been a burial place in their civil strife."

[Footnote 1: Hist. v. 13. Gens superstitioni prona, religioni obnoxia.]

It is curious that a little later, when he resumes the narrative of the Roman campaign, and returns presumably to a Roman source, he says that the Jews, elated by their unexpected success, made incursions on the Greek cities. The success referred to must be the defeat of Cestius Gallus, and it looks as if this lurid account of the horrors of the civil war in Jerusalem were not known to the Roman guide, and that at the least Josephus has embroidered the story of the feud to suit his thesis. The measure of the Jewish writer's dependence for the main part of his narrative of the siege is singularly illustrated by a small detail. Josephus throughout his account uses the Macedonian names of the months, and equates them loosely with those of the Jewish calendar; but it is notable that the three traditional Jewish dates in the siege which he inserts, the fourteenth of Xanthicus (Nisan), when it began, the seventeenth of Panemos (Tammuz), when the daily offering ceased, and the ninth and tenth of Loos (Ab), when the Temple was destroyed, conflict with the other dates he gives in his general account of the siege. So far from being a proof of his independence, as has been claimed, his Jewish dates show his want of skill in weaving his Jewish information into his scheme. When he is original, he is apt to be unhistorical. Josephus agrees with the Talmud that the fire lasted to the tenth of the month,[1] but while the Rabbis cursed Titus, who burnt the Holy of Holies and spread fire and slaughter, and Roman historians[2] declared that Titus had deliberately fired the center of the Jewish cult in order to destroy the national stronghold, Josephus is anxious to preserve his patron's reputation for gentleness and invest him with the appearance of piety and magnanimity. Voicing perhaps the conqueror's later regrets, he declares that he protested against the Romans' avenging themselves on inanimate things and against the destruction of so beautiful a work, but failed despite all his efforts to stay the conflagration. The historian writes a lurid description of the catastrophe, but he omits the simple details that make the account in the Talmud so pathetic. "The Temple," runs the Talmudic account[3] "was destroyed on the eve of the ninth day of Ab at the outgoing of Sabbath, at the end of the Sabbatic year; and the watch of Jehoiarib was on service, and the Levites were chanting the hymns and standing at their desks. And the hymn they chanted was, 'And He shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off with their own wickedness' (Ps. 94:23); and they could not finish to say, 'The Lord our God shall cut them off,' when the heathen came and silenced them." This account may not be historically true, but it represents the unquenchable spirit of Judaism in face of the disaster.

[Footnote 1: Comp. Yer. Taanit, iv. 6.]

[Footnote 2: Comp. Sulpicius Severus, who used Tacitus (Chron. I. xxx. 6.); and the poet Valerius Flaccus acclaims the victor of Solymae, who hurls fiery torches at the Temple. Dion Cassius (lxvi. 4.) declares that when the Roman soldiers refused to attack the Temple in awe of its holiness, Titus himself set fire to it; and this appears to be the true account.]

[Footnote 3: Taanit, 29a.]

Josephus, on the other hand, regards the fall of the Temple as a favorable opportunity to give a list of the prodigies and omens that heralded it. For example, he finds a proof of Providence in the fulfilment of the oracle, that the city and the holy house should be taken when the Temple should become foursquare. By demolishing the tower of Antonia the Jews had made the Temple area foursquare, and so brought the doom upon themselves. He tells, too, the story of a prophet Jesus, who for years had cried, "Woe, woe to Jerusalem," and in the end, struck by a missile, fell, crying, "Woe, woe to me!" For any reflections, however, on the immortality of the religion or for any utterances of hope for the ultimate restoration of the Temple and the coming of the Messiah, we must not look to the _Wars_. Such ideas would not have pleased his patrons, had he entertained them himself. He pointed to the fulfilment of prophecy only so far as it predicted and justified the destruction and ruin of his people. The expression of the national agony at the destruction of the national center is to be found in the apocryphal book of Esdras II.

Over his account of the final acts of the tragedy we may pass quickly. Undismayed by the fall of the sanctuary and still hoping for divine intervention, John and Simon withdrew from the Temple to the upper city. Driven from this, they took refuge in the underground caverns and caves to be found everywhere beneath Jerusalem, and finally they stood their ground in the towers, until these too were captured, a month after the destruction of the Temple, on the eighth of Elul (Gorpiaeus, as the Greek month was called).

"It was the fifth time that the city was captured; and 2179 years passed between its first building and its last destruction. Yet neither its great antiquity, nor its vast riches, nor the diffusion of the nation over the whole earth, nor the greatness of the veneration paid to it on religious grounds, was sufficient to preserve it from destruction. And thus ended the siege of Jerusalem."

Though the war was not finished, the crisis of the drama was over, and Josephus, doubtless following his source, relaxes the narrative to digress about affairs in Rome and the East. The last book of the _Wars_ is episodic and disconnected. It is a kind of aftermath, in which the historian gathers up scattered records, but does not preserve the dramatic character of the history. He had apparently here to fall back on his own feeble constructive power, and was hard put to it to eke out his material to the proportions of a book.

So careless, too, is he that he abstracts references from his source that are meaningless. In the excursion into general history, he refers to "the German king Alaric, whom we have mentioned before,"[1] though he is brought in for the first time; and in the account of the siege of the Zealots' fortress Machaerus he records the death of one "Judas whom we have mentioned before,"[2] though again there was no previous mention of the warrior. In the same chapter he describes some magical plant, "Baaras, possessing power to drive away demons, which are no other than the spirits of the wicked that enter into living men and kill them, unless they obtain some help against them." This apparently was a commonplace of Palestinian natural science, as known to the Greco-Roman world, and Josephus simply copied it.

[Footnote 1: B.J. VII. iv. 4.]

[Footnote 2: B.J. VII. vi. 4.]

The Zealots still maintained resistance in remote parts of the country, and the legate Bassus was sent to take their three fortresses. He died before the capture of Masada, the last stronghold, a natural fastness overlooking the Dead Sea, which had been fortified by Herod. In this region David and centuries later the Maccabean heroes had found a refuge at their time of distress, and here the Jewish people were to show that desperate heroism of their race which is evoked when all save honor is lost. Masada had been occupied by Eleazar, a grandson of Judas of Galilee, the leader of the most fanatical section of the Zealots; and it fell to the procurator Flavius Silva to reduce it.

Josephus utters a final outburst against the hated nationalist party and especially its two leaders, Simon of Gioras and John of Gischala, though both had become victims of Roman revenge. "That was a time," he exclaims, "most prolific in wicked practices, nor could anyone devise any new evil, so deeply were they infected, striving with each other individually and collectively who should run to the greatest lengths of impiety towards God and in unjust actions towards their neighbors." The more incongruous is it that after this invective he puts into Eleazar's mouth two long speeches, calling on his men to kill themselves rather than fall into the hands of the Romans, which sum up eloquently the Zealot attitude.[1] Josephus indeed introduces in the speech the Hellenized doctrine of immortality, which regards the soul as an invisible spirit imprisoned in the mortal body and seeking relief from its prison. He goes on, however, to make the Jewish commander point out how preferable is death to life servitude to the Romans, in a way in which Eleazar might himself have spoken.

[Footnote 1: B.J. VII. viii.]