and (3) the futuristic eternal kingdom about to dawn.23 This understanding and schema of history, later adopted and adapted by Christian historians, were to dominate historical treatments of Israelite and Judean history until the post-Reformation period.
Four writers of Jewish history from the Greco-Roman period deserve attention: Alexander Polyhistor (first century BCE), Nicolaus of Damascus (born about 64 BCE), Justus of Tiberias (first century CE), and Flavius Josephus (about 37–100 CE). Alexander was from Miletus, although he wrote in Rome where he had been taken by Lentulus during Sulla’s eastern campaign. The latter manumitted and appointed him a pedagogue. Among Alexander’s more than twenty-five works, one was titled Concerning the Jews, fragments of which have been preserved in Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica. Much of his writings apparently consisted of compilations. His writing on the Jews probably belongs to the period shortly after Pompey’s conquest of the Seleucid empire and reflects the Roman fascination with and curiosity about things Eastern. In the preserved fragments, Alexander, who was not Jewish, quotes Jewish and pro-Jewish as well as non-Jewish and anti-Jewish authors, seemingly adhering faithfully and undiscriminatingly to his sources. His account of Jewish history began with the pre-patriarchal ancestors and may have extended down to his own day. The order of the events narrated follows the sequence of the biblical books, beginning with Genesis and extending through Kings and Chronicles, which might suggest that he was familiar with the biblical books in translation. His quotations from some rather obscure writers would indicate his utilization of a significant Roman library. An important feature of Alexander’s work is its reflection of the extensive chronological synchronization of Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, and biblical history and data. For example, Alexander associated the biblical flood and Noah with Berossus’s Babylonian flood story and Xisuthrus. Already in the second and first centuries BCE, numerous attempts had been made to produce a world chronology and an Alexandrian biblical chronological ‘school’ can perhaps be traced hack to the Hellenistic Jewish writer Demetrius, who wrote during the reign of Ptolemy IV Philopator (221–204 BCE).24 The Greek version of the Pentateuch certainly reflects the activity of such a chronological school.
Nicolaus of Damascus, who had served as tutor to Cleopatra’s children and written a biography of Augustus, became a court official and counsellor to Herod the Great some time before 14 BCE probably as part of the latter’s desire to turn Jerusalem into a major literary center. Among his works were an autobiography and a world history composed in 144 books. Nicolaus’s history, written in Jerusalem and under the patronage of Herod, to whose reign about one-fifth of the work was devoted, was a true universal history that integrated Jewish history into the larger context of world history, which was traced back to the times of mythical origins. With the exception of Josephus, Jewish and Christian historians seem to have made little use of Nicolaus’s work, although extensive portions were available to Photius, the ninth-century anthologist and patriarch of Constantinople.
Justus of Tiberias, a contemporary and antagonist of Josephus and like him apparently an unenthusiastic supporter of the revolt against Rome, produced not only a history of the Jewish War but also a chronicle of the Jewish kings extending from Moses to the time of Agrippa II. Justus seems to have made extensive use of Hellenistic universal chronicles, synchronizing the date of the exodus with the assumed contemporary Attic and Egyptian rulers. Justus’s extensive chronological synchronization, through the work of Julius Africanus, exercised a significant influence upon Christian biblical chronography.
Pride of place among Greco-Roman Jewish historians must be assigned to Flavius Josephus, although this may be as much due to the accident of historical preservation as to the excellence of historical presentation in his works. In the last quarter of the first century BCE, Josephus produced four major writings: Bellum judaicum, a history of the Jewish War in seven books; Antiquitates Judaicae, a history of the Jewish people from earliest times down to the outbreak of the Jewish–Roman War in 66 BCE in twenty books; Vita, an autobiographical work primarily describing Josephus’s role in the war; and Contra Apionem, a treatise on the antiquity of the Jewish people in two books. All of Josephus’s works were written for apologetic or polemical purposes, a factor that exercised significant influence and perhaps frequently produced distortions in his presentations. Whether Josephus was a traitor to his own people or a nationalist with loyalties that transcended the passion of Zealotism has been much debated, but that he was a sagacious opportunist has seldom been doubted.
In spite of Josephus’s argument that “the industrious writer is not one who merely remodels the scheme and arrangement of another’s work, but one who uses fresh materials and makes the framework of the history his own” (War 1.15), much of his historical work relied heavily upon previous authors, a factor sometimes acknowledged,sometimes not.25 Josephus was consciously aware of his interest, apologetic concerns, and the need to justify his presentations, and he commented briefly on his historiographic method. The account of the Jewish war, his finest work, was written to demonstrate that the Jewish revolutionary party was the dominant factor in the Jewish–Roman strife and the cause of the destruction of the temple and to correct previously published non-Jewish versions of the conflict (War 1.1–18). As to the first purpose, Josephus informed his Greek and Roman readers that, in spite of his desire to “recount faithfully the actions of both combatants” (War 1.9), his own reflections and private sentiments held that his country “owed its ruin to civil strife, and that it was the Jewish tyrants who drew down upon the holy temple the unwilling hands of the Romans” (War 1.10). As to the second purpose, Josephus felt that he had to correct the view that the Romans were “the conquerors of a puny people” (War 1.8) and to combat ill-informed historians: “As for the native Greeks, where personal profit or a lawsuit is concerned, their mouths are at once agape and their tongues loosed; but in the matter of history, where veracity and laborious collection of the facts are essential, they are mute, leaving to inferior and ill-informed writers the task of describing the exploits of their rulers.Let us at least hold historical truth in honour, since by the Greeks it is disregarded” (War 1.16).
In the War, Josephus’s interpretation of the events of his day is presented, in Thucydidean fashion, in three speeches attributed to Agrippa (2.345–401), Josephus himself (5.362–419), and Eleazar, the leader of the Masada rebels (7.323–36, 341–88).26 The central elements in Josephus’s interpretations were twofold. (1) As in Polybius, Roman dominance was understood as the work of providence or God. Josephus has Agrippa declare: “Divine assistance . . . is ranged on the side of the Romans, for, without God’s aid, so vast an empire could never have been built up” (2.391). Josephus reports that in his speech to the defenders of Jerusalem, he, after surveying the history of Israel’s suffering, sought to convince the Jews that “the Deity has fled from the holy places and taken His stand on the side of those with whom you are now at war” (5.412). Thus, like the prophets of old, Josephus applied a theological rationalization to explain the conditions of history. (2) The decimation of the nation and the trauma of the temple’s destruction were interpreted by Josephus as divine recompense (5.413–19). Josephus has Eleazar declare: “We have been deprived, manifestly by God Himself, of all hope of deliverance,” for God was expressing his “wrath at the many wrongs which we madly dared to inflict upon our countrymen.” He even has Eleazar interpret the rebels’ suicidal death as a form of payment to God: “The penalty for those crimes let us pay not to our bitterest foes, the Romans, but to God through the act of our own hands” (7.331–33). With good Deuteronomistic theology, Josephus explained the calamity that befell the Jews as divine punishment for the sins of the people, though as the sins of a minor element in the population.
Josephus’s other major historical work, his magnum opus, was titled Jewish Antiquities (or, literally translated, Jewish Archaeologies). Involved in Josephus’s presentation of the “ancient history and political constitution” of the Jews to the Greek-speaking world (Ant. 1.5) were two subsidiary influences, one clearly expressed and the second clearly deducible. In the first place, the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek in Alexandria, as reported in the Letter of Aristeas, and the assumed Greco-Roman interest in this work on Jewish history led Josephus to hope that a widespread interest in Jewish history in its entirety existed among non-Jews (1.10–14). The curiosity and encouragement of his patron, Epaphroditus,
