Page 560 - josephus volume one

Abstract

Antiquities, probably due to the more inclusive and markedly more “Jewish” nature of the latter. This
strongly indicates that the rabbis and Josephus had indeed used a common pool of sources, which
Josephus did not consult when he had previously composed the Jewish War.

As for Josephus’s account of the Jewish War events (second half of Book 2-Book 7 of the Jewish
War), not recounted in Jewish Antiquities, this narrative resembles rabbinic reflections on the
Great Revolt only in terms of the historical facts or general themes, with no trace of shared literary
sources. For this reason, this book is divided into two volumes, which differ one from the other both
chronologically and thematically. The first volume, with the sub-title “The lost tales of the Second
Temple period,” includes 20 chapters. They present an analysis of traditions found in Josephus’s
Jewish Antiquities Books 11-20, relating events that occurred between 332 BCE and 66 CE and their
rabbinic counterparts. The second volume, with the sub-title “Tales about the destruction of the
Temple,” includes 15 chapters. They present an analysis of traditions found in Josephus’s Jewish War
Books 2-7, relating events that occurred between 66 BCE and 73 CE as well as rabbinic anecdotes
relating to the same period.

This latter comparison, as opposed to the first, does not seek to reconstruct a shared literary
infrastructure, but rather to compare the image of the same fateful events as preserved in these
two diverse literatures. The thesis of the second volume, which deals with the narratives of the
destruction of the Temple, also primarily maintains that even though Josephus was an eyewitness
to these events, the rabbis did not use his work to tell their tales. The similarities between Josephus
and the rabbis here are very superficial, and include blatant contradictions, like the identity of the
personality who had prophesied to Vespasian his rise to the purple. Josephus claims that he was this
person, while the rabbis attribute this act to Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai.

The thesis put forward in this volume is that shortly after the destruction of the Temple, a set
version (a Vulgate) of how one tells the story of the destruction developed to include a number of
necessary building blocks. These include, for example, the fact that the war began because of an
insignificant and foolish act, that the warring parties inside Jerusalem burnt their own food supply,
that the terrible hunger in Jerusalem brought a mother to eat her own child, etc. One proof of the
existence of these building blocks is indicated by the fact that some of these events (like the mother
eating her son) are told twice in rabbinic literature, one storyteller being oblivious of the other
version, but both shared by the rabbis and Josephus.

The current study enfolds three different literary genres. Primarily, it is a scholarly monograph,
with a set question, a thesis, and a defense of the thesis throughout. In second place, though,
the book intends to serve as a lexicon of sorts, or a companion volume, which requires that it be
inclusive and comprehensive. Thus, it is in fact a collection of “entries” encompassing all the parallel
traditions between the two corpora. Finally, the book could also be viewed as a collection of articles,
since each chapter examines one distinct parallel tradition, and is so formulated as to stand on
its own. Thus, each chapter opens with the parallel primary sources, introduces the reader with a
historical background of the events described in the sources, and then proceeds to a literary and

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