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Freedom and Empire in Josephus1

V21 March 2017

Michael S. Kochin, Political Science, Tel Aviv University

kochin@post.tau.ac.il

ABSTRACT: Flavius Josephus, historian, Pharisee, priest, rebel, and traitor, was

proud to say that he fought against Rome. Josephus is not closed to the value of

freedom as independence from foreign hegemony, nor is he deaf to hopes of the

restoration of Jewish freedom. By meditating on Josephus, with principal attention to

his retelling of the Bible and post-Biblical Jewish history in the Antiquities, I will

explore the complex dialectic Josephus presents of freedom and empire, for both Jews

and Romans.

Why Josephus now?

Flavius Josephus, historian, Pharisee, freedman, priest, rebel and

traitor, was proud to say that he fought against Rome. Josephus's

thought, I will argue, is of freedom. We Jews who attempt think

about politics need Josephus's thought of freedom because the

thought of freedom is more general and prior to the thought of

sovereignty. The thought of freedom is prior to the thought of

sovereignty because the very concept of sovereignty or the

sovereign and his freedom is a secularized medieval Christian

concept, a humanization of voluntarist understanding of divine

freedom or the divine will. In ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish

writers there is no hypostasized will: for them, freedom means

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freedom for the individual or collective to do what they think best,

that is to say, to do what they think will most contribute to their

success or flourishing amidst the things in which they live. The

opposite of freedom is slavery: the slave is compelled or compels

himself or herself to act according to the commands of another

human being or another human collectivity. One may also be

enslaved to a passion: such a person acts as though ruled by a

particular desire or drive rather than by a comprehensive view of his

or her own good.

Despite his reputation as a renegade and collaborator, Josephus was

not closed to the value of freedom as independence from foreign

hegemony, nor was he deaf to hopes of the restoration of Jewish

freedom. Josephus understood freedom not only as freedom from

literal Roman enslavement but even as freedom from Roman

hegemony, which both he and the people he wrote about equated

with slavery (Jewish War 2.264-5, Ananus at 4.175-179, 4.246).

Josephus was proud to say that he fought against Rome: "I was

general of those whom we call Galileans, as long as resistance was

possible" (Against Apion 1.48, tr. modified from Thackeray). One

can see this by inferring his own sense of values from his attack on

Romanizing Sepphoris in Vita 346-348, and his condemnation of

Simon who sided with the Scythopolitans against his fellow Jews

(Jewish War 2.469-476). "The Tiberians and many of those best

reputed among the Galileans have betrayed our liberty," Josephus

quotes himself as having said (Vita 386). Josephus condemned the

Galileans before, of course, he himself went over to the Roman

camp.2
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Nor are the prospects, as Josephus sees them for Jewish freedom

impossibly bleak. Jerusalem fell, as it were, to stasis or civil strife,

not to the Romans (Jewish War 5.257, cf. 5.153, 6.109, Antiquities

14.77), that is to say, without stasis the Jews might have withstood

the Romans, a view with which the Rabbis concur.3 Josephus's

hopes include the hope for the messiah, as we shall see, but they

also rest on the position that he is careful to emphasize of the Jews

as a significant if not the primary force on the ever-contested

boundary of two empires, Parthia and Rome.4 Even Julius Caesar,

Josephus claims, was afraid of Herod (Jewish War 1.386). Both he

and his hero Agrippa (the Second) are careful to maintain their

estimation for freedom (see e.g. Against Apion 2.125 ff., Jewish War

5.365), and even Jewish empire over Gentiles. Writing in defense of

the Jews, Josephus says, "May we not speak of our kings, David and

Solomon, who subjugated many nations?" (Against Apion 2.132).

Josephus was, of course, no Zealot, and he portrays himself as a

most reluctant rebel against Rome. He says repeatedly that there is

no present hope for liberation from Rome. Agrippa says at Jewish

War 2.346 that the rebels have only an irrational hope (alogistos

elpis), and that even God is on the side of the Romans (Jewish War

2.390). Josephus echoes this claim about God, in his authorial

persona (Jewish War 5.365-366, 5.378, 5.400-412). Yet it is not

Josephus's professions of Roman or Flavian sympathies that are

worthy of note, but rather his statement and even magnification of

his own importance in the failed war of Jewish independence. True

manliness, says Josephus about Saul, is to fight knowing you are

going to lose (Antiquities 6.348).

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By meditating on Josephus, with principal attention to his

retelling of the Bible and post-Biblical Jewish history in the

Antiquities of the Jews, I will explore the complex dialectic of

freedom and empire. I aim to elucidate the judgments demanded

from human beings by impersonal reason and by divine law upon

the human-all-too-human drives for freedom and empire.

Josephus as thinker

Because Josephus is the principal source not only for the Great

Revolt but also for the history of the land of Israel and the Jews from

the Hasmoneans to the Destruction, until recently he was generally

quarried for historical information rather than read. He was

assessed, for example in Seth Schwartz's book Josephus and Judean

Politics, as if his only value is as a source for historical science, as an

archive and not as thinker.5 Though ancient historians and scholars

in classics and Judaic studies have begun to address Josephus as a

thinker, there has been, to my knowledge, little written about him

by students of ancient political thought or by political scientists.6

Thinking about the past and the stories and practices that

orient oneself toward one's past means consciously choosing what

to transmit and what to transform. Josephus transmits and

transforms the law and customs of the Jews. Like the Rabbi Yohanan

ben Zakkai of the Aggada, Josephus is one of the entrepreneurs of

Judaism, who sees opportunity in the necessity of transforming

Jewish life to cope with the circumstance of the Destruction.

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Josephus's texts, unlike those of the Rabbis, primarily aim to

present Jews and Judaism to gentiles. To understand Josephus on

freedom we need to understand how he transmits and transforms

Romanitas, what effect he had or aimed to have on readers'

understandings and self-understandings of who they were as

Romans. After all, the Romans in Josephuss time are passing

through a prolonged civilizational crisis. The Romans prior to their

encounter with Greek philosophy, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, were

not what Karl Jaspers called an axial civilization: they did not see

man as stationed within a cosmic order which determined his good

and which it was his task to use his freedom to conform.7 The good

for a Roman was what was made him or his family freer, richer, or

more powerful or made Rome freer, richer, or more powerful. Jews,

on the other hand, "value observing the commandments and piety

toward God more than their own safety and their country" (Against

Apion 1.212). Jason von Ehrenkrook writes that Josephus

"articulates a notion of Jewish identity that reflects in part the values

of Romanitas."8 Ehrenkrook's analysis needs to be pushed farther:

by melding Judaism and Romanitas, Josephus not only is trying to

formulate a notion of Jewish identity that would appeal to Romans

and to Jews living in Rome, he also transforms the very notion of

what it is to be a Roman in response to the Roman's own crisis of

values brought about by the encounter with transcendent

philosophy and transcendent religion.9

In Cicero and Livy, 150 years before Josephus, we already see

Rome challenged by philosophy, by the search for knowledge of the

good in knowledge, and of mans place in the cosmic order. We see

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the beginnings of the Roman response to Judaism, the extraordinary

and mysterious process that would subsequently carry the Romans

in 260 years from IVDEA CAPTA to worshipping a dead Jew. Of

course, any Roman who reads Greek, the language in which

Josephus wrote, was already heavily influenced by philosophy. Such

a Roman was also, probably, influenced by or at least aware of

Judaism, since Greek was the written language in which gentiles

encountered Jewish texts and was the language besides Hebrew, if

any, in which Jews in the Mediterranean lands were schooled.

Josephus, like all thoughtful historians, gives us the history he

thinks that he needs to tell us.10 The easiest place to see Josephus

thinking is where we can compare his narrative with his sources, in

what Louis Feldman calls Josephus's rewritten Bible, the Antiquities

of the Jews. I will argue that Josephus rewrites the history of idolatry

in the Bible to connect kingship and idolatry. He does this, I will

contend, for two reasons: First, to show the Romans and the Jews

that it would be wrong on both Jewish and Roman grounds for Jews

to return to kingly rule, whether under Roman subjugation, or free of

it. Second, by defending what he presents as the fundamental

principle of Jewish law, the rejection of idolatry, as linked to the

rejection of kingship, Josephus taps into the Roman hatred of the

name of "King" and the ideological unease, which would persist for

centuries after Josephus, at the subjection of Rome and its

republican institutions to the personal rule of the Emperors.

Theocracy vs. Kingship

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The regime type that Josephus introduces is theocracy.11 Theokratia

is a word that, according to Per Bilde "does not occur in any other

place in all of the Greek literature."12 Theocracy, Josephus says, is

the regime that puts God at the head of the whole and the priests to

administer the most important affairs of the community (Against

Apion 2.185). Josephus's "theocracy" thus appears to be a form of

aristocracy. It is aristocracy, not kingship, that is the best regime for

keeping the Jews in order (Jewish War 1.170). I have been shown by

Haman, says Ahashverosh/Artaxerxes in Josephus's version of his

first decree, that Jews are insubordinate to kings.13 Before giving

the law regarding kingship, Moses says: "Aristocracy is the best,

and the life under it," while Samuel "regarded aristocracy as "divine

and making blessed those who employed it as a regime" (Antiquities

4.223, 6.36). Aristocracy is the Greek name, Josephus, implicitly

claims, for the kingship of God. Under Moses and Joshua, who was

strategos, the Hebrews were aristocratically ruled (Antiquities

6.84).14 The Judges, too, served an aristocratic polity (6.85), though

at 11.112 Josephus speaks of the form of politeia after the death of

Moses and Joshua the (or "his") general as the rule of judges and

"monarchs." Monarchy (monarchia), as Josephus understands it,

unlike kingship (basileia), is somehow compatible with aristocracy.15

I want to suggest that one should distinguish between the theocracy

properly so called, in which priests administer only the greatest

things of the common with a high priest over the them, described in

Against Apion (2.185), and the regime in which the high priest

governs affairs simply, which regime Josephus calls in Antiquities 11

"aristocratic with oligarchy" (Antiquities 11.111). Oligarchy is, at

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least in Aristotle's Politics a bad, self-interested regime. In the

regime described at Antiquities 11.111, the high priest rules over

more than merely the highest affairs, and apparently without the

authoritative participation of the ordinary priests. The Hasmonean

revolt began with aristocratic hopes: Mattathias asks his sons to

restore the Jews' ancient politeia (12.280). Mattathias orders his

sons to recruit "the righteous and pious," whether priests or not, in

order, according to the manuscripts, to increase the power of the

righteous and pious (12.284). In the purest "theocracy," or in

"aristocracy" without oligarchy, the high priest governs the most

important things with the help of those priests, Levites, and

Israelites who excel in the virtues as the Jews conceive them.

It is Aristobulus the Hasmonean, no fit ruler, who changes the

form of rule into kingship (13.301). Yet because Aristobulus relies

on a fortress and bodyguards (13.307) and his kingly successors

depend on a fortress to secure their rule, they seem more like

tyrants than like kings.16 Roman rule, on the other hand, brings the

Jews back to aristocracy (Antiquities 14.91, Jewish War 1.170).

Asked by Pompey in 64 BCE to choose between Aristobulus and

Hyrcanus, the Jewish nation responded, "We do not like to be ruled

by a king."17 A generation later (c. 38 BCE), some Jews still

preferred death to submission to Herod, which they call slavery.18

By that point, some Jews were so far degraded that it is not of

hatred for kings but out of affection for the Hasmonean Antigonus

that they refuse to proclaim Herod king even when tortured (15.9-

10).
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Yet we should not think the degeneration into despotism or tyranny

began only with the Hasmoneans. David, the exemplary king,

taught in his political testament that "slavery even to a foreign ruler

was not so terrible" (Antiquities 7.373). Solomon his son was a

tyrant (Antiquities 8.148, Against Apion 1.114), though Josephus

carefully attributes this to Dios the Phoenician. In his own name,

though, Josephus says that Solomon the King rebuilt Gezer as a

refuge against sudden change (Antiquities 8.148). It seems safe,

then, to describe Solomon a tyrant seeking a fortress to protect him

from his people, even if Josephus claims that while he enslaved the

foreign peoples under his rule, "of the Hebrews no one was a slave"

(8.160-161). Solomon was not therefore, "a philosopher and the

ideal prince of peace."19

Herod, Josephus does not hesitate to acknowledge, aimed for

tyranny from his youth (Antiquities 14.165). Herod was, in the

decisive sense, utterly unlike his father Antipater in character, who

Josephus admits was "distinguished for piety, justice, and devotion

to his country" (Antiquities 14.283). Herod has foreign bodyguards,

the classical sign of the tyrant (Antiquities 17.398, Jewish War

1.397). There is a full-blown description of Herod's tyranny at

Antiquities 15.366, and he is called "not kingly but tyrannical" at

16.4. Indeed, Herod was so deep-dyed in despotic tyranny that he

wanted everyone to speak of himself as his slave (16.356).20

In the period after Herod and Archelaus, Josephus says at Antiquities

20.234, "the regime was an aristocracy, and the high priests stood

over the nation," that is to say, stood between the nation and the

Roman procurator who had displaced the Herodian king/tyrant. In

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Antiquities 20, the High Priest is Ishmael ben Phabi, appointed by

Agrippa II, but he is hardly a model of noblesse oblige: "Such was

the shamelessness and effrontery which possessed the high priests

that they were actually so brazen as to send slaves to the threshing

floors to receive the tithes that were due to the priests, with the

result that the poorer priests starved to death."21 Though the Jews

were free of the Herodian tyrants, they were far from the theocratic

ideal.

Theocracy is a regime whose purpose is the fulfillment of God's

commands: "Most of all we are lovers of the kalos in relation to the

upbringing of our children and the keeping of our lawful pious

tradition concerning these things" (Against Apion 1.60). Sometimes

it seems that Josephus foretells the comprehensive, not to say

obsessive, details to be found in the latest compendia of Jewish law:

"our law leaves nothing undefined, but relates everything toward

our reverence for God" (Against Apion 2.170). "The Hebrews have

never from compulsion transgressed any one of these laws"

(Antiquities 3.223). The Jews have, however voluntarily

transgressed their laws!

Daniel Schwartz claims that for Josephus liberty or eleutheria

comes to mean autonomy; Schwartz does not recognize that in

Josephus eleutheria always means freedom from tyranny, even

freedom from Jewish tyranny at the price (as offered here) of Roman

domination.22 Yet at Antiquities 12.304 Judas says that they are

fighting for "freedom, fatherland, laws, and piety," which implies

that freedom is something other than having one's own laws and

following one's own religion. Schwartz's student Moshe Tuval writes

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that "the 'liberty' mentioned here [at 12.304] is undoubtedly the

liberty to live according to the ancestral Jewish law."23 I would say

rather that, for Josephus, freedom for Jews means the same thing as

freedom for anybody else, the power to live as they see best. Jews

who are not captivated or enslaved by foreigners or their own

passions, who are free to live as they see best, will of course use

their freedom to live according to the ancestral Jewish law.

Josephus knows the watchword of Jewish pride: "We are more afraid

of the law than of any despot under whom we may happen to live"

(Against Apion 2.277). Our law, he claims, disables Jews for empire.

Here the key commandment is the divine ordinance against fighting

on the Sabbath even if some great necessity seems to us to be

coming on (Vita 161, Agrippa at Jewish War 2.391-4). On the

Sabbath, Josephus asserts, we can only defend ourselves against

actual physical attack, but cannot march out to attack, or even act

to prevent or preempt an enemy action (Jewish War 1.146,

Antiquities 13.252, 14.62-63).24 Josephus claims that this prohibition

against aggression on the Sabbath, or even pre-emptive self-

defense, makes us abstain from war for the sake of conquest

(pleonexia) but makes us courageous defenders of the law (Against

Apion 2.292). Defenders of the law, not of ourselves or our country.

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Kingship and Idolatry

Our theocracy is a regime whose purpose is the inculcation and

proclamation of "the most just faith concerning God" (ts diakotats

peri theou pistes, Against Apion 2.163, to adopt the perhaps

excessively smooth reading due to Eusebius). We proclaim the true

nature of God, tn althn phusin tou theou, as Elijah says on Mt.

Carmel.25

Livy, writing perhaps ninety years before Josephus, already knew

that no image was to be found temple in Jerusalem, since the Jews

"do not think the God partakes of any form."26 Our conception of

God, Josephus claims, may be little different from that of the

philosophers. Yet our law which promulgates this conception not

only to the few but also to the masses does something from which

the philosophers shrank.27 To center our regime on the

promulgation of a conception of God, as Josephus shows, is to risk

the utter extermination of the collective in order to bear witness to

the truth of that conception.28

The Jews of Judea risked their collective survival in resisting

Caligula's demand to erect an image of himself in the Temple.29 As

we shall see, their obstinacy was such as to persuade Petronius the

Roman commander to intercede with Caligula at the price of his own

life (Antiquities 18.278). The Jews persuade Petronius the Roman

procurator to martyr himself on their behalf, out of virtue.

At an earlier stage, under Herod, certain Sages convinced many

Jews to martyr themselves in order to destroy the eagle Herod

erected in the temple as a symbol of subservience to Rome (Jewish

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War 1. 648-655; Antiquities 17.151-154). In the version in the

Jewish War, these Sages promise the martyrs eternal life and eternal

sentience among good things, but in the version in Antiquities

neither is offered, only eternal fame and glory for one's family. In

the Antiquities version, the rewards of martyrdom depend on Jewish

collective survival. Finally, in a third instance, under Pilate, our

ancestors preferred to die rather than allow legionary standards with

imperial busts into Jerusalem (18.55-59). All three martyrdoms are

described in Josephus: the Caligulan is praised by the narrator; the

Herodian and the one under Pilate are at least not condemned.30

In order to present this choice for martyrdom as the only valid

choice for a Jew, to make the Jews live up to the reputation for

aniconism Romans such as Livy had already granted them, Josephus

makes the Jewish religion more radically opposed to images than it

appears in the Bible or in other sources. It is to avoid complicating

the explicit praise of the resistance to idolatry under Caligula and

the implicit praise of the resistance to idolatry under Herod and

Pilate that Josephus omits from his midrash on Exodus in the

Antiquities the tale of the golden calf and the brazen serpent; from

his version of Judges, the tale of the idol of Micah and of the ephod

of Gideon; and from his version of Samuel, the teraphim in the tale

of the escape of David from Saul.31 After discussing the graven

images of Egypt, Josephus claims that "Moses, when he built the

first temple to God, neither put this kind of image in it, nor did he

order those who came after him to do so" (Against Apion 2.12). This

pronouncement ignores the cherubs placed in the Holy of Holies

upon the Ark. Perhaps the cherubs are relevantly different from the
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usual run of idols: At Antiquities 3.137 Josephus claims that the

cherubs are said to have a shape different from anything seen by

human beings, though Moses said he had seen them on the throne

of God, and at 8.73 that no one can describe or imagine them.32

Remember that Josephus claims in Antiquities to put the Hebrew

books into Greek without adding anything or omitting anything, or at

least without adding or omitting anything on his own (1.17,

10.218).33 We need to bear in mind the rabbinic legend concerning

the Septuagint, that every departure from the literal translation was

made by each of the seventy scholars working separately (BT

Megilla 9a-b).

With one exception Josephus suppresses every idol story under

Jewish aristocracy -- and Moses's monarchical rule he calls

"aristocratic" -- but keeps most of those under kingship.34 Kingship,

for Josephus, always veers toward tyranny or despotism, as we have

seen, and under despotism, Davidic, Israelite, Herodian, and not just

Greek, or Roman, the Jews' ability to live by their conception of the

nature of God is liable to be threatened. Solomon was seduced to

the worship of false gods by his many wives and concubines, but

"even before this he had sinned against the observance of the law"

by placing bulls under the bronze laver in the Temple, and an image

of a calf and lions on his throne (8.191-195, cf. 8.140). Jeroboam

built golden calves, and presumably not coincidentally, creates a

priesthood open to all Israelites (8.226-229). In consequence,

"priests and Levites and others of the many who are good and just"

defected from Jeroboam to Rehoboam (8.248). Jeroboam put his

trust in heifers and so will be defeated by us Judeans, Abiah King of

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Judah said, since we practice justice and piety toward God (8.279-

281). Ahab worshipped the heifers erected by Jeroboam, married

Jezebel, and learned to worship her particular gods (8.316-318).

Jehu purged the land of Baal worship, but permitted the Israelites to

bow down before the golden heifers (9.139). Amatziah fostered

worship of the god whom he had brought from the country of the

Amalekites.35 Herod's erection of Caesar's trophies in the theater

were taken as an erection of idols, and both the Jews of the time and

Josephus their chronicler finds this worse even than the gladiatorial

games Herod sponsored there (15.275-276). Herod even spoke of

"the name of Caesar and the other gods" (16.346): Josephus's

account of Herod's tyrannical mode of rule is preceded immediately

by the statement that he built a temple to Caesar near the sources

of the Jordan, which the attentive reader who knows his geography

will recall is the same spot where Jeroboam erected one of the two

golden calves (15.364, 15.365-366, cf. 8.228).

The one exception in the Antiquities to Josephus's general policy of

altering the Biblical narrative to link idolatry with kingship and

kingship with idolatry is the story of the temptation of the Israelites

by the daughters of Midian, under the aristocratic monarchy of

Moses. In Josephus's account, the Midianite women seduce some

Israelites to idolatry "when they perceive that the men are enslaved

completely by intercourse with them" (hs dedoulmenous autous

katenosan kai teles hupo ts suntheias echomenous, Antiquities

4.133, and cf. 4.139.). Slavery to sexual passion, like slavery to a

despot, can make one act contrary to one's own understanding of

the true nature of God.36 Slavery, to a man or to eros, can make

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even one who knows better worship idols. People can be overcome

by the desire for kingship in place of the best regime, that is,

aristocracy. Josephus's Moses describes that desire as "eros for a

king" (4.223). If one's only access to Jewish history were through

the Antiquities, one would believe that only when enslaved by eros,

whether enslaved by the more familiar sexual eros or by eros for a

king, do Hebrews or Jews build or worship idols.

Roman Freedom

To understand how Josephus appealed to the Romans of his time we

must keep in mind that their education and laws taught them that

only a Republic was a regime suitable for free men, and that the

power of the Emperor enslaved and unmanned every Roman who

submitted to it. Part of the greatness of Josephus as a political

thinker is his effort to exploit this ideological weakness of the

Emperor's position on behalf of the Jews. To that end Josephus

narrates in detail in Antiquities XIX the downfall of Caligula, enemy

of God and the Jews, at the hands of a republican conspiracy.

Chaerea, the military tribune, joined the plot against Gaius

[Caligula], Josephus relates, "because he felt disgraced by the slurs

cast on his manliness by Gaius; moreover, there was daily peril in

his intimate attendance on Gaius, and he considered it the part of a

free man to put an end to him" (Antiquities 19.21, tr. Feldman). Our

duty as soldiers, Chaerea tells his fellow plotters, is "to preserve the

freedom and empire of the Romans," not "to save the life of the one
 16

who enslaves them in body and mind" (19.42). The watchword of

the plot is "Liberty" (eleutheria, 19.54).

Yet despite their Republican paideia and politeia, the conspirators'

scheme for getting rid of emperors and restoring to their former

power the Republican institutions, and in particular the Consuls and

Senate, failed miserably. For one night the Republic was restored,

Romans were not ruled by a despot but by themselves, and for the

first time in a hundred years the consuls gave the watchword,

thereby proudly proclaiming "Liberty!" (19.186-187). Yet the next

day the Senate were forced to accept Claudius in order to appease

the slain Emperor's German bodyguards (19.248-250), and Chaerea

and the other plotters were executed (19.268-271).

To make Judaism appeal to the Romans, Josephus shows the

Jews as no worse (and no better) subjects of imperial despotism

than the Roman themselves. The Jews too value freedom and

virtue, and they offered Petronius the Roman procurator a chance to

show his virtue by esteeming the Jews and siding with them against

the mad whims of Gaius Caligula. One may no longer be able to live

free under the Emperors, but one can at least die well: when the

Jews insist that they will die rather than erect a statue of Gaius,

Petronius, the Roman procurator who ruled Syria, including Judea:

thought it a terrible thing to bring death upon so many

tens of thousands of men in carrying the mad orders of

Gaius, and thus to hold them guilty for their reverence to

God and thus to spend the rest of his life with poor

hopes. He considered it far better to send a letter to

Gaius and to endure the latter's inexorable wrath

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aroused by his not carrying out the orders at once.

Perhaps, moreover, he might even convince them.

Nevertheless, if Gaius persisted in his original lunacy, he

would undertake war against them. But if, after all,

Gaius should turn some of his wrath against him, a man

wo made virtue his goal might well die on behalf of such

a multitude of men (Antiquities 20.277-278, tr. modified

from Feldman).

Having made up his mind Petronius addresses the Jews:

I do not deem it right not to hazard my own safety and

position in order to save you, who are so numerous, from

perishing. You are carrying out the precepts of your law,

which as your heritage you see fit to defend, and serving

the sovereign of all, almighty God, whose temple I would

not dare to see fall because of the outrageous violence

(hubris) of the power of the Emperors. Rather I am

sending a dispatch to Gaius fully explaining your

determination and also in some way advocating my own

case for compliance, contrary to his decree, with the

good object which you have proposed. May God assist

you, since His Might is above any human ingenuity or

strength; may he enable you to maintain and preserve

your ancestral laws without His being deprived of His

customary honors by capricious human plots (Antiquities

20.280-281, tr. modified from Feldman).

Petronius believes that for a good man it were better to die than to

submit to the inhuman whims of the Emperor Caligula, who, claims

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Josephus, had ceased to think of himself as a man (18.256). Note

that Petronius does not anchor his defiance in Romanitas or liberty,

unlike the Republican plotters against Caligula, for Petronius himself

feels obliged not to liberty but to obey "the law of my own master"

(ho toumou despotou nomou).37 Petronius's ground for defiance of

his master is in the claims of the Almighty God, whose might "is

above any human ingenuity or strength." The emperor is unworthy

of obedience, Petronius asserts, but, speaking to Jews, he appeals to

the transcendent authority of God rather than the ancestral

authority of Rome.

By the time he wrote the final books of the Antiquities, Josephus

understood and tried to exploit this Roman unease at their own

slavishness, at their own rejection in thought -- and submission in

deed -- to one-man rule. There is no Jew, he told Romans who read

Greek, who does not obey his law, the Torah over any despot

(Against Apion, 2.277). Josephus dares his readers to make the

analogous boast, that they love virtue or Roman ways more than

they fear the Emperor, but he reminds them that the last such

Romans were executed at the accession of Claudius.

Martyrdom

What distinguishes the Jewish understanding of God from that of the

philosophers, Josephus claims, is not primarily its content, but the

fact of its public proclamation and adherence (Against Apion 2.168-

169, 179-180). Jews worship as all human beings should worship --

and would worship were they not ignorant or enslaved. The

 19

martyrdom that promulgation of the true conception of God

demands threatens the very survival of the Jewish virtuous city.

Josephus quotes Hecaetus: "For these laws [the Jews], even if naked

and defenseless, face the most terrible of tortures even unto death

rather than deny the faith of their fathers" (Against Apion, 1.191, tr.

modified from Thackeray). Because we are prepared for martyrdom,

our enemies torture us just to entertain themselves with the

spectacle of our martyrdom.38

Collective martyrdom relies upon faith in the providence of God,

who saves the Jewish witnesses to his true nature from the fury of

His deniers. Divine intervention prevented the massacre of all the

Jews of Judea for resisting the erection of the Emperor Gaius's image

in the temple, but unlike Philo, Josephus describes this intervention

in largely humanized terms, just as Haman's rise and fall are

described in Esther in humanized terms. Josephus casts Agrippa as

Esther Agrippa's intimacy with Caligula allowed him to intercede,

and persuade the Emperor to drop the demand for his statues to be

erected within the Temple.39

One might reasonably have feared that Caligula's moment of sanity

and clemency was only transient.40 Thanks to God acting through

the republican faction, Caligula was murdered. In part thanks to

Agrippa, maneuvering to be restored to Herod's throne, Claudius

ascended (Jewish War 2.206, Antiquities 19.236 ff.), and once firmly

seated praised the Jews and condemned the madness of Caligula.

Like Ahashverosh, Claudius wrote in favor of the Jews to all the

provinces of his empire (19.284-292). Perhaps the Jews can learn

from the disaster of the Great Revolt to accept Roman rule, and the
 20

Romans ought not judge them as incorrigibly disobedient to foreign

rule: Josephus says of the Gazans in their ancient conflict with the

Hasmonean rulers of the Jews, "Before they experience misfortune,

human beings do not understand what is good for them: only when

they find themselves in some difficulty and after stubbornly resisting

what they have might better have done when they were quite

unharmed, do they finally choose to do this when once they have

been afflicted" (Antiquities 13.252).

The Great Revolt of 66-73 was an excessive and failed response to

Roman misgovernment. The resistance, one is tempted to say, the

nonviolent resistance, to Caligula was restrained, and thanks to God

or fortune, successful. With God's help the Jewish people will

survive, Josephus promises, to bear witness even under Roman

domination. No persecution will sway them: "for the Hebrews have

never from constraint transgressed any of God's laws" (Antiquities

3.223). Even if some Jews Hellenize (e.g. Antiquities 12.240-1,

18.141), others choose martyrdom (12.254-256). God has always

made it possible for them to obey his laws: the Romans do not

(usually) require the Jews to erect statues of the emperors (Against

Apion 2.73-78), and God killed Caligula who did so insist, for Caligula

"had recruited God as anti-collaborator, as foretold by Philo, not

inexperienced in philosophy."41

Even after the destruction of the Temple, Josephus holds out the

hope that the Jews can move from Roman domination back to

Roman hegemony and restore their best politeia, theocracy. No

passage in Josephus is more famous than the noble speech of Elazar

Ben Yair on Masada. God, declaimed Elazar, has condemned his

 21

formerly chosen people (Jewish War 7.327). Yet Josephus

distinguishes himself from Elazar who urges his people to suicide

and whom he earlier deprecates as having ruled Masada as a tyrant

(Jewish War 2.447). Josephus, unlike Elazar, has not abandoned his

faith in the saving providence of God. Individual Jews may and will

suffer for their most just faith, but the Jews will survive as a people

both within and beyond the Roman Empire to bear witness to the

true nature of God. That miraculous survival is the truest sign of His

providential care for His people Israel.

Jewish paideia, Josephus shows, is paideia for martyrdom. The

Jew aims to live, but to live in observance of God's law, in witness of

the true conception of God. The Jewish witness does not require

Jews to compel gentiles to renounce idols, only that Jews purge

themselves and their land of false gods: Josephus's Jehu orders all

non-Israelites out before he slaughters the Israelite worshippers of

Baal (Antiquities 9.136, cf. 15.329-330, 19.329). It thus might be

possible for Jews to obey the command of Claudius, "not to nullify

the superstitions of the nations, but to guard their own laws."

(Antiquities 19.290). For the Jews to live under Roman rule requires

the Romans to remain "magnanimous and moderate," that is to say

faithful enough to their own memories of freedom and their

ancestral hatred of despots not to attempt to force the Jews to

worship idols of the emperors (Against Apion 2.73).

It is Elazar ben Yair, not Josephus, who denies that Jewish

collective survival is possible, who proclaims the superiority of the

next life to this one. With God's help, the Jews will survive to make

this an eternal martyrdom (see Moses's promise at Antiquities

 22

4.183). God always makes it possible for the Jews to obey His law, if

they choose.42

It is not for the Flavian freedman Josephus to remind his Hellenized

Roman readers that the Jews have a stronger basis for faith in their

eternal mission than do they, citizens though they be of their

"eternal city." Those who wish to learn the fate of Rome, "let him

endeavor to read the book of Daniel, he will find it in the sacred

writings."43
1An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference on "New Perspectives on
Sovereignty and Jewish Politics," Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1-2 June 2016. I would like to
thank my respondent, Yossi David, and the other participants for their comments.
Material in this paper is taken (with occasional corrections) from Michael S. Kochin,
"Education after Freedom," in In Search of Humanity: Essays in Honor of Clifford Orwin,
ed. Andrea Radasanu (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015).
2Of course, even Romans can express esteem for love of liberty in Jews; Jewish War
2.299.
3See e.g. Babylonian Talmud Gittin 56a; Avot de Rabbi Natan A 6.3.
4Jewish War 1.5-6, cf. 1.284, 6.342-343, Antiquities 14.330 ff., 18.102, 20.17-96.
5Seth Schwartz, Josephus and Judean Politics (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990).
6But see Clifford Orwin, "Flavius Josephus on Priesthood," in The Jewish Political Tradition,
ed. Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum, and Noam J. Zohar, coedited by Yair
Lorberbaum, vol. 1, Authority (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 191-
195; and the Jewish studies scholar Tessa Rajak contributed a chapter on Josephus to the
Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Christopher Rowe and
Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
7Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, tr. Michael Bullock (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1953). Jaspers is aware that philosophy emerged in Greek and was only
received in Rome at "the time of the Scipios" (59). The great study of a non-axial
technological civilization is S. N. Eisenstadt, Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); there is ample material in Cicero, Vergil,
Juvenal, Horace, Josephus, and Tacitus for a similar study of Romanitas as contrasted with
the axial systems of Greek philosophy, Judaism, and Christianity. A simple operational
test to tell whether one is dealing with a non-axial society: do they believe it legitimate
to torture people solely for entertainment? See Antiquities 15.274-276; Against Apion
2.233; Jewish War 2.152-3, 4.477, 7.23-24, 7.39.
8Jason von Ehrenkrook, Sculpting Idolatry in Flavian Rome: (An)Iconic Rhetoric in the
Writings of Flavius Josephus (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), 18.
9On Josephus as preacher of Judaism or Judaic philosophy to gentiles see Steve Mason, "The
Contra Apionem in Social and Literary Context: An Invitation to Judean Philosophy," in Josephus'
Contra Apionem: Studies in its Character and Context with a Latin Concordance to the Portion
Missing in Greek, ed. Louis H. Feldman and John R. Levison (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 187-228.
10Harold W. Attridge writes of Josephus's "literary activity of retelling the sacral history of his people in
a meaningful way"; Attridge, The Interpretation of Biblical History in the Antiquitates Judaicae of
Flavius Josephus Harvard Dissertations in Religion, No. 7 (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press,
1976), 23.
11Orwin, "Flavius Josephus on Priesthood."
12Per Bilde, Flavius Josephus between Jerusalem and Rome: His Life, Works, and Their
Importance (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1988), 116.
13Antiquities 11.217, translating anupotaton with LSJ. Later, after his about-face,
Ahashverosh/Artaxerxes will decree that the Jews "governed themselves in the most
excellent manner" (ton ariston politeumenous tropon, 11.279): he does not say that they
are loyal to kings.
14The Rabbis, by contrast, say that Moses and Joshua ruled as kings (see Ibn Ezra and
Chizkuni on Deuteronomy 33:5).
15See Jewish War 1.70, Antiquities 13.301. At Antiquities 6.268 Josephus speaks of Saul
as "the first to be king after the aristocratic regime under the Judges" (adopting the
reading of manuscripts RO as reported ad loc. by Thackeray and Marcus note d.)
Eckstein, following Daniel R. Schwartz, explains this seeming oddity in Josephus's use of
monarchy by reference to Polybius's distinction between "monarchy" and "true kingship"
(Polybius 6.6-7); Daniel R. Schwartz, "Josephus on the Jewish Constitutions and
Community," Scripta Classica Israelitica 7 (1983/4): 30-52; A. M. Eckstein, "Josephus and
Polybius: A Reconsideration," Classical Antiquity 9 (1990): 175-208, 178-179.
16For Alexandra's fortress strategy, see Antiquities 13.400, 13.405.
17Antiquities 14.41.
18Antiquities 14.429-430, cf. Jewish War 1.311-313.
19Pace Bilde, Flavius Josephus, 101 from whom these words are quoted. Judas
Maccabeus, who fortified Bethsura against any necessity caused by the enemy (12.326)
is among the last incarnation of the primitive monarchy compatible with aristocracy.
Mattathias's hopes (12.284) were not yet blasted.
20Though this is how Hebrews or Jews speak before their king, at least when they want
something (perhaps most strikingly at 1 Kings 1:19), and how the greatest of Jewish
kings, David, spoke of himself in relation to God (see BT Sanhedrin 107a).
21Antiquities 20.181, tr. Feldman. As Feldman points out ad loc., this story was so
notorious that it even made it into the Babylonian Talmud at Pesachim 57a; cf. Tosefta
Menachot 13.21; Teresa Rajak, Josephus: The Historian and His Society (London:
Duckworth, 1983), 22-23.
22See Daniel R. Schwartz, "Rome and the Jews: Josephus on 'Freedom' and 'Autonomy',"
in Representations of Empire: Rome and the Mediterranean World, ed. Alan K. Bowman,
Hannah M. Cotton, Martin Goodman, and Simon Price, Proceedings of the British
Academy 114 (Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 2002), 65-
81.
23Tuval, From Jerusalem Priest, 199.
24This is not the law as observed by Jews today.
25Antiquities 8.338. Phusis is an odd and perhaps unfortunate locution to apply to
our God, who is always what He is, and is not "theogenerated." Compare Exodus
3:14, on which Josephus says, "Concerning this it is not in accordance with divine
law for me to speak" (Antiquities 2.276), and see also 8.107.
26Livy 102, apud Scholia in Lucanum 2.593; quoted in von Ehrenkrook, Sculpting Idolatry, 29-30 from
Stern, Greek and Latin Authors 1:330.
27Against Apion 2.168-169, 2.224; but see Plutarch, Life of Numa 8.7-8; von Ehrenkrook,
Sculpting Idolatry, 161.
28In his version of the martyrdom of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (10.211-215),
Josephus omits their statement to Nebuchadnezzar that "Indeed our God whom we
worship is able to save us, for the burning fire and from your hand, O King, he will save
us. But if does not, know it well, O King that we will not worship you gods nor bow down
before the golden image which you have erected" (Daniel 3:17-18). Josephus covers
over these martyrs' awareness that they might not be saved.
29Jewish War 2.184-203; Antiquities 18.261-288; the most perceptive discussion of this I
have seen is in Bilde, Flavius Josephus, 186-187.
30Cf. H. R. Moehring, "Joseph Ben Matthia and Flavius Josephus: the Jewish Prophet and
Roman Historian," in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Rmischen Welt: Principat, vol. 21.2,
ed. Wolfgang Haase (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1984), 885 on Josephus's
view of the revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes, "Once the very survival of the Jewish law
is endangered, only resistance by any means possible is called for."
31Antiquities, 6.217, and see note c ad Thackeray, Antiquities 3.99; note b ad Thackeray
and Marcus Antiquities 5.178, note a ad 5.232; note a ad 6. 217; van Ehrenkrook,
Sculpting Idolatry, 148-149.
32See Thackeray, note e. ad 3.126, and note c. ad Antiquities 8.73 in the
Thackeray/Marcus translation. Philo similarly glosses over the cherubs in his account of
the martyrdom under Caligula in The First Part of the Treatise on Virtue or the Embassy
to Gaius.
33At Jewish War 1.17 Josephus states that "to tell the antiquities of the Jews would be superfluous
since many Jews before me have put together the things of our ancestors accurately"; the task that
Josephus takes in his own Antiquities would be needed only if its goal were other than to tell things
accurately.
34That Josephus suppresses idol stories is the theme of von Ehrenkrook, Sculpting
Idolatry. Von Ehrenkrook misses the connection Josephus draws between kingship
and idolatry on the one hand and aristocracy and faithful observance of the law
against idols on the other hand. I should add that Josephus claims when retelling
the story of Rachel stealing her father Laban's teraphim that she took them not
because she worshipped them but in order to have something to bargain with
should Laban pursue them in their flight (Antiquities 1.310-311). Josephus also
omits the detail that according to his servant, Joseph used his precious cup for
divination (Antiquities 2.128).
35Antiquities 9.193-195. In 2 Chronicles 25:14 they are called the gods of the children of
Seir; it is Josephus who ascribed them to the Israelites' worst racial enemy.
36See also the tale of Anilaeus, who fell because of his eros for an idolatress (Antiquities
18.340-370).
37Jewish War 2.195; the oddity here is that a master or despot is precisely one whose
command has force that cannot be reduced to law. In Antiquities Petronius gives equally
subtle if less paradoxical versions of Petronius's statement on his duty: at Antiquities
18.265, he asserts that he must obey Caligula or be punished, which evades the issue of
the moral force of Caligula's command or even of his office. At 18.279, Petronius states
that it would be noble for one as himself so honored by the emperor to do nothing
opposed to him, which opens up the possibility of simply refusing to obey him, the course
Petronius adopts.
38Against Apion 2.233; and for an example see the martyrdom of the Essenes at Jewish
War 2.152-3.
39Antiquities 18.298-301. Philo, who went to Rome to plead with Caligula as part of an
Alexandrian Jewish embassy, gives a contemporary account in The First Part of the
Treatise on Virtue or the Embassy to Gaius. Philo's version is much more explicit about
God's role in preventing the disaster than is Josephus.
40Such is Philo's view.
41Antiquities 18.199-200; see Bilde, Flavius Josephus, 211. Similarly, according to
Josephus, but as he admits, not according to Polybius, was the fate of Antiochus
(Antiquities 12.357-359).
42See Antiquities 3.223. On providence in Josephus, see also Rajak, Josephus, 9, 78-79.
43Antiquities 10.210 and see 4.114-117, 125, 314; Marcus ad loc.; Bilde 1988, 188; Rajak,
Josephus, 212; John M. G. Barclay, "The Empire Writes Back: Josephan Rhetoric in Flavian
Rome" in Flavius Josephus in Flavian Rome, ed. Jonathan Edmondson, Steve Mason, and
James Rives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 330 n. 17; Paul Spilsbury, "Reading
the Bible in Rome: Josephus and the Constraints of Empire," in Josephus and Jewish
History in Flavian Rome and Beyond , ed. Joseph Sievers and Gaia Lembi (Leiden: Brill,
2005), 225-226; Erich Gruen, "Polybius and Josephus on Rome," in Flavius Josephus:
Interpretation and History, ed. Menahem Mor, Pnina Stern, and Jack Pastor (Leiden: Brill,
2011), 159-160; Michael Tuval, From Jerusalem Priest to Roman Jew: On Josephus and
the Paradigms of Ancient Judaism, Wissenschaftliche Unterschungen zum Neuen
Testament II/357 (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 189. Cf. David Daube, "Typology in
Josephus," Journal of Jewish Studies 31 (1980): 18-36, 36: "According to Josephus, [the
Romans] rule by the will of God, his God, the God of the Jews, who, as many a time in the
past, enraged by the disobedience of his people gives them over to a conqueror until
they repent." For those of you who collect such things, the allusion to the fourth empire in
Daniel is approximately in the middle of the Antiquities. And for those of you who prefer
something less theocentric, consider the words Josephus gives to Herod: "with mankind,
fortune is never permanently either adverse or favorable" (Jewish War 1.374, tr.
Thackeray; there is no parallel to the line in the version of Herod's speech in Antiquities
15.127-146).