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“And it shall come to pass, that he who fleeth from the noise of the fear shall fall into the pit; and he that cometh up out of the midst of the pit shall be taken in the snare.”
ISAIAH, XXIV, 18
THE STORY OF HOW Josephus persuaded his fellow fugitives to kill themselves is the most equivocal of his entire career. Some historians find it sinister. Yet it is more likely than not that he was innocent of any wrongdoing. We only know about the episode from what he himself tells us in The Jewish War. Had he thought that it might harm his reputation, he could have chosen not to include it in the book. He does not mention it in the Vita, his apologia, which implies that he did not think it needed any explanation.
The Roman legionaries tried particularly hard to find Josephus, because they hated him as the rebel leader who had inflicted so much mischief on them during the siege and because—under the delusion that his capture would help to win the war within a matter of weeks—their general had given specific orders for him to be taken prisoner. Searching everywhere, they turned over all the dead bodies, ransacked the houses, and went down into the city’s cellars and caves, but without success.
At the moment when the city was stormed, aided by a providence that must have been supernatural, despite being hemmed in by the enemy he managed to escape by jumping down into a deep pit, out of which a large cave opened. The cave was completely invisible from above and inside it he found forty notables [of Jotapata] with supplies that would last for a long time. During the following day he remained hidden there, since the enemy was stationed all over the city, but when night fell he climbed up in order to look for some way of escape and see where they might have posted sentries. Everywhere was being so closely watched by the troops searching for him that he had to go back into the cave. For two days he outwitted his pursuers.1
On the third day a woman in the cave went up and was caught by the Romans. Questioned, she told them where the governor was hiding. Vespasian at once sent two tribunes to the pit, Paulinus and Gallicanus, with other officers. They shouted down, asking him, politely enough, to come up and telling him not to be afraid—his life would be safe. However, after killing and wounding so many of their comrades, he expected to be put to a spectacularly horrible death, and in any case he knew that Romans frequently broke their word. He declined the invitation.
Vespasian then sent a third tribune called Nicanor, an old friend of Josephus, who explained that his commander had no wish to punish him but only wanted to save the life of a brave soldier, adding that Vespasian would never use a friend to trick a man. Infuriated at the idea of the enemy general going unpunished, the legionaries began to yell that he ought to be burned in his cave. Nicanor stopped them. He wanted to take him alive. Then Josephus saw a possible means of escape.
“Suddenly he remembered the dreams he had sometimes dreamed at night, when God showed him the future calamities that were going to strike the Jews as well as what would happen to the Roman emperors,” The Jewish War tells us. “As an interpreter of dreams, he understood how to disentangle the real meaning of matters that were expressed by God in ambiguous terms, while he knew a good deal about the prophecies in the sacred books, since he was a priest himself and the descendant of priests.”2
He claims that he became divinely inspired and, bearing in mind the terrible things he had dreamed, prayed to God. “Since it has seemed good to you who created the Jewish nation to level it with the dust, and since all their prosperity has passed to the Romans, and since you have allowed my spirit to have knowledge of the things to come, I willingly give myself up to the Romans and am happy that I am allowed to stay alive. I am not going over to the Romans and I am certainly not a traitor. I do this because I am your servant.”3
This is a key passage, even if written years later. Skeptics question his foreknowledge of what lay ahead for Judea and Rome and his assertion that he had been an “interpreter of dreams.” Yet he is more than likely to have heard of the popular rumors about a new world ruler. Moreover, it is possible that Nicanor had insinuated that he might make himself useful to Vespasian by looking into the future, since Jews in Rome had a reputation for soothsaying. Whatever inspired him, that sharp, resourceful mind had stumbled on a way for its owner to talk himself out of a very unpleasant situation.
“There had spread over all the Orient an old-established belief that in those days [the end of Nero’s reign] men were destined to come out of Judea, who would rule the world,” so Suetonius informs us.4 This is what Josephus must have heard, while it was common knowledge that Nero’s regime was growing shaky. Nor had he forgotten what he had learned of the Essene seers when a young man. Although any Jew knew that his priesthood did not give him special powers of seeing into the future, the idea might convince Romans.
He accepted Nicanor’s invitation, asking to talk to Vespasian as soon as possible. Unfortunately, his friends in the cave had no intention of letting him go. To have an old friend who was a Roman centurion with a Greek-sounding name—they had probably spoken in Greek—seemed bad enough in itself to these straightforward Galilean hill men. But from what they could gather, they suspected that their leader was thinking of entering the enemy’s service, which was downright treason. Josephus records his comrades’ efforts to dissuade him from surrendering:
The laws God gave our ancestors make such a thing impossible, the laws of God who provided us Jews with a spirit that despises death. Josephus, do you love living so much that you’re ready to live like a slave? Have you lost all self-respect? How many men did you persuade to die fighting for liberty? You won’t deserve to be called a man and everybody will despise you for allowing yourself to be spared by the people you fought so fiercely, if you really are ready to accept it from them—provided they’re in earnest. Perhaps the Romans’ awful victory has made you forget who you are, but we are here to see that our forefathers’ honor is not insulted. We will give you our own right hands and a sword, and if you are ready to die properly, then you shall die as a Jewish general. But if you refuse them, you can die as a traitor.5
It is likely that from the start these rough provincials had distrusted this rich aristocrat from Jerusalem. Now they threatened him with their swords, promising they would cut him down if he tried to surrender to the Romans. He must join them in a mass suicide. Frightened that they might attack him, before killing themselves, Josephus tried to talk them into a more reasonable frame of mind—“like a philosopher.” His reply, which he puts in The Jewish War, is too long to quote in full, but even if composed in retrospect, it must repeat some of the things he said.
“What makes us so frightened of going up to the Romans?” he asked. “Is it death? If so, why are we afraid of it when we’ve made up our minds to kill ourselves—we only suspect the enemy might kill us. Or are we scared of being made slaves? Well, just now we’re not exactly free.” Then he argued that suicide was a sin. “The souls of men who act against themselves in this mad way are shut up in the darkest hole in Hades while God punishes their children, blaming them for their fathers’ sin. God hates such a deed and the crime is punished by our lawgiver [Moses]—the law demands that the bodies of suicides should never be exposed until the sun has set before they are buried, yet we are allowed to bury the corpses of our enemies much sooner.” There is no need to doubt his sincerity in questioning what he called “self-murder.” Many rabbis disapproved of suicide. No doubt, Zealots preferred it to captivity—as they were to show at Masada—but Josephus did not subscribe to the Fourth Philosophy.
“I am not going over to the Romans because I want to betray myself,” he ended. “I would be as stupid as a deserter if I did—they do it to save themselves while I should be doing it to destroy myself. Yet in a way I should rather like it to be a piece of Roman treachery. If they kill me after giving their word to spare my life, I shall die happy, since it will show up their falseness and their lies, and be worth even more than winning a victory.”6
His speech caused uproar, and he describes himself as being like a wild beast at bay surrounded by huntsmen. “They were infuriated by Josephus,” he admits frankly. “They ran at him from all sides with drawn swords, calling him a coward, and were only too keen to thrust at him.” The scene in the cave must have been a nightmare, the former governor trying desperately to dodge the sword blades in the darkness, ducking and pleading. In the end, he somehow managed to calm them down.7
Even so, he was still committed to a suicide pact. “Since we are all determined to die, let us draw lots about how we do it,” he announced, neatly gaining control of the situation. “The one who draws the first lot will die by the hand of the one who draws the second lot, until we have worked our way through all of us—nobody ought to die by his own hand as it would be unfair if a survivor was left to change his mind and stay alive after everybody else was dead.” The forty calmly allowed themselves to be killed in turn, until only Josephus and another man remained. “Disliking the prospect of being condemned by lot out a choice of two or of shedding the blood of a fellow Jew, he soon talked the other man into abandoning the pact and persuaded him to go on living.”8 But he had only won the right to climb out of the cave and face the Romans.
“It happened by chance or by God’s providence” is how he explains his survival.9 Some commentators are not so sure, convinced that he rigged the draw. It has been suggested that this was a circular count rather than simply drawing lots and that he might have fixed the result by using a formula that mathematicians unjustly call the “Josephus count.”10 Yet we only know what went on in the cave at Jotapata because Josephus chooses to tell us. If he had thought there was anything sinister he would never have told the story, while clearly he was proud of having tried to prevent his companions from “murdering themselves.” Nor does he appear to have been accused by his enemies of having done anything wrong in the cave, although they must have read The Jewish War.
There were many men who were prophets in first-century Judea, all of them convinced that they possessed the gifts of another Jeremiah or Isaiah. Nor did the Roman dismiss such foreknowledge out of hand; they had their own pagan oracles. It was in this context that Josephus claimed to have dreams in which he saw how the war would end and who was going to rule Rome. Although he never actually describes himself as a prophet, before the conflict was over, he too would be comparing himself to Jeremiah.
Throughout the summer of 67 CE Vespasian must have been an extremely worried man. Only the previous autumn Emperor Nero had forced his best general, Domitius Corbulo, to commit suicide, although Corbulo had routed the Parthians, ridding Rome of her biggest danger in the East. Admittedly, the aristocratic Corbulo was destroyed for having relations who had political ambitions. Suetonius, in his Lives of the Caesars, explained why Vespasian had been chosen: “because of the obscurity of his family and lineage there was no need to fear him.”11 Yet Nero might easily come to the conclusion that he was not so harmless after all. Every senior commander feared the emperor. (Later, his successor, Galba, said that when he had received letters from Rome, he had always wondered if they contained Nero’s orders for his death.)
Almost as alarming, the emperor was growing increasingly unpopular. There had been a botched attempt at a coup in 65, involving members of the Praetorian guard, and another, perhaps successful coup must have seemed far from unlikely. If it happened, it meant civil war of a sort unseen for a century, with the dilemma of choosing the right side in order to survive. More than a few strong men were likely to fight each other for Nero’s place, while the Roman aristocracy still sighed for a republic. The future was full of danger. Even so, Vespasian was determined to win this war, whatever might happen at Rome, and in the circumstances Judea was much safer than Italy.
Taking so much trouble to coax the enemy general out of the cave shows the value he set on taking him prisoner. Josephus himself admits that it was too high: “he thought the war would be more or less over, once Josephus was in his hands.”12 Yet the former governor of Galilee possessed a good deal of information that would be extremely useful to the Romans. Not only was his topographical expertise—later, evident in his writings—and his knowledge of the baffling Judean landscape vitally important for their strategy and tactics, but to some extent he would be able to make informed guesses at what the Jewish leaders were thinking at Jerusalem.
At the very least, as an enemy commander he would be a welcome ornament for a spectacular procession through Rome in the event of Vespasian being awarded a triumph after a successful campaign. However, this was far too optimistic a calculation to weigh heavily with such a realist, since Nero was most unlikely to reward him in such a way. On balance, it is likely that Vespasian had not yet made up his mind whether to execute the prisoner as soon as he had been debriefed or send him back to Nero to show that the campaign in Judea was going well.
Josephus cannot have known what to expect when, led by the centurion Nicanor, he was dragged into the Roman general’s presence. Legionaries flocked around the general and his prisoner, struggling to get a better view, demanding that he be put to death. We may question his claim that all the officers felt sorry for him. No doubt, he felt he stood a good chance of being nailed to a cross, the standard penalty for anyone who rebelled against Rome. However, we know that he had already thought of a plan that might just work, his only hope of survival.
He saw, sitting on a curule chair with a folding seat, the invariable camp stool of a Roman commander, a stocky, bald man with a beaked Roman nose whose lined forehead and tightly compressed mouth gave him an oddly tense expression. (Suetonius says that Vespasian always looked as though he were suffering from constipation.13) Yet, judging from the surviving portrait busts and from coin profiles, if it was an alarmingly tough face, it was also a noticeably humorous one. In the eyes of Roman aristocrats he was “not quite a gentleman,” and he seems to have lacked their frozen hauteur.
Next to Vespasian stood his lieutenant, his twenty-seven-year-old elder son, Titus. Not so tall as his father but with the same nose, he was, despite having a plump belly, a handsome and dignified young man with a kind expression. Yet for all his smile, it was obvious that Titus, too, was very formidable indeed.
Knowing the Roman cult of dignity, Josephus looked as unconcerned as possible when he was pushed forward. If one can believe his account, this had its effect on Titus, who immediately felt sorry for him, and it made some of the other Roman officers feel the same way. The prisoner begged to be allowed to say something in private to Vespasian, who told everybody except Titus and two senior officers to leave them, and then Josephus appealed to his captor:
You may think you have done no more than take Josephus prisoner, but I am here to tell you something of vital importance, Vespasian. Had I not been sent to you by God, I should have obeyed the Jewish Law and killed myself—I know how defeated generals ought to die. So why send me to Nero, then? Because Nero and those who will follow him are not going to survive. Vespasian, you shall become Caesar and Emperor, you and your son here. Put me in chains, keep me close to you, because you, Caesar, are not only my lord, but the lord of land and sea, the lord of all mankind. Guard me carefully so that I can be punished if I have said anything that has not been decreed by God.14
Always skeptical, Vespasian at first suspected that he was lying to save his life. So did the two officers. “I’m surprised you did not prophesy to the people of Jotapata that their city would fall, and that you failed to foresee you were going to be taken prisoner,” one of them retorted unpleasantly. “Or are you just talking nonsense in a futile attempt to escape what is coming to you?” It was his most dangerous moment.15
“But I of course I prophesied that Jotapata would fall, on the forty-seventh day, and that I was going to be captured alive by the Romans,” answered Josephus.16 Vespasian then ordered that other prisoners be questioned about this—presumably female prisoners, since the men had all been slaughtered. When the Roman learned that these predictions really had been made by Josephus, he began to take them more seriously, and there was no more talk of sending him to Nero. Vespasian agreed with Titus that he should be spared, giving orders for him to be kept in close but comfortable confinement.
One distinguished modern historian suggests that Josephus invented the prophecy later and inserted it in The Jewish War in order to conceal the extent of his collaboration with the Romans.17 Yet this seems highly unlikely. Although he almost certainly supplied the Romans with vital information, it is surely taking skepticism too far to doubt that he made some sort of prediction to Vespasian.
It must be remembered that he was not alone in making such a prediction. As has been seen, Suetonius mentions in his Lives of the Caesars how a rumor had been circulating for years in the East that new rulers of the world were about to emerge in Judea. Time and again, prophets and “magicians” in Judea had foretold the coming of a messiah. Might he not be a gentile instead of a Jew? Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai told Vespasian he was going to become emperor, just as Josephus had done. There were pagan omens, too. Both Tacitus and Suetonius mention how Vespasian consulted the oracle of Ba’al on Mount Carmel. “While he was offering sacrifice there and pondering over his secret ambitions, Basilides, priest of the shrine, carefully examined the entrails of the sacrificial victims and then told him, ‘Whatever you are planning, whether it is building a house, enlarging your estates or increasing the number of slaves you own, it is certain that a mighty dwelling, immense territory and a whole host of men have been given to you.’”18Both Vespasian and Titus took this sort of foreknowledge very seriously indeed.
Describing how he prophesied before Vespasian, Josephus takes care to remove the incident from the climate of messianic expectation that was widespread among his fellow countrymen. He does so to conceal Jewish resentment at the Roman occupation so that he can argue that most Jews had been against the war but were manipulated by a handful of extremists who prevented them from making peace.19
Josephus’s prophetic utterance before Vespasian was more than a guess about the political situation at Rome or a cynical calculation that it might turn out to be useful for Vespasian’s reputation. He genuinely believed he possessed some sort of prophetic gift, and later he became convinced that he was a prophet in the full, Old Testament sense of the word. The only plausible explanation for his survival after Jotapata is that he really did make his prophecy about the future of the Roman Empire, and it was so convincing that Vespasian and Titus decided it might come true. There is no other good reason for the favor they showed him. His belief in his powers as a prophet also explains his behavior on many occasions during the subsequent course of the war.20