Introduction

The Land Where Josephus Was Born

“Eastward their land is hemmed in by Arabia which forms the frontier, Egypt is on their southern border, Phoenicia and the sea lie to the west, while on the Syrian border to the north is a long range of mountains.”

TACITUS, THE HISTORIES, V

WHAT TACITUS FORGETS to mention to his readers is that a Roman visitor would have been astonished at finding it was such a small country.¹ In modern terms, it was no bigger than Wales and about an eighth the size of Illinois, but its importance was always out of all proportion to its size. During Josephus’s time it had long ceased to be Israel while it was not yet Palestine. However, even if many of the inhabitants were “Greeks”—Greek-speaking Syrians—the Romans still thought of it as the land of the Jews. Although the name was also that of one of its provinces, they called it “Judea.”

The astonishingly varied landscape of Judea “from Dan to Beersheba”—the traditional boundaries—was an awe-inspiring mixture of fertile plains and arid desert, of stony hills and green forest. The population was equally varied. The coast was largely “Greek,” while the south was Idumean (Arab). The actual province of Judea was wholly Jewish, but neighboring Samaria was peopled by a mixed race who had adopted a heretical form of Judaism. The inhabitants of Galilee were also of indeterminate origin, although they professed genuine Judaism.

What complicated matters was the presence of so many “Greeks” in the inland cities as well as in those on the coast, especially in Galilee, where Tiberias and even Sepphoris, the capital, were almost entirely Greek-speaking. In addition, there was the “Decapolis,” the league of the ten Greek cities, most of which lay on the far side of the Jordan River, although Scythopolis was on the west, between Galilee and Samaria.

The provinces that Josephus came to know best were Galilee and Judea. “There are two Galilees, called upper and lower, bounded by Phoenicia and Syria,” he writes. “On the west is the border of Ptolemais and Mount Carmel, once belonging to the Galileans but now belonging to Tyre, and nearby is Gaba, ‘the horsemen’s city,’ which takes its name from being founded as a colony of cavalrymen paid off [with farms] by King Herod. On the south are Samaria and Scythopolis, reaching as far as the river Jordan. On the east are Hippene, Gadaris, Gaulonitis and the frontiers of Agrippa’s realm. On the north is Tyre and the Tyrians’ country. Lengthwise, lower Galilee extends from Tiberias to Zabulon (which adjoins Ptolemais on the coast), in breadth from the village of Xaloth in the Great Plain to Bersabe. Upper Galilee begins here, stretching across to the village of Baca on the Tyrian frontier—lengthwise, it runs from Melloth to Thella, a village near the Jordan.”

“Despite their small size and the threat from powerful nations on their borders, the two Galilees have always survived any attempt at conquest by neighbors, since Galileans are warriors from the cradle and there are plenty of them, while they have never lacked courage or gallant leaders. Everywhere the soil is rich, providing excellent pasture and good for planting all kinds of trees, so that even the laziest peasants are keen to work hard. As a result, the land is very carefully farmed by the inhabitants—not a single bit has been left uncultivated. There are many towns here and because of the region’s fertility its countless villages contain such large populations that the smallest holds at least 15,000 inhabitants.”²

Josephus is wrong about the number of people in the villages, however, because the entire population of the province—seventy miles from north to south and less than forty across—has been reliably estimated at no more than 300,000. He does not mention that there was not a single truly large city, nor does he note the contrast between mountainous upper Galilee and the gentler landscape of lower Galilee, with its hills and its lake. But he is right about the province’s fertility and the energy of its peasantry. Good farmers and fishermen, they were, by all accounts, a tough, hard-working race. He might have added, too, that the landscape of the province was often breathtakingly beautiful, the loveliest in all Judea, especially in spring when it was carpeted with flowers, full of orchards and vineyards that produced excellent fruit and wine.

He does not refer to the unfortunate reputation of the Galileans, whom other Jews looked down on. In addition to big concentrations of Syrians and Arabs, the majority of those in the province who called themselves Jews were largely of foreign immigrant stock, very mixed in origin, easily identifiable by their uncouth accent, and belonging to a despised group, the ’am ha-arez—“people of the land.” Most were the lowest type of laborer, men whose ignorance resulted in a lax observance of the religious law and ritual uncleanliness. Some of them even kept large herds of pigs, like that encountered at Gadara by Jesus of Nazarus. Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes saw the ’am ha-arez as brutish semi-pagans; even the gentle Rabban Hillel, the leading Jewish teacher in the years before Josephus was born, regarded them as criminals who were little better than animals. The class war was at its strongest here, the inhabitants well aware of their superiors’ contempt, which they bitterly resented. Galilee was always a hotbed of social and political unrest.³

Although Perea—ancient Gilead—to the east of Galilee on the other side of the Jordan, was larger, much of it was mountainous, a stony, desert land where no crops would grow, although there were plenty of sheep. A few areas were extremely fertile, however, and good for growing olives, vines, or palms. In addition, there were numerous springs flowing down from the hills that never failed, not even in the dog days. “The land of Moab is its southern frontier, Arabia, Silbonitis, Philadelphia and Gerasa its eastern.”⁴

“In character Samaria is just like Judea,” Josephus explains. “Both regions have hills and plains, with fine soil that richly repays farming. There are large numbers of trees, wild and cultivated, which bear an abundance of fruit. Although rivers are lacking, the rainfall is sufficient while what streams they have provide sweet water. Good grass ensures that the cows yield better milk than anywhere else. The best proof of the two regions’ fertility is their teeming population.”

For Jews, a “good Samaritan” was an impossibility. Descended from foreign settlers who had come during the Babylonian captivity, the Samaritans had evolved a heretical form of Judaism, accepting only the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) and building a rival temple on Mount Gerizim. They were disliked even more than the Galileans. “When the Jews are in trouble, they deny any connection with them, in which they are quite right,” says Josephus.⁵ “But if they see the Jews prospering, then they immediately say that they are Jews too.” A vicious feud existed between the two communities. Earlier in the century, the Samaritans had dragged corpses (or dead men’s bones) into the Temple at Jerusalem, so as to pollute it and prevent the celebration of the Passover, and in 52 CE they ambushed Jews who were going on pilgrimage up to the Holy City. Sometimes they kidnapped their Hebrew neighbors and sold them into slavery.⁶

Josephus’s native province was the one called Judea, a land that in parts could be made extremely fertile, despite a shortage of water and some arid areas. Every scrap of decent soil was farmed; hillsides held terraces of tiny vineyards and olive groves and small patches of grain. Sheep and goats, needed for sacrificial purposes, grazed where they could. Here is Josephus’s terse account: “On the border of Samaria, the village of Anuath Borceos is the northern boundary of Judea. Measuring lengthwise, Judea’s southern region ends at a village near the Arabian frontier, which local Jews call Jar-dan. Across, it stretches from the river Jordan to Joppa. At its centre lies the city of Jerusalem, a city to which some people, not without reason, have given the name of ‘the country’s navel.’ Nor is Judea cut off from the sea, since it has a coastal area reaching as far as Ptolemais. It is divided into eleven districts, Jerusalem—the royal city—being the chief. . . . ”⁷

In Pliny’s view, Jerusalem was the most splendid city of the East. Its population was regularly increased by pilgrims, the majority bringing prosperity. It stood on three hills, which was one reason why people spoke of “going up to Jerusalem.” (Even today, Jews still say they will “go up to Israel”—in modern Hebrew, aliyah—when they intend to settle there.) Amid arid country, stony and waterless, skirted by deep ravines, this was a site that made her almost inaccessible to enemies. The Upper City occupied the highest of the hills, separated from the others by a valley. Three walls of huge stone blocks surrounded the entire area, reinforced by a bastion every hundred yards. There were seven major gates, all fortified. Outside the walls were gardens and allotments, orchards and olive groves and, not very far away, beautiful woodland.

Herod’s Palace stood on the summit of the northwestern hill at the west of the city, near the wall, marked out by three tall towers of white marble, which were named Hippicus, Phasael, and Mariamne. Its apartments were of dazzling luxury, with mosaic floors and jeweled furniture, most of the tables being of silver and gold; more than one of the dining rooms held couches for a hundred guests. It contained arcaded courtyards with lawns, groves and avenues of trees, ponds and canals flanked by rows of statues together with dovecotes, forming the only big gardens in Jerusalem. All this beauty would be burned and destroyed at the start of the war, a loss that Josephus acknowledged tormented him.

There were several other royal palaces as well, not quite so spacious but furnished with no less opulence. The most important was that of the client king, Agrippa II, in the center of Jerusalem. It enjoyed particular prestige among the inhabitants because, even if his kingdom lay outside Judea, Agrippa was the son of the last Herodian ruler.

The city’s equivalent of the Tower of London was the mighty fortress-barracks known as the Antonia Fortress, which had a massive square tower at each corner. This stood on the northeast, overlooking Bezetha, the New City that lay still further to the north. Inside, with courtyards, baths, and squares, “it was just like a town,” according to Josephus.⁸ Permanently occupied by a Roman garrison, the Antonia was the key to Jerusalem, because it guarded the Temple.

“The Temple was the fortress protecting the city,” says Josephus, from whose description alone we know how it appeared to contemporaries. Begun by Herod the Great in 19 BCE on the site where Solomon’s Temple had once stood, this second Temple of Jerusalem would not be completed until 64 CE. The area it covered was larger than that of the Acropolis at Athens.⁹ Constructed of white stone, its halls (such as the Grand Sanhedrin’s Chamber) were paneled in marble or cypress and roofed with cedar. The Royal Portico, three aisles of Corinthian columns, was longer and higher than any cathedral. “It was clothed in plates of massy gold and at sunrise shone with such a fiery splendor that anyone who tried to look at it had to turn his eyes away, as if he had been trying to look into the sun itself,” notes Josephus.¹⁰

To prevent the polluting of this holy place, no one suffering from diseases such as leprosy or gonorrhea, wearing dusty shoes, bearing a staff, or carrying parcels was allowed into the Temple complex by the guards. Beyond the massive fortified gateways, which held double gates plated in gold and silver, were four great courtyards laid out in succession: the Court of the Gentiles, the Court of the Women, the Court of the Israelites, and the Court of the Priests, each set slightly higher than the previous one and reached by steps. The enormous Court of the Goyim (gentiles), flanked by covered porticos with columns thirty-six feet high, was the meeting place for all Jerusalem. Another favorite area was the Portico of Solomon, which was entered by the Sushan gate and supported by a double row of columns; its two galleries overlooked the tombs of the Kedron Valley. The women’s court was fenced off with timber palisades. Inscriptions in Greek and Latin forbade gentiles and women from penetrating any further than the courts that bore their names.

In the Court of Priests stood the altar of burnt offering, a pile of un-hewn rocks thirteen feet high and nearly fifty feet square, with stone horns at all four corners and channels for the blood of the offerings. Lowing and bellowing, oxen, calves, rams, lambs, and goats were tethered next to the altar, to eight cedar pillars. Starting with two lambs at dawn and ending with two more lambs at sunset, hundreds were sacrificed each day, between three ritual pauses that were marked by readings from scripture and a ritual drinking of wine, together with chanting accompanied by a harp, a pipe, a lyre, and bronze cymbals as well as by blasts from a ram’s horn (shofar) and a silver trumpet.

After the animals’ throats had been cut with special knives by the officiating priests, they were gutted, skinned, and dismembered before being carried to marble tables, where they were ritually burned, clouds of priceless incense (prepared according to a secret recipe) mingling with the smoke. No less than seven hundred priests were always at work here, in silence. The blood was drained away by an elaborate cleaning system, water being supplied from thirty-four cisterns, filled by the winter rain from the nearby Pool of Siloam. Near the altar stood a great laver for ablutions whose water enabled the Levites, the priests’ assistants, to cleanse everything for the next offering.

Above the courtyards stood the Sanctuary, which resembled a gigantic, freestanding, long gallery. Its great cedarwood door, studded with gold and surmounted by a golden vine with a cluster of grapes as tall as a man, was veiled by a Babylonian tapestry of blue, scarlet, and purple whose embroidery symbolized the heavens. In the first part of the “Holy House” stood the gold seven-branched candlestick—actually a lamp stand with seven lamps burning olive oil, representing seven planets—the gold altar for the incense of thirteen spices, and the gold table for the shewbread, which consisted of twelve consecrated, unleavened loaves that were renewed on every Sabbath. Its other, innermost part, veiled by a curtain, was the qadosh haqedoshim (Holy of Holies), which had once contained the Ark of the Covenant but was now entirely empty and in darkness, never entered except by the high priest on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).

Many people liked to come to the Temple every day, so that they could face the Sanctuary when they prayed the Shema Yisrael (“Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord . . .”) or made the eighteen prostrations for the Shemone Esreh (the Eighteen Benedictions), as was required of every Jew. A staff of 25,000 manned the Temple, not just priests and Levites, but treasurers and janitors, musicians and cantors. At their head was the anointed high priest, living embodiment of the Law, who on Yom Kippur donned a miter encircled by a gold crown and a gold-embroidered breastplate to enter the Sanctuary to beg God’s forgiveness for the sins of his nation, the only human being allowed to enter. He also officiated on every Sabbath and every new moon, and on festivals, in less dramatic robes.

Deeply respected, the high priest was a species of Jewish pope or caliph. He alone could summon the Sanhedrin. However, because Judea was a theocracy administered by an infidel colonial power, the high priest often faced political challenges, and it was not uncommon for him to be deposed after only a brief period by the Roman procurator. As a result, there were always several former holders of the office, each treated with honor, who were known collectively as “the high priests.” In his Vie de Jésus, Ernest Renan compares them to “a miniature college of cardinals grouped around the Temple, living for politics, not too impressed by excessive religious zeal and even a bit suspicious of it, turning very deaf ears indeed to the various demands made by holy men or would-be reformers, since they did very well out of things as they were.”¹¹

Four times a day, seven silver trumpets sounded three times from the Temple to proclaim the sacrifice and the ritual pauses. In the evening, the trumpets summoned men and women to prayer. On the evening before Passover they sounded six times, preceded by the haunting wail of the shofar, the ram’s horn. Intended to praise God (and not to bewilder Satan, as some non-Jewish sources have suggested, since the concept of Satan did not exist in Judaism), the blowing of the shofar was also used to announce the Sabbath and the holy days of Israel, as on the evening in September before Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the Jewish new year.

The Temple dominated Jerusalem. When a breeze blew on a hot day, her steep, narrow streets and stairways were filled with the odor of burnt flesh and incense wafting down from the Court of Priests, a smell known in other ancient cities but not on such an all-pervading scale. Thoroughfares were blocked by herds of animals being driven up for sacrifice. During such religious holidays as Passover, the city must have been so densely packed by pilgrims as to resemble modern Mecca. What Romans and other foreigners must have found odd was the absence of the statues that filled their own streets. The Jewish religion forbade any physical likeness of their god. For every Jew, the Temple of Jerusalem was the center of the universe and the gateway to heaven. Only here might sacrifices be offered to the one true God. For Josephus, who belonged to a priestly family, the Temple was the focus of all power and influence until he was in his mid-thirties. It also appealed to the poet in him. “When strangers first saw it from a distance, it looked like a mountain covered in snow,” he recalled wistfully, “since it was so wonderfully white where it was not clad in gold.”¹²

Clearly, the young Josephus was very much a man of Jerusalem and of the Temple.