The Jewish War

What It Is

Seven books of Greek prose, published in Rome around AD 75 under the patronage of the emperors whose war it describes. Josephus commanded rebel forces in Galilee against them. By the time he wrote, he was installed in Vespasian's household, drawing an imperial pension, working in the language of the empire under a version of the emperor's own name.

The subject is the Judean revolt against Rome of AD 66 to 73, with the long build-up to it running back through Herod and the Maccabees. It is written entirely inside the Greek historiographical tradition: set-piece speeches, portents, digressions on geography, the shape of the thing borrowed from Thucydides and Polybius. He first composed a version in Aramaic, for readers on the eastern frontier. That text is lost.

It is a long book, and it moves. Josephus can write. He was also, at every moment, writing for people who could have had him killed.

Why It Matters

Without this book, most of first-century Judea is dark. It is the only substantial narrative of the war that reshaped both Judaism and the young Christian movement. Eusebius built on him. Medieval Europe read him in adaptation. Modern Israeli national memory was partly made out of him.

He also matters as a problem. Josephus is the best training a reader will ever get in what a source actually is. He is defending himself, flattering his patrons, explaining to Greek readers that his people are not barbarians, and describing events he watched from close range and could not control. All of that is happening in the same sentence.

Everything he tells you, he tells you for a reason. That does not make him a liar. It makes him the most demanding kind of witness, one you have to read twice: once for what he says, once for what he needs you to believe. Learn to read Josephus and you will never read a war report the same way again.

Before You Read

Around five hundred pages, twenty hours or so. The Greek is high-style but the English is not hard. What is hard is the density of Judean politics, the Herodian family, and a cast of factional leaders with very similar names.

Books 1 and 2 are the background, and they are the slowest part of the book. Move briskly through the Hasmonean and Herodian genealogies on a first read, keep the family tree in your edition to hand, and do not feel you have to hold it all.

Maps matter. So does knowing, before you start, that Josephus is a participant. Read him as a defendant giving evidence about his own conduct and the whole book comes into focus.

Which Translation to Read

• G. A. Williamson, revised by E. Mary Smallwood (Penguin Classics, 1959; revised 1981) — recommended. The version that made Josephus a book people read for pleasure rather than consult. Williamson writes propulsive narrative English, and Smallwood's revision supplies the notes, maps and appendices that keep a modern reader oriented in a very tangled political world. The cost: Williamson is free with the Greek and smooths Josephus's rhetorical set-pieces into plain reportage, which loses something real. The translation is now old. View on Amazon →
• Martin Hammond, with introduction and notes by Martin Goodman (Oxford World's Classics, 2017). The best modern scholarly edition for a general reader: accurate, well mapped, and Goodman is one of the finest historians of Roman Judea alive. The cost: the apparatus is heavy, and Hammond's English is measured where Williamson's drives.
• H. St. J. Thackeray (Loeb Classical Library). Facing Greek, complete, the text scholars cite. The one to check a passage against. The cost: Edwardian English, and nobody reads a Loeb for pleasure.

Take Williamson with Smallwood's notes to read the book, and Hammond if you want accuracy and the best history behind it. One warning: William Whiston's translation of 1737 is free everywhere, bundled online as the Complete Works of Josephus, and constantly recommended for that reason. It is nearly three hundred years old and it reads like it.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the introduction first. Smallwood's and Goodman's are historical rather than narrative, and Josephus is one of the few books here that is much better if you know the politics before you open it.

Watch the speeches. Ancient historians composed the speeches in their histories themselves, by convention, and Josephus puts his own arguments into other men's mouths more nakedly than most. When someone in this book explains why resistance to Rome is futile, ask who benefits from your believing it.

The commonest mistake is to open Josephus looking for evidence for a position you already hold, religious or political. He is obliging enough to seem to supply it. Read him instead for what he is: a first-rate mind in an impossible position, writing the fullest account we have of the world he came from.