The outsiders took it for granted that he would not dare to deny the charge. They also assumed that he hoped, by his pitiful makeup, to secure a reprieve. In fact, he tells us, he had a cleverer plan.2 First—in order to divide the mob—he promised a complete explanation. To get a hearing at all, he must have had a remarkably commanding voice. When the crowd conceded him time to make his case, he responded—like a good advocate—by springing surprises. Entertainment, as well as good timing, is an aspect of successful rhetoric. His first trick was to confess that he had never really meant to return the treasure to Agrippa. But then again, no more did he mean to keep it for himself.
It is not difficult to imagine how Joseph both cued and confused his listeners. By giving them the chance to react in different ways, he was able to control the show. As they jeered or groaned, laughed or frowned, he became their master of ceremonies. Joseph told the people that God would not want him to treat their enemy as his friend or to keep for himself anything to which the people had a right. Having set his listeners a pious puzzle, he solved it for them: “Seeing that your city, citizens of Tarichaeae, had above all a need to strengthen its security, and didn’t have enough money to build up its ramparts, I was afraid that the people of Tiberias and a number of other places would try to trick their way into getting hold of the booty. And that’s why I decided to put it in a safe place.”
If he gave the skeptics a half second to groan, it served to isolate them from the residents. “I did so,” he resumed, “in order to have the means to build you a rampart. If you think that’s a bad idea, I’ll dump the whole lot in front of you and you can help yourselves. On the other hand.… if what I decided seems to you a good idea, why take it out on someone who was trying to do you a favor?”
The effect of his words was to open divisions among those who, not long before, had been united in baying for Joseph’s blood. The inhabitants of Tarichaeae were given an incentive to get rid of outsiders—John of Gischala not least—in order to benefit more fully from Joseph’s largess. While the two parties turned on each other, Joseph found enough voice to continue his harangue. He promised to secure funds to fortify the other towns in the region, if they would stop making trouble. By dividing, he could continue to rule.
As the crowd lost cohesion, some of the protesters drifted away. Joseph had bluffed the majority, but he says that two thousand armed men pursued him back to his lodgings and blocked the way out. It was time to pull another trick. He climbed onto the roof and, with a pacifying gesture, silenced their commotion. Literally above the crowd, he claimed to have no idea what exactly they wanted him to do, because they were all saying different things.e
Joseph proposed to arrange things by inviting a deputation to come into his lodgings for a quiet discussion. His cool style must have impressed the hard men, despite themselves. The Jews took pride in their equality, but the uneducated were often susceptible to lordly eloquence. A mixed delegation of the leaders of the militants and of those whom Josephus calls “magistrates” (presumably from places outside Tarichaeae) came forward. Joseph had them taken into the back of the house and locked the front door. He then had them so severely whipped that, as he tells it, they were virtually flayed alive. The protestors outside could hear nothing. They assumed that their representatives were still pleading their cause.
When Joseph had the doors flung open, the bloody men were thrown into the street. Their appearance is said to have provoked such a panic that the rioters threw down their arms and ran away. The story is too unlikely not to have some truth in it. If so, Joseph must somehow have rallied more supporters than his four faithful bodyguards. Some locals were probably as keen as he was to be done with the outsiders. Even John of Gischala backed off—if only to give himself time to try something more devious. Affecting an illness, he wrote to Joseph, as the general-in-command, for permission to go for a cure to the thermal baths at Tiberias. Fooling and being fooled were part of the farce that preceded the tragedy. Josephus claims that, at the time, he did not suspect John of evil intentions. He even instructed his friends in Tiberias to give John a cordial welcome.
Within a couple of days, John had bribed and browbeaten the Tiberians into abandoning their allegiance to Joseph. Tipped off by a loyal supporter, Joseph went by night to Tiberias. As dawn broke, he was met by a crowd of anxious citizens. John sent word that he was too ill to get up; he would make amends later. Joseph called a mass meeting in the waterfront stadium, where he could address the people from a high tier, backing onto the beach. As he did so, John was rehearsing a party of commandos to kill him. When they appeared behind him and drew their swords, the crowd yelled to Joseph to watch out. He turned just in time, jumped down the twelve-foot-high embankment to the shore and—with two of his bodyguards—tumbled into a boat and set off for the middle of the lake. There was, it seems, already a plan B.
Joseph’s supporters in the town ran for their arms and were soon all set to attack John and his gang. Fearing a bloody civil war, Joseph sent word that no one should be killed, not even the guilty. The volatile locals became so alarmed by the prospect of street fighting that they chased John out of the city and back to his power base in Gischala. Having been friendless not long before, Joseph returned to land to find “several tens of thousands of soldiers” ready to go in pursuit of John, now public enemy number one, burn him alive and reduce his native city to dust and ashes.
Josephus says that the scoundrel’s backers shriveled to his immediate entourage. However, John continued to agitate and soon recruited another swath of support, whose leaders, all said to be remarkable orators, incited several cities, including Tiberias, yet again to renounce their allegiance to Joseph. This time, the governor responded by arranging for the four ringleaders and their best men to be summoned to help in the defense of Jerusalem. It seemed like a promotion. On arrival, they met a hostile reception from Joseph’s friends and had to run for their lives. John, however, had been confident (or cautious) enough to stay, for the present, in Gischala. He would make his move later.
Looking back years afterward, Josephus clearly found it difficult to describe the rogue from Gischala without highlighting his impudence. He reports that in the weeks before the war, while John was trying to displace him as the boss of Galilee, the Gischalan also found time to bargain and bully his way ino a virtual monopoly in the region’s copious olive oil production. Olive oil supplied a third of the caloric intake of the inhabitants, as well as being used for lighting, hygienic and medical purposes. John profited from the apprehension of the Jews, especially those in Syria, that they might be using an impure “Gentile” brand, even though olive oil never featured among foodstuffs expressly disapproved by the Scriptures.f John of Gischala bought cheap oil, rebottled it, and marketed it as a purified—“organic,” as it were—brand suitable for Jewish consumption. He charged ten times the price he had paid and insisted on payment in Tyrian silver coin, which was unadulterated.
Joseph’s determination to stay in his post can hardly have been motivated by the pleasures of command; nor was it seconded by the steadfastness of his allies. Once he had returned to Tarichaeae, the Tiberians called on King Agrippa II to send troops to their aid. The rumor was that a squadron of Roman cavalry had been spotted not far away. It was enough to make the Tiberians solicit help from the same king whose treasure they had been eager to filch. The Tiberian leaders now advertised their resumed loyalty to Agrippa by announcing Joseph’s formal banishment. They were, in effect, opting out of taking the Jewish side in the imminent war.
Joseph met the challenge with renewed Odyssean panache. Having ordered all the gates of Tarichaeae to be closed, so that no one could escape to carry word to the Tiberians of what he was doing, he requisitioned all the town’s boats. Two hundred and thirty small craft were massed on the lake. Joseph divided the available rowers among the boats, four to each, and led the fleet down the coast toward Tiberias. There he anchored his fleet, far enough offshore for those on the ramparts not to
be able to discern how many men were on board each boat. He then had himself rowed close under the walls, with only seven bodyguards in attendance. His enemies yelled the usual abuse when they first saw him. As he got closer, they began to be alarmed. Fearing that the boats out in the lake were crammed with soldiers waiting for Joseph’s signal, they threw down their arms, waved suppliant olive branches and begged him to spare the city.
Standing up in his boat, Joseph scolded them on two counts: they had chosen to take up arms against the Romans and then they had dissipated their forces in civil conflict. On top of that, they had fulfilled their enemies’ wishes by closing the gates against the one man who had done the most to fortify their city. The town councilmen, he insisted, should come and explain themselves. Ten of the chief men walked forward. Joseph demanded that they get into one of the boats. They were promptly rowed out onto the sea. Fifty more councillors were invited to follow their colleagues. They too were somehow persuaded into the boats. In the end, Josephus reports, all six hundred of the town councilmen (including Justus and Pistis) as well as some two thousand citizens were transported across the water to Tarichaeae.
It sounds to be another unlikely story. Yet Tiberias would suffer less than other cities in the war; enough of its citizens survived to give Josephus the lie, if he was romancing. Since their docility added luster to his leadership, it is understandable that he should give no further explanation of why the Tiberians obeyed him. Their actions become plausible, however, if a good many, once they had been promised security in Tarichaeae, were glad to get out of their own city. The remaining citizens are said to have called out to Joseph that the ringleader of the revolt was a certain Clitus (possibly a nickname, “Mr. Bigshot”). Their denunciation of him suggests that the majority was interested, above all, in a quiet life.
Josephus claims that he was determined to bring down the curtain on the episode without anyone being killed. To this humane end, he ordered one of his guards, called Levi, to land and cut off both of Clitus’s hands. Levi refused to go alone among so many changeable people. Joseph made a show of preparing to jump from his boat, splash ashore and do the carving himself. He looked to be in such a passion that Clitus begged him from the beach to be allowed to keep one of his hands. Joseph agreed, on the condition that the villain cut off the other hand himself, which he did. In this way, Josephus promises us, he managed with a fleet of “empty” boats and a handful of bodyguards to regain control of Tiberias.
A few days later, however, both Tiberias and nearby Sepphoris had once again rebelled against his rule. Levi had evidently been no fool when he refused to go ashore. Joseph licensed his soldiers to go in and pillage both towns. The prospect of loot was the happiest way to motivate his levies. When the booty had been accumulated in one place, presumably for distribution to his troops, he ordered that it all be given back to its owners. He hoped that they would learn their lesson and behave. It is unlikely that the morale of his soldiers was enhanced by his magnanimity. It certainly had no grateful effect on the Tiberians.
Although Joseph was supposedly in the region solely to organize resistance to the imperial power, he found a certain Julius Capellus, who led a faction that wanted to stay loyal to Rome (and thus maintain its hegemony in Tiberias), more congenial, because he was more gentlemanly—and hence more like himself—than Pistis (whose Greek name, if not his practice, promised trustworthiness) and his clever son Justus. Since the latter was to be Josephus’s rival as a historian, the portrait painted of him in his youth is unsubtly shaded. In truth, he too resembled Joseph: all of the people involved were playing a double game, without any clear idea of what would count as its vindication, apart from the survival of their persons and property.
Justus took advantage of the unrest to strengthen his personal militia. Indifferent to the nebulous concept of Judaean liberty, he was glad to enroll the rural poor and lead them in raids on the villages around Sepphoris. Tiberias’s feud with its neighborg made it easier to gather volunteers for this purpose than for any national cause. Joseph alternated between punitive and placatory responses: he first threw Justus and Pistis into jail, to prove that he had the necessary muscle, and then invited them to dinner. In private, he told them that he knew that the Romans were too strong to be resisted but that he dared not say so, because of the “bandits” who were the common enemies of everyone at the table. Having reminded Justus of how Galilean roughs had cut off his brother’s hands, he let his prisoners go. His hope had to be that his dinner guests would appreciate that he was engaged on a policy of candid duplicity. To regard the Jewish War only as an instance, or assertion, of national solidarity is anachronistic. The settling of old scores, the hope of petty power and messianic fantasies combined to instigate a confrontation with Rome that—at least to those who had much to lose—was as unnecessary as it was likely to be fatal. Jerusalem was a fine and golden city, with a volatile population, but it excited small allegiance among the mixed, often mutually antagonistic populations of the provinces.h Their monotheism made the Jews appear both introverted and eccentric. Their peculiarities also sealed what appeared, from outside, to be an enviable mutual dependence. Internally, however, their cohesion was never monolithic. In Judaea, Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots and Essenes fought their corners with uncompromising partisanship. Samaritans and Idumaeans, even decades after their conversion to Judaism, were relegated to a lower division.
In his Vita, Josephus deplores Justus’s immoderate language and trickiness. By denouncing the elaboration of his rival’s “Greek” discourse, Josephus assumes the straightforwardness that Romans liked to suppose was their natural manner. Deploring a critic’s florid vocabulary or outlandish gesticulation is a regular way of recruiting the prejudices of an author’s audience against loudmouths.i It can be doubted whether, at the time, Joseph conducted himself with as much reticence and decorum as his later account implied.
Since he was particularly nettled by Justus’s criticisms of The Jewish War,j Josephus supplies a detailed profile of a man who, like many others, was torn by contradictory ambitions and fears. Justus is accused of intimidating his fellow citizens into joining him, but many can be assumed to have volunteered in the hope of gaining booty or power. Long after the event, Justus claimed to have been steadfastly loyal to Agrippa II, his postwar patron, and to Berenice. Fairly or not, Josephus recalls how Justus made a speech, just before Vespasian marched into Judaea, in which he enthused the mob by denouncing Agrippa for favoring Sepphoris over Tiberias. Local grievances had more leverage than any grand considerations.
Joseph was an intruder with wider interests, but he and Justus had made much the same assessment of the situation. Their later literary feud had more to do with vanity than with patriotism. To upstage Justus as a historian, Josephus adopted the stance of a Roman sophisticate. In this, he inaugurated an enduring tradition: Jewish intellectuals not infrequently have a Jewish frère-ennemi who can be assailed with a brand of abusive scorn rarely visited on Gentile critics.k
a Martin Goodman suggests that Josephus “lets slip” that his appointment (or election by “the assembly”) followed that of other “generals.” No scholarly source suggests one qualification that may have made Joseph particularly eligible for the governorship of Galilee: he was a stranger to the region, with no specific ties to any of its rivalrous communities. This gave him some prospect of uniting them without being suspected of partisanship. In Greek mythology, it was often xenoi—heroes or divinities from outside—who managed by the force of their charismatic arrival to unite the people in a way beyond the power of an indigenous leader. The figure of the “heaven-sent” marginal figure who unites contending in-groups spills from myth into history: Theodoric, Napoleon, Atatürk, Hitler, de Gaulle and Margaret Thatcher (whose advent enforced unity on a party of contentious males). In Galilee, Joseph did not succeed on a grand scale, but his seemingly miraculous ability to master crowds must have owed something to his outlandishness.
b Although repudiated
by the Judaean Jews, at the time of Alexander the Great, the Samaritans continued to regard the Torah as their “Bible” and had their own breakaway temple on Mount Gerizim. See Shemaryahu Talmon, “Internal Diversification.”
c During the German occupation, peasant farmers, especially, in France’s southwest, were expected to supply sustenance both to the Germans and to the Resistance, whose exactions could, at times, be more peremptory, because they were patriotic.
d Described as a “son of Levi,” John of Gischala is said to have at first opposed the revolt from Rome; but then neighboring people from Gadara, Gabara and Sogana, with help from some of those from Tyre, attacked the town of Gischala and burned and demolished it. John armed the Gischalans, rebuilt the town and made it into his personal power base. He then became an ardent revolutionary as well as a commercial opportunist. Josephus takes time out to remark that Levites had been authorized by Agrippa II to wear the same linen clothes as priests. As Zuleika Rodgers emphasizes in “Justice for Justus,” it is a mark of Josephus’s pride in his priestly standing that he claims that the Levites’ presumption excited divine punishment. John’s personal history is another symptom of the volatility, if not vacillation, of almost all of the players in the politics of the period, grand or petty.
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