One of the great imaginary conversations in world history would be between Joseph ben Mattathias, as he still was during the siege of his native city, and Tiberius Julius Alexander. The latter, who was so much at his ease in Roman company (and, no doubt, in the officers’ mess), is not unlikely to have asked Joseph why he did not make a clean break with the doomed Jews and become a wholehearted Roman citizen. Joseph was clearly dismayed by the Zealots’ takeover of Judaea. He had already gone so far toward divorce from orthodoxy, and been so ill-used by those still wedded to it, that Alexander might well have wondered why the turncoat did not complete his translation to Romanitas. The reluctance of Diaspora Jews, even those without any preference for Jewish company, formally to renounce Jewishness, if not Judaism, is a trait as persistent as it often appears inexplicable.g
Josephus’s writings offer no analysis of his motives or of his states of mind. The price of his survival, and of his ambiguous loyalties, was that he lived on to stand for Yigael Yadin’s idea of a “bad Jew.” Tiberius Julius Alexander, on the other hand, succeeded so well in standing away from the shadow of his ancestry that he passed into historical limbo with no more tarnished a reputation than that of one of the countless hard men, not of Roman birth, whose careers involved making war on those who challenged Rome’s hegemony.h It is a nice irony that when Tacitus felt disposed to put him down, he described Alexander as “an Egyptian.”
In 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre would say of the French that they had lived in shame a period which the British had lived in pride. Josephus might have said much the same of himself when he compared his life in the Roman camp with that of Tiberius Julius Alexander. Unencumbered by piety, the latter never made the mistake of being on the wrong side. Unlike Alexander, Josephus clung to his ancestral faith and, as he proved by the terms of his annunciation to Vespasian and by his own commentary in The Jewish War, never discounted Yahweh’s role in human affairs.
In the prelude to Titus’s final assault on Jerusalem, Joseph returned and made yet another appeal before the walls. He was greeted, as before, with howls of derision and more stones. Yet he claims that his reappearance brought hope to the “common people.”2 He promised the garrison that surrender, even now, would save the city, but that once Vespasian’s men stormed the city, there would be no mercy for anyone. At the end, Josephus bursts into direct speech, as if unable to contain himself in cool oratio obliqua:
You fools, you forget who your real allies are when you fight the Romans with your own arms and muscles! What other enemy have we ever conquered by those means alone? But when, on the other hand, did God, their founder, not avenge Jews who were victims of injustice? Look around and see what kind of place you are setting out to fight from and what a powerful ally you are defiling! Do you not remember the prodigious acts of your fathers and the terrible enemies that this Holy Place has seen off in the past? You are making war not only against the Romans but against God!
As he did when addressing the notables in Jotapata, Joseph slipped into the sacerdotal mode: the Jews’ only means of salvation lay in obedience to Yahweh’s laws. He would repay the injustices visited on His people. In the spirit of Philo, Joseph recounts Yahweh’s most dramatic interventions:
Our fathers in Egypt, oppressed and humiliated by foreign kings for four hundred years, when they could have defended themselves by force of arms, didn’t they choose to trust in God? Who hasn’t heard what He did to Egypt, crawling with pests and consumed by all kinds of diseases.… after which our fathers were led to safety.… God himself guiding them to become guardians of His Temple? Take the time when the Holy Ark was stolen by the Syrians. Did not the Philistines and the idol of Dagon live to regret it, they and the whole nation of plunderers? Their private parts dripped pus and their guts dropped out with their food, until the very hands that stole the Sacred Ark brought it back, to the sound of cymbals and tambourines and with all kinds of offerings in expiation. It was God as our general who directed what your ancestors did when they renounced violence and left everything for Him to decide.
In the rhetorical manner of Cicero, he says that he is not going to talk about the bloodshed that has been taking place inside the walls, and then does so. At the end, his anguish bursts out:
A man does well to run from a house of shame and to regard its occupants with disgust. And you believe that God can still be with people who are bursting with wickedness, God who sees all that is hidden and hears what is not said? But then, what is not said or kept secret by you people? What is there that isn’t all too obvious, even to your enemies? You parade your crimes and every day you compete to do something worse. You put iniquity on a pedestal as if it were a virtue. But there is still a way out, if you care to take it. The Holy One is quick to forgive those who confess and repent. You hard-hearted fools! Throw down your arms. Shame on you when your homeland is in ruins! Turn around and look at the beauty you are betraying. What a city, what a Temple! How many nations heap tribute here. Who can want all this to go up in flames? Who could want it all to disappear? What could more deserve to be saved forever? You people have hearts harder than stone!.… Oh I know, I know that in the middle of it all is my mother, my wife, my family, which is not without nobility, my house with its glorious history, and I may seem to be giving you this advice only to save them.
There has to have been a pause, during which the advocate allowed the jury members, as it were, to have a moment of triumph in which they could shout that they were sure that this was his only reason. He could then spring his last surprise: “Go ahead then, kill them all! Take my family’s blood in exchange for your own salvation! Yes, I’m ready to die too, if only my death can bring you to your senses.”
Whether they applauded, fell silent or went on heckling him, the citizens were still trapped. The Zealots treated all talk of surrender as treason and killed anyone who attempted it. With their own casualties mounting, the Romans were daily less disposed to distinguish between civilians and rebels. Despite the double danger, quite a few refugees managed to sneak out of the city, taking whatever of value they could carry or, in the case of precious jewels, swallow. Many fell into the hands of scavenging Arabs and Syrians, who ripped open their bellies to retrieve the valuables. Titus is reported to have been appalled by the barbarity the Roman presence had triggered but noted, “Avarice scorns every penalty.”
As things reached the final stages of savagery, in which the Temple itself became a killing ground for competing bands of extremists, Joseph concluded that “God had condemned the whole nation.”i Josephus concedes that the Romans had won, but—on closer reading—the ultimate responsibility is attributed to God. Yahweh was chastening the Jews for their iniquities rather than siding with their enemies. Wary of how he expressed it, Josephus never abandoned hope for the resurgence of Jewish fortunes. His wariness is a small Jewish joke at the expense of the guileless censors, and of modern critics who read him as no more than a rented propagandist.
He encapsulates the terminal horrors of the siege in a close-up of a mother called Mary, the daughter of yet another Eleazar.3 She was a rich woman of good family who had taken refuge in the city as the Romans advanced. Most of the property she had packed and brought into the city from east of Jordan was pillaged by “party chiefs”; the remnants of her treasure was stolen by their henchmen. Filled with uncontrollable rage, she loosed a tirade of curses, which infuriated the looters. Finally, “in defiance of all natural feeling, she laid hands on her own baby. ‘Poor little thing,’ she said. ‘In war and famine and civil war, why keep you alive? When the Romans come there will be only slavery, even if we live that long. Hunger is with us already and the Zealots are worse than both.’ She killed her son, then roasted him and ate one half.… saving the rest.” The Zealots sniffed the “unholy smell” and threatened to kill her if she didn’t give up what she had been cooking. When she did, “they went away quivering. They had never before shrunk from anything, and did not much like giving up even this food to the mother.”
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Josephus appears to be telling the story to prove the depravity of the Jews: “Caesar disclaimed all responsibility in the sight of God for this latest tragedy. He had offered the Jews peace and self-government with an amnesty for all offenders.” It is not clear when exactly these terms had been proposed. Neither Titus nor Vespasian had, at any earlier stage in the campaign, shown a disposition to amnesty. Whatever Joseph ben Mattathias might have meant by “self-government,” it cannot have been anything close to autonomy. Yet Titus is made to seem only now to decide to “bury this abomination of infanticide and cannibalism under the ruins.… and would not let a city in which mothers fed themselves in that way remain on the face of the earth.”
Josephus proceeds to read Titus’s mind: “While he made this clear, he was thinking also of the desperation of these men. They would never see reason after going through all the agonies that might so easily have been avoided by a change of heart.” The effect of the siege becomes the justification for ending it with the obliteration of those whom it drove to cannibalism. Can anyone but Titus himself have been expected to read this account of his motives with complacency?
Although he must have known of it, Josephus does not allude to the grisly precedent in Jeremiah when Jerusalem was under siege by the Babylonians. The prophet had been put in prison for subversion (even in those days, there was angry dissent among the Jews) and witnessed the last days of the siege. “Death has climbed through our windows,” he wrote. “Little children beg for bread. None gives them a morsel. Those who feasted on dainties lie famished in the streets. Those reared in purple have embraced refuse heaps.” Finally, in Lamentations, he says, “With their own hands, tender-hearted women have cooked their own children.”
Josephus reports that there was some final attempt at a parley, but Titus then makes a long speech in which he rehearses a number of the examples which Agrippa II is also said to have listed when he was trying to dissuade the Jerusalem Jews from rebellion. Carthage, the Britons, the Germans (claimed now to be the slaves of Rome) are all paraded in metaphorical chains. There was, Titus is made to say, only one reason for the revolt: “You were incited against the Romans by Roman kindness.… like beasts you bit the hand that fed you.”
It took a further three weeks to build the siege platforms necessary to allow the Romans to complete the capture of the inner precinct. As the legionaries swarmed through the streets, contending Jewish factions were still trying to loot what was left of the city’s treasures. The inner courts of the Temple complex had not yet been stormed. Two Romans, no doubt equally intent on loot, were captured alive. One them of was brutally murdered and “dragged round the city,” like a surrogate Hector. The other—said to have been a cavalryman—was handed over to a Jewish officer called Ardalas, who blindfolded him and proposed to cut off his head in the sight of the besieging army. The blindfolded man managed suddenly to duck away and ran back to the Roman lines. Josephus remarks that Titus could have had him executed, but simply stripped him of his arms and dismissed him from the legion, a fate “to anyone with self-respect” worse than death. Does the vignette of that desperate, blindfolded man running from one camp to the other, and then left alive but without honor, carry an element of self-portraiture?
The last hope of the faction leaders and their gangs lay in hiding out in the sewers of the city.j Josephus has no doubt that the Jews in the tunnels would have had recourse to cannibalism if they had not been captured. Meanwhile, the Idumaeans inside the city preserved their tribal solidarity.k They succeeded, even in the last stages, in coming to terms with Titus, whose character, it seems, was to veer between grand gestures and pitiless fury. One of the priests, another Jeshua, was granted a safe conduct if he handed over some of the Temple treasures. He also brought out a quantity of rare incense and the curtains through which Pompey the Great had entered the sanctuary, after the Romans marched into Jerusalem on that first fatal occasion, more than a century earlier.
When the city was finally subdued, Josephus reports, nearly a hundred thousand prisoners were taken and over a million people had died in the siege.4 (Tacitus put the figure at six hundred thousand.) Many had been trapped in Jerusalem only because they had come to the city for Passover. Even if the figures are again excessive, they suggest that until the last stages of the siege there was no great shortage of food or water within the walls. Perhaps the long tunnel dug by Zedekiah eight hundred years earlier was still bringing water from the spring called Gihon. The besieging Romans, on the other hand, had often been short of water; some of their forces had even deserted to the Jews.
In the aftermath of the killing and looting, Josephus was sent by Titus to a village called Thekoa to check whether the terrain was suitable for a “fenced camp.” This has to have been the lowest moment of his collaboration. Many prisoners had been crucified. More would be, when enough timber had been cut or requisitioned to nail them to. Of the war, the siege, the massacres and the reprisals, Joseph could say, as would Abbé Sieyès on being asked what he had done during the French Revolution: “I survived.” When Joseph and his imperial master sailed for Italy, they left Jerusalem a smoldering husk. No city since Carthage had been so callously obliterated.l
The war did not end with the capture and sack of Jerusalem in 70. The pacification of Judaea continued for three more years, until the reduction of Masada and the defiant suicide of its entire garrison and their families, 960 in all. Echoing Josephus’s pessimism, Eleazar—the last of the family of Judas the Galilean—was to veer between grand gestures and pitiless fury. He told his men that the fall of Jerusalem, which God Himself was said to have founded, meant the end of the Jewish people; there was nothing left to live for. Josephus reports that the Romans were amazed by the determination of the doomed garrison in Masada to dispose of themselves and their families.
The archaeologist Kenneth Atkinson questions the myth of mass suicide at Masada by remarking that there are no mass graves at the site.5 Nor is there any evidence that the siege was as prolonged as folklore insists.m Atkinson also questions the Josephan claim that only Eleazar and his company of ultras and Sicarii were involved in the defense. He insists that priests too were involved. If so, how badly is Josephus’s account damaged? As Josephus himself proves, priestly rank was a matter of social caste; it had nothing to do with spiritual vocation. And if the defenders did indeed die to the last man, woman and child, who would have stayed to bury them in a mass sepulchre suitable for modern excavation?n The Bible shows that the detritus of ancient wars was often left for the dogs to eat.
Another archaeologist, Mordechai Aviam, considers Josephus’s description valid.6 Remains of legionary equipment at Gamala confirm that a number of Romans did die there (more than at Jotapata). Aviam also thinks that, while Josephus may have exaggerated the scope of his command (many commanders do), he was certainly in charge of the defense of Jotapata.
No one has challenged Josephus’s story that he witnessed seven thousand defenders being crucified around the walls of Jerusalem. It is the more credible since he says that he managed to retrieve three of his surviving Jerusalem friends from their executioners. Two were taken down after they had been mounted on—but probably not nailed to—their crosses. Whatever the limits of his treason, Joseph must have rendered considerable services to the Romans. He reports, not without vanity, that Titus offered him “whatever he wanted” when the city fell. He limited himself to asking for mercy for his brother and fifty of his friends, as well as for some two hundred Jews who had been imprisoned in the Temple, presumably the few “moderates” who had survived the purges of anyone who did not favor total war. Joseph also asked for custody of “some sacred volumes.” Although Joseph had spent almost four years in the Roman camp, Titus was not, it seems, tired of his company. If he had been no more than an interpreter of the Jews’ language and a now redundant go-between, Joseph might well have been left to take his chances when the Roman forces departed. His unblinking narrative testifies to his resolve to see thing
s through to the end.
Since the Vita was written in Greek, it is not surprising that its main character pastiches the allure of Homer’s Odysseus. Like Joseph ben Mattathias, the Greek hero had none of Achilles’s reckless urge to live and die gloriously, and young. Metis, the cunning intelligence that the Greeks admired in Odysseus, was Joseph’s prime quality. It had no nobler aim than to surmount whatever challenges and traps life might throw in a man’s path. In Homer, in myth and in Sophocles’s plays, Odysseus was portrayed as, in many respects, despicable; trickery was his great resource, as it was of his patron goddess, Athene. Reluctant to serve in the war against Troy, he faked evidence to revenge himself on the noble Palamedes, who had conscripted him to quit Ithaca. Odysseus was, in truth, a scoundrelly charmer whose resilience matched his determination to prevail.
The wooden horse was Odysseus’s typically sly idea: leaving it as a gift for their gods, he relied on the Trojans’ piety to procure their own downfall by wheeling it, and its hidden freight of Greek elite forces, into their city. Odysseus’s singular concern was his own survival. Yet he remains the Greek with whom readers most happily identify and whose character inspired a catalog of recensions. In Joseph ben Mattathias’s lifetime, Petronius Arbiter refashioned Odysseus into the antihero of his Satyrica, called Encolpius.o Like Odysseus and Joseph ben Mattathias, he will resort to whatever it takes to stay alive (all three survive shipwreck). Different as they may be, they each possess the attributes of charm, durability and double-dealing.
a In his mixture of administrative savvy with mercantile opportunism, Alexander had something in common with Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, but he incurred none of the odium that, in the eighteenth century, in predominantly Lutheran Württemberg, led to the arrest and judicial lynching of “the Jew Süss.” Süss’s misfortune was to be a scapegoat for the hated Catholic duke he had served so well. Susan Tegel notes that Süss had a copy of Josephus in his library.
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