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of Judaism in Against Apion : ‘each individual ... has come to believe –
as the legislator prophesied and as God provided firm assurance – that
to those who keep the laws and, should it be necessary to die for them,
meet death eagerly, God has granted renewed existence and receipt of a
better life at the turn [of the ages].’ For Josephus, this future hope was
closely bound up with the willingness of Jews to die for their beliefs. He
noted that he would have hesitated to write about this devotion ‘had
not the facts made all men aware that many of our countrymen have on
many occasions even now preferred to brave all manner of suffering
rather than to utter a single word against the Law’. A universal willing-
ness to face death was placed by Josephus as the culmination of his
description of the constitution bequeathed to the Jewish people by
Moses:
As for us, then, has anyone known – not to pitch the number so high –
even two or three who have been traitors to the laws or afraid of death,
and I mean not that easiest of deaths, which comes to those in battle, but
that accompanied by physical torture, which seems to be the most hideous
of all? I myself think that some of our conquerors have applied this to
those in their power not out of hatred but because they wanted to see, as
an amazing spectacle, if there were any people who believed that the only
evil they faced was to be forced either to do something contrary to their
laws or to say a word in contravention of them.In his account of the significance of the biblical books to the Jews,
Josephus claimed that ‘time and again ere now the sight has been wit-
nessed of prisoners enduring torture and death in every form in the
theatres rather than utter a single word against the laws and the allied
documents.’^27
This veneration for martyrdom can be traced back to the description
just noted in the Second Book of Maccabees of the heroic deaths of a
mother and her seven sons on the orders of Antiochus IV Epiphanes
during the persecution which led to the Maccabean revolt. The deaths
of the martyrs are narrated in vivid and grisly detail, encouraging the
reader to imagine the scene and empathize with the sufferer:
It happened also that seven brothers and their mother were arrested and
were being compelled by the king, under torture with whips and thongs,
to partake of unlawful swine’s flesh. One of them, acting as their spokes-
man, said, ‘What do you intend to ask and learn from us? For we are ready
to die rather than transgress the laws of our ancestors.’ The king fell into