1
Deserts, Tribes and Empires
At the end of the first century ce Josephus looked back with pride on
the antiquity of his people and the remarkable accuracy of the Hebrew
records in which their history was preserved. It was true that much of
this history had escaped the notice of the non- Jewish world, and that
Greek writers had paid regrettably little attention to the Jews, but this
could be remedied. Before composing the account of Jewish theology in
Against Apion, Josephus set out for gentiles a continuous narrative of
Jewish history from the beginning to his own day. His twenty books of
Jewish Antiquities may have been the first such narrative ever written.^1
Josephus was writing under the burden of a national trauma. Born in
37 ce into an aristocratic family in Jerusalem, he had served as a priest
in the Temple as a young man before being caught up in 66 ce as a rebel
leader in the political struggle against the imperial power of Rome
which led, in 70 ce, to the destruction of the Temple. He had been cap-
tured by the Romans in 67 ce, but in recognition of a prophecy he was
said to have made to the Roman general Vespasian that he would
become emperor, he was granted his freedom when the prophecy came
true. He composed all his writings on the fringes of the imperial court
in Rome, where he seems to have made it his life’s mission to persuade
a sceptical Roman populace that the Jews who had just succumbed to
the might of Rome were in fact a great people with a long history well
worthy of the attention of their conquerors and the wider non- Jewish
world.^2
For those readers of this book who know the Hebrew Bible, which
for Christians constitutes the Old Testament, the first half of Josephus’
Jewish Antiquities will be both familiar and, on occasion, disconcerting.
The Bible is full of stories about the Jewish past, but these stories are
not always easy to reconcile with non- biblical evidence. Reconstructing
the history of Israel in the biblical period was as difficult in the first cen-
tury ce as it is now. Josephus followed the biblical account for the first