8 A History of Judaism
ten books of his history, but with additions and omissions which
reflected how the Bible was being read in his own day. His narrative is
impressively coherent and often vivid, and I shall allow it to speak for
itself. He was immensely proud of the authenticity of his history, but for
us the significance of his version lies not in its accuracy (which can often
be doubted) but in its claim to accuracy. We shall see that the Jews’
understanding of their national history has played a major role in the
development of their ideas and practices. Josephus provides our earliest
full testimony to this historical understanding. We shall find reasons to
doubt the reliability of some of the traditions he transmitted, and at the
end of this chapter I shall venture some tentative proposals about what
may really have happened, and when, but all religions have stories
about their origins, and for the creation of the historical myths on which
Judaism has been founded, what really happened matters much less
than what Jews believed had happened. And for this, the best witness,
writing soon after the completion of the Bible, was Josephus.
Josephus began his narrative by telling his readers about ‘our law-
giver Moses’, on whose wisdom (as enshrined in the biblical text) almost
everything in that history, so Josephus claimed, depends. Hence Jewish
history for Josephus started where the Bible starts, with what Moses
had said about the creation of the world and humanity, and the separ-
ation of the nations after the flood in the time of Noah. Josephus had
already filled half the first book of the Jewish Antiquities with world
history before he even began to speak of the ‘Hebrews’ and the geneal-
ogy of Abraham, but the reader was left in no doubt about the
importance of Abraham, who was ‘the first boldly to declare that God,
the creator of the universe, is one’, nor his significance for the story of
the Jews to follow. Abraham, wrote Josephus, was originally an inhab-
itant of the city called Ur of the Chaldees, but his religious ideas aroused
hostility among the Chaldaeans and the other people of Mesopotamia
and he emigrated to the land of Canaan. There, apart from a brief
period in Egypt to escape the impact of famine in Canaan, he remained
until his death at the age of 175. He was buried beside his wife Sarah,
in Hebron, where his son Isaac was also to be buried in the ancestral
tomb.^3
Josephus proceeds to tell at length the fortunes of some of Abraham’s
descendants in Egypt after Joseph, Isaac’s grandson, was taken there as
a slave but was raised by Pharaoh to a position of exceptional authority
because of his facility in the interpretation of dreams. Joseph provided
a refuge in Egypt for his father Jacob and his many brothers when they