deserts, tribes and empires 9
and their flocks were forced by famine to move south from Canaan in
search of food. The family settled happily in Egypt, but Josephus is at
pains to note that Jacob prophesied on his deathbed that his descend-
ants would all find habitations in Canaan in due course and that the
bones of both Jacob and all his sons, including in due course Joseph,
would eventually be buried back in the family sepulchre in Hebron.^4
The second half of Book 2 of Josephus’ Antiquities turns to the story
of the eventual mass exodus of Jacob’s descendants from Egypt after the
Egyptians grew envious of the prosperity of the Hebrews – a name for
the ancestors of the Jews first used here in Josephus’ narrative, and fol-
lowed in the next sentence by a reference to the same people as ‘the race
of the Israelites’. The division of the people into tribes (named after the
sons of Jacob and, in the case of the half- tribes Ephraim and Manasseh,
his grandsons) is explained by Josephus as the will of Jacob shortly
before his death, when he ‘charged his own sons to reckon among their
number Joseph’s sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, and to let them share in
the division of Canaan’ as requital for Joseph’s exceptional generosity
to his brothers.
The Hebrews, wrote Josephus, were subjected to 400 years of hard-
ship before they were rescued under the leadership of Moses, son of
Amram, ‘a Hebrew of noble birth’, who, with his brother Aaron, led
them out of Egypt and through the wilderness towards Canaan. Moses
himself, despite his forty years in the desert, including the dramatic
revelation on Mount Sinai when he received the laws from God and
gave them to his people, was not to reach their destination. His final
days were shrouded in mystery: ‘A cloud of a sudden descended upon
him and he disappeared in a ravine. But he has written of himself in the
sacred books that he died, for fear lest they should venture to say that
by reason of his surpassing virtue he has gone back to the Deity.’ The
gentile reader of this history, already at the end of the fourth book of
this long work (and one- fifth of the way through the whole account),
might reasonably have felt a bit puzzled by some aspects of the story up
to now, not least the failure of Josephus to refer to any of his protag-
onists as Jews despite his assertion in his introduction that he would
show ‘who the Jews are from the beginning’. The story recounted in
Book 1 about the naming of Jacob as ‘Israel’ by an angel did not even
explain his use of the same name, ‘Israel’, for Jews generally.^5
The next part of the national story fell into a pattern more familiar
for Josephus’ readers in a work of history, since the narrative turned
to war and politics. The Hebrews, he said, had fought a series of