deserts, tribes and empires 17
was, of course, a great deal that he simply could not know. Organizing
the material of the Hebrew Bible, on which he based the first half of his
history, into a continuous narrative was itself a major feat, more recog-
nized in the respect paid to his Antiquities by Christians in the Middle
Ages and the early modern period than by scholars today. The process
required some silent changes to his sources, as in the substitution of the
name of one Persian king for a different one in the biblical text when he
recounted the heroic actions of Esther, in an attempt to bring the chron-
ology of his Jewish narrative into line with the accepted chronology of
the ancient empires familiar to his non- Jewish Greek and Roman read-
ers. Discrepant narratives in biblical texts – when, for instance, the
books of Kings are contradicted by Chronicles – were smoothed out.
Occasionally he missed out material which he must have found in his
source, such as the episode, described in the biblical book of Exodus, of
a golden calf made by Moses’ brother Aaron for the Israelites to wor-
ship, just at the time when Moses was receiving divine instruction on
Mount Sinai. Presumably he wished to avoid recounting a story which
reflected so badly upon his people.^22
Josephus’ narrative covered not just many centuries, which he tried
hard to enumerate for his readers on the basis of the written sources at
his disposal, but also a wide geographical sweep from Mesopotamia to
Rome, incorporating landscapes as various as the fertile irrigation econ-
omies of Mesopotamia and Egypt, the great and terrible wilderness of
the Sinai peninsula, and the coastal lands of the Mediterranean, where
the regularity of annual rainfall patterns marked the difference between
starvation and plenty. It is all the more striking how evidently he believed
that the real focus of his history was the hill country of Judaea. Indeed,
in Against Apion, composed a few years after the completion of the
Antiquities, Josephus cited the landlocked isolation of his homeland as
a reason for the failure of most Greek historians of earlier generations,
the most trusted source of historical knowledge for Josephus’ Greek
and Roman readers, to make mention of the magnificent history of the
Jews: ‘Now we do not inhabit a country with a coast, nor are we keen
on trade or on the mixing with others that results from it .. .’^23
The problem of the silence of Greek sources about Jewish history to
which Josephus was responding was real, and his heroic efforts in Against
Apion to unearth references to Jews in obscure corners of Greek litera-
ture (including an allusion by Choerilus to Homer’s mention of Solymi,
taken by Josephus as a reference to Jerusalem (Greek: Hierosolyma ))
only went to show how little there was to be found.^24 The problem