deserts, tribes and empires 25
which led up to it. It will be evident that, although the structure and
explicit purpose of Josephus’ history presupposed the continuity of the
Jewish people from Abraham to his own day, it is likely that the distinct-
ive national identity he took for granted had only emerged gradually in
the course of centuries under the influence of many different cultures.
We have seen the variety of names by which Jews could refer to them-
selves by Josephus’ time. Josephus called himself both hebraios and
ioudaios, while the Jewish rebels in Jerusalem from 66 to 70 ce pro-
claimed on their own coins the freedom of Israel and of Zion (a name
originally applied to a hill in Jerusalem but often treated in biblical and
later Jewish usage as synonymous either with Jerusalem or with the
Jewish people as a whole). The remembered past was complex, and not
infrequently inglorious, and Josephus could sometimes write the story
of the Jews in his own time as a litany of suffering: ‘Looking over the
whole sweep of history, I would say that the sufferings of the Jews have
been greater than those of any other nation.’
But whatever the genuine origins of the Jewish people, Judaism was
a religion rooted in historical memory, real or imagined, as we shall see,
and the historical books of the Hebrew Bible, which lay at the core of
the religion, gave shape both to Jewish forms of worship, many of which
were specifically configured to recall events in this salvation history, and
to Jewish understanding of the relationship between man and God.^32