to Judean customs to illustrate some other moral point (Arrian,Epicteti
Dissertationes2.9.20; Juvenal 5.14.96-106); so the phenomenon must have
been obvious enough. This concentrated evidence for committed interest
from foreigners, in authors who say little else about Judeans, is confirmed
by incidental remarks in Josephus concerning various Greek cities of the
East (J.W.2.463, 560). It may help to explain his decision to feature stories of
conversion to Judean law and piety near the beginning and end ofAntiq-
uities:Abraham’s adoption of monotheism and efforts to convert Egyptians
(Ant.1.154-68) matches the Adiabenian royal family’s risky embrace of a
Judean identity in the first century (Ant.20.17-96).
Josephus presentsAntiquities,then, as a primer in Judean law, history,
and culture, brought over into Greek from the sacred records, for interested
outsiders in Rome represented by Epaphroditus. The nature of his biblical
paraphrase (books 1–11) has attracted the lion’s share of technical research
onAntiquities.On the one hand, his obvious adjustments to the Bible by
way of omission, rearrangement, and sometimes major addition — for ex-
ample, his much elaborated story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife or Moses’s
Ethiopian campaign — are usually attributed to novelistic or Hellenizing
tendencies (though the latter invites the question, to what extent he actually
thought in common Mediterranean categories, rather than consciously
bending his material). On the other hand, his extensive reworking of source
material has greatly complicated the assessment of his underlying biblical
text. Did he follow the Hebrew text throughout, as he implies? (His proper
nouns often differ in form from those used by the LXX.) Was his Hebrew
text significantly different from our Masoretic text, and would this help to
explain some of his divergences? Did he change his procedure from making
an original translation at the beginning to exploiting existing Greek mod-
els, as he wearied of the project? If he used existing Greek texts, which ones
did he have at his disposal? Was he influenced by Aramaic, targum-like
paraphrases? To what extent did he, consciously or unconsciously, incorpo-
rate existing oral traditions into his retelling of the biblical story, and how
much of the narrative is original with him? These issues remain debated.
With much more space available for the early history thanWa rhad af-
forded him, Josephus also takes the opportunity to expand, inAntiquities
13–17, what he had compressed intoWa r1. Books 18–20 include often quite
different versions of episodes from the first half ofWa r2, supplemented by
substantial new Roman and Mesopotamian material.
Although scholars have understandably been tempted to viewAntiq-
uities’postbiblical material as an afterthought, since the prologue envi-303JosephusEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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