jor works, showing no hint of embarrassment overWar. Antiquitiesintro-
duces the Pharisees very late in the piece (13.171) and treats them with gen-
eral disdain. Josephus’s understanding of legal practice(halakah)shows
no consistent correlation with rabbinic prescriptions. Finally, scholarship
on the early rabbinic movement increasingly stresses its isolation and lim-
ited influence before the end of the second or even third century. The field
thus remains open for closer inquiry into the overall purposes of such a
large work asAntiquities.
One problem in generating comprehensive interpretations arises from
scholarly specialization. As academic interest focused intently on what lies
beneath Josephus’s narratives rather than on the finished works, those who
treated the biblical paraphrase ofAntiquities1–11 were required to have
skills in comparative scriptural interpretation, to be specialists in Hebrew
and Aramaic, rabbinic literature, Dead Sea Scrolls, and “rewritten Bible.”
Excellent and finely grained studies of the biblical paraphrase therefore
flourished, but quite independently of any concern for theAntiquitiesas a
whole. On the other end, a Roman historian could publish an excellent
translation and commentary ofAntiquities19, covering the death of Gaius
Caligula and the accession of Claudius, but paying no attention to the nar-
rative of which the story is a part (Wiseman 1991). This piecemeal ap-
proach seemed justified when the leading Josephus scholar of the early
twentieth century declaredAntiquitiesa “patchwork,” artificially drawn
out to twenty volumes, with whatever sources Josephus could find, in or-
der to match the earlierRoman Antiquitiesby Dionysius of Halicarnassus
(Thackeray 1929: 56-69).
But what would a real audience in the first century have made of the
entire work? Would they have found it so disjointed? Would they have
needed the skills of a biblical scholar with access to the Hebrew Bible, LXX,
Dead Sea Scrolls, and other resources to understand the first half? Would
they have reached book 12 and declared that the rest was not for them? Evi-
dently not. Josephus takes pains to develop the themes announced in the
prologue throughout the whole narrative, and he leaves clear structural
markers along the way to make the narrative coherent and manageable.Structure
As to structure, we have noted Josephus’s evident care in designingWa r,as
well as the thematic correspondence between books 1 and 20 ofAntiquities:305JosephusEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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