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The Failure of Rhetoric in Josephus' Bellum Judaicum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Jonathan J. Price
Jonathan J. Price*
Affiliation:
Tel Aviv University
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Extract

Like any good Greek historian, Josephus salted his BJ with rhetorically elaborate speeches in direct discourse in order to explore the psychological interior of important historical players and to provide insight into motivations for the characters' actions at critical junctures in the narrative. The earliest methodological statement about speech-writing in an historical narrative fairly describes Josephus' own method in the BJ. I refer of course to Thucydides' famous, if perennially debated and reinterpreted, declaration at the end of his so-called Archaeology:

Regarding the speeches which each speaker made either on the eve of war or when they were already in it, it has been difficult to remember with perfect accuracy the spoken words, both for me, of the speeches which I myself heard, being present, and for those who reported to me [speeches] given at different times and places; so that each speaker is made to say what seemed to me most essential for him to say, given the circumstances in each case, while I have tried to keep as close as possible to the overall intention of the actual speech.

(Thuc. 1. 22)

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , 2007 , pp. 6 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 2007

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References

1. See Price, J.J., Thucydides and Internal War (Cambridge 2002), 73f.Google Scholar, and the bibliography in n. 141. Translations of Thucydides in this article are my own; translations of the BJ are based on that of Thackeray, H.St.J., Josephus Vols. II and III (London & Cambridge MA 1927–28).Google Scholar

2. Still good is Runnals, D., Hebrew and Greek Sources in the Speeches of Josephus’ ‘Jewish War’ (Diss. Toronto 1970Google Scholar); see also her article, ‘The Rhetoric of Josephus’, in S. Porter (ed.), Handbook of Classical Rhetoric (Leiden 1997), 737–54Google Scholar; and the important work, Lindner, H., Die Geschichtsauffassung des Flavius Josephus im Bellum Judaicum (Leiden 1972), 21–48Google Scholar. See also P. Villalba i|Varneda, The Historical Method of Flavius Josephus (Leiden 1986), 89ff.Google Scholar

3. BJ 2.409: he ‘persuaded’ (avcwceiOet) temple officials to do it; as an aristocrat Eleazar could probably speak well.

4. BJ 2.539, 650; 4.323; and see Price, J.J., ‘Some Aspects of Josephus’ Theological Interpretation of the Jewish War’, in M. Perani (ed.), ‘The Words of a Wise Man’s Mouth are Gracious (Qoh 10,12)’: Festschrift for GUnter Stemberger on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday (Berlin 2005), 109–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Stern, M., ‘Josephus and the Roman Empire as Reflected in The Jewish War’, in L.H. Feldman and G. Hata (eds.), Josephus, Judaism and Christianity (Detroit 1987), 71–80Google Scholar; id., ‘Joseph son of Matthias, the Historian of the Jewish War’ and ‘The Jewish War of Joseph son of Matthias and the Roman Emperors’, in M Amit et al. (eds.), Studies in Jewish History: The Second Temple Period (Jerusalem 1991), 378–92Google Scholar and 393–401 (Heb.).

6. Almost all these failed speeches are speeches of dissuasion—each speaker failed to dissuade his audience from adopting an extreme course of action. This is true for all the speeches except for perhaps Ananus’ speech, and Eleazar’s successful speeches on suicide.

7. I realise Quintilian himself offers a refinement of this view, and worries whether rhetoric is a power, science or art, but that shall not detain us here.

8. BJ 2.651, 4.320–21; Vit. 17–24, 28–29, and see commentaries by Mason, S., Flavius Josephus, Translation and Commentary IX: Life of Josephus (Leiden 2001), 27–34Google Scholar (esp. 33 n. 150) and 36f.; Schwartz, D.R., Flavius Josephus, Vita: Introduction, Hebrew Translation, and Commentary (Jerusalem 2007), 68–71Google Scholar (Heb.).

9. For detailed analysis see Price, J.J., Jerusalem Under Siege: The Collapse of the Jewish State, 66–70 C.E. (Leiden 1992).Google Scholar

10. Boyd White, J., When Words Lose their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community (Chicago 1984), 193.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. On modern perceptions of Masada, see now the interesting discussion by Chapman, H.H., ‘Masada in the 1 st and 21 st Centuries’, in Z. Rodgers (ed.), Making History: Josephus and Historical Method (Leiden 2007), 82–102Google Scholar; also (among his many writings), Silberman, N.A., ‘The First Revolt and its Afterlife’, in A.M. Berlin and J.A. Overman (eds.), The First Jewish Revolt: Archaeology, History, and Theology (London and New York 2002), 237–52Google Scholar, and Between Past and Present: Archaeology, Ideology, and Nationalism in the Modern Middle East (New York 1989), 87–101Google Scholar. There is a large and ever-growing literature on Masada as a symbol in contemporary Israeli society; see e.g. Zerubavel, Y., Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago 1995Google Scholar); Schwartz, B., Zerubavel, Y. and Barnett, B.M., ‘The Recovery of Masada: A Study in Collective Memory’, The Sociological Quarterly 27 (1986), 147–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ben-Yehuda, N., ‘The Masada Mythical Narrative and the Israeli Army’, in E. Lomsky-Feder and E. Ben-Ari (eds.), The Military and Militarism in Israeli Society (Albany 1999), 57–88.Google Scholar

12. Cohen, S.J.D., ‘Masada: Literary Tradition, Archaeological Remains, and the Credibility of Josephus,’ JJS 33 (1982) (= Essays in Honour of Yigael Yadin), 385–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 405. Cohen’s account is valuable in that it compares Josephus’ Masada account to other accounts of suicide in classical literature. Further on philosophical allusions in Eleazar’s second speech: Luz, M., ‘Eleazar’s Second Speech on Masada and its Literary Precedents’, RAM 126 (1983), 25–43.Google Scholar

13. D.J. Ladouceur, ‘Josephus and Masada’, in Feldman and Hata (n.5 above), 95–113.

14. The date of the composition of Book 7 is irrelevant to the present study, although 1 think it was not written much later than the first six; see Jones, C.P., ‘Towards a Chronology of Josephus’, Scripta Classica Israelica 21 (2002), 113–21.Google Scholar

15. For the latest treatment see Weitzman, S., ‘Josephus on How to Survive Martyrdom’, JJS 55 (2004), 230–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with previous bibliography, although I do not agree with his conclusions. Droge, A. and Tabor, J., A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among Jews and Christians in Antiquity (San Francisco 1992), 93ffGoogle Scholar, stress Socratic necessity as a way of resolving the contradiction in the text (see my discussion below). For general bibliography on the speeches, see n.2 above.

16. Here Josephus sounds very much like PI. Laws 873c: ‘What of him who takes the life that is, as they say, nearest and dearest to himself? What should be his punishment? I mean the man whose violence frustrates the decree of destiny by self-slaughter though no sentence of the state has required this of him, no stress of cruel and inevitable calamity driven him to the act, and he has been involved in no desperate and intolerable disgrace, the man who thus gives unrighteous sentence against himself from mere poltroonery and unmanly cowardice’ (tr. A.E. Taylor).

17. Cf. Sen. Ep. 70 and see Englert, W., ‘Stoics and Epicureans on the Nature of Suicide’, in J.J. Cleary and W. Wians (eds.), Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 10 (1994), 67–96Google Scholar, with the response by M. Nussbaum at 97–111; Warren, J., ‘Socratic Suicide’, JHS 121 (2001), 91–106CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, arguing that Socrates saw suicide only as a final contingency because philosophy should be used to improve one’s life; van Hooff, A.J.L., From Autothanasia to Suicide: Self-Killing in Classical Antiquity (London 1990CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Griffin, M., ‘Philosophy, Cato, and Roman Suicide’, G&R 33 (1986), 64–77Google Scholar, 192–202.

18. This sounds very much like ‘visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons down to the third and fourth generation of those that hate me’ (Ex. 20:5, 34:7; Deut. 5:9).

19. A law with which Joshua is said to have complied with at least twice: Josh. 8:29,10:27.

20. There is some ambivalence in the sources about the deaths of Avimelekh (Judges 9:44–47), Achitophel (2 Sam. 17:23) and Zimri (1 Kings 16:15–20).

21. bBer. 23a, bHul. 94a, bKid. 81b, GenR 65, 22.

22. Cataloguing the laws and beliefs he does mention, and comparing them to the rabbinic corpus, have been attempted before but never carried through to completion. One should note, however, the important dissertation by Nachman, David, The Halakhah in the Writings of Josephus (Diss. Bar Ilan 2004Google Scholar) (Heb.); on suicide see 124f. and 362.

23. But he decided not to mention Razis, who in the period of the Hasmoneans killed himself in order ‘to die nobly and not fall into the hands of sinners’ (2 Mace. 14.41-45); or the famous suicide of the mother of seven sons who died torturous deaths before her eyes (4 Mace. 17. Iff; cf. 2 Mace. 7.1–23).

24. Compare also the heroic, but in Josephus’ eyes deserved, suicide of the Jew Simon because of shame and remorse, BJ 2.469–75.

25. We even have to admit the possibility that Josephus, who perceived he had a higher, God-given mission and had to survive in order to accomplish it, would do anything to survive, and gave a consciously false or misleading speech on the subject of suicide. But there is no indication of any of this in the text.

26. Thus I disagree with prevailing views that Josephus’ primary purpose was to impress Romans and Greeks, or to offer self-apology, or as the Boyarins recently put it, ‘the self-justification of his betrayal’, quoted in Chapman (n.1 1 above), 98.

27. Weiss-Rosmarin, T., ‘Josephus’ “Eleazar Speech” and Historical Credibility’, WCJS 6.1 (1977), 417–27.Google Scholar

28. I am grateful to the participants in the Cambridge Classics seminar for their comments and observations on this paper when delivered as a lecture. Above all I wish to express my gratitude to Helen Morales and Simon Goldhill for organising the splendid event.