Reading the Torah Out Loud: A Journey of Lament and Hope Book

This book is not a slog whatsoever. There are parts where Josephus excels in his story telling. Such as when he describes the Roman Legion's order of battle and what their day to day regime consisted of and why they are the finest fighting force the world has ever seen up to that point, or when Josephus details the distinctions between Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, or when Josephus would drift off into metaphysical meanderings concerning the nature of fate and what that could possibly mean for a people who's history is entwined with prophecies or omens (an owl will mark a Roman Emperor's greatness than will foretell his imminent death according to Josephus or Josephus' own dream tells of his victory).

All rulers who were good to the Jews are considered good, and all rulers who were not are considered bad, according to Josephus. The history of Rome usually never considers the world from the perspective of the vanquished; Josephus gives the modern reader a perspective of a beaten people as they were being scattered to the four corners while providing a quotidian struggle of their striving for relevance before only having their history and their religion as a glue to hold them together. BTW, I had not realized how despicable and duplicitous Josephus was even when he writes his story such that to make himself look favorable in the eyes of his fellow Jews, but always being watchful not to offend the Romans. Even in his own words, he comes across as a traitor to his own people.

A history like this is always just as important for the history that is being told by the historian and for how we with our modern sensibilities see how the historian is telling his story providing us insight into how they thought about themselves as a snapshot of history. As Giovanni Battista Vico says within his New Science from 1725 one should always consider history through the eyes, times and context of the explicator in order to understand.

Josephus' dwelling in detail on the Essenes is fascinating since he writes in a time period such that Christianity if it were considered at all would be mostly considered as a sect of the Jews (70-95 CE). The overlap with who the Essenes were as portrayed by Josephus overlap with how Jesus Christ would be later portrayed by the Gospels especially the Book of John and by the early church fathers far more than I was aware of. Also, I see Josephus really did not like the Epicureans.

After one reads about a thousand pages from the same author, one gets a rhyme and reason to the writer's patter and the section that Josephus connects Pontius Pilate to Jesus Christ did not seem to fit the natural flow of Josephus's writing, but the section later on John the Baptist did at least for me. The Jesus section just did not seem to go with what Josephus was trying to tell in his book as a whole. I'll let biblical scholars and the historians fight it out among themselves, and suspect a good philologist can resolve the point, but overall, it's not really that important one way or another.

Particularly in the 'Jewish Wars', Josephus thinks himself worthy of a Thucydides (for those who don't know, Thucydides wrote the best history ever 450 years before Josephus and all historians of Josephus time period would have been familiar with it as all historians should be today) and tries to recreate speeches never said while being true to intent. He somewhat fails at this. He only sees one side of the argument and they are often tied up with him wanting to please his Roman masters while denigrating his Jewish brethren, those he claims he was fighting for. Obviously, Josephus risked real physical harm if he strayed too far from offending the Romans and would always err on the side of self preservation and the Romans.

The end notes from 1757 of this 1737 translation of a first century Jewish historian make this book worthwhile by themselves. They were as much fun as reading as the text itself. They took themselves incredibly seriously and they took it as a given that if the bible says it, it is true. The remnants of Noah's ark are still available to visit according to them.

There was one Tolstoy type allusion in this book. Tolstoy in War and Peace would say that Russia won the war against France because Napoleon's barber was sick and gave his cold to Napoleon thus making Napoleon not able to lead his army properly. Josephus tells a story of an unnamed Roman soldier a year or two before the complete destruction of Jerusalem who showed his private parts as an insult in front of the temple and that led to the ultimate revolt by the Jews against the Romans. Who knows if it's true? History is often defined by the inconsequential, and by the way, according to Josephus that soldier was beheaded by the Romans.

Everything that was in the Jewish War and the Jewish Antiquities was covered better and more reliably by Heinreich Graetz's Volume I and II of The History of the Jews written in about 1860. Graetz never assumes the truth of divine intervention, or prophets, or omens or dreams while Josephus accepts them at face value, and Graetz considers Josephus' account of Masada as a complete fabrication not worthy of refutation even.