Josephus’s final
work, Against Apion (written ca. 100 CE), is a polemical treatise and a
robust defense of Judaism, countering various anti-Jewish slanders. Building his
case, Joseph boasts about the Jewish scriptures’ antiquity and authenticity. As
it happens, his brief description stands alone as a detailed first-century
account of the Jewish Bible. Like the Hebrew Bible of today, Josephus’s Bible
includes no work that is admittedly later than the Persian period )contemporary
informed readers will perceive that works like Daniel were authored much later,
but the works themselves claim to stem from the Persian period or earlier). Also,
Josephus divides the Jewish Scriptures into three distinct sections: the law,
the prophets, and the final section including “hymns and precepts.” Yet the
report remains somewhat enigmatic. Josephus speaks of twenty-two books,
although the traditional Jewish count is twenty-four (4 Ezra 14.45n; b. B.
Bat. 14b; for the number 22, cf. Jub. 2.23). Possibly, Joseph’s
Bible excluded one book or another of the books whose canonicity is questioned
in rabbinic literature such as Song of Solomon or Ecclesiastes (m. Yad.
3.5). Or perhaps Josephus excluded Job—a book he never mentions and which would
appear to be something other than a “hymn” or “precept.” Another
possibility is that Josephus’s counting differed, perhaps by associating Ruth
with Judges (cf. Ant. 10.79). Complicating this line of thinking is Josephus’
report that Ezekiel authored two books (Ant. 10.79). Equally important
is the fact that Josephus was familiar with, and made us of 1 Esdras (Ant. 12.237-13.214).
It is clear that Josephus for ancient scriptures (see below) would have
certainly prevented his considering 1 Maccabees and most works of the Apocrypha
to be canonical.
(1.38) Our books,
those which are justly accredited, are but two and twenty, and contain the
record of all time. (39) Of these, five are the books of Moses, comprising the
laws and the traditional history from the birth of man down to the death of the
law-giver. This period falls only a little short of three thousand years. (40)
From the death of Moses until Artaxerxes, who succeeded Xerxes as king of
Persia, the prophets subsequent to Moses wrote the history of the events of
their own times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to
God and precepts for the conduct of human life. (41) From Artaxerxes to our own
time the complete history has been written, but has not been deemed worthy of
equal credit with the earlier records, because of the failure of the exact
succession of the prophets. (Trans. H. St. J. Thackeray, Josephus [LCL:
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926].) (Joseph Klawans,
"Josephus on the Twenty-Two Books," in Jonathan Klawans and Lawrence
M. Wills, eds., The Jewish Annotated Apocrypha [New York: Oxford University
Press, 2020], 383)
. . . we can view the
importance of the Septuagint for Josephus. Not only does he convey a story of
LXX origins that is notably dependent on Aristeas (Ant.
12.12-118), but he is also demonstrably dependent on the Septuagint tradition
for many of his “biblical” narratives in that historiographical work. For the Persian
period, Josephus frequently follows 1 Esdras (Ant. 11.1-158 . . . ); Josephus’s
paraphrase, knowledge of the LXX supplemented his acquaintance with the Hebrew
Bible. Almost all modern scholars agree that Philo’s knowledge of the Bible was
limited strictly to the Septuagint. This Alexandrian proponents and exponent of
Judaism worked in an environment entirely bereft of firsthand contact with the
Hebrew language. (Leonard J. Greenspoon, “The Septuagint,” in ibid., 577)
