Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Joseph Klawans and Leonard J. Greenspoon on Josephus and the Old Testament

  

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)