Key Sources of Ancient Jewish History

Josephus 

The primary Jewish source for the history of the Jews during the Hellenistic and early Roman periods is the explicitly historiographical writing of Josephus (37–100 CE). As valuable as his work is, however, it must be read judiciously. His treatment of periods before his own is unreliable, and in general his presentation of historical events is biased, at times even becoming outright fabrication. Nevertheless, a careful critical reading of his work can produce a fairly accurate broad outline of events. And when all is said and done, Josephus’s Jewish War is the fullest account that exists of a native rebellion against Rome, not to mention one of the great turning points in Jewish history. 

Much like those of ancient Greek and Roman historians, Josephus’ working assumptions diverged from those of the modern historian. Ancient historians often wrote history with an explicitly polemical agenda, to support a new political regime or to influence theological belief. Like them, Josephus wrote history as he saw it, with no attempt to avoid personal bias. But despite the limitations of Josephus’ work, it is thanks to him that we can cautiously construct a historical narrative of the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, up to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. He provides only hints about what happened after the destruction of the Temple, and as far as we know, no one took up his mantle as historian of the Jewish people. 

Philo of Alexandria 

Philo of Alexandria, another source for Jewish history in the Roman period, was a member of the leading Jewish family of Alexandria and had strong connections both to the imperial household and to the leading families of Roman Judea. His brother, Alexander, was the alabarch, the leading financial official in Roman Egypt. When the Judean king Agrippa I, Herod’s grandson, visited Alexandria in 38 CE, Philo’s family hosted him, and the families established a connection by marriage as well. Alexander’s son, Tiberius Julius Alexander, was prefect (governor) of Egypt under Nero and praetorian prefect under Vespasian. These were the highest positions in the Roman Empire available to someone who was not a senator. 

Philo was surely the greatest literary figure Alexandrian Jewry produced. As a writer, he was master of a classical Greek style without equal among Jewish and Christian writers of antiquity and deserves to be considered in the first rank of imperial Greek writers. Philo’s surviving writings, preserved primarily by Christians and unknown to medieval Jews, include treatises on general philosophical topics, but most are essays in which he reads the stories and laws of the Hebrew Bible allegorically, with the intention of bringing them into line with Platonic and Stoic ideas. At the time of Philo’s birth, Hellenism as a political position was already dead among the Jews of Alexandria, and Philo himself was a vociferous enemy of the politicized and strongly anti-Jewish Hellenism preached by some Alexandrian civic officials. He may well have been the last gasp of Jewish Hellenism in Alexandria. 

1 and 2 Maccabees 

Although the high and late Roman periods are among the best-known eras in premodern human history, for  Jews, this is not the case. The two books of Maccabees and most importantly the writings of Josephus give us a reasonably good idea of the internal history of the Jews, mainly but not only in Palestine, during the culmination of the Second Temple period, from the Maccabean revolt, ca. 170 BCE, until the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in the summer of 70 CE. First and Second Maccabees is the title attached in Christian tradition to two unrelated pieces of historiography written by Jews in the later second century BCE. 

First Maccabees was written in Hebrew—although the book survives only in an early Greek translation—in imitation of the historical books of the Bible. It promotes the interests of the Hasmonean family and has little to say about the causes or earliest stages of the Maccabean revolt, devoting its attention instead to the establishment of the Hasmonean dynasty after the revolt and carrying its story down to the accession of John Hyrcanus I, the son of Simon, brother of Judah Maccabee. By contrast, 2 Maccabees was written in Greek, and its two great themes are the heroism of Judah Maccabee and God’s protection of the Temple. It is not interested in the Hasmonean dynasty. Its story begins with the first Seleucid threat to the Temple (probably unhistorical) by the royal minister Heliodoros, ca. 178 BCE, culminates with the story of the purification and rededication of the Temple by Judah and his men in December of 164 BCE (the first Hanukkah), and ends with Judah’s surprising defeat of the Seleucid general Nicanor, who had threatened to destroy the Temple, in 160 BCE.

Rabbinic Literature 

A long-standing tradition in Jewish scholarship has attempted to write history by collecting historical-sounding anecdotes in rabbinic literature, trimming away their miraculous and homiletic elements and patching them together into the semblance of a historical narrative. In the 1970s, however, Jacob Neusner demonstrated through rigorous analysis, by tracing rabbinic stories and laws in chronological order, that these brief narrative units had their own histories and were affected, often in unpredictable ways, by the interests of the rabbis who transmitted and edited them. The stories thus tell us much about the concerns of the transmitters and editors of rabbinic doctrine and lore but sadly little about actual historical events. 

Older scholarship also subjected rabbinic anecdotes to readings that did them considerable violence. Rabbinic texts commonly assumed that some post–70 CE Jews accepted the rabbis’ judicial authority. This became a claim that the rabbis had political authority, recognized by the Romans. Similarly, scholars read stories about events and developments within the rabbinic movement as if they were stories about the Jews in general (e.g., the famous story of the deposition of Rabban Gamaliel II, commonly understood to reflect his removal as the Jews’ prime minister by a kind of rabbinic parliament). But rabbinic stories, if read cautiously, never make such maximalist claims about rabbinic authority. So the traditional Wissenschaft or Zionist reconstruction of a Jewish political history after 70 CE is based not only on insufficiently rigorous attention to the internal history of and ideology behind rabbinic texts and traditions but also on a kind of aspirational, romantic view that there was an ancient and authentic Jewish statecraft, relatively uncompromised by collaboration with Rome, which could serve, if appropriately updated, as a model for modern Jewish politics. 

How, then, can we reconstruct an internal Jewish history after 70 CE? The truth is, we cannot. We have much raw information, but it is scattered, hard to situate chronologically, and difficult to interpret. Indeed, the absence of a marginally reliable running historical narrative, such as that provided by Josephus for the later Second Temple period, makes any such effort futile a priori. But this does not mean that there is nothing to say: we can certainly reconstruct some important developments and thus get a broad overview of history—and of Jewish perceptions of that history.