Bibliography
| Title: Flavius Josephus: Eyewitness to Rome's First-Century Conquest of Judea Pages: XVI, 269 Type: Book Year: 1993 Abstract: BJGS 14 (1994), 20-21: "First published in French by Fayard in 1989, Mireille Hadas-Lebel's biography has the merit of being written by someone who is perfectly at home both in Greek and in Hebrew, and the additional charm of a sensitive sympathy that Josephus has not always inspired in his biographers. Intended for readers with no specialised knowledge, it is nevertheless written with careful scholarly precision, and equipped with a light apparatus of notes. Readers of this Bulletin will be interested particularly in the authors's handling of the thorny question of Josephus's Greek education. She concludes that his early education will have been entirely "Judaic". "Only after he had thoroughly studied the wisdom of Israel did a young Jewish aristocrat come into contact with the wisdom of nations. For Josephus, therefore, his Greek studies must have occurred sometime around his twentieth year" (p. 49). His knowledge of Greek culture remained rudimentary, she argues, because more advanced Greek studies "would have included a consideration of literary works that were tarred with the brush of paganism, prominent among them the Homeric epics. [...] Jews like Josephus [...] had to cleave to fabulists like Aesop or Babrius" (p. 48). And, following a common interpretation of the key text in A 22:263, she concludes that he "spoke Greek with an accent that made him immediately identifiable as an easterner" (ibid.). Mireille Hadas-Lebel has given us a Josephus who is human being of flesh and blood: we share in the dilemmas and hard decisions of his incidentpacked life, and we face with her the problems of assessing his life's achievements. Thanks to the skill and efforts of her translator, Richard Miller, her book is as readable in English as it is in French". Keywords: Examination of the Complete work, Jos as historian Flavius Josephus. Jewish historians, Biography. Jews, History, Rebellion of 66-73 C.E. |