Josephus's Use of the Book of Daniel: a Study of Hellenistic-Jewish Historiography
| Shawn C. Madden Abstract:Out of the war between the Jews and the Romans of 66-70 C.E. emerged a man who would make his mark on the history of his people through the ages. Flavius Josephus Judaicus produced an autobiography, an apologetic work, an account of the war in which he was involved, and a rewrite of the history of the his people from their beginnings up to his time. The production of the last work, his Antiquitates Judaicae, was based in large part on the Jewish Scriptures. He borrowed heavily from them, deleting and adding whole portions. He displayed a typical historian's propensity for selectivity, using what he felt was germane to his production and leaving off what was not. Within the corpus of the Jewish Bible he retained a great deal of the book of Daniel. This is noteworthy in that while he drew infrequently from the other major Jewish prophets he devoted an entire chapter of his Antiquities to this prophet. The purpose of the enclosed work is to evaluate the reason that Josephus used the book of Daniel to the exclusion of the other Hebrew prophetic books. This was accomplished by first taking a detailed look at the text of Josephus's Daniel pericope and comparing it to the Hebrew/Aramaic text of Daniel and the two extant Greek translations. This was done to determine what text Josephus primarily relied upon. Next, his production was evaluated in light of Richard Burridge's What are the Gospels: a Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography to determine if the Daniel text of Josephus qualified as a Hellenistic bios. With this accomplished, Josephus's authorial intent was evaluated to determine how his inclusion of Daniel served his overall purpose of the production of his Antiquities. It was determined that Josephus was concerned to show to the Romans the value of having a Jew in the court of a foreign king and he used Daniel to this end as he had earlier in the Antiquities with Joseph. |