Flavius Josephus: The Wars of the Jews, Book 1 — How Division Within Judea Opened the Door to Rome and Herod

Flavius Josephus opens the first book of The Wars of the Jews with a century and a half of Judean history, running from the rise of Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 175 BCE to the death of Herod the Great at Jericho in 4 BCE. He wrote in Koine Greek for a Roman audience, and he wrote with a thesis: Judea fell to foreign power because its own leaders tore the nation apart from within. He calls that internal strife στάσις, and he returns to the word wherever disaster strikes. A Christian who reads Book 1 gains the political ground beneath the Gospels, since this is the world in which Matthew places the Magi, Luke places Zechariah, and Acts places the death of Herod Agrippa I. Scripture supplies the standard by which Josephus’s account must be weighed, and that standard exposes the failures he records as well as the limits of the explanation he gives.

Literary Backgrounds: Greek and Second Temple Connections

Josephus works within the conventions of Greek political history and borrows its tools freely. From Polybius he takes the habit of explaining institutions, military tactics, and the rise of Roman power as a development whose causes a reader can trace. From Thucydides he takes the diagnosis of civil conflict as a sickness that consumes a society in crisis. For the details of Herod’s court he relies on the memoirs of Nicolaus of Damascus, and he reshapes Nicolaus’s favorable portrait by giving full weight to Herod’s cruelty. He also removes much of the open miracle that fills 2 Maccabees and tells the same wars in the manner of a Greek military narrative. The book moves in five stages: the Seleucid persecution and Maccabean revolt (BJ 1.31–69), Hasmonean expansion and decay up to Pompey in 63 BCE (1.70–158), the rise of Antipater and the early career of Herod (1.159–285), Herod’s consolidation of power and his building projects (1.286–430), and the domestic tragedy that closes his reign (1.431–673). Josephus covers a century in the opening pages and then slows to a crawl, spending the last movement of the book inside a single household.

Herod dominates the second half, and Josephus paints him in two colors. In public affairs Herod commands armies with courage and serves Rome with loyalty, and fortune (τύχη) favors him at nearly every turn. Inside his palace he appears as a man ruled by passions (πάθη), jealousy, and suspicion. Josephus arranges the two portraits so that each triumph abroad collects a loss at home, a reversal of fortune that Greek tragedy calls περιπέτεια. The reader sees what Herod cannot, as informants whisper against his sons and his own son Antipater feigns devotion while he schemes against his brothers. Letters, depositions, poison accusations, and trials fill the pages that national policy once occupied, and the fear grows until the whole court lives on rumor. Josephus moves the reader from the wide movements of empires in the opening chapters into the small, airless rooms where a king’s terror does its work.

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Theological and Ethical Analysis

Josephus states his theology plainly. God moved sovereignty from the Jews to Rome, and he did so because Jewish impiety and civil bloodshed called for judgment. The book follows that impiety into the sanctuary itself: Antiochus IV profaned the altar, Alexander Jannaeus executed his opponents near it, Pompey walked into the Holy of Holies in 63 BCE, and Herod slaughtered members of the Sanhedrin. Josephus names the power behind these events πρόνοια, providence, and he uses it to argue that Rome’s victories carry divine permission. A conservative evangelical reader recognizes the pattern, since it drives 1 and 2 Kings and Jeremiah, where God hands a covenant-breaking people to foreign armies. Josephus is right that God rules the movements of nations and that sin at the center of worship draws judgment.

The ethical verdict of Book 1 falls hardest on ambition. Josephus condemns leaders who risk the nation for personal gain, and the brothers Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II serve as his clearest case: Hyrcanus passive and easily steered, Aristobulus impulsive and reckless, and both willing to carry their quarrel to Rome. Antipater the Idumean prospers through shrewd alliances, supporting Julius Caesar and winning Roman citizenship and offices for his sons Phasael and Herod. Josephus admires the skill and records the price. Herod secures his crown in 40 BCE, captures Jerusalem in 37 BCE, wins Octavian’s confirmation after Actium in 31 BCE, and dies afraid of his own household. Josephus credits much of this career to τύχη, and Scripture corrects him here. Fortune has no hand in the history of Israel. The covenant God who gave the law at Sinai sets the boundaries of every king, and Herod’s successes served purposes that Herod never grasped.

Flavius Josephus: The Antiquities of the Jews (Books 11–20) — Empire, Priesthood, and Providence

Flavius Josephus composed his twenty-book history in Rome around 93–94 CE, and Books 11 through 20 carry the Jewish nation from the Persian restoration under Cyrus the Great to the eve of the First Jewish-Roman War. He wrote as a Jewish priest and former general who had surrendered to Vespasian, and he wrote under Flavian patronage, addressing a Roman audience that needed persuading of the loyalty and antiquity of the Jewish people. The result is a history that spans five centuries and five imperial regimes: Persian, Hellenistic, Hasmonean, Herodian, and Roman. Josephus gives Christian readers something Scripture itself does not supply in this stretch of centuries, a continuous narrative bridge across the intertestamental gap, and he gives them documentary access to the political world in which Jesus, John the Baptist, and the early church appeared.

Literary Backgrounds

Josephus writes within the tradition of Greco-Roman apologetic historiography, following models such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus. He inserts speeches into the mouths of his characters, moralizes through digression, and shapes his major figures according to classical dramatic patterns. Herod the Great receives the fullest such treatment. Books 15 through 17 present him as a tragic tyrant whose external achievements, the fortresses, the harbor at Caesarea, the expanded Temple, collapse under the weight of his domestic paranoia and the executions of his own wife and sons. Agrippa I, by contrast, appears in Book 19 as a monarch whose fidelity to ancestral law brings him temporal favor, at least until his own moment of pride undoes him. Josephus organizes the whole sweep of these books around a single moral principle: εὐσέβεια toward the law of Moses produces civic flourishing, and its absence produces catastrophe. He also draws his source material into conformity with this framework. In Book 12 he strips the poetic prayers of 1 Maccabees and replaces them with the battle speeches and indirect discourse of classical historiography, and in Books 14 and 16 he embeds Roman senatorial decrees to prove to his readers that Jewish religious rights carried long-standing legal sanction across the empire.

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Theological and Ethical Analysis

The theology running beneath this narrative is πρόνοια, divine providence operating through the decisions of pagan kings rather than through direct theophany. Josephus removes much of the anthropomorphic divine speech native to his Hebrew sources and replaces it with a more philosophically palatable account of God directing history indirectly. Cyrus, Alexander, Ptolemy II, and Claudius receive favorable treatment because they confirm Jewish law and custom. Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Caligula, and the later Roman procurators receive hostile treatment because they violate it. This is not merely narrative color. Josephus is making an ethical argument, that the Jewish people as a whole remained loyal subjects of whatever empire respected their πολιτεία, and that the catastrophe of 66 CE traces to corrupt individual agitators and incompetent administrators rather than to any defect in the Mosaic constitution itself. The moral arc of the narrative, however, exposes something Josephus does not fully reckon with. Books 18 through 20 chart a priesthood that degenerates from the reforming zeal of Ezra into an aristocracy that purchases its office from Roman governors and sends armed retainers to strip tithes from poorer priests. The very institution meant to mediate covenant relationship between God and Israel becomes, in Josephus’s own record, an instrument of predation.

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Old Testament Analysis and Critique

Book 11 opens with Cyrus’s decree, and Josephus draws on the Hebrew text of Ezra 1:1–11, which grounds the return from exile in the direct fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophecy. Ezra 6:1–12 records Darius’s confirmation of that decree after Persian officials locate Cyrus’s original memorandum in the Achaemenid archives at Ecbatana, and the episode presents Yahweh as sovereign over the administrative memory of a foreign empire, inclining a second king to honor the commitment of the first. Esther 3 and 8 supply the other major source for Book 11, and the Hebrew narrative constructs a chiastic reversal: Haman’s genocidal decree in chapter 3 against Mordecai and the Jewish people gives way to the royal counter-decree in chapter 8, secured through מָרְדֳּכַי and Esther, that permits Jewish self-defense throughout the empire’s provinces. The Hebrew text never names God directly, yet the reversal itself testifies to providential protection worked out through human courage inside a foreign court. Josephus retells both accounts, but he shifts their emphasis toward Hellenistic categories. He recasts Nehemiah as a φιλάνθρωπος, a benefactor whose private wealth serves public welfare, and he frames Haman’s plot as an assault on Jewish constitutional standing rather than as ethnic hatred alone. The covenant particularity of the Hebrew narrative gives way, in his retelling, to a universal civic virtue more legible to a Roman audience.

Plautus: Rudens — Storm, Sanctuary, and the Search for a True Refuge

A tempest wrecks a slave trader’s ship off the coast of Cyrene, and two trafficked young women wash ashore clinging to nothing but hope and a temple altar. Plautus wrote Rudens sometime between 211 and 191 BC, adapting a lost Greek comedy by Diphilus of Sinope for a Roman audience gripped by the anxieties of the Second Punic War. The play opens with the constellation Arcturus announcing that Jupiter has sent the storm on purpose, to punish the wicked pimp Labrax and to reunite the exiled Athenian Daemones with his long-lost daughter Palaestra. Beneath its comic surface, Rudens asks a question every human heart asks: does anyone actually watch over the vulnerable, or are the trafficked, the shipwrecked, and the forgotten simply left to chance? Scripture answers that question with far greater clarity, power, and grace than Plautus ever imagined, and reading his play against the full canon of God’s Word sharpens our gratitude for the God who not only observes suffering but enters it to save.

Literary Backgrounds: Greek and Ancient Connections

Plautus builds his plot on patterns his audience already recognized from the wider Greek literary world. Palaestra, stripped of home and status by a violent sea, arrives on a foreign shore and depends entirely on the mercy of strangers, echoing Odysseus washing up on the beach of Scheria in Homer’s Odyssey. The scene at Venus’s altar, where the frightened women cling to sacred stone while Labrax tries to drag them away by force, draws directly on the suppliant tradition of Greek tragedy found in Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women and Euripides’s Children of Heracles. Even the play’s cosmic opening has a literary ancestor: Hesiod’s Works and Days describes thousands of unseen spirits roaming the earth to report human wrongdoing to Zeus, and Arcturus performs exactly this function for Jupiter. Plautus takes these serious, even tragic, conventions and folds them into comedy, all while threading in the legal language of Rome’s own Twelve Tables regarding formal summons and property claims. The result is a play stitched together from Greek myth, Greek tragedy, and Roman law, united by one persistent longing: that some higher power notices when the weak are crushed by the strong.

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Theological and Ethical Analysis

Plautus gives that longing a name, but not the right one. Arcturus tells the audience that Jupiter keeps a running ledger of human conduct and dispatches storms as payment for wickedness, a transactional universe in which divine favor is earned or forfeited through deeds. Daemones embodies the Roman virtues of pietas and fides, and his willingness to risk his own household to defend two strangers at an altar genuinely reflects something true and good, a fragment of the moral order God stamped on every conscience at creation. Yet the entire drama assumes chattel slavery as an unquestioned fact of life; Palaestra escapes bondage only because she happens to be freeborn, proven by trinkets pulled from the sea in a fisherman’s net, while her companion Ampelisca remains enslaved to the very end. Scripture will not allow this arbitrary distinction to stand. Every human being, not merely the fortunate few with the right birth tokens, bears the image of God and possesses a dignity that no shipwreck, no pirate, and no market price can erase.

Old Testament Analysis and Critique

The Old Testament shares Plautus’s conviction that the sea itself answers to a higher authority, but it grounds that authority in a very different character. When Jonah flees toward Tarshish, Yahweh hurls a violent wind upon the water not out of mechanical retribution but to pursue his own disobedient prophet with relentless covenant love, and the pagan sailors who once prayed to lifeless gods end up fearing the living Lord and offering him sacrifices (Jonah 1:4–16). The law given at Sinai goes further than any altar of Venus ever could. Exodus 22 forbids the exploitation of the resident alien, גֵּר, the widow, אַלְמָנָה, and the fatherless child, יָתוֹם, warning that if these defenseless people cry out, Yahweh will surely hear them, because he is compassionate by nature rather than compassionate by mood (Exodus 22:21–24, 27). Where Plautus offers sanctuary only to those who reach a particular altar in time, the God of Israel commands his own people to build cities of refuge and to remember that they themselves were once strangers in Egypt, making protection of the vulnerable a matter of covenant identity rather than lucky proximity to sacred stone.

Plautus: Menaechmi — Twins, Trickery, and the Search for Something Truer

Somewhere on the Illyrian coast, in a city whose very name warns visitors of financial ruin, two identical brothers are about to turn a normal day into an unraveling comedy of mistaken identity. Plautus’ Menaechmi, staged sometime around 205–184 BC, is one of the oldest surviving farces in Western literature—and one of the most quietly revealing windows we have into the world the early church was born into.

A Roman Comedy in Greek Clothes

Menaechmi belongs to a genre the Romans called fabula palliata (pronounced FAH-boo-lah pahl-lee-AH-tah)—”comedy in a Greek cloak.” The setting is nominally Epidamnus, a Greek trading city on the Adriatic, and the characters wear Greek dress and bear Greek names. But underneath the costume, the play is thoroughly Roman. Plautus wrote in the decades following the Second Punic War, when Rome’s armies and merchants were pushing deep into the Greek Mediterranean, and his audience knew the world of piracy, slave markets, and courtroom politics firsthand.

The plot itself is simple on its face: two twin brothers, separated as boys, are unknowingly reunited in the same city on the same day, and everyone who meets one mistakes him for the other. A stolen cloak, a hungry parasite, a suspicious wife, and a courtesan named Erotium all get swept into the chaos before the truth is finally, joyfully uncovered.

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The Engine of the Farce

What makes Menaechmi work as comedy is dramatic irony—the audience knows the truth about the twins from the opening prologue, and every character’s confusion becomes a source of delight rather than confusion for the audience itself. Plautus reinforces this with constant winks at the crowd, at one point noting that while other playwrights always set their comedies in Athens to seem properly Greek, he will set his “nowhere”—wherever the actors happen to be standing. It is theater that never quite forgets it is theater.

Beneath the slapstick, though, Plautus lets real Roman anxieties surface. In one striking monologue, Menaechmus of Epidamnus steps outside the fiction entirely to complain about the burdens of Roman patronage—how a man of means is obligated to spend his days in the forum defending clients, worthy or not, simply because that is what the system demands. It is a moment where the Greek mask slips and Rome itself looks out at the audience.

A World Without Providence

Read simply as farce, Menaechmi is clever and disposable entertainment. Read alongside Scripture, it becomes something more interesting: a portrait of a world operating entirely without the light of revelation.

The play’s plot—a boy stolen from his family, years of separation, an eventual recognition scene in a foreign city—bears a striking structural resemblance to the Joseph narrative in Genesis, and to Jacob and Esau’s tangled identities in Genesis 25 and 27. But the resemblance only sharpens the contrast. Where Joseph tells his brothers that what they intended for evil, God intended for good, in order to preserve life (Genesis 50:20), Plautus’ twins credit nothing but blind luck (Fortuna) and their own cleverness for their reunion. There is no hashgachah—no providence—governing the plot of Menaechmi, only coincidence dressed up as fate.

The same emptiness shows up in how the play treats people. Messenio, the loyal slave, obeys his master purely out of fear of the whip, the millhouse, and the iron chain. Human beings are, in the language of Roman law, instrumentum vocale—”speaking property.” Compare that to Paul’s letter to Philemon, written two centuries later, in which the runaway slave Onesimus is to be received “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother” (Philemon 16). Or to Ephesians 6:9, where Christian masters are told to give up their threats altogether, since master and slave alike answer to the same Lord in heaven. The gospel did not immediately dismantle Roman slavery as an institution, but it detonated the assumptions underneath it—and Menaechmi shows us exactly what those assumptions looked like before the detonation.

Marriage fares no better in Plautus’ world. Menaechmus’ wife holds leverage over her husband only because of her dowry, and the whole arrangement is treated as a transaction to be managed rather than a covenant to be kept. The play’s resolution is telling: Menaechmus liquidates his estate and puts everything up for public auction—including, as a punchline, his own wife. Ephesians 5 answers this directly, calling husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (Ephesians 5:25). Where Plautus ends in an auction block, Paul ends in a cross.

Ion

In his play, Ion, Euripides attempts to answer the question of why the gods hold back justice. In the play, Creusa is seduced by Apollo and she becomes pregnant. In order to avoid shaming her father, Creusa abandons her son in a cave near Apollo’s temple at Delphi. She later marries Xuthus, who is unaware that she ever gave birth to a child. The two travel from Athens to Delphi because Xuthus wants to seek an oracle from Apollo concerning a male heir since they are childless.

At the temple, Creusa meets a young man named Ion who is the keeper of the temple. He tells Creusa of how he was abandoned as an infant and taken into custody at the temple, where he has lived for his whole life. He longs to know his mother and father but has lost all hope of ever knowing who they were. Touched by his sad story, Creusa tells of her misfortune, only she says it is a story of one of her friends.

Meanwhile, Xuthus receives an oracle in the temple telling him the next person he sees will be his son. As soon as he exits the temple he sees the Ion and runs and embraces him. Ion is startled, but when he hears that he will be adopted as Xuthus’s heir, he rejoices because at least he will have a father and a future.

Creusa, however, is outraged at this, fearing that Xuthus will kill her and give her inheritance and kingdom to Ion. She devises a plan to murder Ion with poison, lest she lose all she has. She has her servant put a drop of gorgon venom into Ion’s wine cup while he is partying with his friends over his good fortune and Xuthus is offering a sacrifice to Apollo. Ion, however, anticipates treachery and pours out the wine and has new wine brought. A bird drinks the wine and dies, confirming Ion’s suspicions. He calls the leaders of the city to arrest Creusa and throw her off a cliff for her crime.

Creusa hides in the temple but is found by Ion. Fortunately, Creusa realizes that Ion is the son she abandoned many years earlier when he tells her about the blanket and the basket he was left in. Ion rejoices to be reunited with his real mother and to learn that his father is a god. He agrees to keep this a secret from Xuthus, and they prepare to return to Athens as a happy family.

As they are leaving the temple, Athena appears and explains why Apollo had them wait so long to be reunited and why they had to go through such trying circumstances. Creusa repents of her anger and hatred towards Apollo, realizing that he had a greater plan to bless the region with a powerful new nation. Ion will have four sons who will set up power city states along the coast and on the islands of the Aegean Sea. This Ionian kingdom with have great influence throughout Asia and Europe. Xuthus will also have a natural son, Dorus, who will become a powerful king in Achaea.

Athena concludes her speech: “Heaven’s justice may tarry a while, yet comes it at the last in no wise weakened.”

The play ends with the chorus chanting: “’Tis only right that he, whose house is sore beset with trouble, should reverence God and keep good heart; for at the last the righteous find their just reward, but the wicked, as their nature is, will never prosper.”

The Greeks, as well as the Hebrews, struggled with the sovereignty of God (the gods) and the problem of evil. Both concluded that while the righteous may suffer, in the end, they will be blessed by God, and while the wicked may prosper for a while, they will not ultimately prosper in the end. God is in control and has our ultimate blessing in mind even though we may have to endure some trouble along the way. Don’t curse God when trouble comes; be patient and remain righteous.