Flavius Josephus: Against Apion, Book 2 — The Law That Needs a Changed Heart

Flavius Josephus wrote Against Apion in Rome during the late Flavian era, around A.D. 94 to 96, and dedicated it to Epaphroditus, a Greek patron of letters and an imperial freedman. Titus had destroyed the Second Temple a generation earlier. Diaspora Jews now faced Roman suspicion, civic disenfranchisement, and the insult of the Fiscus Judaicus. Josephus answered with a defense that refuted Greco-Egyptian slander and established the antiquity of Judaism, and he argued that the Law of Moses produced civic virtue and order alongside genuine piety.

Book 2 meets the accusers directly. Alexandrian Greeks and Jews had clashed under Caligula and Claudius, and writers such as Apion, Lysimachus, Chaeremon, and Apollonius Molon carried the quarrel into print. They claimed the Jews left Egypt because of leprosy. They claimed worshipers in the Holy of Holies bowed to a donkey’s head, a charge the Greeks called ὀνολατρεία, and that Jews sacrificed Greek captives in ritual murder. They added that Jews swore oaths against Gentiles and never produced a philosopher or inventor worth naming. Behind each charge stood the accusation of ἀμιξία, a settled refusal to mix with other peoples. Christians who read this book watch a believing community answer public slander with evidence and moral clarity, a task the church has never outgrown.

Literary Backgrounds: Greek and ANE Connections

Josephus builds the book as a courtroom drama. Greek forensic rhetoric supplies the categories of κατηγορία, accusation, and ἀπολογία, defense, and the second half of the work swings into encomium, a speech of praise. He adapts Hellenistic conventions to defend a legal tradition born in the ancient Near East. After a short opening that recaps his answers to Manetho and Chaeremon (2.1–14), he takes on Apion across 2.15–144. He covers Alexandrian citizenship and Jewish legal standing, loyalty to the Ptolemies and the Roman emperors, the golden ass-head and the supposed Greek sacrifice, and the charge that Jews produced no notable men. A brief rebuttal of Apollonius Molon and Lysimachus follows (2.145–150). Then comes the positive defense of the Jewish constitution, the πολιτεία, in 2.151–286, and an epilogue in 2.287–296 that asserts the divine origin and moral superiority of Mosaic law.

Characterization carries much of the argument. Apion comes across as a bombastic charlatan and an immoral slanderer, while Moses stands as the oldest lawgiver in the world, wise, humble, and guided by God. In 2.220–286 Josephus sets Moses beside Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Sparta, and Athens. Plato’s Republic and Laws sketched an ideal city that stayed on paper for a few philosophers, and Moses gave an entire nation a lived legal order. Lycurgan Sparta collapsed under rigid isolationism and moral flaws, and the Mosaic law endures through exile across the world. Josephus also prefers physical evidence to speculation, so royal decrees, bronze tablets, and the stones of the Temple carry his case. His voice stays commanding from first page to last, and he ridicules Apion’s inconsistencies with open moral indignation.

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Theological and Ethical Analysis

The pivot of the book sits at 2.165, where Josephus coins the word Θεοκρατία. He draws the reader’s whole attention to it because it places every part of Jewish government under the sovereignty of God. God governs the universe as its active Ruler, and Moses serves as his faithful administrator, transmitting a divine order. From there Josephus surveys the Mosaic precepts in 2.190–219: the unity of God, worship at the one Temple, the high priesthood, family life, burial, charity, and fairness in the courts. He speaks to Roman ideals of pietas, justice, and courage, and he argues that Jewish practice surpasses them.

Josephus defends the invisibility and uncreated nature of God against the rumor of hidden idols in the Temple. He cites Mosaic provisions for strangers, charity, and fair trial to refute the charge of μισανθρωπία, and he presents the purity and dietary laws as training in self-control, σωφροσύνη. He stresses that every Jewish child receives instruction in the Law. Scripture affirms the goodness of that Law, and these ethical claims deserve a Christian’s respect. The weak point comes in 2.170–183, where Josephus presents full obedience to the Mosaic code as the path to personal righteousness, national unity, and divine favor.

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Old Testament Analysis and Critique

Josephus roots Θεοκρατία in the Old Testament itself. At Sinai Yahweh called Israel a מַמְלֶכֶת כֹּהֲנִים, a kingdom of priests (Exod 19:5–6), and Scripture names him King over his people (1 Sam 8:7). The Decalogue (Exod 20:1–17) grounds ethics in redemption, since the God who brought Israel out of Egypt speaks first and obligation follows his rescue. Josephus translates this covenant language into a political structure that Roman theorists could grasp. He also echoes the prohibition of images (Exod 20:4–5) and the confession of Deuteronomy 6:4, שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל, with its command to teach children at home and in the community (Deut 6:4–9). His insistence on universal legal education grows straight from that passage.

Deuteronomy 4:5–8 supplies the verse behind his whole apologetic. Moses told Israel that the statutes themselves would testify to the nations of God’s nearness and righteous judgment. Josephus lifts up the universal moral wisdom of Deuteronomy 4:6 for his Gentile audience in Rome and supports it with the Law’s provisions for the stranger (Exod 22:21; Lev 19:33–34). He leaves the covenant blessings and curses in the background. The Old Testament presents the Law as a holy covenant bound to Yahweh’s election and redemptive history, and that fuller voice carries a weight civic virtue can’t bear. A nation can admire a code of conduct and still miss the Lord who gave it.

The Hellenistic Philosophers: Philo of Alexandria — On the Decalogue, On the Special Laws, On Virtues, and On Rewards and Punishments

In the early decades of the Roman principate, a wealthy Jewish philosopher in Alexandria set out to prove that Moses was the greatest lawgiver the world had ever known. Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC–AD 50) wrote his sprawling exposition of the Mosaic Law—On the Decalogue, On the Special Laws, On Virtues, and On Rewards and Punishments—to defend his people’s faith against pagan mockery and to keep educated Diaspora Jews from abandoning literal obedience for empty philosophical abstraction. He wrote as a man under pressure: Alexandria’s Jewish community had just endured brutal anti-Jewish pogroms under the governor Flaccus, and Philo himself would soon lead a desperate embassy to the emperor Caligula to plead for his people’s survival. Reading his legal treatises today gives modern Christians a rare window into how a brilliant, embattled Jewish mind tried to reconcile divine revelation with Greek philosophy—and it gives us an opportunity to see, by contrast, how much more glorious the gospel of Jesus Christ truly is.

Literary Backgrounds: A Bridge Between Sinai and the Lyceum

Philo composed his work as part of a grand, multi-volume project called the Exposition of the Law, moving systematically from the creation of the world to the Ten Commandments, then to the entire body of Mosaic legislation, then to the virtues that law produces, and finally to the blessings and curses that crown obedience or disobedience. His method borrows heavily from Greek philosophical schools. He maps the Ten Commandments onto the ten Aristotelian categories and onto Pythagorean number theory, arguing that the perfection of the number ten proves the commandments encompass the whole of reality. He personifies conscience, which he calls ἔλεγχος, as an internal accuser residing within the soul, echoing the Stoic concept of συνείδησις. He even reinterprets the Septuagint’s strange wording in Exodus, that the people “beheld the voice” of God at Sinai, as evidence that divine revelation is not fleeting sound but a visible, permanent illumination of the mind, filtered through Platonic categories of sight and intellect. Philo’s genius lay precisely here: he took Israel’s sacred history and translated it into the philosophical vocabulary of the Greco-Roman world, hoping to persuade skeptical Gentiles that Moses, not Plato, was the true source of all wisdom.

Theological and Ethical Analysis: Cosmic Law Without a Cosmic Savior

Philo’s central theological claim is that the Mosaic Law is nothing less than the transcript of Cosmic Natural Law, νόμος φύσεως, written into the very structure of the universe. This is why he can insist that Moses gave the law in the wilderness rather than in a city: the desert’s silence strips away the noise and corruption of human civilization and forces the soul to confront divine reality directly. It is also why he treats the singular, second-person address of the commandments, “Thou shalt not,” as evidence of God’s determination to hold every individual personally accountable rather than letting sinners hide inside the anonymity of the crowd. There is real moral insight here, and Christians can appreciate it. But the deeper structure of Philo’s ethics is a program of self-mastery: the soul disciplines the passions, ascends through philosophy, and achieves virtue by its own rational effort, guided by the divine λόγος. Salvation, for Philo, is an intellectual and moral achievement. It is a ladder the soul climbs, not a gift the soul receives.

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Old Testament Analysis and Critique: From Covenant History to Timeless Allegory

The actual text of the Decalogue in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 does not read the way Philo reads it. The commandments open with a historical prologue, “I am YHWH your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery,” establishing that these are not abstract philosophical axioms but covenant stipulations given to a people YHWH has already redeemed. The first four commandments demand exclusive loyalty to YHWH against the polytheism of the ancient Near East; the remaining six protect life, marriage, property, truth, and the human heart within the covenant community. The blessings and curses of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 likewise function as the standard terms of an ancient Near Eastern vassal treaty, promising tangible national and agricultural consequences for covenant fidelity or rebellion. Philo retains the LXX’s precise wording but empties it of this historical, covenantal shape. Israel’s exodus from literal slavery in Egypt becomes an allegory for the soul’s escape from bodily passion; the promised blessings of the land become allegories for inward peace and philosophical contemplation. What God gave as a real, dated, historical covenant with a real, redeemed nation, Philo converts into a timeless myth of the rational soul’s private ascent.

The Pre-Socratics: Archelaus of Athens: The Philosopher Who Made Justice a Matter of Opinion

Long before modern culture began arguing that morality is whatever a society decides it to be, a philosopher in fifth-century BCE Athens had already staked out that ground. Archelaus of Athens stood at a hinge point in Greek thought, trained under Anaxagoras and later teaching the young Socrates, and he used that position to push Greek philosophy from questions about nature toward questions about how people ought to live. His answer to those questions—that justice and nobility exist only because human beings agreed to call them so—still echoes in every conversation where someone insists that right and wrong are simply products of culture. Reading Archelaus through the lens of Scripture exposes both the poverty of that claim and the surpassing beauty of a moral order grounded in the character of God rather than the shifting consensus of men.

Literary Backgrounds: Greek and Ancient Near Eastern Connections

Diogenes Laertius preserves the fullest account of Archelaus, presenting him within the genre of philosophical biography that traces the succession of Greek thinkers from one master to the next. The text organizes reality around a series of contrasts: heat against cold as the forces that generate physical life, and nature (φύσις) against convention (νόμος) as the forces that generate moral life. Archelaus taught that animals arose directly out of primordial mud, a claim that faintly echoes the Mesopotamian creation accounts and stands remarkably close to Genesis 2:7, where God forms man from the dust of the ground. The resemblance ends there. Where the ancient Near Eastern myths and Archelaus alike leave the origin of life to blind material process, Genesis insists that dust becomes a living being only when God Himself breathes life into it. Archelaus’s ethical claim proved even more consequential for the history of thought: he argued that justice and shame belong to nomos rather than physis, a position that the Sophists Protagoras and Gorgias would sharpen into a full program of moral relativism, and that Plato and Aristotle would spend their careers refuting.

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Theological and Ethical Analysis

Archelaus deserves credit for careful observation. He watched the natural world and tried to explain it through consistent causes, and he correctly noticed that human societies build legal codes through agreement. But his philosophy collapses at its foundation because it removes the Creator from both physics and ethics. A universe governed only by hot and cold acting on mud has no room for purpose, and a morality grounded only in nomos has no room for permanence. If justice is nothing more than what a given city or generation decides to enforce, then justice has no authority over the next city or the next generation that decides differently. Archelaus handed later thinkers a coherent statement of a very old temptation: to build a moral order without submitting to a moral Lawgiver.

Old Testament Analysis and Critique

Genesis 2:7 answers Archelaus’s biogenesis directly. Man is indeed drawn from apar, the dust of the ground, but the text will not allow the reader to stop at dust. God forms the man with His own hands and breathes into him the breath of life, neshamah, so that he becomes a living soul through personal divine action rather than thermal accident. The Old Testament answers Archelaus’s ethics with equal force. Psalm 89:14 declares that righteousness and justice are the very foundation of God’s throne, and steadfast love and faithfulness go before Him. Micah 6:8 grounds human obligation in the character of the Lord Himself. Mishpat, justice, and hesed, covenant loyalty, are not human inventions subject to renegotiation; they flow from the unchanging nature of God and are revealed to His people so that they might walk uprightly before Him. Archelaus looked at law and saw only human agreement. Scripture looks at law and sees the fingerprint of God.