Josephus Defended Jewish Suffering Against Its Mockers

The argument was ancient by the time Josephus heard it, and it has not grown old since: a people's suffering proves their guilt. If God favored them, they would not have lost their city. If their laws were just, they would not be ruled by others. The misfortune of the conquered is evidence of their unworthiness to be free.

Apion of Alexandria, a Greek-educated Egyptian intellectual of the first century CE, made exactly this case against the Jews. His version went something like this: the Jewish people have been subject to foreign rule, their city has suffered catastrophes, they have none of the marks of divine favor that a truly righteous nation would display. Alexandria, by contrast, has always been an imperial city. Therefore the Jews are not what they claim to be.

Josephus found the argument so contemptible that he wrote an entire book against it. Against Apion, composed around 94-96 CE, two decades after he had watched the Temple burn from the Roman side of the siege. He knew what Jewish suffering looked like. He had seen it in person. And he was not going to let Apion use it as ammunition.

His counterargument is a masterclass in historical irony. Josephus turns to Egypt itself. Apion's own people, as his first exhibit. The Egyptians, he points out, have perhaps the least standing of any ancient nation to claim that subjugation indicates unworthiness. They have been conquered by the Persians. They have been conquered by the Macedonians. They have had their temples demolished and their sacred animals, the animals they worshipped as gods, killed by foreign rulers. "They appear to have never, in all the past ages, had one day of freedom, no, not so much as from their own lords." The people Apion holds up as evidence of divine favor have been subject to successive empires from the earliest historical records forward.

The deeper argument is about what history proves. Does suffering prove guilt? Then what does it say about the Athenians, who suffered calamities and are nonetheless admired for their philosophy and their courage? What does it say about the Spartans, whose piety was beyond question and who nonetheless faced destruction? What does it say about Croesus of Lydia, who was known throughout the ancient world for his devotion to the gods and who lost everything?

History, Josephus argues, does not work as a ledger in which virtue is immediately rewarded and wickedness immediately punished. Empires rise and fall. Good people suffer. Bad rulers sometimes win. To infer from a nation's current political situation anything about the quality of their relationship with God is to misread what history actually shows.

This argument has particular force coming from Josephus, who was writing in the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The Second Temple had been destroyed. The city had been burned. Hundreds of thousands of Jews had died or been taken into slavery. Josephus himself had surrendered to the Romans and spent years as a client of the Flavian dynasty, writing Jewish history for a Roman audience. Nobody had more reason to understand both the depth of Jewish suffering and the temptation to interpret that suffering as a verdict.

He refused the interpretation. Not because the suffering wasn't real. He had seen it. But because the logic didn't hold. The Josephan corpus, written between the 70s and 90s CE, consistently insists on the historical dignity of the Jewish people even in the moment of their deepest catastrophe. His Jewish Antiquities traces Jewish history from creation to his own time as a continuous civilization with a coherent identity. His Jewish War presents the Romans who destroyed Jerusalem as violators of something sacred, not as agents of divine punishment.

The Book of Maccabees, composed two centuries before Josephus, preserves a story that his argument illuminates. Joseph son of Zacharias and Azarias, two military commanders who decided to seek glory while Judas Maccabeus was away, led an unauthorized attack against Gorgias at Jamnia. They lost. Two thousand Israelites died. The text is clear about why: they sought their own honor rather than obeying the strategic plan. Ambition without wisdom, action without authorization. The defeat was a consequence of their specific error, not a verdict on Jewish worthiness as a people.

That is the distinction Josephus was defending against Apion. Particular failures have particular causes. A nation's suffering in a specific moment can be explained by specific failures: of leadership, of strategy, of faithfulness. But to convert that into a general verdict on the people's standing before God, on the quality of their laws, on their worthiness to exist as a civilization. That is not history. That is motivated reasoning dressed as analysis.

Apion's argument has appeared in every century since Josephus wrote against it. The answer has not changed either: suffering is not a verdict, and the historical record of every nation, examined honestly, includes catastrophe. What matters is not whether a people has suffered, but what they made of the suffering and what they insisted on being in spite of it.