35 texts in Josephus
After Alexander the Great died in 323 BCE, his empire shattered into warring kingdoms. Ptolemy, son of Lagus, seized Egypt—and Jerusalem along with it. Josephus records that Ptolem...
The Tobiads were a Jewish family who became the most powerful tax collectors in the Ptolemaic Empire—and nearly destroyed Judea in the process. Josephus tells the story of Joseph b...
The crisis started from within. Josephus records that after the High Priest Onias III died, a power struggle erupted between his brothers. Jason and Menelaus each bribed the Seleuc...
In the village of Modin, a priest named Mattathias gathered his five sons and told them it was better to die for the laws of their country than to live in disgrace. When the king's...
After routing the Seleucid armies, Judas Maccabeus did not rest. Josephus records that the surrounding nations, alarmed by the sudden revival of Jewish power, attacked Jewish commu...
Demetrius I, a Seleucid prince who had escaped captivity in Rome, seized the Syrian throne and immediately turned his attention to Judea. Jewish collaborators, led by the corrupt H...
After Judas Maccabeus fell in battle, everything he had fought for nearly collapsed. Josephus opens Book XIII of his Antiquities with a bleak picture: the lawless and the disloyal ...
The Seleucid Empire was tearing itself apart, and Jonathan knew exactly how to exploit it. Josephus records that after Alexander Balas overthrew Demetrius I and claimed the Syrian ...
When Trypho murdered his brother Jonathan, Simon, the last surviving son of Mattathias, took command. He was the eldest of the five brothers and the only one still alive. Josephus ...
John Hyrcanus escaped his father's assassination and seized control of Jerusalem before his treacherous brother-in-law could reach it. But the early years of his reign were brutal....
When Aristobulus I died after just one year on the throne, his widow Salome Alexandra did something audacious. She released Aristobulus's brothers from prison, where he had kept th...
After defeating the rebellion, Alexander Jannaeus returned to Jerusalem and made his enemies pay in the most horrifying way possible. Josephus records the scene: Alexander captured...
In 63 BCE, two brothers tore Judea apart. Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, both sons of the Hasmonean queen Alexandra, fought each other for the throne. Hyrcanus was the elder and the hig...
The real power behind the Jewish throne in the first century BCE was not a Jew at all. Antipater, an Idumean whose family had converted to Judaism only a generation or two earlier,...
Julius Caesar did something remarkable for the Jews. In a series of decrees preserved by Josephus in his Antiquities (written c. 93 CE), the Roman dictator formally guaranteed Jewi...
Herod was twenty-five years old when his father Antipater handed him the governorship of Galilee. His first act was to hunt down a band of raiders led by a man named Hezekiah who h...
In 40 BCE, the Parthian Empire invaded the Roman East and everything Herod had built nearly collapsed overnight. Antigonus, the last surviving son of Aristobulus, allied with the P...
Herod returned from Rome with a crown but no kingdom. Antigonus, backed by the Parthians, controlled Jerusalem. It took Herod three years of brutal campaigning to claim what the Ro...
Herod had the throne, but the Hasmonean family still haunted him. His wife Mariamne was a Hasmonean princess. Her mother Alexandra was relentless in promoting Hasmonean claims. And...
Mariamne was everything Herod wanted and everything he feared. A Hasmonean princess of extraordinary beauty, she gave him legitimate connection to the dynasty he had overthrown. Jo...
Herod tore down the Second Temple and rebuilt it from scratch. Not because it was falling apart. Because it wasn't grand enough for him. According to Josephus in Antiquities XV, He...
Herod sent his sons to Rome for an education. They came home polished, handsome, and walking straight into the deadliest family feud in Jewish royal history. Alexander and Aristobu...
Antipater wanted the throne so badly he was willing to destroy every member of his own family to get it. And for a while, it worked. According to Josephus in Antiquities XVI, Antip...
Herod strangled his own sons. Both of them. On the same day. At Sebaste, the city where he had married their mother Mariamne twenty years earlier. According to Josephus in Antiquit...
Two Torah scholars convinced their students to tear a golden eagle off the Temple gate in broad daylight. Herod burned them alive for it. According to Josephus in Antiquities XVII,...
Herod died the way he lived: in agony, surrounded by plots, and trying to control what happened after he was gone. His body was rotting while he was still inside it. According to J...
The moment Herod was dead, the nation exploded. Three separate revolts broke out across the country before his sons could even settle who inherited what. According to Josephus in A...
When Rome imposed a census on Judea in 6 CE, most Jews grudgingly complied. One man declared that paying taxes to Caesar was slavery, and slavery was a sin against God. According t...
Pontius Pilate moved his troops into Jerusalem at night and brought Roman military standards bearing Caesar's image into the holy city. Every previous governor had known better. Ac...
Agrippa went from debtor, to exile, to suicidal fugitive, to prisoner in chains, to king of all Judea. His life reads like the plot of a novel that an editor would reject as too im...
Caligula declared himself a god and ordered a colossal statue of himself installed inside the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem. The Jews told the Roman general they would rather die, ev...
Agrippa did something no Jewish king had done in a generation: he made the people feel like they had a ruler who was actually one of them. According to Josephus in Antiquities XIX,...
A queen from Mesopotamia converted to Judaism, moved to Jerusalem, and saved the city from famine. Her name was Helena of Adiabene, and she was one of the most remarkable converts ...
In the decades before the Great Revolt, Judea descended into a spiral of bandits, assassins, false prophets, and Roman brutality that made the final catastrophe feel inevitable. Ac...
Josephus ends his twenty-volume history of the Jewish people with a list, a boast, and a confession. The list is of every high priest from Aaron to the destruction of the Temple. T...
