Download PDF | (Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology) Steven B. Bowman - Sepher Yosippon _ A Tenth-Century History of Ancient Israel-Wayne State University Press (2022).
555 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I first met David Flusser as a Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1978-79. In our telephone conversation, I congratulated him on his forty-year effort to present a scholarly edition of Sepher Yosippon, thus superseding the fourteenth-century edition of the text by Yehudah ibn Mosqoni, which I was then researching. He immediately invited me to his home along with my dissertation. We continued to discuss my work for the next twenty years, during which I enjoyed an intellectual feast of his vast knowledge. Rav todot to my companion and counterpart ezer kenegdi Yael Feldman, whose control of Hebrew language and literature as well as editorial experience has made many of my projects and this particular text more comprehensible.
My thanks too to Aviad Kleinberg, who read through the entire text, applying his medieval expertise. Special thanks to Dan Ben Amos for his comments and mostly for shepherding the text through the press as part of his Raphael Patai Series. Many thanks to the many scholars with whom I have discussed the text, as mentioned in the notes. I am grateful to the libraries, institutions, and staffs whose hospitality and support over the decades have facilitated my research and study: the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Ben Zvi Institute, Hebrew Union College, the John Miller Burnam Classics Library of the University of Cincinnati, Indiana University, New York University, the University of California at Berkeley, the Jewish Museum of Greece, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection at Cambridge University, and Wolfson College. Special thanks to the Judaic Studies Department at the University of Cincinnati, which succored me for over three decades, and to the Charles Philip Taft Memorial Fund at UC, which graciously supported much of my research and publications. Finally, 1 am most grateful to the Fulbright Foundation for its continued support of my career.
STEVEN BOWMAN Cincinnati, New York, Jerusalem
INTRODUCTION
SEPHER YOS/PPON: AN ORPHAN CLASSIC
Sepher Yosippon (The Book of Yosippon, alt. Josippon, Yosifun) has been for over a millennium one of the most popular and influential books for Jews and non-Jews alike who consider it the lost work of Josephus Flavius on the RomanJewish war, a work that he claimed to have written for his own people in their language. The earliest date we have for this Hebrew masterpiece, 953 CE, is in an internal colophon by a copyist in a fifteenth-century manuscript of Yosippon, read over a millennium after Josephus’s Bellum Iudaicum appeared at the court of Domitian, son of the emperor Vespasian, and his brother Titus, the conquerors of Jerusalem who destroyed the Temple in 70 CE (or 68, as medieval Jews calculated it).
The anonymous author of Sepher Yosippon had access, perhaps in Naples and other Italian locales, to a decent library of ancient and medieval material that he and his later editors gathered and translated and cobbled together in this first history of the Second Temple period since Josephus Flavius. The author’s main sources were 1 and 2 Maccabees, found in Jerome's Latin Apocrypha to the Bible, Josephus’s Bellum Iudaicum and books 1-16 of his Archaeologies (or Antiquities) of the Jews, and the fourth-century Pseudo-Hegesippus’s Latin theological/historiographical polemic De excidio urbis Hierosolynitano (DEH; On the Destruction of Jerusalem), which was itself based on Josephus’s Jewish War. He supplemented these basic sources with numerous Latin chronicles such as Jerome’s translation of Eusebius, as well as Latin classics such as Virgil’s Aeneid, Macrobius, Orosius, and later epitomes of Livy as well as midrashic allusions. For style he relied on Jerome’s Vulgate Latin and the Hebrew TaNaKH. All this material and more, including Apocrypha, Late Antique (classical) and later medieval rabbinical midrash, and the new literature of the South Italian Hebrew renaissance, was reworked into a first-class history in an elegant Hebrew style. This history, in its many secularized and translated versions, remained for centuries a most important national and religious source for Jews, as well as a key complement to Josephus for Christians and even Muslims.
Sepher Yosippon contains a history of Jews during the Second Temple period (sixth century BCE to the finale at Masada). The author begins his story with the family of nations (cf. Gen. 10) he compiled from the various travelers, diplomatic accounts, and other local sources that described the peoples of the tenth century CE. His second chapter introduces the theme of Rome and Jerusalem that he learned from Josephus and Livy and identifies Rome with the ancient rival of Edom through his biography of Zepho ben Eliphaz ben Esau, a Hebrew version of Herakles. He summarizes Rome’s rivalry with Carthage, the career of Hannibal until his defeat by Scipio, and Rome’s emergence as the conqueror of the western Mediterranean, which led to its victorious turn to the East.
There the Roman Republic emerges first as the protector and ally of the Maccabees and Herod and later as the imperial conqueror and destroyer of Jerusalem and Masada. The author’s treatment of the Maccabees is heroic, while that of Herod combines the panegyric of Nicholas of Damascus, Herod's prolific secretary, with the critique of Josephus to produce a picture that echoes the glorious but flawed careers of David and Solomon, the latter derived perhaps partly from Nicholas of Damascus and Josephus. The author's brilliant rhetoric captures the style of Pseudo-Hegesippus in the tale of the woman who ate her son and introduces a large corpus of Neo-Platonic themes that influenced his Jewish readers and interpolators. Among other additions, the interpolations to Sepher Yosippon include Pseudo-Kallisthenes’s fabulous account of Alexander and reflections of early Christian fabulae of Jesus.
Abraham Conat summarized the contents of Sepher Yosippon in his introduction, which may interest readers today as it has for some five centuries:
How all the families on earth dispersed by name according to their fathers, the wars of the Babylonians and the Romans, the wars of the Persian kings with the Babylonian king and how Belshazzar was killed, the story of Daniel’s valor in the eyes of the Persian kings and the reason for his greatness and its consequences; twice he was lowered into the lions’ den and how he was fed by the prophet Habakkuk; and how he destroyed the temple of Bel the major errant in Babylon and killed his priests and also how he killed the great dragon in the cave. Also the reason for the greatness of Zerubavel ben Shealtiel in the eyes of Darius king of Persia; the prayer to God of Ezra the scribe and Nehemiah ben Hakhaliah and Mordecai and Yeshua and the rest of the leaders of the Exile for the strange fire, and how it was found since there was no priestly direction to offer up the strange fire.
It also includes Queen Esther's story and her prayer, a most pleasant story, along with a lengthy history of Alexander the Great and his heroic deeds, beginning with Nektanibur the great magician, king of Egypt. It mentions by name and describes the grandeur of all the kings and caesars that were in Rome at the time of the Second Temple, as well as their love and their hate for the kings of Judah during the Second Temple. Included too are the great and terrible wars that began to break out among the people of Judah in the days of Antiochus, and the signs that were seen in Jerusalem and their consequences, and the holiness and fear of the Lord that Hannah sanctified with her seven saintly sons, along with the tale of Hasmonean bravery and the story of Hanukkah, and the record of all the kings who ruled during the Second Temple. He also tells the pleasant story about Herod’s building and the gold vine that he set in our Lord’s Sanctuary as well as all his exploits including the murder of his wife the queen and his three sons.
This is followed by the affair of his son Antipater and his end, and many other pleasant stories, so numerous that I am wearied to recall them here. Finally, the valor ofJoseph ben Gurion for God’s people and His Sanctuary, and how he saved his life through his wisdom. Also his dirge over Jerusalem and the Temple of God and His people, as well as his rebukes of the men of Jerusalem in the days of Vespasian and Titus his son and his prayer to God, Lord of all the earth, and all that followed until the destruction of our Temple—let it be built and established quickly in our days, amen. Blessed be the living and awesome Lord on high who assisted me, Abraham, in completing the book, today, 49 of the reckoning [1489].
A tenth-century copy of Sepher Yosippon was made for the Sephardi Jewish leader Hasdai (ibn Shaprut). In southern Italy, Yerahme’el ben Shlomo included a copy of Sepher Yosippon in his late eleventh—twelfth century manuscript preserved in Eleazar ben Asher’s Sepher Ha-Zikhronoth (Book of Records)—a major anthology of the early fourteenth century. A partial edition of Yosippon was excerpted by Abraham ibn Daud in twelfth-century Spain (critical edition by Gershon Cohen, The Book of Tradition: (Sefer ha-Qabbalah) by Abraham ibn Da‘ud [Philadelphia, 1967]; and Katja Vehlow, Dorot Olam: A Critical Edition and Translation of Abraham Ibn Daud’s Universal History [New York, 2013]); an expanded version of Sepher Yosippon was made by Yehudah ibn Mosqoni in mid-fourteenth-century Byzantium and later published by Tam ibn Yahya at the beginning of the sixteenth century in Ottoman Constantinople (1510). Abraham Conat published the first edition of Sepher Yosippon in Mantua 1475-77 based on Ibn Daud’s excerpts.
The first modern edition was published by Baron David Guenzburg ( Yosifun: Kefi defus Mantovah .. . [Berdichev, 1896-1913]) based on Ibn Yahya’s edition. In 1978, two scholarly editions appeared in Jerusalem: Hayyim Hominer’s fourth edition of a traditional version also based on the 1510 publication, with rabbinic annotation and an introduction by Rabbi Avraham Yosef Wertheimer (Jerusalem, 1978); and David Flusser’s two volumes (Jerusalem, 1978 and 1980), the first scholarly edition to be based on manuscripts. An important critical review by Reuven Bonfil of Flusser’s edition appeared in the major daily Davar (September 28, 1981, 12-14).
Translations of Yosippon were already available in the eleventh century, if not earlier, in Arabic (by Zakaria ibn Sa’id), in Old Russian, and in Slavonic. The Ethiopic version (ca. 1300)! was added to the Scriptures of that church. Ibn Khaldun provided a lengthy Arabic version of a Coptic text he found in Egypt in the fourteenth century; he commented that it was the only text available on the ancient history of the Jews after the Torah.” Sebastian Muenster published a partial Latin version of Conat’s edition in 1541 (Josephus Hebraicus [Basle]), and an English précis of it by Peter Morvyn appeared in 1558 (A Compendious and Moste Marveylous History of the Latter Times of the Jewes Commune Weale [London]), often reprinted (Boston, 1718; Worcester, MA, 1805; Vermont, 1819); it became popular through its Boston publication in 1718 and was reprinted several times in New England during the early nineteenth century. A Yiddish translation by Michael Adam appeared in 1546. A revised Yiddish version by Menahem Amelander appeared in 1743, followed by a sequel covering the next millennium and a half since Josephus. A complete annotated version in Latin by Johannes Gagnier appeared in 1706, text by Johan Friedrich Breithaupt, Josephus Hebraicus ... Libri VI. Juxta editonem Venetam (Gotha and Leipzig, 1710), and numerous modern language translations and excerpts subsequently. A Judeo-Arabic version appeared in the late nineteenth century. A scholarly Hebrew edition of the Arabic Yosippon appeared by Shulamit Sela (Jerusalem, 2009).
An English translation of the first section on the Maccabees of Yerahme’els eleventh-century recension of Sepher Yosippon was translated by Moses Gaster in The Chronicles of Jerahmeel (Oxford, 1899).> A recent German translation by Dagmar Borner-Klein and Beat Zuber is interfaced with Flusser’s Hebrew text: Josippon (Wiesbaden, 2010).
The pre-Flusser bibliography on Sepher Yosippon was compiled by Louis H. Feldman in his bibliographic volume on Josephus: Josephus and Modern Scholarship (1937-1980) (New York, 1984); this bibliography updates the entry in The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York, 1905), s.v. “Josippon.” An extensive scholarly prolegomenon by Haim Schwarzbaum was prefaced to Gaster’s Chronicles of Jerahmeel.* An update on more recent scholarship by Feldman appears in Josephus, the Bible, and History, edited by Feldman and Gohei Hata, 334-39 (Detroit, 1989). Subsequent basic studies include Albert Bell, “Josephus and Pseudo-Hegesippus,” in Feldman and Hata, Josephus, the Bible, and History; and Steven Bowman, “Josephus in Byzantium,” and Flusser, “Josippon, a Medieval Version of Josephus,” in Feldman and Hata, Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity (Detroit, 1987); also see Bowman, “A Tenth-Century Byzantine Jewish Historian? A Review of David Flusser’s Studies on the Josippon,” Byzantine Studies / Etudes Byzantines 10 (1983): 133-36; Bowman, “Yosippon and Jewish Nationalism,’ PAAJR 61 (1995): 23-51.
Scholarship by Saskia Dénitz includes Uberlieferung und Rezeption des Sefer Yosippon (Tiibingen, 2013); “Historiography among Byzantine Jews: The Case of Sefer Yosippon,’ in Jews in Byzantium: Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures, edited by Robert Bonfil, Oded Irshai, Guy G. Stroumsa, and Rina Talgam, 95 1-68 (Leiden, 2012); and her English summary “Sefer Yosippon (Josippon),” in A Companion to Josephus, edited by Honora Howell Chapman and Zuleika Rodgers, 382-89 (Oxford, 2016). An important update on Hegesippus in medieval scholarship is by Richard Matthew Pollard, “The De Excidio of “Hegesippus’ and the Reception of Josephus in the Early Middle Ages,” Viator 46 (2015): 65-100, along with the ongoing publications of Carson Bay on the relationhip of DEH to Sepher Yosippon and his forthcoming translation of DEH.
The author of Sepher Yosippon is unique in his historical methodology, which helped him arrive at conclusions that anticipated the Jewish historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The work of these historians—part of the Wissenschaft des Judenthums, the scholarly movement that represents the influence of German scholarship in the nineteenth century—offers an interesting modern parallel to the philosophizing influence of the Hellenistic period and the Christian influence of the Middle Ages. Yosippon was faithful to his sources—some of which are no longer extant—that represented sound medieval scholarship (as Flusser was able to test). His reliance on Pseudo-Hegesippus’s abstruse Latin and the faulty manuscripts he read resulted in anumber of errors that have been preserved in this translation. The specialist is referred to Flusser’s extensive Hebrew and Latin annotations in volume 1 and to his historical commentary in volume 2 of his Hebrew edition. A representative selection of Flusser’s annotations appears in this volume’s notes. For further reading, Flusser’s essay “The Author of Sepher Josippon as Historian” (1973), reprinted in Sefer Yosippon, ed. Flusser, Hanusah Hamekori (Jerusalem, 1979), 28-51, summarizes the major points of Flusser’s enchantment with the author of Sepher Yosippon. His volume 2 of the scholarly edition contains a summary of his historiographical research; that volume’s table of contents is annotated following this introduction.
Sepher Yosippon is a good read, which is probably one of the main reasons for its popularity over the ages, as attested by the plethora of translations into numerous languages throughout the medieval and modern periods. Its lively Hebrew language anticipates, in a way, Modern Hebrew and has provided numerous words and phrases to later Hebrew. Eliezer ben Yehudah plumbed the text for his Thesaurus of Modern Hebrew; see Yosippon’s two statements by Matityahu the Hasmonean in chapter 16, for example, “Live and prosper,’ and anshei shlomeinu in chapter 42. Moreover, Abba Kovner quotes (with subtle adjustment) Matityahu’s rallying cry for revolt (chapter 16). The book became a major influence on subsequent historical style and content for Jewish scholars for centuries. In sum, Sepher Yosippon’s author, as his modern editor David Flusser argued, may have been the only true “historian,” in the modern sense of the term, during the medieval period. He devoted his story completely to the distant past, critically read his sources, and examined a wide range of materials that he adjusted to enliven his story (e.g., Virgil’s Aeneid and the author's imaginary biography of Zepho in chapter 2).
The text chosen for this translation is the critical edition prepared by David Flusser based on the first scholarly comparison of the extant manuscripts, including Genizah fragments, and his extensive philological analysis of Sepher Yosippon’s sources. Whatever challenges have been raised regarding Flusser’s dating and the interpretations he offered in his annotated commentary, his edition opened a new chapter in the study of this unique Hebrew text. It is also a monument to his philological and historical expertise and to his broad learning in Second Temple and medieval sources as well as modern scholarship. In addition, many of his notes include explanatory background and references to Josephus for his Hebrew audience.
Sepher Yosippon is part of a rich midrashic literature that runs the gamut from the historical and chronological commentaries of the Hellenistic period to the legal, ethical, and folkloristic material that saturates rabbinic literature. Midrash, a new term that appears first in 2 Chronicles (13:22 and 24:27), was translated in the Septuagint as “book” (biblos) and “writing” (graphe) (compare Herodotus’s istoria as an investigation and a “history,” and the Greek version of Ecclesiastes [51:23] paideia). Along with the two Talmuds, this postbiblical literature expanded and rewrote the biblical corpus as a tool to assist Jews to adopt and adapt to contemporary gentile challenges to the expansion of their own identity and cultural development. As the classic Roman statement of Terence put it, “nothing human is alien to me.’ So Jews studied everything as a potential source to expand their understanding of the Bible, the core of their national and religious history, using the panoply of intellectual tools of the period in which they wrote (classics, philosophy, mathematics, physics, and a host of nineteenthand twentieth-century disciplines). Since God had created everything for the good by the word, so everything in our reality had to be examined and Judaized to the greater glory and holiness of that Creator and creation itself. Among Jews, the newly acquired Greek sophia merged with Hebrew hokhmah in a double helix of (holy) wisdom that continually redefines Western civilization.
Midrash became an ongoing project in tandem with contemporary developments of Jewish legal and moral precepts later codified in the Mishnah and Talmud and their ongoing commentaries. New materials too were translated and interpolated into older literature, just as the Apocrypha were added to the biblical corpus (see Yosippon’s use of Apocryphal additions to the Scroll of Esther and the Book of Daniel, including Esther’s prayer based on Asenath’s conversionary prayer). Also we find the new literature generated by Jewish Messianists in the New Testament and the latter’s own Apocrypha. So too the Greek and Latin popular literature of Late Antiquity was translated and interpolated into Sepher Yosippon, viz. the Alexander Romance of Pseudo-Kallisthenes and other interpolations such as Jerome's Illustrious Men and the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor in 962, which was applied to Vespasian. These interpolations by later copyists from the tenth to the eleventh centuries have been isolated and translated in the appendices at the end of this volume.
The choice in this translation to transliterate the names rather than render them in modern English reflects one of Flusser’s responses to his critics that the names are derived from the Latin of his sources and the Italian of the author’s environment. The first mention of a name is accompanied by its more familiar form; thus, Kleopatrah (Cleopatra).
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
Sepher Yosippon and its derivative versions represent an ongoing exercise in the Jewish encounter with non-Jews, whose manifestation in all facets of intellectual endeavor has fructified and advanced our common striving to develop the mind and soul of the animated clump of clay that is our common ancestor, the first golem. And the tortuous path toward maturity of Adam’s descendants during the period between the destruction of the two ancient Temples of Jerusalem was deemed a necessary addition to Jewish lore by an anonymous author toward the end of the first millennium of the Common Era. It is fitting that a new English version appears at the bridging of the second and third millennia. May it harbor better prospects for our common family of nations as they work through the vicissitudes of the present historical transitional period.
S.B. Rosh Hashanah September 2022
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