Whether, and how far, Josephus used the Hebrew along with the Greek text has not yet, it seems, been ascertained with sufficient accuracy. There can hardly be a doubt that a man of his antecedents and education would be almost as well acquainted with Hebrew as with the Aramaic spoken in his day; but the indications that he made any use of the copy of the Hebrew Scrip- tures which he rescued from the ruins of Jerusalem (Vita, 418) are very slight. Practically, the only hint which he gives of a knowledge of Hebrew, and the only criterion which he offers us for test- ing the extent of his knowledge, is to be found in the etymological explanations which he appends to the Hebrew proper names throughout the narra- tive; many of these explanations, however, where they are not easily deducible from Scripture, are probably taken from contemporary Midrashim ; while occasionally, as in the explanation of the names Mwvofs (Ant. It. 228) and ‘Iepooddvua (BS VI. 438), he accommodates himself to his Greek readers, and accepts incorrect, or at best extremely doubtful, etymologies. See, on the whole subject, Siegfried, ‘Die Hebriischen Worterklirungen des Josephus’ (ZATW, 1883, pp. 32-52).
2. Canon of OT.—Josephus, as we have seen, in writing his Antiquities, draws freely upon Greek books, such as 1 Esdras and 1 Maccabees, which were never regarded as canonical; and no hint is given that the information derived from them is less trustworthy than that contained in the can- onical books. In the opening of his work, using rhetorical language, he declares that ‘the holy jytitings contain the history of five thousand years’ (ioe Cla XX 259i), ut that he was aware of the distinction between canonical and un- canonical books is made plain by a well-known passage in the contra Apionem, whichis of primary importance for the history of the OT Canon, and must be quoted in full. Contrasting the reliability of Greek and Hebrew records, he says (c. Ap. 1. 37 ff.): ‘The writing [of the Scriptural records] was not within the power of all alike: nor is there any inherent discrepancy in what is written. It fell to the prophets alone to learn the events of the highest and most remote antiquity in virtue of the direct inspiration of God, and to record clearly the events of their own time just as they happened. It therefore naturally, or rather neces- sarily, follows that we do not possess ten thousand discordant and conflicting books. No; we have but two-and-twenty books, which contain the record of all time, and are justly credited.t And of these, five are those of Moses, containing the laws and the tradition from the origin of man up to
*It is to be noted that in this book Josephus transposes chapters 19-21 (the events leading up to the almost complete extermination of the tribe of Benjamin), placing them at the beginning of his account of the Judges.
id The Hellenized forms of Hebrew proper names employed by Josephus are given in Dr. Redpath’s Supplement to the Sep- taagint Concordance (Fasc. i., Oxford, 1900).
{ The word dé (‘which are with justice believed to be divine’) is an addition of Eusebius, HH iii. 10.
JOSEPHUS
the death of Moses: this period is little short of three thousand years. And from the death of Moses until that of Artaxerxes,* the successor of Xerxes on the throne of Persia, the prophets who succeeded Moses recorded the events of their time in thirteen books. The remaining four contain hymns to God and counsels for the life of men. But from Artaxerxes until our own time records of all things have been kept, but they have not been considered worthy of equal credit with the records of previous times, because there has not been the (same) uninterrupted succession of the prophets.’ He goes on to say that, although so long a time has elapsed since the Scriptures were written, no one has ventured to add to them, or to remove or alter anything ; and that all Jews from their birth instinctively regard them as the teaching of God, and are ready, if need be, to die on their behalf. In this statement the following points are noticeable. (a) In the time of Josephus there was a canon of Scripture which had long been recog- nized. The test of the canonicity of a book was its antiquity. The mention of Artaxerxes, who in Josephus (Ané. XI. 184) and the LXX represents the Ahasuerus of the Book of Esther, must have special reference to that book. Nothing later tha its reputed date was regarded as canonical. The 22 books of Josephus are generally taken to be: (1) the 5 books of the Pentateuch ; (2) Joshua, Judges+Ruth, 1 and 2 Sam., 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chron., Ezra and Neh., Esther, Job, Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah + Lamentations, Ezekiel, the 12 Minor Prophets (13 in all); (3) Psalms and Song of Songs (‘the hymns’), Proverbs and Ecclesi- agstes (‘the practical precepts’).—(d) There is a tripartite division of Scripture, but not the ordi- nary Jewish division of Law, Prophets, Hagio- grapha. The second group of historical-prophetical books has in Josephus been increased by a number of books which the Rabbis placed among the Hagiographa. The Rabbinical arrangement is not chronological, nor based on the subject-matter, but is the result of the gradual.growth of the Canon, and an indication of three stages in its development. In Josephus, on the other hand, the arrangement is one of subject-matter. Such an arrangement had already been attempted in the Greek Bible of which Josephus made use ; but the exact division into groups of 5, 13, and 4 books is not met with elsewhere. It was natural that Josephus, writing for Greeks on the historical records of his nation, should place together all the historical or quasi-historical books.—(c) The number of books is given as 22, not, according to the commoner Jewish enumeration, as 24. Josephus is the only Jewish writer who gives the former number, but it recurs in the Christian Fathers such as Origen (on the authority of Hebrew tra- dition, ap. Eus. HE vi. 25) and Jerome (Preface to Books of Sam. and Kings); the latter writer gives 5 books of Moses, 8 of Prophets, 9 of Hagio- erapha, and alludes to the other enumeration of 24 books (see Ryle, Canon of OT, 221). The > number 22 was arrived at by joining Ruth to Judges, and Lam. to Jeremiah ; and a fanciful ex- planation was found for it in the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet (Origen, Jerome, etc.). It is curious that this explanation is confined to Christian writers; it seems to be of Alexandrian origin. The number 24 appears to be the older, but the relation between the two numbers is still obscure. The idea of equalizing the number of books with the number of Hebrew letters need not have produced the division into 22 books ; it may have been a later play of the imagination (Buhl), possibly the invention of Origen, who is the first to note it. In view of the parallels in * Or, according to another reading, ‘until Artaxerxes.’