The Histories

There are several preliminary problems that must be acknowledged in the study of these histories. We have only three full works composed in Greek that are still extant: the epitome of Jason of Cyrene’s five-volume work known as 2 Maccabees; and Josephus’ Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities. (If 1 Esdras was composed in Greek, we would have a fourth). We have two other works originally composed in Hebrew but that have come down to us in another language: 1 Maccabees (in Greek) and Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities (in Latin via an earlier Greek translation). We have fragments of ten other historians who composed in Greek. Unfortunately, the identities of these historians and the specific contexts in which they wrote are often problematic. The fragments have come down to us either through later Christian sources or through a double chain extending from the Roman polymath Alexander Polyhistor to the early Christian writer Eusebius. The summary of their dates and locales below represents common judgments, but they are debatable.

Complicating the situation further is the decision whom to include and exclude from the ranks of historians. Ancient Jewish historians were far more creative in recasting the past than we would permit; so much so that it is not always possible to differentiate with precision among what we would consider a history, historical novel, or romance. Do we distinguish among these on the basis of authorial intent (whether the author intended the work to be read as history or fiction) or of the readers’ reception (whether ancient readers understood the work to be an accurate reporting of the past or a fiction)? Both of these criteria are problematic since we cannot know the author’s intent or the reader’s perspective in most instances - if ever. I prefer to make distinctions on the basis of the work’s relationship to its sources: prose works that create a narrative principally on the basis of sources that ancients believed to report the past I consider histories. (Note the adverb “principally”: even the most sober of the Jewish historians use freedoms that we would not permit.) Works that narrate the stories of historical figures and circumstances, but do not follow historical sources as the basis for the narrative, I consider historical novels. I do not want to suggest that the figures are necessarily historical, but that the sources were treated that way. These texts use accepted historical frameworks to fill in or flesh out their stories. Finally, I think of works that are free creations - even if they use known figures - to be romances or fiction. The line among these three is not always clear and there is considerable room for debate: 3 Maccabees, for example, could be a historical novel or a romance. We must remember that this taxonomy is modern, not ancient. The categories do, however, permit us to form some useful judgments about these prose writers. I have set out the three groups in the following charts, adding a category of related works for the first two categories to include works that are similar but belong to different genres. The lists below are not exhaustive: they do not include works identified by moderns as sources incorporated into larger works, but only works that have attested independent existence in ancient sources.

The Jewish Appropriation of Hellenistic Historiography

I. Jewish Historians, 323 bce-135 ce

Pagans and Christians alike (e. g., Alexander Polyhistor and Eusebius) often lumped the first two groups together in the category of accounts of the Jews. For this reason, we will consider both of these groups but exclude the third. This raises the question

Whether these works shared common historiographical orientations and practices. Josephus (Ap. 1.6-56) claimed that there was a tradition of eastern historiography, including Jewish historiography: the first half of Josephus’ excursus (1.6-27) is a critique of the Hellenic tradition; the second half (1.28-56) is a defense of the eastern tradition. Josephus criticized the Hellenic tradition for two reasons: it was relatively recent (1.6-14) and was inconsistent (1.15-27), because Greek historians failed to keep accurate records (1.19-22) and were preoccupied with style over substance (1.23-27). Byway of contrast, the eastern peoples kept reliable records (1.28-29), including the Jews (1.30-43). The credibility of Jewish historians extends also to contemporary events: Josephus was an eyewitness of the Jewish War (1.44-56). Thus whether addressing ancient traditions or contemporary events, the Jews based themselves on reliable sources.