Book 1
1. My books on the antiquity of the Jews, most excellent Epaphroditus, should have made clear to anyone who has read them that the Jewish nation is of very great antiquity and had its own distinct identity from the beginning. In those works I also explained how we came to settle in the land where we now live. The history recorded there spans five thousand years, drawn from our sacred books and translated into Greek by my own hand. Yet I have noticed that a considerable number of people continue to lend their ears to the slanders spread by those who wish us ill, refusing to accept what I have written about our nation's ancient origins. They take it as obvious proof that our nation is of recent origin simply because the most celebrated Greek historians make no mention of us. This has convinced me that I must write something, even if briefly, on these matters: to expose those who slander us as motivated by malice and deliberate dishonesty, to correct the misunderstandings of others, and to give everyone who genuinely wants the truth a clear account of how ancient we really are. The witnesses I will bring forward to support my claims are those whom the Greeks themselves regard as the most reliable and the most learned in ancient history. I will also demonstrate that those who have written about us in such a contemptuous and dishonest way are contradicted by their own writings. Beyond that, I will try to explain why so few Greek writers have mentioned our nation in their histories at all, and I will bring to light those Greeks who did not overlook our history, for the benefit of those who are either unaware of them or who pretend not to be.
2. To begin with, I find myself genuinely astonished by those who insist that we must rely exclusively on Greek sources when investigating the most ancient events, as though only the Greeks can tell us what actually happened, while our own records and those of other nations deserve no credence. I am convinced the opposite is true, and not merely as a matter of opinion. If we set aside wishful thinking and follow the evidence honestly, we quickly discover that nearly everything the Greeks can claim as their own history happened relatively recently. One might almost say it happened yesterday. I am talking about the founding of their cities, the development of their arts, the codification of their laws, and their habit of recording history, which was among the last things they got around to doing. To their credit, they do acknowledge this much themselves: it was the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, and the Phoenicians (I will set our own people aside for the moment) who preserved the records of humanity's oldest and most enduring traditions. Nearly all of these nations occupy lands that have been spared the kind of catastrophic upheaval that erases civilizations, and they took great care to ensure that nothing of significance went unrecorded. Their histories were treated as sacred, inscribed in public archives, and composed by the wisest minds their societies produced. The Greek world, by contrast, has been struck by countless disasters that wiped out the memory of earlier events again and again, leaving each generation to start fresh and imagine itself the beginning of something entirely new. Even the alphabet came to them late and with considerable difficulty. Those who want to push Greek literacy as far back as possible claim the Greeks learned their letters from the Phoenicians and from Cadmus, yet no one can point to a single piece of writing preserved from that era, whether in a temple or any other public monument. The uncertainty surrounding this is clear from the ongoing debate about whether the Greeks were even literate during the time of the Trojan War, and the most credible view is that they were not using writing in anything like its current form at that time. In any case, there is no writing that the Greeks themselves universally accept as authentic that predates the poems of Homer, who was plainly born after the fall of Troy. What's more, the tradition holds that Homer himself did not commit his poems to writing at all, that they were passed down through oral performance and only later assembled into a fixed text, which would explain the many variations found across different versions. As for the first Greek historians, figures such as Cadmus of Miletus, Acusilaus of Argos, and those who came after them, they lived only a short time before the Persian invasion of Greece. And when it comes to those who first brought philosophy and the study of celestial and divine matters to the Greeks, such as Pherecydes of Syria, Pythagoras, and Thales, there is universal agreement that they drew their knowledge from the Egyptians and Chaldeans and left behind very little in writing. These are the works considered the oldest in the Greek tradition, and even they are met with considerable skepticism about whether they are genuinely authentic.
3. How absurd, then, that the Greeks should be so proud of themselves, boasting that they alone understand antiquity and have recorded those early times with precision and accuracy. Anyone who reads the Greek writers carefully can see that they had little solid foundation when they sat down to write; they were working largely from guesswork. As a result, they contradict one another openly in their own books and show no embarrassment about presenting wildly conflicting accounts of the same events. I would be wasting my time pointing out to the Greeks what they already know better than I do: the deep disagreements between Hellanicus and Acusilaus over genealogies, the many places where Acusilaus corrects Hesiod, how Ephorus demonstrates that Hellanicus fabricated the greater part of his history, how Timaeus does the same to Ephorus, how later writers do it to Timaeus, and how virtually all subsequent historians do it to Herodotus. Timaeus couldn't even agree with Antiochus, Philistius, or Callias on Sicilian history, just as the various writers of the Atthis contradict one another on Athenian affairs, and the historians of the Argolica do the same on Argive matters. Why even bother with individual cities and minor localities, when the most respected accounts of the Persian expedition and its campaigns are riddled with such serious discrepancies? Even Thucydides himself has been accused by some of writing falsehoods, despite the fact that he is generally regarded as the most reliable historian of his own era.
4. There are probably many reasons for such widespread disagreement among Greek writers, and anyone curious enough to investigate would find no shortage of explanations. For my part, I trace these contradictions primarily to two causes, which I will now lay out, though I consider the first to be by far the most significant. The Greeks, in their earliest period, made no effort to maintain official records of their own history. This failure almost certainly gave later writers both the opportunity to make mistakes and the freedom to fabricate outright. Such neglect of historical record-keeping was not limited to the smaller Greek states; even the Athenians themselves, who claim to be the original inhabitants of their land and pride themselves on their devotion to learning, have no such records surviving. In fact, they freely admit that the laws of Draco concerning homicide are the oldest written public documents they possess, and Draco himself lived only a short time before the tyrant Pisistratus. As for the Arcadians, who boast so loudly about the antiquity of their civilization, there is little need to single them out for special treatment, since they acquired literacy even later than the rest, and only managed it with considerable difficulty at that.
5. When writers have no original records to build on, significant disagreements between them are inevitable. Without a reliable foundation, there's nothing to inform honest readers or expose those who would distort the truth. But there's a second reason for these contradictions, beyond the first: the most enthusiastic historians were not particularly concerned with discovering the truth, even though claiming to pursue it cost them nothing. Their real goal was to show off their writing ability and make an impression on their audience. Whatever style they thought gave them an edge over their rivals, that's the direction they pursued. Some turned to writing fanciful stories; others sought to flatter cities or kings by singing their praises; still others made a name for themselves by attacking events or the writers who recorded them, thinking this approach would earn them a reputation. In doing so, they produced something directly opposed to genuine history. The hallmark of true history is that everyone involved, whether speaking or writing, tells the same story. These writers, by contrast, offered conflicting accounts of the same events and apparently believed this made them look more committed to the truth. We Jews must concede to the Greek writers when it comes to language and literary style; but we will not grant them any such advantage when it comes to the accuracy of ancient history, and least of all when the subject concerns the affairs of our own nations.
6. Regarding the careful preservation of records from the earliest antiquity among the Egyptians and Babylonians: the priests were entrusted with this responsibility and approached it with genuine philosophical seriousness. Among the Babylonians, it was the Chaldean priests who carried out this work, while the Phoenicians, living among the Greeks, made extensive use of writing both for everyday affairs and for preserving the history of important events. I think I can skip offering proof of this, since it is widely accepted. But when it comes to our own ancestors and their equal dedication to keeping such records (I won't claim they were more diligent than the others, though I could make that argument), and the fact that they entrusted this work to their high priests and prophets, and that these records have been maintained with the greatest accuracy right down to our own time, and will, if I may be so bold, continue to be maintained with the same care going forward, I will try to give you a brief account of how this was done.
7. Our forefathers not only selected the finest priests for divine service from the very beginning, but also took deliberate steps to ensure that the priestly lineage remained pure and unmixed. Any man who shares in the priesthood must marry a woman of the same nation, with no consideration given to wealth or social standing. He is required to investigate his prospective wife's background, trace her genealogy through ancient records, and produce multiple witnesses to confirm it. This practice is observed not only in Judea but wherever communities of our people are found. Even in those distant places, precise records of priestly marriages are maintained. I am speaking of Egypt, Babylon, and every other part of the inhabited world where our priests have settled. They send to Jerusalem written accounts of their parents' names and those of their more distant ancestors, along with the names of the witnesses who can verify these claims. When wars have broken out, as they have many times, whether during the invasion of Antiochus Epiphanes, the campaigns of Pompey the Great and Quintilius Varus, or the conflicts of our own era, the priests who survive compile new genealogical records from the old documents and carefully examine the circumstances of the women who remain. They do not accept women who have been taken captive, on the grounds that such women may have had relations with foreigners. The strongest evidence of how carefully we manage all of this is something I will now set out plainly: we have the names of our high priests recorded in an unbroken father-to-son succession spanning two thousand years. Any priest found to have violated these rules is barred from approaching the altar or participating in any of our purifications. This is not merely a just policy; it is a necessary one, because not just anyone is permitted to write these records, and there is no contradiction among what has been written. Only the prophets composed the original and earliest accounts of events, having received them from God Himself through inspiration, while others recorded what took place in their own times, and did so with equal care and precision.
8. Unlike the Greeks, we don't have a vast, contradictory collection of books that disagree with one another. Instead, we have just twenty-two books, which contain the complete record of our past and are rightly regarded as divinely inspired. Five of these belong to Moses, covering his laws and the history of humanity from its origins up to his death, a span of nearly three thousand years. From the death of Moses to the reign of Artaxerxes, king of Persia, who ruled after Xerxes, the prophets who followed Moses recorded the events of their own times in thirteen books. The remaining four books consist of hymns to God and guidance for how human beings should live. It's true that our history has been recorded in considerable detail since the time of Artaxerxes, but our ancestors did not grant those later writings the same authority as the earlier ones, because there has been no unbroken line of prophets since that period. How deeply we trust the books of our own tradition is clear from how we actually behave: across all the centuries that have passed, not one person has dared to add anything to them, remove anything from them, or alter them in any way. Every Jewish person, from birth, is raised to regard these books as containing divine teaching, to hold fast to them, and, when necessary, to die for them willingly. It is nothing new for our captives, many in number and spread across many different times, to be seen enduring torture and every kind of death in public arenas rather than speak a single word against our laws and the writings that preserve them. Among the Greeks, by contrast, there is no one who would suffer even the slightest harm for the sake of their texts, not even if every piece of writing they possessed were destroyed, because they regard those works as nothing more than compositions shaped by the personal preferences of their authors. And they are entirely justified in holding the same low opinion of their ancient writers, since they can see people in their own generation bold enough to write about events they never witnessed and never bothered to investigate through those who had firsthand knowledge. Our own recent war provides clear examples of this: certain individuals wrote and published histories of it without ever having visited the places involved or being anywhere near the action when it happened. Instead, they stitched together a few scraps of hearsay, brazenly deceived the public, and had the audacity to call what they produced history.
9. I have written a complete and truthful account of that entire war, covering all its particulars, because I was personally involved in every stage of it. I served as the general commanding those of our people known as the Galileans, for as long as resistance remained possible. I was then captured by the Romans and held as a prisoner. Vespasian and Titus kept me under guard and required me to remain close to them at all times. At first I was placed in chains, but I was later released and sent to accompany Titus when he traveled from Alexandria to the siege of Jerusalem. Throughout that period, nothing of significance escaped my notice: what happened inside the Roman camp I witnessed directly and recorded with care, and when deserters brought information out of the city, I was the only person capable of interpreting it. Afterward, once I had settled in Rome and gathered all my materials, I enlisted the help of several people to sharpen my command of the Greek language, and through that process I produced my history of those events. My confidence in the accuracy of what I had written was strong enough that I submitted the work first to Vespasian and Titus themselves, the men who had held supreme command during the war, asking them to serve as my witnesses. After them, I presented the books to many Romans who had fought in the campaign. I also sold copies to many of our own people who were versed in Greek learning, among them Julius Archelaus, Herod (king of Chalcis), a man of considerable distinction, and King Agrippa himself, a figure who commanded the deepest respect. All of these men testified that I had maintained the strictest fidelity to the truth, and they were not the sort to have stayed silent or looked the other way had I, through ignorance or partiality, distorted any events or left any of them out.
10. Some dishonest individuals have attempted to discredit my history, dismissing it as a kind of academic exercise written for students to practice on. What a strange and baseless accusation. Anyone who undertakes to write a genuine history of events must first know those events accurately, either by having participated in them personally or by learning from those who did. I can legitimately claim both of these qualifications for each of my works. As I have already noted, I translated the Antiquities from our sacred books, a task I was well suited for, since I was born into the priesthood and have devoted serious study to the philosophy contained in those writings. As for the History of the War, I wrote it as someone who took part in many of its events directly, witnessed most of the rest with my own eyes, and had no ignorance of anything that was said or done throughout the conflict. How brazen, then, must we consider those who presume to contradict me on the true state of these affairs? Even if they claim to have consulted the emperors' own memoirs, they could not possibly have understood our side of things, since they were fighting against us.
11. I was compelled to make this digression out of necessity, since I wanted to expose the emptiness of those who claim to write history. I trust I have made the case clearly enough that the nations commonly called Barbarians have actually preserved the records of ancient times more faithfully than the Greeks themselves. I now want to turn briefly to those who argue that our constitution is a recent invention, on the grounds that Greek writers make no mention of us. After addressing that, I will bring forward testimony to our antiquity from the writings of foreign authors, and I will also show that those who heap reproaches on our nation do so without any justification.
12. As for ourselves, we are not a maritime people, nor do we take pleasure in trade, nor in the kind of mingling with other nations that commerce naturally produces. The cities we inhabit lie far from the sea, and since we are blessed with fertile land, we have devoted ourselves to working it. Our chief concern, above all else, has been the proper education of our children, and we regard the careful observance of our laws and the faithful practice of the piety handed down to us as the most essential work of our lives. Given all of this, and given how distinctly our way of life has always set us apart, there was simply no opportunity in ancient times for us to mix with the Greeks the way others did. The Greeks mingled with the Egyptians through the constant back-and-forth of trade; they mixed with the Phoenicians through that people's relentless appetite for commerce along the coastlines. Our ancestors, for their part, never turned to piracy as some peoples did, nor did they launch foreign wars to accumulate wealth, even though our country could have supplied tens of thousands of capable fighting men. It was precisely through trade and seafaring that the Phoenicians first became familiar to the Greeks, and through the Phoenicians that the Egyptians and all the other peoples whose goods the Phoenicians carried across the seas on their long voyages also became known. The Medes and Persians, as rulers of Asia, grew familiar to the Greeks as well, and the Persians especially so, since their armies marched all the way into Europe. The Thracians were known simply by proximity, and the Scythians through those who sailed to the Black Sea. The pattern is clear: coastal nations, and those living near the eastern or western seas, were the ones most likely to appear in the works of writers eager to record the world. Those who lived further inland remained largely invisible to them. This same pattern holds true even in Europe, where the city of Rome, which had by then accumulated enormous power and accomplished extraordinary things in war, goes entirely unmentioned by Herodotus, by Thucydides, or by any of their contemporaries. The Romans entered the Greek consciousness only very late, and with considerable difficulty. Even those historians considered the most thorough, Ephorus among them, were so ignorant of the Gauls and the Spaniards that Ephorus apparently believed the Spaniards, who occupy a vast stretch of the western world, to be nothing more than a single city. These same historians went so far as to invent customs and practices for peoples they had never actually encountered or studied. Their ignorance of the truth came from a simple lack of contact, and their willingness to fabricate came from a desire to seem knowledgeable about things others did not know. Given all of this, why should it surprise anyone that our nation remained unknown to much of the Greek world, and gave those writers little reason to mention us, living as we did far from the sea and according to a way of life entirely our own?
13. Consider, then, what would happen if we used this same argument against the Greeks to deny their antiquity, simply because our own records say nothing about them. They would laugh at us, and rightly so. They would offer the same explanations for our silence that I have just given, and they would point to their neighboring nations as witnesses to their ancient origins. That is precisely what I intend to do. I will call on the Egyptians and the Phoenicians as my primary witnesses, and no one can dismiss their testimony as biased in our favor, since everyone knows these peoples have harbored deep hostility toward us. This is true of the Egyptians as a whole, and among the Phoenicians it is the Tyrians in particular who have been most hostile. I will admit, however, that I cannot say the same about the Chaldeans, since our earliest ancestors came from among them, and they do mention the Jews in their records, owing to the kinship between our peoples. Once I have established my case through these witnesses, I will go on to show that certain Greek writers have also taken note of us, so that those who resent us will have no grounds left to dispute what I have said about our nation.
14. I will begin with Egyptian sources, though not with texts written in the Egyptian language itself, since that is beyond my reach. Manetho, however, was a native Egyptian who had thoroughly mastered Greek learning, as his work makes clear. He wrote the history of his own country in Greek, translating it, by his own account, from their sacred records. He also sharply criticizes Herodotus for his ignorance and his many errors about Egyptian affairs. In the second book of his Egyptian History, Manetho writes about us in the following way. I will quote his exact words, as though I were calling the man himself as a witness in court: "There was a king among us named Timaus. In his time, for reasons I cannot explain, God turned against us, and men of low birth came from the eastern regions in a remarkable fashion. They had the audacity to invade our country and subdued it with ease, without our ever meeting them in open battle. Once they had brought our rulers under their control, they burned our cities, tore down the temples of the gods, and treated all the inhabitants with extreme cruelty. Some they killed outright; others they enslaved along with their wives and children. Finally, they made one of their own number king, a man named Salatis. He ruled from Memphis, imposed tribute on both Upper and Lower Egypt, and stationed garrisons wherever he judged them most useful. His primary concern was securing the eastern frontier, since he anticipated that the Assyrians, then the dominant power, would covet the kingdom and attempt an invasion. In the Saite nome, in the district of Sethroite, he found a city ideally suited to his purposes, situated on the Bubastic channel and known, for certain religious reasons, as Avaris. He rebuilt this city and fortified it heavily, surrounding it with strong walls and installing a garrison of two hundred and forty thousand armed men. Salatis would come there each summer, partly to collect grain and pay his soldiers, and partly to drill his troops and project strength to potential enemies. He reigned for thirteen years. After him came Beon, who reigned forty-four years; then Apachnas, who reigned thirty-six years and seven months; then Apophis, who reigned sixty-one years; then Janins, fifty years and one month; and finally Assis, forty-nine years and two months. These six were the first rulers of this people, and throughout their reigns they waged continuous war against the Egyptians, intent on destroying them utterly. The entire nation was called the Hycsos, meaning Shepherd-kings: the first syllable, Hyc, means 'king' in the sacred dialect, while Sos means 'shepherd' in the common dialect, and the two together form Hycsos. Some, however, say these people were Arabians." In another version of the text, the word is said to mean not 'kings' but 'captive shepherds,' on the grounds that Hyc, when aspirated, means 'shepherds' in Egyptian, and quite explicitly so. This interpretation strikes me as more likely and more consistent with ancient history. Manetho continues: "These people, whom we have called kings and also shepherds, along with their descendants, held Egypt for five hundred and eleven years." After this, he says, the kings of Thebes and the rest of Egypt rose up against the shepherds, and a fierce, prolonged war broke out between them. He goes on to say that under a king named Alisphragmuthosis, the shepherds were defeated and driven out of the rest of Egypt, but were confined to a territory of ten thousand acres called Avaris. Manetho says the shepherds built a large, strong wall around this entire area to protect their possessions and their plunder, but that Thummosis, the son of Alisphragmuthosis, attempted to take it by force, surrounding it with four hundred and eighty thousand men. When it became clear that the siege would not succeed, they reached an agreement: the shepherds would leave Egypt freely, without harm, and go wherever they chose. On those terms, they departed with their entire households and all their belongings, numbering no fewer than two hundred and forty thousand people, and traveled from Egypt through the desert toward Syria. But fearing the Assyrians, who then controlled Asia, they built a city in the region now called Judea, large enough to hold that great multitude, and named it Jerusalem. In another of his books, Manetho says that this nation, known as the Shepherds, was also called the Captives in the sacred records. And this is accurate: herding sheep was the occupation of our ancestors in the earliest times, and because they lived a wandering life as shepherds, they were known by that name. Nor is it surprising that the Egyptians called them Captives, since one of our own ancestors, Joseph, identified himself to the king of Egypt as a captive, and later brought his brothers to Egypt with the king's blessing. I will examine these matters more carefully in another place.
15. Now I will call on the Egyptians themselves as witnesses to our nation's antiquity. I return once more to Manetho and what he records about the sequence of events, and this is what he says: "After this people, the shepherds, had departed from Egypt to Jerusalem, Tethtoosis, the king of Egypt who had driven them out, reigned for another twenty-five years and four months before he died. After him, his son Chebron held the kingdom for thirteen years; then came Amenophis, for twenty years and seven months; then his sister Amesses, for twenty-one years and nine months; after her came Mephres, for twelve years and nine months; then Mephramuthosis, for twenty-five years and ten months; then Thmosis, for nine years and eight months; then Amenophis, for thirty years and ten months; then Orus, for thirty-six years and five months; then his daughter Acenchres, for twelve years and one month; then her brother Rathotis, for nine years; then Acencheres, for twelve years and five months; then another Acencheres, for twelve years and three months; then Armais, for four years and one month; then Ramesses, for one year and four months; then Armesses Miammoun, for sixty-six years and two months; then Amenophis, for nineteen years and six months; and after him came Sethosis and Ramesses, who maintained both a cavalry and a naval force. This king appointed his brother Armais to serve as his deputy over Egypt." (In another copy the passage reads as follows: "After him came Sethosis and Ramesses, two brothers, the first of whom commanded a naval force and violently destroyed those who opposed him at sea; but having killed Ramesses not long afterward, he appointed yet another of his brothers as his deputy over Egypt.") He also granted this deputy all the powers of a king, but with three specific conditions: he was not to wear the royal crown, he was not to harm the queen, the mother of the king's children, and he was not to interfere with the king's other concubines. With those terms in place, Sethosis set out on campaign against Cyprus, Phoenicia, and then against the Assyrians and the Medes. He conquered them all, some by force of arms, some without a battle, and some simply through the fear his massive army inspired. Emboldened by these remarkable successes, he pressed on with even greater confidence, overthrowing cities and kingdoms across the eastern regions. After a considerable time had passed, however, Armais, who had been left in charge of Egypt, brazenly did everything his brother had forbidden him to do. He violated the queen and continued to use the other concubines freely, sparing none of them. More than that, at the urging of his friends he put on the royal crown and openly set himself up as a rival to his brother. The chief priest of Egypt then wrote to Sethosis, informing him of everything that had happened and how his brother had risen against him. Sethosis returned to Pelusium at once and reclaimed his kingdom. The country itself came to bear his name, for Manetho tells us that Sethosis was also called Egyptus, just as his brother Armais was called Danaus.
