The Jewish War: First half of Book 2

[cahn]

Last week: Discussion on how Herod stacked up against various Roman emperors in terms of body count of his nearest and dearest; how Friedrich Wilhelm might hear the Josephus text; Herod throwing money around; Cleopatra!

This week: ...uhhhh there was a lot going on and I haven't actually finished the reading yet *ducks* -- I am doing that right now and I should most likely be able to comment tomorrow. (I don't anticipate this being a problem again for at least two more months, and most likely not then either; this was a confluence of various time sinks that doesn't usually happen all at the same time.) But I wanted to go ahead and get the post up because I know you guys have read it... (ETA: have finished the reading now :P :) )

Next week: finishing up Book 2!

Comments

Re: There are three kinds of Jew...

[cahn]

It is bizarre! And yeah, seems very different from how he treats Judaism in all the rest of the texts to, as you say, sell it to his audience.

(The Romans think old things are really important, so this is the kind of behavior they respect even when the customs seem weird to them.)

Oh, I didn't pick up on that, thanks! I did kind of feel like with e.g. the covert portraits being moved into Jerusalem that the Jews were coming across as more reasonable to a modern eye, at least.

there are a lot of mechanisms for mass control and indoctrination of new recruits.

This is a good point.