The Jewish War: Last half of book 5

[cahn]

Last week: Titus saving the day single-handedly as a millenium-old trope. The synoptic gospels foreshadowing these events, and discussion of the abomination of desolation. The Yom Kippur service description of the priest in his vestments. How much Titus might have intended the destruction of Jerusalem, and when, and how much that question may be different from how Josephus feels like he needs to justify it? A mention of R. Yochanan ben Zakkai, which all of you should definitely tell me more about :D

This week: Jerusalem is under siege. It's quite awful for those under siege, what with famine inside the city and getting crucified by Romans if they try to escape. Titus and Josephus continue to be blameless and awesome.

Next week: First half of Book 6: "...from its rebuilding by Haggai in the second year of the reign of Cyrus to its capture under Vespasian was 639 years and 45 days" (270).

Comments

[cahn]

On another note, there have been a few things in other books that remind me of the Book of Mormon (e.g. the robbers/bandits who take down the society), but Josephus going around the wall and speaking unwanted truths to the wicked ones inside the city and them throwing missiles at him to try to kill him (but not being able to) -- to me this sounded so incredibly similar to the prophet Samuel the Lamanite in the Book of Mormon (Helaman chapters 13-16), who does all these things (well, okay, he actually stands on the wall, which of course is more dramatic), that it pushed me to look around a bit to see how likely it was that Joseph Smith had read Josephus. The first part of this paper makes it sound like it was quite likely. (Interestingly -- I only skimmed the rest of the paper -- it brings up a lot of other stuff, like JS's rewriting of the OT in a way that apparently is often reminiscent of Antiquities of the Jews, but it doesn't bring up Samuel the Lamanite.)

[selenak]

Huh, interesting!

My suggestion to divide book 6 is to stop with the burning of the Temple ("...until the destrusction under Vespasian sixhundredandthirtynine years and forty five days" in my translation.)

[cahn]

I should also have mentioned that Samuel never gets hit by any of the missiles (also dramatically). So it's different enough, I guess, in detail that maybe that's why no one brings it up -- orrrrr maybe Church scholars haven't necessarily read The Jewish War, because the feel of Samuel and Josephus just feels very similar to me even though details are different.

[cenozoicsynapsid]

The paper basically says that Smith probably *read* J, but that there are no "smoking gun" cases where he seems to have *used* J--- general ones like "bandits" and "people resort to cannibalism as a sign of societal collapse" but no clear textual parallels in the ways they discuss Noah, Abraham or Moses. In particular: "Though some in the spirit of exposé have claimed that various incidents contained in the Book of Mormon are so close to incidents contained in Josephus that the latter is the source for the former, upon closer examination such alleged parallels are grossly exaggerated. [footnote: Holley, “A Study of the Similarities Between the Works of Flavius Josephus and the Book of Mormon.” The arguments put forth by Holley in this unpub
lished paper are both ill conceived and absurd; Holley knows neither the Book of Mormon nor the writings of Flavius Josephus.]" But go on, tell us how you really feel about the guy.

It's possible that Samuel's wall-top sermon owes something to other sources: Jonah "went into the city a day's walk" before preaching, but Jonah's Nineveh (3 days walk across) is crazily oversized. If I started at Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan and walked 20 miles north--- a standard pace for a full day's walk--- I'd deliver my message about God's judgement on the iniquities of Times Square somewhere up in Yonkers. So a parallel story to Jonah would probably set the preaching somewhere else. Jeremiah (ch 20) is put in the stocks "in the upper gate" for his prophecies as well. It doesn't say whether people threw things.

Just by the by, I've always found it fascinating how the Gadianton Robbers are supposedly refounded by people who found relics of the first guys in a cave. (Or do I have this wrong? Does it ever say exactly how or why they were refounded? I don't remember.) Like, "Look, we found the records of a society of evildoers who were utterly wiped out because of how terrible they were. Let's painstakingly reconstruct their secret code of conduct so we can do it all over again!" Sounds unlikely and then you realize neo-Nazis do exactly that, so...

[cahn]

Oh, I don't think JS would have copied Josephus, and I absolutely believe for that reason that there's no real smoking gun, but I think it's very possible (if he did indeed read Josephus) he could have got inspired by him, especially for his Bible translation which to my eye mostly follows the principle of "it would totally make more sense to me [JS, that is] if it said this instead." (E.g., last week we were doing Pharaoh and the plagues, and the JST says that Pharaoh hardened his own heart instead of God hardening it, which does neatly dispense with the question of what was going on with Pharaoh's free will.) That footnote is hilarious, though! Though I haven't read Antiquities of the Jews so I can't really comment on any of that.

And yes, there's a ton of stuff (much more than Josephus) both micro and macro that you could argue was inspired by various bits of the Bible. (Even discounting the parts where various prophets just straight-up quote whole chapters of Isaiah or Malachi or Matthew from the KJV.) Though neither Jonah nor Jeremiah ever really reminded me that much of Samuel the Lamanite. I think it was the shouting things from the wall around the city while people are trying to kill him that made the resonance in my mind, even if Josephus actually shouts things from outside the wall. It just feels to me like the sort of dramatic image one might remember from a book and be tempted to put in a fanfic, lol. Not a scholarly argument, just an argument from feels :)

I remembered another thing in Josephus that reminded me of the BoM, though this is definitely not at all a smoking gun, just me being very silly: One of Orson Scott Card's arguments for the BoM as a historical document rather than a novel (I should also append here, although this is probably obvious, that this was an essay he wrote from the POV of a novelist, not as a historian) was that sometimes the action just stops so that the author can, for example, carefully explain how the currency system works which is never brought up again -- which he, as a novelist, points out is not something you would do if you were writing a novel. ...Which of course reminds me of the Essenes! :)

My understanding is that the Gadianton robbers mostly just make up the secret combinations again (Now behold, those secret oaths and covenants did not come forth unto Gadianton from the records which were delivered unto Helaman; but behold, they were put into the heart of Gadianton by that same being who did entice our first parents to partake of the forbidden fruit (Helaman 6:26)). But they would have presumably known about the guys who were wiped out, yeah, even if they didn't know or follow the exact details. That's... a really chilling comparison to neo-Nazis. Huh. Gonna go revise my estimate of how historically plausible that is.