Josephus Geographicus: The Classical Context of Geography in Josephus (review)

Though this book appears in a Jewish history monograph series, it concerns itself with Graeco-Roman writers for more than two-thirds of its length, in an effort to sketch out (as the subtitle indicates) the classical context for the geographic concepts and approaches found in the writings of Josephus. Most of the book's chapters are given over to a survey of the way in which Greek authors dealt with various issues involving geographic space; Roman writers are dealt with more briefly in a penultimate chapter, and Josephus himself comes into the discussion in the last and longest one. The point of this long lead-up, as Shahar states quite succinctly in the introduction, is to show that "Josephus consciously and definitively follows Polybius and Strabo" in terms of his organization of geographic space, and furthermore "was conducting a hidden dialogue with Strabo" in his description of Biblical lands and peoples (3–4). In choosing one set of classical writers as his model, Josephus also rejected other models, especially a Roman one exemplified by Tacitus and Livy, in which "space . . . is merely a literary element which is intended to provide surprise, dramatic intensity, and so forth" (3).

Shahar's goal of connecting Josephus more closely with Greek historiographic traditions is a worthy one, and the very real contribution Josephus made to ancient geography, through his Judaic perspective on issues of land, territory, and the oikoumene, are certainly deserving of close study. But Shahar subordinates the many interesting observations that come out of his comparisons to his more limited and, to my mind, tendentious attempt to prove Josephus' "hidden dialogue" with Strabo in the Bellum Judaicum. Shahar also addresses this "hidden dialogue" in a nearly contemporaneous article he contributed to an anthology on Strabo (D. Dueck et al., eds., Strabo's Cultural Geography: The Making of a Kolossourgia [Cambridge 2005]), and his focus on it in the final chapter here, at the culmination of an otherwise more far-reaching study, seems out of place. The argument here becomes narrowly philological and dependent on long tables comparing the minutiae of chorographic descriptions, as though looking through a microscope rather than a telescope—to borrow Shahar's own comparison of Herodotus' approach with that of Thucydides (129).

There are other indications throughout this book of poor organization and/or hasty compilation. Tabular arrangements of textual evidence are introduced in place of verbal arguments and are made to bear the weight of far-reaching conclusions, a methodology which is problematic in itself but complicated here by a lack of clarity in the tables (e.g., 55–56, where a table of passages from Herodotus is inadequately labeled and improperly subdivided). Assertions are made without proper recognition of scholarly debate and differences of opinion (such as the statement that Hecataeus of Miletus divided the earth into two continents, 27). Typographical/spelling errors abound, and transliterated words appear now in italics, now without, in no discernible pattern. The overall impression the book gives, unfortunately, is one of an enthusiastic and inspired amateurishness.