Jerusalem Under Siege: The Collapse of the Jewish State 66-70 C.E. (review)

124 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No.3 This is a good book, whose contributors are seasoned scholars. Its succinct essays, each followed by a select bibliography, are balanced in treatment, usually calling attention to the previous picture of their subject before offering the alternative interpretation from the "marketplace of religions" model. No doubt the brevity of the essays will attract student readers who are impatient of wading through considerable detail before understanding the authors' arguments. Stuart D. Robertson Department of History Purdue University Jerusalem Under Siege: The Collapse of the Jewish State 66-70 C.E., by Jonathan J. Price. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992. 361 pp. $91.50. What distinguishes this extremely careful analysis of the great war of the Jews against the Romans is that, unlike Josephus, who writes from the point of view of an outsider looking in, this account is written from the point of view of insiders, namely the Jewish revolutionaries, looking out. It is remarkably thorough, often highly technical; indeed, fully a third of the volume is taken up by detailed-and extremely valuable-appendices on such subjects as Josephus' Jewish War as an historical source, sources other than Josephus, Josephus' reliability when he presents numbers, chronological problems in the War, Jewish weapons and other military details, the Jews' supplies of food and water and the accounts of famine, the evidence for desertion, and the historicity of Rabban Johanan ben Zakkai's appearance before Vespasian. On numerous topics Price is critical of his predecessors and adopts an independent point of view. The key to the whole topic is, of course, how to evaluate Josephus, since the overwhelming majority of details about the war come from his pages. Josephus has not had a very good press; as someone put it, he is not the kind of fellow from whom you would want to buy a used chariot. Price avoids the hypercritical attitude toward him of Shaye Cohen in the latter'sJosephus in Galilee and Rome, as well as the too trusting attitude of Tessa Rajak in her Josephus, the Historian and His Society. We may here call attention to Josephus' statement at the very qpening of his War that the war had not lacked its historians; hence, we may suggest, Josephus had to be careful with his interpretation of the war in order to justify his composition ofyet another account of the war. Price wisely seems to adopt Book Reviews 125 what we might term the motto to respect but to suspect Josephus, whose greatest offenses (and talents) lay in exaggeration and suppression rather than in sheet invention. Even pure propaganda, as he notes, is effective only iffirmly based on reality. Moreover, external sources-notably Tacitus, Dio Cassius, rabbinic literature, archaeology (one of the most valuable parts of the book, however, is his critique of the limitations of archaeological methods and evidence), and numismatics-confirm Josephus' account in its main outline, as well as in numerous details. In the words of Nietzsche, the Greeks blame the gods, the Jews blame them,selves. Much of the theme of this book is an attempt to determine why the Jews lost the war. Price declines to accept Josephus' answer, which is to blame the revolutionaries for undertaking a war in which they had no chance ofsuccess and for perpetrating unspeakable acts against the innocent general population and against one another. Price blames all parties, including the so-called moderates, for not rationing food and planning strategy with better coordination; in fact, as he convincingly argues, the term "moderates" entirely disappears from Josephus' discussion once the war is underway. Indeed, his well supported argument is that mostJews, including the aristocrats, favored the revolution, and not merely because of the excesses of the procurators. Since Price endeavors to present the discussion from the revolutionaries ' point of view, one misses, surprisingly, an analysis, to be sure speculative, of why sensible people, including aristocrats, should have thought that the Jews had reasonable chances of success. We may here suggest the following: (1) the war came at the height ofJewish success in converting many thousands of non-Jews to Judaism so that perhaps as much as ten percent of the population of...