Contents

Introduction
Life versus War
The Phases of Josephus' Activity Before the Coming of Vespasian
       Estimating Dates
The Major Cities and The Situation in Galilee
Map of Galilee
Chronological Table
 

"The principal instigator of the mob was Jesus son of Sapphias, the chief magistrate of Tiberias, an unprincipled man who had an instinct for introducing disorder into matters of consequence, and who exceeded all others in the fomenting of sedition and revolution.

Taking a copy of the laws of Moses into his hands, he now stepped into the midst of the people and said: 'Fellow citizens! If you cannot for your own sakes bring yourselves to condemn Josephus, then have regard for the laws of your country, which your commander-in-chief intended to betray -- and for their sakes hate the crime and bring this insolent criminal to his just punishment!'

When he had said this and the crowd had loudly applauded him, he took some soldiers and hurried to the house I was lodging in with the intent to kill me at once.

I was wholly insensible of this, having fallen asleep from fatigue. But Simon, who was entrusted with guarding my person and had alone remained with me, seeing the onrushing citizens, awoke me and told me of the danger, and urged me to die honorably as a general, by my own hand, before my enemies arrived to force me to it or to kill me themselves.

Such were his words; but I committed my fate to God and hastened to go out to the people.

Changing my garment for one of black and suspending my sword from my neck, I proceeded, by a different road on which I expected no enemy would encounter me, to the hippodrome.

I appeared among the people suddenly, flung myself on my face, and watered the ground with my tears -- and so became to them all an object of compassion."

                             Josephus The Life 27-28 134-139

At the age of 29, with no leadership or military experience, Josephus took command of the Jewish forces in Galilee. Or he tried to: the local politicians who had spent their lives building a power base there resented the intrusion of the haughty Jerusalemite. Josephus found himself battling his own countrymen more than the Romans.

Part 4 of the War Chronology covers Josephus' tumultuous and controversial activities as commander of Galilee up until the Roman invasion. Merging the two accounts of the War and the Life, with parallel references, the complex activities are organized into phases and presented in convenient summary form.  Included are a map of the key locations in Galilee and a table of the political situation in the major cities.
 

 
When Josephus was made commander of Galilee (see the War Chronology Part 3), he was thrust into a complex and brutal power struggle with the local politicians, ambitious businessmen, factional supporters and gangs of guerillas. For a man 30 years old with no apparent leadership experience his actions in Galilee are remarkable, fortifying key defensive points while staving off a series of attempts by his opponents to murder him. These actions are all the more amazing in that he did not have the unequivocal support of the leaders of Jerusalem, who recalled him after a few months and ordered he be taken from Galilee dead or alive. Yet somehow Josephus was able to make himself popular with "the people" of Jerusalem and, most powerfully, the ones he simply calls "the Galileans", who supported him against the aristocracy and the wealthy middle class of the major cities.

Such is his story -- and there is nothing more controversial in Josephus studies than his actions in Galilee. Is his account an objective rendering of the facts, or was it filled with tendentious statements, a plea to protect himself after the war from accusations of betraying, on the one hand, his country, and on the other, the Roman Empire?

 
The truth of his account is an issue that will not be gone into deeply here. At present what we want to do is to organize what Josephus himself says occurred in Galilee in the months preceding the Roman invasion under General Vespasian.

To do so one immediately must face the fact there are two accounts of this period, the one in Book 2 of the Jewish War and that told in the Life, Josephus' autobiography. Almost the entire book of the Life is devoted to Josephus' actions in Galilee told in great detail, while that of the War is much shorter. Since these accounts do not always agree some choices must be made in order to combine them into a single chronology.

The scholarly debate on this subject requires a more careful study, but the present state can be summarized by two camps. One sees the Jewish War as the true account, and the Life, written 20 years later, as an attempt to whitewash Josephus' reputation and defend himself from accusations of anti-Roman leanings. A modern writer taking this view is Shaye J. D. Cohen in Josephus in Galilee and Rome (1979). The other view sees continuity between the two accounts, their differences due to their different purposes and times of writing and not arising from deliberate distortion; a proponent of this is Tessa Rajak in Josephus: The Historian and his Society (1983): "when his memory was jogged and he was compelled to concentrate more closely on what had happened, he reached a more accurate view" and with the help of "discussion or reading, he encountered the truth in what was said by friends or adversaries" (Rajak, p. 147). The conflicts between the two positions are examined by Per Bilde in Flavius Josephus between Galilee and Rome (1988).

There is also the theory, suggested by the Josephus scholar R. Laqueur in 1920, that Josephus wrote a memoir shortly after the war, which was greatly shortened and summarized for his first book; and that when he had the opportunity, and had improved his knowledge of Greek, he returned to the memoir and published it in its entirety. Josephus does tell us he kept a record while he was held prisoner in the Roman camp during the war, from 67 to 69 CE (Against Apion 1 49); not only did he have time to write, but as one who presented himself as wanting to cooperate with the Romans it made sense for him to write an account of his activities in Galilee for their benefit.

In the chronology given below I choose to regard the Life as the more accurate account. The greater detail is compelling: it is filled with facts and plans that would be irrelevant for either a fiction writer or a polemicist to bother writing about.

Also in the Life Josephus permits more gray areas in his own actions. In the War he flatly states he was made commander of Galilee; in the Life he notes he was only one of three that were assigned to Galilee, and only became sole commander when two of them decided to return to Jerusalem. In War he takes credit for building walls to fortify numerous Galilean cities; in the Life he astoundingly admits that he was forced into fortifying the cities as a stratagem to account for a large amount of wealth he had appropriated. He also admits in the Life that he did send some plunder from Syrian cities to relatives in Jerusalem, rather than keeping it for the war effort, something he criticized others for. Another point is that the Life treats Josephus' enemies in more detail and sometimes more objectively than does the War.
 

 
With the Life so full of detail and incident, and with its repetition of players and locales, simply reading the story from start to finish leaves one confused as to what actually happened. It is thus useful to organize events in some fashion.

Upon examination, the story breaks up into distinct phases. At the highest level one can make the following identification, to which I've added estimates of the minimum time each phase lasted:
 

Phase 1. The Three Commanders of Galilee [3-4 weeks]

Phase 2. Josephus Left in Sole Command [2-3 weeks]

Phase 3. Opposition to Josephus in the Major Cities [6+ weeks]

Phase 4. Jerusalem Envoys Attempt to Remove Josephus [4-5 weeks]

Phase 5. Increasing Military Action against the Romans [3-4 weeks]

Josephus' troubles began when he became the sole commander of Galilee (Phase 2). This was not what Jerusalem had intended: each section had multiple commanders, probably from different political parties. It also upset the local ambitious leaders who regarded him as an outsider trespassing on the territory that they had worked so hard to become strong in; John of Gischala was the most ambitious and the most dangerous of these. The colleagues had been allies of John in his business ventures, having outvoted Josephus so as to allow John to make an enormous profit: "Unsupported and outvoted by the other two, I held my peace." (Life 13 73). When these men left, John lost his friends in the Galilee government and so was almost forced to make his own arrangements to gain power, becoming a source of deadly trouble for Josephus.

Why was Josephus left alone? Josephus makes two points: That his colleagues were allowed by the Sanhedrin to either stay or go; and that his colleagues were only interested in money, and returned to Jerusalem as soon as they had enough. When they received the message that they were free to leave Galilee if they chose, the colleagues "having amassed a large sum of money from the tithes which they accepted as their priestly due, decided to return home; but, on my request, consented to stay until we had brought matters into order." (Life 12 63) So Josephus emphasizes that he did not want to be left in sole command. But what matters needed to be brought into order? The only planned event afterwards is the demolition of Herod's blasphemously decorated palace as the Sanhedrin had ordered them; afterwards, Josephus, at Gischala, allowed is colleagues to return to Jerusalem."

A more cynical reading of this all would be Josephus bribed them to leave. For, he states, "I even declined to accept from those wo brought them the tithes which were due to me as a priest." (Life 15 80) Thus the colleagues took the tithes, but Josephus did not take his share. On the one hand, this looks like care to avoid any appearance of impropriety; but, if this was Josephus' policy from the beginning, the result of this decision was that any collected tithes only needed to be divided between the two colleagues, not three ways. In effect, Josephus has transferred money from himself to his colleagues in a subtle way.

This led to Phase 3. While he was successful in many ways as leader, he had a difficult time maintaining the goal of his moderate party: defending the nation with sufficient strength so as to encourage the Romans to negotiate favorable terms (such was Ananus' motive as described in War 4.5.2 320). But Josephus could not keep the powerful cities under control, and eventually he was forced into violence: he took Tiberias by force in the imprisonment of the most prominent people of Tiberias and the cutting off their leader's hand.

This violence on the part of Josephus opened him to charges of either incompetence or tyranny, which his opponents immediately pounced on, persuading the Jerusalem leadership to remove Josephus from his command. This established Phase 4: Josephus' cunning resistance to those sent to remove him and his ultimate success in maintaining his position and defeating his worst opponents. The last phase follows, consisting of the increased battles leading up to the arrival of Vespasian.
 

Some themes are constant throughout the phases. One is Josephus' frequently expressed horror of civil war between Jews; he criticizes those he sees as breaking the populace into factions, and himself refuses to war against his own people. Skeptics will note that the factions challenged his own authority, so it was natural to detest it, and that in any case he did eventually use violence against them.  Another frequent theme is his respect for property. Whether it is loot from Herod's palace, treasure stolen from the king's overseer by the young men of Dabarittha, or plunder taken by his soldiers at Tiberias and Sepphoris, Josephus always tried to return it to their rightful owners in order to preserve good will. This is consistent with his aristocratic and wealthy background: he  had no personal need for more wealth, but only needed the rights of the propertied classes to be respected. From his insistence on these themes one might detect the defensive purpose of the Life: Josephus seems to have been accused of tyrannical violence against his own people and theft of property. And at one point Josephus indeed makes a confession: "I did take a portion of the spoils after defeating the Syrian inhabitants of the surrounding cities, and admit to having sent these to my kinsfolk in Jerusalem." (Life 15 81). But these battles and plunder are not described elsewhere in the Life.

Estimating Dates

Josephus is lax about giving clues to when events occurred. We can make guesses based on a few principles. His tenure in Galilee began in December 66 or January 67, as indicated in Part 3 of the War Chronology. The next firm date he gives is when he leaves Tiberias and enters Jotapata on 21 Artemisius [June 8 67, Niese] to face Vespasian's army. (War 3.7.3 142) We can work backwards from this: Josephus tells us the Romans spent the 5 days immediately preceding building a road. This suggests Vespasian began operations about mid-May; his arrival links to Josephus also via the garrison's arrival at Sepphoris (War 4 32, continued at 59; Life 394) and Josephus' assault on the city (War 61, probably the same as Life 365).

From Dec 1 to May 15 is about 22 weeks. Thus we need to apportion this amount of time among the phases and sub-phases of Josephus' tenure. We are assisted in this by estimation of travel times. There are many movements between cities, and to each we can assign one day maximum, as Galilee is a small place. Travel to Jerusalem takes a minimum of 3 days, if the travel can take place through often-hostile Samaria, and longer otherwise. This means at least 1 week to send a message and get a reply, as in the initial report back to the assembly and in the pro-Josephus delegation following the recall. Putting this together I made the date estimates given in the table.

Galilee was a thickly populated area, comprising 204 towns, "none of which had a population less than 15,000." The largest cities are identified by Josephus as Sepphoris, Tiberias, Gischala, and Gamala. The people who were not citizens of these or other major cities are called by Josephus simply "the Galileans."

Between the original revolt in Jerusalem and Josephus arrival, each city had developed its factions for and against revolution, and one or the other gained the upper hand at various times.

What drove a city over the edge to revolution? In each case, Josephus identifies the crucial factor as the ethnic warfare being waged with nearby Hellenistic cities. There had already been terrible fighting between the Galilean cities and those of Syria and the Decapolis in the first days of the revolt and before Josephus' arrival (see War Chronology 3). Local leaders took the violence that was occurring with their neighbors and used it as a reason to make a complete break with the Romans.

The capitol, Sepphoris, however, was surrounded by small villages, and had no nearby non-Jewish city to do battle with. This would seem to be an essential factor in explaining why the revolutionary party never managed to gain an upper hand there.

The following table summarizes the situation in the major cities at the time Josephus and his two colleagues arrived to make their initial study of the region.

Each phase of Josephus' action is marked by a color in the heading row and down the leftmost column.

Phase 1. The Three Commanders of Galilee. (December-January 66/67)
Phase 2. Josephus Left in Sole Command. Fortifications begun (January 67)
Phase 3. (February-March 67)
      a. Opposition to Josephus Begins. First plots of John and Justus.
      b. The Dabarittha affair: ending in the taking of Tiberias and imprisonment of leaders.
      c. Fortifications substantially completed
Phase 4. The Recall.
    The affair of the envoys and the subduing of John and Justus. (March-April 67)
Phase 5. Increased Roman incursions. (April-May 67)

Created by G. J. Goldberg July 2000
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