The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

corrected accordingly.
16. The conquest of Jerusalem
War 343 - 357 = Ant. 465 - 491
After his decisive victory over Antigonus, Herod advances to Jerusalem and conquers
the town after a rather lengthy siege. The report about this, as it is given in Ant. 14.470 - 481,
coincides substantially with War 347 - 353, but differs in comparison by a series of details that
must be investigated collectively. In the first instance, the comments [in] 476b - 478 have no
model antecedent in the War where, rather, the information about the scaling of the walls by
Sossius is directly followed by the account about the battle in the town (350). The part of the
Antiquities lying in between deals with the length of the battle for the “first” and “ second” wall
(40 and 15 days respectively), then it relates that Herod, in order to malign Antigonus, alleged
that the latter has had some of the temple halls set on fire. After the fall of the outer temple
and the lower city the Jews fled into the inner sanctuary and the upper city. Since they were
lacking animals for the daily offerings, they had requested of [211] Herod that [he grant] these
same [animals] entry, and he made this concession to them with the assumption that they
would now surrender. But since they did not do this, but rather they continued to fight for
Antigonus, so Herod took the town by force.
There can be no doubt at all now that here we have an insertion into the Antiquities, and
not some condensation of a common original text in the War. The evidence is supplied by [the
fact] that we already find the fate of the town sealed in [section] 476a with the scaling of the
town walls; by contrast, the expositions about the Jews’ offerings hark back to the past, and
consequently, in order to effect the continuation the author must again first create the doublet
in 478 προσβαλὼν κατὰ κράτος εἴλεν τὴν πόλιν to the [phrase] in 476 ἀναβαίνουσιν δὲ ἐπὶ τὸ
τεῖχος. The insertion is based on good tradition, as is evidenced by the details about the length
of the battle for the two town walls. But it is precisely these details that stand in direct
contradiction to the account of War 351 that the battle for Jerusalem lasted five months; and
precisely because Josephus himself also deemed these two sets of information to be
incompatible, he deleted the information about the five months from the Antiquities where he
interlaced the details from the new source about the battle for the two walls, [which lasted] 55
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