The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

days altogether. Both changes therefore stand in a mutually dependent factual relationship,
and Josephus, who deleted the chronological details of the War from the Antiquities, has for
once proven himself to be the better critic here than the modern scholars who wish to unite
both sets of information.
A few further details also belong to this very same source as the insertion 476b ff., by
which Josephus enriched the narrative of the War in the Antiquities. Firstly, the chronological
note in [section] 473: θέρος τε γὰρ ἦν and the statement in [section] 475 that it was a Sabbath
year so that the inner town was in dire straights due to lack of grain. Finally, the information
that the fall of the city occurred “in the third month on the Day of Atonement” (487) belongs
to this as well; it does not originate from the War either, rather it stands in obvious contrast to
this, whereas it matches the chronology of the insertion perfectly; for if the two walls were
fought over for 55 days then it adds up [212] quite well that the town fell in the third month; 74
because after that the upper town still remained to be conquered. So we see how all the details
agree amongst themselves: when the siege began, it was summer ([section] 473); the battle for
the two town walls lasted 55 days, the upper town fell in the third month of the siege on the
Day of Atonement, i.e. the third of October. Accordingly [the siege] had begun in July when it
was certainly summer and everything was dried out. This system fell short only in the one
point: in Ant. 465 Josephus had transferred the information from War 343 that the siege had
begun “after the end of winter” and surely by this the author meant perhaps March or April.
Therefore only in this one passage set apart, in which Josephus had essentially extracted one
piece of information too many from the War, there exists the rupture in the Antiquities, which
consequently obviously combined two sources with each other. The chronology of the one
source (War) reads: march to Jerusalem after the end of winter ([section] 343), beginning of the
siege, fall of the town after five months. The other chronology records: beginning of the siege
in July, fall of the town on the third of October in the third month of the siege. Only these two
systems are available to the researcher and the decision [between the two] can result only
from an assessment of the sources themselves. Without doubt, the exhaustive details of the
74
It is incomprehensible to me how one could think to interpret the words τῷ τρίτῳ μηνί in
such a way that they would mean the third month of the Olympiad. For a start, one should
point out passages in which historians have divided whole Olympiads into months. This
attempt at interpretation was really only a makeshift [solution] [Notbehelf] because one always
had the fifth month from the War in mind while reading the Antiquities.
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