The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

[military] action against Aristobulus at Hyrcanus’ request in the War, then this constitutes an
acknowledgement of Hyrcanus’ rights by Pompey, and Josephus did not want this very thing to
hold true any longer in the Antiquities. But now in order to set the scene for Pompey’s military
action, which could not be denied outright after all, without having to concede that Hyrcanus
and Antipater were in the right as a result, Josephus reckons – by exploiting the bribery theme
–, that the raising of these grievances earned Aristobulus only ill-will among the Romans (37).
Thus the Antiquities is based on the War but completely remodels its view and we hereby
encounter the phenomena that are [already] more than well known to us from [our]
comparison of Life and War, so that there is no doubt that here, in fact, exists the very work of
[none other than] Josephus himself.
But some parts do not fit into this point of view, rather they expose new material;
already in 35 - 36 there was a direct excerpt from Strabo, which of course had no antecedent in
the War; and the same applies later to the appearance of the Jewish people against both
pretendants, which was described in the report about Pompey’s [military] actions in Syria and
Lebanon (38 - 40), and finally [it also applies] to Hyrcanus’ accusation that [148] it is
Aristobulus “who has provoked the raids into the neighbouring territory and the acts of piracy
at sea” (43). Especially the last comment, which has absolutely no model and no support at all
in Jewish lines of thought, leads inevitably to the conclusion that here a writer is being used
who has narrated the Roman history of this time – [namely] Pompey and the war against the
pirates. Thus, Hölscher (page 42) too, following Otto (Leipziger Studien 11.230), already thought
of Strabo as a source and attributed to him, albeit incorrectly, those segments that had been
extracted directly from the War by means of reinterpretation; Josephus had expanded upon
Nicolaus’ [work] in the War, and when he composed the Antiquities he compared [Nicolaus’
writing to] the historical work of Strabo and by the comparison he established the similarity
between the two reports (section 104). He utilized Strabo for supplementing by partly
interlacing literal quotations from him and partly interweaving his larger stock of facts into
the new presentation; but since the use of Strabo has now been established precisely for 34 -
36, then it is only self-evident, purely formally, that the supplementing parts in 38 ff. must be
ascribed to this same source. Hölscher correctly emphasized the similarity of the contents to
Strabo’s Geography.
By a fortunate coincidence we are even able to go one step further with respect to this
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