The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

did admittedly still give Herod preference later on in the comparative evaluation [of Herod and
Antigonus], but this signified merely the choosing of the lesser of two evils and therefore all
passion for Herod had to be discontinued.
After a bloody struggle the fight was settled in Herod’s favour; his exhausted friends lay
down to rest while Herod himself went for a bath accompanied only by one slave, as War 340/1
recounts. Before he enters the bathhouse one of the enemy in full armour dashes suddenly
from the house, then another and another, [and] finally a greater number. These people had
run from the battle in full armour into the bathhouse in order to hide. When they now caught
sight of the king, however, they attempted to run by him, trembling, even though he was
unarmed (γυμνός), and that is why they rushed to the exits. Since nobody else was there who
could have seized the people, and Herod was content to have suffered no harm, the people
were all able to escape. Ant. 462/3 shifts this situation. While in the War we are to imagine
Herod still outside the baths when the people attempt to run by him, in the Antiquities he is
already sitting in the water (περὶ λουτρὸν ἦν 462, λουομένου 463). Why? because when
Josephus approached his text again in order to produce the Antiquities, he no longer
interpreted βαλανεῖον as bathhouse but as bathwater, and because he accordingly takes
γυμνός in the sense of “naked” (463), but in War 341 it simply means “unarmed”, in accordance
with the situation. After βαλανεῖον had lost the meaning of bathhouse, it now still had [210]
to be explained first which house it then was, in which the soldiers had hidden themselves and
in which Herod [Ed.: German mistakenly reads ‘Josephus’] was bathing. Thus arise εἴς τι
δωμάτιον (462) and ἐν τῷ οἰκήματι (463). The overall view is ultimately shifted by the
reinterpretation: in the War, where Herod, who was out of the water, was not in any additional
danger, Josephus was required to explain how it came to be that the opponents escaped after
all; in the Antiquities on the other hand, where Herod was sitting in the water and could not
threaten the enemy, he tried to justify how it came about that Herod was saved. We see the
well-known picture of Josephus’ method of working: the entire scene was logically
reinterpreted consistently, the adjustments are mutually dependent. The reinterpretation is
factually insignificant from a political point of view, but for the history of the text it is very
informative: Josephus is induced to reformulate the text by his differing conception of the
words γυμνός and βαλανεῖον . This case is identical to that discussed in section 12. The sole
historical source for the anecdote is, of course, the War. Otto’s note in column 30 is to be
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