The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

ut rather of [the fact] that he would be in a position to procure the money for building the
walls — so he does not yet have it — and it is in section 611 that the modification in
comparison with the administrative report, already discussed by us on page 61, had been made
precisely because Josephus did not have the money on him. Thus sections 602 and 607 proceed
from very different premises than do 596, 609 and 611 with which they stand in contradiction.
2. In section 605 Josephus explains that he did not have the intention of transferring
the money to Agrippa; “because I will never deem your enemy to be my friend nor consider as
a benefit something that brings harm to the community.” That such a sentence, in which
Agrippa is designated as a pest, [70] did not exist in the book that Josephus trimmed for
Agrippa’s reading [pleasure] requires little explanation; we did see how, quite to the contrary,
the underlying thought of the War was that Josephus had done everything for Agrippa’s sake
and that the context was altered with precisely this in view (cf. page 62).
3. In the mutually parallel passages 602 and 608 there is still a remarkable difference to
be found. According to 602 the party hostile to Josephus consisted of “people from the
countryside”, whereas in 608 the Tiberians are named as opponents. Now, it will arise later
that the War has acquired a further characteristic in that all of Josephus’ conflicts with the
Tiberians are deleted (cf. page 84); therefore, at that time Josephus could neither have
produced the sentence (606) according to which he had to fear that the Tiberians had intended
to steal the monies, nor 608 according to which the Tiberians reviled and threatened Josephus.
From this last observation it also arises that, of the two parallel versions, the one from section
602 is to be assessed as the original, so that the first version initially read: πρὸς ταῦτα τῶν μὲν
οἰκείως ἐχόντων καὶ μάλιστα τῶν Ταριχεατῶν οἶκτος ἦν, οἱ δ’ ἀπὸ τῆς χώρας καὶ τῶν πλησίον,
ὅσοις ἐδόκει φορτικὸς, ἐβλασφήμουν· // καταλιπόντες δ’ ἑκάτεροι τὸν Ἰώσηπον ἀλλήλοις
διεφέροντο· κα’κεῖνος θαῤῥῶν ἤδη τοῖς ᾠκειωμένοις, ἦσαν δὲ εἰς τετρακισμυρίους Ταριχεᾶται,
παντὶ τῷ πλήθει παρρησιαστικώτερον ὡμίλει. By this, it is now quite clearly seen how the
ᾠκειωμένοις from section 608 incorporates the οἰκείως ἐχόντων from section 602.
4. All the same, this version that has just been delineated is not yet the final one.
Josephus’ [rapport] with Tarichea unfolds in the opposite sense to that of his rapport with
Tiberias (page 91 ff.) as an inevitable consequence of the fact that these two towns stood in
opposition to one another. In particular, we shall see that Josephus deleted all his close
relations with Tarichea while composing the War, because Agrippa and the Romans took
64