Antiquities of the Jews

About this work

In AD 93–94 Josephus produced the Jewish Antiquities; in twenty books he wrote the history of the Jewish people from God’s creation of the world to the outbreak of the war with the Romans. His source for the first eleven books was the Jewish scriptures, although there has been considerable dispute as to whether he used a Hebrew or a Greek text. Despite the fact that Josephus, at the beginning of the Jewish Antiquities, declared that in his retelling of the biblical story he would neither add nor omit anything (Ant. 1.17), he did, in fact, both add a considerable number of haggadic stories and embellishments natural to his own interests, and omit a number of biblical incidents.

Donna R. Runnalls, “Josephus,” in Dictionary of Biblical Criticism and Interpretation, ed. Stanley E. Porter (London: Routledge, 2007), 184.