The Wars of the Jews

Book excerpt: The Jewish War or Judean War, also referred to in English as The Wars of the Jews, is a book written by Josephus, a Roman-Jewish historian of the 1st century. Divided into seven books, it opens with a summary of Jewish history from the capture of Jerusalem by the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 164 BC to the first stages of the First Jewish-Roman War (Book I and II). The next five books detail the unfolding of the war, under Roman generals Vespasian and Titus, to the death of the last Sicarii. The book was written about 75 AD, originally in Josephus's "paternal tongue," probably Aramaic, though this version has not survived. It was later translated into Greek, probably under the supervision of Josephus himself. The sources of knowledge of the First Jewish-Roman War are: this account of Josephus, the Talmud (Gittin 57b), Midrash Eichah, and the Hebrew inscriptions on the Jewish coins minted, and Book V of Tacitus' Histories. The text also survives in an Old Slavonic version, as well as Hebrew which contains material not found in the Greek version, and which is lacking other material found in the Greek version.