God's Brigands: People, Party, and Sect in Flavius Josephus's Bellum Judaicum

Abstract

Renowned as a historian, Flavius Josephus enjoys little reputation as a political thinker. As heir to the classical historical tradition of Thucydides, however, considerations of the regime remained primary for him. All the more so given his most important task not inherited from them: the defense of the Jewish law and people against their pagan detractors. Josephus defended the law as having specified the best political regime (which he called “theocracy” but by which he meant a rigorous natural aristocracy). He defended the people as faithful to that law and as innocent of the terrible excesses of the great uprising of 66 CE. In so doing he was compelled to confront a phenomenon unknown to his classical predecessors: a politics not of class divisions but of sectarian ones. His response to it uncannily anticipated features of the modern (post-Machiavellian) reinterpretation of politics in terms of “peoples” and “elites.”