Description

In his major work, the Jewish Antiquities, Josephus gives a history of his people in Greek. He begins with the Bible, and after it he collects other sources till his own time. The work was published in 93, under emperor Domitian, but unfortunately the Biblical part is a paraphrase, not an accurate translation, and it has often been thought that it was merely a loose adaptation of a previous Greek translation. However, this study offers a minute comparison with other ancient Biblical texts known to us in Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek. The general conclusion is that he used only a Hebrew source, which has some af-finities with several Qumran fragments. Beyond many little details, one can see that for some books, especially Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, the copies he used were quite differ-ent from the canonical forms.