BOOK REVIEW: The Jewish Revolt against Rome.

Editor Mladen Popović has collected sixteen articles on the Judaean-Roman conflict. For example, Brian Schultz deals with the ideas about the eschatological war in the famous War Scroll and related texts and shows how the identification of the archenemy, the ‘Kittim’, shifted from Greeks to Romans. This conclusion is not very surprising but makes it clear how the study of the scrolls can be useful to military historians.

In this way, it is possible to offer more context to Josephus’ account. Werner Eck observes that the author of the Jewish War always blames members of the equestrian order and almost never suggests senatorial errors, which suggests that the book was read by senators. This in turn suggests that there were limits to Josephus’ fantasy. Pieter van der Horst tries to find out what was intrusive about the fourth philosophy and concludes that the refusal to pay taxes was indeed unheard of. Jodi Magness shows that Josephus’ account of the siege of Masada is quite accurate.