Against Apion
Josephus’s defence of the antiquity of the Jewish people, written after his Antiquities. It quotes at length from historians now lost, among them the Babylonian Berossus, and describes the Jewish Scriptures as a fixed collection.
Josephus wrote these two books at Rome after finishing the Jewish Antiquities, to answer writers who denied that the Jews were an ancient people. To make his case he quotes Egyptian, Phoenician, Babylonian and Greek authors whose works have since been lost.
Among them is Berossus, a Babylonian who wrote a history of his country in Greek in the third century BC. The extracts in book 1 give the reigns of the kings of Babylon from Nebuchadnezzar to Nabonidus and an account of the Persian conquest. They reach us at second or third hand: Berossus wrote some 250 years after the events, and Josephus quotes him four centuries later still. In the same book Josephus says that the Jews have twenty-two sacred books and that the history written since the reign of Artaxerxes is not held in equal esteem, because the succession of the prophets had failed.
Cited in
- about 1000 BC, traditional date
- about 966 BC to 959 BC, estimated date
- 12 October 539 BC, firm date
- about 435 BC, estimated date