Part 64 (2/2)
BOOK 18 FOOTNOTES
[1] Since St. Luke once, Acts 5:37, and Josephus four several times, once here, sect. 6; and B. XX. ch. 5. sect. 2; Of the War, B. II. ch.
8. sect. 1; and ch. 17. sect. 8, calls this Judas, who was the pestilent author of that seditious doctrine and temper which brought the Jewish nation to utter destruction, a Galilean; but here [sect. 1] Josephus calls him a Gaulonite, of the city of Gamala; it is a great question where this Judas was born, whether in Galilee on the west side, or in Gaulonitis on the east side, of the river Jordan; while, in the place just now cited out of the Antiquities, B. XX. ch. 5. sect. 2, he is not only called a Galilean, but it is added to his story, ”as I have signified in the books that go before these,” as if he had still called him a Galilean in those Antiquities before, as well as in that particular place, as Dean Aldrich observes, Of the War, B. II. ch.
8. sect. 1. Nor can one well imagine why he should here call him a Gaulonite, when in the 6th sect. following here, as well as twice Of the War, he still calls him a Galilean. As for the city of Gamala, whence this Judas was derived, it determines nothing, since there were two of that name, the one in Gaulonitis, the other in Galilee. See Reland on the city or town of that name.
[2] It seems not very improbable to me that this Sadduc, the Pharisee, was the very same man of whom the Rabbins speak, as the unhappy, but undesigning, occasion of the impiety or infidelity of the Sadducees; nor perhaps had the men this name of Sadducees till this very time, though they were a distinct sect long before. See the note on B. XIII. ch. 10.
sect 5; and Dean Prideaux, as there quoted. Nor do we, that I know of, find the least footsteps of such impiety or infidelity of these Sadducees before this time, the Recognitions a.s.suring us that they began about the days of John the Baptist; B. 1. ch. 54. See note above.
[3] It seems by what Josephus says here, and Philo himself elsewhere, Op. p. 679, that these Essens did not use to go to the Jewish festivals at Jerusalem, or to offer sacrifices there, which may be one great occasion why they are never mentioned in the ordinary books of the New Testament; though, in the Apostolical Const.i.tutions, they are mentioned as those that observed the customs of their forefathers, and that without any such ill character laid upon them as is there laid upon the other sects among that people.
[4] Who these Polistae in Josephus, or in Strabo, among the Pythagoric Dacae, were, it is not easy to determine. Scaliger offers no improbable conjecture, that some of these Dacae lived alone, like monks, in tents or caves; but that others of them lived together in built cities, and thence were called by such names as implied the same.
[5] We may here take notice, as well as in the parallel parts of the books Of the War, B. II. ch. 9. sect. 1, that after the death of Herod the Great, and the succession of Archclaus, Josephus is very brief in his accounts of Judea, till near his own time. I suppose the reason is, that after the large history of Nicolaus of Damascus, including the life of Herod, and probably the succession and first actions of his sons, he had but few good histories of those times before him.
[6] Numbers 19:11-14.
[7] This citation is now wanting.
[8] These Jews, as they are here called, whose blood Pilate shed on this occasion, may very well be those very Galilean Jews, ”whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices,” Luke 13:1, 2; these tumults being usually excited at some of the Jews' great festivals, when they slew abundance of sacrifices, and the Galileans being commonly much more busy in such tumults than those of Judea and Jerusalem, as we learn from the history of Archelaus, Antiq. B. XVII. ch. 9. sect. 3 and ch. 10. sect.
2, 9; though, indeed, Josephus's present copies say not one word of ”those eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them,”
which the 4th verse of the same 13th chapter of St. Luke informs us of.
But since our gospel teaches us, Luke 23:6, 7, that ”when Pilate heard of Galilee, he asked whether Jesus were a Galilean. And as soon as he knew that he belonged to Herod's jurisdiction, he sent him to Herod;”
and ver. 12, ”The same day Pilate and Herod were made friends together for before they had been at enmity between themselves;” take the very probable key of this matter in the words of the learned Noldius, de Herod. No. 219: ”The cause of the enmity between Herod and Pilate [says he] seems to have been this, that Pilate had intermeddled with the tetrarch's jurisdiction, and had slain some of his Galilean subjects, Luke 13:1; and, as he was willing to correct that error, he sent Christ to Herod at this time.”
[9] A.D. 33, April 3.
[10] April 5.
[11] Of the banishment of these four thousand Jews into Sardinia by Tiberius, see Suetonlus in Tiber. sect. 36. But as for Mr. Reland's note here, which supposes that Jews could not, consistently with their laws, be soldiers, it is contradicted by one branch of the history before us, and contrary to innumerable instances of their fighting, and proving excellent soldiers in war; and indeed many of the best of them, and even under heathen kings themselves, did so; those, I mean, who allowed them their rest on the sabbath day, and other solemn festivals, and let them live according to their own laws, as Alexander the Great and the Ptolemies of Egypt did. It is true, they could not always obtain those privileges, and then they got executed as well as they could, or sometimes absolutely refused to fight, which seems to have been the case here, as to the major part of the Jews now banished, but nothing more.
See several of the Roman decrees in their favor as to such matters, B.
XIV. ch. 10.
[12] Since Moses never came himself beyond Jordan, nor particularly to Mount Gerizzim, and since these Samaritans have a tradition among them, related here by Dr. Hudson, from Reland, who was very skillful in Jewish and Samaritan learning, that in the days of Uzzi or Ozis the high priest, 1 Chronicles 6:6; the ark and other sacred vessels were, by G.o.d's command, laid up or hidden in Mount Gerizzim, it is highly probable that this was the foolish foundation the present Samaritans went upon, in the sedition here described.
[13] This mention of the high priest's sacred garments received seven days before a festival, and purified in those days against a festival, as having been polluted by being in the custody of heathens, in Josephus, agrees well with the traditions of the Talmudists, as Reland here observes. Nor is there any question but the three feasts here mentioned were the pa.s.sover, pentecost, and feast of tabernacles; and the fast so called by way of distinction, as Acts 27:9, was the great day of expiation.
[14] This calculation, from all Josephus's Greek copies, is exactly right; for since Herod died about September, in the fourth year before the Christian era, and Tiberius began, as is well known, Aug. 19, A.D.
14, it is evident that the thirty-seventh year of Philip, reckoned from his father's death, was the twentieth of Tiberius, or near the end of A.D. 33, [the very year of our Savior's death also,] or, however, in the beginning of the next year, A.D. 34. This Philip the tetrarch seems to have been the best of all the posterity of Herod, for his love of peace, and his love of justice. An excellent example this.
[15] This Herod seems to have had the additional name of Philip, as Antipus was named Herod-Antipas: and as Antipus and Antipater seem to be in a manner the very same name, yet were the names of two sons of Herod the Great; so might Philip the tetrarch and this Herod-Philip be two different sons of the same father, all which Grotias observes on Matthew 14:3. Nor was it, as I with Grotias and others of the Philip the tetrarch, but this Herod-Philip, whose wife Herod the tetrarch had married, and that in her first husband's lifetime, and when her first husband had issue by her-; for which adulterous and incestuous marriage John the Baptist justly reproved Herod the tetrarch, and for which reproof Salome, the daughter of Herodias by her first husband Herod-Philip, who was still alive, occasioned him to be unjustly beheaded.
[16] Whether this sudden extinction of almost the entire lineage of Herod the Great, which was very numerous, as we are both here and in the next section informed, was not in part as a punishment for the gross incests they were frequently guilty of, in marrying their own nephews and nieces, well deserves to be considered. See Leviticus 18:6, 7; 21:10; and Noldius, De Herod, No. 269, 270.
[17] There are coins still extant of this Eraess, as Spanheim informs us. Spanheim also informs us of a coin still extant of this Jotape, daughter of the king of Commageus.
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