The Jewish War, the Antiquities and Against Apion

Josephus's The Jewish War, written in the 70s CE, is an eyewitness military and political history of the revolt and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, composed first in Aramaic for a Jewish and Parthian audience before Josephus produced the Greek version that survives. His much longer Jewish Antiquities, completed around 93 to 94 CE, retells the whole history of the Jewish people from creation to the eve of the revolt, drawing on the Hebrew Bible, oral tradition and earlier Hellenistic Jewish writers, and it is the single most detailed surviving source for the Hasmonean and Herodian periods and for groups such as the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes.

His later apologetic work Against Apion defended Judaism against contemporary anti-Jewish polemic and argued for the antiquity and coherence of Jewish law and history. Because so much of Second Temple Judea would otherwise be known only through fragments, biblical text or later rabbinic memory, Josephus is the primary narrative source the atlas draws on across a wide range of entities touching Second Temple Judaism, Herodian era institutions and the Jewish Roman wars, and his account, while shaped throughout by his own political position, remains indispensable precisely because so little else survives to check it against.