Flavius Josephus

Josephus was born around 37 CE in Jerusalem to a priestly family with claimed royal Hasmonean descent on his mother's side, giving him standing in both the religious and political elite of Judea before the revolt against Rome even began. When the First Jewish Roman War broke out in 66 CE he was given command of Jewish forces in Galilee, where he organized the region's defenses against the Roman legions under Vespasian.

The Galilean campaign ended in defeat, and Josephus surrendered at the fortress of Jotapata in 67 CE rather than dying with the last defenders, as several of his companions reportedly urged. By his own account he predicted to Vespasian, while a prisoner, that Vespasian would become emperor, a prophecy that came true in 69 CE and won Josephus his freedom, Roman citizenship and the patronage of the new Flavian dynasty, whose family name he adopted. He spent the rest of his life in Rome under that protection, an arrangement his fellow Jews, both then and afterward, have often read as opportunism or outright betrayal, a judgment his own writing spends considerable energy trying to answer. His account of the prophecy scene, delivered to Vespasian while he stood as a prisoner facing likely execution, is preserved only in his own later writing, and its neat fulfillment two years later has led many historians to treat it with some caution as self-serving retrospective shaping rather than as a report that can be independently confirmed.

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.