Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations

Martin Goodman's Rome and Jerusalem sets the First Jewish-Roman War within the wider political and cultural relationship between Rome and Judea across the first century, arguing the war grew from a genuine, longstanding failure of the two societies to accommodate one another rather than from any single provocation. Goodman, a specialist in Roman-period Jewish history at the University of Oxford, works from Josephus alongside Roman and archaeological evidence, and treats Josephus's own casualty figures for the siege of Jerusalem as rhetorically inflated rather than as a demographic record.