Reviewed by: Josephus Geographicus Stuart D. Robertson Josephus Geographicus, by Yuval Shahar, translated by Susan Weingarten. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 98. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004. 305 pp. $149.50. Professor Shahar's Josephus Geographicus, which would be "Josephus Geographer" in English, examines far more than Josephus as a geographer. Indeed, it is not until chapter six, page 190, that the author gets to the subject of Josephus as a geographer. The subtitle of this volume gets more particularly at Shahar's subject: "The Classical Context of Geography in Josephus." The author proposes to write another study of Josephus' Jewish Geography (p. 267). In this volume Shahar examines Josephus as a participant in the classical tradition. The tradition that the author examines is often far beyond any that had an influence on Josephus. Two questions underlie Shahar's investigation of the various classical writers who discuss geography: First, "Why did the historian include a geographical description in his historical work? What narrative or other function is intended for the spatial description?" Second, "How does the spatial [End Page 205] description fulfill its goal? In other words, what are the creative methods with which the historian shapes space and suits it to the historiographic function which the historian intends it to fulfill?" (p. 1). In discussing the classical historical literature the author groups his comments around four spatial concepts. Herodotus, the father of history, inherited three of these and added the fourth. These concepts are: "First, the oikoumene, the inhabited world, and its three aspects: the geographical aspect, the political one, and the oikoumene as a space of cultural identity. Second, Homer as the father of geography, especially as reflected by Strabo, who combined the first two spatial concepts: the geographical aspect of the oikoumene and the Homeric as the space of cultural identity of Strabo himself. Third, Greek geography—but not geography of Greece. There is a basic difference between descriptions of Greece and descriptions of other countries . . . [There was no concept of Greece as a whole up to this time, just various city states.]. Fourth, The linear literature—the literature of travel by sea and land" (p. 2). The second concept above mentioned Strabo in particular because Strabo is the funnel through whom Polybius' reflection of the prior tradition reaches Josephus. Josephus cited Strabo eleven times in the Antiquities (p. 238) but is informed by him elsewhere. When Josephus was writing the Jewish War, "He wove his descriptions on the basis of the warp and weft set up on Strabo's loom" (p. 256). Here Shahar supports the contention of Louis Feldman, who saw that Josephus continually had in mind readers educated in classical literature as he retold the story of his people. The author proposes that Tacitus engaged in a dialogue with Strabo and Josephus, a theory Shahar derives from his view that the Latin historian, contemporary with Josephus, would have learned his information on the geography of Palestine not from personal experience but from reading the works of these two historians/geographers who wrote in Greek (p. 250). This in itself was not impossible, since learned men knew both Latin and Greek. He supports these views with tables comparing citations from the work of each. A thread running through this book is the variety of meanings associated with the term oikoumene, the inhabited world. Josephus expands on the geographical and political nuances of this word. This Jewish historian had in mind the "eternal and unlimited creation of God." He observes that the way Josephus uses geographical terms relating to Palestine shows he stands within the midrashic tradition of his day (p. 5). Shahar's concluding remark is "Tell me what the meaning of the oikoumene is for you, and I will tell you who you are." Josephus displays his Jewishness, though he stands in the classical tradition, by the meaning he understands of oikoumene. [End Page 206] The author does not mention the New Testament historian, Luke, who wrote linear geography in the Acts and described Palestine in his Gospel. This reviewer encountered a number of typographical errors (p. 25—Odessey for Odyssey, p. 70—Hellepont for Hellespont, p. 129—Thudydides for Thucydides, among others...
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