Whether Sadduccees or Essenes.
I`ve always taken Josephus with more than a grain of salt; his account of the mass suicide led by Eleazar ben Yair sounds contrived to make the Jews seem admirable to a Roman audience. Such suicide was a Roman virtue, not a Jewish one.
King David`s ruling on that matter seems operant. When a traveler told King David he`d assisted King Saul in suicide, King David -- accounted a scholar as well as a judge -- ordered the traveler immediately executed, condemned out of his own mouth.
Can Prof. Elior suggest a reason Josephus would have made up the Essenes? Or may he just have been an indiscriminate collector of tales, like Herodotus, the Father of Journalism, who wrote of ants the size of dogs? |
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