JOSEPHUS AND 1 MACCABEES

A painstaking comparison of 1 Maccabees and Josephus' paraphrase in his Jewish Antiquities shows (1) that his copy significantly differed from the usual book, and (2) that he worked on a Hebrew text, as he did elsewhere with the help of Greek-speaking assistants. He brought in several digressions taken from Jewish sources and Hellenistic historians, but his improvement of the narrative itself is minimal (he never heard of 2 Maccabees). However, his reworking provides us in a number of places with a better understanding of the traditional Greek text of 1 Maccabees, which is a very literal translation, sometimes misleading.