Hi Folks,

This is from the Josephus preface to Antiquities, written long after he had written "Jewish Wars". The () are my additions.

www.ccel.org/j/josephus/w...t-pref.htm
2. Now I have undertaken the present work (Aniquities), as thinking it will appear to all the Greeks worthy of their study; for it will contain all our antiquities, and the constitution of our government, as interpreted out of the Hebrew Scriptures. And indeed I did formerly intend, when I wrote of the war (Jewish Wars), to explain who the Jews originally were, - what fortunes they had been subject to, - and by what legislature they had been instructed in piety, and the exercise of other virtues, - what wars also they had made in remote ages, till they were unwillingly engaged in this last with the Romans: but because this work would take up a great compass, I separated it (Antiquities in an early state, essentially a translation of Tanach) into a set treatise by itself, with a beginning of its own, and its own conclusion; but in process of time, as usually happens to such as undertake great things, I grew weary and went on slowly, it being a large subject, and a difficult thing to translate our history into a foreign, and to us unaccustomed language.

It helps to know the Josephus background a bit. What is pretty clear is that he began to translate the Jewish history into Greek. And that would be many books of the Tanach (OT); although not the Penteteuch, meaning that those history books were not available at the time in Greek, otherwise there would be no need to translate. However the job was wearying, years went by, and Josephus wrote Antiquities instead as a history summary instead of doing a translation.

I have seen no indication, textually or historically, that Josephus had a Greek translation to work with. Generally Josephus does not line up with our supposed LXX quotes either.

The situation with Philo is also worthy of a careful look.

Shalom,
Steven Avery