On Jewish War Under Trajan and Hadrian, by William Horbury ***

This is the most complete account of the wars between the Jews and the Roman Empire post 70 CE that I've read, going deeper into the subject than Mary Smallwood's very thorough but also easier to follow book. Horbury's text is very much an academic work, at times difficult to follow and very much bogged down in details that, to be exhaustive, it must be.

After a contextual introduction, in which Horbury claims that all the Jewish wars can be seen as one uprising rather than a set of uprisings, the book provides a long account of the literature that already exists on the subject--a very useful exercise. I'd read several of these works, as it turns out, and it was great not only to read Horbury's summation of works I hadn't gotten to but also to some I had, in part to remind me of their basic points but also because it was interesting to read how Horbury himself interprets the findings of some of these authors.

The text turns then to the various wars and their causes, most particularly to the Kitos War, for which very little information exists. Horbury does an admirable job pulling in the various historical sources and some sources that less certainly refer to it. The war, as he notes, was not just in Egypt but also in Cyprus and modern-day Libya (Cirenaica), the latter two actually seemingly more heavily the source of the conflict, at least as I read it. Egypt, of course, was a constant bed of intrigue between Jewish and Greek residents, but the Messianic hopefuls did their best to spread into the area, spreading the war. The war also coincided with the Roman invasion of Parthia. I expect I'll return to Horbury's text to review more about this war, since I've seen nothing else quite so thorough.

Judea's turn at the war, of course, would come a little over a decade later, in what is known as the Bar Kochba uprising. On this, I was on more solid ground having read more about it. Horbury doesn't just repeat what others have said, of course, but since those others have written more accessibly about the subject, I found myself more easily zoning out in these latter sections.