The works of the Jewish writer Flavius Josephus represent one of the most important records of Judaism and the Jews that survive from the ancient world. The Jewish Antiquities, his largest historical enterprise, is an account in twenty books of Jewish history from the creation to the outbreak of the Jewish revolt against Rome in AD 66.

Here is all the drama of the Old Testament transformed into a historical narrative of Greco-Roman character; and more important, our only continuous account of Middle Eastern affairs in the two hundred years that led up to the revolt.

William Whiston, successor to Isaac Newton as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, published his famous translation of Josephus' works in 1737. The modern system of chapter divisions has been added.