Love of Piety, Hatred for Herod: The Emotions of Devotion Among Jews in Josephus’s Antiquities

Emotions play an important role in Josephus’ characterization of Herod’s relationship with his Jewish subjects in Antiquities. According to Josephus, Herod loves honor, while the Jews love piety, and Herod’s willful neglect of divine law leads his subjects to hate him. These emotions play a central role in two martyrdom narratives (Ant. 15.267–291; 17.149–163) in which Jews risk capital punishment in order to defend the Law from Herod’s offensive conduct. Hate in the Greco-Roman world was not simply a feeling of enmity but a moral emotion that served as a necessary reaction to vice. In the context of Antiquities, the emotion of hate inspires martyrs because their act of total devotion is a response to Herodian vice. Similarly, the martyrs’ expressed love of piety contrasts with Herod’s own love of honor, bringing into sharp relief the different value systems that Josephus sees as the root of the dissension between the king and his subjects. By associating specific emotions with the devotion of the martyrs in these two narratives, Josephus enables his audience to discriminate between virtue and vice, a fundamental distinction throughout Antiquities as a whole.