Josephus's two-book defense of Jewish antiquity and law against Greek and Egyptian slanders, including the famous claim of a 22-book scriptural canon.
Against Apion is Josephus's last known work, written after the Antiquities and addressed, like it, to his patron Epaphroditus. It is a point-by-point rebuttal aimed at people who doubted the antiquity of the Jewish nation or repeated hostile stories about its origins. Book 1 argues that Jewish records are older and more reliable than Greek historiography, which Josephus says only began with Homer and is riddled with disagreement; he then works through non-Greek witnesses (Manetho, Berossus, Phoenician and Tyrian records) to establish a Jewish chronology reaching back further than most Greek accounts admit. In the course of this argument he describes how the Jewish scriptures were composed and preserved by prophets and priests, stating that there are exactly twenty-two books covering all of history down to Artaxerxes, and that no one has dared to add, remove, or alter a word in them.
Book 1's second half and most of Book 2 turn to refuting specific hostile writers, above all Manetho's Egyptian tale that the Jews' ancestors were expelled lepers, and the grammarian Apion, whose accusations against the Alexandrian Jewish community Josephus dismantles line by line, including the absurd claim that Jews sacrificed a Greek annually and worshipped a golden donkey's head. Josephus treats these authors as self-contradicting and easily caught in factual errors, using their own words against them.
The work closes with a positive account of the Mosaic constitution: laws for family life, sexual conduct, care of the poor, and treatment of foreigners, and a description of a form of government he coins as a "theocracy," in which God alone is sovereign and the priesthood administers the community's laws. Josephus argues this constitution's endurance for over two thousand years, and its power to draw non-Jewish admirers and imitators across the Mediterranean, is itself proof of its excellence and of Moses's superiority to Greek lawgivers like Solon and Lycurgus. The work matters as the fullest surviving ancient statement of a scriptural canon list and as a rare complete specimen of Hellenistic-Jewish apologetic literature responding directly to named opponents.
“we do not have countless volumes among us in disagreement and conflict with one another, but only twenty-two books, containing the record of all time, which are justly believed to be divine”
— Against Apion — Book 1 · read this chapter →
“In general, no writing is found among the Greeks that is agreed to be older than the poetry of Homer, and he plainly lived even later than the Trojan War”
— Against Apion — Book 1 · read this chapter →
“That he is talking nonsense and lying openly I will show, first setting apart, for the sake of what I shall say to others later, this point: he has himself granted us and admitted that our race was not originally Egyptian, but came in from outside”
— Against Apion — Book 1 · read this chapter →
“what could be nobler or more just than a constitution that has made god the leader of the universe, that entrusts to the priests in common the management of the greatest matters”
— Against Apion — Book 2 · read this chapter →
“our law has prevailed by itself, apart from any inducement of pleasure to draw men in, and just as God pervades the whole universe, so our law has made its way”
— Against Apion — Book 2 · read this chapter →
It is Josephus's two-book defense of Jewish antiquity and law, written to refute Greek and Egyptian writers who claimed the Jewish people had no ancient history or slandered their origins. Book 1 argues for Jewish antiquity using non-Greek chronological sources and describes the Jewish scriptural canon; Book 2 refutes named opponents, chiefly Apion, and describes the Mosaic constitution.
Apion was an Alexandrian Greek grammarian who wrote hostile accounts of the Jewish community in Alexandria, including claims about donkey-worship and ritual sacrifice of Greeks. Josephus devotes most of Book 2 to quoting Apion's claims and showing them to be self-contradictory and factually impossible.
Yes. In Book 1 he states there are twenty-two Jewish books total: five books of Moses, thirteen prophetic-historical books running from Moses's death to Artaxerxes, and four books of hymns and moral instruction, and says none has ever been added, removed, or altered.
Manetho, an Egyptian priest-historian, claimed the Jews' ancestors were diseased outcasts expelled from Egypt who later conquered it under a renegade priest. Josephus quotes Manetho's own account and argues it contradicts itself, since Manetho's version implicitly places the Jews' ancestors leaving Egypt centuries before the events Manetho uses to smear them.
Josephus coins the term to describe the Jewish constitution as one where God alone is sovereign and priests jointly administer the law, distinguishing it from monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy as forms Greek writers recognized.
It is the fullest surviving ancient statement of a fixed Jewish scriptural canon and count of sacred books, and one of the few complete Hellenistic-Jewish apologetic texts responding by name to specific anti-Jewish authors, making it a primary source for both canon history and ancient antisemitic polemic.