He writes:Now I have undertaken the present work, 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.

[5] With these harsh accusations against the Jews fluttering about the Roman empire, Josephus, set out to provide a Hellenized version of the Jewish history.

In order to accomplish this goal, Josephus omitted certain accounts in the Jewish narrative and even added a Hellenistic "glaze" to his work.

Thus, in an attempt to make the Jewish history more palatable to his Greco-Roman audience, the great figures of the biblical stories are presented as ideal philosopher-leaders.

In another example, apparently due to his concern with pagan antisemitism, Josephus omitted the entire episode of the golden calf from his account of the Israelites at Mount Sinai.

It has been suggested that he was afraid that the biblical account might be employed by Alexandrian antisemites to lend credence to their allegation that the Jews worshiped an ass's head in the Temple (cf.

In the Middle Ages and up to modern times the book was considered one of the most important sources in ancient Roman history, along with the works of Titus Livius, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Jerome.

The earliest Greek manuscript of Books 11–20 of the Antiquities dates from the eleventh century,[11] the Ambrosianus 370 (F 128); preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.

This work of Joseph Flavius was translated into Old Bulgarian at the Preslav Literary School in the beginning of the 10th century during the time of Simeon the Great.

It described the events of world and Jewish history from the time of the construction of the Tower of Babel to the capture of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD.

[15] The Loeb Classical Library published a 1926 translation by Henry St. John Thackeray and Ralph Marcus, normally preferred academically.