This book investigates the discourse on idolatry and images, especially statues, in the writings of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, with a particular focus on his numerous accounts of a contentious and at times iconoclastic relationship between Jews and images. Placing this narrative material within a wider comparative context, both Jewish and non-Jewish, demonstrates that the impression of strict aniconism uniform and categorical opposition to all figurative art emerging from Josephus is in part a rhetorical construct, an effort to reframe Jewish iconoclastic behavior not as a...