Josephus's Sky-Armies before the Fall of Jerusalem

Theoretical Alignment

This file sits in a genuinely unusual position among this site's Ancient Records: the underlying claim is attested not once but twice, by two different authors, writing in two different languages, for two different audiences, within roughly two generations of the event and, in Josephus's case, by a participant in the war itself. That is a stronger evidentiary starting point than most pre-modern anomaly reports on this site receive. What remains genuinely disputed is not whether both texts exist — they plainly do — but what relationship they have to each other (independent corroboration, or a shared literary source both writers drew on) and what, if anything, either author's "chariots"/"armies" actually described. The apocalyptic-prodigy reading, which treats the passage as belonging to a recognized genre of doom-portent literature deployed around catastrophic sieges throughout the ancient Mediterranean, is treated here as the best-supported explanation for why the detail was recorded at all. The atmospheric-optical reading (a mirage or halo display) is a live secondary candidate for what any real underlying stimulus might have been, discussed at length in the Conventional Explanation Candidates section below. The paleocontact reading has no support in either primary text beyond the passages' vivid, martial vocabulary.

Sensor & Instrumentation Detection Profile

As with every case in this site's Ancient Records series, there is no instrumentation record of any kind. The entire "sensor" for this event is the unaided human eye of an unspecified plural group of Jerusalem residents, filtered through two literary historians working in different genres, different languages, and different decades. Josephus's own phrasing is notably cautious for a writer generally willing to assert supernatural causation elsewhere in the same passage: he introduces the chariots-and-armies sign by saying "I suppose the account of it would seem to be a fable, were it not related by those that saw it" — an explicit acknowledgment that the claim strains credulity, resting entirely on secondhand testimony he says he trusts. No compass bearing, duration, or altitude is given by either author; Josephus places the sign "before sun-setting" on the twenty-first day of the Jewish month Artemisius (Iyar), without specifying a modern calendar year, though the passage's position among Josephus's list of signs is generally read by historians as belonging to the tense months of 66 CE, in the run-up to open revolt. Tacitus supplies no date at all beyond situating the portents generally "during these same days" as the war's final crisis.

Environmental & Geospatial Context

Jerusalem sits at approximately 31.78°N, 35.22°E, in the Judaean highlands of the eastern Mediterranean, at an elevation of roughly 750 meters. Both Josephus and Tacitus place their respective signs in and around the Jerusalem Temple specifically — Josephus describes a preceding sign (unrelated supernatural light) as occurring "at the ninth hour of the night" around the altar, and Tacitus explicitly places his "hosts joining battle" alongside a report of the Temple being "lit up with fire from the clouds," suggesting both authors, whatever their ultimate sources, were describing phenomena centered on the same specific structure. No solar or lunar eclipse is independently associated with either passage. The eastern Mediterranean summer sky, and the specific optical conditions around Jerusalem's elevated, exposed hilltop site, are directly relevant to the mirage/halo explanation discussed in the Conventional Explanation Candidates section: hot, dry summer air over the Judaean hills is a recognized regional setting for fata morgana-type superior mirages, in which distant objects (including, historically, entire cities or armies) are optically displaced and distorted into the sky.

Observer Credibility & Occupational Profile

Unlike most cases in this site's Ancient Records series, this file's chain of testimony includes two named, professionally significant authors whose broader biographies and motives can actually be assessed. Flavius Josephus (c. 37 – c. 100 CE) was born Yosef ben Matityahu, a Jerusalem priest of aristocratic lineage who commanded Jewish forces in Galilee at the start of the First Jewish-Roman War, was captured by the Romans at Yodfat in 67 CE, and survived by prophesying (successfully, per his own account) that his captor Vespasian would become emperor. Taken into the Flavian household, he wrote The Jewish War in the 70s CE under the patronage of the same dynasty whose armies had destroyed his own Temple — a genuinely awkward position that modern historians, including Oxford's Martin Goodman, have flagged as reason to read Josephus's editorializing (though not necessarily his basic factual reporting) with real caution: a client historian writing for his conquerors' court had every institutional reason to frame the war's outcome as divinely ordained rather than a preventable Roman atrocity. Tacitus (c. 56 – c. 120 CE) was, by contrast, a Roman senator and consul with no personal stake in the Jewish side of the conflict and an independently documented reputation, then and now, as one of antiquity's more skeptical historians of prodigy claims generally — making his willingness to repeat a near-identical sky-army image genuinely more evidentially interesting than if a second credulous or partisan source had simply copied Josephus. Neither man personally witnessed the sign himself; both explicitly attribute it to unnamed third parties, and the exact relationship between their two accounts (common written source, oral tradition, or true independent transmission) is a live, unresolved question in Josephan scholarship, discussed in the Historical Precedents section below.

Historical Precedents & Archive Matches

"Armies," "shields," and other martial shapes reported in the sky are a real, recurring category in ancient Mediterranean prodigy literature, not a pattern unique to Judaea in 66 CE. The closest and best-attested classical precedent, extensively documented in this site's own Livy's Roman Prodigia Records file, is the Roman state's formal registration of "round shields" (parmae) and "phantom ships" seen in the sky during the anxious opening years of the Second Punic War (218–217 BCE) — a full two and a half centuries before Josephus, using strikingly similar martial visual vocabulary to describe an ambiguous sky event. Roughly seven centuries after Jerusalem's fall, this site's Sigiburg Castle Apparition file documents a Carolingian court chronicle describing "two shields, red in colour and flaming" over a besieged fortress church in 776 CE — another instance of a culture reaching for its own soldiers' equipment as the ready descriptive vocabulary for an unexplained sky phenomenon at a moment of maximum military peril. What makes the Josephus/Tacitus pairing distinct from both of those cases is that it is the only one on this site with two independent named authors, writing in two different languages for two different audiences, describing what appears to be the same underlying report.

Historical Background

The First Jewish-Roman War (66–73 CE) began after years of rising tension between Judaea's Roman administration and its Jewish population, inflamed by heavy taxation, the brutal governorship of Gessius Florus, and deep internal Jewish factional divisions over how to respond to Roman rule. Open revolt broke out in 66 CE; Rome's response, delayed by the chaotic "Year of the Four Emperors" (69 CE), ultimately fell to the general Vespasian and, after his elevation to emperor, his son Titus, who led the final siege of Jerusalem in the spring and summer of 70 CE. The city fell after a siege of several months; the Second Temple, the center of Jewish religious and political life, was burned and demolished, an event Josephus treats as the central catastrophe of his entire narrative and, per his own repeated framing, one that the city's population had been divinely warned of and failed to heed.

Josephus's account of the pre-war portents appears in Book 6 of The Jewish War, positioned as part of his broader argument — made explicitly and repeatedly throughout the work — that the Temple's destruction was a divine judgment on the Jewish revolutionary factions (the Zealots and Sicarii) whose infighting and desecration of the sanctuary, in his telling, forfeited God's protection, rather than a simple Roman military atrocity. Modern historians including Steve Mason (in his extensive work on Josephus as a Roman Historian) and the contributors to Chapman and Rodgers's Companion to Josephus have argued that this theological framing served a real, practical purpose for its author: writing under Flavian patronage, in Rome, for an audience that included the very emperors who had ordered the Temple's destruction, Josephus had strong incentive to present the war's outcome as an act of God rather than a preventable atrocity for which Rome bore primary responsibility. The list of seven portents — a sword-shaped star, supernatural light at the altar, a cow giving birth to a lamb in the Temple, the massive eastern gate opening by itself, the chariots and armies in the clouds, a voice at Pentecost saying "Let us remove hence," and finally the lone prophet Jesus ben Ananias crying "Woe to Jerusalem" for over seven years before the siege — functions within the text as evidence that God gave ample warning before withdrawing his protection, a genre of retrospective doom-prophecy common in both Jewish apocalyptic writing and Greco-Roman historiography alike.

Tacitus wrote his own account of the same war roughly a generation later, around 100–110 CE, as part of his Histories, of which only the first five books (covering 69–70 CE) survive complete; his account of the Jewish War breaks off, mid-narrative, in the extant manuscript before the siege's conclusion. Tacitus was famously hostile to Judaism as a religion and to Jews as a subject people throughout his surviving ethnographic digression on Judaea (Histories 5.2–13), yet his account of the portents preceding Jerusalem's fall reads as strikingly close to Josephus's, listing "hosts joining battle in the skies, the fiery gleam of arms," a light around the Temple "from the clouds," the Temple gates opening "suddenly," and a "voice of more than mortal tone" declaring that the gods were departing. That a Roman senator with no evident sympathy for Jewish religious claims, writing independently, in Latin, for a Roman audience, chose to repeat this specific cluster of signs is the single fact this file treats as most significant — whether because he had independently reliable testimony, because he drew directly on Josephus's own already-published account (a live possibility discussed below), or because both men were drawing on a shared earlier written or oral tradition that neither invented from scratch.

Complete Timeline

Date	Event
c. 37 CE	Josephus (Yosef ben Matityahu) is born to a priestly aristocratic family in Jerusalem.
66 CE	Open revolt breaks out against Roman rule in Judaea, beginning the First Jewish-Roman War; Josephus is appointed a Jewish commander in Galilee.
66 CE	Per Josephus, on the 21st of the month Artemisius (Iyar), before sunset, "chariots and troops of soldiers in their armor" are reported running among the clouds and surrounding cities — one of several portents he lists as preceding the war's catastrophe.
67 CE	Josephus is captured by Roman forces at the siege of Yodfat (Jotapata); he later claims to have prophesied Vespasian's future accession as emperor, securing his own survival.
69 CE	Vespasian is proclaimed emperor during the chaotic "Year of the Four Emperors"; his son Titus assumes command of the war in Judaea.
70 CE	Titus's forces besiege and capture Jerusalem; the Second Temple is burned and demolished.
c. 56 CE	Tacitus is born, likely in Gaul or northern Italy, to a family of the Roman equestrian order.
c. 75–79 CE	Josephus completes and publishes The Jewish War (Bellum Judaicum) under Flavian patronage in Rome, including the full list of pre-war portents in Book 6.
c. 100–110 CE	Tacitus writes his Histories, including an ethnographic digression on Judaea and an independent account of the same cluster of pre-siege portents (Book 5, Ch. 13); the surviving text breaks off before the siege's conclusion.
c. 100 CE	Josephus dies in Rome.
c. 120 CE	Tacitus dies.
1737	William Whiston publishes his complete English translation of Josephus's works, the version that would become the standard popular English text for over two centuries.
1959 / 1970	G.A. Williamson's modern Penguin Classics translation of The Jewish War is first published, later revised with E. Mary Smallwood's notes.
Present day	Both passages remain in active circulation in two separate literatures — academic Josephan/Tacitean scholarship, and popular ancient-astronaut/UFO catalogs, which typically cite the Josephus passage alone and rarely mention the Tacitus parallel.

The Primary Source Documents

Two independent ancient texts are at the center of this case. Both are genuine, securely attributed, and available today in open scholarly digital editions.

Josephus, The Jewish War, Book 6, Chapter 5, Section 3

In the standard Whiston translation (1737), still widely reproduced because Josephus's Greek text is in the public domain:

"Besides these, a few days after that feast, on the one and twentieth day of the month Artemisius, [Jyar,] a certain prodigious and incredible phenomenon appeared: I suppose the account of it would seem to be a fable, were it not related by those that saw it, and were not the events that followed it of so considerable a nature as to deserve such signals; for, before sun-setting, chariots and troops of soldiers in their armor were seen running about among the clouds, and surrounding of cities."

Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War, Book 6, Ch. 5, §3 (Whiston translation, 1737), as hosted by the Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University

This sentence sits within a longer catalog of seven portents Josephus lists as preceding the Temple's destruction, including a "sword"-shaped star, an unnatural bright light around the altar at the ninth hour of the night, a cow giving birth to a lamb inside the Temple court, the massive eastern bronze gate opening by itself at midnight, a supernatural voice heard by priests at Pentecost saying "Let us remove hence," and the lone prophetic figure Jesus ben Ananias, whose repeated public cries of "Woe to Jerusalem" are separately corroborated as a real historical episode by most modern historians, unlike the more overtly supernatural signs around it.

Tacitus, Histories, Book 5, Chapter 13

Writing independently, roughly a generation later, in a different language and for a different audience, Tacitus records:

"Prodigies had indeed occurred, but to avert them either by victims or by vows is held unlawful by a nation which is a slave to superstition and opposed to all propitiatory rites. Contending hosts were seen meeting in the skies, arms flashed, and suddenly the temple was illuminated with fire from the clouds. Of a sudden the doors of the shrine opened and a superhuman voice cried, 'The gods are departing:' at the same moment the mighty stir of their going was heard."

Cornelius Tacitus, The Histories, Book 5, Ch. 13 (trans. Alfred John Church & William Jackson Brodribb), as hosted by the Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University

The overlap is genuinely close: both authors describe combatant forces or "hosts" appearing in the sky, both connect the sign to the Temple specifically, and both frame it as part of a cluster of related portents rather than a single isolated event. The overlap is not, however, total: Tacitus does not mention chariots specifically, and includes the "gods are departing" voice and the self-opening doors within the same compressed sentence that Josephus treats as two of his separate, numbered signs. Classical scholars have long debated whether Tacitus used Josephus directly as a source (a real possibility, since Josephus's account predates Tacitus's by roughly two decades and was well known in Flavian Rome), whether both drew on a shared earlier Roman military or administrative report, or whether the similarity simply reflects two authors independently reaching for the same conventional Greco-Roman prodigy vocabulary to describe a genuinely ambiguous shared event or rumor. No surviving evidence resolves this definitively.

Witnesses and the Chain of Testimony

Evidence Assessment

Comparative Analysis

Livy's and Obsequens's Roman Shield Prodigies (218–217 BCE)

This site's own Livy's Roman Prodigia Records file documents the Roman state's formal registration of "round shields" and "phantom ships" seen in the sky during the early Second Punic War, officially answered with expiatory religious rites. The nearly two-and-a-half-century gap between that case and Josephus's Jerusalem, combined with the shared martial vocabulary ("shields," "armies," "arms") used to describe an ambiguous sky phenomenon, is one of the clearest illustrations across this site's Ancient Records of how consistently different Mediterranean cultures reached for the same descriptive category — their own soldiers' equipment — when trying to put an unexplained sky event into words.

The Sigiburg Castle Apparition (776 CE)

This site's Sigiburg Castle Apparition file documents a structurally similar pattern nearly seven centuries later: a besieged fortress, a Christian chronicle tradition, and "two shields, red in colour and flaming" appearing over a church at the moment of maximum military peril. As with Jerusalem, the Sigiburg case pairs a genuine, externally verifiable military crisis with a providentially framed sky sign recorded by an institution (there, the Carolingian royal court; here, a Flavian-patronized historian) with a documented interest in shaping how the underlying military outcome was remembered.

The Question of Direct Literary Dependence

Unlike most comparative pairs on this site, Josephus and Tacitus were not separated by centuries or continents; Tacitus wrote in Rome, in Latin, within living memory of Josephus's own Greek account, which had circulated in the city for roughly two decades by the time Tacitus composed his Histories. Classical scholars including those represented in Chapman and Rodgers's Companion to Josephus have noted that Tacitus's broader account of the Jewish War shows demonstrable points of overlap with Josephus's narrative elsewhere, making direct literary dependence a live and, on balance, more parsimonious explanation than fully independent testimony for at least some of the shared portent details — a genuine limitation on how much additional evidentiary weight the Tacitus passage should be given beyond corroborating that the claim was circulating and taken seriously enough for a skeptical Roman senator to repeat it.

Material Analysis: The Manuscript Evidence

There is no physical trace evidence of any kind associated with either reported sign — no artifact, no inscription, no independent Roman military record. What exists, and what this file treats as the actual evidentiary record, is the manuscript and translation history of both texts. Josephus's Greek original survives through a medieval Byzantine manuscript tradition; William Whiston's 1737 English translation, still the most widely circulated public-domain version, and G.A. Williamson's modern Penguin Classics translation (1959, revised 1970s with E. Mary Smallwood's scholarly notes) both render the chariots-and-armies passage in substantively identical terms, which this file treats as reasonable cross-confirmation that the passage's content has not shifted in translation. Tacitus's Histories survive far more precariously: the entire text is known from a single medieval manuscript tradition (the Codices MediceI, copied at Monte Cassino), and the surviving portion of Book 5 breaks off before the siege of Jerusalem's actual conclusion — meaning Tacitus's fuller account of the war's end, if it differed from or added to Josephus's, is permanently lost. This file was able to confirm the wording of both passages against open scholarly digital editions (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University) hosting the standard Greek/Latin texts alongside professionally published English translations, but did not undertake independent manuscript-tradition collation beyond what these standard editions already represent.

The Paleocontact / Ancient-UFO Interpretation

Within ufological and ancient-astronaut literature, the Josephus passage circulates as one of the oldest and most frequently cited "ancient aerial battle" reports, sometimes presented under headlines asking whether it describes literal UFOs; the popular site Ancient Origins, for instance, has run a piece specifically asking "Does Historical Account of 'Chariots in the Clouds' Actually Describe UFOs?" Jacques Vallée's own historical catalogs have likewise long included the Josephus passage among pre-modern anomaly reports. The Tacitus parallel, by contrast, is almost never mentioned in this popular literature, which is itself informative: a genuinely independent second ancient source corroborating the core image would, if anything, strengthen a paleocontact reading, yet it is largely absent from the popular treatments this file located, suggesting most such treatments work directly from Josephus (often via secondary UFO-catalog citations) rather than from the wider classical source base.

It is worth being precise about what both primary texts do and do not claim. Neither author describes controlled flight, landing, occupants, or any device-like structure beyond the bare comparison to chariots and armed soldiers; both explicitly embed the sign within a formal, numbered list of divine portents, alongside overtly supernatural, non-technological signs (a talking voice, a self-opening gate, a cow giving birth to a lamb) that no paleocontact reading treats as literal physical events. Reading only the "chariots and armies" sentence as plausible testimony to a real aerial craft, while discarding its immediate textual neighbors as clearly legendary embellishment, is a selective reading with no more warrant in the text itself than treating the entire numbered list, including its explicit divine-warning framing, as a single coherent literary unit.

The Mainstream Historical Interpretation

The Apocalyptic-Prodigy Genre Reading

The dominant scholarly reading, represented across the essays collected in Chapman and Rodgers's Companion to Josephus and in Steve Mason's extensive work on Josephus's historiographical method, situates the entire seven-sign catalog within a well-documented ancient genre: retrospective doom-portent literature, in which a catastrophe's inevitability is narratively reinforced by a list of warning signs the doomed population failed to heed. This genre draws on both Jewish apocalyptic tradition and the Greco-Roman prodigy-catalog convention this site documents at length in its Livy and Julius Obsequens-adjacent files, and served Josephus's specific, documented rhetorical goal of presenting the Temple's fall as divine judgment on Jewish revolutionary factionalism rather than a preventable Roman atrocity — a framing directly relevant to his position as a client historian writing in Rome, under Flavian patronage, for an audience that included the war's Flavian architects.

The Mirage / Atmospheric-Optical Candidate

Independent of the literary-genre reading, some historians and atmospheric-science-minded commentators have proposed that a real, ambiguous optical event may sit underneath both accounts: a superior mirage (fata morgana), in which distant objects, armies, or entire landscapes are optically displaced, distorted, and lifted into the sky by temperature-inverted air layers, is a documented phenomenon in exactly the hot, dry summer conditions typical of the Judaean hill country, and has a long independent history of being mistaken for spectral armies and cities in other documented cases worldwide. This candidate is not treated by mainstream classical scholarship as necessary to explain the passage — the literary-genre reading is sufficient on its own — but is included here because it remains, unlike a literal aerial craft, a real, physically documented class of phenomenon capable of producing exactly the kind of large-scale, panoramic, "armies among the clouds" imagery both ancient authors describe.

Five Observables Assessment

The Five Observables framework, developed decades later by former AATIP director Luis Elizondo to classify modern UAP performance characteristics that exceed known technology, is included here for structural consistency with the rest of OverClassified's case files, but it does not meaningfully apply to a pre-instrumentation, two-sentence textual source. Every category is necessarily assessed as not applicable or, at most, weakly speculative.

Assessment: As with this site's other pre-modern files, the Five Observables framework is simply the wrong instrument for a two-thousand-year-old literary source with no distance, speed, or altitude data. Its inclusion here should not be read as suggesting genuine performance evidence exists for this case.

Conventional Explanation Candidates

Because this is a pre-instrumentation documentary case rather than a physical-evidence case, its Conventional Explanation Candidates (CEC) evaluate the reported phenomenon and the reporting process together. Three candidates are assessed below.

1. Apocalyptic-Prodigy Literary Convention

The leading scholarly explanation for why this detail was recorded at all: a formal, numbered catalog of divine warning-signs, drawing on both Jewish apocalyptic tradition and the Greco-Roman prodigy-catalog convention, deployed by Josephus specifically to frame the Temple's destruction as deserved divine judgment rather than a preventable Roman atrocity. This candidate does not require that nothing was seen in the sky, only that whatever ambiguous event or rumor existed was shaped, selected, and framed to serve a documented rhetorical and political purpose.

Plausibility Rating: HIGHLY PLAUSIBLE (best explains why the detail was recorded and framed as it was)

2. Superior Mirage (Fata Morgana) or Related Atmospheric-Optical Display

A real, still-documented optical phenomenon in which temperature-inverted air layers optically displace, distort, and elevate distant objects — including, in some historically recorded cases elsewhere, entire cities, fleets, or armies — into the sky, sometimes appearing to move. The hot, dry summer conditions typical of the Judaean hill country around Jerusalem are a plausible setting for such a display. This candidate is speculative as applied to this specific case (neither ancient author describes atmospheric conditions in enough detail to confirm it), but it remains, unlike a literal aerial craft, a genuine physical phenomenon capable of producing large-scale, panoramic, army-like sky imagery.

Plausibility Rating: POSSIBLE (a real, physically documented class of phenomenon; not confirmable from the surviving texts)

3. Direct Literary Dependence (Tacitus on Josephus)

Rather than an explanation of the sky phenomenon itself, this candidate addresses the apparent "two independent witnesses" strength of the case: if Tacitus drew his account directly from Josephus's already-published, widely circulated Jewish War rather than from independent Roman sources, the case effectively rests on a single original claim repeated by a second author, not two genuinely separate lines of testimony. Classical scholarship treats this as a live, unresolved possibility rather than a settled fact.

Plausibility Rating: PLAUSIBLE (would not eliminate the underlying claim, but would meaningfully reduce its evidentiary weight)

4. Genuine Anomalous / Paleocontact Phenomenon

Included for completeness, per this site's standard framework. No positive physical evidence, and no scholarly consensus, supports a literal non-natural aerial phenomenon over the candidates above; the case for it rests almost entirely on the passages' vivid martial vocabulary and on selective popular citation of the Josephus passage in isolation from its own immediate textual context.

Plausibility Rating: SPECULATIVE / UNVERIFIABLE

Why "Disputed"

This case receives a DISPUTED rather than "debunked" or "credible" classification because it combines an unusually strong documentary foundation with a genuinely open interpretive question sitting on top of it. Both underlying texts are real, securely attributed, and confirmed against open scholarly digital editions: this is not a fabricated case, a modern misattribution, or a claim traceable only to secondary ufological literature. Josephus's participation in the war itself, and Tacitus's documented lack of sympathy for the Jewish side of the conflict, both weigh in favor of taking the underlying claim seriously as a real, circulating report rather than dismissing it outright. What remains genuinely unresolved is threefold: whether Tacitus's account is truly independent of Josephus's or substantially derivative of it; whether the apocalyptic-prodigy genre convention fully explains the sign's inclusion and framing, or whether a real ambiguous atmospheric event (most plausibly a mirage) sits underneath it; and, in either case, how much weight a modern reader should place on a report that both of its own ancient sources embed within an explicitly supernatural, divine-judgment narrative structure rather than a neutral description. DISPUTED reflects that this is a real, well-documented, cross-referenced historical claim resting on two genuine ancient sources — not a settled case, and not a fabrication either.

Related Entries

Further Reading — Recommended Literature

Essential Viewing

Sources

• Josephus, Flavius. "The Jewish War," Book 6, Ch. 5, §3 (trans. William Whiston, 1737). Perseus Digital Library. perseus.tufts.edu
• Tacitus, Cornelius. "The Histories," Book 5, Ch. 13 (trans. Alfred John Church & William Jackson Brodribb, 1876). Perseus Digital Library. perseus.tufts.edu
• "The Jewish War." Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
• "Josephus." Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
• "Tacitus." Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
• "Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)." Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
• "First Jewish-Roman War." Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
• Cook, Katherine. "Fake news, circa 70 A.D.: The Jewish War by Josephus." OUPblog, Oxford University Press, 2017. blog.oup.com
• "The Seven Miraculous Signs of Josephus during the Last Days at the End of the Age." Cry For Jerusalem. cryforjerusalem.com
• "Does Historical Account of 'Chariots in the Clouds' Actually Describe UFOs?" Ancient Origins. ancient-origins.net
• Chapman, Honora Howell & Rodgers, Zuleika (eds.). A Companion to Josephus. Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.
• Momigliano, Arnaldo. Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography. University of Chicago Press.
• Mason, Steve. A History of the Jewish War: AD 66–74. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• Syme, Ronald. Tacitus. Oxford University Press, 1958.
• Josephus, Flavius (trans. G.A. Williamson, rev. E. Mary Smallwood). The Jewish War: Revised Edition. Penguin Classics.
• "File: David Roberts - The Siege and Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans Under the Command of Titus, A.D. 70.jpg." Wikimedia Commons (public domain). commons.wikimedia.org
• "Flavius Josephus: The Man Who Recorded Jesus, the Temple, and the Fall of Jerusalem." Religious Historian, YouTube. youtube.com
• "The Destruction of Judea: Inside Jerusalem's Final Days." Get.history, YouTube. youtube.com