Between Ethnos and Nomos: Josephus and the Goyim

In the context of Josephus biblical narratives,the relationships between Israelites and others are more abstract than in his political treatises .And yet there too,the nature of their shared concept of Jewish exceptionalism does not allow for a Jew/goymodel to develop. In other words, the centrality of the law prevents Philo’s and Josephus’s exceptionalism from developing into a real dichotomy. Just as the Deuteronomistic discourse of “other gods”that is not translated intoan independent concept of humanotherness, so too this reworked,partly Deuteronomistic, no moktratic model does not develop an abstract, binary structure of Jews vs. gentiles. It still assumes a plurality of constitutions and the flexibility to adopt a constitution. Only with the birth of the goy will all those who are not Jews receive a singular, unified, negative, name, thus collapsing all the various entities and distinctions into one binary, dichotomous, a-political, structure.But this is already a different chapter of that story, the story of the rabbis and of the birth of the goy