Yosef ben Mattityahu (Josephus) יוסף בן מתתיהו

A priest of Jerusalem, on his mother's side of the Hasmonean house. At the start of the Great Revolt he was given the Galilee. The defence of Yodfat held forty-seven days; when the fortress fell, the survivors in a cave resolved to die rather than surrender, and drew lots. Yosef was left last and gave himself up. He foretold the empire to Vespasian; the prophecy came true, and the prisoner became a freedman of the Flavians—whence the name by which Europe knows him.

He wrote The Jewish War; the Antiquities of the Jews—twenty books from Creation to the revolt; an autobiography; and Against Apion, a defence of the antiquity and dignity of the Jewish people. Nearly everything known of Herod, of the Hasmoneans, of the sects of the Second Temple and of the course of the war is known from him.

Judgement of the man is still divided: to some a traitor who left his own at Yodfat, to others someone who saw the war could not be won and saved the memory of it. The Talmud tells a similar story of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, who went out of the besieged city to that same Vespasian and begged for Yavne. Both survived to preserve—one the Torah, the other the written memory.