The Works of Josephus
Published 1980 · 940 pages · 258,500 words · about 17 hours at an average pace · History, Biography, Religion & Spirituality
How hard is The Works of Josephus to read?
The Works of Josephus scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Whiston's eighteenth-century English brings archaic diction, Biblical cadence and many transliterated Hebrew and Greek names and titles. It is more formal than Moby-Dick's whaling lexicon but not as opaque as Ulysses.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Whiston's long periodic sentences with stacked clauses reflect Georgian prose. They are weightier than Orwell's declaratives in 1984 but easier than Tolstoy's long embedded sentences.
- Abstraction: 38 out of 100
- The text mostly narrates sieges, reigns, battles and genealogies in concrete terms. Theological and philosophical passages, such as the account of the Jewish sects and the speeches on fate and providence, add some abstraction.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- Josephus packs in kings, sects, campaigns, dates and place names across more than a thousand years of history. The sheer volume rivals War and Peace's historical backdrop without its interwoven plots.
How The Works of Josephus is regarded
The Works of Josephus holds a literary regard score of 72 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.