JOSEPHUS, FLAVIUS, Jewish historian, born at Jerusalem, of royal and priestly lineage; was a man of eminent ability and scholarly accomplishments, distinguished no less for his judgment than his learning; gained favour at Rome; was present with Titus at the siege of Jerusalem, and by his intercession saved the lives of several of the citizens; he accompanied Titus back to Rome, and received the freedom of the city; devoting himself there to literary studies, wrote the “History of the Jewish War” and “Jewish Antiquities”; he was of the Pharisaic party, but his religious views were rationalistic; he discards the miraculous; takes no note of the rise of Christianity or of the person of its Founder (37-98).

JOSHUA, a Jewish military leader, born of the tribe of Ephraim, the minister and successor of Moses, under whose leadership the Jews obtained a footing in the Land of Canaan.

JOSHUA, THE BOOK OF, a book of the Bible, is closely connected with the Pentateuch, and now regarded as the continuation and completion of it, constituting along with it what is called the Hexateuch, or sixfold book; it covers a period of 25 years, and contains a history of Israel under the guidance of Joshua, commencing with his appointment as leader and concluding with his death.

JOSIAH, a king of Judah from 639 to 609 B.C.; was zealous for the restoration of the Jewish worship according to the ritual of Moses, as recently come to light in the discovery by Hilkiah the high-priest of the “Book of the Law”; he fell in battle before an invading Assyrian host.

JOSS, a Chinese god or his idol.

JOeTUNHEIM, the abode of the Joetuns in the Norse mythology, as
Asenheim is that of the Norse deities.

JOeTUNS, a race of giants in the Norse mythology, “huge, shaggy beings of a demonic character, representing the dark hostile Powers of Nature, such as Frost, Fire, Sea-tempest, who dwelt in Joetunheim, a distant, dark chaotic land ... in perpetual internecine feud with the gods, or friendly powers, such as Summer-heat and the Sun, and who dwelt far apart.”

JOUBERT, BARTHELEMI, French general; distinguished himself in the Rhine and Italian campaigns, and fell mortally wounded at the battle of Novi; one of the most promising generals France ever had (1769-1799).

JOUBERT, JOSEPH, author of “Pensees,” born in Montignac, Perigord; educated in Toulouse, succeeded to a small competency, came to Paris, got access to the best literary circles, and was the most brilliant figure in the salon of Madame de Beaumont; his works were exclusively pensees and maxims, and bear at once on ethics, politics, theology, and literature; “There is probably,” Professor Saintsbury says, “no writer in any language who has said an equal number of remarkable things on an equal variety of subjects in an equally small space and with an equally high and unbroken excellence of style and expression;... all alike have the characteristic of intense compression; he describes his literary aim in the phrase ’tormented by the ambition of putting a book into a page, a page into a phrase, and a phrase into a word’” (1754-1824).