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Josephus Flavius's sweeping history of the Jewish people, from Creation to the eve of the great revolt against Rome — the single most important non-biblical source we have for the world of the Second Temple.
Writing in Rome at the end of the first century, Josephus set out to explain Jewish history to a Greek and Roman readership: he retells the biblical narrative from Adam through the return from Babylon, then carries the story forward through the Persian and Hellenistic periods, the Hasmonean revolt and dynasty, the rise of Herod, and the Roman governors — the years in which the sages of the Mishnah lived and the Temple stood.
Much of what we know about this era exists nowhere else. The Hasmonean kings, the Pharisees and Sadducees, the priesthood, Herod's building of the Temple, the Jewish communities of Alexandria and Babylon — Josephus is the eyewitness historian who described them for posterity. Read alongside Chazal, his account gives flesh and chronology to a period the Talmud assumes but rarely narrates.
A foundational work of Jewish history, translated into flowing Hebrew and indispensable to anyone studying the Second Temple period.