What Really Happened at Masada?
COHEN, SHAYE J.D.
WHAT REALTY HAPPENED AT MASADA? SHAYE J. D. COHEN Masada—a rock, a fortress, a symbol. Protruding among the rugged hills of the Judean wilderness overlooking the Dead Sea, Masada (Hebrew for...
...concern for historicity...
...Aside from their evident courage, the Masada defenders possessed few other admirable traits...
...But in a stunning reversal, as the state of Israel prospered and grew, Masada came to represent justified resistance to foreign domination and laudable devotion to the ancestral homeland...
...The strategically inexplicable Roman withdrawal provided Josephus with the opportunity to place two magnificent speeches in the mouth of Eleazar, speeches that were never delivered in the form in which they appear in the pages of Josephus, and probably never were delivered in any form at all...
...Thus Josephus...
...The next morning the Romans expected a battle but discovered only silence...
...His surveyors realized that Masada was a natural fortress, and his architects and engineers outfitted it sumptuously...
...The major themes of this speech are not Israel, God and sin, but soul, death and suicide...
...They did not see the fires, smell the smoke, hear the cries of the women and the screams of the children, or notice the scurrying to and fro...
...Most of the blame for the war, according to Josephus, belonged to various hotheads, fanatics and criminals who in no way represented either Judaism or the Jews...
...No raids on the Romans from the rear, no feints to distract the Romans or to alleviate the pressure of the siege of Jerusalem, no attempt to aid the city in its time of crisis...
...These beams may have been used in the construction of the inner wall described by Josephus...
...They probably expected that the end would be inaugurated by the descent of angels from heaven and the eruption of the final war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness, but instead the end was brought by the Tenth Roman Legion...
...Each man killed his own family...
...It is ironic that this fortress was used not by its builder, Herod, the friend and supporter of the Romans, but by the Sicarii, a rabid anti-Roman group that contributed to the collapse of the Roman-Jewish symbiosis that Herod had cultivated during his 33 years on the throne (37 B.C.E.-4 B.C.E...
...But it is unlikely that the Sicarii performed the deed with the deliberation and concord described by Josephus...
...How much then of that night's other events represent historical truth...
...Seen here is King Herod's three-tiered palace, located on the northernmost corner of the fortress...
...Instead, the Sicarii of Masada concentrated their efforts on attacking their fellow Jews, often raiding nearby Jewish settlements from their haven at Masada...
...Writing after the war, sitting in his study in Rome under the watchful eye of his Roman patrons, Josephus wanted Eleazar, the leader of the revolutionaries, to take responsibility for the war, to admit that his policies were wrong and to confess that he and his followers had sinned...
...ten men were then selected by lot to kill the rest...
...The camps were used to quarter the Roman troops and to block possible escape routes for the Sicarii, the Jewish defenders of Masada...
...The Jews must learn to live and practice their religion in the context of Roman rule...
...These were not secular nationalists fighting for the political freedom of their homeland, as they were portrayed several years ago in the television mini-series "Masada," but sectarian religious fanatics, who hoped that the war would inaugurate the end time and bring glory to themselves and their group...
...Thus, there must have been some connection between the Sicarii, the defenders of Masada, and the Essene community of Qumran (where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found), a connection not mentioned by Josephus...
...and one of the remaining ten was selected by lot to kill the remaining nine, set fire to the palace where the slaughter took place and then kill himself...
...Josephus puts these words in Eleazar's mouth because Josephus wants his Jewish readers to realize that the way of the Sicarii is the way of death...
...when in fact there were two (the other is on the western side...
...There they built a mikvah, an immersion pool for ritual purification, and seem to have converted one of Herod's assembly halls into a synagogue...
...In order to make the fortress inhabitable, they also built cisterns and storerooms...
...The men then gathered all their possessions in one pile and set it ablaze, each incinerating his family's possessions...
...They go to Latrun instead, a site filled with important memories from the war of independence of 1948...
...Josephus therefore has Eleazar, in his first speech that night when the Romans withdrew, publicly confess that he and his followers, who had fomented the war, had erred and were now receiving deserved punishment from God (at the hands of the Romans) for their sins...
...That night, in Josephus' description, was an eventful one for the Jews...
...In addition, Yadin discovered a group of eleven lots, which may confirm the Josephan statement that a sortition or lottery played an important role in the events of that final, dramatic evening...
...Very dramatic but utterly incredible...
...To the right is the ramp the Romans built to enable them to storm the fortress...
...Herod the Great, the king of Judea during the last third of the first century before the common era, who feared his subjects almost as much as they feared him, built a network of fortresses throughout the country to serve as places of refuge in times of unrest...
...Their only activity that night was to maintain a careful watch lest any of the Jews escape...
...Most important, Yadin discovered the fragments of several scrolls whose texts are identical with or closely related to those of the scrolls that originated at the Essene settlement at Qumran, a few miles north on the plateau overlooking the Dead Sea...
...On the night before the Roman assault, emboldened by the oratory of their leader Eleazar Ben Ya'ir, the Sicarii Masada, the near-impenetrable mountain fortress, rising more than 1,300 feet above the Dead Sea, towers over the surrounding Judean desert followed a plan of mutual self-destruction...
...Josephus, like practically all ancient historians, loved exaggerations, embellishments and even inventions—despite his basic Two of eight Roman army camps surrounding the fortress of Masada...
...No doubt some of the defenders committed suicide rather than face Roman capture...
...Even some of the stones hurled by the Roman ballistae from the siege tower they built on the ramp were recovered by Yadin...
...In other respects, archaeology shows that Josephus' account is wrong, or at least is very incomplete...
...From there they staged a raid on Jerusalem and for a time led the revolution, but they were ousted by other Jewish factions and spent the remainder of the war at this remote outpost...
...When Jerusalem was besieged by the Romans in 70 C.E., the Sicarii at Masada sat the battle out...
...In the two pits the Jews dug beneath the floor, archaeologists found biblical scrolls—Deuteronomy in one pit and Ezekiel in the other...
...and was reused by the Sicarii, who occupied the mountaintop fortress in 66 CE...
...Josephus says that the defenders gathered all their possessions in one large pile and set it ablaze, but archaeology shows that the defenders burnt their possessions in many places throughout the fortress...
...The major purpose of Josephus' Jewish War, of which the Masada account is a fitting conclusion, was to restrict Jewish guilt in the eyes of Rome...
...In one instance, the Sicarii of Masada killed 700 women and children at Ein Gedi, according to Josephus...
...women who hid themselves with their children survived to tell the tale...
...Why did Josephus describe a premature— and fictitious—Roman withdrawal...
...But they attacked not only the Roman forces, but also the Jewish aristocracy, looting homes of the wealthy and massacring many of the Jewish nobility, including the high priest...
...But the demythification of Masada is not yet complete...
...Josephus' account of the events of the final evening is not plausible...
...When the Sicarii leader, Menachem, was killed in this internecine warfare in Jerusalem, his followers fled to Masada where they remained for the rest of the war, doing nothing to help the Jewish struggle against Rome...
...The men were convinced by Eleazar's eloquence and proceeded, each one, to kill his wife and children...
...Two Many of the important buildings on Masada are grouped together at the north end (left), on the highest ground, which was easiest to defend...
...There is no record that Herod himself ever visited this outpost, but surely he must have been pleased with his creation...
...Can we trust the account of the historian Josephus...
...In his second Josephus-created speech, Eleazar speaks on the "Immortality of the Soul...
...Why withdraw when victory was so close...
...The deed was done...
...According to Josephus, after breaching Masada's defense wall, the Romans found themselves facing a hastily built inner wall of wood and earth designed to absorb the blows of the Romans' deadly battering ram...
...When the Romans burst into the fortress the next morning, they expected a battle but were stunned by the silence...
...The Sicarii remodeled the building, lining the walls with benches and adding a small genizah, a storage area for worn-out holy books, which also acted as a fortification along Masada's outer defense wall...
...385-405...
...The other two skeletons, those of a man and a young child, were found close by...
...The scene, according to archaeologists who discovered the skeletons, was reminiscent of a passage written by Josephus describing the last moments of the mass suicide...
...At the beginning of the war, in the autumn of 66 C.E., the Sicarii entered Jerusalem...
...Units of the Israeli army were brought to the plateau in order to be sworn in with the ringing cry, "Masada shall not fall again...
...Foodstuffs alone were spared to show the Romans that the defenders were not suffering from famine...
...Whatever we may think of the fighters of Masada, one point beyond debate is their defeat...
...Eleazar, the rebel leader, assembled his followers and delivered two stirring orations advocating collective suicide...
...Left Corroborating Josephus' account of the mass suicide are 11 sherds, each inscribed with a different name, that may have been the lots cast to choose those men who would kill their comrades...
...After burning their possessions, the men killed each other, the order and choice depending on the casting of lots...
...that is Josephus' theme...
...The content and setting of the speeches are bogus...
...Because of the dry atmosphere, the sandals, as well as the scalp of the young woman to whom they belonged, remained in excellent condition...
...The Roman camps, the siege wall, the ramp, the layer of destruction in the debris atop the fortress— all these attest to the basic accuracy of the larger contours of the Josephan story...
...In Josephus' account, the Jewish people as a whole were innocent of the rebellion...
...That some of the defenders tried to escape is suggested by 25 skeletons discovered by Yadin in a cave in the southern slope of the plateau...
...According to Josephus, the Jewish historian of the revolt and our sole literary source for these events, at the last moment the Sicarii preferred a self-inflicted death to death in battle...
...These people, and probably many others as well, were discovered by the Romans and slain...
...The major difficulties are raised not by archaeology, however, but by common sense...
...To allow Eleazar to confess his guilt and to display Josephus' own rhetorical skills, Josephus inserted a crucial but inexplicable pause in the Roman assault on Masada...
...Protruding among the rugged hills of the Judean wilderness overlooking the Dead Sea, Masada (Hebrew for "fortress") is a flat-topped outcropping of rock separated from its neighbors by steep ravines on all four sides...
...In fact, archaeologists found that some large wooden beams had been stripped from the Herodian palace before its destruction by fire...
...His description of the northern palace and the height of Masada's walls and towers is very inaccurate...
...We must still ask, what really happened at Masada when the fortress fell to the Romans in 73 or 74 C.E...
...As a result of this story, in the 1920s Masada came to represent "Fortress Israel," the beleaguered Zionist settlements in the land of Israel...
...Resistance to foreign rule which leads to the total self-destruction of the community is a problematic legacy indeed...
...Even if it were late afternoon or evening when fire finally took to the inner wall, a point Josephus does not make clear, the Roman commander Silva could have stormed the fortress by night, just as Vespasian had done at a Galilean fortress that had been under the command of Josephus himself in an earlier phase of the war...
...But fanatics of all stripes and all descriptions have always been capable of extraordinary acts, and our admiration for their courage should not blind us to their futility, stupidity, selfishness or wickedness...
...When the Romans tried their ram on the inner wall without success, they set it on fire...
...They built a magnificent three-tiered palace at the northern end, bounded the perimeter of the entire plateau with a wall and constructed numerous buildings, large and small, all over Masada...
...Then, inexplicably, according to Josephus, the Romans withdrew for the night, postponing their assault until the following morning...
...Josephus seems to know of only one palace on Masada, the northern palace, Top: The synagogue excavated on Masada was originally built as an assembly hall by King Herod between 36 and 30 B.CE...
...8' For a detailed scholarly analysis of the Masada story, see Shaye J. D. Cohen, "Masada: Literary Tradition, Archaeological Remains, and the Credibility of Josephus," Journal of Jewish Studies, vol...
...Eleazar alludes to Plato, invokes the example of Indian philosophers, and declaims a philosphical essay on the immortality of the soul that is wonderfully incongruous...
...The Dead Sea can be seen in the distance...
...They lost, and it is always difficult to create a national myth around losers...
...33, nos...
...Yet he could not help but be amazed at their ultimate act of courage...
...Josephus was no supporter of Masada's defenders...
...At first the symbol had negative overtones—the Jews would destroy themselves rather than submit to forces of destruction from the outside...
...The 960 inhabitants of Masada gathered at the northern palace...
...It is utterly incredible, however, that after breaking the outer wall and then setting fire to the hastily-constructed inner wall, the Romans would have withdrawn for the night...
...Since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, however, and more especially since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Masada is gradually being abandoned as a useful symbol...
...To a remarkable extent, the archaeological finds confirm Josephus' account...
...Furthermore, that night on the assault ramp the Romans must have maintained a careful watch, precisely as Josephus says, lest the Jews try to escape or to surprise the besiegers...
...Imagine a Jewish revolutionary justifying suicide by appealing to the examples of the Brahmins of India...
...Moreover, many Jews committed suicide during other crucial moments of the war of 66-70 C.E., including the defenders of the Galilean fort commanded by Josephus himself...
...It seems clear that the basic story is factual...
...Far left Found in the small bath house, this leather sandal lay near one of three skeletons covered by a layer of ash...
...Archaeology also supplements the Josephan narrative, giving us detailed knowledge of the buildings and the topography of the site...
...Josephus has Eleazar declare that God has condemned the "tribe of Jews" to destruction...
...At the outbreak of the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66 C.E., the Sicarii seized the fortress at Masada...
...Yadin found what appear to be some lots that could have been used in the selection process...
...The positive evaluation of the resistance at Masada contributed to, and in turn was strengthened by, the enormous interest in the archaeological excavations conducted there by eminent archaeologist Yigael Yadin (1917-1984...
...The Israelis have built a cable car to the top of Masada, so that even the most spoiled of tourists can ascend the plateau and marvel at the rugged terrain and the wondrous archaeological remains, but Israeli soldiers are no longer sworn in at Masada...
...1-2, Spring-Autumn 1982, pp...
...Collective suicide was not uncommon in ancient times...
...When the smoke cleared, all 960 men, women and children were dead...
...As noted earlier, they were members of a revolutionary group known as Sicarii, which literally means "assassins...
...The final survivor set ablaze the building that contained the corpses and then killed himself...
...The Roman siege works, their camps, their ramp to the top— all remain in a remarkable state of preservation...
...Eleazar's invented speeches must be understood in the light of Josephus' theme...
...In at least sixteen other cases in Greco-Roman antiquity, the inhabitants (men, women and children) of a besieged city or fortress preferred death to surrender or capture...
...Volunteers from all over the world came to toil under the hot sun of the Judean desert in order to tread the rocks and uncover the remains of the heroes of old...
...The second sherd from the right in the second row bears the name of Ben Ya'ir, possibly referring to Eleazer ben Yalr, the leader of the Sicarii, the Jewish defenders of Masada...
...But this careful watch saw and heard nothing during that busy and eventful night...
...The Romans besieged Masada, built a ramp to the top of the plateau, and stormed the fortress...
...The Sicarii sat and waited for the end to come...
...The rest of the Jews were apparently not included in the blessed future...
...Masada is not only a rock and a fortress, it is also a symbol...
Vol. 13 • July 1988 • No. 5
