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Masada (a romanisation of the
Hebrew מצדה, Metzada, from מצודה, metzuda, "fortress") is
the name for a site of ancient palaces and fortifications in
the South District of Israel on top of an isolated rock
plateau, or large mesa, on the eastern edge of the Judean
Desert overlooking the Dead Sea. Masada became famous after
the First Jewish-Roman War (also known as the Great Jewish
Revolt) when a siege of the fortress by troops of the Roman
Empire led to a mass suicide of the site's Jewish Sicarii
fugitives when defeat became imminent. Today, Masada is a
very popular tourist destination.
According to Josephus, a
first-century Jewish Roman historian, Herod the Great
fortified Masada between 37 and 31 BCE as a refuge for
himself in the event of a revolt. In 66 CE, at the beginning
of the First Jewish-Roman War against the Roman Empire, a
group of Judaic extremist rebels called the Sicarii took
Masada from the Roman garrison stationed there.
The works of Josephus are contested. But nevertheless, as
the sole record of events that took place then, according to
Josephus, the Sicarii were an extremist group.
According to some modern
interpretations of Josephus, the Sicarii are considered an
extremist splinter group of the Zealots.[1] The Zealots
(according to Josephus) in contrast to the Sicarii, carried
the main burden of the rebellion, which opposed Roman rule
of Judea (as the Roman province of Iudaea, its Latin name).
The Sicarii on Masada were
commanded by Elazar ben Ya'ir (who may have been the same
person as Eleazar ben Simon) and in 70, they were joined by
additional Sicarii and their families that were expelled
from Jerusalem by the other Jews with whom the Sicarii were
in conflict shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem and
the Second Temple.
Archaeology indicates that
they modified some of the structures they found there; this
includes a building which was modified to function as a
synagogue facing Jerusalem, (in fact, the building may
originally have been one), although it did not contain a
mikvah or the benches found in other early synagogues.[2]
Remains of two mikvahs were found elsewhere on Masada.
In 72 CE, the Roman
governor of Iudaea Lucius Flavius Silva marched against
Masada with the Roman legion X Fretensis and laid siege to
the fortress. After failed attempts to breach the wall, they
built a circumvallation wall and then a rampart against the
western face of the plateau, using thousands of tons of
stones and beaten earth.
Josephus does not record
any attempts by the Sicarii to counterattack the besiegers
during this process, a significant difference from his
accounts of other sieges against Jewish fortresses. He did
record a raid on a nearby Jewish settlement called Ein-Gedi
during the siege, where the Sicarii killed 700 of the
inhabitants.
Some historians also
believe that Romans may have used Jewish slaves to build the
rampart, whom the Zealots (these historians see them as
Zealots rather than Sicarii) were reluctant to kill because
of their beliefs, however as sicarii believed that Jews who
did not belong to their sect could be robbed and killed with
impunity this is disputed. According to Dan Gill,[3]
geological observations in the early 1990s revealed that the
375 foot high assault ramp consisted mostly of a natural
spur of bedrock that required a ramp only 30 feet high built
atop it in order to reach the Masada defenses. This
discovery would diminish both the scope of the construction
and of the conflict between the Sicarii and Romans, relative
to the previous perspective in which the ramp was an epic
feat of construction.
The rampart was complete in the spring of 73, after
approximately two to three months of siege, allowing the
Romans to finally breach the wall of the fortress with a
battering ram on April 16. When they entered the fortress,
however, the Romans discovered that its 936 inhabitants had
set all the buildings but the food storerooms ablaze and
committed mass suicide rather than face certain capture,
defeat, slavery or execution by their enemies.
The account of the siege
of Masada was related to Josephus by two women who survived
the suicide by hiding inside a cistern along with five
children, and repeated Elazar ben Yair's exhortations to his
followers, prior to the mass suicide, verbatim to the
Romans. Because Judaism strongly discourages suicide,
Josephus reported that the defenders had drawn lots and
killed each other in turn, down to the last man, who would
be the only one to actually take his own life. This account,
too, may be at issue, however, since Judaism also
discourages murder and some historians believe the suicide
account to be an invention by Josephus. They claim suicide
is unlikely as the defenders had neither the opportunity nor
the unanimity required. Josephus says that Eleazar ordered
his men to destroy everything except the foodstuffs to show
that the defenders retained the ability to live, and so
chose the time of their death over slavery but
archaeological excavations have shown that storerooms which
contained their provisions were burnt. Josephus also
reported that the Romans found arms sufficient for ten
thousand men as well as iron, brass and lead which casts
further doubt on the account. Historians also point out the
parallels between the incidents at Jotapata and Masada such
as Eleazar's second speech corresponding to the speech which
Josephus himself delivered at Jotapata under similar
circumstances and the transference of the lottery motif from
the former to the latter.[4] |
