Masada

In Western culture, the basis for understanding the events that gave Masada a high historical profile was for centuries the work of Josephus, a first-century Jew who wrote an account of the three-year siege by Roman legions of a Jewish fortress community originally built by Herod the Great, the last Hasmonean king (Small, 1990). The siege followed the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in AD 70, the culmination of the so-called First Jewish Revolt, which had begun in AD 66 at the instigation of the zealots. The Jews who established themselves in Masada may have left Jerusalem as early as AD 66 (Masada, 1999), possibly a hard-core faction of the zealots who began the conflict and then decamped to the well-fortified and well-supplied rock -- and well out of range of the confusion surrounding destruction of the temple by Vespasian's legions (Cohen, 1982).

Equipped with cisterns and food stores, Masada had been both well engineered and well secured as a fortress and leisure retreat at the time of its construction. This was supported in 1996, when the luxuriousness of the facilities was inferred from excavation of a decorated reception hall, part of a seri

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remains of soldiers from the Roman garrison that occupied Masada after the Jewish rebellion was suppressed (Watzman, 1997, p. 15). Thus the archaeological record at Masada seems far from historically conclusive. Some of the Sicarii may have killed themselves, as many Jews did during the Revolt. But the archaeological evidence does not support the conclusion that, under siege, the defenders of Masada could have organized a systematic vote or project of murder-suicide. Instead, Josephus constructed such a system, based on similar stories (Cohen, 1982). The importance of JosephusÆs account of the siege to modern archaeological evidence is that on many points, the evidence does not tend to confirm that account. Indeed, controversy surrounds the discrepancy between Josephus and the discoveries of modern archaeology that have been analyzed independently of his Jewish Revolt, as well as the array of conclusions that were drawn based on modern archaeological efforts. The major controversy centers on the famous collective suicide of the defenders of Masada, preceded by the mass murder of their loved ones. Cohen summarizes the basis for the controversy by reference to the absence, not the presence, of an archaeological record: The archaeolo
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Approximate Word count = 2300
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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