Episode 1
Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode of Unpacking Israeli History is generously dedicated by Avi and Debra Naider in loving memory of Ari Deshe (deh-sheh). If you want to sponsor an episode of Unpacking Israeli History, or you just want to say shalom, get at me at noam@unpacked.media.
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Normally, I like to spend four AM asleep.
But when my alarm went off at four AM the morning of June 22, 2023, I didn’t hit snooze, even though it was pitch black outside and miserably chilly. My 10-year-old son Eyal and I had somewhere to be. Together with my good friend Avi Posen, we made our way up the narrow trail that winds up the side of a steep cliff in the Judean desert, flashlights bobbing in the dark.
We weren’t alone on the trail. Even at this godforsaken hour, hundreds of other hikers were huffing and puffing their way up the mountain right next to us. Birthright groups, Israeli teens on school trips, tourists, families – all of us trying to reach the summit before the sun rose over the Dead Sea.
Eyal, Avi, and I were just three of the nearly one million tourists who flock to Masada each year. This Roman-era fortress perched atop a mountain is one of Israel’s most iconic and popular tourist destinations, and the sunrise hike up the steep and curving Snake Path is basically a rite of passage for anyone who comes to the Holy Land.
But as we schlepped towards the top, that voice in my head – the same one that made me start a podcast about Israeli history – was babbling away, asking questions like ok but WHY is this place such a big deal and what does it MEAN about Israeli identity that Masada has become so central in the state’s mythology and oh my god I am so hungry, is it normal to be THIS hungry THIS early in the morning?
And look, the voice in my head, I call him Carl, he does know the basic outlines of the Masada story. It goes something like this: two thousand years ago, a bonkers king named Herod built a luxury fortress at the top of a mountain, complete with bathhouses and grain silos and whatever else an ancient royal needed to withstand a prolonged siege in comfort and style. But a century after he completed said palace fortress, Judea was gearing up for war, and in 66 CE, the complex became home to a ragtag band of hardcore Judean rebels who were about to lose the fight against Rome.
For three years, the fortress sustained nearly a thousand Jewish men, women, and children, most of them of the “extreme rebel” variety. But the Romans weren’t about to let them keep living atop this isolated outcrop. The Roman Empire was done with these pesky Jews and their pain-in-the-neck rebellion, which cost the ancient world’s biggest superpower far more in blood and treasure than Emperor Vespasian cared to admit. So even though the Temple was destroyed, the Jewish rebellion all but suppressed, Vespasian sent the Roman Tenth Legion to crush whatever embers of rebellion still smoldered atop Masada.
So Commander Lucius Flavius Silva dutifully led his men to the base of the mountain and forced his Jewish slaves to build a ramp to the top.
All of this is verifiable fact. Remnants of the Roman ramp still exist. So does archaeological evidence of the camps that ring the mountain’s base.
It’s what happened next that confounds historians, and that kept nagging at me and Carl as we stood atop the mountain watching the sunrise paint the Judean desert gold. Because the story most people hear on their tours goes something like this:
The men, women, and children atop the mountain knew they had no hope of surviving this encounter. So they made a shocking decision. Or, more accurately, a handful of men made the decision forthem. The night before the Romans were due to arrive, ten men called down the Angel of Death. Together, they killed their families and friends before turning their swords on one another. When the Romans showed up the next morning, all they found was death. Death… and seven survivors: two women and five children who escaped the flash of swords by hiding in a water cistern.
It was these survivors who allegedly recounted the horror to the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus. And it was this version of the story, plus a number of very rousing speeches, that made it into Josephus’ history The Wars of the Jews, which to this day remains the only contemporaneous account of the tale.
So no wonder my brain was working overtime that day, as I stood at the top of Masada, sweaty and out of breath, wondering what it all meant.
I mean, first of all, there were all the problems with the sourcing. Generally, modern historians don’t rely on accounts that can’t be independently corroborated. And Josephus was hardly an impartial historian. You can learn tons more about the guy from an amazing episode of our sister podcast, Jewish History Nerds. (I’ll of course include the link in the description.) But the quick version is, before he started working for the Romans, he commanded a Judean rebel group fighting to kick the Romans out of Judea. But when Roman soldiers wiped out his entire company – or whatever you call a handful of guerilla fighters – Josephus switched sides, becoming a translator for the Roman generals and writing histories in his spare time.
All of which means that the story behind one of Israel’s most enduring and iconic national myths relies on a single source that can’t be independently corroborated, written by a very complicated guy who wasn’t there and probably had some ulterior motives.
So yeah, my inner voice, Carl, had questions. Like, why did Masada muscle its way into the collective 20th century Jewish story, becoming a fixture of modern Zionist identity? Why is this old fortress a Must-See on every tourist itinerary stop here, including the non-Jewish ones? Why do the gift shops at Ben Gurion Airport sell sweatshirts proclaiming “Masada will not fall again”?
Because if you look at classical Jewish tradition… Masada barely exists. It’s not in the Hebrew Bible. There’s not even an apocryphal text that could have potentially made it into the Bible, like the Books of the Maccabees. (Nerd Corner Alert: Did you know there are five Books of the Maccabees, though only the first was written in Hebrew? Seriously, way to milk the franchise. A sequel I get, but four follow-ups? Seems excessive.)
Most suspiciously, unlike the Bar Kokhba rebellion that happened 60 years later, Masada is never mentioned in the Mishna or the Talmud, never referenced by future scholars like Rambam or Rav Yosef Karo. There are no fast days or holidays or prayers or lamentations for its martyrs. As far as Jewish liturgy is concerned, the whole story never happened.
And maybe that makes sense, considering Judaism’s emphasis on preserving life. Mass suicide isn’t exactly a Jewish value. But if the story really happened the way Josephus recounted it, wouldn’t the rabbis of the Talmud have mentioned it, at least, even if just to criticize the decision? Seems like a pretty big thing to just ignore, you know?
In other words: we have no proof that the 960 martyrs of Masada ever even existed – at least, not in the way we’ve always been taught.
So what were Eyal and Avi and I doing here?
But even as I contemplated all of these questions, feeling a little like the Grinch Who Stole Masada, I found myself dumbstruck. The sun had climbed the horizon, illuminating parched sands and the metallic glint of the Dead Sea.
Despite the crowds of tourists and teenagers taking selfies – and the one Chabad rabbi asking me if I wanted to put on tefillin – I couldn’t stop myself from feeling amazed, grateful, and humbled by the fact that I was standing on history itself. The relics found at Masada are yet another reminder that the Jewish story in this land stretches back for millennia.
But awe can coexist with tough questions, just as doubt can coexist with faith. Truth is not always synonymous with fact. Myths have uses. They don’t need to be factual, or verifiable, to tell us something about ourselves.
I didn’t start this podcast to poke holes in Israeli history or its founding myths, but to explore those myths from different angles and maybe provide a more holistic understanding. To understand why they exist. What purpose they serve. How they came to be. And this two-part series is no exception.
We may never know what really happened on top of Masada that night in 73 CE. But we can unravel the legend that emerged from the shadows, look at it plainly, and learn something about ourselves.
This week, we’ll explore first-century Judean society as it hovered on the brink of apocalypse. We’ll talk about the various factions of the time, from the scholars to the priests, the normies to the extremists. We’ll talk about the strange arc of Flavius Josephus. And next week, we’ll pinpoint the exact moment in time that Masada became a rallying cry for Israel’s youth, for Israel itself, and explore why.
So we’re gonna go back, way back, to the moment Masada sprang into being…
Chapter One: The Mountain and the Madman
It started with the Hasmoneans.
That was the dynasty established by the Maccabees, the ragtag rebels and heroes of the Chanukah story, who stared down an empire and won. In the second century BCE, the Hasmoneans noticed that the Judean desert was the perfect place to build a fortress: harsh, arid, jagged with mountains. And the mountain they chose was a beast: a massive, flat-topped mesa jutting out of the sand like something dropped from the sky. The plateau itself was huge – roughly 33 football fields (AKA big), surrounded on all sides by a sheer drop of more than 1500 feet.
Talk about having the high ground. (ba-dum-bum-ssssh)
So the Hasmoneans built a small fortress atop the mountain, which soon came to be known as the mightiest stronghold in Judea. But its legend didn’t take off until a couple hundred years later, when a Roman puppet king gave the mountain – and the entire Land of Israel – a serious glow-up.
Herod the Great may have been a widely despised paranoid lunatic with very little legitimacy and a penchant for killing his own family members, but the guy knew his way around a blueprint. He was probably the most successful and impressive architect slash builder in the region’s history, and you can still see the remains of his projects in Israel today.
It was Herod who built the 60-foot limestone walls that once encircled the Temple courtyard, including the Western Wall, aka the Kotel. And it was Herod who built the port city of Caesarea, with its architectural marvel of a harbor and its two-thousand-year-old amphitheater where both Israeli and foreign musical icons play sold-out shows.
But Herod didn’t stop at building a fabulous port city overlooking the glitter of the Mediterranean, or at renovating the Temple, or at constructing lavish palaces in Jerusalem and Jericho. The guy had enemies, both real and imagined, and when you’re paranoid, rich, and a really good architect, you build yourself not one, not two, but as many fortresses as you can. Sometime in the 30s BCE, Herod turned his attention to Masada. And, as with all of his building projects, he went big.
The ancient Near East had its fair share of doomsayers – some of whom we’ll get to later in the episode – and Herod was no different. The guy saw schemes and calamity everywhere, and he chose Masada as his end-of-the-world escape hatch, the ancient and far more stylish equivalent of those doomsday bunkers filled with ten years worth of canned tuna and iodine tablets. If things ever got bad enough for Herod to flee to Masada, he was prepared to dig in forever.
So he wrapped the entire plateau in a casement wall – basically a double wall with chambers in between. He added towers, barracks, and defensive systems for all the battles he planned to win. He carved gigantic cisterns into the rock to channel seasonal rainwater, ensuring years of water security in a parched landscape. And he built huge warehouse complexes stocked with enough food, wine, oil, and weapons to last for years. (Nerd corner alert: When archaeologists began excavating Masada nearly 2,000 years later, they found that the desert air had actually preserved some of the supplies Herod had stocked away, including grains and date seeds. Decades later, Israeli scientists managed to germinate one of those date seeds, which grew into a living palm nicknamed “Methuselah.” For years, it held the world record for the oldest seed ever successfully sprouted before other date seeds from the same era muscled it out of the way, resulting in living trees with similarly Biblical names. Pretty cool, huh?)
But Herod wasn’t your average doomsday prepper.
Yeah, he wanted his apocalypse safehouse to be, you know, safe, but he also wanted it to be luxurious. What’s the point of spending eternity at the top of a godforsaken mountain in the desert if you don’t have your creature comforts? So he built a “hanging palace:” three tiers of Roman-style luxury cascading down the northern cliff face, complete with bathhouses, courtyards, frescoes, and every other amenity imaginable.
The puppet king never had to use his luxury panic room. But in 66 CE – roughly a century after he put the final touches on Masada – a group of Judean rebels moved in, ready to throw off the yoke of the oppressor.
Because soon after Herod died, the Romans fully and officially took charge of Judea. They’d tried this whole puppet king charade, and it proved to be more trouble than it was worth. But if they thought direct control would be easier, they were very, very wrong.
The Judeans did not appreciate living under Roman occupation. They hated the heavily corrupt Roman governors who taxed them to hell. And they really hated the fact that their tax money was used, in part, to build new pagan temples all over the country.
But no one agreed on how to handle that insult. First-century Judean society was a polarized mess way before it was cool, and the worse things got with the Romans, the more fractured the Jews became. And those fractures made them vulnerable.
Broadly speaking, Judea’s Jews were divided into a number of sometimes-overlapping factions. We’ll start at the top of the heap, with not one but two groups of elites: the Pharisees, or prushim, and the Sadducees, or Tzdukim.
Now, the Pharisees weren’t what you’d generally imagine the one-percent to be. They weren’t necessarily wealthy or fancy. Instead, their status came from their scholarship. These were the guys who spent all their time learning Torah, arguing the finer points of Jewish law. Nerds, basically, but with a single obsession: Jewish continuity, no matter what. So most kept their heads down, studied hard, and did their best to just make it through – even if some privately supported their more hardline brothers in rebelling against the pagan empire that had taken over their country.
Then there were the more stereotypical elites, the Sadducees, who were as different from the Pharisees as you could get. Where the Pharisees spent their time studying and debating, the Sadducees could usually be found in the Holy Temple, managing sacrifices, accepting tithes, and just generally running the show. Where the Pharisees mostly wanted to be left alone to study, many Sadducees hobnobbed with the Romans – partially out of political necessity, and partially because plenty of them were cool with the current status quo, which left them at the top of the heap. If the Pharisees were the devout intellectuals, the Sadducees were the aristocrats and politicians – shaking hands, kissing babies, and showing up to fancy Roman events in the first-century equivalent of a limo.
In the middle of the social hierarchy, if we can call it that, were ordinary Jews – just simple farmers and traders and craftsmen, doing their best to survive the crushing taxes and rising political turmoil. Like the elites, they too were split between accommodating Rome and rebelling.
These normies had one interest: surviving the Roman occupation unscathed, AKA staying alive. Sure, these toga-wearing pagan occupiers were the worst, but if the choice was between living under a humiliating occupation or dying in some doomed rebellion against the world’s most powerful empire, they preferred living, thanks very much. And that meant that they paid their taxes, kept their heads down, and refused to participate in the brewing rebellion.
Rounding out the factions of Judean society were the false messiahs and doomsday cults. If you’re into apocalyptic cults, and really who isn’t, you can’t do much better than the Essenes – or, as they called themselves, “the Sons of Light,” who spent their time preparing for the ultimate showdown with the “Sons of Darkness.”
The Essenes weren’t normies – I don’t think you can be a normie if you refuse to talk to women, only wear white, and have a mild obsession with bathing – but they mostly kept out of politics. Their shtick was waiting for the holy war at the end of days, not making it happen. They couldn’t have, anyway, since they believed that the coming war would be supernatural, not merely a plain old guerilla rebellion, with angels and other celestial beings fighting alongside Judean rebels. It might sound kooky, but like everyone else in first-century Judea, they were responding to the catastrophe and corruption ravaging their society. And honestly, there are worse ways to handle the apocalypse than to hide out in the desert and take a lot of baths.
Like, for example, becoming a Zealot or a Sicarius.
Yup, there was one more faction in ancient Judea. Well, technically two, but they often get lumped in together even though they largely hated each other. Because these were the factions who embraced political violence… until it consumed them whole.
Chapter Two: The Fourth Philosophy
In the year 6 CE, a new Roman governor decided to take a census of Judea’s citizens. After all, you can’t tax people effectively if you don’t know how many people you’re taxing!
Though Roman taxes had long been a point of contention for ordinary Judeans, this new census was the last straw. For a certain subset of Judea’s population, submitting to this census was tantamount to agreeing that their land now belonged to Rome, when everyone knew it really belonged to God. And pious Jews would not stand by and allow pagans to rule the Holy Land.
So a so-called “fourth philosophy” emerged among Judea’s factions. Unlike the philosophies of the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes, this one had only two requirements.
The first was deep devotion to God, Pharisee-style.
The second was a lack of squeamishness. Because this so-called “fourth philosophy,” which looked a lot like Pharisee-ism with weapons, demanded that Judeans revolt, violently, against the Roman oppressor – as well as anyone who cooperated with Rome.
Sometimes, loyalty to God required violence. And that’s why the “authors of the fourth philosophy,” as Josephus calls them, became known as “Zealots.” In Hebrew, kanaim. They took their name, and inspiration, from the Biblical story of Pinhas, an ancient priest best-known for killing a fellow Jew with a spear to stop him from committing a serious sin.
These Zealot rebels were proof that the blood of Maccabees still ran hot, and they were convinced that – just like their relatively recent ancestors – they, too, could overthrow a pagan empire. All they needed was faith… and a potent weapon.
It was in honor of that weapon that one Zealot faction got their name – though, again, the various factions tended to squabble internally and would have hated being lumped in together.
The Sicarii, or “dagger men,” carried curved daggers called sicae (SEE-kay) under their cloaks. During Jewish festivals, when the streets were teeming with pilgrims and tourists, they’d use those daggers against Roman officials or even fellow Jews who looked too cozy with the Romans, before melting away into the crowd. Just like the Biblical Pinhas, or the Maccabees, they had very little remorse about killing fellow Jews who they saw as traitors. Sometimes, a little zeal is necessary – even if it hurts.
Not all of the rebels were Sicarii, trained assassins with an uncompromising vision. Other so-called “Zealots” had different motivations. Sure, they wanted Rome out of Judea. But – nearly two thousand years before Karl Marx – they were also committed to class struggle. So when the revolt against Rome began, they didn’t start off with assassinations. Instead, they burned down the buildings that housed economic records, wiping out any evidence of debt for Judea’s poor.
Wild.
Rome was unprepared for the scale and ferocity of the Zealots’ revolt, and by 66 CE, Judea was on fire. From the rebellion’s headquarters in Jerusalem, Zealot leaders prepared for siege. Meanwhile, other commanders headed up the rebellion elsewhere. Among them was a young Pharisee Zealot named Yosef ben Mattityahu, assigned to hold back the Romans from the Galilee. For 47 days, he succeeded, keeping the Romans from the northern city of Yotvata before Vespasian’s soldiers burned its walls to the ground. (Nerd corner: Yotvata is now the name of a delicious kosher restaurant in Rome. Never been there, but it’s what they tell me. History is funny like that.)
With only forty of his soldiers remaining, Yosef understood that the rebellion was doomed. But he and his men were Zealots, after all. Which meant no surrender. Not an option. So he convinced his men that the most honorable way out was (ready for something a little familiar?) a suicide pact. He promised that as commander, he would be the last man standing – the final witness to this act of holy defiance.
But Yosef did not kill himself.
Instead, after his companions lay in a pool of their own blood, he slipped from their hiding place and surrendered to Vespasian, claiming he had the gift of prophecy. Confidently, and with no small amount of chutzpah, he declared that the Roman general would soon become emperor. When that “prophecy” came true two years later, Emperor Vespasian freed his Jewish prisoner of war, even bestowing him with his own family name.
The transformation was complete.
Former Pharisee and Zealot commander Yosef ben Mattityahu was now Flavius Josephus, better known to us today as just Josephus: interpreter and adviser to the Roman emperor; historian; and history’s primary witness to the coming apocalypse.
In the year 70 CE, the world as Judeans knew it came to an end.
Four years into the bloody and disastrous Jewish revolt, Jerusalem was starving, overcrowded with refugees.
The famine was not due to poor planning, but to pure zealotry.
Believing that a little desperation could only help the coming fight, and determined to consolidate their own power, the various Zealot factions who controlled Jerusalem burned the city’s food supplies. To them, compromise was worse than starvation; submission worse than despair. Plus, each faction was determined to starve the other out and take control of the capital – and the rebellion – once and for all.
But defiance is cold comfort when the Romans breach your walls, knock down your Temple, burn it to the ground, slaughter hundreds of thousands of your people, and haul off another hundred thousand into captivity.
After the Temple fell, only three Jewish strongholds remained. One by one, the Romans took them all.
First Herodium, in what is today the West Bank.
Then, the fortress of Machaerus (mah-KEE-roos), in what is today Jordan.
Two years after the fall of the Temple, only one stronghold was left. A single symbol of hope in a post-apocalyptic world. A mighty fortress constructed a century earlier by a paranoid builder-king. And at its summit, nearly one thousand rebels, mostly Sicarii and their families.
Masada.
And now, a reminder. This is where we transition from facts to…something else. Remember, Josephus is the only source we have for this story. So, as I’ll say a few more time, probably to the point where it’s annoying, take this story with a spoonful of salt.
The rebels at the top of Masada were well prepared for a prolonged siege, thanks partly to Herod’s foresight and partly to what we today might call war crimes. It’s hard for me to say this part out loud. It’s embarrassing, it’s awful, and it’s sickening. But after they seized the fortress in 66 CE, the Sicarii decided to do a little raiding. Over the Passover holiday of 67 CE, a handful of hardened warriors made their way to the Jewish village of Ein Gedi, where they slaughtered 700 fellow Jews before burning the village, seizing its supplies, and making their way back to their fortress.
Five years later, there they were: 967 men, women, and children – the only remaining outpost of Jewish rebellion at the end of the world. As long as the Sicarii stood atop Masada, a spark of Jewish defiance still flickered.
Unless the Romans could stamp it out.
But even they were not prepared for what followed.
Chapter Three: Alone at the End of the World
Elazar ben Yair came from a family of rebels.
According to Josephus, Elazar descended from “Judah the Galilean,” aka “Judah of Gamla,” co-founder of the so-called “fourth philosophy” of the Zealots. It was Judah who led the revolt against the Roman census in 6 CE, and now, Elazar had taken up his mantle as the commander of the Sicarii.
It would be an understatement to say that Josephus, our narrator and single source for all that happened next, was no fan of the Sicarii. In Chapter 8 of The Wars of the Jews, he calls them “robbers,” “barbaric,” “wicked,” and “corrupt,” describing in great detail their so-called “reign of terror” that culminated with them stuck atop Masada, watching the Roman Tenth Legion circling 1500 feet below like sharks drawn by the smell of blood.
To be fair, he wasn’t exactly alone. Though the Talmud never mentions Masada, it has plenty to say, none of it good, about the Zealots, though it doesn’t use that name. Instead, the rabbis refer to the Zealots as “biryonim,” which roughly translates to “ruffians,” or “thugs.” (Nerd corner alert: according to Tractate Gittin 56a, one of the Zealot leaders, Abba Sikkara, was the nephew of the great sage Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai. But when the great sage asked his nephew why he was okay with condemning the people of Jerusalem to a slow death by starvation, Abba Sikkara explained “I can’t do anything, because if I speak out, they’ll kill me.” And though the Talmud can’t be taken at face value as a historical document, I think this is a pretty decent illustration of the intense factionalism ripping Judea apart. Here is the purported leader of a Zealot faction, scared to be taken down by his own followers!)
But if Abba Sikkara was scared of his own men, Elazar ben Yair had no such fears – at least, according to Josephus. Back in 66 CE, said Josephus, he led a small band of Sicarii rebels to take control of Masada, establishing a base at the top of the mountain. While other Sicarii terrorized Jerusalem, killing off any priests they suspected of corruption – Elazar mostly stayed on the mountain, where – Josephus informs us – he “act[ed] the part of the tyrant.” (By the way, I know I said this is all from Josephus, but we do know a lot about Elazar ben Yair. We know he was real. We know he was the commander at Masada. Those are facts.)
But whatever Elazar’s personality, his band of rebels grew slowly as the war dragged on and more Sicarii fled the starvation and increasingly brutal killings in the capital. By 70 CE, 967 Sicarii – including women, children, and the elderly – clustered atop the mountain, alone at the end of the world. (Again, this is alllll Josephus.)
And though we don’t know much about who they were, or their personalities or hopes or dreams, we do know a surprising amount about their daily lives in the years before the Romans arrived to root them out.
We know they kept doves, both for food and for fertilizer. We know they transformed Herod’s swimming pools into ritual baths, mikvaot. We know they built a synagogue – the one structure Herod had neglected to include in his end-of-days hideaway. We know they lived communally and took care of the children and elderly among them.
And we know something else. Something that may back up some of Josephus’ claims.
When archaeologists began exploring Masada, they found more than 700 ostraca (oh-STROCK-ah) – basically, the ancient world’s equivalent of Post-It notes. These inscribed shards of pottery were used to jot down lists, take down information, keep records… and maybe also as lots. Like some sort of selection method. Because among the 700 ancient Post-Its, each an invaluable window into daily life at the fortress, archaeologists discovered 11 notes that looked different from the others. All small, all written by the same person. All inscribed with male names or nicknames. Including “Ben Yair.”
And here’s the thing. Josephus had described lots. A random lottery to determine the order of killing, the final arbiters that decided who would be the last man standing, when all 966 of Masada’s inhabitants lay silent in a pool of blood? There’s not enough proof one way or another. But for those who want to believe Josephus’ account, the mysterious ostraca (oh-STROCK-ah) are a tantalizing piece of evidence.
Elazar had spent six years atop the mountain, watching his doomed community grow. Until now, they had managed to hold on: through brutal civil war, through the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of the Temple, through famine and slaughter and horror. Theirs was the last rebel holdout, still going strong after all others had fallen. Still, they knew they were living on borrowed time. That unless some divine force intervened, their story would not have a happy end.
In 72 CE, the Roman Tenth Legion arrived to prove them right. And again, we learn the following from Josephus (but also, much of it is corroborated by archeological evidence).
Commander Lucius Flavius Silva came prepared. He had only governed Judea for a short time, but he already knew not to underestimate the “dagger men.”
So even though there were fewer than one thousand rebels atop Masada, and many were in no shape to fight, Silva brought 8,000 Roman troops to besiege the fortress, as well as thousands of Jewish slaves. From the top of the mountain, the rebels watched as their enslaved brothers built fortified camps around the mountain’s base, etching scars in the landscape that remain to this day.
But the Romans weren’t merely settling in for a prolonged siege and waiting for the Sicarii to starve to death. They knew they had no hope of taking the Snake Path – the skinny, twisted, rocky route that is the only way up the mountain. Instead, they built an enormous earthen ramp up the western side of the cliff: a slow, grinding, brutal construction project. Day after day, enslaved Jewish captives hauled earth and stone under the desert sun, building the ramp meant to snuff out the last remaining symbol of hope.
For their part, Eleazar and his people tried to slow the Romans down as best they could. But stray arrows and well-aimed stones were no match for the implacable force of the Roman Tenth Legion, and the Sicarii began preparing for the inevitable. Their fortress might have been surrounded by stone walls, but everyone knows that stone is vulnerable to battering. (Everyone knows that, right?) So they built yet another wall behind the stone: an inner wooden wall packed with earth, meant to absorb the impact of a battering ram.
It worked perfectly.
At least, until the Romans set it on fire.
As flames consumed the inner defenses, the rebels looked at one another, resigned. The war was truly over, and they had lost. Masada’s walls had been breached. The Romans would come at dawn.
And everyone knew how the Romans treated captured rebels. The Sicarii understood that if they weren’t tortured to death, they would be crucified. If they weren’t crucified, they would be enslaved. The old would be cut down without a thought, while fit men would be sent to die as gladiators, fighting lions for the amusement of a jeering crowd. Women who weren’t murdered outright would become sex slaves. And no one wanted to imagine what might happen to the children. The best-case scenario was a triumphal parade back in Rome: the humiliation of being captured, caged, and publicly degraded before a short, brutal life of enslavement.
And though the Sicarii had never once shied away from a fight, they knew this was not a battle they could win.
Unless.
Unless they deprived the Romans of a battle at all.
So, the night before the Romans were due to climb their completed ramp up the mountain, Elazar ben Yair gathered all of the 966 people under his care. And then, he gave them the following pep talk:
It is known and written that tomorrow will come our demise, but the choice is to us to die the death of heroes, we and all those dear to us…. Since we long ago… resolved never to be servants to the Romans, nor to any other than God Himself… the time is now come that obliges us to make that resolution true in practice.
Cheery stuff, huh?
But Elazar reminded them all that they were Sicarii. They would not be enslaved to anyone but God. They would fight to the last breath. And with that last breath, they would deprive the Romans of the satisfaction of killing them.
Or, as Elazar put it:
I esteem it a favor that God has granted us, that it is still in our power to die bravely, and in a state of freedom.
In other words: we’re lucky, guys. We still have a choice for how we die. That’s a luxury so many of our brothers and sisters didn’t have. But, he continued, making that choice would be difficult. Because it would require killing the people each man has sworn to protect.
We cannot save our souls…. so let our wives die before they are violated, let our sons die before they taste the taste of slavery. Then we shall bless one another with the blessing of heroes. How good and how great it will be when we carry our freedom to our grave.
In the wake of this stirring speech, Josephus – who, I will remind you, was not there – describes a scene of great emotion:
…the husbands tenderly embraced their wives, and took their children into their arms, and gave the longest parting kisses to them, with tears in their eyes. Yet at the same time did they complete what they had resolved on, as if they had been executed by the hands of strangers; and they had nothing else for their comfort but the necessity they were in of doing this execution, to avoid that prospect they had of the miseries they were to suffer from their enemies.
So each man killed his own family, and then turned the dagger on himself. Some burned their possessions, to deny the Romans the satisfaction of looting. And at the end, after the screaming stopped, as the fires smoldered and the daggers dripped with blood, the ten remaining men drew lots once more, to decide who would be the last man standing.
We don’t know who “won” that lottery. We can only imagine it: the last man, surrounded by ghosts. The lonely task of making sure that not a soul was left.
When the Romans entered the next morning, all they found was silence.
Silence: and seven survivors. Two women and five children, who managed to escape the mass slaughter by hiding in a cistern. It was these survivors who provided the basis for Josephus’ account of the slaughter, and of Elazar’s rousing speeches. But once Josephus heard their story, they conveniently disappeared from his narrative. We have no idea what happened to them, or even who they were – only that one of the women was old, and somehow related to Elazar ben Yair. Maybe a mother or grandmother. Maybe an aunt.
Maybe a figment of Josephus’ imagination. Again, none of this is independently corroborated! My buddy Carl is buzzing right now.
So he wrote down this story, stirring speeches and all. And for 1700 years, it was largely forgotten, a footnote in Jewish history. The Talmud never mentions it. The liturgy is silent. There is no commemoration, or fast day, as there is for the day the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem, or the day the Romans breached Jerusalem’s walls, or the day both Temples burned.
There is no prayer, not even a Lamentation, as there is for victims of the Crusades. And there is certainly no holiday, like Hanukkah or Purim, to commemorate the rebels at Masada.
Maybe because Hanukkah and Purim both have a happy ending.
Maybe because this story is too apocryphal, too bloody, too troubling, too foreign. After centuries of exile and abuse, most Jewish people could hardly imagine the warriors who once wielded daggers against one other, in the name of Jewish sovereignty and freedom.
Until the Zionist movement is born. Until a new generation of Jews begins to dream of sovereignty. Until another apocalypse threatens to consume the entire world. Until a fateful expedition in 1942.
And that is where we’re going to end today’s episode: on a teaser. Because I’ve just told you so many disturbing things.
We’ve talked about the politics of ancient Judea. About the fractures between factions. About some incredibly disturbing moments of Jewish history – like Josephus convincing his men to commit suicide before he decided, oops, not me!, and turned himself over to the Romans. Or like the Sicarii burning Jerusalem’s food stores, or pillaging Ein Gedi, or killing anyone who got in their way. We talked about crucifixion, about the high cost of rebellion, about Jewish life under Roman occupation. We talked about traitors and extremists, about doomsday cults and paranoid kings.
But we still haven’t answered the question that stuck in my mind and refused to let go as I stood atop Masada with my son Eyal in the dawning light of June 22, 2023.
Knowing what we know now – every horrible detail, every betrayal, every flash of a curved dagger – WHY did Masada become SUCH a crucial part of Israeli identity and myth-making? And how should we feel about the glorification of this objectively horrible and depressing story?! Tune in next week to find out.
Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And as always, I love hearing from you. So email me at noam@unpacked.media.
This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includes Simon Apfel, Adi Elbaz, Rob Pera, and Ari Schlacht. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for being here, see you next week.