The Dark Truth Behind Masada | Archaeology ht
Masada, the site of an astonishing tale of heroism. A few hundred Jewish families holding off thousands of Roman soldiers, choosing in the end death over enslavement. But in the modern dance of politics and archaeology, did the real story of this ancient battle get lost? Hello, I’m John Rhys-Davies. Join me as we relive the siege of Masada next on archaeology.
In the year 66 AD, at the beginning of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, a band of Jewish rebels called Zealots captured this mountain fortress by the Dead Sea. Here at Masada, 960 defenders, including women and children, held some 15,000 Roman soldiers at bay for almost 2 years. The Romans built a ramp up the side of the mountain and battered the walls of
the fortress. According to the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, who was in the employ of the Romans, the Zealots made a desperate decision to kill themselves rather than be delivered into the hands of their enemies as slaves. When Roman soldiers poured through the broken walls of Masada, they were greeted only by the silence of death.
In 1963, almost 2,000 years later, Israel undertook an ambitious excavation at the flat-top rock of Masada. What they found appeared to match Josephus Flavius’ description in uncanny detail. Today, however, Masada is once again under siege. Some scholars question the story of the Zealots’ last desperate hours.
Where, they ask, are the bodies of the 900? Or is the tale of the mass suicide nothing more than the hackneyed literary device of an ancient historian? In fact, did it happen at all? Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to welcome you to the rock of Masada, which is a very important page in the book of history which called Israel.
If we are talking about heroism in this book, this is the spot and this is the page. I would like to go with you back around 2,100 years ago. King Herod took the road that we did today, and when he came to the foot of Masada, he said to himself, “I’m going to change this place into my winter resort.” At what has become one of the most visited tourist sites in the world, guides tell the story of the Zealots’ last stand and their self-sacrifice as historical fact.
And when the Romans arrived to the top, they found here food storages full with food, water cisterns full with water, and 960 hero dead bodies laying around here, left this world as free people, not as Roman slaves. Danny Bahat is not your average visitor at Masada. He is a veteran archaeologist who took part in the 1963 excavation.
The place is so dear to me that I refrain from coming here. I’m today here for the first time after 7 years. The idea is you know, further from the eyes, the more further we go, it becomes more sublime. Perhaps at no other archaeological site in the world has the tension between the sublime and the real played itself out more dramatically than at Masada.
Here, in an unprecedented fusion of myth and archaeology, the story of Masada took on a life of its own. A life that had to do more with modern-day Israel than the siege of 2,000 years ago. When the young state of Israel needed a symbol of national pride, the call to excavate Masada enticed hundreds of volunteers from around the world.
What they found would not only excite archaeologists, but would create something of a national shrine for Israel. It became our national pilgrimage since we saw it in the last link which connects our country our people to our country, and we, of course, wanted to re-know re- renew that link. We went every year on a pilgrimage, all the youth movements, and everyone used to come to Masada.
In October 1963, the stronghold was laid open down to the foundations, this time by the archaeologists. A giant mission of exploration supported by volunteers from 29 different countries, headed by Professor Yigael Yadin. Yadin, former head of the Israeli Defense Forces and the most celebrated archaeologist in Israel, orchestrated the enormous undertaking at Masada.
He had a mission which had worldwide attention. Well, for a long time we have been the people of the book living in the land of the book. Then for 2,000 years we have been the people of the book without the land. Now, for the first time after 2,000 years, we are again living in the land of the book.
My aim is, I would say, to live again as the people of the book in the land of the book. They began their assault on the mountain in the scorching desert in 1963. The excavation became, next to the tomb of Tutankhamun, one of the most publicized digs of the 20th century. It was a very exciting time for young Israeli archaeologists like Gideon Foerster.
And one can remember the very great excitement we had coming into the field, starting our work on a unknown country. The hundreds, thousands of volunteers who took part in the unfolding of the history uh of Masada. We had this was the site that was actually some kind of a national uh site. It was a national hope by everyone to be able to work on this site, which was very difficult to excavate because of its it’s so far away from any other center.
We had, of course, a lot of information, particularly from Josephus, and we were very eager to see if we were if our expectations were to be fulfilled. In contrast to the painstaking tedium of an ordinary dig, Masada yielded up important finds daily, sometimes hourly. Things turn up every day, every day. It’s not that kind of site where you dig for weeks and weeks until you find something. It’s loaded with finds.
It was the greatest time of my life. Charred beams and blackened stones testified to a great conflagration. Biblical scrolls and a synagogue spoke of Jewish occupants. Catapult stones and Roman of the siege. But it was the human remains that spoke most poignantly to the archaeologists. Amnon Ben-Tor remembers.
And I I think one of the most exciting days of my life, not just professional life, but in general, was when I was working in the northern palace of Masada and digging in the little bath of the northern palace, under meters of ashes and collapsed debris, we uncovered uh the remains of three uh people, man, woman, and a youngster.
The clothes, the sandals, the hair, the blood on the stairs where it was uh not red, but brown or black. Here are the people who perished on the last night of Masada. And and you can actually touch you do actually touch them. And I don’t think that there can be many moments in one’s life that are more exciting than this. It was really exciting.
Another two dozen bodies were found in a cave on the southern side of the mountain fortress. But it was Danny Bahat who would make an astounding find. A few yards from here away, that the first which I found with my own hands, the 11 sherds which bear names, amongst them one who was a commander of Masada, Ben Ya’ir.
The other names were on the sherds were names which were kind of friendly names, like the fat man, the man from the valley, valley of Jezreel, the man with the round hair rounded hair, the curly hair, Joab, the fisher, and these are the ones I can recall now, and Ben Yair, of course. If this is not exciting, I don’t know what excitement means.
But you suddenly feel that you have a bridged those 2,000 years, and you are making a continuity. And this is the appeal of Masada. But there was something profoundly unorthodox in the way archaeology was conducted in the heady days of those excavations. In 1965, Israel was a nation that felt surrounded, pressured from many sides, and the Masada story had obvious resonance.
Neil Silberman, an archaeologist trained in Israel, is a long-time observer of the uneasy mix of politics and archaeology. The excavations of Masada must not be seen as a normal archaeological excavation or scientific experiment in which rival scientific hypotheses are being tested.
It was instead, under the direction of Yadin, something of public performance art. A national pageant with an entire nation for an audience, with the entire world looking on. Though the excavations at Masada ended in 1965, the public life of the site escalated, and perhaps even embellished the historical reality. The Israeli Defense Forces began taking their national oath atop the ancient mountain fortress, and the nation swore that Masada should never fall again.
But scholars today find the archaeological record is not in such perfect accord with the story of Josephus. Murmurs of doubt about the mass suicide at Masada circulated. Why were there 11 shards bearing personal names when the historian Josephus had reported 10? And why had only three skeletons been found in the northern palace when Josephus had reported that the mass suicide of all 960 had taken place there? While Josephus described that there were 960 Zealots on the summit of Masada and
took their own lives, Yadin found only a little more than two dozen. The fact that the bodies found in the cave on the southern side of the mountain, those given a military funeral in 1969, were, as Yadin himself publicly admitted, mixed with the bones of pigs, makes their identification with the Zealots, who were extremely particular about the observance of Jewish law, at least problematic.
And what of the famous shards with the names of the defenders on them? The 11 inscribed potsherds that Yadin suggested might have been the very lots cast by the last 10 Zealots before their suicide are also problematic in that hundreds, if not thousands, of inscribed potsherds were found over the surface of the mountain.
In fact, inscribed potsherds seem to have been the method by which the Zealots distributed food. According to the Roman historian Josephus, not all of the Zealots died at the top of the rock of Masada. Five women and children hid in a water duct from the slaughter and lived to relate the horrifying final hours. They told Josephus of the magnificent speech given by the garrison commander Eleazar ben Yair after the Romans had broken through the fortress walls and defeat was imminent, convincing the rebels to choose death
over capture. Scholars began to question the historical truth of Josephus. Besides a number of improbabilities in the story itself, such as how the women and children who were hiding in a water cistern could have repeated verbatim that the the text of Eleazar ben Yair’s suicide speech, I think that it’s fairly clear by now that Josephus, like many classical authors, was giving a melodramatic ending to a great epic.
The theme of suicide as a heroic ending for classical histories was common to people throughout the Greek and Roman worlds. In that, Josephus was really doing nothing new, but giving an accepted end to his literary tale. Their reinterpretation of the Masada story would touch off a controversy about the famous mass suicide and add to a growing consternation about the place of the Masada myth in a nation’s self-definition.
Colonel Meir Pa’il is Israel’s leading military historian. The The The pattern was more or less like this, that the men killed their wives and children. Then they elected 10 people to kill the other ones, the other men there. And then the the last 10 ones, you know, elected one of them to kill the other nine.
And the only one who committed suicide was the last one. So it it should not be considered as a suicide, but it it was really I won’t say massacre, it was a slaughter. As far as what really happened at Masada, there’s no question that there was a slaughter and a brutal, bloody defeat.
But what probably happened in the last moments of Masada was more chaos than suicide. Certainly some may have committed suicide. Others were killed. Yet others taken into slavery. To assume that Josephus’s story is literally correct is to misunderstand what he was trying to say. And it’s even more ironic that even for a time an entire nation would take what was a melodramatic ending for a national ideal.
The theory that the mass suicide of Masada was nothing more than a literary cliché has gotten a mixed reception among the original excavators of the site. It is a true story. It is a true story which we hear about from Josephus Flavius. We believe Josephus Flavius in everything he did. We discovered in Masada every possible physical proof to what Josephus Flavius says.
There’s no way we can prove one way or the other. So, for those of us who want to believe the story verbatim that this is what happened, they committed suicide. For others, they were killed when the roof collapsed on their heads. Uh one way or the other, these are the last defenders of Masada. And that’s the big thing.
It doesn’t matter if the story of Josephus is 100% so. Some of us needed to be exactly so. I don’t think it’s really important. Well, it’s Well, it it is it is not a myth because, after all, I mean, the thing happened. The question is what was the significance for the history of this country, for the people of Israel.
Every archaeologist is, in a sense, a mythmaker, contributing by his discoveries to the creation of a shared national story of the past. This is where myth gets fused with politics. But Neil Silberman thinks that the world of archaeology is never immune to the power of political myth. For him, Masada is a cautionary tale.
I think the danger of a huge project like Masada, so focused in, so so so entirely devoted in the public mind to a single historical incident, is that archaeologists can lose control of its political significance to politicians and other leaders who have very different agendas and different objectives to use the past.
And for some, even the act of suicide is inappropriate as a symbol of national pride. And according to Jewish tradition, usually you would prefer life to death, even if you are doomed to be a slave. You fight if there is no choice. If you stand with your back to the wall, you fight until you fight for whatever it is you believe in, and if it you need to die, you die.
But this is not an ideal to die for one’s country. The ideal is to live for one’s country. Cheryl Spivek came from California to find she had a different feeling about the story of Masada once she walked in these ruins. There’s, in to my mind, a prevailing sense of of sadness here, of loss. Uh people killing their children bothered me a great deal.
Masada, in some ways, is a sign of failure, of giving up, of of bowing to the inevitable uh catastrophes that happen in life, and giving in to them. I thought once that Masada should be developed as a myth in order to, you know, um create bravery within our forces. But now, following the Six-Day War, I think that Masada is obsolete.
Colonel Meir Pa’il, in charge of training young army recruits at the time, has gone through something of a change of heart about the use of Masada for national purposes. Let’s put it this way. Our educational and political authorities, uh maybe even military authorities, they use it for two different uh um sakes.
The first one is to try to educate the army to be brave and fight till the death, etc. Basically, which I don’t accept because I don’t consider this a real, you know, symptom of bravery. And the other, uh, intention is to demonstrate to the Jewish people in Israel the, I would say, the negative outcome of a disaster of a total disaster out of which we should learn what should we do in order to avoid another massacre.
But they, about 30 20 years ago we started a reassessment and we change it. Now, basically, you won’t find an Israeli, uh, a unit who would come there and swear an oath to take an oath there. At the time of the excavations, Masada provided a metaphor of heroic self-sacrifice for the modern nation under siege. But in a land where myths and history intermingle freely many now question the wisdom of defining a national consciousness through a tale of zealotry and suicide.
We should face Masada as it was and I think that from the point of view of culture and moral and humanistic and Jewish tradition we should deny Masada.