ABSTRACT
Masada is a huge, butte-like rock that, thirty miles south of Qumran, rears itself a sheer thirteen hundred feet from the west shore of the Dead Sea. It has a flat top, shaped rather like a ship, that measures nineteen hundred feet from north to south and six hundred and fifty from east to west. Here Herod, in his paranoid suspicion, built one of the several citadels in which he sought to fortify himself against the forces that he felt were threatening him: the Jews who were discontented with a king set up by the Romans and of Edomite, that is, of non-Jewish blood—the hostile feeling between the Jews and their neighbors goes back a very long way—and who might try to bring their Hasmonean dynasty back; and the ambitions of Cleopatra, who had begged Antony to kill Herod and get for her the throne of Judea. He constructed on Masada, we are told by Josephus, our sole ancient authority on the subject, a palace and a casemate wall, surmounted by thirty-eight towers. This stronghold, after Herods death, was taken over by the Romans, but later it was retaken and their legionaries were killed by Menahem, the leader of the Jewish revolt against them, in 66 a.d. Thereafter it was occupied by the militant Jewish group variously known as the Zealots and the Sicarii (Daggermen), who held it for seven years. It was accessible from below only by two paths, one a zigzagging trail which Josephus says was 307called "the snake": "For its course is broken in skirting the jutting crags and, returning frequently upon itself and gradually lengthening out again, it makes painful headway. One traversing this route must firmly plant each foot alternately. Destruction faces him; for on either side yawn chasms so terrific as to daunt the hardiest. After following this perilous track for thirty furlongs, one reaches the summit, which, instead of tapering to a sharp peak, expands into a plain." But the Jews were able to bring up provisions, and the top of the rock was so relatively fertile that it had always been possible to grow vegetables there; the climate, Josephus says, was so preservative that the Jews found supplies still edible and drinkable that had been there almost a century. He declares that the Zealots were a nuisance, that they preyed on the country below in a brutal and unscrupulous way. Josephus shows evidence of a certain bias all through his History of the Jewish War. He had at first taken part in the Galilee campaign, but had later surrendered to Vespasian, the Roman general in Palestine, and had advised Vespasian's son Titus during the siege of Jerusalem. Jerusalem had been destroyed in 70 a.d,, at the time of which Josephus is here writing, and nothing could be more bitter than the feeling between those Jews who had submitted to the invaders—as had earlier been the case with those who had submitted to the Greeks—and those who had continued to fight them. Josephus likes to flatter Titus for his relative magnanimity and—himself a descendant of a noble priestly family, who had visited Rome in his youth and had evidently been impressed by Roman power and civilization-tends to emphasize the barbarities of his countrymen. He was, in fact, writing his book in Rome as a protégé of the Emperor.
