The Fall of Masada

Masada is a flat rock above the Dead Sea, sheer on three sides, with a single snaking path. Herod had built a palace, storerooms and cisterns there against a day of trouble. After Jerusalem fell, the last band of rebels held that rock—sicarii under Elazar ben Yair, with their families, some nine hundred people.

The Tenth Legion under Flavius Silva walled the whole mountain in with eight camps so no one could slip away, and heaped an enormous earthen ramp against the western slope. The work took months. Up the ramp came a battering ram, and the wall was breached.

What happened on the final night is known only from Josephus. The defenders chose not to be taken alive: ten were chosen by lot, they killed the rest, then one killed the nine; two women and five children survived hidden in a water channel. In the morning the legionaries entered a burning fortress and, Josephus writes, took no joy in the victory.

The Talmud never mentions Masada. The sages did not make it an example: Jewish law is extremely restrained about voluntary death. Masada returned to Jewish memory only in modern times, when Josephus was translated into Hebrew and Yigael Yadin's archaeologists uncovered a synagogue, a mikveh and inscribed potsherds on the summit.

After Alexander the divergence of the chronologies nearly disappears: both rest on the same Greek and Roman documents. The remainder of a year or two is the difference between the traditional count and the date refined from external sources.