Masada

Herod enlarged the original small fortress into a stronghold which combined royal magnificence with great defensive strength, so that Masada became the fortress (metsuda) par excellence. In the troubled year 40 B.C., when the Parthians chose the Hasmonean Antigonus as their leader, Herod brought his family and his betrothed wife Mariamne here for safety. Again in 31 B.C., when Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra's fleet in the battle of Actium and Herod traveled to Rhodes to swear allegiance to the new master of Rome, Herod's family sought the safety of Masada, though this time Mariamne, along with her mother Alexandra, was taken separately to the fortress of Alexandreia in Samaria.

Between 37 and 31 Herod had turned Masada into an impregnable fortress. The summit plateau, covering an area 600m/660yds long by 200m/220yds wide, with its palaces, administrative buildings, store-rooms, barracks and cisterns, was enclosed by a 1300m/1420yd long casemate wall reinforced by 38 towers each 10m/33ft high. There were twelve cisterns, each with a capacity of 4,000 cu.m/880,000gallons, which together with the supplies of food in the store- rooms would enable the fortress to withstand a long siege.

This situation occurred some decades later, during the Jewish rising against Rome. In A.D. 66, even before the rising broke out, a group of Zealots - members of the radical party who had left Jerusalem as result of internecine conflicts among the Jews - had established themselves on Masada under the leadership of Menachem Ben Judah. Soon afterwards Menachem was murdered in Jerusalem and his nephew Eleazar Ben Yair assumed command on Masada. The Romans took the fortress of Herodeion, while the Zealot forces in the stronghold of Machaerus, on the east bank of the Jordan, surrendered in return for a promise of free passage and thereupon reinforced the garrison on Masada, which finally was occupied by a total of 967 men, women and children. After the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70 the defenders of Masada continued to hold out, and in 72 the Romans decided to overcome this last pocket of resistance by a siege. Their commander Flavius Silva enclosed Masada within a circumvallation (siege wall) with a total length of 4,500m/4,900yds and outside this built eight camps for the besieging forces; his headquarter camp, rhomboidal in plan, was on the west side. A great ramp was built up on the west side of the hill so that battering-rams and other siege engines might be deployed against the walls of the fortress. After an eight months' siege the Romans broke through the walls and set fire to the timber stockade behind them. Seeing that the situation was hopeless, Eleazar called on his companions in arms, in a speech recorded by Flavius Josephus ("Jewish War", VII,8,6-8), to die rather than be taken prisoner. They burned all their possessions except the stores of food (there since Herod's time), in order to show the Romans that they had not been starved into surrender. Then, although Jewish law forbade suicide, they chose ten men who were to put the rest of the defenders to the sword and then kill themselves. When the Romans took the fortress on the following morning they found 960 bodies. Two women who had hidden in a water conduit along with five children told them what had happened. "But when they discovered the great numbers of bodies they did not rejoice over their defeat of their enemies but admired the noble resolution and the unshakeable defiance of death shown by all those involved in the deed" (VII,9,2). This heroism, irrational though it might be, has made Masada a symbol of Jewish determination to hold out even in an apparently hopeless situation. When recruits to the Israeli army are sworn in on Masada the oath includes the words "Never again shall Masada fall".