The Myth of 'The Great Siege of Masada'
The Mythical Great Siege was in Reality a parochial Anti-Bandit Operation
Everyone has heard of the ‘Great Siege of Masada’ and the story they know will be something like the following:
‘Some 75 years after Herod’s death, at the beginning of the Revolt of the Jews against the Romans in 66 CE, a group of Jewish rebels overcame the Roman garrison of Masada. After the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple (70 CE) they were joined by zealots and their families who had fled from Jerusalem. There, they held out for three years, raiding and harassing the Romans.
Then, in 73 CE, Roman governor Flavius Silva marched against Masada with the Tenth Legion, auxiliary units and thousands of Jewish prisoners-of-war. The Romans established camps at the base of Masada, laid siege to it and built a circumvallation wall. They then constructed a rampart of thousands of tons of stones and beaten earth against the western approaches of the fortress and, in the spring of 74 CE, moved a battering ram up the ramp and breached the wall of the fortress.
Once it became apparent that the Tenth Legion's battering rams and catapults would succeed in breaching Masada's walls, Elazar ben Yair - the Zealots’ leader - decided that all the Jewish defenders should commit suicide; the alternative facing the fortress’s defenders were hardly more attractive than death.
Flavius dramatically recounts the story told him by two surviving women. The defenders – almost one thousand men, women and children – led by ben Yair, burnt down the fortress and killed each other. The Zealots cast lots to choose 10 men to kill the remainder. They then chose among themselves the one man who would kill the survivors. That last Jew then killed himself.’ (1)
The reality is however significantly different to the myth, which has been fostered since 1940 as the foundation of modern Israeli identity and is particularly cherished by the more radical believers in Zionism. (2)
According to the myth, the Sicarii were noble, brave and uncompromising proto-Zionist jewish warriors fighting against the Roman colonial oppressors. (3)
There is some basis for the view of the Sicarii as an anti-Roman force; in the fact that when they captured the Herodian fortress of Masada in 66 AD under the command of a fanatic we know only as Menachem. (4) They may have in fact triggered the Great Revolt against Rome in Judea itself. (5)
However this view must be tempered by the context that while the Sicarii did use the armaments they captured at Masada to assist in occupying the upper city of Jerusalem. (6) They were religious zealots who adhered to proto-socialist ideas. (7)
The Sicarii demonstrated this nicely by promptly burning the house of the then High Priest Hanania along with the entire legal and financial archives of the Temple in Jerusalem. (8) Afterwards putting Hanania and his family to death as well as cowardly executing all the Roman prisoners - who had surrendered to the rebels in return for their lives – they could get their hands on. (9)
This politico-religious violence towards both jews and non-jews was the hallmark of the Sicarii at the time.
As Ben-Yehuda points out: ‘It does not take much to consider the Sicarii a “bunch of assassins”’ who were not ‘freedom fighters’, but rather ‘a group of detested assassins’. (10)
The Sicarii primarily targeted their own people with their politico-religious terrorism. (11) This is not because the Sicarii didn’t detest and want to exterminate the Romans, but rather because the Romans tended to fight back and the jews didn’t.
We can see this in the often ignored Sicarii conduct towards the countryside around the fortress of Masada with the sect ruthlessly murdering and plundering every nearby settlement with the object of stealing supplies and wiping out those who disagreed with them by indiscriminately murdering the local women and children – Idumean or Judean – after forcing the men of the settlements to retreat. (12)
The origin of this behaviour is the fact the Sicarii were members of what was in effect a doomsday cult that believed that every jew who wasn’t a follower of the Sicarii sect was ipso facto not jewish and were therefore evil people who were doomed to die by God’s hand anyway. (13) Thus it didn’t matter to the Sicarii whether such people lived or died, because they were doomed to be wiped out by God soon anyway.
To paraphrase Shaye Cohen: the Sicarii fled to Masada expecting Heavenly Chariots and the return of the Messiah not the arrival of battle-hardened Roman soldiers. (14)
This in turn gives us the key to understanding the myth of the siege of Masada. This is that the Sicarii were religious fanatics who had little experience in war beyond the political assassination of soft targets and what was in effect banditry.
When in the aftermath of the Great Revolt; Flavius Silva and the Tenth Legion turned their attention to the fortress of Masada. It was an afterthought and a mopping up operation not an important military target. (15)
This knowledge in itself is usually enough to cause Zionist fanatics to froth at the mount and scream ‘anti-Semitism’ from the nearest soapbox. This is however the reality of the situation at the time.
The Sicarii – who actively sought not to fight Roman soldiers in battle but focused on murdering women and children who couldn’t fight back – were simply irrelevant and the Romans didn’t even deploy their elite legionaries to clean out Masada, but rather their second line lightly-equipped (and far more disposable) troops: the Auxiliaries. (16)
The cowardly Sicarii didn’t even try to use bandit tactics or indeed any form of military tactics against these Roman troops. (17) Instead they hid behind their walls and demanded that Yahweh immediately send his heavenly host to rescue them and exterminate the Roman infidels.
This is obvious from the fact that Josephus never describes the Sicarii as actually having fought the Romans and refrains from praising the military prowess or bravery let alone the heroism of the defenders of Masada. (18)
To paraphrase Ben-Yehuda once again: there was really ‘no battle around Masada’ and the Sicarii were a band of murderers and robbers who had little in the way of ‘fighting spirit’ when confronted with people who could fight back. (19)
The reality was that the Sicarii – who in effect only had sharpened sticks and stones as their weapons – were quickly mopped up by the ruthless military professionalism of Flavius Silva and the Tenth Legion’s auxiliaries (20) in an operation that took a few months at the very most. (21)
Indeed there may not even have been a siege worthy of the name at all. Since as Haim Goldfus has pointed out; there is no actual evidence of blood being spilled a battle in the archaeological record of the site. (22)
Goldfus takes this a step further by arguing that the so-called ‘Roman ramp’ – aka the battery – was too small to have fulfilled the purpose attributed to it by Yigael Yadin and the propagators of the myth of the ‘Great Siege of Masada’. (23)
Jonathan Roth disagrees with Goldfus on this preferring – along with Ben-Yehuda and Cohen – the traditional narrative without Josephus’ and Yadin’s myth-history. (24)
Personally – while I think Goldfus may be correct – I would argue that was at least some kind of armed engagement between the Sicarii and the auxiliaries of the Tenth Legion probably did occur at Masada. I would also concur with Roth that Ben-Yehuda’s estimate of the siege lasting several months – albeit he does state it is a maximum figure – is significantly overstated.
Roth’s estimate of – at maximum – a six week siege of Masada is more reasonable in my mind, because once you take into account the fact that the Sicarii were not experienced soldiers and didn’t have a high level of morale or anything but basic weaponry against battle-hardened well-equipped professional soldiers like the auxiliaries of the Tenth Legion. (25)
The likelihood is that the Romans simply built the necessary siege equipment and then assaulted at the first opportune moment carrying Masada in the first assault.
Evidence that this was the case is found in the fact that we have long known that Josephus’ account of the alleged retreat of the Tenth Legion in the face of tenacious jewish resistance is simply an invention and that so-called twin orations of the Sicarii leader Eleazar never happened. (26)
From the archaeological evidence we know that the Sicarii managed to set fire to all the public buildings – except the all-important armoury and unimportant Herodian and out-of-date food stores - but failed to do anything but partially burn the structures they set light to. (27)
If Josephus’ narrative about the alleged retreat of the Tenth Legion, the twin speeches of Eleazar and suicide pact of the Sicarii was true; then all the buildings – especially the all-important armoury - would have been set on fire and completely not partially burnt.
The fact that only some buildings were set on fire and even then only partially burnt suggests that the Sicarii set fire to them in a state of disorganised panic in order to try and deny a rapidly advancing victorious enemy any supplies. The swift and decisive victory of the Tenth Legion then in turn allowed them to quickly douse the flames and prevent major damage to the buildings and their contents.
Further evidence for this version of events can also be adduced in the form of the twenty-five Sicarii skeletons that were found in the cave in Masada trying to escape the righteous justice of the Tenth Legion, which is simply ignored in Josephus’ account. (28)
Josephus’ story that the Sicarii nobly committed suicide rather than surrender is the invention of its author, who was always keen – as an ardent jewish nationalist himself – to show that the jews were superior to the ‘Roman barbarians’. (29)
It should be remembered that only two Sicarii women and five small children were left alive when combat between the Sicarii and the Roman forces ceased at Masada. These seven survivors – as both Cohen and Jerome Murphy-O'Connor contend – simply could not have passed on what Josephus implies they did. (30)
They conclude that the suicide narrative is a mixture of politically-motivated fiction and conjecture based on reports of existent substantial food reserves in Masada, (31) but which in reality was over a hundred years old having been laid in by the Herodian dynasty but not replenished since that time. (32)
It was also likely based on the probability that a few Sicarii – seeing that all was lost – did murder their wives and children before committing suicide themselves, (33) which then became the factual kernel for Josephus mythic ‘heroic jewish resistance’ at the fortress. (34)
That is the reality of the siege of Masada: cowardly jewish religious fanatics hid there while murdering women and children in the surrounding settlements. While actively avoiding battle with their avowed Roman enemies only to then completely collapse militarily when confronting second rate Roman troops from a strongly fortified position.
The cowardly reality is deliciously ironic when compared to the heroic myth: isn’t it?
References
(1) http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/masada-desert-fortress
(2) For example: http://www.zionism-israel.com/dic/Massada.htm; on the myth and its importance to historic and contemporary Zionism see http://artscapeweb.com/masada.html, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ancient-battle-divides-israel-as-masada-myth-unravels-1275878.html; http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.789492; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/22/israel-masada-myth-doubts and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, 1995, ‘The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel’, 1st Edition, University of Wisconsin Press: Madison from p. 50 onwards.
(3) Ben-Yehuda, Op. Cit., pp. 5-6
(4) Ibid., p. 35
(5) Ibid., p. 39
(6) Ibid., p. 35
(7) Ibid., p. 36
(8) Ibid., p. 35
(9) Ibid.
(10) Ibid., pp. 4-5
(11) Ibid, p. 35; Shaye Cohen, 2010, ‘The Significance of Yavneh and Other Essays in Jewish Hellenism’, 1st Edition, Mohr Siebeck: Tubingen, pp. 149-150
(12) Ben-Yehuda, Op. Cit., p. 36; Cohen, Op. Sit., p. 150
(13) Cohen, Op. Cit., p 150
(14) Ibid., p. 151
(15) Ben-Yehuda, Op. Cit., p. 36
(16) Ibid., pp. 39-40
(17) Cohen, Op. Cit., pp. 149-150
(18) Ibid., p. 149; Ben-Yehuda, Op. Cit., p. 41
(19) Ben-Yehuda, Op. Cit. p. 40
(20) Cohen, Op. Cit., pp. 149; 153
(21) Ben-Yehuda, Op. Cit., p. 39
(22) http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.789492
(23) Ibid.
(24) Ibid.
(25) Cohen, Op. Cit., p. 151
(26) Ibid.
(27) Ibid., pp. 151-152
(28) Ibid., p. 152
(29) Ibid., p. 152; Ben-Yehuda, Op. Cit., p. 40
(30) Cohen, Op. Cit., p. 146; http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ancient-battle-divides-israel-as-masada-myth-unravels-1275878.html
(31) Ibid.
(32) Ibid., p. 150
(33) Ibid., p. 151
(34) Ibid., p. 149