Masada

Spirits still live at Masada. You can feel them.

Not so much at the palatial ruins the hated King Herod built here. He built an armed fortress-palace atop this butte, making it nearly impregnable. This client-king of the Romans is remembered primarily for his jealousy of anyone else claiming to be a king, hence, the slaughter of every infant boy he could find who had been born about the same time as Jesus.

We do not have any extra-Biblical confirmation of that event, but the mass slaughter is consistent with other reports of his character. In the Roman world, geese were commonly raised as poultry. Herod killed a number of his relatives lest they assassinate him and assume his throne, prompting the ruthless Emperor Caligula, himself no saint, to quip, “I would rather be Herod’s goose (in Greek “hus”) than his brother (“huios”).”

The spirits one feels here are those of the Sicarii who died here in the First Jewish War (AD 66-70). According to the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus, about a thousand resistors held out here against the Tenth Roman Legion for over a year. During that time the Romans built a seige ramp, which is still visible, as are the Roman encampments on the valley floor below the butte.

As the seige ramp reached the shoulder of the precipice, the Jewish defenders knew that they would be defeated soon. None of them wanted to be taken alive, so according to Josephus they made a circle and each man at the same time stabbed the man next to him. A few hours later when Romans soldiers finally occupied the fortress, all of the Jewish defenders were dead and none was taken alive.

Even today newly minted officers in the Israeli defense forces are commissioned in a nighttime service on the top of Masada. Recalling their ancestors’ defense of their nation, each new Israeli officer vows, “Masada will never fall again.”

Israel’s defenders are here. Both the living and the dead. Those are the spirits one senses here at Masada, a site that is as important to modern Israel as it was to their ancient forbears.En savoir plus