Masada | Notes & Review

Yigael Yadin. Masada: Herod’s Fortress and the Zealots’ Last Stand.  Steimatzky Ltd., 1997. (272 pages)

* Western drop to the Dead sea is more than 1,300 feet.
* 66 AD, the Jewish revolt flared up into a full-scale country-wide war.
* 70 AD, the Roman general Titus conquered Jerusalem, sacked the city, destroyed the Temple, and expelled the bulk of the Jewish survivors from the country.
* According to Josephus, the first to fortify this natural defensive position was ‘Jonathan the High Priest.’ Is it A) the brother of Judah the Maccabee (middle of 2nd century BC) or B) Alexander Jannaeus (who reigned 103-76 BC), who was known in Hebrew as Jonathan.
* All agree it was King Herod the Great who turned Masada into the formidable fort between the years 36 and 30 BC.
* At the beginning of the 66 AD rebellion, a group of Jewish zealots had destroyed the Roman garrison at Masada and held it throughout the war. They were joined by a few surviving patriots, after the fall of Jerusalem. They “harried the Romans for two years.”
* In 72 AD, Flavius Silva, the Roman Governor, resolved to crush this outpost of resistance. He marched on Masada with his Tenth Legion, its auxiliary troops and thousands of prisoners of war carrying water, timber and provisions.
* The Jews at the top, commanded by Eleazar ben Yair prepared for defence.
*10 cisterns each with a capacity of up to 140,000 cubic feet, altogether totaling close to 1,400,000. Herod constructed two small dams from which they would open challens to two sets of cisterns, one from the southern wadi to the top row, and the second aqueduct from the northern wadi to the bottom row.

THE SITE

*Masada measures 1900 feet north to south and 650 feet east to west.
*Surrounded by a casemate wall, (a double wall divided by partition walls into a series of rooms or casemates) running some 4250 feet round the top
*Most of the buildings are concentrated in the northern half of the summit. The southern half was bare for the most part, at least in Herod’s time, and was possibly used to raise vegetables.
*The unevenness of the ground does not show on aerial photographs, but in fact there are hollows and mounds.
*Re: Northern Palace. The rock on the north tapers steeply, and to erect anything at all on it, “Herod’s engineers had to fashion some kind of artificial platform with the aid of powerful supporting walls, up to eighty feet in height, hanging over the abyss.”
*The principal purpose of the artists of the wall paintings/frescos, was to give the lower part of the plastered walls the appearance of being paneled in stone and marble.
*Though Josephus mentions pillars made of a single stone, they were actually constructed of several drums of soft stone, plastered and then grooved giving them the appearance of giant sculptured monolithic columns. Crowning them were Corinthian capitals, and these, too, were painted.
*On this slope, Herod did have a Roman style bathhouse, with a cold water pool, tepid room, and hot room.

JOSEPHUS

*See Wars 7.252 – 7.388 (Chapter 8)

Discussing the realities of European volunteers on an Israeli dig who coped with the heat by wearing bikinis, Yadin writes, “There was a feeling at times that the volunteers — the women at least — were concerned as much with exposing the present as with uncovering the past.” (35)

Yadin’s team needed a place to camp for excavations, but the ideal spot was taken already by Silva and his army 1900 years earlier.

…TO BE CONTINUED…MORE NOTES COMING…

~ by VIA on August 17, 2009.