A legend under siege

As rousing death-and-glory speeches go, it is one of the best. With a besieging Roman army only hours from storming the mountain stronghold of Masada, where 967 Jews were making their last stand in around AD 73, the rebel leader Eleazar Ben-Yair gathered the men together and called for a mass suicide. He told them:

We have it in our power to die nobly and in freedom. Our fate at the break of day is certain capture; but there is still the free choice of a noble death with those we hold most dear.

That way their wives would not be dishonoured by Roman soldiers, nor their children enslaved:

Let us spare nothing but our provisions; for they will testify, when we are dead, that it was not want which subdued us, but that… we preferred death to slavery.

The stirring story comes from Josephus, the 1st-century Jewish-Roman historian, in his seven-volume account of The Jewish War. It is so powerful that in the earliest years of Israel it became the new state’s rallying cry — ‘Masada shall not fall again!’ — and the Israel Defense Forces have long used the ancient hilltop fortress for induction ceremonies. This hugely evocative site, perched in a spectacular natural setting in the Judean desert overlooking the Dead Sea, has served for decades, in the words of the archaeologist and historian Neil Silberman, as the ‘elaborate and persuasive stage scenery for a modern passion play of national rebirth’.

The tantalising problem with all this is that Josephus is our only source for the siege of Masada. And his credentials as an impartial historian are suspect, to say the least. For many Jews, he was a turncoat, a rebel leader in Galilee who failed to honour a suicide pact during the first Jewish revolt against Rome, which broke out in 66, then surrendered and joined the other side.