Siege of Masada (AD 73-74): Last Stand of the Jewish Revolt

The Siege of Masada was the last major action of the First Jewish-Roman War. In the winter of AD 72/73 a Roman army under Lucius Flavius Silva surrounded Masada, a fortified mountain-top palace above the Dead Sea held by Jewish rebels, and built a massive ramp to reach its walls. When the fortress fell in the spring of AD 73 or 74, the historian Josephus reports that most of the 960 people inside chose death rather than slavery, a story that has been both celebrated and fiercely debated.

Herod’s fortress

Masada is an isolated rock plateau on the eastern edge of the Judaean Desert. Its cliffs rise about 400 metres above the shore of the Dead Sea on the east, while on the west a lower spur of rock links it to the surrounding desert. The flat summit measures roughly 550 by 270 metres.

A fortress already existed there in the Hasmonean period, but its lasting form was the work of Herod the Great, who turned it into a royal refuge between about 37 and 31 BC. He surrounded the summit with a casemate wall (a double wall divided into rooms) with towers, and built the spectacular Northern Palace on three terraces cut into the cliff, a larger Western Palace, bathhouses and long storerooms. Huge cisterns filled by flash floods let the fortress hold out for years.

Josephus, who describes Masada in detail, says Herod feared two threats: a rising by his own Jewish subjects, who might restore the Hasmonean dynasty he had replaced, and an attack by Cleopatra of Egypt, who wanted Mark Antony to give her Herod’s kingdom. The storerooms were stocked with grain, wine, oil and weapons, and Josephus claims that some of these supplies were still usable when the rebels arrived almost a century later.

How rebels came to hold Masada

When the Jewish revolt against Rome broke out in AD 66, a group of radical rebels known as the Sicarii seized Masada and killed its Roman garrison. The Sicarii took their name from the sica, a short dagger used to assassinate opponents. After their leader Menahem was killed in factional fighting in Jerusalem, his relative Eleazar ben Yair led them at Masada.

The Sicarii stayed at Masada for most of the war and took no part in the defence of Jerusalem. Josephus, who was hostile to them, says they raided the surrounding area, including a Passover attack on the oasis of Ein Gedi in which some 700 women and children were killed. After the Siege of Jerusalem in AD 70, Masada became the last significant rebel stronghold, alongside Herodium and Machaerus, which the Romans took first.

The Roman siege

The task fell to Lucius Flavius Silva, governor of Judaea. He arrived with the Tenth Legion, Legio X Fretensis, together with auxiliary units, a force usually estimated at around 8,000 soldiers, plus thousands of Jewish prisoners and other labourers who carried water, food and building material across the desert.

Silva first enclosed the mountain with a siege wall of stone, about 4.5 kilometres long, linked to eight camps. This circumvallation made escape impossible. The outlines of the wall and camps are still clearly visible from the summit today and are among the best preserved Roman siege works anywhere.

On the western side the Romans then built an assault ramp of earth, stones and timber on top of the natural spur that Josephus calls the White Promontory. Modern studies show that the natural rock made up much of the ramp’s height, which explains how the work could be finished within a few months. On top of the ramp the Romans raised an iron-clad siege tower with artillery and a battering ram.

The greatest problem for the besiegers was supply. Masada lies in one of the hottest and driest places on earth, and all water and food for thousands of soldiers and labourers had to be brought in from springs and settlements such as Ein Gedi, many kilometres away. The defenders, by contrast, could rely on Herod’s cisterns and storerooms. The Roman decision to commit a whole legion to a remote rock held by fewer than a thousand people shows how determined Rome was to leave no rebel stronghold standing.

The fall of the fortress

The battering ram broke through the casemate wall. Behind it the defenders had quickly built a second wall of timber beams packed with earth, which absorbed the blows of the ram. The Romans set it on fire; after a shift in the wind, the wall burned, and the soldiers withdrew to attack the next morning.

According to Josephus, Eleazar ben Yair then gave two long speeches urging the defenders to kill their families and themselves rather than face slavery. The men killed their wives and children, then chose ten men by lot to kill the rest, and finally one man killed the other nine and then himself. Before dying they burned their possessions but, Josephus says, left the food stores intact to show that they had not been starved into surrender.

When the Romans entered the next day they found 960 dead. Two women and five children who had hidden in a water conduit survived to tell the story. Josephus dates the end to the 15th of the month Xanthicus, around the time of Passover.

Key people

• Eleazar ben Yair: leader of the Sicarii at Masada and a relative of Menahem; known almost entirely from Josephus.
• Lucius Flavius Silva: Roman governor of Judaea and commander of the siege; he later became consul in AD 81.
• Flavius Josephus (c. AD 37-c. 100): Jewish general turned Roman client whose Jewish War is the only literary account of the siege.
• Yigael Yadin (1917-1984): Israeli archaeologist and former army chief of staff who led the major excavations of 1963-1965.

Archaeology and the debate

Yadin’s excavations uncovered Herod’s palaces, a synagogue, ritual baths, storerooms, living quarters built into the casemate wall, and many objects left by the rebels. Fragments of scrolls were found, including parts of the Book of Ben Sira, Psalms and a text also known among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Burned layers confirmed the destruction described by Josephus.

Among the finds were small inscribed pottery sherds, or ostraca, bearing names, one of them reading “ben Yair”. Yadin suggested they might be the lots described by Josephus, but this cannot be proven. The remains of only about 28 people were found: three in the Northern Palace and roughly 25 in a cave below the southern cliff. They were given a state burial in 1969, although some scholars question whether all the cave bones belonged to the defenders.

Historians are divided over the suicide account. Josephus was not at Masada, the speeches are his own composition in the style of Greek and Roman historians, and he had reasons to portray the Sicarii as fanatics. On the other hand, the archaeology fits a siege that ended with the fortress burning and few signs of a last battle. Many scholars therefore accept that the defenders died in some collective act, while treating the details as uncertain.

The date of the siege is also debated. Josephus places the fall of Masada after describing events of AD 73, and this has long been the traditional date. However, inscriptions recording the career of Flavius Silva suggest he became governor of Judaea only in AD 73, which would push the siege into the winter of AD 73/74 and its end into the spring of AD 74. Both dates appear in modern works.

By the numbers

Legacy

In the 20th century Masada became a powerful national symbol in the Zionist movement and in Israel. Isaac Lamdan’s Hebrew poem Masada (1927) gave rise to the line “Masada shall not fall again”, and for years some Israeli army units held swearing-in ceremonies on the summit. Critics, notably the sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda, argued that this heroic narrative simplified Josephus’s darker account.

Today Masada is one of Israel’s most visited sites, reached by the Snake Path or by cable car, and it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001. Its Roman siege system is studied as a textbook example of ancient military engineering. Six decades later, Jewish resistance to Rome flared again in the Bar Kokhba revolt.

Timeline

• c. 37-31 BC: Herod the Great builds his palaces and fortifications on Masada.
• AD 66: The Sicarii seize Masada at the start of the revolt against Rome.
• AD 70, August-September: The Romans destroy the Temple and capture Jerusalem.
• AD 71-72: The Romans reduce the fortresses of Herodium and Machaerus.
• AD 72/73, winter: Flavius Silva begins the siege and surrounds Masada with a wall and camps.
• AD 73 or 74, spring: The ramp is completed, the wall is breached and the fortress falls.
• 1963-1965: Yigael Yadin leads large-scale excavations.
• 2001: Masada is inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

Masada ended the First Jewish-Roman War and preserved, in the Roman ramp and camps, the most complete picture of an ancient siege anywhere in the Roman world. Through Josephus’s account and the debates it has provoked, it has also become a lasting symbol of resistance, and a case study in how history and myth intertwine.