1. The Last Stand (AD 74)

2. In AD 64, the Roman governor confiscated money from the temple funds because taxes from Judea were overdue. When the Jews rioted, the Roman soldiers were permitted to plunder the city. This led to further widespread rebellion, which prompted Nero to send troops in under Vespasian. The campaign was interrupted by the death of Nero and Vespasian’s efforts to become emperor. However, the Jews were subjugated by Vespasian’s son Titus. In AD 135 the Jews were driven out of Jerusalem and forbidden to return.

7. The only written source about Masada is Josephus Flavius’ The Jewish War. Born Joseph ben Matityahu into a priestly family, Flavius was a young leader at the outbreak of the Great Jewish Rebellion against Rome (AD 66) when he was appointed governor of Galilee. Calling himself Josephus Flavius, he became a Roman citizen and a successful historian. According to Flavius, Herod the Great built the fortress of Masada between 37 and 31 BC. Herod, an Idumean (from Edom [south of Judea & southeast of Dead Sea]), had been made King of Judea by his Roman overlords and “furnished this fortress as a refuge for himself.” It included a casemate wall around the plateau, storehouses, large cisterns ingeniously filled with rainwater, barracks, palaces and an armory. IDUME'A (id-u-me'a; Gk. "Pertaining to Edom"). This is a term employed by Greeks and Romans for the country of Edom (Mk 3:8). After the fall of Jerusalem (587 BC) the Edomites began to advance northward. By 312 B.C. the Nabataeans, who established themselves in Edom, drove them from Petra. The Edomites were gradually pushed into the southern half of Judea, including the region around Hebron, an area that the Greeks later called Idumea. Judas Maccabaeus warred against them and a half century later John Hyrcanus completely subdued them, imposed the rite of circumcision, and invoked the old Jewish law of assembly (Deut 23:7-8). Julius Caesar in 47 BC appointed an Idumean, Antipater, procurator of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. Herod, son of Antipater, was crowned king of the Jews in 37 BC. When Titus besieged Jerusalem in A.D. 70, the Idumeans joined the Jews in rebellion against Rome. Josephus says that 20,000 Idumeans were admitted as defenders of the Holy City. Once within, they proceeded to rob and kill, but these traitors received the same fate as the few surviving Jews when Rome took over Jerusalem. Idumea, or Edom, ceased to be.

8. 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.

9. Elazar’s final speech clearly was a masterful oration: "Since we long ago resolved never to be servants to the Romans, nor to any other than to God Himself, Who alone is the true and just Lord of mankind, the time is now come that obliges us to make that resolution true in practice...We were the very first that revolted, and we are the last to fight against them; and I cannot but esteem it as a favor that God has granted us, that it is still in our power to die bravely, and in a state of freedom." The story of Masada survived in the writings of Josephus but not many Jews read his works and for well over fifteen hundred years it was a more or less forgotten episode in Jewish history. Then, in the 1920's, Hebrew writer Isaac Lamdan wrote "Masada," a poetic history of the anguished Jewish fight against a world full of enemies. According to Professor David Roskies, Lamdan's poem, "later inspired the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto." The heroic story of Masada and its dramatic end attracted many explorers to the Judean desert in attempts to locate the remains of the fortress. The site was identified in 1842, but intensive excavations took place only in the mid-1960's with the help of hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers from Israel and from many foreign countries. To many, Masada symbolizes the determination of the Jewish people to be free in its own land.