"The Masada mystery" Topic

"In 73 or 74 CE, 960 Jewish zealots – men, women and children – committed suicide on top of the mountain of Masada by the Dead Sea in Israel rather than be captured by the Romans. The story, told by the Roman historian Josephus, is one of the most famous from antiquity. But did it actually happen? Yigael Yadin, the late Israeli archaeologist from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who excavated the site in the mid-1960s, said that it did. Moreover, he also said that the objects found during his dig proved it. His subsequently published book, Masada: Herod's Fortress and the Zealots' Last Stand (1966), was a bestseller.

It was no secret that Yadin's excavations at sites in Israel, such as at Hazor in the 1950s and at Masada in the 1960s, were in part under­taken in the hope of reinforcing Jewish claims to the land by linking them to biblical stories and other famous events. Some have long charged Yadin with a political agenda detached from the truth – and cast a shadow over his interpretations of the finds at Masada and elsewhere in the Levant. In 1995 and 2002, Nachman Ben-Yehuda, a sociologist also at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published his own interpretation of the finds from Masada in two separate books – The Masada Myth and Sacrificing Truth. He con­cluded that Yadin had been incorrect in many of his interpretations, perhaps deliberately so, in the interest of creating a nationalist narrative to help the young state of Israel forge an identity for itself…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Political.

However, the political and the religious cannot be separated from the historical.

I believe there is enough of the historical for Masada.

Yes, it's a very political article. Modern politics influencing the author. The author dismisses Josephus stating he was told to 'whitewash' the fact the Romans actually over ran the defenders and massacred them. I've never read that the Romans were the least bit squeamish, and usually shouted to the world, that they massacred the residents of a city that resisted them. Such treatment was common until the early 19th century for any city that had to be taken by storm.

I too believe there's plenty to support what Josephus wrote.

Agree with Dn Jackson that the Romans were more inclined to glory in massacre than to "whitewash." I also note that those who agreed with the Josephus account were archaeologists on the site, while the "refutation" comes from a sociologist. I might pay attention to a historian.

Truth is they just throw Bob over. No one liked him anyways.

There are Crusader accounts of the first Crusade of Jews in European cities committing the same type of mass suicides in the path of Count Emerich. Coincidence or confirmation of a cultural pattern?

Dn Jackson, such treatment was not common from the end of the Western Roman Empire to the 19th C. Quite the opposite.

Please cite your sources.

Glup!….

Amicalement
Armand

Lots of sources, but see Lauro Martines, <Furies: War in Europe, 1450-1700> (Bloomsbury, 2013) for a summary of early modern evidence.

Thanks!.

Amicalement
Armand