INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT MASADA

1. Masada (“strong foundation or support”) is a plateau near the Dead Sea in Judea in Israel. It is 1,300 feet high.  The mesa covers 840 acres.
2. It was turned into a fortress by Herod the Great from 37 – 31 B.C. He built two palaces, a bath house, barracks, houses, and a cistern for water.  A thirteen-foot high wall was built around the top.
3. In 6 A.D., Judea was annexed by emperor Augustus. A Roman garrison was established there.
4. In 66, the First Jewish-Roman War broke out after the Romans desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem. The war is also known as the Great Jewish Revolt.  The rebellion was put down with extreme force by the Romans.  Jerusalem was captured after a siege in 70 and the war was over, for most people.  We know about this from a Jewish collaborator named Flavius Joseph.  He wrote “The War of the Jews”.
5. A group of radicals called the Sicarii (“dagger men”) continued the fight. They took Masada from the Roman garrison.  They were led by Eleazar Ben-Yair.  Other rebels joined them there.  It became their base for raids on Jewish towns. They were basically terrorists. The Romans were not the type to put up with even pin pricks like these.
6. Emperor Titus ordered the Roman governor of Lucius Flavius Joseph to take care of the Sicarii. He had the most famous Roman legion available –  the 10^th legion.  It would be the immovable object versus the unstoppable force.
7. The Roman’s were great at siegecraft, but this seemed beyond even their talents. You could only reach the top by way of narrow, winding trails.  So, it was seemingly impossible to break an opening in the wall.  And the fortress could not be starved into submission.  It had plenty of food and could even grow more.  And it had huge cisterns holding water.
8. To keep any supplies and reinforcements from getting in and the rebels from getting out, the Romans built a wall around Masada. To get into the fortress, they constructed an earthen ramp up to the front gate.  15,000 prisoners of war labored on the wall.  Many died as the rebels fired arrows and stones at them.  The ramp ended up being 1,968 feet long and 375 feet high.  It was an amazing accomplishment and shows how far the Romans would go to beat their foes.
9. On April 16, 73 A.D. the Romans rolled a siege tower with a battering ram up the ramp to the wall. They bashed their way into the fort and found … silence.  They expected a desperate fight as everyone knew that if you didn’t surrender during a siege before the first battering ram hit the wall, you were doomed to being killed or enslaved.
10. The reason for the silence was all the Jews were dead. All 960 men, women, and children had committed suicide, with the exception of two women and five children who hid in a cistern.  The Romans won the siege, but they were cheated of their victory.
11. Today Masada is a sacred place for the Jews of Israel. It is a major tourist attraction.  Recruits in the Israeli army swear allegiance to the country and promise never to let Masada fall again.

https://www.mazadatours.com/14-facts-about-masada/

https://www.historyhit.com/locations/masada/

https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-middle-east/masada

https://historyofyesterday.com/masada-e8e860ab3ba1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Masada