Thanks to the work of the archaeologist Yigal Yadin, many people today have heard of the fortress site of Masada and its dramatic capture by the Romans at the end of the first century CE. Josephus described in vivid detail the story of the Jewish rebels who had taken refuge there, and who committed mass suicide rather than letting the Romans capture them. When Yadin excavated Masada in the 1960s, the archaeology of the site seemed to verify much of Josephus's story, which he publicized in a popular book about his findings.
Since that time, many more popular books about Masada have been written, but no archaeologist has produced an accessible full-length treatment of the site, meaning that the public has not had the chance learn how scholars think about Masada today. Into this void comes Jodi Magness's Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth. An archaeologist who has excavated at numerous sites throughout Israel, including at Masada, Magness presents the latest scholarship in a way that is useful to lay readers and also of service to academics in adjacent fields.
Magness begins with Josephus's basic narrative about the events at Masada, but quickly moves on to complex issues involving excavation, interpretation, history, and historiography, covering much ground without overwhelming the reader with technical details. Her first chapter dives right into the archaeology of the site, as she herself had excavated the remains of the Roman siege camps in 1995. These camps are still visible at the base of the site, and Magness explains that because of their remote location, they were never disturbed and are therefore the best-preserved Roman siege camps in the world.
Her next chapter recounts every mention of Masada by nineteenth-century travelers, not just those who tried to locate the site, but also those who simply noted it in their itineraries. She ends with a discussion of the work of Shemaryahu Guttman in the early twentieth century, as well as that of Yadin in the 1960s, which sets the stage for the more complex historiographic analysis to come. Before that analysis, she takes the reader on a tour of the general geography of Masada's larger region, including the Dead Sea, the oasis site of Ein Gedi, and water issues in the desert. She surveys the archaeological sites occupied in each chronological period starting from prehistory and moving through the Byzantine period, pointing out that Masada itself was only occupied in Roman and Byzantine times.
In the following chapter, Magness discusses the earliest occupation of the site, which dates to the first century BCE, when the Roman-appointed ruler Herod founded it as a fortress. Josephus preserved detailed information about this event and also described how several generations after Herod, during the time of the Great Revolt against Rome, Jewish rebels took over the site. When Yadin excavated Masada, he made many assumptions about the architecture he found there based on Josephus's text. For instance, Yadin identified a particular structure that was built during Herod's time as a synagogue. Magness, however, deconstructs this identification, questioning whether Herod would have had any reason to build a synagogue, or whether it is more likely that the structure was built as stables, which the rebels later converted into a synagogue, as the scholar Ehud Netzer proposed. Magness also describes Herod's other building projects in this chapter, including those at Caesarea, Sebaste, Jericho, Herodium, and especially Jerusalem.
In chapters 5, 6, and 7 Magness takes the reader on a journey through earlier history, beginning with the Babylonian destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE and continuing all the way through Herod's time and beyond. She describes Herod's rise to power, his rule, and the regimes of the Roman procurators of Judea who followed him, pausing at the procurator Florus, under whom the Great Revolt began. She notes the escalating problems between Florus and the Jews, and explains how Florus used undue force on his Jewish subjects, which fomented the rebellion. Even though the Romans had soldiers stationed throughout Judea, the rebels could not be stopped. One of them, a man named Menachem, led his group to a small Roman garrison, far away from the main action. This was Masada. Menachem captured Masada from the Romans and took the weapons he found there to Jerusalem for the rebels to use (142). Menachem was soon caught and executed, but his relative Eleazar ben Yair headed back to Masada and became leader of the rebels who had remained there. Magness goes on to describe the rest of the rebellion, and the Jews’ ultimate loss to Rome.
Chapters 8 and 9 are perhaps the most important in the volume. Here, Magness discusses how Yigal Yadin appropriated Josephus's telling of the story of Masada and twisted parts of it together with the archaeological remains that he excavated. His whitewashed narrative is still entrenched in the modern imagination—what has been dubbed by scholars like Nachman Ben-Yehuda as the “Masada Myth.”Footnote 1 Yadin would pluck certain terms from Josephus and use them repeatedly, but he would ignore other, less pleasant, terms and incidents. For instance, Josephus referred to the dominant and very violent group of rebels at Masada as the Sicarii (dagger men), and only occasionally used the term Zealot to describe them, but Yadin chose to use only the term Zealot, in order to downplay the violent nature of the rebels. Magness also references Shaye Cohen's discussion of the likely fabrication of the mass suicide part of the narrative, and Joe Zias's argument regarding the small number of human remains found, in order to explain to her readers that the real history of Masada was not exactly as the modern narrative presents it.Footnote 2
Magness discusses Yadin's military and political careers in order to explain how and why Yadin wanted Masada to become a symbol for the modern State of Israel (200). Yadin never published a final excavation report, only a popular book that glorified the idea of rejecting defeat no matter the odds, which served the modern State of Israel well, especially during its first decades of existence.
Throughout the volume Magness references the scholarship of other archaeologists and historians, giving credit where it is due. She refers to scholarly disagreements and contradictions, and even acknowledges moments when she has changed her own mind from previous publications. She is always careful to remind the reader that archaeology cannot prove or disprove Josephus's narrative, and that lack of archaeological evidence does not mean that an event did not happen.
The book is visually modest but features black-and-white photographs, along with a few in color, as well as instructive line-drawn maps and plans of the site, a full bibliography, index, and extensive endnotes.
