Masada - Mountaintop Fortress
Massada is a mountaintop fortress transformed in 35 BC into a 3 tiered winter home by King Herod. Massada's steep slopes are sitting on an isolated cliff in the Judean Desert and the Dead Sea valley, between Sedom and Ein Gedi. The flat top of the rock has a rhomboid shape, elongated from north to south. Its height is 440 above the Dead Sea (50 m above sea level), and it is isolated from its surroundings by deep gorges on all sides. This position forms a natural fortification. Although the mountain had natural fortifications, Herod built a casemate wall around the entire summit. This was a tremendous undertaking, since the summit was 600 meters long and 300 meters across at its center. Herod's plan for the mountain was fantastically ambitious. Massada was not designed merely as a fortress, but as a royal stronghold with spacious palaces, a bathhouse with the all conveniences available at the time, and a number of smaller palaces, The access in ancient times (as Josephus Plavious describes) was by a steep "Snake Path" from the east (from the Dead Sea), "the White Rock" from the west, and two approaches from north and south, all of them rather difficult to climb.
History - After Rome destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70, the Great Revolt ended-except for the surviving Zealots, who fled Jerusalem to the fortress of Masada, near the Dead Sea. There, they held out for three years. The Romans were well aware that the Zealots at Masada were the group that had started the Great Revolt; in fact, the Zealots had been in revolt against the Romans since the year 6. More than anything else, the length and bitterness of their uprising probably account for Rome's unwillingness to let Masada and its small group of defiant Jews alone.
Once it became apparent that the Tenth Legion's battering rams and catapults would soon succeed in breaching Masada's walls, Elazar ben Yair, the Zealots’ leader, decided that all the Jewish defenders (960 men women and children) should commit suicide. Because Jewish law strictly forbids suicide, this decision sounds more shocking today than it probably did to his compatriots. The alternative facing the fortress’s defenders were hardly more attractive than death. Once the Romans defeated them, the men could expect to be sold off as slaves, the women as slaves and prostitutes.
Today there is an easy 10-minute ascent from the west, and the cable-car from the east. The "Snake Path" is still open for tourists wishing to use this ancient trail.
Masada’s latest attraction is its fabulous new museum. The precious findings displayed in its nine dramatically lit rooms, along with life-size statues, help visitors picture not only the last moments of the 960 souls at Masada, but also the lives they built here.
Massada National Park is 18 km southern of Ein Gedi, or 12 km from Ein Bokek to the cable train on the east (Dead Sea)
