Text and Artifact in the Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity: Essays in Honour of Peter Richardson

26. The Archaeological Artifacts of Masada and the Credibility of Josephus

26 THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL ARTIFACTS OF MASADA AND THE CREDIBILITY OFJOSEPHUS WILLIAM KLASSEN The best wayto seeMasada isto walk the steep "snake path" before dawn and watch the sun rise over the hills of Moab. As Ijoined a group of students from the University ofToronto up the desert incline in July 1999,1 could not help but reflect on the reasons why the story of Masada moves so many people so deeply. One can easily imagine being a slave of King Herod carrying a lamb or calf up the mountain for a royal banquet. One can even imagine oneself as a Jewish Zealot during the fateful last siege of Masada in 73 CEwatching from above as Roman soldiers moved into position to make the final assault. But what intrigues me most is the dramatic end of the first Jewish revolt against Rome.The revolt had been going on at least since the year 66;during Passover of the year 73 it was drawing to a tragic conclusion. The artifacts discovered at Masada in the years 1963­66 urgently need to be brought to bear on the evidence provided by the texts ofJosephus. Given the opportunities I have had at Masada to discuss with Peter Richardson the relationship of realia to the written record of Josephus, it seems only appropriate to explore the topic in this volume honouring a dear friend and colleague, I intend in this essay to describe some aspects of Josephus's role as a historian, and then raise two questions: When did Masada fall? How did the Zealots on Masada die? What people die for, the reasons they are killed and who keeps the story alive are important clues to what is going on in a society. No reminder is needed that issues are much more complex when suicide is involved. Since virtually all clues come from Josephus, attention will also be paid to what motivated Josephusto write and how well he adhered to his own standards of historiography.I make no claim to have covered all the research, ARTIFACTS OF MASADA 457 nor indeed even to have touched on the most important treatments. At the same time the issuesaddressedhere are significant and deserve more attention. The comprehensive assessment of scholarly research on Masada so carefully made by Louis Feldman lists seventy­nine individual items which are part ofthe archaeological and historical writing that has been carried on since 1943 (Feldman 1975: 218­48). An analysis of this material indicates the following characteristics. First, the highest degree of interest in Masada has centred not on the archaeological and historical realia but on the significance of Masada for modernJudaism, especially for the current Israeli "politics ofsurvival." We owe this interest in large part to Yigael Yadin. Yadin's shift from archaeology to politics in later life may have been good for the political maturing of Israel but it did not speed up our ability to assess the artifacts from Masada (Feldman 1984). Neil Silberman (1994), in tryingto do justiceto severalof these aspects of Yadin's life, concludes that his deep interest in war and military aspects of history influenced both his nationalistic agenda and his archaeological foci. Yadin said: "[O]ne of the most amazing,heroic, alas tragic episodes in [the struggle of the Jewishpeople for their spiritualindependence] is no doubt the story of Masada." Masada is therefore "not just another archaeological site; for many of us it is a sort of mausoleum of the nation's martyrs." His dig there he describes as "the greatest experience" of his life, and he sees Masada as having a heroic, Herodian facet." Second, much ofthe writingon Masadahas been accessible only to people who read modern Hebrew. Third, although Yadin'sexcavations took placefrom 1963 to 1965, critical archaeological presentations of the discoveries did not begin to appear until 1989 (Netzer1989­94). Fourth, more recently scholars have shown interest in the critical issues raised by Josephus's account of the fall of Masada, in light of the discoveries that bear on it. The work of Shaye Cohen on the credibility of Josephus isof particular importance. He has become an established authority on Josephus (Cohen 1979), and has pursued the topic of Masada in an essay to honour 1 Forumaddress,May4,1976, BrighamYoung University; now published in Hall and Welch (1997:17­20). 458 TEXT ANDARTIFACT Yigael Yadin (Cohen 1982).2 Steve Mason's work on Josephus (1991; 1992) has now also...