The Fall of Masada

Josephus gives the day, the fifteenth of the month Xanthicus, and no year (Josephus, Jewish War 7.389–401). The last date he gives before it is the fourth year of Vespasian, for another event told earlier in the same book (Josephus, Jewish War 7.219). From that the year 73 was inferred, and the World Heritage listing gives AD 73 for the fall (UNESCO World Heritage List, Masada Description). Werner Eck, “Die Eroberung von Masada und eine neue Inschrift des L. Flavius Silva Nonius Bassus”, Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 60 (1969), pp. 282–289, argued from the order of the offices in Silva’s inscription (Urbs Salvia inscriptions of Flavius Silva AE 1969/70, 183b, lines 1–3) that he cannot have become governor of Judaea before the spring of 73, and so proposed the spring of 74 for the fall of Masada. Eck’s argument and the older inference are given here as Hannah M. Cotton reports them in “The Date of the Fall of Masada: The Evidence of the Masada Papyri”, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 78 (1989), pp. 157–162. Cotton sets against the inscription papyri found at Masada that give circumstantial support to 73, and concludes that the evidence cannot decide the issue. Jonathan Roth, “The Length of the Siege of Masada”, Scripta Classica Israelica 14 (1995), pp. 87–110, calls the choice between 73 and 74 a matter of controversy and lists the literature. The timeline places the event at 73 and shows both years.

Roth notes that only one account of the siege survives, that of Josephus. How far his account of the last night can be trusted is also debated. Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Masada: Literary Tradition, Archaeological Remains, and the Credibility of Josephus”, Journal of Jewish Studies 33 (1982), pp. 385–405, sets it beside the finds of Yigael Yadin’s excavation of 1963–1965. He notes that Yadin found three skeletons in the northern palace and twenty-five in a cave on the southern cliff, and traces of many separate fires, where Josephus has 960 dead in the palace and a single heap set alight. Cohen concludes that some of the defenders did kill themselves, that Josephus enlarged and embellished this, and that Eleazar’s speeches are Josephus’s own composition.

Jodi Magness, Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth (2019), holds that archaeology is not equipped to settle whether the mass suicide took place. She reports that Yadin took a group of twelve potsherds inscribed with names, one of them “ben Yair”, for the lots of Josephus’s story, and that Joseph Naveh, who published them, could not identify them conclusively as such.