Masada

After the interesting early morning at Jericho, we finally made it to Masada a little after 8.

Masada is the site of a fortress constructed by Herod the Great between 37 and 31 BCE. It was later inhabited by Jewish extremists and other Jews who had fled Jerusalem after the Second Temple was destroyed. One of the stories of lore of Masada is of the 960 Jews who committed mass suicide rather than be taken by sieging Romans. As the story goes (as told to the early historian Josephus), the Jews, realizing they would be enslaved by the Romans whom they could no longer hold at bay, decided suicide was a better option that slavery. The problem is that Judaism does not take kindly to suicide. The solution was for the men to draw straws, the process of which would leave ten men to kill every other person on the mountain so that those people would not have to commit suicide. Then, one of those ten men was chosen to kill the other nine, so that only he was left to suicide. Pretty grim. The leader of the 960 had all of their food and supplies burned so that it would be clear to the Romans that the Jews had chosen death voluntarily and that they had not died of starvation. Sort of a final “so there” to the Romans.

Archaeologists have found little evidence to support much of this story, but, you know, tomaytoe/tomahtoe.

You can either hike up the mountain like a 1^st century donkey or you can ride a cable car like a 21^st century wuss. We chose the donkey route and made it to the top of the mountain by 9 o’clock. It was raining lightly (in the desert, yes) and was overcast so the pictures weren’t great. Brace yourself for many pictures of rocks.