The Last Stand That May Not Have Happened

High on a sheer-sided desert mountain overlooking the Dead Sea stand the ruins of a fortress called Masada. And it is the setting for one of the most famous, dramatic, and genuinely disturbing last stands in all of history: the story of nearly a thousand people who, trapped and doomed, chose to kill themselves and their own wives and children rather than fall into the hands of the Roman Empire. It is a story of desperate courage and unimaginable horror. But it is also a story with a twist, because the more closely you look at it, the less certain we can be that it happened the way it’s told.

The fortress of Masada was a place of legendary strength. Built by Herod the Great atop an isolated plateau that rose some thirteen hundred feet above the surrounding desert, protected on all sides by sheer cliffs, it was virtually impregnable. It held palaces, vast storerooms of food, and huge cisterns of water. And during the great Jewish revolt against Rome in the first century, this mountain fortress was seized by a radical group of Jewish rebels called the Sicarii, led by a man named Eleazar ben Ya’ir. When the Romans crushed the revolt, destroyed the great Temple in Jerusalem, and burned the city, Masada became the very last stronghold of the rebellion, a final island of resistance holding out against the might of Rome.

The Horror

Rome could not allow it to stand. Around the year 73, the Roman governor Flavius Silva marched to Masada with the Tenth Legion, an army of some fifteen thousand men, to destroy the roughly nine hundred and sixty men, women, and children on top of the rock. But how do you storm a fortress on a mountain with cliffs on every side? The Romans found an answer that stands as a monument to their ruthless engineering genius. Rather than try to climb the cliffs, they decided to build a mountain of their own. Using thousands of tons of earth and stone, hauled by hand by Jewish prisoners of war, the Roman army constructed an colossal ramp running all the way up the western face of the plateau. It was a staggering feat of labour, and you can still see it there today. Up this ramp they rolled a massive siege tower and a battering ram, and they began to smash a hole in the fortress wall.

The defenders on top of Masada could see what was coming. They knew that when the sun rose, the Romans would pour through the breach, and that their fate would be the fate of all who defied Rome: the men would be slaughtered or crucified, and the women and children would be dragged off into slavery. And so, according to the story, on that final night, Eleazar ben Ya’ir gathered his people together and made a terrible argument. He told them that it was better to die as free men and women, by their own hands, than to live as slaves and playthings of the Romans. Death, he said, was preferable to the degradation that awaited them.

And the people of Masada agreed. But they faced a problem, because their own faith forbade suicide. So they devised a grim and methodical solution. Each man would first kill his own wife and his own children, ending the lives of the people he loved most so they could never be enslaved. Then the men drew lots, and ten were chosen to kill all the others. And when those ten had done their work, and only they remained among the dead, they drew lots one final time, and a single man was chosen. He killed the last nine. And then, the only true suicide among them, he killed himself. When the Romans burst through the wall the next morning, braced for a desperate, bloody battle, they found instead only silence, and the bodies of nearly a thousand people. The rebels had cheated Rome of its victory. There was no one left to conquer, no one left to enslave. Only the dead.

The Modern Relic

It is a haunting, powerful story, and for two thousand years it has stood as one of the ultimate symbols of choosing freedom and death over slavery. But now we must be honest about a problem at the heart of it, because this is where the legend meets the doubt. The entire dramatic account of the mass suicide, the speeches, the drawing of lots, the nine hundred and sixty dead, comes from a single ancient source: a historian named Flavius Josephus. And Josephus is a problematic witness. He was a Jewish general who had actually defected to the Roman side during the war, and he was writing his account decades later. Crucially, he was not there. He did not witness any of it. He claimed his information came from two women and five children who had survived the massacre by hiding in a water cistern, and who supposedly repeated everything, including Eleazar’s stirring speeches, word for word.

And modern archaeology has raised serious, uncomfortable questions about the whole tale. When the site was excavated in the twentieth century, researchers expected to confirm the dramatic story of the nine hundred and sixty dead. Instead, they found the skeletal remains of only around twenty-five to twenty-eight people. Not nine hundred and sixty. A few dozen. Where were all the bodies? What’s more, scholars point out that it would have been nearly impossible for a handful of women and children, cowering in a cistern, to have overheard and memorised Eleazar’s grand speeches so perfectly. Most historians now believe those eloquent speeches were simply invented by Josephus, a common practice for ancient writers who liked to put dramatic words into their characters’ mouths. His account has other errors too, exaggerating the height of the walls and getting details of the fortress wrong.

So what really happened on top of Masada? The truth is, we may never know for certain. The siege itself absolutely happened, that much is beyond doubt, proven by the Roman ramp and the archaeological evidence of battle. And it’s very possible that at least some of the defenders did choose to take their own lives rather than surrender. But the beautiful, terrible, perfectly organised mass suicide of nine hundred and sixty people may be largely a dramatic literary creation. A grimmer possibility is that the Romans, once they broke in, simply massacred most of the defenders in the usual brutal Roman fashion and threw the bodies from the cliffs, which would explain why so few remains have ever been found. The noble last stand we remember might, in reality, have been a far more ordinary and one-sided slaughter.

And yet the legend endures, because it speaks to something deep in the human spirit: the idea that there are things worse than death, that freedom can be worth more than life itself, and that even in the face of an overwhelming empire, a people can refuse to be conquered. True or not, exaggerated or not, the story of Masada became immortal. It became a symbol of resistance for two thousand years, and a founding myth of the modern nation of Israel, whose soldiers once swore an oath that “Masada shall not fall again.” Whatever truly happened on that silent mountaintop, whether a heroic mass suicide, a brutal massacre, or something in between, the rock of Masada still stands over the desert, keeping its secret, a monument to a last stand that may be part history and part legend, but has never lost its terrible power.

(This post touches on a sensitive subject. If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out to a mental health professional or a support line — you are not alone.)

← Back to the archive