Herod the Great, unloved by his people, fortified this citadel in case it should be needed as protection against them. Great men, perhaps, are always a little tainted with madness. Who but a madman would dream of a palace redoubt upon a mountain in the middle of a desert? Perhaps it was the ambition of insanity, but it was certainly ambition.
And who but the Romans would seek to capture such a place? They could have let these last few survivors be, with maybe a million dead at Jerusalem and the entire city in ruin, the Temple dismantled, stone from stone. Masada threatens no supply lines, little but wilderness. The Israelites are long since crushed. Victory has already been declared. Rome minted coins to celebrate the conquest so long ago that some have even drifted up here: Judaea Capta they read and show a weeping Jewess beneath a Roman standard. What would it matter, a handful of rebels holed up in a place from which they could not come down?
But that is not Rome’s way. Her Empire can only be held if rebellion is publicly crushed, ruthlessly, brutally and utterly. The expense is irrelevant: Judaea and the world must know that every thimble of resistance was rinsed. No one can be seen to escape the maws of the wolf. So the nine hundred and some at Masada, larger part women and children, are encircled by Roman siege camps and the full-strength Tenth Legion. There will be no escape: you might just as well try to outrun the wind.
A black kite wheels in the sky, yellow claws only half sheathed. Ready to dive on such rodents as dare to live on the mount: golden spiny mice; soft furred jerboa; bushy-tailed jird. All beautiful in their way, but quick and fearful of the open. Even the desert rats know that a burrow must have an escape route, or all is lost.
The finish will be soon: the Romans draw near. Their ramp is visibly closer every day. They have already trundled into view a chain-slung battering ram for the breaching of Masada’s wall.
The defenders have built a second wall, of loose earth around logs, that a ram will not easily smash, but only pack. But no one really believes it will stop the legionaries for long. It was not built in the hope of victory, but only of preserving some spirit of fight.
The real plan is of a darker weave and few are privy to it for now. The night before the Romans look ready for their final push, everything of any value will be burned. And then each man in Masada will end the life of his wife and children. Better it be done with a loving hand, if that is all the love that is left. Better that than the alternative. All know well what comes to pass when Rome takes female prisoners. There are but a few hundred women and girls and ten thousand Roman aggressors. Any loved ones who survived such plunder might be murdered anyway and would certainly be enslaved. Not as house servants, or even field slaves, but as military chattel, or sent to the quarries and the mines; condemned to death though still alive. Far better it be done by the loving hand of a husband and a father, if that is all the love that remains. And then ten men drawn by lot will kill all the other men. And one man drawn from them will finish the final nine. And this last will kill himself. The enemy will take possession of a worthless empty vessel. Three months and ten thousand troops and they will not find a beggar’s treasure or capture a single slave.
Was it ever worth it, for a piece of land, the Highlander wonders — not just Masada, but all of it — such unending bloodshed for this parcel of goats, boats and Jehovah?
You cannot blame those Jews who rose up because if you believe it to be true that God killed the first-born of every single family in Egypt, why would He suffer the Romans? To rebel might seem insane, but not if you trust scriptures that say Yahweh once killed a hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrians in their sleep for the sake of His people. Not if you believe that God sent giant hailstones down on the Amorites, and stopped the sun in the sky to give Joshua sufficient daylight to butcher the survivors. Not if you believe that God bewildered Sisera’s army, so that they slew one another, without the Israelites having to draw a sword. If you believe that this is God’s country and these are God’s children, then how could you believe that He could let them fall? If you believe that Gideon with just three hundred men slaughtered a hundred and twenty thousand Midianites, why would an entire nation fear a few legions? If you believe that Samson killed a thousand men, with just the jawbone of an ass. If you believe that God smote fifty thousand and seventy Bethshemites. If you believe that David massacred every male in Edom and all the people of Ammon and sixty-nine thousand Syrians. If you believe that Ahab killed a hundred thousand foes, because they mocked the God of Israel. If you believe that the Lord slew twenty-seven thousand men in Aphek by crushing them under the walls, and uncountable by the same act in Jericho, why would you think He would let Caesarea stand? If you believe that God struck dead a million Ethiopians in a single day, for daring to attack Judah, it hardly seems possible that He would not assist at all in fighting Rome.
Which is why Yosef has come to discover that he no longer does believe: he no longer credits that the scriptures can be true.
He is seemingly alone in this: most of the others here in Masada cling to their faith, like the last flotsam remnant of a smashed ship.
There is a group of twenty-four or so, who are followers of The Way. They keep themselves a little apart, but not so much. After all, they don’t differ greatly from the religion of the rest: they believe in a Messiah of the line of David — as most Jews do — only they believe he has already come and will soon return, having already risen from the tomb.
The Highlander could perhaps tell them something about that, if he had a mind to, because he was the one who pleaded with and bribed the prefect Pilate to be given Yeshua bar Abba’s body. It was Yosef Haramati who undertook to accord the corpse the rites that should have been its due. And one might say that if a fellow has made it his business to see that a man he esteemed is buried properly with respect and expense, as soon as the Sabbath is over, then that is just what that fellow would do. One might say that the Sabbath ends at nightfall. And while women may fear to leave the safety of Jerusalem’s walls in the dark, the servants of a wealthy highlander would have no such compunction. One might say that, of course, the tomb was empty by the sunrise of the next day: why wouldn’t it be empty? It wasn’t Yosef’s tomb after alclass="underline" it was a tomb that he had temporarily availed himself of. One might say that if a fellow had put it upon his honour that the proper duties would be accorded at the earliest opportunity, just as they should be, then for a fellow not to have fulfilled what he had undertaken would have been a queer gift. A fellow might say that was the simple truth of it.
But what is truth? Maybe something can be true even while it is not true. Or, rather, perhaps it can be real, as a lived experience, without being objectively true. Because are they not happier, those followers of The Way? Doesn’t their faith give them something that others lack? Doesn’t it fill a breach otherwise evident in the world and in the person? Is it really better to be wise and empty than to be foolish and filled with love?
But what does that all matter now anyway? Yeshua is dead, and those who awaited his return in Jerusalem must virtually all be dead too. Baptizer John is dead. James the Just is dead. The Judaean nation is in shattered fragments and the Temple utterly destroyed. The Way is certainly finished. What further truth could matter now?
Sixty-two Years after the Crucifixion
… if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is futile and your faith is empty. More than that, we would then be lying about God, because we have testified that God raised Christ from the dead, whom He did not raise, if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless …