On Wednesday, we booked a tour of Masada and the Dead Sea that left from Jerusalem at 8:30 a.m. As usual, we got a slightly late start, and we hit a horrendous traffic jam on the way there (Jerusalem is a little more than an hour from where we are staying with David's sister in Kfar Saba). Lots of frantic telephoning with the tour company resulted in our catching up with the group at the last of the string of hotels they use for pickup, and we were on our way, a little the worse for the stress.

The tour begins with a long drop from the heights of Jerusalem (at 2500 feet above sea level) to the Dead Sea (-1400 feet) in about 20 miles. After the obligatory commercial stop at a factory store for Ahava cosmetics (Dead Sea minerals will apparently reverse aging and make you dance around trailing scarves seductively), we dropped 3 women at a spa and headed to Masada, site of the last stand against the Romans during the first Jewish revolt.

Whereas the last time David was here, access to this mountaintop stronghold was only by foot up a long winding path known as the Snake Path:

it is now accessible to 1200 visitors an hour via a cablecar. This is the view from the cable car down to three of the Roman siege camps clearly visible to the left of the cablecar base station as quadrangles laid out in the standard Roman army grid.

The crush of visitors and the pace of our tour did not allow for lingering anywhere very long. It was also very hot (about 95 degrees). We did see the remains of Herod's palace. He had captured Masada and built his palace and numerous storage rooms, along with the amazing water storage system (see later), so he could escape if anyone revolted against him. His mother was Nabutean, so he wasn't acutally Jewish, but basically he was pathologically paranoid. He killed off several of his sons and at least one of his wives so they wouldn't try to seize power. Anyway, here are the remains of his multi-level palace.

 

We didn't go down to the palace, but the remains of an officer's quarters give a whiff of the sorts of decorations that might originally have been there. The reconstructed portion is helpfully delineated by the black line. Frescoes covered the walls and mosaics covered the floors.

The Dead Sea gets about 10 days of rainfall (amounting to less than 2 inches) a year, so water catchment was paramount. There was an extensive system of channels surrounding the hilltop leading to cisterns that caught and stored the water. Apparently, a constant stream of slaves with donkeys transferred the water from these cisterns to those within the walls. Here is a model of the system -- an attempt to photograph the water poured on by the guide was foiled by the almost instant evaporation in the heat.

 

And here is a remnant of the system that can be seen as you enter and leave the site from the cablecar.

This water system, along with the fully stocked store rooms thoughtfully provided by Herod (for his own use) allowed the rebels holed up in Masada to withstand the 2- or 3-month siege by the Romans. The Romans first constructed a circumvallation wall around the city, then a siege embankment that allowed them to get their huge siege engines up to the city's fortified walls. Two more Roman camps are visible as quadrangles on the valley floor, and the siege ramp is the smooth wall of earth with the path leading up to and along its length at the left of the photo.

Probably the single biggest reason for the enduring interest in Masada is the account by Flavius Josephus of the final denouement of the rebels. As his story goes, the 10 heads of the main families were persuaded to kill all their relatives, and then one of the 10 killed the others and then himself. When the Romans entered the city, they supposedly found 960 corpses, less a woman and child or two who hid and were saved. These pottery shards with names on them are displayed as evidence of this story.

There are a number of problems with this story. First, the mass-suicide-instead-of-capture theme was one of Josephus' favorite tropes and appears a number of times in his accounts, including his own capture at Jotapata several years earlier. Second, if everyone died, how do we know what was agreed upon? Third, if you can read the sign in this picture, these 10 "lots" were conveniently chosen from among hundreds found at the site. And lastly, only 28 skeletons were found at the site, not 960.

 

After descending the cablecar again and enjoying lunch in a food court at the cablecar station that included a MacDonalds (we ate our picnic lunch thoughtfully provided by David's sister Dina), we all packed back into the bus and went back to the resort where we had dropped the three women earlier. Here we changed to bathing suits and did all the usual Dead Sea things: floated on the water (about 45% salt, as compared to normal seawater, which is about 3.5%) and slathered ourselves with Dead Sea mud (which is supposed to cure all manner of ailments, but really is very good for psoriasis).