A desert fortress

This is my first post in quite a while, but that's because I've been particularly itinerant since Easter Week, and so I have various little adventures to update you on, dear reader. To start with, there was a trip to Masada and Qumran: this post is about the former place, and it'll be followed by a post about Qumran.

Herod the Great built many fortresses up and down the land, but probably his most impressive was the large fortress of Masada, on a mountaintop overlooking the Dead Sea. One of the oddities of that part of the world, however, is that the peak of this mountain is only about 30 metres above normal sea level, although it towers hundreds of metres above the plain.

Looking back down from the cable car

Masada is mainly remembered as the last holdout of the Jewish Zealot revolt against the Romans, which is usually considered as ending with the capture of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, although Masada was taken two or three years later. Given how it ended, with the remaining Zealots in Masada killing themselves when it became inevitable that the Romans would take the fortress, I was slightly surprised at first that it's the place where Israeli soldiers come to take their oath. I didn't like to think that they were upholding the tragic folly and eventual suicide of their forebears as a good example for their military. Apparently, however, the thinking is something like, "This is where a previous attempt at an independent Jewish state finally failed; we won't let it fail this time." Nonetheless, many Israelis do see the story as one "of courage, heroism, and martyrdom" (which is not a reading I would endorse).

In the centre of this photo you can see some of the ramp that the Romans built

to reach the walls of the fortress - a massive undertaking.

In the intervening centuries, the site has been largely unused. But in Byzantine times there was a church and a small community of monks living there. The story is told that they had a vegetable garden down near the Dead Sea (presumably in a place where there was a spring) and a donkey who would fetch vegetables from there. All they had to do was put the saddle-bags on the donkey and by itself it would walk down the steep, winding path to the plain, where the gardener would load the bags, and then it would faithfully go back up to the mountaintop to the monks. I hope it got a good share of the vegetables in return for its efforts.

Here follow some other photographs of the place.