Masada Speeches

Two memorable speeches in defense of freedom.

At Masada in the year 74, over 900 rebels chose death before surrender, an extreme stand for freedom. Masada is a famous episode in Jewish history. It was long an icon of Israeli nationalism, although recently some Israelis have turned away from it and what its suicides symbolize.

The Romans attacked Masada four years after they destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 70, thereby wiping out the center of the Great Revolt of Jews against Rome (66-70). It was the last of several mopping-up operations. The historian Josephus attributes two speeches to the leader of the rebels at Masada, Eleazar son of Yair.

I discuss those speeches in this excerpt from my new book, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World's Mightiest Empire (Simon & Schuster, 2025):

Masada is a steep-sided plateau, crowned by two palaces and a set of fortifications, that rises dramatically in the wilderness. Masada lies in the desolate and forbidding landscape of the Judean Desert. To the west rise scarred and craggy hills. To the east, the Dead Sea. Beyond the Dead Sea rise the rugged mountains of Moab. The Dead Sea is the lowest place on the surface of the earth….

Masada was a station on an ancient version of an Underground Railroad. It was a place where Sicarii ["dagger men," among the most determined of Rome's Jewish opponents]and other freedom seekers might stop before continuing to Egypt, Libya, Arabia, the Parthian [Iranian] Empire, or Galilee….

For all his harsh criticism of Eleazar and the Sicarii, Josephus attributes two speeches to Eleazar that are moving encomiums of freedom. Indeed, they are among the classic statements on freedom written in ancient Greek. (Josephus wrote in Greek, but Eleazar would no doubt have spoken in Aramaic or possibly Hebrew.)

As we saw, when Eleazar realized that there was no longer any hope of resisting the Romans or of escaping them, he concluded that mass suicide was the honorable choice, and tried to persuade his followers of that. In the first speech he addressed what Josephus calls only the bravest of his comrades, all males. Josephus's Eleazar reminded them of the creed that inspired the founder of his sect generations earlier: to serve neither the Romans nor anyone else other than God, the only true and righteous Master of humanity. Eleazar stated his pride in being descended from the first Jews to rebel against Rome, and now being the last to bear arms against them (at least the last in Judea).

Josephus has Eleazar admit that he and his followers deserved to die for their crimes—something that Eleazar surely did not say, no matter how much Josephus wanted to believe it. Eleazar urged his men to slaughter their families and each other, and so to choose to die nobly rather than to live on in slavery or be killed by the Romans. He summed up his advice with this exhortation:

Let our wives die unravaged and our children innocent of slavery, and after them let us do each other a generous favor, preserving our freedom as a noble winding sheet.

But many of his followers were unconvinced, so Eleazar gave a second speech, in which he supposedly went on a rhetorical flight of fancy about the immortality of the soul. Once again, he foregrounded freedom. He stated that death is the ultimate liberator of the soul, sounding as much like a Greek philosopher as a believing Jew.

He maintained that there was no shame in being defeated by the Romans, especially since the Romans could not even take credit for the many defeats inflicted on the Jews in recent years by Egyptians in Alexandria, and by Greeks and Syrians in and around Judea. With Jerusalem in ruins, he argued, it seemed hard to continue living. He summed up his advice with an appeal to family and freedom:

Unenslaved by the enemy let us die, and as free men let us leave life together with our children and our wives.

[I]t is unlikely that Eleazar ever uttered the beautiful words that Josephus gave him, although some of those words might have been true to Eleazar's thinking.… [H]istorians in Greece and Rome considered it their responsibility to compose beautiful speeches based on what they believed the occasion called for. Accurate knowledge of what was said was optional. The two speeches by Eleazar, therefore, are probably largely Josephus's creations. And that makes them even more striking.

Josephus chose to give noble words to a man he despised. Furthermore, he graced Eleazar and his followers with what the ancients called "a beautiful death." When the Romans discovered the dead, as previously described, they were amazed at the nobility of the plan, their unhesitating behavior, and their contempt for death.