Masada is an isolated rhomboid mesa rising thirteen hundred feet above the western shore of the Dead Sea, with sheer cliffs on every side and a single serpentine path — the Snake Path — climbing the eastern face. Herod the Great fortified the summit between 37 and 31 BC as a refuge against both Cleopatra of Egypt and his own Judean subjects, building a casemate wall around the entire summit, two palaces, vast cisterns hewn into the rock, storerooms, and a bathhouse. Yigael Yadin led the Hebrew University expedition there from 1963 to 1965, with thousands of volunteers from twenty-eight countries — the most ambitious volunteer dig of its era. The site's enduring significance is the final episode of the First Jewish Revolt. After the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, a Sicarii faction under Eleazar ben Ya'ir held Masada for three more years against the Tenth Legion under Lucius Flavius Silva. Josephus's account at Jewish War 7.252–406 — written within a generation of the events — describes the Roman siege ramp on the western side, the breach of the casemate wall on the night of 15 Nisan AD 73, and the collective suicide of 960 defenders rather than capture. Yadin's expedition recovered the siege ramp essentially as Josephus described it, the burned casemate rooms, the synagogue (one of the earliest known anywhere), the storerooms, and eleven ostraca inscribed with single names — including one reading "ben Ya'ir" — that Yadin tentatively identified with the lottery Josephus describes for the order of the suicides. The reading is plausible but not certain. Among the synagogue finds was a Hebrew scroll fragment containing portions of Ezekiel 35–38 — buried beneath the synagogue floor in a small genizah, and one of the oldest known biblical manuscript witnesses to Ezekiel. Masada is a UNESCO World Heritage Site; the Yadin finds are at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Sources: Yigael Yadin, Masada: Herod's Fortress and the Zealots' Last Stand (Random House, 1966); Ehud Netzer, Masada III: The Yigael Yadin Excavations 1963–1965, Final Reports — The Buildings (Israel Exploration Society, 1991); Josephus, Jewish War 7.252–406; Jodi Magness, Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth (Princeton, 2019).
Masada anchors First Jewish Revolt archaeology by providing physical corroboration for Josephus's Jewish War account of the AD 73 siege, including the Roman ramp, burned casemate rooms, and an early synagogue containing a Hebrew Ezekiel scroll among the oldest manuscript witnesses to that biblical book.