This is definitely a book with more questions than answers.

Many people know the traditional tale of Masada: When the Jews rebelled against Rome in 66 C.E., they took many fortresses in the area of Judea and held out there even after Jerusalem and its Temple had been destroyed. Masada, on a high butte that could only be reached by very difficult trails, heavily fortified by Herod the Great, and surrounded by harsh terrain, was the most defensible of them all, and was the very last to be besieged by the Romans. In the end, the Romans built a ramp that would let the legions reach the high plateau, and the garrison committed suicide rather than be taken prisoner.

The problem is that, although the Jewish Revolt was real, and Masada was real, and the Roman siege was clearly real (their ramp can still be seen), our only account of the siege of Masada is from Josephus, and he wasn't there. Nor was he always reliable. And so archaeologists, including the famous scholar/soldier Yigael Yadin, have studied the ruins of Masada... and often interpreted it in terms of their own view of history.

This book, by an archaeologist who was also a tour guide in the area, tries to clear up some of that confusion. But I'm not sure it succeeds. For two reasons.

First, it suffers from its own case of Yadin-ism. This manifests itself in several ways. The one that grated the most, for me, was Magness's history of the Maccabean Kingdom -- the story of the priestly family that rebelled against the Seleucid Empire in the 160s B.C.E., and eventually founded the last independent Jewish state until the founding of modern Israel after World War II, but which quickly fell from its lofty purpose and became aggressive, overly-politicized, bully-kings; the Romans took over the Maccabean Kingdom just about a century after the beginning of the Maccabean Revolt. Our sources for the Maccabean Era are very poor -- for the beginning of the revolt, the books of I and II Maccabees (the former tendentious and the latter just plain unreliable), and after that, nothing but Josephus plus a few scraps from Philo and rabbis and the like. Magness often lands on some particular interpretation, some of which I think are right but none of which are as certain as Magness's presentation. Similarly Magness's comments on the Essenes and their relationship to Qumran. It's a complicated issue that is made too simple.

Second, I just don't understand what Magness is giving us that is new. We are told to beware of Yadin-ism, but aren't really presented with a coherent alternative. I can just hear you saying that first I complained about her being too certain and then complaining about not being certain enough. That's fair, but the situations aren't parallel. If Magness wants to tell us that Josephus and Yadin are wrong, or may be wrong, then we need to know what else might have happened. And I don't think that alternative is offered. Some reasons are offered to think that the mass suicide didn't happen, and justifications for why Josephus made it up (though I found those to be utterly inadequate) . There are also reasons to question the reliability of Yadin's excavations, simply because his techniques were rather out of date. But those are just isolated questions.

I did learn a lot of things from this book that I hadn't known. But they're mere isolated facts. I feel as if, to really understand this book, you need to already know all about the Maccabees, and Herod the Great, and Qumran and its inhabitants, and Roman history, and Josephus -- and if you already know all that, then you hardly need this book. I'm truly not sure who this book was intended for. ( )