The Masada Synagogue

Herod ringed the summit with a casemate wall: two parallel skins of masonry with chambers between them, so that the fortification and the accommodation are the same building. The synagogue occupies a stretch of that wall in the northwestern sector of the plateau, which is why it reads from outside as part of the defences rather than as a separate structure. Encyclopaedia Judaica's Masada entry, written by the archaeologist Guy D. Stiebel, places it there and describes what the revolt-period builders did to it: they turned the plan into a large hall with two rows of columns in the centre and a back service room, and built a series of four peripheral tiers of plastered benches along the walls.

Tiered benches around the walls are the feature that carries the argument. They face inwards, on all sides, which describes a room built for people to listen to something read in the middle of it rather than a room built to be walked through. The parks authority's own account of the plateau says only that tiered stone benches were built against the walls, and leaves the inference to the reader.

The published descriptions record benches, columns and a back room, and very little else: no mosaic floor, no carved Torah shrine, no dedicatory inscription set into the stone. That absence is itself part of the interest. The decorated synagogue with a mosaic zodiac is a later thing, a building type that emerges after 70 CE, and nothing here anticipates it.

There is a ritual immersion pool close by. Stiebel's entry lists the mikveh near the synagogue among the several on the mountain, and notes that Masada was the first site anywhere at which stepped plastered pools of this kind were recognised as mikva'ot, an identification that afterwards became a standard marker of Jewish settlement. Britannica states flatly that the synagogue and ritual bath found on Masada are the earliest yet found in Palestine.

• Set into the northwestern sector of the casemate wall, not freestanding
• A hall with two rows of columns down the centre and a back service room
• Four tiers of plastered benches along the walls, built during the revolt
• Two pits cut into the floor of the back room, read as a genizah
• A ritual immersion pool nearby, among several on the plateau

The parks authority's page on the plateau says the structure served in Herod's time as a stable and was converted into a synagogue by the rebels. The Israeli foreign ministry's description of Masada, reproduced by the Jewish Virtual Library, says the synagogue was part of the Herodian construction, incorporated into the northwestern section of the casemate wall and oriented towards Jerusalem, and that it also served the Jews who lived at Masada during the revolt. Those are two different buildings in the same place: one a stable that became a prayer hall in the 60s CE, the other a prayer hall from the start that the rebels remodelled.

Stiebel's encyclopaedia entry hedges in a way that shows where the evidence runs out. The building was seemingly used as a stable in the first half of the first century CE; during the revolt its plan was transformed; the building was identified by Yadin as a synagogue. The identification was supported afterwards, he writes, by parallels from Herodium and more decidedly from Gamla, and by the discovery of the scroll fragments under the back room floor and an ostracon inscribed ma'aser kohen, priest's tithe, in the main hall.

The wider question is not settled either. Buildings claimed as synagogues from before the destruction of the Temple form a short and contested list: Gamla, Masada, Herodium, Migdal, Modi'in, Qiryat Sefer and a handful of others, and scholars accept some and argue about the rest. Masada appears on that list with the qualification attached. Against that, Britannica's entry states without qualification that the synagogue and ritual bath at Masada are the earliest yet found in Palestine.

What nobody disputes is what the room was doing in the year the mountain fell. People sat on those benches, a scroll of Deuteronomy and a scroll of Ezekiel were buried under the floor of the back room, and a potsherd naming a priest's tithe was dropped in the hall. The disagreement is about the previous seventy years, not about the last one.

Two pits were dug into the floor of the small room at the back. Portions of biblical parchment came out of them, and the parks authority calls the pits apparently the synagogue's genizah. A genizah is not a hiding place: worn or damaged sacred writing may not simply be thrown away, so it is stored and eventually buried. If that reading is right, the pits are not a wartime measure at all but ordinary practice, carried out in a fortress under siege.

The two texts are known. Stiebel's entry names them as parts of Ezekiel and Deuteronomy. The foreign ministry's account is more specific about the second: Ezekiel 37, the vision of the valley of the dry bones, the passage in which a plain of scattered bones is knitted back into a living army. The parks authority's own ceremonies page repeats that identification when describing the room to families planning a bar mitzvah there.

An ostracon inscribed ma'aser kohen, tithe for the priest, was found in the main hall. It is a two-word potsherd and it carries a fair amount: tithes imply agricultural produce being separated according to law, and a priest implies someone on the rock entitled to receive them.

The scroll finds do not stop at the door. Immediately south of the synagogue, in what excavators named the casemate of the scrolls, parchment and papyrus fragments from the period of the revolt were recovered. The Israel Antiquities Authority records that the Masada manuscripts were found not in caves but within the structures of the reconfigured palace, near the section identified as a synagogue, and that they amount to fragments of seven biblical scrolls: Genesis, two copies of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Ezekiel and two copies of Psalms, plus the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice and a Hebrew text of Ben Sira. The biblical fragments match the traditional Masoretic text, which the authority reads as evidence that a stabilised text was already in place in the first century CE.

• Two pits in the back room floor, read as a genizah
• Parts of Deuteronomy and of Ezekiel, including the valley of the dry bones
• An ostracon in the hall inscribed ma'aser kohen, priest's tithe
• The casemate of the scrolls immediately south, with parchment and papyrus from the revolt
• Seven biblical scrolls from Masada in all, matching the Masoretic text

Masada is one of the rare sites where the answer to "what is original here" is drawn on the wall. The UNESCO evaluation of the property, reproduced alongside the foreign ministry's description, records that there have been no additions or reconstruction beyond an acceptable level of anastylosis, that inappropriate materials used in early conservation are being replaced, and that limited restoration has been carried out to aid interpretation with the original archaeological levels clearly defined by a prominent black line set in the new mortar joints. On the benches and the walls of the synagogue, everything below that line came out of the ground; everything above it was put back.

The reason so much survived to be marked is the emptiness. After the Byzantine monastic settlement broke up in the sixth century the mountain was left alone for more than thirteen centuries, and the buildings collapsed onto themselves and were buried by their own debris. Yadin's expedition excavated nearly the whole plateau over two seasons from 1963, and the current management plan commits to no further research excavation on the main site in the present generation.

This room also sits close to the violence. Stiebel records that the section of the western casemate wall directly above the Roman ramp is entirely missing, in all likelihood breached by the battering ram, and that ballista balls, arrowheads and slingshots were found in the immediate area of the breach. The parks authority's own description of the synagogue as a ceremony venue notes that archaeologists found hundreds of ballista balls on its floor. The room where the scrolls were buried and the wall the Tenth Legion knocked down are a short walk apart.

The practical consequence is that this is a plan to be read rather than an interior to be stood inside. The columns are stumps, the benches are partly rebuilt, and the roof is long gone.

The parks authority runs a programme called Mosaic that lets families hold a bar mitzvah, a bat mitzvah or a chuppah at heritage sites it manages, and it lists 22 of them, from Bar'am and Gamla in the north to Tel Arad and Tel Be'er Sheva in the south. Masada is one, and the authority's page for it names the ancient synagogue first among the ceremony settings on the mountain, followed by a room in the casemate wall and other locations chosen after a preparatory visit.

One line in the programme's own list of questions singles the place out. Asked whether a Torah scroll will be available, the authority answers that a Torah scroll is currently available only at Masada National Park. Everywhere else in the scheme, families bring their own.

The practical rules are published and they are worth reading before booking anything. A preliminary tour of the site is compulsory. During regular opening hours the park is not closed to other visitors while a ceremony is under way, so a family holding one on the summit is holding it in public; ceremonies before opening or after closing can be arranged with the site management at extra cost. Catering generally cannot be brought in, though light refreshments can be agreed. Tables, chairs and a water heater can be hired. The fees for a ceremony are additional to the entrance fee. Reservations at Masada go through the site's own reservations manager, Heli Markovitz, on 08-9959333 or masadaevents@npa.org.il, with a downloadable form to fill in and return.

For an ordinary visitor with a park ticket, the effect is that the synagogue is the one ruin on the plateau where the thing being described may be happening in front of you.

• One of 22 heritage sites in the parks authority's Mosaic ceremonies programme
• The ancient synagogue is listed first among the ceremony settings at Masada
• The only site in the scheme where the authority provides a Torah scroll
• A preliminary tour is compulsory before a ceremony is confirmed
• The park stays open to other visitors during ceremonies held in opening hours