The Masada Discoveries
It was less than forty years ago that the first mikveh was found by an archaeologist, and it aroused a tremendous amount of emotion in Jewish quarters. In 1963 the top Israeli archaeologist, Yigael Yadin, commenced excavations on Herod’s fortress of Masada, on the west short of the Dead Sea. During these excavations he unearthed what appeared to be a mikveh. News of the find was communicated to the press, and great excitement was aroused among Orthodox Jews around the world.
Professor Yadin, has not only been one of the foremost Israeli archaeologists in the past four decades, but he has remarkable facility in describing for readers his interpretation of the events surrounding his discoveries. Two significant discoveries by his team, have confirmed some very early arguments concerning Christian baptism. He describes one as follows:
“Reaching Masada by this route each day we could see to our left, on the western slope, remains of the powerful project of Herod – the water system. What we saw were two rows of what looked like dark holes, one series above the other. These were openings to huge cisterns which had been scooped out of the rock, each with a capacity of up to 140,000 cubic feet and altogether totalling close to 1,400,000. How did Herod and his engineers think of filling these cisterns, when there was not then – nor is there today – any spring near Masada, and the rainfall is so rare and meagre? Their solution reflected sheer genius, and like so many ingenious solutions, the concept was simple but the execution very difficult. They based their plan on the existence of two small wadis which pass to the north and the south of Masada. They constructed dams in two places, and from these dams they laid open channels to the two sets of excavated cisterns, one from the southern wadi to the top row, and the second aqueduct from the northern wadi to the bottom row. It was their assumption that with the rains, the water would be held up by the dams and by gravity flow would stream along the aqueducts and fill up the cisterns one after the other.”
Another set of cisterns was excavated at the top of Masada and these were filled with the water from the lower cisterns which was brought up by the `electric’ power of those days – thousands of slaves and beasts of burden who carried up the water in jars along two paths, from west and east, which ended by joining the `snake path’. A simple plan. A plan of genius! Yet when one stands near Masada today in the broiling sun, the area all around bare and burnt, the wadis dry, and no source of water welling forth anywhere in the vicinity, the plan could never have worked.
Both during our first and second seasons, we were afflicted by particularly harsh winters. These were a blessed boon to the country, after several years of drought, but for us at Masada they were grim. Many times the southern wind reached gale force of over sixty miles an hour and tore our tents to shreds. Torrential rains which burst from the skies without warning filled the ravines in a flash. Even the wadi between our dining hall and the volunteers’ tents became a river, isolating the two sections of our camp. All the wadis west of Masada, including those crossing the Beersheba – Arad road, also overflowed their banks, and the new highway to Arad crumbled in several places, cutting us off from the rest of the country. There were days when the only way in which we could receive our basic supplies was by helicopter. There were days when we had to stop digging because the ground had turned to mud. All this was very trying. It must be remembered, too, that the tents were full of water and the clothes the volunteers had brought with them utterly soaked, with no prospect of drying them quickly. And there were two consolations: first, we witnessed a rare natural spectacle when the two wadis which had supplied the water to the Herodian channels serving the cisterns suddenly filled up and burst their banks.
The aqueducts themselves have long been destroyed; the southern one lies buried beneath the great earth ramp constructed by the Romans, and the northern channel was ruined in several places in the course of time. And so the water of the wadis streamed to waste, and instead of being harnessed by drainage ditches, leapt towards the Dead Sea in a series of breath-taking waterfalls. In the driving rain, we of the permanent staff and the volunteers would rush to see these falls and gaze in rapt wonder at such marvels of nature. Equally exciting was the visual evidence of how Herod’s water supply system worked. If the aqueducts had still been in good repair, all the cisterns excavated in the slope of the Masada rock would have filled up in only a few hours.
We were also able to confirm another item in the writings of Josephus which had seemed to many scholars to be legendary: Josephus says that before the reign of Herod, years before he fortified Masada, Herod’s brother Joseph plus members of his family found refuge at Masada. Holding out against the troops of the last of the Hasmoneans and his allies, the Parthians, they were about to die of thirst, when suddenly the heavens opened and all the pits that had been in Masada filled with water, and Joseph and his people were saved.
This report in Josephus had been hard to believe; for even if one could imagine the waters of the wadis piling up to fill the cisterns from the rains of Masada – or more particularly from the westward flowing rain-water of the Judean hills – it was difficult to conceive that direct rain over the Masada summit would be enough to fill its clefts. Yet I recall one of those days when we all had to rush for shelter from a sudden downpour. When it was over, I was astonished to behold that the lower-lying areas of the summit were but one huge pool of water. If I had not myself photographed this sight, I would not have believed that it had been taken at the top of Masada. So this story of Josephus had evidently also been based on reliable information.” “Masada” Yigael Yadin. pp 21-34. George Weidenfeld & Nicholson Ltd. 1966.
That water system which provided so much water that the Zealots who fought the Romans could boast that with their abundant food storages, they wanted for nothing, was the first discovery that supported another amazing archaeological find, that of the ritual bath or mikveh. Again let Yadin tell it:
“We were much surprised by what came to light as we uncovered one of the chambers in the southern section of the casemate wall. When we had cleared all the debris from this room, what we saw was a system of three adjacent pools – one large, one medium-sized and one small. Steps had been built in the two larger pools so that one could reach the bottom, and in the wall between them there was a connecting hole through which water could flow from one to the other. Moreover, there was an open, plastered, water conduit leading into the first – the largest – pool, and this conduit no doubt served to collect and channel rainwater from the roof of the room and its surroundings.”
This find immediately suggested to us that what we had discovered was a ritual immersion bath – Mikveh in Hebrew -and this we announced at our routine press conference. The news that we had brought to light a mikveh from the period of the Second Temple quickly spread throughout the country, arousing particular interest in orthodox religious quarters and Talmudic scholars; for the traditional Jewish laws of the Talmud relating to the ritual bath are quite complex, and no mikveh has so far been discovered belonging to this very period, the period when much of the relevant traditional law governing the mikveh was written.
This special interest in the mikveh led to one of my strangest meetings on the Masada summit, and it indicates, too, how wide was Masada’s appeal to our people, and how it spoke to each in his own language. We received information one day, during the excavations, that Rabbi David Muntzberg, specialist in the laws of the mikveh, and Rabbi Eliezer Alter, were anxious to visit Masada and see for themselves the mikveh we had discovered. I signalled that I would be pleased to receive them, and one hot day, during the hottest hour of the afternoon, the two Rabbis arrived on the summit. They had climbed the tough `snake path’ on the east face under the broiling sun, wearing their characteristic heavy garments, and accompanied by a group of their Hassidic followers. Though they are no longer young, neither agreed to rest when they finally reached the top; nor did they wish to see the handsome structures of King Herod. They wanted one thing only: to be led directly to the mikveh. The aged Rabbi Muntzberg immediately went into one of the pools, a tape-measure in his hand, to examine whether in fact the volume of this mikveh was the `forty measures’ required by the ritual law.
Spiritually, these people had been deeply stirred by what apparently was a very humble structure, though, admittedly, dramatically sited within a wall at the edge of a steep escarpment. This mikveh meant more to them than anything else on Masada. This mikveh was indeed a ritual bath `among the finest of the finest, seven times seven’.
How had this mikveh been built? According to Jewish religious law, such a bath, without which no orthodox Jew could live, particularly in those days, had to be filled for the most part with rain-water flowing into it directly, and not brought to it with buckets or the like. This of course was not possible in Palestine during most months of the year, when there is simply no rain, and the law therefore prescribes that it is sufficient if part of the water is `pure’; additional water, drawn and brought from elsewhere and not direct-flowing rain-water, becomes `purified’ on contact with the pure water. They therefore built two pools. In one – in ours at Masada the one nearest the entrance – water was gathered during the rainy season and stored; the second was the actual bath itself. Before using it, they would open the bung in the connecting pipe allowing some drops of the stored, direct rain-water to flow into the bathing pool and thus purify it.
The third pool in the Masada mikveh, the smallest, which was not connected to the other two pools, was for actual cleansing purposes (as distinct from ritual purification), for washing the hands and feet before immersion in the mikveh. That this was not the only mikveh on Masada, and that it had clearly been constructed according to standard ritual regulations, we found out just before the end of our excavation season when we unearthed an almost identical mikveh on the other side of the summit, in the north-eastern corner of the large administration building to the west of the storehouses. This building had also been in use both during the period of the Zealots and later at the time of the Roman garrison. We discovered the mikveh when we excavated its courtyard. Here, too, may be seen the carefully installed communicating pipe between the `pure’ water pool and the immersion pool. This device shed interesting light on a number of hitherto obscure passages in the Mishnah. It also illustrates, as do the inscriptions about tithes mentioned earlier, that the defenders of Masada were devout Jews, so that even here, on dry Masada, they had gone to the arduous lengths of building these ritual baths in scrupulous conformity with the injunctions of traditional Jewish law.” “Masada” Yigael Yadin. pp.164-167. George Weidenfeld & Nicholson Ltd. 1966.
Here, for the first time in the modern era, a ritual baptistery been discovered, complete with changing rooms similar to that of the Laver Room, and the complex water system which allowed fully the use of plentiful water even on top of such a high fortress. Obviously, Orthodox Jews regarded highly the importance of the Mikveh both in the first century AD and for today. For news of this discovery sent a wave of excitement through Orthodox Jews in many countries, causing a search in other archaeological sites for evidence of the presence of Mikva’ot. To the surprise of most, the next few years unearthed many such baptisteries, from the hills of Judea to the inner city Jewsish ghettos of Europe. Further archaeological light was yet to break forth on the mikveh, not far away at Qumran where the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls had ignited such interest.
