Background
Eleazar was a member of a family of freedom fighters that had its origins well over a century earlier with Hezekiah the Galilean, who rallied around him Jews opposed to the Herodian family because of its subservience to Rome.
Eleazar was a member of a family of freedom fighters that had its origins well over a century earlier with Hezekiah the Galilean, who rallied around him Jews opposed to the Herodian family because of its subservience to Rome.
In the year 74 (or possibly 73), after a prolonged siege, the Masada bastion fell to the Romans, but the defenders were never captured alive; preferring mass suicide to torture and death at Roman hands. A total of 960 men, women and children, led by Eleazar ben Jair, died by their own hands, while making certain to leave their food stores intact to make it clear that it was not the fear of starvation that drove them to their last defiant act. Ten of the defenders were chosen by lot to do away with all the rest and ultimately themselves.
Quotations:
Conclusion of Eleazar ben Jair’s speech before the Masada mass suicide
Our hands are still at liberty and have a sword in them: let them be subservient to us in our glorious design: let us die before we become slaves under our enemies, and let us go out of the world, together with our children and our wives, in a state of freedom....Let us make haste and instead of affording the Romans so much pleasure as they hope for in getting us under their power, let us leave them an example which shall at once cause their astonishment at our death and their admiration of our resolution.
A remarkable find at Masada of shards with names on them, by the Hebrew University archeologist Yigael Yadin in the 1960s, and in particular a shard with the name “Ben Jair,” appear to be striking corroboration of the historical account found in Josephus.
Josephus relates that two women of the group who, together with five children, concealed themselves in the fortress’s subterranean aqueduct and later gave themselves up to the Roman legionnaires. The final act of suicide, according to the survivors, occurred after Eleazar had exhorted the defenders to kill themselves, stressing the importance to die nobly as free Jews. Josephus concludes: “The Romans encountering the mass of slain, instead of exulting as over enemies, admired the nobility of their resolve and the contempt of death they displayed in carrying out their act.”