SOME FAMOUS SKELETONS FROM MASADA are being given a new interpretation:

Researchers claim to have solved mystery of Masada remains (The Scotsman)
MATTI FRIEDMAN IN MASADA

AN ISRAELI anthropologist is using modern forensic techniques and an obscure biblical passage to challenge the accepted wisdom about human remains found at Masada, the desert fortress famous as the scene of a mass suicide nearly 2,000 years ago.

A new research paper re-examines the remains of three people found in a bathhouse at the site - two male skeletons and a woman's full head of hair, including two braids.
Advert for Barclaycard

They were long thought to have belonged to a family of Zealots - the fanatic Jewish rebels said to have killed themselves rather than fall into Roman slavery in the spring of 73AD, a story that became part of Israel's national mythology.

The bodies found at Masada were recognised as Jewish heroes by Israel in 1969 and given a state burial.

But now it seems Israel might have mistakenly bestowed the honour on three Romans, according to the paper, published yesterday in the journal Near Eastern Archaeology by anthropologist Dr Joe Zias and forensics expert Azriel Gorski.

[...]

Actually the occupiers of Masada were Sicarii, not Zealots.

The core argument is given as follows:

The new paper focuses on the hair, noting the absence of a skeleton to go with it. Forensic analysis showed the hair had been cut off the woman's head with a sharp instrument while she was still alive.

Dr Zias' attempt to explain the discrepancy led him to the Old Testament's Book of Deuteronomy, where a passage says that foreign women captured in battle by Jews must cut off all their hair, apparently in an attempt to make them less attractive to their captors.

He thus concluded that the hair belonged not to a Jewish woman but to a captured foreign woman.

In his scenario, the woman was attached to the Roman garrison stationed at Masada at the time the Zealots took over the fortress and killed the Roman soldiers. Jewish fighters threw two Roman bodies into the bathhouse, and then treated the woman captive according to Jewish law, cutting off her hair, which they threw in along with the bodies.

Typically, the article does not give the biblical reference. The passage in question seems to be Deuterononmy 21:10-14:

10: "When you go forth to war against your enemies, and the LORD your God gives them into your hands, and you take them captive,
11: and see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you have desire for her and would take her for yourself as wife,
12: then you shall bring her home to your house, and she shall shave her head and pare her nails.
13: And she shall put off her captive's garb, and shall remain in your house and bewail her father and her mother a full month; after that you may go in to her, and be her husband, and she shall be your wife.
14: Then, if you have no delight in her, you shall let her go where she will; but you shall not sell her for money, you shall not treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her.

If this passage applies to the Masada scenario, it would imply that one of the Sicarii occupiers had taken the captured gentile woman as a wife. It doesn't seem likely to me that an eligible woman would have been found in a remote Roman garrison, but I suppose it isn't entirely impossible. One question is whether she had to be an unmarried virgin. The passage seems to imply this, since she only bewails her mother and father, not her (dead?) husband or her children. Still, the earlier passage in Deuteronomy 20:10-15 which deals with holy war commands the preservation of all women as "booty," which may imply that any captured woman could be taken as a wife or concubine:

10: "When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it.
11: And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you.
12: But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it;
13: and when the LORD your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword,
14: but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you.
15: Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here.

I would not have expected that whole families would be living in the garrison at Masada with women potentially eligible if captured, but I don't know much about the social organization of Roman garrisons in the provinces.

Incidentally, I read the hair and nail cutting in Deuteronomy 21 to be a rite of passage to mark the woman's changed status, not any effort to make her less attractive.

Anyhow, an interesting theory to go with an odd piece of evidence from Masada. I'll try to get a chance to look up the article, which doubtless presents the arguments much more clearly and in greater detail.

UPDATE: It's actually an AP article and the Washington Post has a more complete version. Note in particular the following:

Ehud Netzer, a veteran Hebrew University archaeologist who participated in the 1960s dig and later oversaw restoration work there, questioned the new findings.

Zias is "building a story on assumptions built on assumptions," he said.

"I think that with the existing information, you can't make such theories, and I think that those people should be allowed to rest in peace," Netzer said.

UPDATE (26 June): Joe Zias kindly sent me a copy of the article and it does clarify one of my questions above, about women at provincial Roman garrisons in this period:

As to the inevitable question of a woman garrisoned atop Masada prior to its capture by the Zealots, a cache of documents found preserved in a Roman period fort in northern Britain reveal that higher-level Roman officers and soldiers often brought women with them during military campaigns (Bowman 1994: 51–65). Therefore the shorn woman may have been married or at least related to one of the two males killed and thrown into the Northern Palace bathhouse. Her braided hair however suggests that she was married, since a woman in the Greco-Roman world changed her hairstyle after marriage to symbolize her unavailability to any man but her husband (Cosgrove 2005).

Bowman 1994 is the following:

Bowman, A. K.
1994 Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier: Vindolanda and It’s
People. London: British Museum Press.

The slightly later garrison at Vindolanda did, of course, include whole families.

UPDATE (27 June): Josh Waxman comments at Parshablog.