Story

The Bar Kokhba Letters

c. 134 CE

Biblical Narrative

For eighteen centuries Shimon bar Kosiba — Bar Kokhba, Son of the Star — was a name in a story. Rabbi Akiva's exclamation, ״דָּא הוּא מַלְכָּא מְשִׁיחָא״, ״this is the King Messiah,״ rang in the Jerusalem Talmud (Taanit 4:8) without an answering voice from the man himself. The rabbinic tradition turned ambivalent: he became Bar Koziba, son of a lie, the false messiah whose hubris had cost a generation of sages. Of his own words, his own hand, his own military orders, the centuries had nothing.

Then in March 1960 Yigael Yadin — soldier, archaeologist, son of the polymath E. L. Sukenik who had purchased the first Dead Sea Scrolls — descended into a remote cave in the cliffs above Nahal Hever, in the Judean Desert. The cave was reachable only by ropes lowered from the cliff-top; below it the wadi dropped two hundred meters. In a niche of that cave, sealed in skins, lay a bundle of fifteen letters in three languages — Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek — written from the field headquarters of Bar Kokhba to his commanders during the last months of the revolt.

The voice that emerged was not the voice of the legend. ״שִׁמְעוֹן בַּר כּוֹסְבָא הַנָּשִׂיא עַל יִשְׂרָאֵל לִיהוֹנָתָן וּלְמַסְבְּלָא שָׁלוֹם,״ — ״Shimon bar Kosba, the Nasi over Israel, to Yehonathan and to Masabala, peace.״ Then the demands. Send the wheat. Send the salt. Send the men. Confiscate the property of those who refuse to come up to the camp. ״אֲנִי אֶעֱנֹשׁ אֶתְכֶם,״ — ״I will punish you.״ The Galileans are not exempt. Bring up palm branches and citrons for the festival, that the soldiers may keep the four species.

Beside the letters lay other things. A woman's bronze mirror, polished to a high shine. A bundle of marriage contracts and deeds belonging to one Babatha, daughter of Shimon, of the Roman province of Arabia, who had fled with her papers and her boy. And, in a deeper chamber of the cave, the bones of forty refugees — men, women, children — who had hidden there from the legions of Tineius Rufus until the Romans, unable to descend, simply camped on the cliff above and waited. Outside the cave's mouth Yadin found Roman bath complexes, built so the soldiers above could wait in comfort. Below, the families starved.

Shimon bar Kosba, the Nasi over Israel, to Yehonathan and to Masabala, peace. I take heaven to witness against me, that unless you mobilize the Galileans... I shall put fetters on your feet.Mur 43 / 5/6Hev — letter of Bar Kokhba, c. 134 CE

Archaeology · History · Genetics

The 1960–1961 expeditions to the Judean Desert were a four-team operation organized by the Israel Exploration Society and divided among Yigael Yadin, Nahman Avigad, Yohanan Aharoni, and Pesach Bar-Adon. Each team was assigned a sector of the cliffs above the Dead Sea wadis. Yadin drew the section above Nahal Hever, where Bedouin shepherds had been pulling antiquities for years. The Cave of Letters (5/6Hev) and the Cave of Horror (8Hev) yielded the most spectacular finds.

The Bar Kokhba letter cache itself comprises fifteen documents (some fragmentary), of which eight are in Aramaic, six in Hebrew, and one in Greek. They were addressed primarily to Yehonathan ben Be'ayan and Masabala ben Shimon, commanders at Ein Gedi on the western shore of the Dead Sea. The letters are concerned almost entirely with logistics: requisition of food, dispatch of fugitives, harvest control, and ritual supplies (the etrogim and lulavim of P.Yadin 57). They reveal a tightly administered insurgent state, not a chaotic uprising.

Alongside the military correspondence, the cave contained the personal archive of Babatha bat Shimon (P.Yadin 1–35), thirty-five legal documents in Greek, Aramaic, and Nabataean, dating from 94 to 132 CE. They include her marriage contracts, deeds for date orchards in Maoza on the southern Dead Sea, court cases over guardianship of her son, and tax receipts. The Babatha archive is one of the richest documentary windows ever opened on the daily life of a Jewish provincial woman in the Roman East.

The skeletons of the forty refugees, recovered with their woven sandals, baskets, glass vessels, household keys, and a hoard of bronze cult objects (apparently looted from a Roman shrine and brought down for the metal), tell a story the letters do not. The Roman investiture of the cave is documented archaeologically by the camps Yadin found on the plateau above. The defenders did not fall in battle; they simply ran out of water. The cave was sealed by the survivors, or by the Romans afterward, and stayed sealed until 1960.

When I had finished reading the letter, my hands trembled. I held in them the original despatches of a man who, eighteen hundred years before, had ruled here as a king.Yigael Yadin, Bar-Kokhba (1971)