Victims of the Sicarii are said by Josephus to have included the High Priest Jonathan, and 700 Jewish women and children at Ein Gedi.
Victims of the Sicarii are said by Josephus to have included the High Priest Jonathan, and 700 Jewish women and children at Ein Gedi.
In one account, given in the Talmud, they destroyed the city's food supply, using starvation to force the people to fight against the Roman siege, instead of negotiating peace.
[6] Josephus also wrote that the Sicarii raided nearby Hebrew villages including Ein Gedi, where they massacred 700 Jewish women and children.
[6] In Josephus' The Jewish War (vii), after the fall of the Temple in AD 70, the sicarii became the dominant revolutionary Hebrew faction, scattered abroad.
Josephus particularly associates them with the mass suicide at Masada in AD 73 and to the subsequent refusal "to submit to the taxation census when Cyrenius was sent to Judea to make one," as part of their rebellion's religious and political scheme.
[23] The 2nd century compendium of Jewish oral law, the Mishnah (Makhshirin 1:6), mentions the word sikrin (Hebrew: סיקרין), perhaps related to Sicarii, and which is explained by the early rabbinic commentators as being related to the Greek: ληστής (= robbers), and to government personnel involved with implementing the laws of Sicaricon.
[24] Maimonides, in his Mishnah commentary (Makhshirin 1:6), explains the same word sikrin as meaning "people who harass and who are disposed to being violent.