Doves were caged and kept for a number of reasons. One of those reasons was so they would be ready and available for sacrifice. Another was so they could carry messages for their captors. Those who kept doves knew to send only one of a pair as a messenger so that the bird would return. Even though it was untethered and free to escape while on its mission, the dove would return to its cage, where its mate waited in the dovecote.
The dovekeepers understood the heart of the dove. “Love made you give yourself away, it bound you to this world, and to another’s fate.” They knew that love was their fate, their blessing, and ultimately their undoing.

“The Dovekeepers,” Alice Hoffman’s latest novel, is set in ancient Israel and is based on the historian Josephus’ account of Masada, where over nine hundred Jews tried to withstand the invading Roman Legion. After three years, when all hope was lost, they committed mass suicide. Those at Masada died in a state of freedom rather than be captured by the Romans to die a tortuous death or be taken into slavery.
But, according to Josephus, two women and five children hid themselves in underground caverns and survived to tell the story.

Hoffman recreates a fictional account of the events leading up to the final zealous act, told through four distinct voices, the women who kept the doves at Masada. Even though in their culture they were little more than possessions, these four managed to hold onto their individuality by weaving new patterns, fitting feathers to arrows, baking bread for the enemy, and passing on healing knowledge.

The story is not only about Masada; it is about relationships between women and men, mothers and daughters, sisters and sisters, sisters and brothers, captives and captors. The story is about beliefs, and how individuals and groups respond to persecution. Hoffman brings together a world of seeming opposites, focusing on their intersections, or crosspoints: men and women; Judaism and worship of the Ancient Goddess; desert and water; death and life; the cage and freedom. But the main crosspoint comes back to the dove—where wing meets sky, that is the crosspoint of sacredness, the state of freedom.

Why did a handful of Jews at Masada choose life and captivity over the freedom of death? Josephus indicates that they wished to share their message, their account of the siege, with the world. But Hoffman takes the message one step further and in the voice of one of the dovekeepers, says, “We were no different from the doves above us. We could not speak or cry, but when there was no choice we discovered we could fly. If you want a reason, take this: We yearned for our portion of the sky.”