The revolt lasted a little longer in the Dead Sea region. The castle of Herodion soon fell; Macherus surrendered, but the men were slain, the women and children sent to slavery. Masada held out till the year 73, when the garrison, seeing their case hopeless, killed their wives and children, and then themselves after setting fire to the castle. The Jews in other parts of the world suffered many disasters and made a few efforts at revolt under Zealots, but gradually all resistance was crushed out in blood, and the Jews having perished by the hundred thousand, ceased to be a nation. As Munk said, “Almost all Judea became a desert; the wolves and the hyenas entered the cities.”[a] [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE TOMB OF THE KINGS, JERUSALEM] From that day forward the Jews have no important history. The extremist party of the prophets and Zealots, which was likewise the nationalist party, no longer existed; it had been drowned in blood. As for the priests and rabbis, they had long since withdrawn from the conflict, but it is due to them that the Jews, having completely lost their national existence, have been able to subsist to this day as a religious body. “Renouncing the hope of playing a political rôle,” says Munk, “the Jews directed all their efforts towards a moral aim, and devoted themselves wholly to consolidating their religious unity.” Convinced at last that their mission as a body politic was at an end, and that the sanctuary at Jerusalem, with its priests and sacrifices, could no longer be the symbol about which the scattered remnants of the Jewish nation were to gather, they laid down their arms, and sought by peaceful ways and intellectual methods to strengthen themselves as a religious body. For a while Palestine still remained the chief seat of religious study, the rabbis settling in several cities of Galilee, notably Sephoris and Tiberias. From the school of Tiberias, founded about the year 180, came forth the famous rabbi, Yehudah, surnamed the Holy, who collected the incomplete codes and traditional laws of the schools of the Pharisees, and, in the first quarter of the third century, fashioned them into an immense system of laws known under the name of the _Mishnah_, or Second Law. This code is divided into six parts, entitled _Sedarim_, orders. Each of the six is subdivided into several treatises, each treatise into chapters. This code was annotated, discussed, and amplified, first by the Palestinian and then by the Babylonian school, and each school afterwards made a collection of these annotations and discussions. The name of _Gemara_, Complement, was given to these collections, which were much more voluminous than the _Mishnah_ that serves for their text. The _Mishnah_ and the _Gemara_ together form the _Talmud_, the Teaching.