The Samaritan sect of Judaism claims to have the oldest Torah scroll. They say that Mount Gerizim in the West Bank is the Holy Mountain and not the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. We shall discover why neither Jerusalem nor Gerizim are relevant.
We see here Yaakov ben Aharon, Samaritan High Priest (1896–1916), and the “Abisha Scroll” in 1905. The Samaritans claim that it is 3000 years old, but that claim is hard to verify.
“We are looking into the eyes of the chief representative of a religious sect, one of the oldest and certainly smallest in the world. They claim that they are the lineal descendants of the Israelites of old, from a remnant that was left when the tribes were carried into Syrian captivity. There is no doubt but that they are the representatives of the Samaritans of the time of Christ.”
Have you ever asked yourself, “Who are the Samaritans?”
Both the Samaritans and the Jews are Hebrews and Israelites. In Jesus’ time, the Samaritans numbered in the hundreds of thousands; today, only 777 Samaritans have survived. Protecting Babylonian exile and pre-captivity traditions is central to their culture.
They use a spindly, antique version of the Hebrew script. They sacrifice animals, something Jews gave up centuries ago. And because their holy mountain is Mount Gerizim, near the Palestinian town of Nablus, they don’t really care very much for the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
This unique religious view has proven useful politically. Samaritans can claim Israeli citizenship. They serve in the Israeli army. But their disinterest in Jerusalem means they shun aspects of Zionism. “We want East Jerusalem for Palestine and West Jerusalem for Israel,” says Hosni Cohen, a Samaritan priest.
Let’s go to the beginning of all stories, when the words came into existence that make up our story.
We’re going to find the origin of words for Hebrews, Israelites, Jews, and Samaritans. Because when a concept is named for the first time, it comes into being.
The first Hebrews, 1350 BCE
The Amarna letters first mention the term “Habiru” (also “Apiru”), meaning “outsiders,” around the year 1350 BCE, meaning the nomads, rebels, outlaws, raiders, mercenaries, bowmen, servants, slaves, and laborers in the region of Canaan.
The term “Habiru” is connected to “Hebrew.” Semitic languages are typically abjads, meaning they often omit certain vowels in their written forms. Therefore, we can represent this as: Hab(i)ru, Heb(i)rew, or simply Heb()rew.
Egyptian, New Kingdom, Amarna Period
The Amarna letters are an archive written on clay tablets of diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian administration of pharaoh Akhenaten and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru in the middle 14th century BC. They are written in cuneiform and Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the time.
If we look at where the “habiru” were active in 1350 BCE, you’ll find that their activity is contained within the borders of the modern Israeli and Palestinian territories, 300 years before the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel.
The first Israelites, 1208 BCE
The word “Israel” first appeared in Egyptian hieroglyphics on the Merneptah stele, dated 1208 BCE.
This date is also generally agreed to be the time of the return of the Jews from Egypt. Israel is spelled “i.si.ri.ar” or “Ysrỉꜣr” on the Merneptah stele, which celebrates various victories of Pharaoh Mernephta’s army in Canaan.
Since the Egyptians had only ever been worried about rebellious cities before, the Israelites must have been a new problem for them. They might have been attacking Egypt’s trade routes in Canaan.
Some people think that the Israelites did not live in cities at this time, and we do not know anything about the actual social structure of the group of people who are called Israel here.
But most experts agree that Merneptah’s Israel must have been in the hill country in the middle of Canaan.
“Plundered is the Canaan with every evil;…
Israel is laid waste—its seed is no more;…
All lands together are pacified.
Everyone who was restless has been bound.”
The Old Testament reference to “Israel”
The authorship of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, is attributed to Moses, who lived around 1391 to 1271 BCE, according to rabbinical sources.
Is there any archaeological evidence for the existence of Moses, or “Moshe,” as he is known in Hebrew?
And do we have any idea under what pharaoh the Hebrews slaved in their exile?
Well, in 1911 the German collector Wilhelm Pelizaeus bought in Cairo the “Mose Stele“. It dates to the year 1250 BCE and comes from near the Egyptian city of Pi-Rameses. The stone relief depicts pharaoh Rameses II giving lavish gifts to someone called Mose.
Some have said that the Egyptians did not know the name “Mose” (or Moses) except as an adjunct, like in “Amenose” or “Thutmose”, because “Mose” by itself means “child”. And no Egypian would ever name his child “child”. That is not true: the Mose stele explicitly describes the pharao Ramses the Great giving gifts to a person named “Mose”.
In Hebrew, the names “Mose” and “Moshe” are spelled the same way. The Egyptian character of his name was recognized as such by ancient Jewish writers like Philo and Josephus.
Some believe that the Exodus pharaoh was Ramesses II, also known as Rameses the Great. This idea is even featured in the 1956 Hollywood movie “The Ten Commandments.” But how did the screenwriters come up with that idea?
There’s a cue right in the Exodus tale written by Moses himself:
Exodus 1, verse 11, says that the Israelites built the garrison cities of “Pithom and Raamses”— the Egyptians called them Pi-Rameses. And there is archaeological proof that Rameses the Great actually built the cities of Pi-Rameses.
So, when we go back to look at the Mose stele, that many sceptics say has nothing to do with Moses or the Exodus, we find that the Mose stele was actually found just two kilometers from the ancient remains of Pi-Rameses. That is not a coincidence.
Jacob wrestles with a divine agent, Genesis 32:24
Moses places the birth of the name “Israel” 500 years before the Mernephta stele, to 1709 BCE. There is no contradiction here with the Egyptian source. From the establishment of a tribe until the tribe becomes powerful enough to be mentioned in Egyptian war records, that can take a while.
In the Pentateuch, Genesis 32, verse 24, Jacob wrestles with an unidentified man all night long before crossing a tributary of the Jordan River. Jacob is 100 years old at that point.
In the 1200s, Rabbi Rashi (Rachi), from Troyes in France, said that the Hebrew name Jacob means “a lurker and a trickster.” That meant “Jacob” was not a name to be very proud of.
After the struggle, the other man tells Jacob, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”
And the name Israel in Hebrew means “God perseveres,” or “a man who wrestles with God.” In modern times, Israel is understood to mean “a man seeing God”: from ʾyš (man) rʾh (to see) ʾel (God).
Some commentators say it was God himself that Jacob wrestled with, or an angel, or even Jesus himself. But, truth be told, we don’t know who it was.
The newly named “Israel,” a.k.a. Jacob, then went on to purchase a plot of land at Sheshem (Nablus), near Mt. Gerizim in Samaria. This is the location of Jacob’s well. Israel’s/Jacob’s family then lived there for a while.
Genesis 34
One day Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, went to visit some of the Canaanite women in her neighborhood. The prince of Sheshem saw her and took Dinah’s virginity.
By the norms of the Middle East at the time she was disgraced. Dinah’s brothers were furious .They suggested a bargain with the prince: in exchange for the honorable marriage of his daughter, the prince should circumcise every man in his tribe. In essence, Simeon and Levi invited the non-believers to join the faith of Israel. Thus, the prince of Sheshem and the whole city were circumcised.
But Jacob’s sons, Simeon and Levi, had not been truthful; they could not stand the idea of gentiles marrying Israeli girls.
So after three days, they went and killed all the men of the tribe and plundered the city of Sheshem, taking all their women, children, valuables, and livestock from the fields as their own.
Jacob was upset. On his deathbed, he spoke of their cruelty and prophesied that the families of Simeon and Levi would be broken up, which happened (Genesis 49:5-7).
Nowadays, some scholars argue that the people of Shechem were prototypes for the Samaritans, a people nominally identified with Israel before the Babylonian exile but excluded from allying with the Jews upon their return to Zion (circa 5th century BCE).
Egyptian Reference
In the Egyptian language of the time, the word “Israel” in hieroglyphics symbolized a “foreign people, typically nomadic groups or peoples, without a fixed city-state home.” That description is, of course, right on target for the year 1208 BCE. King Solomon would not start the Kingdom of Israel for another 150 years.
The Kingdom of Israel, approx. 1047-922 BCE
When King Solomon, the founder of the kingdom, died between 926 and 922 BCE, ten rebellious northern tribes refused to follow his son and heir, Rehoboam, because he made them work too hard. All of the tribes, except Judah and Benjamin, rejected Rehoboam as king.
From this point on, there would be two kingdoms of Hebrews: Israel under King Jeroboam in the north and Judah in the south. The Israelites formed their capital in the city of Samaria, and the Judaeans kept their capital in Jerusalem. These kingdoms remained separate states for over two hundred years, until they were both conquered, one after the other.
The first Jews, 722 BCE
The word “Jew” first appears after the conquest of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah by the Assyrians in 722 B.C.E. Since only the Kingdom of Judah survived, yehudi יֽהוּדִי came to denote ‘Jew’, resp. ‘Jewish’, a follower of Yahweh.
The Assyrians scattered the leaders of the tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel in small groups throughout the Middle East. They became what is known as “the ten lost tribes of Israel.”
But it was not long before the Kingdom of Judah suffered a similar fate.
In 597 BCE, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon laid siege to and conquered Jerusalem, destroying Solomon’s temple and exiling the Jews to Babylon for 70 years.
In 539 BCE, the founder of the Persian empire, Cyrus the Great, gave the Judeans permission to return to their homeland.
The Jews returned home to Israel with a vastly different Torah than the one they had left with.
The Israelite Samaritans were surprised; they still only knew the first 5 books of the Torah, namely the Pentateuch of Moses. But the new Judean Masoretic Torah written in the Babylonian exile now consisted of an additional 34 books, none of which are known to the Samaritan liturgy to this day.
On the other hand, the Jews of the southern kingdom believed that the Samaritan Israelites, having remained in the North, were a small group of unfaithfuls, intermarrying with the non-Jewish invaders. They frowned on the Samaritans, denying that any non-Hebrew had any right to be included among the chosen people.
This echoes the sentiment of the story of Jacob (Gen 34:14-25), where Simeon and Levi could not accept the born gentiles, even after their circumcision.
The newly settled Assyrians that came to Samaria, the Samaritan territory, initially brought with them their own gods, but within a short time they worshiped Yahweh as well as their own gods, and then within a couple of centuries, they worshiped Yahweh exclusively.
The dispute over the Holy Mountain
A central part of the disagreement between Israelites, as the Samaritans call themselves, and the Judeans, who call themselves Jews, is the location of their Holy Mountain.
The “Holy Mountain” is where Abraham was told to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, by God, only to be told at the last minute that it was just a test. The Jews believe that the mountain is the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where both Solomon’s and the Second Temple were built.
The name of the Holy Mountain is “Moriah” or “Moriyya” in Hebrew, “Marwah” in Arabic, “Amoria” in Greek, and last but not least, “Moreh,” according to the Samaritans.
As mentioned before, semitic languages are abjads; they often don’t include all the vowels, which doesn’t really help in identifying place names accurately.
The Samaritan Bible calls the place of Abraham’s sacrifice “Moreh.” This is the geographic region around Sheshem, on Mount Gerizim.
The Old Testament Bible that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are using calls the place “Moriah,” which is the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Where is it?
In essence, the conflict between Jews and Samaritans, or between Judeans and Israelites, is that they disagree on the location where God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son and, later, where to build a temple and exclusively worship Yahweh.
Left: the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, ca. 2610 years ago,
Right: Mount Gerizim near Nablus,
today.
Thus was formed the only major schism in the Yahweh religion: the schism between the Jews and the Samaritans.
What does the Jewish Masoretic Old Testament say about Mt. Gerizim?
Between the 7th and 10th centuries AD, a group of scribes known as “The Masters of Tradition” (the Masoretes) in the Middle East compiled the Masoretic Torah.
According to the Masoretic version, it says in Deuteronomy 27 to build an altar on Mount Ebal, the Mount of Offense, or cursing:
“So when you have crossed over the Jordan, you shall set up these stones, about which I am commanding you today, on Mount Ebal, and you shall cover them with plaster.”
This text and translation are inherited by nearly all Abrahamic religions (Jews, Christians, and Muslims) in the world. The lone exception are the Samaritans (their text in 27:4 reads “Mount Gerizim”).
This passage is problematic. Why? The Mount of Blessing is Mount Gerizim; there Israel gathers to bless. But the Masoretic text of Deuteronomy 27:4 records a very perplexing commandment: to build the altar on Mount Ebal, the Mountain of Cursing.
What do the Dead Sea Scrolls say about the location of the altar, in circa 30 BCE
The scrolls that were found in Qumran are over 2000 years old, 1000 years older than the oldest surviving Masoretic Torah scroll.
Now, you would expect that the Masoretic Torah would be a good match with the texts of the Dead Sea scrolls, right?
But this is not so.
The Dead Sea scrolls match the Samaritan texts more closely than the Masoretic text, leading some researchers to believe the Samaritan text held validity in the minds of Jews during the Second Temple period and that both texts were once studied together.
The scroll is written in black ink on brown leather, measuring about 40 millimeters wide and containing four lines of text. Only this fragment remains from a complete leather-bound copy of Deuteronomy. This copy of Deuteronomy was most likely inscribed around 50-20 BCE.
In the second line of this fragment, the scribe wrote bhrgrzim, which means “on Mount Gerizim.”
Except for Samaritan manuscripts, all Hebrew manuscripts of Deuteronomy contain “on Mount Ebal” in that verse.
The translation of this scroll reads: (Dead Sea Scroll & Samaritan Deuteronomy 27:4)
“When you have crossed the Jordan, you shall set up
these stones, about which I charge you today, on Mount Gerizim, and coat them
with plaster.”
