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The Samaritans at Shechem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2011

G. Ernest Wright
G. Ernest Wright
Affiliation:
Harvard Divinity School
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Extract

An expedition under the writer's archaeological direction and sponsored by Drew University, McCormick Theological Seminary and the American Schools of Oriental Research completed its fourth season of excavation at Tell Balâtah, the ancient Shechem, in 1962. The site lies at the eastern opening between Mts. Ebal and Gerizim, forty-one miles north of Jerusalem. The earlier Sellin expedition had reported two strata of Hellenistic settlement at the site, though the date and extent of the occupation were not clarified. The Drew-McCormick Expedition has been particularly concerned with the Hellenistic occupation for two reasons: (1) The opportunity to clarify an obscure age in the cultural history of Palestine and especially to develop a ceramic typology, with chronologically fixed points, so that a more precise means of dating may be available for the archaeology of the period; (2) the problem of the historical meaning of the Hellenistic ruins at Shechem.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , October 1962 , pp. 357 - 366
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1962

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References

1 For the preliminary reports of the first three campaigns in 1956, 1957, and i960, see Bulletin Nos. 144, 148, 161; B.A. XX.i and 4; XXIII.4; Archaeology, Vol. XIV (1961), pp. 171–179. The expedition has been assisted by the Bollingen Foundation, the Nicol Museum of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Harvard Semitic Museum, and other institutional and private sources.Google Scholar

2 See Sellin, E., Anzeiger der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wiss. in Wien, Phil. hist. Klasse, Vol. 51, No. VII (Mar. 4, 1914), pp. 35–40Google Scholar ; No. XVIII (July 8, 1914), pp. 204-207. ZDPV, Vol. 49 (1926), pp. 229-236, 304–327Google Scholar ; Vol. 50 (1927), pp. 205-211, 265-274.

3 See his Palestinian Ceramic Chronology 200 B.C.-70 A.D., New Haven, ASOR, 1961; and the present writer in BASOR 161 (Feb. 1961), pp. 40–48.Google Scholar Nancy L. Lapp is preparing a companion work to that of her husband for the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C., based especially on the material at Shechem recovered in 1960.

4 The spring of Balâfah village is so copious and excellent that we must presume that some type of settlement has always existed by it since Neolithic times at least, no matter what the fortunes of the tell to the north of it.

5 Antiquities XII, 257 ff.

6 Ibid. XIII, 372-383; War I, 90-98.

7 For detailed discussion of the coin and stratigraphical evidence for this conclusion, see BASOR 161, pp. 44-46.

8 That the final and definite split between the Samaritans and the Jerusalem Jews occurred at the end of the 2nd century B.C. is further suggested by Frank M. Cross, Jr.'s demonstration that the Samaritan script began its independent history at this time: see his “The Development of the Jewish Scripts,” The Bible and the Ancient Near East. Essays in Honor of W. F. Albright (Garden City, 1961; ed. by Wright, G. E.), pp. 133 ffGoogle Scholar.

9 A great body of literature has arisen around this problem, and it is not the purpose of this brief discussion to present a lengthy review of the scholarly debate. Suffice it to say, that the main problem with which the literature has been concerned is whether or not there were two Jadduas and two Sanballats, and the consequences of affirmation or denial of this central question. In addition to the literature cited in the review article of H. H. Rowley (see n. 22), see among others Tcherikover, V., Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (Philadelphia, 1959), pp. 42ft.Google Scholar The necessity of explaining the archaeological data from the Shechem tell seems to us to lead to the necessity of a new review of the problem, a solution to which otherwise appears to have reached an impasse.

10 Josephus, , Loeb ed., Vol. VI, p.532.Google Scholar

11 Marcus, ibid., Appendix C.

12 Antiquities IX, 291.

13 IV.v.9.

14 The date would have to have been during the winter or spring of 331.

15 Op. cit., VIII.10; tr. J. C. Rolfe, Loeb ed.

16 Chronicon, , Armenian text, II, 223Google Scholar, ed. Aucher (= II, 114, ed. Schoene). The references are those of Marcus, as are those in notes 17 and 18.

17 P. 496, ed. Bonn.

18 Op. cit., II, 229, ed. Aucher ( = II, 118, ed. Schoene).

19 Op. cit., pp. 524-525.

20 J. W. Crowfoot in Samaria I. The Buildings (1942), pp. 24 and 27.Google Scholar

21 Note also the reference in Sirach 50:25-26 to two nations with which the author is vexed and to a third which “is no nation … the foolish people that dwell in Shechem” (R.S.V.).

22 In 1955 H. H. Rowley published a survey of the story of Josephus regarding the building of the Samaritan temple, with full bibliography, and concludes that it is entirely untrustworthy: “Sanballat and the Samaritan Temple,” BJRL, Vol. 38, pp. 166-198. Heretofore, most treatments of the question have centered in Josephus' confusion of late 5th and late 4th century events. Rowley surveys three main solutions which have emerged: (1) that of Torrey who combined both events and dated Nehemiah in the 4th century; (2) that of a large number of scholars who see a kernel of truth in the tradition about the building of the temple, but deny the trustworthiness of its accompanying elements, including the relation of a Sanballat to it; and (3) those who transfer the temple's erection back to the 5th century. Rowley believes that each of the three views is very problematical. Yet as for Rowley's objection that there was no time to erect the temple in the approximately nine months between Alexander's permission to build it and Sanballat's death, in the Josephus account, one could note that such an observation can scarcely be used for or against the tradition's historicity. The temple, for example, might have been virtually complete before Alexander's appearance at Tyre, and Sanballat's visit to Alexander, and the present to him of 8,000 troops, was a drastic measure designed to secure official approval for a program already well under way with the blessing of the Persian court. Be that as it may, the treatment of Ralph Marcus, and the historical-archaeological observations added above, put the whole issue in a new light, so that it must be reconsidered, even though it must be granted that Josephus has confused events in two centuries. For our purposes here, however, the chief issue is to explain the sudden rebuilding of Shechem about the time when Josephus claims the Samaritan temple was erected. The tradition of Eusebius and Syncellus to the effect that Samaria was given to Macedonians would provide the simplest explanation for Shechem's reoccupation as Samaria's replacement on the part of the Samaritans during the last third of the 4th century.