Samaritans

DNA and other evidence suggests the early history of the Hebrew Old Testament concerns two entirely separate people united by monotheism and military conquest. The first, taking the name of Israelites from Israel (Jacob), the grandson of the Patriarch Jacob, had a brief stay in the Egyptian Eastern Delta before falling out of favour and eventually fleeing to West Arabia in the chaos of Bronze Age collapse ca.1200 BC. There they were overwhelmed in a lengthy campaign by a black Nubian Cushitic-speaking people called the Hebrew, recently converted to the cult of YHWH. The two peoples intermarried but the Nubian priesthood dominated thereafter and eventually reinvented itself as part of the Semitic Abrahamic tradition. Cut off through Babylonian exile from its gene pool in West Arabia, the Nubian high priesthood identified the present-day area of Israel and Palestine as the Promised Land of Moses and portrayed themselves as a special Middle East people who had escaped slavery in the Delta, not as a black Nubian enslaved gold mining force that had fled to Yemen during a time of ecological disaster characterised by severe earthquake and volcanic activity.

The study of the Samaritan version of Saadya Gaon’s translation of the Pentateuch (the tafsīr), mainly based on MS London BL OR7562, shows that a Saadyan version in Arabic Characters was adopted by the Samaritans and adapted to the Samaritan Hebrew Pentateuch. The transmission of this version in MS London BL OR7562 continued after the early Samaritan Arabic translation of the Pentateuch and perhaps also its later revision had already been created, since many of their translations were preserved in MS BL OR7562, mixed with its Saadyan basic text. As MS London BL OR7562 also contains numerous words and phrases paralleled only in Christian Arabic translations of the Pentateuch and Saadyan adaptations, mainly related to the Peshitta tradition, it is reasonable to assume that these were the sources of this Samaritan Saadyan version and possibly also of the other Samaritan Arabic translations. The Samaritan version of Saadya’s translation of the Pentateuch also reveals some parallels to tenth- and eleventh-century Karaite translations and it contains prominent Aramaic and Islamic vocabulary, unfamiliar in other versions of Saadya’s tafsīr.

2 Kgs 17:24–41 uses the phrase yere YHWH  in two distinct
ways and that the tension between the two different meanings of this phrase is an essential part of the narrative. This phrase can refer to cultic worship and also to exclusive loyalty to God. Phrases similar to the former meaning are extensively used in Akkadian, and the latter meaning seems unique to the Hebrew Bible. This passage contrasts these meanings to highlight the idea that the new settlers in Samaria were disloyal to YHWH despite their ritual worship of Him.

The common belief among the general public, the military and many governments is that UFOs/UAPs are interstellar vehicles arriving here from other star systems. Is there evidence, however, that some mysterious objects appearing in our skies harbor sentient plasma-based intelligences? Can UFOs/UAPs connect with human consciousness through processes related to quantum entanglement? It is possible that some UFOs/UAPs act as gateways or portals to higher dimensional realms co-existing with our own? A form of string theory called M-theory predicts the existence of a multidimensional realm known as the bulk, which might well be the key to understanding the true origin of these higher dimensional intelligences. Lastly, did contact with transdimensional intelligences begin at places like Israel's Qesem Cave where shamanism began as much as 400,000 years ago? Answers to these questions and more are provided by Andrew Collins drawing on his findings discussed in the book Origins of the Gods: Qesem Cave, Skinwalkers and Contact with Transdimensional Intelligences (2022), co-authored with Gregory L. Little.

The Gerizim composition found in the Samaritan text of the Ten
commandments in Exod 20 and Deut 5, according to medieval manuscripts, presents a deliberate scribal attempt to stress some main points of Pentateuchal hermeneutics, completely in line with the hermeneutics and the literary techniques attested in the pre-Samaritan textual layer. Nothing in the Gerizim composition itself, or in its insertion at these points of the Pentateuch narrative, is specifically “Samaritan.” Rather, the authors of this insertion seem to have been part of the scribal culture shared by followers of both the Jerusalem and Gerizim sanctuary.

This study proposes a new approach to an ongoing scholarly discussion. How can the relationship among the encounters at wells narrated in the Pentateuch (Genesis 24 and 29, Exodus 2) and the New Testament (John 4) be defined? Does the Gospel episode assume the reader’s familiarity with these Torah texts? If so, what sort of interpretation of them is presupposed, and what significance does this have for the exegesis of the Gospel pericope?
What comes to light is a complex interrelation which does not fall neatly into a single category. There are numerous literary parallels, but in the Johannine rereading these have come to be thematically refocused, and intertwined with words and actions of Jesus. The resultant dynamic invites readers to interpret John 4:1–42 in light of three passages from the Pentateuch, and vice versa.

The use of inscribed amulets by Samaritans is documented from the Byzantine period up to the present time. Taking into account the amulets which have come to light since the publication of the catalogue of early amulets in Revue Biblique in 1987, the paper addresses the questions: Are the objects under discussion of a magical or a religious nature? How do we differentiate between magic and reli-gion? Or should we even differentiate between them? What does the Torah say about the production and use of amulets and magical practices in general? Who wore the amulets-Samaritans only or also Jews and Christians? RÉSUMÉ L'usage par les samaritains d'amulettes avec inscription est documenté depuis la période byzantine jusqu'à nos jours. En tenant compte des amulettes dont on a pris connaissance depuis la publication du catalogue des premières amulettes dans la Revue Biblique en 1987, cet article pose les questions suivantes : est-ce que les objets traités relèvent de la religion ou de la magie ? Comment saisir la différence entre religion et magie ? Ou devrait-on même faire cette distinction ? Qu'est-ce que la Torah affirme en général sur la production et l'usage des amu-lettes et des pratiques magiques ? Qui portaient les amulettes ? Les samaritains uniquement, ou également les juifs et les chrétiens ?

Jewish Circumcision during Hellenistic Period, analysis of 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees, the Sephora's enigma has been solved and I discovered that the Priest opposed to the Master of Justice in the Qumran commentary on Habaquq is indeed a Cohen Gadol of Jerusalem but I don't know precisely which one. This document is my m.a. thesis which has not been presented yet and I hope to present it in the next days.

From antiquity to the present, Samaritans and Jews have lived as close neighbors in the Land of Israel and in nearby diaspora communities. It is difficult to imagine Judaism without Samaritanism, or Samaritanism without Judaism—the two are intertwined in profound ways. This very closeness, however, has often been the source of intense friction, as reflected in various historical sources. The present contribution deals with the Samaritan view on the Samaritan-Jewish split, which differs radically from the Jewish
perspective.

This is the new introduction (uncorrected proofs) to The Prophet-King by Wayne A. Meeks, first published as NovTSup 14 (Brill, 1967), now in paperback as The Johannine Monograph Series, Vol. 5 (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2017--series editors Paul N. Anderson and R. Alan Culpepper) xi-xxx.

For Wellhausen, the exile marked a decisive turning point in the construction of Israelite collective identity: Israel went into exile as a people and returned as a religious sect. This assessment led to the definition of post-exilic Israel as a religious community, based on a shared faith, adherence to the law etc., which is still quite commonplace in OT exegesis. This paper looks at the criteria that different Persian period texts provide to determine who belongs to Israel. It argues that the question of the Israelite-ness of the populace in the area of the former Northern Kingdom triggered a dispute. But while there was no consensus regarding the status of the Samarians, the same underlying criterion for defining an Israelite was used either to include or exclude the Samarians – the social construction of a common descent which finds its expression in the system of the twelve tribes of Israel.

At John 4:42, the Samaritans oddly recognize Jesus as “savior of the world”, a pagan phrase. But this can be understood as their switching away from Simon Magus, a Samaritan who was later deemed to be the “forerunner of all the heresies”. The statement is transformed into “salvation is from the Jews” in Jesus’ speech, when he addresses the Samaritan woman, who is poorly connected to her sixth “husband” Simon.

“The Discovery of Samaritan Religion” was the title of an article published in 1972 by one of the leading scholars of Samaritanism in the twentieth century, John Macdonald of the University of Glasgow. At first glance, it may appear that the author wants to say that there was a time when the Samaritan religion had disappeared from the scholarly horizon. But what he actually means was that the “discovery of the true nature of Samaritan religion is a very modern happening”1. Knowledge about the Samaritans among Jews and Christians was never lost, neither in the Middle East nor in Europe, where the New Testament story of the Good Samaritan is particularly well known. What changed over the course of centuries, and particularly in recent decades, is the understanding of Samaritan beliefs on the basis of their own traditions, as found in their writings and oral traditions. Both early Christian and rabbinic sources had preconceived notions of the Samaritans’ beliefs and practices. Influenced by the biblical passage 2 Kings 17:24–42, many tended to see the Samaritans as a Jewish sect that strayed from the true path of the Yahwistic religion of Israel and practiced a syncretistic form of faith. But even if the Samaritans were no longer accused of syncretism, they were still considered a sect of Judaism.2 However, this view was eventually abandoned because scholarship gained a more nuanced understanding due to having better access to the Samaritans’ own literature, to new archaeological discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the excavations of Samaritan synagogues, and, above all, of the temenos of what once was the Samaritan sanctuary on Mt. Gerizim.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the Tannaitic attitude towards the Samaritans (Kutim) through the analysis of a number of references where the Kutim are associated, analogically or contrastively, either to Israel or to the gentiles. Focusing the attention more on the plane of discourse than on that of factual history, I shall use the case of the Kutim to discuss the process of (textual) definition of the notion of Israel as it emerges from Tannaitic (thematic) texts. The assumption is that studying how the Rabbis categorized the Kutim, is a (tangential and not at all conclusive) way of studying the process of identity definition of the social entity the Rabbis intended to create.

Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah express a different approach to the future of Israel to that given in the Former Prophets. First, the nature and the dating of this part of the Hebrew Bible are discussed, suggesting the end of the 5th and the very beginning of the 4th century B.C. as the time of its origins. Then the retrospection of the past in the two Books of Chronicles is presented, with its very specific attitude towards the Exile. The article focuses its attention on the detailed analysis of Ezra 4,1-5, that represents the very core of this book. Having in mind the identity of the delegation coming to Jerusalem as seen by the author of Ezra and the completely different self-presentation of the delegates from the north, the serious conflict that ensues is described, this bearing analogies with the former antagonisms and tensions between the Kingdom of Judah and the Kingdom of Israel. On the basis of this conflict a new reality emerges, namely Judaism. The religion of the pre-exilic Israel was deeply transformed, limiting itself only to those Judeans who came back from the Exile. As a result of this separation, the question of the “true Israel” started to be more crucial, giving new direction to the project of the national and religious identity of biblical Israel.

This book is the third volume dedicated to the excavations at Mount Gerizim, which began in the early 1980s and lasted for 25 years. The book describes thousands of coins that have been discovered in the excavations at Mount Gerizim, from the Persian period in the fifth century BCE and until the end of the Byzantine period, the seventh century CE.

According to ancient Jewish and Christian sources, Samaritans in ancient times didn't believe in an Afterlife. Kitab al-Ma'ad by Abu al-Hasan al-Suri (11th century) represents the moment in which Samaritans started believing in an Afterlife, through the influence of Muslim Theology. Published in: Al-Lugha al 'Ibriyya wa-Thaqafatuha 4:2 (July 2018), 13-18.
,يوم القيامة عند السامريين: كتاب المعاد لابي الحسن الصوري
اللغة العبرية وثقافتها 4:2 (تموز 2018), 13-18

The evolution of biblical texts has been described mainly from the perspective of textual composition and transmission in writing. In It seems obvious, however, that the formation of ancient hebrew texts was heavily influenced by oral performance and oral traditions, not only in the early stages, but throughout the whole literary process until the emergence of texts regarded as authoritative and fixed, from the late 2nd century BCE onwards.
One aspect of this interplay of oral and literary textual representation and transmission is that the orally realized reading of written records
in different contexts, as well as the subsequent emergence of oral reading traditions, influenced and shaped the written transmission of biblical texts and became a most influential factor in their multiplication and dissimilation, leading to diverging written consonantal frameworks. The paper demonstrates that the emergence of both the Samaritan and the Jewish text of the Pentateuch should at least partly be understood as resulting from divergent reading traditions, which had been orally transmitted in different contexts and by different communities.

The site was found during an archaeological survey in April 1980 by the mount Menashe Survey Group. It was excavated between 1982 and 1989 by a delegation led by Prof. Adam Zertal. The ritual site at Mount Ebal was excavated for eight seasons. The similarity between the ritual site at Mount Ebal and the biblical description of the altar mentioned in the book of Deuteronomy and Joshua is undisputed. Among the archaeologists there is a fierce debate about the source of the site, it´s interpretation, the ethnicity of the people who founded it, and its purpose and function.

In the Second Temple period, from the fifth to the fourth centuries CE until 70 CE, the form of the Assyrian script (also known as a square script, Jewish, Aramaic) became the most common form of writing among Jews of Judea, and also among residents of Samaria (alongside with the Greek script of course). Paleo-Hebrew script, which was the most common correspondent in the area during the First Temple period, became relatively rare during the Second Temple period, and after the Bar Kokhba revolt, it was no longer used at all.
Surprisingly, the Paleo-Hebrew script was rejuvenated from the third and fourth centuries CE. A new variant of the Paleo-Hebrew script, often called the Samaritan script, became part of the cultural and religious symbols identified with the Samaritan community.
Some scholars have already claimed that the Samaritan script was not always a Samaritan symbol, but only beginning in the Late Roman or Byzantine period, well before that, in the Roman and Hellenistic periods, we find no evidence that the Samaritans used a different script than the Jews
Many studies have shown that in times of the emergence of ethnic groups and ethnic identity, groups use past memory and ancient cultural elements, to achieve the group's present goals.
In this article I will try to show how the Samaritan community in the Late Roman and Byzantine periods used Paleo-Hebrew script and other cultural symbols (such as ritual purity and art) as a historical symbol that links the present group members to their History and their ancestors. To my suggestion, with the help of the archaic cultural symbols, the Samaritans claimed that they, and not any other religion, are the exclusive and true heirs of the sons of Israel.
To this day, research on the religious conflict between the monotheistic religions in the Land of Israel in late antiquity has focused mainly on the Jewish-Christian debate. However, the innovation of this paper is that the interfaith struggle was also composed of a third factor - the Samaritans

The audio document contains the Samaritan recitation of Exod 12, read by the Samaritan High priest during the Passover sacrifice. During the very last words of this passage "wšā:ṭu ūtu" ("and they/you shall slaughter it") the slaughtering is carried out.
The text is in Samaritan Hebrew, which is a Hebrew dialect used by the Samaritans for reading the Torah and prayers. It is, therefore, generally confined to liturgical contexts. Samaritan Hebrew has been described by Zeev Ben-Hayyim in his “A Grammar of Samaritan Hebrew Based on the Recitation of the Law in Comparison with the Tiberian and Other Jewish Traditions” (English edition, with the assistance of Abraham Tal; Winona Lake, IN, 2000).

Identification, reconstruction, and presentation of the "Treatise on the Qibla" by the 11th century Samaritan polymath Abū l-Ḥasan al-Ṣūrī along with its Qaraite refutation.
To be published in the proceedings of the 8th Congress of the Société d’Études Samaritaines (Erfurt, 15–20 July 2012) entitled Samaritan Languages, Texts, and Traditions (Studia Samaritana 8), ed. S. Schorch (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 1-32.
Further papers on the texts presented in this article as well as a full edition and annotated translation are in preparation. In these follow-up articles I will also present important new discoveries made after 2015, incl. additional manuscripts of the Qaraite refutation and the Samaritan abridgement.

1-2 Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah express a different approach to the future of Israel to that provided in the Earlier Prophets. Firstly, the nature and the dating of this part of the Hebrew Bible are discussed, suggesting the end of the fifth and the very beginning of the fourth century B.C. as the time of its origins. Secondly, the retrospect of the past in 1-2 Chronicles is presented with a very specific attitude towards the Exile. The article focuses on the detailed analysis of Ezra 4:1-5, a passage representing the very core of this book. Against the backdrop of the identity of the deputation visiting Jerusalem as seen by the author of Ezra and the completely different self-presentation of the envoys from the north, the serious conflict that ensues is described. It bears analogies with the former antagonisms and tensions between the kingdom of Judah and the kingdom of Israel. On the basis of this conflict, a new reality emerges, namely Judaism. The religion of the preexilic Israel was profoundly transformed, having been exclusively limited to those Judeans who had come back from the Exile. As a result of this separation, the question of the "true Israel" became more crucial, setting new direction for the project of the national and religious identity of biblical Israel.

This chapter presents the faunal remains from a small deposit at Tel Barukh, and discusses the possible scenarios leading to the formation of this unique feature and the possible ritual significance of its deposition. Eight rock-cut burial caves and a single rock-cut pit, most probably associated with Samaritan rural populations, were excavated in Tel Barukh. Their main period of use is dated to the 4th–5th centuries, with a possible
smaller-scale activity in the 6th century. To date, no study of animal remains from a similar burial context associated with the Samaritan population is available. In this study, the context of the finds testifies to their ritualistic significance and the inquiry focuses on the processes that led to their deposition in the pit—whether it represents the leftovers of funerary meals or a deliberate ritualistic deposition. The possible scenarios suggested here are based on species and body-part frequencies, in addition to the occurrence of modifying factors.