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THE SAMARITANS 
 
THE SAMARITANS 
 
 THEIR TESTIMONY TO 
 THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL 
 
 Being the Alexander Robertson Lectures^ delivered 
 before the University of Glasgow in 1916 
 
 BY 
 
 Rev. J. E. H. THOMSON, D.D. 
 
 AUTHOR OF " BOOKS WHICH INFLUENCED THE LORD 
 AND HIS apostles" 
 
 f 
 
 OLIVER AND BOYD 
 
 EDINBURGH: TWEEDDALE COURT 
 LONDON: 33 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.G. 
 
 I 91 9 
 
 UWIVI- :r;| I 
 
TO MY FRIEND 
 
 Rev. JAMES ROBERTSON, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF ORIENTAL LANGUAGES 
 GLASGOW UNIVERSITY 
 
 TO WHOSE SUGGESTION AND ENCOURAGEMENT 
 
 MY STUDY-OF THIS AND COGNATE 
 
 SUBJECTS OWES SO MUCH. 
 
 «2 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The present volume contains the substance of a course of 
 lectures delivered in the spring of 1916, before the University 
 of Glasgow, on the Alexander Robertson Foundation. There 
 has been no attempt to retain the lecture form, as much 
 more was required for an adequate discussion of the subject 
 than could be compressed into the compass of six lectures. 
 Besides there were many sides of the questions at issue, 
 which did not lend themselves to treatment in the form of 
 an address. The writer would take the opportunity to thank 
 anew the Divinity Faculty for suggesting to the Senate of 
 Glasgow University his nomination to the above lecture- 
 ship, and the University Court for his appointment to it. 
 Under the conditions of the lectureship the present work 
 ought to have been published in the spring of the year 
 following ; but on economic and other grounds connected 
 with the War, the University kindly permitted delay in the 
 hope that matters would improve. So far, however, from 
 things improving by the signing of the armistice and the 
 practical ending of the War, they have become worse. As 
 the prospect of any improvement in the conditions of book- 
 publication appeared to be rather remote, and for the writer 
 time was passing, it seemed better to risk the disadvantage 
 of issuing a book on a Biblical subject, at a time like the 
 present, when the English-speaking public are obsessed by 
 the Great War and its consequences, than wait any longer. 
 
 At the best, even in normal circumstances, a book like 
 the present interests only a very limited public. Not many 
 even among Biblical students, know much about the 
 Samaritans or the relation in which their rites and cere- 
 monies stand to those of the Jews ; and of these, very few 
 manifest any wish to increase their knowledge. Conse- 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 quently it is with considerable diffidence that the writer 
 approaches the public with a treatise on this subject. A 
 little consideration shows that notwithstanding the neglect 
 under which it has suffered, it has an important bearing on 
 questions in regard to the criticism of the Old Testament. 
 The writer's excuse for intervening is that the present 
 work represents the results of independent study pursued 
 somewhat intermittently for nearly thirty years, and in 
 circumstances more favourable to acquiring information than 
 are possessed by many. A somewhat lengthened residence 
 in Palestine, repeated visits to Nablus, and presence at the 
 celebration of the Samaritan Passover, vitalised to the 
 writer ideas derived by him from other sources. Further, 
 personal inspection of a considerable number of Samaritan 
 MSS., including codices of the Torah, was kindly permitted 
 him by the authorities of the British Museum ; the Bodleian 
 Library, Oxford ; the University Library, and the Libraries 
 of Trinity College and Westminster College, Cambridge. 
 Through the kindness of the custodians of the Bibliotheque 
 Nationale, Paris, he was also enabled to examine the leading 
 codices possessed by them, including that brought to Europe 
 by Pietro della Valle in 1616. One thing which this last 
 privilege revealed to the writer was the very decided 
 difference which subsists between the form of Samaritan 
 characters in type, and those most common in manuscript. 
 The difference of the shape these letters assume in Walton's 
 Polyglot — derived from the Paris Polyglot — from the true 
 form is considerable ; out of sight worse, and further from 
 the original is that adopted in Germany from Gesenius 
 downward to Petermann's Grammar. In Nicholls' Grammar 
 the alphabetic forms are better as nearer Walton's. Con- 
 fusions of letters easily explicable by the MS. type of 
 character are utterly incomprehensible to one who only 
 knows the conventional form adopted at Gotha and Leipzig. 
 One unfortunate result of the independent way in which 
 he has carried on his study of this subject is that the writer 
 finds himself, in his conclusions, in opposition on the one 
 side to traditional orthodoxy, and on the other to the still 
 more uncompromising orthodoxy of the dominant critical 
 school. The supercilious contempt with which the latter 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 regard every opinion that has not been "made in Germany" is 
 scarcely creditable to British scholarship. Especially is this 
 so in regard to the present subject, as most of the recent 
 German writers on Samaritan subjects have been Jews, in 
 whom the passage of twenty centuries and more has not 
 dulled the edge of their animosity, nor lifted at all the veil 
 of their prejudices. 
 
 For assistance in correcting proof, the writer would 
 return thanks to the Rev. Dr James Robertson, Professor 
 emeritus of Oriental Languages, Glasgow University ; Rev. 
 Dr James Kennedy, Librarian, New College, Edinburgh ; 
 Dr John Hutchison, Rector emeritus, Glasgow High School ; 
 Rev. Dr Charles Jerdan, Greenock, Senior Clerk, U.F.C. 
 General Assembly. He has further to thank the Rev. 
 W. B. R. Wilson, Dollar, for compiling an index, and 
 E. Russell, Esq., for general suggestions. The writer would 
 also acknowledge the kindness of Professor W. B. Stevenson 
 in bringing to his notice not a few facts and authorities, 
 which might otherwise have escaped him ; to Professor 
 A. R. S. Kennedy for assistance in books ; and to Dr Cowley, 
 Oxford, for kind answers to inquiries in regard to matters, 
 authoritative information on which was not open to the 
 writer. He would express his gratitude to Dr Rendel Harris 
 and to his friend the Rev. J. C. Nicol, M.A., Eccles, for 
 information as to the Samaritan codices in the Rylands 
 Library, Manchester. The kindness of the librarians of the 
 Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and of New College, 
 Edinburgh, must not be forgotten. Above all he would 
 tender his thanks to his wife for her assistance in preparing 
 the manuscript for the Press. 
 
 In regard to books, the writer would acknowledge his 
 indebtedness to Dr Montgomery's Samaritans, especially 
 to the copious list of literature appended ; to various articles 
 of Dr Cowley, and to Dr Mill's Modern Samaritans. 
 
 In transliterating" Hebrew words, Dr Davidson (Hebrew 
 Grammar) has been followed, with this exception that tz 
 is used for v tzade instead of ?. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 I. The Home and the People 
 
 II. The History of the Samaritans 
 
 III. MosAiSM IN Northern Israel . 
 
 IV. Prophetism in Northern Israel 
 V. The Ritual of Samaritan Worship 
 
 VI. Samaritan View of Sacred History 
 
 VII. The Theology of the Samaritans 
 
 VIII. The Evolution of the Samaritan Script 
 
 IX. The Language and Literature of the Samaritans 
 
 X. Comparison of the Samaritan Pentateuch with 
 
 THE MaSSORETIC ..... 
 
 XI. The Relation of the Samaritan Recension of 
 THE Pentateuch to the Septuagint 
 
 XII. The Bearing of the Foregoing Argument on 
 Pentateuchal Criticism .... 
 
 PAOE. 
 I 
 
 25 
 
 57 
 83 
 "5 
 «43 
 173 
 203 
 236 
 
 275 
 
 319 
 
 352 
 
 Appendices :— 
 
 Catalogue of Manuscripts (Codices), complete and fairly 
 
 complete, of the Samaritan Torah in Europe and America 387 
 
 Description of the Nablus Roll ..... 39^ 
 
 The Relation of the Minoan Alphabet to the Semitic . . 404 
 
 Naville's Theory of the Original Language of the Old 
 
 Testament ....■•• 4" 
 
 Index . 
 
 425 
 
THE SAMARITANS : THEIR TESTIMONY 
 TO THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE HOME AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 The testimony of any person or persons as to the social 
 habits of any nation, still more as to their religious 
 observances, will be valuable in so far as it can be shown 
 that by their prolonged residence in the country of that 
 people they are in a position to possess first-hand knowledge. 
 As, however, it is in regard to religion that men are most 
 reticent, even residence in a country would not be enough 
 to guarantee adequate knowledge. If proof were given of 
 participation in the same religious rites as those of the 
 people in question, that would be a warrant for further 
 confidence. In primitive days, religion was connected with 
 race; the religious observances even of one family differed 
 from those of another, and the ritual of each was carefully 
 concealed from all others. To prove that those on whose 
 testimony reliance is placed are of the same race and 
 practised the same rites as those concerning which informa- 
 tion is desired, is to make assurance doubly sure. Hence 
 in the present chapter we shall consider first the home of 
 the Samaritans, whose testimony to the religion of Israel 
 we would evoke, and next the race to which they belonged. 
 There is this additional suitability in the above order that 
 unlike most peoples whose country is generally named from 
 them, as England the land of the English, the Samaritans 
 are named from their country; they are the people of 
 Samaria. Their religious rites and observances they claim 
 to be theirs in virtue of their race. 
 
 A 
 
2 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 The Home of the Samaritans. 
 
 As the Samaritans claim to be descended from the tribes 
 that followed Ephraim when they rebelled against the rule 
 of the Davidic family, the whole of the territory of these 
 Northern tribes has to be regarded as their home. The 
 name Samaria, however, was first applied only to the city 
 erected by Omri for the capital of his kingdom. According 
 to the Scripture narrative (i Kings xvi. 24) the city was 
 named after the original owner of the hill on which it was 
 built ; as his name was Shemer, it was called Shomeron, or 
 probably originally Shamrain (Burney, Kings, 204) ; this, 
 hellenised, became Samaria. Its situation on the top of a 
 bold headland is at once one of great beauty, and what was 
 of greater importance in the capital of a kingdom, of great 
 military strength as against the primitive artillery of the 
 ninth century B.C. The military wisdom of the choice was 
 proved by the fact that though several times besieged by 
 the Syrians it was never captured by them, and by the 
 further fact that only after it was besieged three years did it 
 surrender to Sargon. With its special advantages it is not 
 to be wondered at that it remained the capital of the 
 Northern Kingdom even after the dynasty of its founder 
 had been overthrown. In course of time the name was 
 extended to the whole territory of which it was the capital. 
 This is specially the usage of the prophets. In a similar 
 way, Babylon (Babel) is not always the city, it is occasionally 
 the province, e.g., Dan. iii. i. Samaria in this wider sense, 
 as including the whole territory of the Northern tribes, 
 extended from the slopes of Hermon and the Lebanon on 
 the north, the transjordanic lands of Reuben, Gad, and the 
 half tribe of Manasseh on the east, and south to a line that 
 appears to have varied, passing slightly south of. Bethel, the 
 boundary of the kingdom of Judah. It may be doubted 
 whether, even in the palmy days of Jeroboam II., the 
 territory embraced "the entering in of Hamath," the 
 ambitious limit of the land claimed by Solomon (i Kings 
 viii. 65). 
 
 The provinces east of Jordan were held by a very 
 uncertain tenure. The Stone of Mesha of Moab tells of the 
 
THE HOME AND THE PEOPLE S 
 
 claims he made on the territories of Reuben and Gad ; and 
 the narratives in Kings relating the contests concerning the 
 possession of Ramoth-Gilead which Israel had to maintain 
 against the Aramaean kingdom in Damascus show how 
 precarious a hold the King of Israel had on what was 
 beyond Jordan. The fact that even after Ahab had inflicted 
 on Benhadad of Damascus more than one crushing defeat 
 (i Kings XX.) Ramoth-Gilead is still in the hands of Syria, 
 implies that Bashan, which lay north of it and nearer 
 Damascus, also was left in the possession of Syria. Although 
 Elijah is a Gileadite yet his activity is mainly restricted to 
 the west of Jordan. The kingdom of Jeroboam II. may 
 have included the east of Jordan ; but if so his successors 
 soon lost it. The advance of Assyria tended to cut short 
 the coasts of Israel. The Ninevite Empire appears to 
 have absorbed Bashan, Gilead, and the rest of the eastern 
 territories in the reign of Tiglath Pileser (i Chr. v. 26). 
 
 The northern province of Galilee, physically resembling 
 the east of Jordan in the fact that it is intersected with 
 numerous ravines, very deep and precipitous, was like 
 it frequently assailed by invaders. The Aramaeans of 
 Damascus did not attempt so much to hold it in permanent 
 possession as they did Gilead, but they seem to have made 
 frequent raids. In the troublous times which succeeded the 
 death of Jeroboam II., Tiglath-Pileser first reduced the 
 Israelites to the condition of tributaries, and then carried 
 away all the principal inhabitants of the northern portions 
 of Galilee, Abel-Maacah, Ijon, Hazor, and the rest. It is to 
 be presumed that inhabitants from other portions of the 
 Assyrian Empire were brought partly to fill up the blank 
 left by the removal of so many of the inhabitants and loss 
 of others by the ravages of war, and partly to act as a 
 garrison against those who were left in the land. Although 
 the deportation of inhabitants only from the northern portion 
 of Galilee is recorded, it would seem that at this time the 
 whole province of Galilee passed from under the rule of the 
 monarchs of Samaria. 
 
 To the south was Judah, which had never been under 
 the rule of the kings of Samaria. As has been said, the 
 boundary between these two kingdoms, Ephraim and Judah, 
 
4 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 was somewhat indefinite as to the precise line, but the 
 difference in the characteristics of the two territories is 
 marked to the traveller. Judah is in the main a mass of 
 round, barren, stony hills. Though without the frequ'ent 
 and marked wadies which characterise Galilee, still there 
 are some ; and the deepest of these go down towards the 
 Salt Sea. It is mainly pastoral, though even for sheep and 
 , goats at the present time the pasturage is by no means 
 rich or abundant. The early notes of its history all impress 
 on the reader that the " hill country of Judea " was for the 
 pasturing of sheep. David was a shepherd ; his quarrel 
 with Nabal took place when that worthy was shearing sheep ; 
 and Absalom invites his father and brothers to his sheep- 
 shearing, when he has determined to take vengeance on 
 Amnon. At a far later date there were shepherds watching 
 by their flocks at night. 
 
 In course of time, the name Samaria became restricted to 
 the portion of Palestine between the plain of Esdraelon and 
 the land of Judah. Politically it appears to have formed 
 a separate province under the kings of Assyria. When 
 Sargon, who succeeded Shalmaneser, finished the siege which 
 his predecessor had begun, he set a governor over the land ; 
 there is at least a possibility that Hezekiah was the unnamed 
 viceroy. At first like Ahaz his father he was the faithful 
 vassal of Assyria. The summons he sends to all Israel to 
 come to the Passover implies the existence of no authority 
 that could interfere; therefore it would seem that Hoshea 
 had already been deposed and Samaria taken. 
 
 The contrast between the middle province and those to 
 the north and south is very marked. From the sea, across 
 the plain of Sharon, the hills of Samaria rise terrace upon 
 terrace till they culminate in the twin heights of Ebal and 
 Gerizim. The aspect of this western front is like that of 
 Palestinian hillsides generally, somewhat sterile, but within 
 this girdle of hills it is very different. To the traveller 
 riding through the district of Samaria, following most likely 
 a bridle-path along the front of low hills, there open out at 
 every turn views or glimpses of rich holms that only need 
 cultivation to laugh with abundant crops. Even as it is, 
 with all the misgovernment of the Turk, villages are frequent] 
 
THE HOME AND THE PEOPLE 5 
 
 surrounded by cultivated fields and orchards of almond, 
 citron, and orange trees. Besides, there is in every fold of 
 the hillside the ubiquitous olive. A feature of the province 
 is the number of small plains that are shallow lakes in 
 January, in February dry up, and in May are bearing crops. 
 There is to the east the wide plain of Mokhna and to the 
 west down to the sea that of Sharon. In regard to the 
 latter, it is doubtful to what extent the seacoast was assigned 
 to Ephraim. Even in the days of the dynasty of Omri which, 
 judged by the statements of Mesha, on his stela, was very 
 powerful, the Philistines possessed the plain, for to appeal to 
 the God of Ekron is to pass beyond Israel (2 Kings i. 6). 
 It is in Ezion-geber on the Red Sea that Ahaziah joins with 
 Jehoshaphat in building ships, not at Joppa or Akka on the 
 Mediterranean (i Kings xxii. 48 ; 2 Chron. xx. 36). The 
 characteristics of the province itself which strike the traveller 
 as in contrast with those of the south and the north, are the 
 want of the rolling sterile hills of Judea, and of the frequent, 
 deep, and precipitous gorges of Galilee ; it is, in the language 
 of Isaiah, full of "fat valleys" with numerous vineyards and 
 many winefats. 
 
 Not only was the central portion of Palestine the most 
 beautiful and most fertile, it had much, perhaps most of 
 historic interest attaching to it. Especially was this the 
 case in regard to the central valley of Shechem in which the 
 remnant of the nation is still to be found. In Shechem it 
 was that Abraham first encamped, and there was he 
 privileged to receive his first revelation of God. His next 
 place of encampment was still within the central province ; 
 he placed his tent on " a mountain between Bethel and Hai " 
 (Gen. xii. 8). When Jacob came back to Canaan from 
 Padan-Aram, he purchased "a parcel of a field from the 
 children of Hamor where he had spread his tent" (Gen. 
 xxxiii. 19). There too, Joshua, when he was old, called 
 together all the elders of Israel, their heads and their judges 
 to present themselves before God to renew their covenant 
 with the Lord (Josh. xxiv. i). There at an earlier period 
 had Joshua fulfilled the command of Moses, and had built 
 on Mount Ebal an altar to the Lord, and "wrote there a 
 copy of the law of Moses, in the presence of the children of 
 
6 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Israel." There, too, he placed the elders of one half of the 
 tribes of Israel on the slope of Mount Gerizim, and the 
 other half on the slope of Mount Ebal, the one to recite the 
 blessings, the other the curses written in Deuteronomy. At 
 the mouth of the valley where it opens out into the plain of 
 Mokhna is, according to a well-supported tradition, the tomb 
 of Joseph. In the valley itself occurred the bloody episode 
 of the slaughter of the sons of Gideon. From the slope of 
 Gerizim, Jotham declaimed his parable. Here, too, in 
 Shechem it was that Rehoboam met the tribes of Israel, and 
 by his insolence lost the kingdom to the House of David. In 
 this province, to the south-west, is Timnath-Serah where 
 Joshua was buried. To the north in the territory of 
 Manasseh is Ophrah of the Abiezrites, where was the 
 threshing-floor of Gideon. In Mount Ephraim "between 
 Ramah and Bethel " rose the palm-tree under which Deborah 
 sat and judged Israel. Toward the south of Mount Ephraim 
 was the Ramah where Samuel was born, and where in after 
 years he dwelt. Nearly within sight of the valley of Shechem 
 was Shiloh, where so long stood the central shrine of the Holy 
 People, in which Eli ministered. 
 
 To one looking from the mountains of Galilee across the 
 plain of Esdraelon, the two mountains Ebal and Gerizim 
 stand out prominent, and form the centre of the view which 
 has Tabor Carmel and Gilboa for a foreground. Ebal, 
 although the nearer and the higher, does not quite hide 
 Gerizim from view. These peaks have equal prominence 
 from the east of Jordan. It is no wonder that Moses singled 
 out these mountains as those on which the law was to be 
 engraved and on which the altar was to be built. It is no 
 wonder that he selected the valley between these mountains 
 as the place where the tribes were to recite the solemn 
 curses and blessings. These mountains were in the very 
 centre of the Promised Land ; what place more suitable could 
 be found in which Israel should renew their covenant with 
 JHWH? If Deuteronomy was forged, the forger must 
 have been endowed with a transcendent dramatic instinct 
 to enable him to view the Land of Promise from a point, 
 physical and moral, which would appeal to the Hebrew 
 Lawgiver, looking at it from the east of Jordan, however 
 
THE HOME AND THE PEOPLE 7 
 
 little it might appeal to a Jew of Jerusalem. This is all 
 the more remarkable that not till long afterwards was the 
 artistic necessity of local colour recognised in literature. 
 Shakespeare makes Hector quote Aristotle, and gives 
 Bohemia a seacoast. It is difficult to imagine a Jerusalem 
 Jew of the seventh century B.C. able to place himself so 
 completely in the position of Moses. 
 
 Such was the home of the Samaritan people when it was 
 flourishing, such their home when the name Samaria was 
 restricted to the middle province of Palestine. Now it is 
 further restricted. Little more than a century ago the 
 Samaritan nation had several communities in Egypt and 
 Syria, but now only in the valley of Shechera — only in a 
 small quarter of the city of Nablus are any Samaritans to be 
 found. It is true the valley of Shechem was the very heart 
 of Samaria, indeed of the whole land of Israel. Extremity 
 after extremity has been lopped off, only in a single valve 
 of the heart the life's blood remains. 
 
 The valley of Nablus is one of the most beautiful places 
 in Palestine. It runs nearly east and west, strictly speaking 
 from nearly south-east to nearly north-west, between Ebal 
 on the north and Gerizim on the south. To the traveller 
 coming from the north, after he has passed Sebastiyeh on 
 his right hand, there opens shortly to his left the broad 
 glen of Shechem. It is a sea of verdure, not the pale verdure 
 of the grass of the field, but the full rich green of the fig-tree 
 and the pomegranate. It consists of numerous orchards and 
 gardens, overshadowed with fruit-trees — citrons, oranges, and 
 apricots. According to the season the traveller, as he 
 passes along, sees peeping out from its dark green polished 
 leaves the bright insistent red of the pomegranate flower, 
 or earlier the white blossoms of the almond. The green of 
 the mass of verdure is carried up the slopes of the mountains 
 that bound the valley, by olive-yards and vineyards. Mainly 
 on the slopes of Mount Gerizim is this seen, though Mount 
 Ebal is not so sterile as some have imagined it to be. Above 
 the belt of olives and vines rise the twin mountains, the 
 highest in Central Palestine. If the traveller withdraws his 
 eyes from the heights, and gazes along the tops of those green 
 fruit-trees, he will note the minarets of the five mosques 
 
8 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 of the city, rising white out of the mass of dark green- 
 ery. Four of these mosques were originally Christian 
 churches ; one is claimed by the Samaritans as having been 
 their principal synagogue. To one approaching Nablus 
 from the south the view is somewhat different. The track 
 leads round the base of Mount Gerizim to the left, and leaves 
 Joseph's tomb and Jacob's well to the right ; it then passes 
 westward through a mile or two of broad fertile fields. In 
 front rise the green orchards, from which spring the minarets 
 before spoken of. Nearer the city are heaps of ashes, the 
 refuse of soap manufacture, the principal industry of the 
 place. This valley owes its fertility and beauty to the 
 moisture of the winter snows and rains which, stored up in 
 the bosom of the two guardian mountains, is shed forth in 
 springs and streams that flow out unstinted during the 
 drought of the hottest summer. Heat and moisture are 
 the twin sources of fertility. 
 
 The modern city of Nablus is one of the most important 
 in Palestine; its population is probably from twenty to 
 twenty-five thousand. Like most Eastern cities there is a 
 broad street, called the Suq or market, which traverses the 
 city from east to west. The greater portion of this is 
 vaulted, and is lighted by openings in the roof which are 
 glazed. The length of the city is estimated by Guerin to be 
 about three-quarters of a mile ; its breadth he reckons to 
 be rather less than a third of a mile at its broadest. It is 
 divided into quarters, as are so many cities in the East. 
 These are traversed by streets leading off the Suq, which 
 are narrow and crooked, full of dust and garbage in summer, 
 and mud and garbage in winter. The largest of these 
 quarters is the H^ret Jasmineh. It is close beside the foot 
 of Mount Gerizim, and the traveller, entering Nablus from 
 the north, comes into it first. A lane leaves the Suq to the 
 right and leads up to the Haret es Samireh — the Samaritan 
 quarter. It is not strictly speaking a quarter of the city, it 
 is too small ; it is merely a group of mean houses that cluster 
 about the small dark synagogue, the last remaining shrine 
 of the sons of Ephraim. This group of houses is the Ghetto 
 of the small remnant of the Ten Tribes. 
 
 From this quarter a bridle-path leads up to the top of 
 
THE HOME AND THE PEOPLE 9 
 
 Mount Gerizim. Very soon the path has crossed the belt 
 of orchards and vineyards, and thereafter it skirts them for 
 about two hours, riding at muleteer's pace. When the vine- 
 yards are left the pathway becomes more rocky and the 
 hillside is bare, covered only with grass and a few small 
 bushes. A short pull brings the rider and his steed to 
 the top of the mountain. The pathway ends at one of 
 the higher portions of the plateau that forms the top of 
 the mountain. From there it dips down to where there 
 appear the green mounds that mark the ruins of ancient 
 buildings. Most of the ruins in Palestine, at least of any 
 antiquity, except on the seacoast, are represented by green 
 mounds ; perhaps the friable nature of the stone of which 
 they have been built explains this. At the opposite end of 
 the platform, toward the south-east, the ground rises again ; 
 on the highest point of this there is erected a wely, the 
 tomb of a Mohammedan saint. Sheikh Ghanem. Like other 
 buildings of this class it is domed and white. It overlooks 
 the plain of Mokhna ; visitors are recommended to view the 
 plain from its window. 
 
 The slight depression in this platform represents the 
 home of the Samaritan religion. Those green mounds, 
 from which here and there appear traces of carved stones, the 
 Samaritans claim to be the remains of their ancient temple. 
 This claim can only be admitted with modifications. There 
 have been numerous successive buildings erected one on the 
 top of the other. There might be an ancient Canaanite High 
 Place here. It is not improbable, although there appears 
 no notice of it in Scripture, that an Israelite High Place 
 would replace that of the Canaanites. Superimposed upon 
 these in all likelihood was the temple erected by Sanballat. 
 It was destroyed by John Hyrcanus (120 B.C.) and its 
 rubbish added to the general heap. As the language 
 of the Samaritan woman in her conversation with our 
 Lord seems to imply that worship was at that time 
 carried on in the sacred mountain, it is not improbable that 
 Herod rebuilt the temple for the Samaritans when they 
 were put under his rule. It may certainly be regarded as 
 against this, that Josephus, when he relates the slaughter 
 inflicted by Cerealis on the Samaritans, does not say 
 
10 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 anything of edifices having been destroyed by him. The 
 Samaritans themselves credit Adrinus (Hadrian) with the 
 destruction of their temple. He erected a temple to Jupiter 
 on Mount Gerizim, as in Jerusalem he erected a temple to 
 Venus. A coin of the period of the Antonines, struck in 
 Flavia Neapolis (Nablus), represents on the reverse a 
 temple with pillared portico on Mount Gerizim ; a stairway 
 is shown going from the foot of the mountain to the top. 
 A century later a coin of Volusianus shows the same design. 
 It has been assumed that this was a heathen temple, but 
 according to Josephus the temple in Jerusalem, as rebuilt 
 by Herod, had porticos with pillars; if one may judge by 
 other Herodian remains these pillars would be after Roman 
 models. It might quite well be that Hadrian repaired the 
 Herodian temple on Mount Gerizim and rededicated it to 
 Jupiter. 
 
 Dr William Thomson in The Land and the Book gives a 
 plan of the ruins to be traced on the top of Gerizim, copied 
 from that in the Pal. Explor. Quart. Statement, 1873, P- 66, the 
 work of Sir Charles Warren : in a subsequent page there 
 is a view of some of the structures. Guerin {^Description de 
 la Palestine: Samarie, xxv., pp. 424-445) has a careful 
 description, accompanied by measurements, of the structures 
 as he saw them in 1870. The most striking is the platform 
 composed of large blocks of stone, called from their number 
 thenasher bdlata, "the twelve stones." At first sight they 
 appear to be native rock, part of the mountain ; but half a 
 century ago Lieutenant Anderson proved by excavation 
 that they were not part of the rock but had been placed in 
 their present position. They are huge undressed blocks of 
 limestone. The Samaritans assert that these were the 
 twelve stones which Joshua commanded the children of 
 Israel to take up out of the midst of Jordan and carry to 
 the place where they lodged. The probability is that these 
 stones were originally laid there to form a platform for the 
 altar which preceded the erection of the temple by Sanballat. 
 These stones were twelve " according to the number of the 
 tribes of Israel." Then tradition took the matter in hand 
 and identified them with the stones taken out of Jordan. 
 It is to be noted that there is evidence here that the 
 
THE HOME AND THE PEOPLE 11 
 
 Samaritans knew something of the contents of the book of 
 Joshua. This platform, according to Sir Charles Warren's 
 plan, is to the west of the mountain. 
 
 Immediately to the east is a ruined structure which 
 Guerin calls qalah, "the castle." It is a large four-sided 
 enclosure of 79 metres by 64^ metres (86| yards by 70), thus 
 approximately a square. At each of the corners there are 
 the remains of four square towers with one in the middle 
 of the south wall. Sir Charles Warren's plan is presumably 
 drawn accurately to scale. According to it the size of this 
 structure differs considerably from the measurements of 
 M. Guerin. Warren's figures are 200 feet by 150, that is 
 to say, 67 yards by 50, so very much smaller. Round this 
 platform, between the towers, Warren notes that he observed 
 the remains of chambers. This may have marked off the 
 hardm area of the Samaritan temple. It is, however, so 
 much smaller than that at Jerusalem that one hesitates to 
 afifirm this confidently. In the centre of this enclosure there 
 is figured by Sir Charles Warren the plan of an octagonal 
 structure. This is described by M. Guerin. The walls are 
 only to be traced by the irregularities of the ground. It 
 has been built, he says, of cut stones regularly and 
 throughout polished. It was doubtless covered over by a 
 dome. There had been an apse to the east, and five side 
 chapels, one directly south, the rest in the intermediate 
 directions S.W., N.W., N.E., and S.E. The doorway was 
 to the south. According to Warren's plan there were eight 
 pillars supporting the dome. The diameter of this structure 
 within, if the chapels and the apse be neglected is, according 
 to Guerin, 23 metres (25J yards), and each side of the 
 polygon, 9 metres (11 yards). In this case Sir Charles 
 Warren's figures agree with those of M. Guerin. When, 
 however, Guerin says the depth of the recess of the apse is 
 equal to the length of one of the sides of the polygon, the 
 difference between the authorities is considerable ; instead of 
 the 9 metres of Guerin, Warren has 20 feet, little more than 
 6 metres. The measures given in the Memoirs do not quite 
 accord with either. Procopius describes a church erected 
 by the Emperor Zeno on Mount Gerizim, and dedicated to 
 the Virgin Mary, which seems to agree with this. M. Guerin 
 
12 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 deduces that the structure which rose upon this plan had a 
 domed roof, a deduction that is confirmed by Sir Charles 
 Warren's plan which, as we have said above, shows eight 
 pillars. There is an obvious resemblance in this on the one 
 side to the Mosque of Omar, the Qubbet es-Sakhra, and on 
 the other to Saint Sophia. In Sir Charles Warren's article 
 it is said that the floor had been partly of marble and 
 partly of tiles. As we have indicated, there is a tendency 
 to regard it as certain, that this church was erected on 
 the site of the Samaritan temple. This, however, is not 
 the Samaritan tradition. About 240 feet distant from the 
 enclosure surrounding the Church of Zeno, according to the 
 map of the Palestine Exploration Fund, is a site much 
 more sacred to the Samarftans. It is like the rock that is 
 seen in the Mosque of Omar, a platform of native rock of 
 irregular shape and surface ; at its southern end is a 
 depression, presumably for the reception of the blood of 
 sacrificial victims. This may have been an altar in 
 Canaanite times, and the human bones found in the pit near 
 at hand may have been those of human victims. The 
 Samaritan tradition is that it was over this rock that their 
 temple was built. This Sakhra or Holy Stone is the place, 
 of all the sites on this sacred hill, which is most sacred ; no 
 member of the Samaritan community approaches it but 
 barefoot. It would be loss of time to describe the stone on 
 which Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac, and the Seven 
 Steps by which Adam descended when he was driven out 
 of Paradise; for here, according to Samaritan tradition, 
 was the Garden of Eden. 
 
 Quite to the west of these structures is the portion of the 
 sacred plateau which the Samaritans have purchased for the 
 celebration of their Passover. They had been excluded from 
 the top of Mount Gerizim for about forty years by the Turks, 
 but through the intervention of the British Consul the right 
 of visiting the sacred sites was restored to them. It ought 
 to be noted that M. Guerin credits Louis Philippe with this 
 interference on behalf of the Samaritans. Dr Montgomery 
 {Samaritans, p. 141), gives a very different account of the rela- 
 tion of the Orleanist sovereign to the persecuted remnant in 
 Nablus. They appealed to him, but their appeal for State 
 
THE HOME AND THE PEOPLE 13 
 
 reasons remained unanswered. They were at all events, by 
 whose influence so ever, allowed to purchase a portion of the top 
 of the sacred hill, in order to consecrate it for the Passover 
 celebration. In this plot they dug a trench and a pit which they 
 lined with stones, so that, though filled up in the interval 
 between the periods of observance, they could easily be re- 
 opened. In a communication to the Palestine Exploration 
 Quarterly {igo'i p. 91) the Rev. Roland G. Stafford gives an 
 account of the Passover observances dictated in Arabic by the 
 Samaritan High Priest, which includes a rough diagram. 
 There is in it no attempt at drawing to scale, or even at 
 approximation to accuracy in the representation of the topo- 
 graphical relation of the sites. The pit is represented by a 
 square, in which is inserted the statement that this " furnace " 
 was "taken from the time of Abraham" (Gen. XV. 17); in other 
 words this pit was " the smoking furnace and burning lamp " 
 which Abraham saw when God made a covenant with him 
 after the slaughter of the kings. It is not of importance to 
 Samaritan tradition that this was a vision furnace, or that 
 the vision in which it was seen occurred in Hebron. 
 
 No description of the home of the Samaritans would be 
 complete without some account of the characteristics and 
 appearance of Mount Ebal. It rises to the north of the 
 valley of Nablus and attains a height of over 3000 feet. It is 
 rather more rugged and difficult of ascent than is Mount 
 Gerizim. Although the vineyards and olive-yards do not rise 
 up the side of Mount Ebal so high as they do up the 
 side of Mount Gerizim, still Ebal is not the desolate 
 mountain, in comparison with Gerizim, that it has pleased 
 the imagination of some travellers to describe it. Certainly 
 the rocks are more in evidence, and riding up is more 
 precarious on account of the liability of the horses to slip 
 on the flat exposed surfaces of limestone. There are traces 
 that in earlier days cultivation by terraces was carried up 
 much higher. When the top is reached there are remains 
 of pretty extensive ruins, evidently supposed by native 
 tradition to be those of a fortress, as they are called qalah, 
 " the castle." Guerin describes this structure as built of blocks 
 of stone, very roughly cut ; he gives the measurements of 
 the irregular square as thirty-two paces a side; this, 
 
U THE SAMARITANS 
 
 reckoning a pace at 2| feet, would make the size about 
 80 feet square. Near by are other ruins supposed, at 
 least by the natives, to be those of a church, as they call 
 the heap khurbet keneisek, " ruined church." The view from 
 the top is superb. Away to the north rises to the right, the 
 great mass of Hermon which even in midsummer justifies the 
 name by which it is sometimes called, Jebel et-Telj, "the 
 Mountain of Snow"; to the left, peering over the nearer 
 peaks of the Lebanon, overlooking the sea, is visible the 
 white top of Jebel Sannin. To the west is the plain of 
 Sharon, and beyond it the Great Sea of the Hebrews sparkles 
 in the sunlight. Away over Jordan rising above the rest of 
 the mountains of Gilead is Jebel Osha, which some regard 
 as the true Nebo from which Moses saw the Promised Land, 
 and south over the Dead Sea are seen the mountains of 
 Moab ; while nearer hand the towers are visible that crown 
 Mount Olivet. 
 
 Such then is the home of the Samaritans that survive 
 from the Ten Tribes, despite the persecutions they have 
 endured at the hands of every power which has borne rule 
 over Palestine. Here have they dwelt alongside of the Jews, 
 according to their own account since Joshua conquered the 
 land ; even on the Jewish account, since some seven centuries 
 before Christ. Parallel with them they have obeyed the 
 same law, observed the same customs, and celebrated the 
 same festivals. As credible witnesses of the nature of the 
 religion of the Jews they have every local advantage. 
 
 The Samaritan People. 
 As we have already seen, that while local identity is an 
 important element in regard to testimony as to religion, 
 identity of race is yet more important. The Samaritans 
 themselves claim to be, like the Jews, the descendants of 
 Abraham and of Jacob. The Jews, in this followed by the 
 Christians, regard the tribes which inhabited the north of 
 Palestine as having been deported totally, and therefore to 
 be sought anywhere but in the land given to their fathers. 
 Few things have more occupied the imaginations of those 
 peoples who possess the Scriptures of the Old Testament, 
 whether Jews or Christians, than the fate of what are called 
 
THE HOME AND THE PEOPLE 15 
 
 " The Lost Ten Tribes." In the most diverse quarters have 
 they been discovered. The Talmudic accounts are vague geo- 
 graphically ; somewhere away to the east is all that is asserted. 
 Very different in this respect are the views of the Christians 
 who have occupied themselves with this question. Some find 
 them in the Jews who are resident in China, Others think 
 the Afghans to be the true descendants of the ten lost tribes. 
 Not a few have been ready to recognise them in the much 
 persecuted Nestorians of Mesopotamia. Most extraordinary 
 of all is the notion that these lost tribes have reappeared in 
 the Anglo-Saxon race. On views like these, of course the 
 claims of the modern Samaritans to Israelite descent are not 
 worthy of a moment's consideration. These ideas are derived 
 from the seventeenth chapter of 2nd Kings, and in accord- 
 ance with it, the Samaritans are regarded as the offspring of 
 the mixed multitude of heathens, the colonists who, sent by 
 the Assyrian monarchs, assumed, from the fear of lions, a 
 certain reverence for JHWH, but at the same time continued 
 the worship of their own gods. This is the view of the Jews 
 of the present day. Earlier also in the Talmud the 
 Samaritans are always spoken of as D^rrta " Cuthseans," since 
 Cuthah was one of the places from which the colonists had 
 been brought by the Assyrians. 
 
 It cannot be denied that at first signt the statements in 
 2 Kings xvii. seem to warrant this interpretation, but closer 
 study of the narrative leads to the conclusion that certain 
 modifications of the common view are needful. The common 
 view implies that the whole population was removed, but in 
 the narrative the statement is general and to be regarded 
 as more sweeping than accurate. If all the prominent 
 people — all that meant the nation in the eyes of the people 
 of Israel themselves or in the eyes of neighbouring nations — 
 were deported, that would satisfy the representations of the 
 book of Kings. It is to be noted that the repeated state- 
 ment that JHWH "removed Israel out of His sight" points 
 rather to the deprivation of spiritual privileges than to 
 physical removal to another land. It is certainly said that 
 " Israel was carried away out of their own land " ; but it is 
 not said that all Israel was so deported : the removal, as we 
 have said, of all the prominent persons, the heads of families, 
 
16 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the priests, the prophets, would satisfy this statement. On 
 the other hand when Hezekiah celebrated his great Passover 
 (2 Chron. xxx. i fif.) he " wrote letters also to Ephraim and 
 Manasseh that they should come to the House of the Lord at 
 Jerusalem," a fact to which we have already adverted in another 
 connection. He further made a proclamation "throughout 
 all Israel from Beersheba even unto Dan that they should 
 come to keep the Passover . . . saying, 'Ye children of 
 Israel, turn again unto the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, 
 and Israel, and He will return to the remnant of you that 
 have escaped from the hand of the kings of Assyria.' " What 
 was the date of this Passover ? At first sight it would seem 
 to be in the first year of Hezekiah's reign in Jerusalem. But 
 by careful comparison of dates it would appear that his reign 
 is computed according to two different reckonings. Parallel 
 with this is the fact that while Sargon appointed a deputy over 
 the kingdom of Israel, the name of the deputy is not given in 
 Sargon's inscription. If Hezekiah were this deputy, then the 
 apparent confusion of regnal years would be explained, and 
 also the tone which he employs in writing to the inhabitants 
 of the Israelite territory " from Beersheba even unto Dan." 
 Hezekiah reckoned occasionally the years of his reign from 
 his entrance upon his rule over all Israel.^ It was quite 
 natural that he should solemnise his accession to a new 
 dignity by celebrating a Passover to which all Israel were 
 summoned. Thus this Passover is to be dated in the sixth 
 or seventh year of his reign in Jerusalem. It is clear from 
 this summons that the " remnant that had escaped from the 
 hands of the King of Assyria " was very considerable. In 
 the account of the Passover kept by Josiah, more than three- 
 quarters of a century later, given in 2 Chron. xxxv. 17, it is 
 said, " The children of Israel that were present (marg. " found," 
 han-nimtza'im) kept the Passover at that time " ; in the 
 next verse the Chronicler speaks of "all Judah and Israel 
 that were present" — a phrase which shows that he had the 
 distinction between Judah and Israel before his mind. In 
 perfect accordance with this is the testimony of Josephus 
 
 ' The writer would acknowledge his indebtedness to Rev. R. B. Pattie 
 B.D., Glasgow, for the explanation here given of the apparent dis- 
 crepancies of the chronological notes of Hezekiah's reign. 
 
THE HOME AND THE PEOPLE 17 
 
 (Ani. X. iv. 5): '-After these things J osiah went also to all 
 the Israelites who had escaped captivity and slavery undpr 
 the Assyrians, and persuaded them to desist from their 
 impious practices." From his statements elsewhere it is 
 clear that Josephus would be under no temptation to justify 
 the claims of the Samaritans to Israelite descent ; hence his 
 admission in this instance of the existence of a considerable 
 Israelite remnant is of all the greater value. 
 
 Further, when we consider the object the Assyrians had 
 in view in these deportations, the total removal of the people 
 of one province to another becomes the more unlikely. 
 Their object was to prevent rebellion against their rule on 
 the part of any of the conquered peoples that manifested a 
 tendency to revolt. To deport totally the population of one 
 region to another, would not necessarily lessen the 
 probability of rebellion to any serious extent ; it would 
 merely change its geographical theatre. Moreover when 
 the methods of Nebuchadnezzar are considered (and his 
 empire was in all essentials a continuation of that of Assyria), 
 the view above indicated is confirmed. When he carried 
 Judah into captivity he left the poor of the people "which 
 had nothing, in the land of Judah, and gave them vineyards 
 and fields at the same time," and put them under the hand 
 of Gedaliah, the son of Ahikam (2 Kings xxv. 22 ff. ; Jer. 
 xxxix. 10; xl. 5). The probability is that the practice of 
 Nebuchadnezzar was one which he had inherited from the 
 kings of Assyria before him. Yet another thing ; those who 
 believe that the total population of Israel was deported 
 to the regions beyond the Tigris and Euphrates, must 
 forget the difficulties of transportation in the days of Sai"gon. 
 The population of Palestine must still have been very great, 
 even after the fullest weight is given to the devastating 
 effects of Assyrian methods of "Rightfulness," and the 
 lessening of the population in consequence. Menahem had 
 in his dominions sixty thousand " mighty men of wealth " — 
 a number that implies a general population of possibly 
 two millions. Though the kingdom of Hoshea was less 
 than that of Menahem by the loss of Galilee, still the 
 population left in the land could not be less than half 
 a million. A horde of captives of that size passing through 
 
 B 
 
18 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Coele-Syria to Carchemish, and from thence down the 
 Euphrates, would lay the whole country bare, and would 
 empty of provisions the magazines of every store-city on 
 its route. The consequence of this would be that the armies 
 of Assyria would be unable to pass that way for some years 
 to come. 
 
 We have further the direct evidence of Sargon's own 
 inscriptions — contemporary documents, records of the events 
 made when they happened. A monarch would be little 
 likely to minimise his own exploits when he had them 
 recorded on the walls of his own palace. In his account of 
 the conquest of the land of Israel and capture of Samaria, 
 Sargon does not claim to have carried away all the 
 inhabitants of the land — he asserts only that he took 27,280 
 of them. The population of the province of Samaria must 
 have been vastly greater than that. If the numbers of the 
 armies which the kings of Israel are recorded to have 
 assembled are to be taken as not historic, yet the account 
 of the tribute exacted by Tiglath-Pileser (Pul) has every 
 appearance of being so, and the method Menahem took to 
 raise the amount has every look of probability. As above we 
 saw what population that involved — approximately twenty 
 times the number Sargon says he carried away. We are 
 not, however, reduced to arriving at a decision by deductions 
 like those above. It is clear that Sargon carried away only 
 a portion of the inhabitants, for he adds, " I changed the 
 government of the country and set over it a lieutenant of 
 my own"; instead of a subject king like Hoshea, there was 
 now to be an Assyrian viceroy. We have seen that it is 
 not impossible that Hezekiah was that viceroy. Sargon 
 continues, " The tribute of the former king I imposed upon 
 them." The Ninevite king would not appoint a viceroy 
 over empty fields, or expect them to pay him a tribute. 
 
 We have already said that it was the intention of the 
 Assyrians to remove from any province, the loyalty of 
 which they suspected, all notables — every one who could 
 prove a centre of rebellion, or a strength to it when it had 
 begun. This was a plan that was admirably fitted to secure 
 the end at which they aimed. When these persons arrived 
 at their new abode they would find themselves surrounded 
 
THE HOME AND THE PEOPLE 19 
 
 by people whose language they did not understand, with 
 whose customs they were unfamiliar, whose religion it might 
 be they despised. Men in such circumstances, however 
 great their ability or their hatred of the rule of Assyria, 
 would be impotent for political disturbance. If those who 
 had been the natural leaders of the nation into the bounds 
 of which they had been introduced had been sent to replace 
 them in the land whence they had come, then in both 
 countries there would be leaders without followers, and 
 followers without leaders. In the account of the captives 
 that Nebuchadnezzar took with Jehoiachin (2 Kings xxiv. 
 14) we have the classes of persons who were liable to 
 deportation, " the princes and all the mighty men of valour 
 ... all the craftsmen, all the smiths.'' All metal workers, 
 and generally all who could help in producing munitions of 
 war, all scribes whose knowledge of the art of writing might 
 be put to political uses — all the priests and the prophets, all 
 who could give a religious sanction to rebellion would be 
 carried away. 
 
 We learn from the scenes portrayed on the Ninevite 
 marbles that the captives were not debarred from conveying 
 much of their property with them to their new abode. 
 Consequently when they arrived at the new country assigned 
 to them they would have much of the influence over their 
 new neighbours that wealth always has over the poor, who 
 alone would be left in the region to which they had come. 
 Education and habit of command would tell despite the 
 differences of language and religion, and the difficulties in 
 the way of intercourse which these entailed. The influence 
 of the colonists on the residuary inhabitants would be 
 concurrent with the influence the residents would have on 
 the colonists. The difficulty of language would be lessened 
 in the case of South-Western Asia by the widely diifused use 
 of Aramaic. This would tend to displace the native tongue, 
 and profoundly modify it even in those cases when it did 
 hot drive it out. In religion the views of heathenism as 
 to the local restrictions of divinities — gods who were gods of 
 the hills and not of the valleys — would tend to make the 
 religious views and practices of the otherwise despised 
 remnant potent. Customs would also tend to assimilate. 
 
20 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 After all things are considered, when the residual popula- 
 tion left in the land after the devastating campaigns of the 
 Assyrians is put at its lowest probable figure, and on the 
 other hand the number of the intruded colonists reckoned 
 at the highest, still the mass of the inhabitants would be 
 Israelites. There would also be the small remnant of the 
 Canaanites who still survived. From an imperfect inscription 
 of Sargon (Schrader, Keilinsch. i. 268) it would seem that 
 shortly after the deportation of such captive Israelites as he 
 did remove, he sent colonists to occupy their places. The 
 statement these colonists make, as recorded in Ezra iv. 7^ 
 shows that they regarded Esarhaddon as the monarch 
 responsible for their presence in Palestine. But in verse 10 of 
 the same chapter they claim to have been brought thither 
 by " the great and noble Asnapper," who is in all probability 
 to be identified with Asshur-bani-pal. From this it may be 
 deduced that the colonists were sent into Palestine by relays. 
 This would tend to make the influence of the Israelite 
 remnant more powerful ; the small number of scattered 
 colonists would readily fall under the influence of their more 
 numerous neighbours, so that by the time that the next band 
 arrived the leavening with Jahveism had proceeded a good 
 way. Thus it was said that the earlier English colonists 
 in Ireland became in subsequent generations Hibernis 
 Hiberniores. Moreover, the different relays did not in all 
 likelihood come from the same places as their predecessors ; 
 thus they would be separated from them by as great barriers 
 of language, custom, and religion as from the original inhabi- 
 tants. When on the weakening of the Assyrian Empire 
 Josiah assumed dominion over Northern Palestine, his treat- 
 ment of the priests of the High Places implies that he 
 regarded the mass of the inhabitants as Israelites over whom 
 in virtue of his Davidic descent he could claim to be king, 
 and whose worship at the High Places he could treat — indeed 
 was bound to treat — as heretical ; and this according to the 
 ideas of those days was equivalent to being treasonable. 
 Josiah's reformation seems to have had a deep effect on the 
 Northern Israelites. After Ishmael the son of Nethaniah 
 had slain Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, it is recorded that 
 " Fourscore men came from Shechem, from Shiloh, and 
 
THE HOME AND THE PEOPLE 21 
 
 from Samaria with offerings and incense in their hands to 
 bring to the House of the Lord " (Jer. xli. 5) with all the 
 signs of mourning, as it was only to the ruins of the Jerusalem 
 temple that they could bring their offerings. These 
 Ephraimites had accepted Josiah's reformation and had 
 acknowledged the Solomonic shrine as their qiblah, and 
 regarded even its ruined site as sacred so far as important 
 sacrifices were concerned. These worshippers came to 
 Mizpah long after the Assyrian colonists had been established. 
 It is necessary for a little to consider from whence these 
 colonists were brought. Some it is recorded were brought 
 from Babylon. Historically, it is intrinsically very probable 
 that citizens from Babylon would be deported to Palestine. 
 As the sacred capital of the Assyrian Empire, as much older 
 than Nineveh, the pride of the Babylonians was offended by 
 the precedence over them taken by the more recent city in 
 virtue of its being the Imperial residence. Incited to 
 rebellion by Merodach-Baladan, and assisted in it by him, 
 the Babylonians were in a state of chronic unrest. Senna- 
 cherib, after numerous campaigns and victories over the 
 Babylonians, interspersed with efforts at conciliation, 
 determined to destroy the city wholly ; which destruction he 
 set about systematically and thoroughly. This would be 
 accompanied doubtless by extensive deportations. These 
 in all likelihood had begun in the reign of Sargon, during 
 which the intervention of Merodach-Baladan and his 
 Chaldseans began. Esarhaddon rebuilt Babylon and assumed 
 the title of King of Babylon. Cuthah is identified by Dr 
 Finches as Kutu, a place in the neighbourhood of Babylon, 
 devoted to the worship of Nergal. It would naturally follow 
 the lead of Babylon and share in its vicissitudes. There is 
 greater difficulty in the identification of Ava. From the 
 names of the deities they worshipped, Conder would localise 
 the Avites at Accad and therefore nearer Nineveh. It is 
 scarcely possible that the Hamath of this passage can be 
 the Hamath of Northern Syria; communication between 
 it and Palestine was too easy for the purposes of the 
 Assyrian deportation being carried out. Hamath, however, 
 is a common Aramaic name ; probably it is in Mesopotamia 
 that the Hamath of this passage is to be sought. There is 
 
22 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 some discussion as to the locality of Sepharvaim ; a number 
 of commentators maintain that it is Sibrain in Syria, but 
 the same political objections, that must be urged against 
 Hamath of. Syria, apply to Sibrain. The probability therefore 
 is that the old identification of Sepharvaim with Sippara is 
 after all correct. It would thus seem that the body of the 
 colonists were Semites from the region of Mesopotaniia. 
 What has been said as to the inhabitants of Central Palestine 
 applies also to the deportations of Tiglath-Pileser from 
 Galilee, their place probably being supplied by colonists 
 from the same quarters.^ 
 
 It may be thought that it is antagonistic to the view 
 above maintained that although the Israelite inhabitants of 
 the Northern Kingdom were greatly reduced in numbers by 
 the ravages of the Assyrians (those early apostles of " fright- 
 fulness ") in war, they still were the predominant element in 
 the population, that the colonists appeal to Esarhaddon to 
 be taught ".the manner of the God of the Land," and the 
 consequent mission of the priests to teach the knowledge they 
 professed to desire. This, however, does not in reality dis- 
 prove our assumption. Laying aside the possibility that this 
 appeal was a covert petition to be reponed in their own land — 
 it must always be remembered that in every heathen religion 
 ritual was all important. That a sacrifice should be acceptable 
 to the deity to whom it was offered, it was imperative that in 
 offering it the right gestures be used in the right order ; 
 the correct titles given to the divinity when addressing him ; 
 the proper terms of dedication used ; probably these were 
 couched in archaic language. Every one of these elements 
 was regarded as of the utmost importance. These the 
 colonists would not be sure that the simple peasantry could 
 
 ^ What has been said above exhibits the absurdity of the view 
 maintained by Dr Paul Haupt that our Lord was not a Jew but of 
 Aryan descent. He thinks that the deportations of Tiglath-Pileser were 
 total, which they were not ; that the colonists sent to replace those 
 carried away were Aryans, of which there is no proof; the assertion of 
 Dr Paul Haupt is scarcely evidence as to what happened twenty-five 
 centuries ago. He assumes that, when Simon the Maccabee removed 
 back to Judea such Jews as had settled in Galilee, he left none of 
 Israelite descent. Of course Haupt maintains against Matthew and 
 Luke that Christ was born in Nazareth not Bethlehem. 
 
THE HOME AND THE PEOPLE 23 
 
 know. Only the priests of JHWH would be the custodiers 
 of such knowledge. As we have seen, priests and prophets 
 would be among those deported, as they would be specially 
 liable, among a fanatic race like the Israelites, to be leaders 
 of revolt. In answer to the appeal of the colonists, a priest, 
 or more probably priests were sent, and one of them made 
 his abode in Bethel. As this was one of the principal 
 schismatic shrines established by Jeroboam, it may be 
 assumed that the worship taught was that of the High 
 Places denounced by the prophets. 
 
 The teaching of these priests seems to have been suc- 
 cessful, if one may judge from the prominence given to the 
 destruction of High Places, and the slaughter of the priests 
 of them, in the account of Josiah's reformation and of the 
 extending of it to the territory of Israel. When the inhabi- 
 tants of Northern Palestine again come into notice, Zerubbabel 
 had commenced rebuilding the temple at Jerusalem ; the 
 Samaritans then claim to be allowed to share in the work as 
 having been themselves worshippers of JHWH from the days 
 of Esarhaddon. The wish to participate in the restoration of 
 the Jerusalem temple implies that the colonists had been 
 won over to adopt the views as to the superior sanctity of the 
 shrine on Mount Zion, implied in the prophetic reformation 
 begun by Hezekiah, and by Josiah resumed and extended to 
 Israel. It may seem to contradict the predominance of the 
 Israelite element that these correspondents of Zerubbabel 
 claim to have been brought into the land of Israel by 
 Esarhaddon. But the colonists, as we have seen above, from 
 their wealth, education, and habits of command, would 
 probably occupy a position of influence not altogether 
 unlike that of the Norman nobles in England in the days 
 of King John, who, although as to numbers very much the 
 minority in England, yet claimed to be the spokesmen of the 
 people whole. Their reference to Esarhaddon might be 
 intended to meet objections based on the alien origin of 
 these colonists; even they have been worshipping JHWH 
 for more than a century and a half, as they did not belong 
 to the races excluded from the House of JHWH for ever, 
 they might claim to be received as proselytes ; the case of 
 the Israelites by descent was beyond discussion. It is to 
 
24 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 be observed that their claim to be genuine worshippers of 
 JHWH is not denied to them by Zerubbabel and Joshua 
 the High Priest, only they assert that to the Jews and 
 Benjamites alone had been entrusted, by the Persian king, 
 the work of rebuilding the temple. 
 
 As the relatively small infusion of Norman blood into 
 England did not seriously alter the predominantly Teutonic 
 character of the people, so the coming of the Assyrian colonists 
 did little to dilute the Israelite blood of the inhabitants of 
 Northern Palestine. Hence whatever claim identity of race 
 may put forward to be heard as to religious practices or tenets 
 of any people, the Samaritans can make that claim as to the 
 religion of Israel. 
 
 It is a matter of minor importance in regard to our 
 argument, but still it is worthy of note that the personal 
 appearance of the Samaritans suits our contention. They are, 
 as a community, tall and fine looking. Their features represent 
 the finest type of Israelite. In this view I am supported by 
 several other observers. On this question, see Montgomery, 
 p. 26. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE HISTORY OF THE SAMARITANS 
 
 If the history of the Samaritans showed that they were in 
 constant friendship with the Jews, and that in all religious 
 matters they followed their lead submissively ; if in short 
 Samaritanism was merely a pale reflection, perhaps a little 
 distorted, of Judaism, then the evidence of the Samaritans 
 would not have the same value. If further they showed an 
 easy facility in taking on the characteristics of those with 
 whom they came in contact, ready to alter or modify their 
 religious practices at the bidding of any predominant power, 
 there would be a further lessening of the value of their 
 testimony. If on the other hand there was a mutual 
 jealousy and suspicion between the Jews and Samaritans, 
 if each was willing to impute to the other the worst practices 
 in conduct and the most erroneous doctrines in regard to 
 creed, if each endeavoured to take the political attitude that 
 would be most embarrassing to the other, in such circum- 
 stances it is difficult to imagine any slavish following on 
 either side. So far from being ready to adopt the opinions 
 of those who had secured the Imperial power in South- 
 western Asia, the Samaritans have been consistently 
 persecuted by each of these in turn ; that there was an excep- 
 tion during the time of the Seleucid supremacy we know 
 only on the suspect evidence of Josephus. The religious 
 independence of the Samaritans, alike in regard to the Jews 
 and in regard to their Gentile neighbours, is the thesis we 
 hope to prove by the study of their history, of the 
 persecutions they endured, and the vicissitudes they 
 underwent. 
 
 The history of the Samaritan people might be said to 
 
26 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 begin with the revolt of the Northern tribes from the rule of 
 the House of David under the leadership of Jeroboam. This 
 was, however, only the final expression of a cleavage dating 
 much further back in the history of Israel. It had been seen 
 in the struggles for supremacy between David and the House 
 of Saul, and in the ease with which Sheba the son of Bichri, 
 on the very morrow of the overthrow of Absalom, secured a 
 following. In the yet earlier days of the Judges, Judah 
 and Simeon kept themselves aloof from the Northern and 
 more advanced tribes. When Deborah and Barak delivered 
 Israel from the yoke of the Canaanite oppressors, the 
 Southern tribes did nothing ; what is more striking, they do 
 not seem to have been expected to render any assistance. 
 While the divisions of Reuben are commented on, and the 
 Reubenites are taunted with their continuance by the sheep- 
 folds, and contemptuous reference is made to the excuses 
 advanced by Gilead, Dan, and Asher to cover their inaction, 
 and Meroz is bitterly cursed, nothing is said of the absence 
 of Judah and Simeon from the army of Barak. In the 
 history of the period of the Judges, the Southern tribes have 
 nothing of the prominence in the narrative that is given to 
 Ephraim. When Eli was judge there seem, from the 
 prominence of Shiloh as the national shrine, to be signs of 
 a tendency towards national unity. This was deepened 
 under Samuel, until it found its final expression in the 
 national selection of Saul as king. Toward the latter years 
 of the reign of Saul the tribe of Judah seems to have 
 transferred its allegiance to David. On the death of Saul 
 the difference between the North and South became open 
 war. Later the Northern tribes accepted David as their 
 king. The union of Israel achieved by his father, Solomon 
 endeavoured to consolidate by the erection of the temple 
 at Jerusalem. The ease with which the arrogant folly of 
 Rehoboam broke it up, shows that the process of unification 
 had not gone very deep nor been very thorough. 
 
 The original difference between the two sections of the 
 people, due to the predominantly pastoral character of the 
 tribe of Judah, in contrast with the widely spread agriculture 
 of Ephraim and Manasseh, and the tribes that possessed 
 the pre-eminently fertile plain of Jezreel, was accentuated 
 
THE HISTORY OF THE SAMARITANS 27 
 
 during Solomon's reign, and after it, by a religious difference. 
 In the South, on account of the presence in their territory of 
 the temple — the splendid national shrine — the priesthood 
 occupied a position of influence which the priests of the 
 Northern High Places, even those of Bethel or of Dan, 
 never had. On the other hand, the prophets in the Northern 
 Kingdom had a political power which they had not in the 
 South. Through their schools, the prophets could arrange 
 concerted action all over the country. It would seem that 
 these prophetic guilds carried organisation so far as to have 
 a sanhedrin of elders for themselves (2 Kings vi. 32). There 
 was, however, nothing of this in the South, the House of David 
 reigned with priestly and prophetic sanction, and moreover 
 had the prestige due to age and to the memory of the glory 
 of David and the splendour of Solomon. In the North the 
 violent changes by which dynasty succeeded dynasty, 
 allowed none of them to become rooted in the traditions of 
 the people, and there the kingly office never had the position 
 to balance the influence of the prophets. All this tended 
 to produce a radical difference between the two branches of 
 the Israelite nation. In the North the religion was essentially 
 prophetism, while the ritual and consequently the priesthood 
 occupied a strictly subordinate position. In the South the 
 king was a sacrosanct person, he was the Lord's anointed, 
 and the prophets affected the course of national politics not 
 directly but as advisers of the king or princes. The High 
 Priest, as presiding over the splendid shrine on Mount Zion, 
 had a position second only to the king. In the North there 
 was no such dignitary ; and further the king in Samaria had 
 none of the sanctity of the Lord's anointed. There was 
 no influence in the religious field to balance that of the 
 prophets. Under Hezekiah and Josiah, when the Northern 
 Kingdom had fallen, there certainly was an assimilation of 
 the religious position of the Northern Kingdom to that of 
 Judah. The High Places of Samaria were destroyed, their 
 altars desecrated, and their priests slain, and all the remnant 
 of Israel acknowledged the temple on Mount Zion as the 
 national hearth. This assimilation was but short-lived ; 
 with the death of Josiah after the battle of Megiddo, all 
 this came to an end. The sovereigns that followed in the 
 
28 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Southern Kingdom had little religious character and even 
 less influence by which to maintain this assimilation, even 
 if they had been in sympathy with it. 
 
 After the death of Josiah till the arrival of Zerubbabel 
 and of Joshua the High Priest in Palestine, during the 
 reign of Darius Hystaspis, we know nothing of Samaria or 
 of the Samaritans, These two had come from Babylon 
 authorised by Darius to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. 
 As we have already seen, the Samaritans approached 
 the Jews with an offer to assist them in their work ; but 
 Zerubbabel rejected the offered help. The leaders of the 
 Northern Israelites identify themselves with the Assyrian 
 colonists. The rejection of the proffered assistance by 
 Zerubbabel was directly at variance with Josiah's compre- 
 hensive invitation to the inhabitants of Northern Palestine 
 to join in celebrating the Passover, and was a continuance 
 of the feud in which Ephraim envied Judah and Judah 
 vexed Ephraim. This treatment roused the wrath of the 
 Samaritans, and they informed the Persian local governors 
 that the Jews intended to rebel. Certainly Zerubbabel's 
 Davidic descent, taken in connection with some of the 
 statements of the prophets Haggai and Zechariah, made 
 the accusation at least plausible. After something like 
 three-quarters of a century, first Ezra arrived at Jerusalem 
 and then Nehemiah. At this point of time the Samaritans 
 were under the governorship of a countryman of their own, 
 Sanballat the Horonite, that is a native of Beth-Horon. 
 His name is Assyrian and means " San (the Moon god) 
 revivifies." This fact does not prove him not to be a 
 genuine Israelite, any more than does the fact that 
 Zerubbabel was also known by the Assyrian or Babylonian 
 name Sheshbazzar, disproves his claim to Davidic descent. 
 
 By the time that Ezra and Nehemiah arrived in Jerusalem 
 the feelings occasioned by Zerubbabel's refusal of the help of 
 the Samaritans appear largely to have evaporated. The 
 relations between the inhabitants of Judea and those dwell- 
 ing in the territories of the Ten Tribes are of the friendliest 
 description. There had been numerous intermarriages, a 
 proof that the claim to Israelite descent was tacitly allowed. 
 The fact that Eliashib had prepared a chamber for Tobiah 
 
THE HISTORY OF THE SAMARITANS 29 
 
 in the temple, showed that Tobiah had claimed to be an 
 Israelite and to have the right to worship at the central 
 shrine, and that the High Priest had allowed both those 
 claims. It is hardly possible that the term "Ammonite" 
 applied to Tobiah was other than a nickname — a worshipper 
 of Moloch would be little likely to desire to be called by a 
 name which means "JHWH is Good." Such nicknames 
 have been common in all ages ; thus Ludovico Sforza, Duke 
 of Milan, in the end of the fifteenth century was called " II 
 Moro," not because he was a Moor but because of his dark 
 complexion. One may be permitted to doubt how far the 
 excessive zeal of Ezra and Nehemiah was in accordance with 
 the Divine plan, and how far it was due to the narrow 
 legalist position which degenerated, some centuries later, 
 into Pharisaism. 
 
 These marriages, into which so many of the leading Jews 
 had entered, were declared by Ezra to be illegal. He 
 apparently grounded this decision on the warning in Exod. 
 xxxiv. i6, addressed to the Israelites, in prospect of entering 
 Canaan, against taking the daughters of the land to their 
 sons to wife, lest they should lead them to become idolaters. 
 Those with whom these marriages had been contracted were 
 neither Canaanites nor idolaters. This narrow interpretation 
 of the Mosaic warning led to the religious schism which, 
 perpetuated to the present day, has separated the Jews from 
 the Samaritans. One instance of these intermarriages 
 deserves special attention. In the book of Nehemiah 
 (xiii. 28) we are told that " one of the sons of Joiada, the 
 son of Eliashib the High Priest, was son-in-law to Sanballat 
 the Horonite " ; Nehemiah adds, " therefore I chased him 
 from me." Josephus {Ant. XI. vii. 2; viii. 2) says that a 
 nephew of this man whom Nehemiah chased from his 
 presence, a hundred years later, married the daughter of 
 Sanballat, the Governor of Samaria; this nephew Josephus 
 calls Manasseh, and his wife Nicaso. From the Assouan 
 papyri there is, to a certain extent, a confirmation of the 
 Biblical narrative, as they contain an appeal for assistance 
 against their Egyptian oppressors addressed to the " sons of 
 Sanballat," who occupy a position of influence in Samaria. 
 This was in the reign of Darius Nothus. Josephus further 
 
30 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 relates that the elders of Jerusalem, indignant that a brother 
 of the High Priest should marry a foreigner, " commanded 
 Manasseh either to divorce his wife or not approach the 
 altar." He adds, "There was now a great disturbance in 
 Jerusalem, because many of the priests and Levites were 
 entangled in these marriages." It seems an improbability, 
 which amounts almost to an impossibility, that after the 
 solemn public repudiation of such marriages only a century 
 before, the practice should so soon become general again. 
 Josephus makes Jaddus (Jaddua) — the brother of this 
 Manasseh — contemporary with Alexander the Great, the 
 nephew of a man who was of marriageable age more than a 
 hundred years before. This is not absolutely impossible, but 
 from the fact that the High Priesthood followed the line of 
 primogeniture, it is extremely improbable. Had Josephus 
 been careful of chronology his statements would have 
 deserved greater attention. He, however, is vague and 
 inaccurate to an extraordinary degree. According to him, 
 Nehemiah is the cup-bearer not to Artaxerxes but to his 
 father Xerxes. By Xerxes, Nehemiah is sent to Jerusalem 
 in the twenty-fifth year of his reign ; but Xerxes was 
 assassinated in his twentieth regnal year. Moreover 
 Josephus drops a whole century of history, making Darius 
 Codomannus the successor of Artaxerxes Longimanus. The 
 chronology of the Talmud, in this instance, is preferable to 
 that of Josephus ; it makes, not Jaddua, but Simeon hatz- 
 Tzaddiq the contemporary of Alexander the Great, and the 
 interview with the conqueror, which Josephus describes as 
 taking place with Jaddua, the Talmud assigns to Simeon 
 (Yoma, 6(ja). As the grandson of Eliashib whom Nehemiah 
 drove from his presence is not named, the name Manasseh, 
 which Josephus gives to his hypothetical nephew, may be 
 assumed for the sake of convenience to designate the son-in- 
 law of Sanballat. It seems not improbable that the consent 
 which Josephus says he got from Darius Codomannus to 
 build a temple on Mount Gerizim, he actually got from 
 Darius Nothus. The Israelites of Upper Egypt, when they 
 appeal to the " sons of Sanballat," do so as to co-religionists ; 
 hence the worship of JHWH must have been established in 
 Samaria. Assuming that this was the case, then the worship 
 
THE HISTORY OF THE SAMARITANS 31 
 
 set up by Manasseh would be in complete agreement with 
 that in Jerusalem ; Mount Gerizim would repeat exactly the 
 ritual of Mount Zion.^ 
 
 When the Hellenic Empire succeeded that of Persia there 
 was comparatively little change in the political status of the 
 subject peoples. Under the Greeks as under the Persians 
 they occupied a position of semi-independence. It is true 
 that many cities became hellenised and adopted Greek 
 constitutions, and also that the Diadochi (the successors of 
 Alexander) had a liking for founding cities to which they 
 gave their own names ; these cities also were Greek. All 
 this tended to spread the denationalising and hellenising 
 influence of the Greek domination. This gradually sapped 
 the independence of the subject peoples. At iirst Samaria 
 seems to have fallen less under Hellenic influence than did 
 Judea. There is a story told by Quintus Curtius (iv. 8) that 
 while Alexander was in Egypt the Samaritans rebelled and 
 burned alive Andromachus, the governor he had appointed 
 over Coele-Syria. He hurried from Egypt and inflicted 
 condign punishment on those guilty. As there is no trace 
 of this in Josephus, although it was an occurrence which he 
 would have delighted to record, as it reflected discredit on 
 the Samaritans, and showed them as out of favour with the 
 Macedonian conqueror, one may venture to doubt the truth 
 of the statement. An assertion of Eusebius, as some inter- 
 pret it, would indicate that Alexander's vengeance went 
 further than could be deduced from what Curtius says ; his 
 statement in his Chronicle, as in the Armenian version, is, 
 " Demetrius, King of Asia, called Poliorcetes, took the city 
 of the Samaritans which Perdiccas had built ; " this implies 
 that the city had been wholly destroyed by Alexander. The 
 whole transaction is thus liable to doubt. 
 
 There is more evidence of the relation of the Samaritans 
 to the Jews in the similarity of the treatment meted out to 
 them by Ptolemaeus Soter. Josephus relates that when he 
 
 1 That Josephus is practically without any historical value in regard 
 to the history of the Jews under the later Persian Empire, we shall have 
 occasion to show later. Chap. IV., pp. in, 112. References in Rabbinic 
 sources are not of much greater value. According to th^m, Darius 
 and Cyrus were generals of Belshazzar, and Darius the Persian was the 
 son of Esther. 
 
32 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 had taken Jerusalem he removed to Egypt not only Jewish 
 but Samaritan captives and settled them there {Ant. XII. i. i). 
 The notices of the Samaritans during the reigns of the earlier 
 Diadochi are connected with military operations, and as the 
 city of Samaria lay out of the line of march ordinarily 
 followed by the Macedonian armies, they are rare. It 
 became of more military importance in the time of Antiochus 
 the Great. Polybius relates that after having captured 
 Rabbath-Ammon and left a garrison in it, he sent Hippo- 
 lochus with five thousand men to occupy positions about 
 Samaria, " that they might take measures for the protection 
 of all who acknowledged his authority " ; this occurred in the 
 first Syrian campaign of Antiochus (Polyb. v. 71). In a 
 fragment from a subsequent book it is related of his second 
 Palestinian campaign that, having overcome Scopas, Antio- 
 chus recovered Samaria and certain cities on the east of 
 Jordan (Polyb. xvi. 39, quoted in Josephus' Ant. XII. iii. 3). 
 From this it is obvious that Samaria, no more than Judea, 
 was a factor of any importance in the struggle between the 
 Lagids and the Seleucids for the supremacy in South- Western 
 Asia ; notwithstanding that the lengthened sieges it had 
 endured during the earlier periods of its history might have 
 led to the city being appreciated as a place of strength. 
 From all this nothing can be learned of the actual condition 
 of the Samaritan people or their relation to the Jews in the 
 matter of religion. 
 
 The removal of Samaritans to Egypt by Ptolemaeus 
 Lagi, along with the captives of the Jews, gave an oppor- 
 tunity for their rivalry being carried into the diaspora of 
 both peoples. When by the order of Ptolemaeus Phila- 
 delphus the Septuagint translation was executed, there was, 
 so far as Jewish tradition goes, no mention of the Samaritans. 
 There seems, from statements in the Fathers, however, to 
 have been a translation of the Samaritan Pentateuch referred 
 to by them as the Samariticon. 
 
 The principal occurrence in the controversy in Egypt 
 between the Jews and the Samaritans is the dispute alleged 
 to have been held between representatives of the two sections 
 of Israel before Ptolemaeus Philometer, as recounted 
 respectively by Josephus and Abu'l Fath. According to 
 
THE HISTORY OF THE SAMARITANS 33 
 
 the former historian the Jewish representative, Andronicus 
 the son of Meshullam, argued the Jewish case so convincingly 
 that the Samaritans were never heard but were put to death 
 out of hand. The account given by Abu'l.Fath of course 
 represents the discussion having a totally different conclusion ; 
 according to the Samaritan authority the discussion took 
 place on the occasion of the proposed translation of the Law 
 into Greek. 
 
 With the accession of Antiochus Epiphanes, and the 
 ambitious projects he formed for the conquest of Egypt, 
 Palestine assumed a new prominence. This was increased 
 by the efforts of Epiphanes to coerce the Jews into abandoning 
 their faith. Our principal authority for the history of the 
 Samaritans at this time is necessarily Josephus. His evidence 
 is always to be taken with a reservation as his bias against 
 the Samaritans is unconcealed. This appears very markedly 
 in his account of the position taken up by the Samaritans 
 during the persecution of the Jews by Antiochus Epiphanes. 
 Josephus declares it to be the general policy of the Samaritans 
 to assert themselves Israelites whenever the Jews were in 
 favour with the Imperial power, whatever it was, to which 
 both races happened at the time to be subject ; but that 
 whenever the Jews were out of favour, the Samaritans denied 
 that they had any connection with them, but were the 
 descendants of the Assyrian colonists. According to Josephus 
 (Ant. XII. V. 5), when the Antiochian persecution began 
 the Samaritans sent an epistle to Antiochus in which they 
 addressed him as " God manifest " and claimed to be 
 Sidonians, " the Sidonians living in Shechem." It is to be 
 noted that in his account of the Samaritan negotiations with 
 Alexander, Josephus says that they declared themselves " to 
 be Hebrews, who were called ' the Sidonians of Shechem.' " 
 It is possible they made the same addition to the claim to 
 be Sidonians in this epistle. They explained their observ- 
 ance of certain Jewish rites, such as the keeping of the 
 Sabbath, and the special sacrifices which they offered on 
 Mount Gerizim, by plagues which had befallen their fore- 
 fathers. They made the assertion that the temple on Mount 
 Gerizim had not been dedicated, and that the deity to whom 
 it was erected was unnamed. It is somewhat confirmatory of 
 
 C 
 
34 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the authenticity of this letter that its contents do not quite 
 agree with the account given of the general Samaritan 
 statements by Josephus. He asserts that the Samaritans 
 claimed to be descendants of the Medes and the Persians, 
 while in the epistle a different origin is claimed — that they 
 are Sidonians. The assertion that the deity to whom their 
 temple had been erected was unnamed, may be a reference 
 to the incommunicable name of JHWH. Their further 
 request to be allowed to call it the Temple of Zeus 
 Hellenius may mean an identification of Zeus, the supreme 
 God of the Greeks, with JHWH. This was quite in accordance 
 with Hellenic modes of thought, as may be seen in Herodotus, 
 who identifies the various members of the Egyptian Pantheon 
 with the different deities "of Olympus. The title given to 
 Zeus — Hellenius, "the Grecian," implies some such philo- 
 sophical identification. The temptation was great to escape 
 by any subterfuge from the savage persecution which the 
 Jews were enduring at the hands of Epiphanes. They 
 probably continued their ritual observances according to the 
 Law; only when speaking to Greeks these sacrifices were 
 declared to be offered to Zeus, while among themselves they 
 acknowledged them as offered to JHWH. 
 
 As a result of their politic action, the Samaritans were 
 undisturbed during the Maccabsean struggle. While the 
 Samaritans took no active part in the conflict, they seem 
 to have harassed the Jewish inhabitants of Galilee at the 
 instigation of the Seleucid rulers. Apollonius when he went 
 " to fight against Israel " " drew a great host out of Samaria," 
 if we may credit i Maccabees iii. lo. When the Jews 
 had, under the Hasmoneans achieved independence, they at 
 first respected the neutrality of the Samaritans.^ With the 
 
 ' Indeed one passage (2 Maccabees xv. i) represents the 
 Samaritans as standing to Judas in a relation of at least benevolent 
 neutrality — " Nicanor hearing that Judas and his company were in the 
 strong places about Samaria " (places under Samaria), etc. Judas could 
 not have occupied these places without at least the connivance of the 
 Samaritans. Certainly historical accuracy is not a strong point with 
 this author, still this representation intimates that the occupation of 
 places in the Samaritan province with the consent of the inhabitants 
 was not inconceivable. The Samaritans were thus not at enmity with 
 the Jews at that time. 
 
THE HISTORY OF THE SAMARITANS 35 
 
 accession of John Hyrcanus this policy was changed; when 
 the death of Antiochus Sidetes set him free from fear of 
 interference from the side of Syria, fired by ambition he 
 invaded Samaria and burned the temple on Mount Gerizim, 
 which as stated above had been rededicated. Josephus, when 
 he refers to this event in the introduction to the Wars, says 
 that Hyrcanus, besides capturing Sikima (Shechem) and 
 Garizin (Gerizim), subdued " the race of the Cuthaeans " ; a 
 statement that would imply that at all events for a time 
 Samaria was incorporated with the kingdom of Hyrcanus. 
 To what extent they conformed to the Southern ritual cannot 
 be known ; even when they had no temple of their own, they 
 do not seem to have worshipped in the temple in Jerusalem. 
 Probably this state of matters continued during the reign of 
 Alexander Jannseus and his widow — civil incorporation with 
 Judea but religious independence. It is a singular fact 
 that nothwithstanding the fierce invasion of Hyrcanus, the 
 Samaritan annals do not hold him up to execration, but 
 declare that he^^f enounced his Judaism and became a 
 Samaritan. 
 
 The position taken up by Galilee and its inhabitants 
 in regard to the Jews and their religious revolt against 
 Epiphanes is somewhat enigmatical. Judging by the policy 
 pursued by the Sargonid kings of Assyria, the deportation 
 of the inhabitants , of Galilee attributed to Tiglath-Pileser 
 would only extend to the more prominent personages ; the 
 majority of the people who were left would be Israelites. 
 The part they played in the Maccabaean War was strictly 
 subordinate. After Judas had conquered army after army 
 and general after general of Antiochus, only then do- the 
 Galilaeans manifest their sympathy with the Jews by inform- 
 ing Judas of the machinations and intended hostility of 
 those of Tyre and Sidon and of the " foreigners resident 
 in Galilee," hot allogeneis Galilaias. Hostilities had begun 
 before Simon, with three thousand picked men, arrived on 
 the scene and put the enemies of Israel to flight and 
 released the Jews, who had been made captives (Jos., Ant. 
 XII. viii. I, 2). Thereafter Galilee formed part of the 
 dominion of the Asmonaeans first, and then of the Herodians. 
 This maintained their political union with Jerusalem, to 
 
36 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 which also it would seem their religious allegiance had 
 Already been given. 
 
 The historical background of this has probably to be 
 traced back to Assyrian times. After Tiglath-Pileser's 
 deportation of the leading inhabitants and the intrusion 
 of colonists from other parts of the Assyrian Empire, 
 Galilee would be placed under a separate governor. This 
 must have been continued under the Persians, as Sanballat 
 was governor only of Samaria ; a state of matters which 
 remained unaltered under the Greek domination, alike of 
 the Lagids and the Seleucids. As Josiah had assumed 
 the rule over all Israel when the Assyrian Empire fell 
 into decrepitude, by destroying the local High Places and 
 requiring the people to offer sacrifice in the temple at 
 Jerusalem, he united them religiously with Judea. Jews 
 came as colonists, attracted not only by the fertility of the 
 province but also by the fact that in Galilee, as they would 
 not be in Samaria, they would be surrounded by their 
 co-religionists. This process continued under the Herodians. 
 Joseph, the putative father of our Lord, is an example of 
 this. In the Roman War against the Jews under Vespasian, 
 Galilee is regarded as so much a stronghold of Judaism 
 that it is assailed first by the Roman Generalissimo. Every 
 town became a fortress and only surrendered after a pro- 
 longed siege. 
 
 As the province of Galilee was under a separate rule 
 from Judea, the Israelites resident in it might readily escape 
 the fury of Antiochus. When the temple had been 
 desecrated by " the abomination of desolation '' being set up, 
 the only worship open to the Israelites was that of the 
 synagogue ; consequently their rites could easily be concealed. 
 They would have no motive to obtrude their faith on their 
 Greek rulers, and so lead them to persecute. This may 
 explain at once the Judaism of the Israelites of Galilee 
 and their escape from persecution. 
 
 The fact that they had those who were Jews by religion 
 not only to the south of them in Judea but also to the north 
 in Galilee, makes the resolution of the Samaritans to main- 
 tain their religious independence all the more marked. 
 
 It is more diiificult to settle what was the precise relation 
 
THE HISTORY OF THE SAMARITANS 37 
 
 of the Samaritans to Judea in the troublous times which 
 followed. The quarrel between the two brothers, John 
 Hyrcanus II., and Aristobulus, brought in the Romans, who 
 would appear to have removed Samaria from under the 
 dominion of the Jewish High Priest (Jos., Ant. XIV. iv. 4; 
 Wars, I. vii. 7). The sympathies of the Samaritans seem 
 to have been more with the Romans than with the Jews, 
 as is seen by the fact that when Alexander the son of 
 Aristobulus escaped from the custody in Rome to which 
 Pompey had consigned him, and having invaded Palestine and 
 seized the government had commenced to slay such Romans 
 as fell into his hands ; the rest betook themselves to Mount 
 Gerizim where they were besieged by Alexander. The 
 Romans clearly thought that they had more chance of safety 
 among the Samaritans than among the Jews. Their resist- 
 ance was successful as Gabinius raised the siege by defeating 
 Alexander. During this period the Samaritans were both 
 politically and religiously separate from Judea (Jos., Ant. 
 XIV. vi. 2). 
 
 Under Herod, Samaria was once more united politically 
 to Judea. The efforts he put forth to ingratiate himself 
 prove that they did not relish being subject to any authority 
 which had its seat in Jerusalem. To lead them to appreciate 
 his rule and take kindly to it, Herod built a forum in Samaria, 
 the remains of which are still standing, also a street of 
 columns, the shafts of many of which still testify to the fact. 
 He changed the name of the city to Sebaste, in honour of 
 Augustus, in order to retain the favour of the ruler of the 
 world. To curry favour further with Augustus, and at the 
 same time please the Samaritans, he built a temple to the 
 Emperor in Samaria. It is not impossible that Herod also 
 rebuilt the temple on Mount Gerizim which had been burned 
 by Hyrcanus. Although this is not recorded by Josephus, a 
 reason may be found for his silence in his special hatred of 
 the Samaritans as the rehgious opponents of Israel. There 
 are several indications in the Gospels that in the days of our 
 Lord the temple on Mount Gerizim was standing. When 
 Herod's dominions were divided at his death, Archelaus 
 received Samaria along with Judea. On the deposition of 
 Archelaus, when Judea became a Roman province, Samaria 
 
38 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 still remained united with it in all matters of civil government. 
 In regard to religion and worship the Samaritans always 
 kept themselves apart from the Jews. The relation in which 
 the two peoples stood to each other may be seen in the 
 conversation which our Lord had with the Samaritan 
 woman. Her assertion, however, that the Jews have no 
 dealings with the Samaritans, is not to be taken to the foot 
 of the letter. In the tract Masseketh Kuthim^ in which are 
 collected the various Talmudic dicta concerning the 
 " Cuthseans," it may be seen that they are regarded as closer 
 to the Israelites than the Gentiles. There are singular and 
 somewhat contradictory restrictions in commercial transac- 
 tions ; while the Jews might not sell to Samaritans sheep 
 for shearing, they might sell them if the sheep were to be 
 slaughtered. One instance of restriction is due to the 
 different way in which even in relatively ancient times the 
 Samaritans reckoned the date of the celebration of the 
 " Feast of Unleavened Bread." " We may not buy bread 
 from a Samaritan baker at the end of Passover, until after 
 three bakings." This period would need to be considerably 
 increased now, as the date of the Samaritan Passover may 
 •be a month after that of the Jews. In religious matters the 
 Jews acknowledged the Samaritans in some relations ; though 
 the Jews would not receive Sin-Offerings or Guilt-Offerings 
 from the Samaritans, they might accept Vows and Freewill- 
 Offerings from them. More remarkable is the fact that the 
 Jews held that a Samaritan might legitimately circumcise a 
 Jewish child. This tract maintains the embargo which Ezra 
 laid upon marriages with the Samaritans. A singular 
 evidence of the difference put between the Samaritans and 
 the Gentiles is quoted by Montgomery from Aboda Zara{The 
 Samaritans, p. 199) : " An Israelite who has his hair cut by a 
 Gentile must look in a mirror, but if by a Samaritan he need 
 not look in a mirror," lest the Gentile barber should cut his 
 throat, a thing he could trust the Samaritan not to do. In 
 civil matters while the Jews and Samaritans were united 
 under the same Roman governor they each had a separate 
 " Sanhedrin." The Romans wisely permitted to the races sub- 
 
 ' It has been translated by Dr Montgomery with illustrations from 
 other parts of the Talmud {The Samaritans, pp. 197-203). 
 
THE HISTORY OF THE SAMARITANS 39 
 
 ject to them a very considerable amount of self-government. 
 It is likely, that as the Jewish High Priest presided over the 
 Jewish Sanhedrin, so the High Priest of the Samaritans 
 presided over their Sanhedrin. When Pilate slew a large 
 number of Samaritans, who, seduced by the promises of a 
 fanatic prophet to show them the long concealed sacred 
 vessels assembled in arms in the village of Tirathana, with a 
 view to ascending Mount Gerizim, the Samaritan Sanhedrin 
 made a successful appeal to Rome against him, and occa- 
 sioned his recall from the government of Palestine. 
 
 The political attitude of the Samaritans during the 
 principate of Nero, when the Jewish revolt against the 
 Romans began, is difficult to understand. Florus and the 
 other Roman governors who, by Josephus's account, goaded 
 the Jews into rebellion, appear on the whole to have been 
 favourable to the Samaritans. Certainly under Felix they 
 seem to have been restless and quarrelsome (Tac, Ann. xii. 
 54), though it would seem that the governor was in part 
 instigator. When the Jews actually rebelled against the 
 Romans, the Samaritans do not appear to have acted at 
 all in concert with them. On the other hand they do not 
 seem to have manifested any hostility towards them, when 
 by doing so they might have hampered the Jews and so 
 rendered valuable assistance to the Romans, who would 
 not have been slow to reward it. Yet while Vespasian 
 was engaged in the conquest of Galilee, they assumed what 
 Vespasian regarded as a threatening attitude, so much so 
 that he sent Cerealis against them. They had assembled 
 in great numbers on Mount Gerizim, but they were in 
 want of water and had not provided themselves with food ; 
 yet when Cerealis, after a blockade of some length, advanced 
 up the mountain and offered them terms they would not 
 submit. The whole transaction has the appearance of being 
 a hideous blunder. The fact that they had not seen to 
 it that their cisterns were full, and that they had not a 
 sufficiency of provisions, seems to disprove any hostile 
 purpose. It wou|d probably be some irregular religious 
 gathering. Whatever the real meaning of their assembly, 
 the end was tragic. When they would not listen to his 
 overtures, Cerealis attacked them and slew eleven thousand 
 
40 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 and six hundred. It might be that they could not make 
 Cerealis understand their object, and that he, acting on 
 the maxim that seems to have guided the Romans in their 
 dealings with those they called barbarians, " When in doubt 
 kill," slew all he found on Mount Gerizim (Jos., Wars, III. 
 vii. 32). He seems to have destroyed Shechem in the course 
 of his operations, as Vespasian afterwards rebuilt it and 
 called it after his own name Flavia Neapolis, from which is 
 derived the modern name Nablus. In the days of Justin 
 Martyr, who was born there, it appears to have become 
 a purely Gentile city. After the massacre which they 
 sustained at the hands of Cerealis, the Samaritans do not 
 seem to have again come under the suspicion of the Romans 
 during the course of the Jewish War. So far as may be 
 deduced from the action of Vespasian in regard to the 
 rebuilding of Shechem, the Samaritans appear to have been 
 left at peace during the subsequent reign of the Flavian 
 dynasty. 
 
 For the later history of the Samaritans under the Roman 
 domination, the student has no longer the guidance of 
 Tacitus or Josephus, however unreliable they may in some 
 respects be, the one from ignorance, the other from national 
 prejudice. After the assassination of Domitian, with which 
 the Twelve Ccesars of Suetonius ends, the history of the 
 Roman Empire has come down to us mainly in the short 
 rhetorical biographies of the emperors, to be found in 
 the Augustan Histories, and in the curt narratives of 
 Dion Cassius — shortened in the case of the books relating 
 to this period into the meagre epitomes of Xiphilinus. 
 Illustrious as were the reigns of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, 
 Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius, from the unsatis- 
 factory nature of the authorities which alone survive 
 to us, little authentic is known of the history of the 
 Empire during their rule. During this period, which 
 Gibbon deems to have been a specially happy one for the 
 inhabitants of the Roman Empire, although there are but 
 the most cursory notices of the Samaritans, it may be 
 assumed that they shared in the prosperity around them. 
 Although the Samaritans could scarcely fail to be affected 
 by the war occasioned by the claim of Bar-Cochba to be 
 
THE HISTORY OF THE SAMARITANS 41 
 
 Messiah, it yet can hardly have been to the extent repre- 
 sented by the Samaritan annals as will be exhibited in 
 a subsequent chapter. Among the remains of buildings 
 which may be traced on the top of Mount Gerizim, there 
 are indications, as suggested in Chapter I., of a circular 
 temple probably of the age of Hadrian, who had a favour 
 for that shape. As it would be erected to some deity of 
 the Olympian Pantheon, this would excite the fanaticism 
 of the Samaritans, unless the deity were Zeus, and they 
 like their ancestors in days of Antiochus, by identifying 
 Zeus with JHWH contrived to adjust themselves to their 
 circumstances. At the same time it must be noted that 
 the Samaritan Joshua tells of a terrible persecution which 
 the Samaritans endured at the hands of Adrinus (Hadrian). 
 During the rule of the Antonines, when so many splendid 
 synagogues were raised by the Jews, it is probable that 
 the Samaritans were left at peace. The persecutions which 
 Abu'l Fath records as befalling the Samaritans during the 
 reign of Commodus are by no means improbable. Lampridius 
 in his life of him represents Heliogabalus introducing into 
 the temple of the God whose name he bore, Samaritanorum 
 religiones. As a Syrian he knew enough for his compre- 
 hensive syncretism to embrace within its compass not only 
 the Jews and Christians but also the Samaritans. 
 
 There seems, however, no doubt that the Romans 
 differentiated between the Jews and the Samaritans to the 
 disadvantage of the latter ; while the Jews were permitted 
 to perform the rite of circumcision, in the case of the 
 Samaritans the rite was brought under the sweep of an 
 old edict against mutilation, i.e., castration, and so forbidden 
 to them under severe penalties. The evidence of Origen 
 {Contra Celsum, ii. 13) indicates that it was mainly because 
 of the rite of circumcision that the Samaritans were perse- 
 cuted ; the rite was permitted to the Jews but not to them. 
 The fact that they sustained so many persecutions on 
 account of the various rites of their religion proves their 
 zeal, and further evidences the strenuous hold they retained 
 on their faith. 
 
 With the Christianisation of the Empire which followed 
 the conversion of Constantine, a change for the worse came 
 
42 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 over the affairs of the Samaritans. In the persecutions 
 which they had endured ^t the hands of Imperial Rome, 
 there was always a political element, but the bitterer element 
 of religious fanaticism was now added. The Church, which 
 had so long been persecuted, now assumed the role of 
 persecutor. Constantine himself did not persecute, possibly 
 as his own conversion had been largely the result of political 
 expediency, he had not the fanatic rage against those who 
 differed from him, which filled the hearts of the bishops 
 who had tasted the pains of persecution. He had seen 
 the evil wrought by the persecutions of Diocletian, and was 
 not likely to renew them. His son Constantius, who is 
 called by Abu'l Fath Tahus, renewed the edict against 
 circumcision. To this period would Dr Montgomery assign 
 the episode of Garmun and Baba Rabba, although from 
 the confused state of the chronology of the Samaritan annals 
 it may be placed either a little earlier or a little later. 
 The story as told in the Samaritan book of Joshua is as 
 follows : When the eldest son of Nathanael, the High Priest, 
 was born, he knew it was specially incumbent on him to 
 have his son circumcised on the eighth day. It was then 
 the Samaritan custom to perform the ceremony before the 
 community assembled in the synagogue, but it was illegal 
 by Imperial law to do so, and the penalty was death. 
 Nathanael determined that the child should be carried to 
 a cave, and that there before a select company he should 
 be circumcised. In order not to attract attention, Nathanael 
 sent a maid-servant with the infant in a basket to the cave. 
 Garmun, whom Abu'l Fath calls " prefect," met the girl 
 and said to her, " Do what thou intendest and fear not." 
 She informed Nathanael, and when he heard he was afraid, 
 but said, " Let us commit the matter to God." When the 
 girl was returning, again Garmun met her and said : " Bring 
 him up in peace, my girl." Nathanael, afraid of what the 
 prefect would do, went to offer him a bribe. Garmun, 
 however, would only take three pence, -and he took these 
 fpr the singular reason, lest he should be thought to be 
 forming a plot against the High Priest. Dr Montgomery 
 thinks that this Garmun was not a prefect but a bishop, 
 Germanus, who, as Bishop of Neapolis, took part in several 
 
THE HISTORY OF THE SAMARITANS 43 
 
 of the many Church councils of the reign of Constantius. 
 The story indicates how the decree against circumcision 
 was rendered ineffective through the connivance of those 
 who, though government servants, did not believe in persecu- 
 tion. It also shows how constant the Samaritans were to 
 their faith. 
 
 From the Church Fathers there is evidence in regard to 
 the doctrinal position of the Samaritans. Although his 
 testimony is not always satisfactory as not always accurate, 
 Epiphanius testifies to the existence of the Samaritans as 
 a sect, and gives some of the doctrines which he assumed 
 that they taught. ^ He mentions several heretical sects that 
 sprang from them'. Later Jerome notes the habits of the 
 Samaritans in regard to several matters, as for instance 
 that they, like the Jews, shun contact with Christians (in 
 Esaiam Ixv. 3) ; he regards them as schismatics for their 
 reverence of Gerizim in preference to Jerusalem (in Esaiam 
 ix. 2). He draws conclusions from the form of the letter 
 " tau " as written by them (in Ezechielem ix. 4). As 
 Jerome was for many years resident in Palestine, and as 
 a Biblical scholar was curious to learn everything that had 
 any bearing on Scriptu're, his testimony as to the Samaritans 
 and their tenets is of peculiar value. He says nothing 
 of the Samaritans being persecuted in his day for their 
 religion, or forbidden the rite of circumcision. It would 
 seem that at that time the decrees against them had 
 been allowed to fall into desuetude ; or perhaps they were 
 held over the heads of the Samaritans in terrorem in order 
 that the magistrates might exact bakhshish. Still, in 
 that case, some reference might have been expected to the 
 fact that they were under the ban of the Empire, if things 
 were so. 
 
 With the permanent division of the Roman Empire into 
 Eastern and Western, and still more when the Empire of 
 the West fell, matters assumed a yet worse aspect for the 
 Samaritans. While the Empire was still nominally Roman, 
 it really had become Byzantine. Under the new regime 
 the Samaritans were subjected to a grinding but irregular 
 •persecution. These irritating acts of oppression, without 
 seriously weakening them, excited riots which at times became 
 
44 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 important enough to be designated rebellions. While under 
 Theodosius the Great the claim to exemption from the pay- 
 ment of certain duties was allowed to the Samaritans and 
 the Jews, and in general the scales of justice were held even 
 in any contests between the Samaritans and their Christian 
 neighbours, the reign of the second Theodosius saw the 
 imposition of new and galling disabilities. Under the 
 Theodosian Code the rights of testamentary disposition 
 are in the case of the Jews and Samaritans limited, much 
 as it was with the Roman Catholics in Ireland a couple 
 of centuries ago ; they were not allowed to disinherit a 
 child who had become a Christian, while the penalty of 
 death was incurred by any Samaritan who induced a 
 Christian to become a Samaritan. In order to limit the 
 sect the more effectively, the Samaritans were not permitted 
 to build new synagogues or even rebuild old ones. Along 
 with Jews, pagans, and heretics, the Samaritans were deprived 
 of the right to hold civic appointments. 
 
 These harassing regulations were not consistently applied ; 
 under one governor they would be as a dead letter, while 
 under his successor only abundant bakhshish saved the 
 community from suffering their utmost rigour. As was 
 natural such treatment produced, as we have said, frequent 
 riots. Quarrels arose on other accounts also ; Joseph, whose 
 tomb is near Nablus, was a saint not only of the Samaritans 
 and the Jews but also of the Christians. In their mania 
 for getting sacred remains for their churches, the Christians 
 wished to remove the bones of the Patriarch. The 
 Samaritans resisted this sacrilege ; if we are to believe 
 Abu'l Fath, they were helped in their efforts by miraculous 
 portents. Towards the end of the fifth century of our era, 
 in the reign of Zeno, the Samaritans rose in rebellion, and 
 after massacring many of the Christian community, set up 
 as king a certain robber named Justasa. At first they 
 were so far successful that they captured Csesarea, and 
 after the massacre of the Christian community there, 
 celebrated a triumph. They were, however, soon overthrown 
 by the Imperial forceps. As a punishment for their rebellion 
 the Samaritans werfe_3eprived of access to Mount Gerizim, 
 and a church to 'the Virgin Mary replaced the temple. 
 \ 
 
THE HISTORY OF THE SAMARITANS 45 
 
 They were forced to submit. This attempt at rebellion is 
 recorded with variations in the Samaritan annals. Abu'l 
 Fath assigns as a reason for this rebellion the intention 
 of the Christians to carry away the bones of Eleazar and 
 Phinehas the High Priests. 
 
 During the reign of Anastasius, the successor of Zeno, 
 untaught by experience, the Samaritans made another up- 
 rising. In it, led by a woman, they seized Mount Gerizim — 
 which as. above noted had been fortified against them — 
 slew the garrison, and took possession of the church which 
 had displaced the temple. Procopius the historian, who 
 narrates these occurrences, was Governor of Palestine at the 
 time. He quickly suppressed the uprising ; the leaders 
 were put to death. 
 
 The sovereign who was at first the most oppressive 
 to the Samaritans was Justinian. The edict he issued in 
 A.D. 527, de Heretids et Manichceis et Samaritis, was only a 
 republication of earlier legislation against them, an indication 
 that the penalties were not inflicted in strictness. Under 
 Justinian the cruelly unjust law was administered with 
 all severity. In two years these oppressive enactments 
 produced a very serious uprising of the Samaritans. The 
 account of this rebellion is given by Procopius. It spread 
 through the whole territory of Samaria from Scythopolis 
 to Caesarea, but had its centre in the hill country. The 
 rebels seem to have wreaked vengeance on the Christians 
 for the wrongs done to them by the legislation of Justinian. 
 As they had done in the earlier rebellion in the reign of 
 Zeno, the Samaritans set up a sovereign for themselves, 
 whom they do not seem to have designated by the theocratic 
 title of King, but more ambitiously named him Emperor. 
 Like Justasa of the days of Zeno, this emperor, whose 
 name was Julian, was a bandit. This rebellion ran a course 
 very similar to that of the earlier rebellion which it resembled 
 in so many other respects. In the beginning it had success, 
 and emphasised that success by a triumph accompanied 
 with games. This triumph was celebrated not in Samaria 
 but in Neapolis. As in the earlier case, the opening victories 
 were followed by overwhelming defeat, and the pseudo- 
 emperor was beheaded. Later Justinian became more 
 
46 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 clement to the remnant of the Samaritan people. A con- 
 siderable number of them had to assume a profession of 
 Christianity ; Procopius says, in his chronique scandaleuse, 
 The Secret History, that the majority did so. Some of 
 these converts of fear bribed the governors to allow them 
 to carry on their old hereditary rites. Notwithstanding 
 the transitory clemency of Justinian, the Samaritans again 
 revolted, and in Csesarea attacked and killed many of the 
 Christians and burned their churches. The extreme of 
 oppression was reached in the reign of Justin II.; the 
 rescripts of that reign practically wholly outlaw them ; many 
 of the Samaritans fled to Persia. Singularly enough, although 
 the Samaritans took refuge in Persia when Khosrou Purviz, 
 the Persian King, conquered Palestine, the Samaritan 
 chronicles tell that he crucified many of the Samaritans. 
 Dr Montgomery argues that while the Persian conqueror 
 was assisted by the Jews, he was opposed by the Samaritans. 
 They appear to have welcomed Arqali (Heraclius) when 
 he restored Palestine to the Empire. 
 
 The present date is a suitable one at which to pause and 
 review the past history. Since the time when the colonists 
 were sent by Esarhaddon — and they seem to have been the 
 majority of them — to the date of the conquest of Palestine 
 by "the sons of Ishmael," there is a space of thirteen 
 centuries ; nearly the same period separates the present 
 time from that event. Two characteristics are to be noted ; 
 in the first place continued opposition of the Jews to the 
 Samaritans, amply reciprocated by the Samaritans ; next — 
 from the beginning of our era to the end of the Roman rule 
 in Palestine — the Samaritans have endured persecutions of 
 ever-increasing severity, in which they were differentiated 
 to their disfavour, from the Jews : the two features of 
 Samaritan history are their pertinacious adherence to the 
 faith they had inherited, and their independence of the Jews. 
 
 After Heraclius had regained Palestine, if not with the 
 assistance of the Samaritans at least with their concurrence, 
 he did nothing to preserve it to the Empire. The truth is 
 that in consequence of the corrupt administration of his 
 predecessors, the Empire was utterly exhausted, so that his 
 splendid campaigns against Persia, far from strengthening 
 
THE HISTORY OF THE SAMARITANS . 47 
 
 the Byzantine Roman Empire, really exhausted it only 
 , the more. At this point when the Persian Empire was 
 exhausted with defeat and that of Byzantium equally 
 exhausted by victories, a whirlwind from the desert smote 
 both empires. 
 
 Away on the further side of Arabia from Palestine or 
 Persia, in Mecca and Medina, had sprung up a new religion. 
 Mohammed had proclaimed himself a prophet, and after 
 various vicissitudes had first fled to Medina then from thence 
 conquered Mecca. The conquest of Arabia followed. The 
 death of Mohammed did not quench the zeal of his adherents ; 
 they passed the limits of Arabia and assailed Persia on the 
 one side and the Empire of Byzantium on the other. After 
 several campaigns lasting over a decade, during which external 
 assault was helped by internal division and treachery, Persia 
 was completely conquered and Yezgered compelled to flee the 
 country. The date of the final battle was A.H. 22. While 
 the struggle was going on to the east the Moslems advanced 
 to the conquest of Palestine. The conflict was waged with 
 varying fortunes, but at length all Syria submitted to the 
 Arabs. The Samaritans welcomed the advent of the 
 Saracens ; they had no reason to desire a continuance of 
 the oppressive rule of Constantinople. In consequence they 
 were treated with a certain amount of favour by the con- 
 querors. M. Lammens {Califat de Yazid F^, chap, xxifi.) 
 says, on the authority of Baladhuri, that the reason of the 
 favour shown them was that they had acted as guides to the 
 Moslem armies, especially in the east of Jordan. Indeed 
 M. Lammens thinks that they assisted them in arms, but 
 that it became a point of honour with the Arabs to deny 
 that the followers of the Prophet accepted any assistance from 
 unbelievers. Yet the exceptional privileges which they 
 received from Abu Obeida, that their land should be free 
 of every impost but the capitation, seems to imply special 
 services rendered to deserve them. This was in the Khalifate 
 of Omar. At the same time earlier they, along with all the 
 inhabitants, had suffered from the raid of Amru ibn el 'Asi. 
 When the idea of plunder gave way to the thought of perma- 
 nent conquest, the inhabitants were no longer indiscriminately 
 plundered, but were regarded as subjects ; and then it was 
 
48 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 that the services of the Samaritans were rewarded with 
 special treatment. 
 
 This favour lasted during the rule of the Ommeyads. 
 With the reign of the Abbasides more fanatical ideas pre- 
 vailed. The persecutions that resulted from the efforts at 
 forcible conversion seem to have left deeper traces in the 
 memories of the Samaritans than have the earlier acts of 
 favour. Montgomery (^Samaritans, p. 27 fif.) gives an 
 account drawn from Samaritan sources, especially the 
 supplements to Abu'l Fath, of the different disasters that 
 befell the Samaritans under Moslem rule. While the 
 Abbasides, fanatically orthodox as they were, treated with 
 savagery all who refused to accept Islam, the Samaritans 
 were not discriminated against ; although they were not 
 received into the position of quasi favour occupied by the 
 Jews. On the death of Harun er Raschid, the khalifate 
 was shared by his two sons Mamun and Amin, who soon 
 quarrelled and declared war on each other. The opportunity 
 afforded by this was seized by a pretender who claimed to 
 be descended both from AH and Mo'awiyah ; he overran 
 Syria and secured possession of Damascus. He appears to 
 have set himself specially against the Samaritans ; three of 
 their cities were destroyed by his orders. As an evidence 
 of the change in the spirit of the Mohammedans from the 
 time of the Ommeyads, a Moslem governor of Nablus was 
 killed by his co-religionists for favouring the Samaritans. 
 As a consequence the land was filled with corpses, and crimes 
 passed unpunished. Matters reached a climax when the 
 Khalif Mutawakkil prohibited the Samaritans from performing 
 the rites of their religion. Thus, whether the legitimate 
 rule of the khalifs had the authority or rebels had usurped 
 the pd'^er, whether the orthodox Moslems were in the 
 ascendant or heretical sects, the Samaritans were equally 
 oppressed and persecuted. Some of them fled away to other 
 lands ; the Samaritans assert that these fugitives came to 
 the West, to Britain. Although with the fear of death 
 before them some abjured the faith, others rather submitted 
 to death. Dr Montgomery sums up the history of the 
 period as " an almost unintermittent picture of the mis- 
 fortunes of the miserable sect, persecuted by both: orthodox 
 
THE HISTORY OF THE SAMARITANS 49 
 
 and heretical parties of Islam," and harried by the wars that 
 swept over the debatable land of Palestine. 
 
 When the Crusaders, in their zeal to regain the places 
 sacred to Christendom, swept in wave after wave from 
 Europe into Asia, and at length set up the Latin Kingdom 
 of Jerusalem, the Samaritans were again brought in contact 
 with Christianity. Singularly enough the Samaritan annals 
 do not give any account of their relation to the kings of 
 Jerusalem. On the other hand the chronicles of the 
 Crusades are completely barren of references to the 
 Samaritans. Yet they must have come in contact with 
 them. The Crusaders were great builders and erected many 
 churches. In Sebastiyeh, the ancient Samaria, they erected 
 a church to John the Baptist ; it is now a mosque. Four out 
 of the five mosques in Nablus were originally Christian 
 churches. They suffered in the campaigns which Saladin 
 carried on against the Christians ; after the battle of Hattin 
 Nablus was wasted. Sultan Baibars in his ruthless war 
 against the Christians in Palestine made the Samaritans 
 suffer also. They were devastated also by the invasions of 
 the Kharezmians and the Mongols in the thirteenth century. 
 
 More interesting and fruitful are the notices of the 
 Samaritans to be found in the travels of the pilgrims, Jewish 
 and Christian, during this period. The most interesting of 
 these is the narrative of the Spanish Jew, Benjamin of 
 Tudela, who travelled through Italy, Asia Minor, and 
 Palestine about the middle of the twelfth century. His 
 account of the Samaritans may be quoted : " Nablus the 
 ancient Shechem in Mount Ephraim ... is situated in the 
 valley between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal. It is the 
 abode of about one thousand Cuthaeans ^ who observe the 
 Mosaic Law only, and are called Samaritans. They have 
 priests, descendants of Aaron, the priest of blessed memory, 
 whom they call Aaronim. These do not intermarry with 
 any but priestly families ; but they are priests only of their 
 
 1 The more common reading is "one hundred," but this is an 
 impossible number, as Benjamin speaks of them claiming to be of the 
 tribe of Ephraim and to have priests of the seed of Aaron. A mere 
 handful of this size would not have a separate priesthood. More, the 
 representations of other travellers suit the larger number. 
 
 D 
 
50 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 own law, and offer sacrifices and burnt-offerings in their 
 synagogue on Mount Gerizim. They do this in accordance 
 with the words of Scripture, 'Thou shalt put the blessing 
 on Mount Gerizim,' and they pretend that this is the Holy 
 Temple. On Passover and holidays they offer burnt- 
 offerings on the altar, which they have erected on Mount 
 Gerizim from the stones put up by the children of Israel 
 after they had crossed the Jordan. They pretend to be of 
 the tribe of Ephraim, and are in possession of the tomb of 
 Joseph, the righteous, the son of our father Jacob, upon 
 whom be peace, as is proved by the following passage of 
 Scripture, ' The bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel 
 brought up with them from Egypt, they buried in Shechem.' 
 The Samaritans do not possess the three letters He, Heth, 
 and Ain ; they have not the He of the name of our father 
 Abraham, so they have no glory ; the Heth of our father 
 Isaac, in consequence of which they are devoid of piety; 
 the Ain of our father Jacob, so they want humility.^ Instead 
 of these letters they always put an Aleph by which you 
 may know that they are not of Jewish origin, because in 
 their knowledge of the Law of Moses they are deficient in 
 three letters. This sect carefully avoid being defiled by 
 touching bones, corpses, or those killed by accident, or 
 graves ; and they change their garments whenever they 
 visit their synagogue, .upon which occasion also they wash 
 their body and put on other clothes. These are their daily 
 habits." 
 
 The admission which Benjamin here makes, that the 
 Samaritans observe the Mosaic Law, and that their priests 
 are the children of Aaron, are points to be noted in this 
 passage ; it seems to be an abandonment to a great extent 
 of the position of orthodox Judaism that these Samaritans, 
 who alleged themselves Israelites, were really Cuthseans, a 
 view to which he afterwards returns. It is singular to find 
 Benjamin asserting that the Samaritans "offer sacrifices 
 
 ' These letters occur each in the names referred to. He n in 
 Abraham nmns and hod Tin ; " glory " begins with n, fleth n occurs 
 in Isaac pnSJ and is the first letter of hesed-[XiX\ "piety." Ain j? occurs 
 in Jacob 3)?J>i and it is the first letter of anava ni3J? " humility." 
 
THE HISTORY OF THE SAMARITANS 51 
 
 and burnt-offerings in their synagogue on Mount Gerizim " ; 
 this certainly contradicts the Samaritan tradition which 
 declares that the cessation of sacriiices dates from the return 
 of the Samaritans from Harran — a mythical event it may 
 be observed, but regarded as contemporary with the Jewish 
 return from Babylon. In dating the cessation of sacrifice thus 
 early, Samaritan tradition is clearly wrong, as at all events to 
 the destruction of the temple on Mount Gerizim by Hyrcanus, 
 sacrifices must have been offered. Even after that event 
 our Lord tells the Samaritan leper to show himself to the 
 priests (Luke xvii. 14), a command that would imply the 
 offering of the cleansing sacrifices ordained by the Law. 
 Still, as the Samaritan theologian Marqah, who was much 
 earlier than Benjamin of Tudela, implies that no longer were 
 sacrifices offered, this would indicate that the traveller had 
 been led into a mistake by a too absolute credence of the 
 statements of his dragoman. There is another confusion in 
 regard to the " twelve stones " ; they are still shown but not 
 as an altar. They are situated, as has been stated above, 
 near the foundations of a building which is alleged by some 
 to have been the ancient Samaritan temple. It must be 
 presumed that Benjamin of Tudela did not climb to the 
 top of Mount Gerizim to verify what were alleged to be 
 facts, but was satisfied to accept as true what was told him. 
 
 About a century after the visit of Benjamin of Tudela, 
 Moses ben Nachman came to Palestine. When in Acco he 
 found a.Jewish coin of the Maccabaean period, the inscrip- 
 tion on which he was unable to read, it was read to him 
 by some Cuthseans resident there. This is evidence of a 
 Samaritan community being in Acco, and also that in the 
 days of Nachmanides the Samaritans had a script similar to 
 that found in the extant copies of the Law of the tenth 
 century. 
 
 Toward the middle of the fourteenth century the 
 veracious traveller, Sir John Mandeville, in the course of his 
 journey to the Holy Land, paid a visit to Nablus, or as he 
 calls it Shechem, or Neapolis, and says that it is ten miles 
 from Jerusalem. The distance is approximately forty Roman 
 miles as the crow flies; it may have been that he used a 
 German mile. He makes the same assertion as does 
 
52 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Benjamin of Tudela as to the Samaritans offering sacrifice 
 on Mount Gerizim. It would appear that he had some- 
 intercourse with the Samaritans, as he is correct as to their 
 theology, at a time when errors on this were common. He 
 says, " They say that there is only one God, who created all 
 things and judges all things." He seems to have been 
 unaware of the limited extent of the Samaritan Bible ; he 
 says, " They hold the Bible according to the letter, and use 
 the Psalter as the Jews do." He refers to their claim to be 
 the genuine Israelites. " They say that they are the right 
 sons of God ; they say that they be the best beloved of 
 God, and that to them belongs the heritage which God 
 promised to His beloved children." Probably neither Sir 
 John nor his interpreter had any sufficient initial knowledge 
 of the Samaritans when he visited Nablus and began his 
 inquiries, and in consequence neither knew what questions 
 to put, nor understood properly the answers given him to 
 those he did ask. He mentions the red head-dress they 
 were required to wear, but seems to regard it as a matter 
 of choice. He is by no means conspicuous for accuracy, as 
 may be gauged by the fact that he credits Rehoboam with 
 setting up the golden calves at Bethel and at Dan. Though 
 as to the Samaritans his evidence is 'fairly accurate, yet on 
 the question of the sacrifices on Mount Gerizim it may not 
 be pressed. 
 
 About three hundred years after Sir John Mandeville's 
 visit to Palestine, came Pietro della Valle to travel in the 
 East. He was a Roman nobleman, and member of the 
 literary and scientific society of Rome, the Umoristi. A 
 disappointment in love led him to become a pilgrim. He 
 visited Constantinople on his way to the Holy Land and 
 stayed there thirteen months. The French Ambassador, 
 M. de Sanci, in his desire to possess a copy of the Samaritan 
 Pentateuch, directed the attention of Delia Valle to the 
 Samaritan people, and he visited their communities in Cairo, 
 Gaza, Nablus, and Damascus. The narrative of his travels 
 is written in an easy, interesting style. He gives an account 
 of the various Samaritan communities which he had seen, 
 especially of that in Nablus. He speaks of them as 
 " Samaritan Jews whom the other Jews regard as heretics." 
 
THE HISTORY OF THE SAMARITANS 53 
 
 He refers to their rebellion in the days of the Emperor 
 Zeno, and how they had cut the throats of the Christians, 
 and what vengeance the emperor exacted. He must have 
 had some Jewish informant, as he speaks of the Samaritans 
 as Cuthaeans. He devotes some time to the Biblical 
 account of their origin, evidently from memory, for although 
 it is generally correct it is not invariably so. From the fact 
 that they had inherited errors, he declares "that they did 
 not wish to read the other Biblical books, besides the book 
 of the Law, that is to say, the five books of Moses. . . . The 
 other books of Holy Scripture, which have been collected 
 since, as the Prophets and the others, they do not receive 
 and do not reckon them as canonical." He declares that 
 "the priests of the race of Aaron" did not intermarry with 
 the rest of the Samaritan community. This was the case 
 not only in Nablus but also in Cairo. " When they met 
 together," he says, " they sacrificed and performed all the 
 ceremonies which were performed anciently in the Jerusalem 
 temple, but according to the manner of the Samaritans." 
 It is to be observed that Delia Valle, like Benjamin of 
 Tudela and Sir John Mandeville, asserts that the Samaritans 
 ofTered sacrifices. His description of the dwellings of the 
 Samaritans of Damascus is as follows : " They were houses 
 outside the city, in gardens, splendid inside with gilding, 
 but of little appearance outside ; " this suggests a class of 
 people desirous of being inconspicuous, a persecuted people, 
 whose safety lay in being unnoticed. 
 
 Near the end oi the seventeenth century, in the earlier 
 part of which Pietro della Valle had visited Shechem, 
 an English traveller, Henry Maundrel, starting from Aleppo, 
 reached Nablus, or as he calls it Naplosa, on the 24th of 
 March 1697. He says that the Samaritans have upon 
 Mount Gerizim "a small temple or place of worship, to 
 which they still are wont to repair at certain seasons for 
 the performance of the rites of their religion." What these 
 rites were he did not ascertain. He informs his readers 
 that tlie Jews asserted that the Samaritans worshipped 
 a calf, but that he thinks "has more of spite than truth 
 in it." He had a prolonged conversation with the Samaritan 
 High Priest who, as is the wont of the Samaritans, accused 
 
54 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the Jews of falsifying the text of the Pentateuch in putting 
 Ebal for Gerizim as the mountain on which the Law was 
 to be written, alleging the fact that Ebal was the mountain 
 of cursing and Gerizim that of blessing, that therefore it 
 would be more suitable that on the mountain of blessing 
 the Law should be preserved ; the priest referred also to 
 the superior fertility of Mount Gerizim, a superiority which 
 did not impress the traveller as very striking. Maundrel 
 consulted the High Priest as to the precise force of the 
 words in the Pentateuch translated "quails" and ''man- 
 drakes," and got answers which seem to have satisfied him. 
 In our rapid review of the history of the Samaritan 
 people we have evidence from Scripture, from Josephus 
 the Jewish historian, from Samaritan annals, from secular 
 historians and from travellers, Christian and Jewish, which 
 proves their continuous existence, at all events from the 
 arrival of the Assyrian colonists in Palestine down to the 
 present day. Even then if we had to do merely with 
 descendants of those who received their knowledge of the 
 Hebrew religion from the priests sent by Esarhaddon, 
 their beliefs and practices would bear the impress of the 
 faith and practice of a much earlier day. All the while 
 there is evidence that there was an opposition, a rivalry 
 between them and the Jews so great as to preclude any 
 serious amount of borrowing by the Samaritans from that 
 source. If the Samaritan' claims be admitted, that they 
 are the genuine children of Israel, and as has been shown 
 the balance of evidence favours the view that despite the 
 negligible admixture of foreign blood, the present Samaritans 
 are the descendants of those who under Joshua conquered 
 the land ; thus their ritual really represents an uninterrupted 
 tradition from primitive times. According to the traditional 
 view of the origin of the Pentateuch, they have been in 
 possession of the Mosaic Law for above three thousand 
 years ; according to the prevailing critical view, they have 
 been concurring spectators of all the changes it has passed 
 through since the return under Zerubbabel of the Jewish 
 exiles, save what may have taken place in Babylon. There 
 has been no break in the succession. After the fall of the 
 Northern Kingdom the inhabitants of the territories of the 
 
THE HISTORY OF THE SAMARITANS 55 
 
 Ephraimite tribes continued their observance of the ceremonies 
 of the Mosaic Law. They have circumcised their children 
 even when obedience to the Mosaic precept meant rendering 
 themselves obnoxious to the penalty of death ; year after 
 year they have celebrated the Passover on Mount Gerizim 
 when they might ; in their own houses when they were 
 forbidden access to the sacred site. Throughout their long 
 history they have been witnesses for the religion of Israel, 
 and in many cases witnesses that have sealed their testimony 
 with their blood. 
 
 In some respects the Samaritans are better witnesses 
 than the Jews, and their testimony has more evidential 
 value. The line of their tradition has not been broken 
 by banishment from their own land, as that of the Jews 
 has been since the overthrow of Bar-Cochba's rebellion. 
 For a considerable while after that event the Jews were 
 excluded from Jerusalem altogether. From this fact, where 
 their method of observance in regard to any ceremony differs 
 from that of the Jews, there is a primd facie probability in 
 favour of that of the Samaritans. Noticeably is this the 
 case in regard to the Passover and the rite of circumcision. 
 If Benjamin of Tudela is to be believed, supported as he 
 is by Sir John Mandeville and Pietro della Valle, against 
 the express testimony of the Samaritans themselves, then 
 they were offering sacrifices and burnt offerings till the 
 seventeenth century of our era ; maintaining thus the 
 Levitical Law in its entirety. It must be noted that as 
 to the date when bloody sacrifices ceased, Samaritan tradition 
 is distinctly wrong ; they did not cease in the reign of 
 Artaxerxes Longimanus. How long they continued to be 
 offered after that time there seems to be no means of 
 determining. 
 
 Were this a case of customary right pled before a court 
 of law, the kind of evidence afforded by the Samaritans 
 would be looked upon as exceptionally strong. It must 
 be borne in mind that all law is founded primarily on custom. 
 Were the question at issue one regarding " Right of Way," 
 one in which evidence as to custom is most frequently 
 called for, the testimony would be invaluable of one who 
 not only had lived all his life in the district, and used 
 
56 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the path in dispute, but could invoke family tradition that 
 his father and grandfather had used the pathway, and had 
 given him to understand that their use of it had never been 
 challenged. Of such a kind then is the evidence that may 
 be drawn from the ritual and beliefs of the Samaritans 
 as to the Religion of Israel. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 r 
 
 MOSAISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 
 
 Assuming the conclusion at which we have arrived to be 
 correct, that even after the deportation of many of the 
 Israelites and the advent of Assyrian colonists, the Israelites 
 still formed the great majority of the inhabitants of Northern 
 Palestine, it may be further assumed that the religious views 
 and practices of the colonists would be very much tinctured 
 by those of their neighbours.^ 
 
 This religious likeness to the Israelites would be increased 
 into practical identity by the instruction which the colonists 
 received from the priest or priests sent by Esarhaddon. 
 Hence as a preliminary to a study of the worship and 
 religious beliefs of the Samaritans of later da5's it is necessary 
 to consider the doctrines believed and the ritual observances 
 practised by the Northern Israelite tribes. Although it 
 might, from what has already been seen, be assumed that 
 even after the separation of Israel into two distinct states, 
 Jahweism continued to be the religion of the North as well 
 as the South, yet it is well to fortify this conclusion by 
 collateral evidence. 
 
 One evidence of special cogency is the prevalence of 
 proper names having JHWH as one of its elements. The 
 eldest son of Jeroboam " who made Israel to sin " is " Abijah," 
 i.e., "JHWH is my Father." All the sons of Ahab, another 
 monarch concerning whom Judaean records would be little 
 likely gratuitously to relate anything favourable, whose 
 
 ' It would seem, if the evidence of Tolstoi may be trusted, that a 
 somewhat similar thing has taken place in the Caucasus, where the 
 Christian Cossaclcs have imbibed a great deal of the manners and 
 morals of the Moslem natives. 
 
 57 
 
58 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 names have been recorded have all Jehovistic designations ; 
 Joash ("whom JHWH supports") who is left governor of 
 Samaria when his father leads his army to Ramoth-Gilead, 
 Ahaziah ("whom JHWH upholds") who succeeds his father, 
 and Jehoram ("whom JHWH exalts") who in turn succeeds 
 him. His steward is Obadiah "the servant of JHWH." 
 The military commander who destroyed the House of Omri 
 is Jehu ("JHWH is"); his father is Jehoshaphat ("JHWH is 
 Judge") ; his friend is Jehonadab ("whom JHWH impels"). 
 The great Prophet of the Northern Kingdom is Elijah 
 ("JHWH is my God"). Of the prophets who prophesy 
 before Ahab in Samaria before he sets out to Ramoth- 
 Gilead only two are named, Zedekiah ("JHWH is just") 
 and Micaiah ("who is like JHWH"). The fact that the great 
 mass of the narnes that have come down to us from that 
 period are Jehovistic is evidence of how widespread was the 
 reverence accorded to JHWH among the subjects and in 
 the household of Ahab. This phenomenon is all the more 
 singular, that in the beginning of his reign, Ahab seems to 
 have done more than merely tolerate the worship of Baal 
 (i Kings xvi. 31), whose cult Jezebel had brought with her 
 from Tyre. At the same time, not more than 7000 can be 
 claimed as not having conformed in any measure to the 
 worship of Baal (i Kings xix. 18). The most probable 
 explanation of this would seem to be that there was a deep- 
 seated religious syncretism in Israel, natural to those whose 
 attitude in acts of worship was political rather than theo- 
 logical. To the statesman the worst of religious crimes is 
 intolerance, to the prophets, the worst sin was tolerance. 
 The same antagonism appeared, three-quarters of a mil- 
 lennium later, in the disastrous quarrel between Judas the 
 Maccabee and the Hasidim. 
 
 There is a phenomenon connected with Hebrew names 
 which requires to be noted. Before the time of David, 
 names involving " Baal " as an element are fairly common. 
 The cases in which these names occur are not in incon- 
 spicuous families ; the son of Saul who succeeded him on the 
 throne was really named Eshbaal, " the man of Baal " 
 (i Chron. viii. 33), though scribes changed the name to 
 Ishbosheth, which has the impossible meaning " man of 
 
MOSAISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 59 
 
 folly " (2 Sam. ii. 8) ; his grandson, the son of Jonathan, is 
 called at first Meribbaal, "strife of Baal" (i Chron. viii. 34), 
 afterwards scribally altered to Mephibosheth, " destruction of 
 folly" (2 Sam. ix. 6) ; also another son of Saul by his concu- 
 bine Rizpah, called Mephibosheth in 2 Sam. xxi. 8, was in all 
 likelihood really named originally as his nephew, Meribbaal. 
 A son of David, born to him after he became king over all 
 Israel, is named Beeliada, "whom Baal knows" (i Chron. 
 xiv. 7), though it is transformed to Eliada, " whom God 
 knows "(2 Sam. v. 16). The name of no other foreign deity 
 occurs as an element in Jewish names till Israel came under 
 the dominion of an alien power. This indicates that Baal, the 
 God of the Canaanites, was regarded by Israel as standing in 
 a relation to them different from that in which did the deities 
 of other heathen nations. To understand the reason of this 
 it is necessary to go back to the conquest of the land. 
 
 When the Israelites crossed the Jordan we must assume 
 that the numbers ascribed to them in the books of Numbers 
 and Joshua are greatly in excess of reality. Instead of 
 entering Canaan with a warlike host of more than six 
 hundred thousand men, probably the real number would 
 be somewhere about the tenth of that figure. This would 
 represent a population of about a quarter of a million. Judg- 
 ing from the indications in the Tell Amarna tablets, Palestine 
 was not densely peopled, probably the number of the inhabi- 
 tants then did not seriously differ from the present figure 
 that is approximately from three-quarters of a million to a 
 million. The Israelite people as a whole would therefore 
 be approximately equal to from a third to a quarter of the 
 inhabitants which they found in Canaan. Had the native 
 inhabitants formed a homogeneous mass the chance of the 
 Israelites to effect the conquest of the land would have been 
 slight. So far from this being the case they belonged, accord- 
 ing to repeated numerations, to " seven " different nationalities. 
 Some of the names that, from the connection in which they 
 stand, might be reckoned national designations, seem rather 
 to indicate the character of their dwellings. While the 
 names the Amorite, the Hittite, and the Canaanite desig- 
 nated peoples of distinct national types, the Hivites and 
 Perizzites really meant villagers as distinct from inhabitants 
 
60 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 of walled towns. The Jebusites and the Girgashites seem 
 to have been named from the locality in which they dwelt. 
 The three leading nationalities appear to have been inter- 
 mingled. A very similar state of things is seen in Palestine 
 in the present day, where Kurd, Bedu, and Druse villages 
 alternate irregularly. Unwalled villages appear then to have 
 been relatively few. The body of the population lived in 
 small independent fortified towns ; most of them were 
 monarchical, ruled over by a patesi or priest-king. Some 
 of them appear to have been republics, as the league of 
 the four cities of which Gibeon was the chief: it is the 
 elders of the cities in question that treat with Joshua and 
 the Elders of Israel. The towns belonging to the same 
 race do not seem to have formed any league, each "city" 
 was, as a rule, entirely independent and by itself Such 
 seems to have been the condition of matters in Babylonia 
 when Assyria began to intervene in the affairs of Southern 
 Mesopotamia. This rendered the conquest of the land much 
 more easy of accomplishment to the Beni Israel. 
 
 It is a mistake to imagine that the conquest of Canaan 
 was completed by Joshua ; the territories assigned by him 
 and Eleazar to the different tribes were really " spheres of 
 influence " within which the conquests of each tribe were to 
 be limited. The list of thirty-one cities enumerated with 
 their kings (Josh, xii.) as conquered, does not imply that 
 even in Joshua's lifetime they were permanently held. 
 Jerusalem and Hebron although on that list have still to 
 be conquered after Joshua's death (Judges i. 8, lo). The 
 former, soon after its reconquest by Judah, must have been 
 again regained by its original possessors, for in the story of 
 the Levite and his concubine (Judges xix. ii), which is dated 
 in the lifetime of Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, Jerusalem is 
 in the hands of the Jebusites. What the several tribes seem 
 to have done, was to settle in the territory assigned them, 
 occupying such of the cities as they had captured, and 
 whose inhabitants they had slain or expelled, watching for 
 any favourable opportunity to increase their hold on the 
 land. 
 
 Alike worldly prudence, as surrounded by a hostile 
 population, and loyalty to JHWH who had given them the 
 
MOSAISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 61 
 
 land, ought to have led the Israelites to maintain a close 
 union among themselves. So far from this being the policy 
 followed, they scarcely ever, even in a limited degree, during 
 the time of the Judges, seem to have recognised their national 
 unity ; never indeed unless when some foreign oppressor 
 forced on them the duty of mutual help. Even this did so 
 only to a very limited extent. Reference has been made 
 above to the evidence afforded by the song of Deborah of 
 the divisions in Israel by the fact that the absence of Judah 
 and Simeon from the army of Barak is not even made 
 occasion of rebuke. When Israel was delivered from the 
 oppression of Midian by Gideon, he seems to have been 
 followed only by the men of his own tribe, that of Manasseh. 
 Not only was every tribe to a great extent independent, even 
 the internal unity of the tribe was loose and indeterminate. 
 The separate walled villages act as independent republics, 
 each under its own senate of " Sheikhs," or Elders. Meroz 
 is cursed by Deborah apart from the tribe to which it 
 belonged ; Gideon treats Succoth and Penuel as enemies 
 although they are Israelite cities, a hostility which they had 
 inaugurated. At the same time, taking the books of Judges 
 and Samuel as they stand, the brazen altar in front of the 
 Tabernacle was regarded as the sacred hearth of the nation, 
 and the Tabernacle itself, the national shrine. Wherever it 
 was, the Tabernacle was the symbol of national unity ; to it in 
 times of emergency gathered the Elders of all Israel (Judges 
 XX. i). The union of the tribes of Israel was, like that of 
 the Hellenic cities by means of the Amphyctionic Council, 
 largely sentimental, but for any practical purpose useless, 
 unless popular sentiment ratified the decisions of the Elders 
 who represented it. 
 
 Meantime the walled villages possessed by the Hebrews 
 formed at first only an additional element in the congeries 
 of nations which inhabited Palestine ; in consequence, 
 however, of the victories of Joshua at Beth-Horon and 
 the waters of Merom, it was in all likelihood the predominant 
 element. On every side were the cities of the Canaanite, 
 the Amorite, and the Hittite. These Canaanite and Amorite 
 cities, as has been learned from the excavations at Gezer 
 and Lachish, were, at this period, irregular collections of 
 
62 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 stone- built hovels, surrounded by earthen walls, with stone 
 towers at the gates. Prominent in all of them was a High 
 Place, with an altar, on which were offered gifts and sacrifices 
 to the Baal of the city. Beside the altars rose monolithic 
 matztzeboth, frequently if we may judge from Gezer, untrimmed 
 stones of varying size, and fixed in stone sockets towered 
 like masts the asheroth, sometimes round, sometimes square. 
 Occasionally a covered building may have occupied some 
 part of the sacred area, and also in other cases a secret cave 
 beneath the floor where Thyestean banquets may have been 
 held, and oracles delivered. In front of the gate of the city 
 was the Maidan on which the riders exercised their horses, 
 and within the gate a space, in which met the Elders of the 
 city. Probably in the centre there was an open square, 
 which formed the market-place. 
 
 When Israel, from being nomads, came into a land of 
 fixed habitations and appropriated lands ; when they took 
 possession of cities which they had not built, and vineyards 
 and olive-yards which they had not planted, the manners 
 and customs of the original inhabitants would tend to have 
 an important influence on them. Especially in matters of 
 religion and worship would the influence of the earlier 
 inhabitants be potent. The prominence of the High Place 
 in each town they captured, and the idea deep-rooted in 
 every savage mind of the local power possessed by the local 
 deity must insensibly have affected them. It was against 
 this influence that the Deuteronomic legislation was primarily 
 directed. Surrounding influences were too strong, the 
 Israelites did not cut down the asheroth, overthrow the matztze- 
 both, or break down the altars of the local Baals. Strangers 
 from neighbouring cities, or even survivors of the inhabitants, 
 who had perhaps been spared as slaves by the Hebrews who 
 now occupied the city, or who having escaped the first 
 onslaught of the conquerors returned in more peaceful times 
 to their former homes, these might easily lead the men and 
 women of Israel to adopt features of the old cult. Not 
 impossibly the features that were most abhorrent, the 
 cannibal feasts and human sacrifices, might be kept secret. 
 
 The effect on the Israelites of the religions of the 
 inhabitants of the land into which they had come being so 
 
MOSAISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 63 
 
 obvious and well known, some study of these religions is 
 necessary. While all the nationalities in Palestine at the 
 time of the conquest are named separately, occasionally they 
 are compendiously termed Canaanites (Josh. xvii. 13 ; Judges 
 i. 9, etc.). When dealing with the question of religion 
 in Canaan we cannot assume that the pantheon of the 
 Canaanites and their ritual of worship were precisely the 
 same with those of the Amorites and Hittites. At the 
 same time the assimilative influences which effected so much 
 in regard to the Israelites must have been at least as potent 
 in the matter of these other nationalities. Further there is 
 another side to be noted ; inquirers have to beware of 
 depending too much on hellenised interpretations of the 
 beliefs of Tyre and Sidon. These are all late, written after 
 the people had been to a great extent hellenised, and 
 moreover are presented in a Hellenic dress for a Greek 
 audience. The first phenomenon that meets the student is 
 the prevalence of the name " Baal," followed by a place-name. 
 But "Baal" means in such a connection "Lord of," 
 " possessor of," e.g., Baal-Gad (Josh. xiii. 5), Baal-Hazor (2 
 Sam. xiii. 23). On the other hand there are occasions in 
 which the name " Baal " stands for the Supreme God, the 
 rival of JHWH. Thus in the dramatic scene on Carmel, 
 the question which Elijah would put to the test was whether 
 Baal or JHWH was to be reckoned the Supreme Deity. 
 So, too, Jehu's proclamation (2 Kings x. 18) implies that he 
 intended to place Baal in the place of JHWH ; at least that 
 was what he intended the Baal-worshippers to understand. 
 
 This is not the place to discuss the historic evolution of 
 religion and worship in general, or of the religion and 
 worship of Canaan in particular. In regard to the latter 
 there are, as has just been noted, special difficulties ; these 
 it is possible may be lessened by future excavations. While 
 this is so, some of the phenomena connected with the relation 
 of Israel to the worship of Baal would appear to be simplified 
 if the local Baals were regarded as due to a species of 
 religious degeneration. The universal Baal, the Lord of 
 all, was worshipped with different rites in the different 
 walled villages. Myths would naturally arise to explain them, 
 which would involve Baal ; the myths of different places 
 
64 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 would conflict, till the Baal of one city would be held as a 
 different person from the Baal of another. A similar process 
 has gone on in Romanist countries as to the Virgin. 
 Whatever their avowed creed, the peasantry act as if the 
 Virgin of one shrine were personally different, endowed with 
 different attributes from " Our Lady " of another. Another 
 process may have been at work, analogous to the fetichism 
 of West Africa. The Africans believe in a great Being too 
 great to be approached with prayer or offering, and too 
 good to work them any ill ; but they believe also in far lesser 
 beings, genii loci, inhabiting trees, rocks, pools, or even 
 more insignificant objects as an oddly shaped stone. 
 Unlike the great Spirit, the spirits that dwell in these objects 
 are malevolent and easily offended, but may, if properly 
 propitiated, prosper the undertakings of their votaries. 
 (R. H. Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa; Andrew Lang, 
 The Making of Religion.) Again we find an analogy in 
 Romanism. In Roman Catholic countries more prayers are 
 directed to the Holy Mother and the other saints than to 
 God the Father or to Christ. A similar process appears to 
 have taken place in Egypt where, according to Dr Wallis 
 Budge, there was belief in a Supreme God, the Creator of 
 all things, of whom the lower gods were attributes or 
 symbols. In India, if the student of religion compares the 
 theology of the Vedic hymns with the absurdities of modern 
 Hinduism, he sees the same process. It would be difficult 
 for the Jew, if animated at all with the harmonistic ideas 
 to be seen so strongly in Herodotus, to avoid identifying 
 JHWH and Baal. This would at once explain the ease 
 with which the Israelites were seduced into Baal-worship, 
 and how they came to introduce the name of Baal into the 
 designations they gave their sons. 
 
 There seem to have been impure rites connected with 
 the worship of the Baalim. The scenes at Baal-Peor imply 
 that whoredom was connected with Baal-worship, although it 
 is not stated. Human sacrifices followed by feasts on the 
 victims seem proved indubitably by Dr Macalister's 
 discoveries at Gezer. The fact that such elements were 
 liable to come in, would be a valid reason for the prophetic 
 denunciation of the sacrifices offered on the High Places. 
 
MOSAISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 65 
 
 If different modes of worship were in any way liable to arise, 
 in consequence it might be, of the previous Canaanite or 
 Amorite worship, then Polytheism would be a present 
 danger. 
 
 Not improbably there would be strange ideas of the 
 persistence, near the scenes where they had been worshipped, 
 of the Baalim and Ashtaroth of earlier days ; this, too, would 
 form a danger to be met. Any misfortune befalling a 
 person of a superstitious nature would be interpreted as due 
 to the malevolence of the deity of the High Place whose 
 dignity had not been respected, and this would result in a 
 secret resumption of the idolatrous rites at his shrine. All 
 these dangers, neither small nor few, might well account for 
 the vehemence of the prophetic denunciation of the worship 
 of the High Places. The influence of the Canaanite religion 
 would tend to be all the stronger that there probably would 
 be much of resemblance between the ritual of the one and 
 the other ; their ordinary sacrifices would be made with the 
 same victims — oxen, sheep, and goats ; the ordinary feasts 
 of the people of the land would be arranged to suit the 
 periods of the agricultural year, and according to the Mosaic 
 Law the main feasts had a like relationship. This very 
 resemblance would make the necessity for prophetic 
 denunciation more urgent. 
 
 All this would suit perfectly with the common critically 
 assumed origin of Deuteronomy. The prophets, painfully 
 impressed with the evils which might result from the worship 
 on the High Places, wishing to get a higher religious 
 sanction for their condemnation of these irregular religious 
 centres, invoked the memory of Moses, and compiled a book 
 in his name, which represented the great lawgiver, before 
 his death, giving final instructions to the people he had led. 
 These discourses not only commanded the destruction of 
 every place in which there had been a heathen shrine, its altars 
 to be thrown down, its asheroth felled, and its matztzeboth 
 overturned, but that there should be only one sanctuary for 
 Israel. Only towards the very end of the Jewish monarchy 
 were the prophets impelled to compose those discourses, 
 when political destruction as the penalty of religious apostasy 
 was impending. The roll containing them was hid, and as 
 
 E 
 
66 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 intended, duly found. The discovery of the " Book of the 
 Law" in the reign of Josiah, is the first appearance and 
 publication of this pseudo-Mosaic legislation. It is beside 
 the question to denounce this action of the prophets as 
 immoral ; they might imagine themselves inspired by the 
 same Divine influence as had inspired Moses, and commanded 
 to supply precepts omitted by the legislator. The book of 
 Ecclesiastes is a standing example of the same literary 
 device. 
 
 While it would occupy too much time to discuss 
 adequately the intricacies of the Deuteronomic controversy, 
 and would obscure the main line of the present argument, still 
 there are difficulties in the way of accepting this hypothesis 
 in its entirety which we would now submit. According to 
 the critical hypothesis of which this, the assumed origin of 
 Deuteronomy, forms an integral part, this book was the 
 earliest book of ritual law.^ Previous to this, ritual acts of 
 worship had been performed according to rules traditionally 
 handed down only among the priesthood. If that is so, how 
 is it that Hilkiah says, " I have found the book of the Law?" 
 If he had said, " I have found a book of precepts by Moses," 
 that would have been the natural language of a man who 
 only now discovered the existence of a book of legislation. 
 His language implies that he knew the existence of Law- 
 books, but that this was a copy specially individualised. If 
 a copy of the Law had been placed at the foundation of the 
 temple when it was built by Solomon, and if in the structural 
 repairs instituted by Josiah the very copy which had been 
 so placed was discovered, that would satisfy the language of 
 Hilkiah. More important is the statement that first in 
 Deuteronomy was the doctrine of the one sanctuary 
 promulgated, and by implication that this one sanctuary was 
 that in Jerusalem. But in the first place, it is not accurate 
 to maintain that in this pseudo-Mosaic legislation sacrifices 
 are absolutely forbidden to be offered in any other place 
 than the central shrine. In Deuteronomy (xii. 21) it is 
 permitted the worshipper, should he be too far from the 
 
 1 Only a very inconsiderable portion of JE was legislative. The 
 great mass of it was narrative both before and after the " Book of the 
 Covenant." What of legislation there is is not ritual. 
 
MOSAISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 67 
 
 chosen sanctuary, if he wished to offer sacrifice, to kill the 
 bullock or sheep of his offering within the gates of his city. 
 When the sacrifice could not be offered at the door of the 
 Tabernacle, the offering would be made most naturally on 
 the local High Place. If it be objected that in the passage 
 referred to the reference is to a private feast; it may be 
 answered that originally a feast and a sacrifice were regarded 
 as nearly synonymous terlns, the same thing only looked at 
 from different points of view; thus in i Sam. ix. 12, Saul is 
 told that the Prophet Samuel is to be found on his way to 
 the feast on the High Place, and the guests are expected 
 to wait till he came "because he doth bless the sacrifice." 
 Subordinate shrines are thus anticipated in the book of 
 Deuteronomy itself The discoveries in Assouan and 
 Elephantin6 confirm this. The Hebrew community in Upper 
 Egypt, in the days of the later Persian monarchs, believed 
 that they were worshipping JHWH according to the Mosaic 
 Law, although they had erected a temple for themselves. 
 They have no hesitation in appealing to the Jewish High 
 Priest at Jerusalem for his good offices against the oppression of 
 their neighbours, nor have they any feeling that the existence 
 of their temple is derogatory to the dignity of that on Mount 
 Zion. It is to be observed that the community is largely 
 composed of Jews, to whom the supremacy of the Jerusalem 
 Temple would specially appeal. Later, in the days of the 
 Ptolemies, Onias erected a temple to the God of Israel at 
 Leontopolis. When he did so, far from thinking that he 
 .transgressed the Law by so doing, he believed that all Jews 
 would welcome what he had done. When the Jerusalem 
 Temple had been desecrated by Antiochus Epiphanes, by 
 his action they should have a shrine in which to worship, one 
 in which the legitimate High Priest ministered. 
 
 The clearest evidence of the permission of subordinate 
 shrines in the Deuteronomic Code, is that regulations are 
 laid down in regard to them. With reference to these, it is that 
 the Israelite is commanded (Deut. xvi. 21, 22) "Thou shalt 
 not set up a post {asherah) of any kind of wood beside the 
 altar of JHWH thy God, which thou shalt make thee ; 
 nor erect an obelisk {matztzebaJi) which JHWH thy God 
 hateth." This cannot refer to any altar or shrine which the 
 
68 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 nation as a whole shall set up. All that precedes refers not 
 to national action but to what individual persons or com- 
 munities ought to do. Although the chapter begins with 
 the celebration of the three great feasts in which it was 
 expected that every male should appear before the Lord, 
 with verse i8 directions- are given, not to the nation in 
 mass but to individual communities; "Judges and officers 
 shalt thou make thee in all thy gates, etc." In the verse 
 following the judges so to be appointed are exhorted 
 personally : " Thou shalt not wrest judgment, etc." In verse 
 20 the people are addressed individually : " That which is 
 altogether just shalt thou follow, that thou mayest live and 
 inherit the land, etc." Then immediately, in that connection, 
 follows the passage in question. It is continued in the 
 opening verse of chapter xvii. : " Thou shalt not sacrifice to 
 JHWH thy God bullock or sheep wherein is blemish." 
 This cannot refer to the general national sacrifices only, 
 but also to what sin-offerings, etc., individual worshippers 
 presented before God. Consequently we must assume that 
 the direction given in the passage under consideration is 
 addressed to a limited village or city community. On any 
 other hypothesis why was this exhortation given at all? 
 If we assume, in accordance with the critical view, that 
 Deuteronomy was composed to meet the tendency to 
 worship in the High Places and induce, indeed compel 
 the people to sacrifice only in Jerusalem in the temple 
 there, this exhortation is scarcely intelligible. That 
 temple and its altars were already old when the book of 
 the Law was found. Did Hilkiah, or whoever composed 
 Deuteronomy, contemplate the possibility of Josiah setting 
 up either asherah or matztzebah within the courts of the 
 temple? Deuteronomy thus regulated the concomitants 
 of worship in the local shrines. There certainly were no 
 asheroth about the temple, although a plausible case might 
 be made out for regarding Jachin and Boaz, the two brazen 
 pillars in the temple court, as aesthetically representing the 
 matztzeboth of the Canaanite shrines. The regulations just 
 noted referred to the commands in Exod. xx. 24, 25, which 
 like the passage before us contemplates a multiplicity of 
 altars. " An altar of earth shalt thou make unto me, and shalt 
 
MOSAISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 69 
 
 sacrifice thereon thy burnt-offerings . . . and if thou wilt 
 make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn 
 stone;" beside such an altar the Israelite was to set up 
 neither asherah nor matztzebah. What the Law regulates it 
 allows. 
 
 By the reigning hypothesis it is assumed that according 
 to the Deuteronomic prophets the temple on Mount Zion 
 is the one and only shrine in which sacrifice is to be 
 offered. On this assumption it is singular that there is 
 no reference, direct or indirect, to Jerusalem. Had 
 Deuteronomy been composed, as is alleged, with the in- 
 tention of enjoining worship on Mount Zion, and on it 
 alone, it might have been expected that the writer would 
 have indicated clearly the place intended, if he did not, as 
 did the Samaritan interpolator with Mount Gerizim, directly 
 name it. The Psalmists had no diffidence in asserting that 
 "JHWH loveth the gates of Zion more than all the 
 dwellings of Jacob." "JHWH hath chosen Zion, He hath 
 desired it for His habitation." Why did this Jew, when 
 his aim was to make Zion the one sanctuary, hesitate to 
 point it out? It is not from his dramatic instinct keeping 
 him back from assuming that Moses knew anything of 
 the places to the west of Jordan, for the writer does not 
 feel himself hindered from representing Moses naming Ebal 
 and Gerizim ; " Thou shalt put the blessing on Mount 
 Gerizim, and the curse upon Mount Ebal" (Deut. xi. 29). 
 When the command is given to record "all the words of 
 this Law " on the stones which were to be " plastered with 
 plaster," the writer does not hesitate to say that these 
 stones were to be set up " in Mount Ebal " (Deut. xxvii. 4). 
 All this suggests that when this book was written, whoever 
 was the author, the place of the central shrine was not 
 fixed ; it was still " the place which the Lord thy God 
 shall choose" (Deut. xii. 5; xv. 20; xviii. 6, etc.). It 
 was recognised that the beni Israel should maintain their 
 national unity, if they were to fulfil their function in the 
 evolution of religion, and further that the most natural 
 way to do so was to have one great national altar, the 
 sacred hearth of the nation, with its accompanying shrine ; 
 yet the place best suited for this had not been determined. 
 
70 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Were it not that it would render the action of David and 
 Solomon in choosing Zion as their temple to JHWH 
 unintelligible, as well as the action of Jeroboam and his. 
 successors in the Northern Kingdom, a case might be 
 made out for maintaining that the designation of Gerizim 
 as the place chosen, instead of being, as generally believed, 
 an interpolation, was part of the original text. In the 
 face of a direct precept like that found in the Samaritan 
 Recension, a man of David's piety would not have consecrated 
 the top of Mount Zion for the future sanctuary ; nor would 
 Solomon have built the, temple there. But even had they 
 been capable of this, Jeroboam would certainly have embraced 
 the opportunity of getting Divine sanction for his revolt, 
 and naturally would have concentrated worship in the shrine 
 on Mount Gerizim, which had been named by God by the 
 mouth of Moses, instead of setting up Holy Places in Bethel 
 and Dan. This applies to all the dynasties which succeeded 
 that of Jeroboam. The original text therefore can have 
 contained no distinct designation of Gerizim or any other 
 site as the place which JHWH "had chosen to put his name 
 there." 
 
 What then was the worship on the High Places? 
 
 It was the worship of JHWH; it was totally distinct 
 from the worship of false gods. It is said of Ahab (i Kings 
 xvi. 31) "As if it had been a light thing to walk in the 
 sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat ... he went and served 
 Baal and worshipped him." It has been already shown 
 that there must have been at one time something like an 
 identification of Baal and JHWH ; yet notwithstanding 
 it is a heinous addition to Ahab's guilt that he worshipped 
 Baal. As to the kings of David's House, it was regarded 
 only as a slight abatement of the eulogy that they "did 
 right in the sight of the Lord " that the " High Places " were 
 not taken away; thus "the High Places were not removed; 
 nevertheless Asa's heart was perfect with the Lord all 
 his days" (i Kings xv. 14). Very different are the terms 
 in which Manasseh is denounced. " He reared altars for 
 Baal, and made an asherah, as did Ahab, King of Israel, and 
 worshipped all the host of Heaven" (2 Kings xxi. 3). 
 When the priest or priests have been sent from Esar- 
 
MOSAISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 71 
 
 haddon to "teach them (the colonists) the manner of the 
 God of the land" (2 Kings xvii. 27), it would be the 
 worship of the High Places that they taught; yet the 
 writer of the book of Kings gives no indication that he 
 regarded the teaching as ritually defective. He assumes 
 that those who had been " brought from Babylon, from 
 Cuthah, and from Hamath, etc.," had been truly instructed 
 in the way to worship aright the God of Israel, but that 
 alongside of this they continued the false worship which 
 they had brought with them from Mesopotamia. It is 
 in perfect harmony with this, that when they claim to be 
 allowed to join the Jews in the erection of the temple 
 at Jerusalem, on the ground that for more than a century 
 and a half they have worshipped JHWH (Ezra iv. 2), 
 their claim is refused ; it is not denied that they have 
 done so, but it is maintained that only to the Jews was 
 permission given to build "the temple to JHWH, God 
 of Israel." Again, while the prophets Hosea and Amos 
 rebuke Northern Israel for worship of other gods, and for 
 worship at the High Places, it is as different things. Judah 
 is warned, " Come ye not to Gilgal, neither go ye up to 
 Bethaven (Bethel), nor swear JHWH liveth" (Hosea iv. 
 15); a warning which assumes at once that this worship was 
 wrong, and that it was a worship offered to JHWH. Earlier 
 a little even than this, the Prophet Amos rebukes the 
 Northern Israelites for breaches of ritual order, in terms 
 which imply that they knew and professed to follow the 
 Priestly Code (Amos iv. 4, 5). The worship of the 
 Ephraimite tribes was really a worship of JHWH, although 
 it was at the same time a worship on the High Places. 
 
 While from general considerations the conclusion above 
 stated has been arrived at, the special nature of the worship 
 has also to be considered. The most glaring difference 
 in the worship of Northern Israel from that of Judea was 
 the introduction of the " golden calves " which Jeroboam 
 set up in Bethel and in Dan. This question is one of no 
 little difficulty ; what was the precise import of the worship 
 of the calves? It has been supposed to be a transference 
 of Apis worship to Israel ; that Jeroboam had become 
 enamoured of this worship during his lengthened stay in 
 
72 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Egypt. But against this is the fact that neither in the 
 case of the Bull Apis nor of the Bull Mnevis is there any 
 word of the statue of the bull being worshipped, it is the 
 bull itself that is regarded as the symbol of deity. Another 
 theory which has received a considerable amount of German 
 support is that the "ox" was an accepted symbol of JHWH. 
 The episode of the golden calf in the desert might seem to 
 support this view. In this way Jeroboam was returning to 
 the older mode of worship. If this is correct it would seem 
 that the Mosaic authorship of the decalogue must be aban- 
 doned. But all tradition regards him as the author of the 
 " Ten Words." And it seems equally impossible to exclude 
 the second commandment from the ten.^ If the command- 
 ment against idolatry is not due to Moses, what figure of 
 such imposing stature among succeeding Israelites can be 
 imagined — what person of so great authority and influence — 
 as could introduce a precept at once so drastic and so opposed 
 
 ' It has been assumed as incontestable that Ephod and Teraphim 
 were images, and that their use in worship was regarded as legitimate. 
 In regard to both these assumptions a most interesting article by Pro- 
 fessor M'Fadyen appeared in the May (1916) issue of the Expositor. He 
 shows conclusively that in every case where the word " ephod " occurs it 
 retains its primary meaning of a garment, a sacerdotal garment certainly, 
 one so connected with worship that clothed in it the wearer was able 
 to give Divine responses. In regard to "ephod," the description in 
 the book of Exodus of that garment as part of the dress of the High 
 Priest is a guide to what an " ephod " was like. Before one would be 
 at liberty to maintain that it was anything else than a garment, at 
 least one passage must be produced in which the word cannot be a 
 garment. The contention is more restricted ; it is maintained that it 
 not only does not mean a garment, but that it does mean an image. 
 One of the passages in which the word is supposed to mean an image 
 is I Sam. xxi. 9, in which the sword of Goliath is said to be " wrapped 
 in a cloth behind the ' ephod.' " Of course it might mean an image in 
 that connection, but it might also mean half a dozen things besides. 
 Such a sacred garment would have a special place where it was kept, 
 either hanging up or folded away, and behind that place was the sword 
 of Goliath laid. Another passage is Judges viii. 27 ; Gideon, after 
 getting the earrings of the prey and their purple raiment " made an 
 'ephod' thereof and put it in his city, in Ophrah." The fact that purple 
 raiment went to the composition of this "ephod" is demonstrative 
 evidence that it was a garment not a statue. The next passage is more 
 vague. It is also found in the book of Judges (xvii. 4, .5). Micah 
 makes with the money which he had received from his mother " a graven 
 
MOSAISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 73 
 
 to every surrounding tendency ? The decalogue is attributed 
 to E, an Ephraimite living about 800 B.C. Elijah might 
 have been the legislator so far as personal influence goes, 
 but there is nothing iconoclastic, in the strict sense of the 
 word, about his mission, still less is there anything legislative. 
 But is there a necessity after all to regard the introduction 
 of the "calves" into the worship of JHWH as contradicting 
 the second commandment? Again we may appeal to the 
 history of Romanism. In every Romanist place of worship 
 of any importance on the Continent, or for that matter in 
 Britain or in America, there are statues of the Virgin and 
 the saints ; it may be that even with no sense of incongruity 
 the decalogue stands engraved in Latin on the walls of some 
 of these churches. Is there no possibility to find a solution 
 in this case along a line similar to that which enables the 
 Romanist to harmonise his prayers to the saints, and the 
 candles burnt before their images, with the commandment 
 
 image and a molten image," and quite separate from them is the " ephod 
 and teraphim." Of course Wellhausen and Kuenen allege interpolations, 
 and Vatke and Bertheau, two narratives united by a redactor ; by such 
 hypotheses documentary evidence may be divested of all value. In the 
 following chapter, vv. 14, 17, ;8, 20, the same words occur and the same 
 distinction is maintained. In none of the other passages is there even 
 the semblance of evidence for the contention that " ephod " means an 
 image. 
 
 There is greater plausibility in the contention that "teraphim" 
 means images ; the word is so translated in the Authorised Version in 
 the earliest passage in which it occurs. The incident in Gen. xxxi. 19, 
 34, throws no light on the form of the "teraphim." As little illumina- 
 tive in this regard is the passage concerning Micah, save to this extent 
 that the "teraphim" was not an idol, however intimately it might be 
 connected with idol-worship. There is greater appearance of evidence 
 that the "teraphim" had a human form in i Sam. xix. 13. Michal took 
 the teraphim and placed it in the bed to make the messengers of her 
 father think that David lay there. Professor M'Fadyen points out that 
 only the bust need have been shown. The theory he favours is that it was 
 a mask which a priest officiating at these High Places wore. A similar 
 use of the mask to that indicated in this hypothesis is found in the West 
 Coast of Africa, where certain secret societies have private sacred rites 
 in which their officials are masked. Hence there is no evidence of 
 generally accepted image-worship to be drawn from the ephod and 
 teraphim, and therefore no proof against the knowledge of the second 
 commandment or of its Mosaic origin. 
 
74 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 against image-worship ? The Romanist makes a distinction 
 in kind between the worship he offers to these statues and 
 that which he offers to God. Judaism before the time of the 
 introduction of Christianity began to give more prominence 
 to the doctrines concerning angels; but the belief in the 
 existence and activities of angels was already long deep in 
 the secret heart of Israel. It has been asserted that the 
 Jews brought the doctrine of angels with them from Babylon. 
 The Talmudic assertion is that they brought the names of 
 the angels from thence. The very earliest documents of 
 the Pentateuch have repeated references to angels. In the 
 case of Jacob's vision, attributed to E, the angels are repre- 
 sented as numerous. The word designating them is D'SK/iD 
 maldchim, " messengers " ; but in Gen. iii. 24 (attributed 
 to J) another word appears C^^? kerubhim, "cherubim." 
 
 With the further evolution of doctrine the functions fulfilled 
 by these spiritual beings became more defined in statement. 
 They were supposed to be intermediaries between God and 
 man. The doctrine was latent in Israel at all times, that 
 God did not speak, even to His chosen people, directly but 
 only through the intermediation of angels. So Stephen 
 in- his speech before the Sanhedrin (Acts vii. 53) said that 
 the Jews had received the Law (e(V ^iaTaya<i ayy'ekwv) " by 
 the ministration of angels." Similar to this is what Paul says 
 in the Epistle to the Galatians, speaking of the Law, that it 
 was Starayeh Si'' ayyiXiav, "ordained by angels" (Gal. iii. 19). 
 So also the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks of 
 the Law as 6 SC ayyeXwi' XaXrjdeh Xoyo?, " the word spoken 
 by angels " (Heb. ii. 2). Though the mediation of a plurality 
 of angels is not mentioned in the Old Testament, almost all 
 the theophanies appear also to have been really angeloph- 
 anies. When God appears to Moses in the "burning 
 tush" (Exod. iii. 2) it is said, "the angel of JHWH appeared 
 unto him" ; so in the book of Judges of Gideon (vi. 12, cf. 14), 
 of Manoah (xiii. 21, cf. 22). Another word than maldchim 
 is frequently used in connections which appear to make 
 " angels " the more natural rendering, i.e., Cn^N Elohim, the 
 word usually rendered " God." Especially in the Psalms is 
 this the case. Thus, according to the Authorised Version, in 
 
MOSAISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 75 
 
 Psalms viii. 5 — a rendering supported by the Septuagint, the 
 Peshitta, the Vulgate, and the Targum. There are, however, 
 other cases where the same word is used and might be 
 rendered in the same way, e.g.. Psalms Ixxxii. i ; xcvii. 9 ; 
 cxxxviii. I. It is to be observed that Jeroboam uses this 
 word when he says in the consecration of the golden 
 calves, " Behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up 
 out of the land of Egypt" (i Kings xii. 28). A fair case may 
 be made out for regarding his statement as meaning, " these 
 are the intermediaries of God, the angels who led your 
 fathers in the wilderness." If this hypothesis is correct it 
 will explain the comparative mildness of the prophetic 
 denunciations of this idolatry. Elijah did not call for fire 
 from Heaven to split into fragments those idolatrous 
 symbols ; nor did bears out of the forest come at the curse 
 of Elisha to devour the priests who ministered before them. 
 It might have been thought that when the Prophet of Judah 
 came to Bethel to rebuke Jeroboam, not only would the 
 altar on which he had been burning incense have been rent 
 (i Kings xiii. 3) but also that the gilded image itself would 
 have shared in its downfall. It is true it is said that 
 Jeroboam offered sacrifices " unto the calves that he had 
 made" (i Kings xii. 32); we must, however, remember that 
 the narrative is from a Judaean record and therefore biased. 
 Moreover, there might be differences in the victims sacrificed, 
 or the mode in which they were offered, which would excuse 
 a distinction being made similar to that suggested by the 
 Romanists in regard to the saints. It was a dangerous 
 innovation, but does not seem to have been as fruitful of 
 evil as might have been anticipated. It was a first step 
 towards polytheism, but it was not followed by a second. 
 
 No indication is anywhere given as to the precise figure 
 these gilded calves presented. The probability is that 
 "calves" is a name given in contempt; in all likelihood 
 "bulls" would have been more accurately descriptive. This 
 at once suggests on the one side the winged human-headed 
 bulls of Nineveh, and on the other the "cherubim," the 
 winged attendants on Deity in Ezekiel's vision. When 
 they are called "golden," it is not to be understood that 
 the statues of these " bulls " or " calves " were made of solid 
 
76 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 gold ; there would be a core of wood or stone overlaid with 
 gold. These statues could scarcely be quite identical with 
 the Ninevite winged human-headed bulls, because they were 
 usually in pairs, and were not strictly statues but were really 
 bas-relief; the material whether wood or limestone was too 
 brittle for the legs to bear the body in a free statue. The 
 difficulty would be solved were the bovine figure represented 
 kneeling, in the attitude to be seen in the oxen that form 
 part of the capitals of the columns in Persepolis and Susiana. 
 Figures of bullocks of fine limestone in that attitude were 
 found in excavating the foundation of a building in Sidon 
 about a score of years ago. 
 
 The mode in which these " calves " formed part of worship 
 is somewhat doubtful. There has already been reference 
 made to sacrifices being .offered by Jeroboam to the calves. In 
 this statement, besides the theological difificulties involved, 
 there is great uncertainty as to the nature of the sacrifices 
 offered, and the ritual observed. A much more difficult 
 passage is that in Hosea xiii. 2b, rendered in both English 
 versions, " They say of them. Let the men that sacrifice 
 kiss the calves." It may, however, be translated, "Saying, 
 They who slay men in sacrifice, kiss calves." This is the 
 rendering adopted by Orelli, following the Peshitta, the 
 Vulgate, and Luther. The Septuagint has had a different 
 reading, and therefore gives a different point to the passage : 
 " Sacrifice men, for bullocks fail ; " ordinary victims fail of 
 effect, resort to human sacrifice. There are two points to be 
 noted ; the victims, and the mode of expressing adoration. 
 That human sacrifice was ever practised in Northern Israel 
 is extremely improbable. While the action of Ahaz in the 
 Southern Kingdom in making " his son pass through the fire " 
 (2 Kings xvi. 3), burning "his children in the fire" (2 Chron. 
 xxviii. 3) makes human sacrifice in the Kingdom of the Ten 
 Tribes not impossible, yet if it were practised in the kingdom 
 of Jeroboam II. the silence of the prophetic historians in 
 regard to it is inexplicable ; they say that he " did evil in the 
 sight of the Lord," but this is not particularised as one of 
 the enormities of which he was guilty. With the exception 
 of this obscure passage, there is no indication of such a 
 practice existing in Israel. We should prefer to retain the 
 
MOSAISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 77 
 
 more ordinary interpretation, which regards the statement 
 as a ritual regulation addressed to those who would oiifer 
 sacrifice, " Let them kiss the calves." This brings us to 
 consider "kissing the calves" as an act of adoration. In 
 this, Romanism supplies an analogy ; the toe of the bronze 
 statue of St Peter in Rome has almost been kissed away by 
 the osculation of worshippers. While sacrificing toJHWH, 
 the worshipper was required to show honour to the " calves " 
 as representing the angelic intermediaries by whom the Law 
 had been given. Thus the passage before us supports the 
 idea, indicated above, that the "calves" were symbols of 
 subordinate beings to whom a lower form of worship was 
 due. 
 
 As to the ordinary ritual worship of the tribes of 
 Northern Israel, the kind of altar, the i mode of sacrifice, and 
 the victims offered are made plain, to a certain extent, by 
 Elijah's sacrifice on Mount Carmel. There had been an 
 altar on Mount Carmel, but it had fallen into disrepair owing 
 to neglect. That original altar had conformed to the 
 regulation of Exod. xx. 25 ; it had been made of unhewn 
 stones as it is of such that Elijah rebuilds it. Probably the 
 further condition had been evolved in the generations which 
 had passed, that it should be constructed of twelve stones, 
 " according to the number of the sons of Jacob." The victim, 
 a bullock, indicates that the animals sacrificed were those 
 designated to this service by the Levitical Law. The most 
 striking abnormality is that Elijah acts as sacrificing priest ; 
 there is no hint that he belongs to the tribe of Levi. On the 
 other hand, we do not know to what extent the inspired 
 prophet might supersede the priest ; the prophet could 
 depose kings, it might seem a slight matter to supersede 
 Levitical priests ; further the priesthood of the High Places 
 might not be regarded as subject to such strict regulations 
 as was that of the central shrine. It is further clear that the 
 victim was burnt, it was a whole burnt sacrifice. Another 
 peculiarity is to be noted ; this sacrifice takes place at the 
 time when the minhah was offered. A meat-offering or 
 minhah accompanied the lamb offered every morning and 
 evening. As a note of time it is used by Ezra (ix. 4) ; 
 he was astonied " until the evening sacrifice " a^Jfn nnjD^ ij; 
 
78 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 'ad leminhath ha'arebh. From this it would appear that the 
 evening sacrifice was so regular among the Northern tribes 
 that they calculated time by it ; probably morning sacrifice 
 was as well established. This would mean that on all the 
 High Places actually in use, every morning and evening 
 would rise the smoke of the oiifering. 
 
 There is yet another source of information, the prophecy 
 of Amos. Although a native of the Southern Kingdom, the 
 mission of Amos was to the Israelites of the northern portion 
 of Palestine. He denounces the various sins and short- 
 comings of the inhabitants, of rulers and ruled, of priests and 
 people. In one special passage he denounces their short- 
 comings in the matter of worship. After a severe rebuke of 
 the wives of the rulers of the nation (Amos iv. i), whom he 
 calls " Kine of Bashan that are in the mountain of Samaria, 
 which oppress the poor, which crush the needy, who say to 
 their lords, ' Bring and let us drink,' " and a denunciation of 
 the judgment of God on them, the prophet proceeds to take 
 up matters of religion, as if these transgressors or their 
 husbands wished to compound for their sins. He declares 
 that though they visit the shrines for worship they transgress. 
 Whether it means that it was transgression even to sacrifice 
 there, or whether it is that when in Bethel or at Gilgal they 
 transgressed, as seems to suit the connection, does not matter 
 for the present purpose, which is to ascertain what their 
 worship actually was. 
 
 The first description of their worship is that they " bring 
 sacrifices every morning." In this they were in agreement 
 with the Southern Israelites; in Jerusalem morning by 
 morning a lamb was sacrificed. If that is what is referred 
 to, then this merely completes the evidence afforded by the 
 narrative of Elijah's sacrifice at Carmel, which was timed 
 by the hour of the evening sacrifice. There is this difference, 
 however, in Elijah's sacrifice at Carmel the mention is not 
 of an offering in which victims were slain, but to the 
 unbloody '' meat-offering " ; still as in the " evening sacrifice " 
 a lamb was slain and offered on the altar along with an 
 appropriate minhah, "meat-offering," the difference cannot 
 be reckoned of importance. In that case the meaning would 
 be that despite their oppression of the poor, they maintained 
 
MOSAISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 79 
 
 an elaborate system of daily sacrifices. There is a point to 
 be noted, however, the lamb of the morning sacrifice was 
 called ^olah, " a whole burnt-oiifering " ; but this is zebak, " a 
 sacrifice," which after being consecrated and slain was used 
 for food ; they changed what was a daily confession of sin 
 and prayer for pardon into a feast. In any case there is 
 implied an identity of the sacrificial ritual of Samaria with 
 that of Jerusalem. The next element of rebuke is more 
 difficult to understand : " bring . . . your tithes after three 
 days." Whatever the force of this, it is clear that the 
 Samaritans under Jeroboam II. did obey the law of tithes. 
 There is less difficulty as to the sense of the next clause ; 
 Amos accuses them of offering " a sacrifice of thanksgiving 
 with leaven." This clause is technical, and to be interpreted 
 accordingly. The nllFi todah, "thank-offering," was funda- 
 mentally the same as the " trespass-offering," but in addition 
 there were to be offered " unleavened cakes mingled with 
 oil, and unleavened wafers anointed with oil, and cakes 
 mingled with oil, of fine flour, fried," and besides this, 
 leavened bread was to be offered (Lev. vii. 12, 13). It might 
 seem that there was nothing irregular in all this ; but again 
 a technical word comes in, "i^jp qitteer, " to burn incense," 
 
 but nothing leavened was to be burned. The connection 
 suggests that the Samaritans introduced this as an improve- 
 ment on the legal method. According to what was enjoined 
 in the Law, while the unleavened cakes were placed upon 
 the altar, but not burnt, the leavened cakes were not even 
 offered on the altar, but one was given to the offering priest ; 
 the rest were eaten at the sacrificial meal (Keil, Minor 
 Prophets, i. 271, Eng. trans.). The last characteristic which 
 Amos brings up for condemnation is that the Samaritans 
 " proclaim freewill offerings and publish them." The idea 
 seems to be that the worshippers were called upon to 
 offer " freewill offerings " (nbnj nedabotk), and when they had 
 
 come forward, their liberality was made known by public 
 proclamation. As a sacrifice meant a feast, the public 
 proclamation probably meant a public invitation to it. The 
 principal point, however, which has to be considered is the 
 fact that the technical word is used, which shows that the 
 
80 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 prophet expected that the Northern tribes not only had 
 the same religious ideas, but expressed them in the same 
 technical language. In the following chapter, vv. 21, 22, more 
 technical terms connected with ritual occur. JHWH declares, 
 " I despise your feast days (M^an haggechem) and I will not 
 smell in your solemn assemblies (Dp'^rihsy 'atztzeroihechem)." 
 
 In the following verse He declares He will not receive 
 their " burnt-offerings " {r\\h)i 'olotk), " meat-offerings (DWrap 
 
 minhothechem), peace-offerings (OPB* shelem (sing.) ). It is to 
 
 be observed that all these terms occur in P, and one of them, 
 minkah, in P alone, in the technical sense. What has to be 
 noted is, that a man who has no connection with either the 
 priesthood or the schools of the prophets, not only himself 
 knows all these technical terms but expects his audience of 
 the Ephraimite tribes to be equally well acquainted with 
 them. All these technical terms to which we have referred, 
 belonged to the worship of JHWH in the highly organised 
 form in which it is recorded in those portions of the 
 Pentateuch designated by P. As conclusive evidence that 
 the worship of the High Places, as found in Israel of the 
 North, was worship of JHW^H, one has only to turn as 
 already noted, to Hosea iv. 15^, "Come ye not to Gilgal, 
 neither go ye up to Beth-aven (Bethel), nor swear, the Lord 
 (JHWH) liveth''; in these Northern shrines, Gilgal and 
 Bethel, it was the custom to swear by JHWH. 
 
 Another part of sacrificial worship was the burning of 
 incense. The composition of the aromatic powder to be burned 
 was somewhat elaborate; it was regarded as sacred, any 
 use of it for ordinary purposes was looked upon as sacrilege, 
 any imitation of it was forbidden. Night and morning was 
 the incense burned before JHWH in the temple at Jerusalem. 
 This was part of the worship on the High Places when that 
 ritual became systematised, as is seen by the fact that 
 Jeroboam "stood by the altar to burn incense" when the 
 "Man of God out of Judah" (i Kings xiii. i) came to rebuke 
 him and denounce Divine vengeance on his shrines. It is 
 to be observed that in Bethel as at Jerusalem there is an 
 Altar of Incense; in Egyptian wall-paintings incense is 
 offered to Deity in a spoon-like censer, or in a cup-like vessel 
 
MOSAISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 81 
 
 either held in the hand or presented on those spoons already 
 mentioned ; no altar appears to be used. Incense burning 
 does not seem to be so prominent in Assyrian worship, if 
 one may judge from the monuments. It is clear, then, 
 that Jeroboam, even while breaking away from the established 
 modes of worship, wished to retain the most obvious features, 
 so that the extent of the breach might be minimised. 
 Jeroboam, however, assumed to himself this part of the 
 priest's office, to burn incense ; the sin of Uzziah in later 
 days (2 Chron. xxvi. 16) would seem to indicate a tendency 
 in monarchs at that time to claim this priestly function as 
 part of the royal prerogative. 
 
 As worship involves not only a consecrated place, 
 consecrated offerings, and consecrated actions and language 
 but also consecrated persons, the singular institution of the 
 Nazirites has to be noticed. Priests were always consecrated 
 personages, but the Nazirite was not consecrated as was 
 the priest for the performance of any special office ; he rather 
 was himself like a consecrated sacrifice. The Law of the 
 Nazirite is elaborately laid down in Num. vi. 1-21, a 
 passage attributed to P. The existence of the order is 
 assumed in the book of Judges (xiii. 14; xvi. 17), and also in 
 Amos (ii. 11, 12). The, first two of these passages, those in 
 Judges, are connected with the history of Samson. The 
 part of Amos in which the reference to them occurs is 
 directed against the sins of Israel, by which the Northern 
 tribes are meant. While the institution then was well 
 known in Israel, it was also extant in Judah, as is seen in 
 Lam. iv. 7 : " Her (Jerusalem's) Nazirites were purer than 
 snow, they were whiter than milk, they were more ruddy in 
 body than rubies, etc." The order of Nazirites was common 
 to both North and South. 
 
 To sum up the foregoing argument ; the Northern tribes 
 retained not only the worship of JHWH, but also to a 
 great extent all the ordinances of worship to be found in 
 the Southern Kingdom. There are two prominent points 
 of difference, one negative, the want of a central shrine ; 
 the other positive, the golden calves. Set up by Jeroboam 
 in Bethel and Dan, they seem to have been erected else- 
 where also ; at all events, it seems most natural to regard 
 
 F 
 
82 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 "Samaria" in Hosea viii. 5, 6, as referring to the city, not 
 the province. If we are correct in our opinion, the worship 
 given to "calves'* was lower in kind than that given to 
 JHWH ; they were the instruments of His will, His angels. 
 The Ephraimite tribes had thus the Law in all its complete- 
 ness, at latest when Amos issued his warnings to them. 
 
 In the argument just concluded it. will be seen that we 
 have assumed, for the sake of broadening the discussion, the 
 correctness of the critical position, that Northern Israel wor- 
 shipped only by the High Places. We have not considered the 
 alternative possibility, that pious Israelites continued to visit 
 Jerusalem and worship at its temple. Yet to the attentive 
 reader the books of Kings and Hosea show not a few 
 evidences of the existence of such a tendency. The purpose 
 Jeroboam had in setting up the Golden Calves was to wean 
 the people from this habit, lest the religious precedence given 
 to the City of David might lead to the re-establishment of 
 the Davidic dynasty in the Northern tribes (i Kings xii. 
 26-31). This purpose does not seem to have been completely 
 achieved, as-Baasha appears to have found himself obliged 
 to adopt more forcible measures (i Kings xv. \y ; cf.2 Chron. 
 XV. 9, 10). An indication of the same tendency may be seen 
 in the reign of Jehoshaphat (2 Chron. xix. 4). Even when the 
 Northern Kingdom is most flourishing, under Jeroboam II., 
 Hosea regards the worship on Mount Zion as that which 
 alone is legitimate (Hosea iv. 15 ; x. 11 ; xi. 12) ; with him 
 the House of David are the Lord's Anointed (Hosea iii. 5). 
 The attitude which EHsha assumes to Jehoshaphat, as com- 
 pared with that to Jehoram, in the expedition against Moab, 
 confirms this (2 Kings iii. 14). Unless the prophets and others 
 of the pious of Ephraim and Manasseh were in the habit of 
 worshipping on Mount Zion, the high esteem in which Elijah 
 is held among the Jews is inexplicable. This unity in worship 
 will explain also the preservation by them of the books, 
 historic and other, of the Northern prophets. For further 
 discussion of this subject, see Chapter XII., p. 383. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 PROPHETISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 
 
 The belief in Deity is wide as the race ; the cases in which 
 it has been alleged that certain races are totally without 
 the idea of a god have been discovered to be due to defective 
 observation on the one side, and on the other to the instinctive 
 reticence of the savage in presence of possible ridicule. 
 Very various, and in most cases very vague are the ideas 
 entertained as to the nature and attributes of the god or 
 gods, but under whatever disguise the belief is there. There 
 is generally present as a supplementary belief the assumption 
 that the Deity can, and ought to be approached with acts 
 of worship, mainly some form of sacrifice. As universal 
 is the belief that Deity can in turn reveal Himself to his 
 worshipper. In short, in all races there is the assumption, 
 to use the words of the Apostle James, that if "we draw 
 nigh to God He will draw nigh to us " ; if the worshipper 
 approached Deity with sacrifices and offerings. He in turn 
 would draw near to His worshipper in revelations of His 
 will. Hence we find in every country that over against the 
 priest, with his knowledge of the ritual of worship that 
 would be acceptable to Deity, stands the prophet, with 
 his claim of being able to find out and communicate the 
 will of Deity, and incidentally the future, whether as 
 dependent on the will of the deities, or as known by him 
 from his superior powers and opportunities though hidden 
 from men. The prophet might assume the guise of a 
 medicine man, or a wizard, or haruspex. Sometimes the 
 same individual was at once prophet and priest. After 
 the victim was slain, he might profess to tell from its 
 entrails what the will of the Deity was, or as at Delphi might 
 pass into a chamber, and there come directly under the 
 
 83 
 
84 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 influence of the Deity, and thus be able to express in words 
 what the god willed. In these cases, although the person 
 was the same, the function was distinct. Another method 
 of Divine revelation which was not restricted to officials, 
 whether priests or prophets, was dreams ; here the prophet 
 appeared in the guise of the interpreter of dreams. 
 
 It will be seen that prophecy in Israel was no isolated 
 phenomenon, but that in this, as in the possession of priests, 
 Israel was on all fours with other peoples. At the same 
 time, no one can fail to recognise how immeasurably the 
 Hebrew prophets excel in spiritual and moral purpose all 
 the augurs, haruspices, and diviners of antiquity, still 
 more the medicine man of modern heathenism. The 
 question now presses : Is the Hebrew prophet an evolution 
 from the medicine man, or is he a survival from a purer 
 day, and the medicine man a degeneration from the prophet ? 
 The most commonly held view is the former. This question 
 cannot be absolutely determined, as history does not reach 
 back to the origin of institutions. If the commonly held 
 view is correct, it would necessarily follow that the earlier 
 the notices of the prophets, the closer would be their 
 resemblance to the medicine man. As the present investiga- 
 tion has to do with Israel and prophecy within that nation, 
 inquiry may be restricted to the phenomena presented by 
 it. Abraham is called a prophet (Gen. xx. 7) ; he certainly 
 is never represented as resorting to incantation to gain a 
 knowledge of the will of God, nor is he represented as 
 invoking Divine direction by lot, a mode of learning the 
 Divine will afterwards so common. It may be observed 
 that the narrative in which Abraham is thus designated 
 is attributed to E, the Ephraimite document. Moses is 
 also a prophet, indeed the greatest of the prophets (Deut. 
 xxxiv. id); it is never related of him that he used en- 
 chantments. In Num. xii. 6, which is claimed for the 
 Ephraimite document, the ordinary method by which 
 JHWH revealed Himself is stated ; " If there be a prophet 
 among you I, JHWH, will make myself known unto him 
 in a vision, and in a dream will I speak with him." There 
 is no word in this of anything approaching incantations 
 to prepare for receiving a revelation, still less is there any 
 
PROPHETISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 85 
 
 idea of wresting a revelation from the Almighty by donning 
 a special dress, or going through any performances with 
 pebbles, bones, or shells. So, too, with Samuel, he has not 
 to go through any process to wrest from God the secret of 
 whom He purposes to set up as king; God reveals it to 
 him that the youth whom JHWH has chosen will come to 
 him ; and when he does come God informs him of the fact. 
 Though Saul's servant expects that " the Man of God " 
 will be able and willing to tell them about the strayed asses, 
 he says nothing to intimate that he expects the revelation 
 even on that trivial matter would be given as the result 
 of an incantation. In regard to none of the prophets of 
 Israel is there any indication that the prophet used any 
 other means than prayer to get a Divine revelation. Most 
 frequently the revelation came to thetn without any wish 
 of theirs ; Jonah indeed fled from the presence of JHWH 
 to escape declaring the message God had given him. The 
 only trace of any affinity of the prophet with the medicine 
 man and his methods is in regard to Balaam. It is said of 
 him (Num. xxiv. i) : " He went not as at other times to seek 
 enchantments," implying that he on the previous occasions 
 had done so. He is a degenerate, who though in a way 
 believing in JHWH, yet thought He might be bribed by 
 offerings or cajoled by enchantments to curse Israel. It 
 does not occur to him, as it would to a Hebrew prophet, 
 to call upon Balak and the Moabites " to break off their sins 
 by righteousness," to give up the hideously impure rites of 
 their worship. He recognises all the while that it is 
 righteousness and purity that gain the favour of God, hence 
 his advice to put temptation in the way of Israel that the 
 people may sink to the Moabite level and lose Divine favour. 
 It may then be regarded as clear that, whatever the case 
 with other races, the Israelite prophet was not evolved 
 from the medicine man. 
 
 The function of the heathen prophet, as of the medicine 
 man of the savage, is in the case of plague or distress of 
 any kind to inform the worshipper what sacrifices he must 
 offer to propitiate deity so that the evil shall depart from 
 him. He and the priest are thus closely allied. In the 
 religion of Israel they occupied a clearly contrasted position. 
 
86 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 While the signs that guided the augur told what enter- 
 prises might be engaged in with hope of a prosperous 
 issue, what days were lucky and what days unlucky, there 
 was nothing moral in it all ; to the Hebrew prophet the 
 moral was everything. When distress of any kind visited 
 a people, the prophet pointed out the moral reason for 
 it, and required a moral not a ritual remedy. At the same 
 time there is no antagonism between the prophet and the 
 legitimate priest. In the Southern Kingdom, while the 
 people are sternly rebuked for trusting in ritual "as a means 
 of pleasing God rather than in rectitude, there is yet no 
 opposition between the two orders. Of the three most 
 voluminous prophets, two are priests, Jeremiah and Ezekiel ; 
 the third, Isaiah, though he denounces all trust in ritual, 
 and demands " To what purpose is the multitude of your 
 sacrifices to me?" (Is. i. ii), yet when he has to choose 
 " faithful witnesses " one of the two is declared to be a priest, 
 and the other has a name that was a popular one with 
 the priesthood (Is. viii. 2). Not that there is not denuncia- 
 tion of the priests and abundance of it, but the prophets 
 share in the condemnation. Isaiah not only declares that 
 the priests but also that the prophets "err through strong 
 drink" (Is. xxviii. 7); further he condemns "the prophet 
 that teacheth lies" (ix. 15). Jeremiah, priest though he is, 
 denounces with fierce frequency the sins of the priests, 
 yet with unvarying regularity unites the prophets with them 
 in his condemnation (ii. 8; vi. 13; xiii. 13; xiv. 18; xxiii. 11, 
 and other passages) ; consequently both classes unite in 
 opposing Jeremiah, and in endeavouring to compass his 
 death (xxvi. 7-1 1). So far from the prophets being in 
 opposition to the priests, Jeremiah declares "The prophets 
 prophesy falsely and the priests bear rule by their means " ; 
 indeed of the two the prophets were the more guilty. So 
 too Ezekiel, though with less frequency and vehemence, 
 if he declares that " the priests have violated the Law," he 
 has already asserted that "there is a conspiracy of the 
 prophets" (Ezek. xxii. 25, 26). In the minor prophets, too, 
 both prophets and priests are condemned. Micah, the con- 
 temporary of Isaiah, condemns both classes for their love 
 of money : " The priests teach for hire and the prophets 
 
PROPHETISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 87 
 
 divine for money" (Micah iii. ii). Zephaniah, the con- 
 temporary of Jeremiah, while he denounces the priests because 
 they " have polluted the sanctuary, they have done violence 
 to the Law," also declares the prophets to be "light and 
 treacherous persons'' (Zeph. iii. 4). 
 
 On the other hand, by the prophets of the Southern 
 Kingdom the priests are frequently directly or by implica- 
 tion highly commended. In the second Isaiah, it is repre- 
 sented as one of the crowning glories of restored Israel that 
 they " shall be named the priests of the Lord " (Ixi. 6) ; and 
 further that JHWH shall say, " I will also take of them for 
 priests and for Levites (Ixvi. 21). Jeremiah in showing 
 forth the blessings that shall accompany the restoration of 
 Judah declares*, " I will satiate the soul of the priests with 
 fatness, and my people shall be satisfied with my goodness, 
 saith the Lord " (Jer. xxxi. 14). The latter chapters of the 
 prophecies of Ezekiel are occupied with ritual arrangements, 
 the form of the renewed temple and the duties and privileges 
 of the priests in connection with it. Joel calls the priests 
 " the Lord's ministers," declares that they mourn on account 
 of the desolation wrought by the plague of locusts, but gives 
 no hint that any shortcoming of theirs had in any special 
 way been the occasion of it. In the prophecies of Haggai 
 and Zechariah, the priests, and above all the High Priest, are 
 specially honoured. So far then as the Southern Kingdom 
 is concerned, there is no antagonism between the two classes, 
 prophets and priests. 
 
 In the Northern Kingdom, the prophets seem to have 
 drawn to themselves all that was properly religious — assuming 
 even what were correctly speaking priestly functions. On 
 Carmel, when putting to the test the right of JHWH to the 
 worship of Israel, Elijah utterly ignores the priests, whether 
 of the schismatic High Places or of the legitimate shrine at 
 Jerusalem, and himself assumes the function of sacrificing 
 priest. It may certainly be urged that all the circumstances 
 were exceptional,' and that in such a case that might be done 
 in regard to sacrifices which would not have been thought of 
 in a normal state of matters. Certainly earlier in the history 
 of Israel, Samuel repeatedly offers sacrifices himself; further 
 when Saul, on account of Samuel's delay, takes upon himself 
 
88 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 at Gilgal to offer sacrifice Samuel blames him and announces 
 that in consequence his rule over Israel should be merely 
 personal (i Sam. xiii. 13). The case of Samuel is not quite 
 parallel with that of Elijah, as he was a Kohathite, a member 
 therefore of the same family of Levites as was Aaron (i 
 Chron. vi. 33-38). It is certainly the case that Elkanah his 
 father is called (i Sam. i. i) "an Ephrathite " = Ephraimite ; 
 that designation, however, may be held as asserting merely 
 that he was born within the territory of that tribe. Still 
 although he was a Levite, Samuel was not an Aaronite. It 
 seems, however, to have been acknowledged that in abnormal 
 circumstances the Levites might be called upon to perform 
 priestly functions, as in Hezekiah's Passover (2 Chron. xxix. 
 34). Samuel's assumption of the priest's office appears to 
 have been habitual. When Saul and his servant come to the 
 unnamed city in the land of Zuph, and determine to consult 
 Samuel about the strayed asses, they find that there is to be 
 a sacrifice in the High Place of the city and that Samuel is to 
 be celebrant (i Sam. ix 12). That he should act as sacrificing 
 priest appears, from the language of the woman at 
 whom Saul had made his inquiry, to be quite the usual 
 practice. Again, when Samuel comes to Bethlehem to anoint 
 David ; while the elders of the city are anxious as to .the 
 motive that brought him to sacrifice among them they are 
 not surprised that he should come to offer sacrifice. The 
 fact that Samuel was by birth of a family closely related to 
 that of the Aaronites lessens the cogency of any argument 
 from him as to prophetic practice. 
 
 What cannot fail to strike the student of the books of 
 Kings, so far as the history of the Northern Kingdom is 
 concerned, is the way in which the prophets ignore the priests. 
 We have already noted the fact of Elijah's supersession of the 
 priesthood on Carmel, but further there is no reference to 
 his ever meeting a priest at all. Elisha equally ignores the 
 priesthood. There must have been numerous priests as there 
 were numerous shrines, but the prophetic activity and the 
 priestly were on different planes. When the age of Amos 
 is reached attention is directed to ritual, and failures in 
 regard to it commented on, as has been shown above. 
 Whether or not it is in consequence of this, the priesthood 
 
PROPHETISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 89 
 
 will no longer allow itself to be ignored. Amaziah, as repre- 
 sentative of the priesthood, challenges Amos for speaking 
 against Bethel, and when he had failed to excite the wrath of 
 King Jeroboam against the prophet endeavours to frighten 
 him away. Amos treats the threats and the accusation with 
 something very like contempt (Amos vii. 10-17), and there- 
 after pays little attention to Amaziah or his underhand 
 efforts at the court. Hosea who followed Amos treats the 
 priests with little respect ; he accuses them of murder and 
 lewdness (vi. 9), declares them to " have been a snare on 
 Mizpah.and a net spread on Mount Tabor" (v. i). There is, 
 however, one passage (iv. 4) which, on the ordinary interpreta- 
 tion, gives a more favourable impression of the position of 
 the priests — "Thy people are as they that strive with the 
 priest." It is frequently held as meaning " Thy people are 
 utterly regardless, they will even quarrel with the priests." 
 Some have suggested another reading (Sir G. A. Smith,Mm. 
 Proph., in loc), but the meaning does not seem to be more 
 satisfactory. The verses preceding show the evil condition 
 morally into which the people had fallen, and in consequence 
 the judgments of God are manifest. " Therefore shall the 
 land mourn, and every one that dwelleth therein shall 
 languish." Then follows : " Yet let no man strive nor reprove 
 another," all efforts at amending them by reproof will be 
 resultless ; " thy people," the followers of the prophets, would 
 be engaged in as fruitless a task as striving with a priest. The 
 priests were so set in their ways and so sure of their ground 
 that they could easily baffle anyone that strove with them. 
 The relation of the prophets to the priests seems to be that 
 of contempt, which generally resulted in the former ignoring 
 the latter. 
 
 An interesting line of investigation is the extent to 
 which the influence of the prophets superseded that of the 
 priests in the religious consciousness of the people. While 
 the book of Tobit is late and unhistorical, it may truly repre- 
 sent the way in which some of the pious in Israel maintained 
 the faith by going to Jerusalem ; yet it probably would be 
 few who could do so (Tob. i. 6). A case that might seem to 
 support this, is that of the fourscore men that came from 
 Shechem and Shiloh with offerings "to bring them to the 
 
90 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 house of the Lord." This, however, only affords evidence of 
 the attitude of the pious in Israel after Josiah had extended 
 his reformation to the territory of the Northern tribes. There 
 is of course the fact that " divers of Asher and Manasseh and 
 of Zebulon humbled themselves and came to Jerusalem " to 
 attend the Passover celebrated by Hezekiah. It must, how- 
 ever, be remembered that they came at the express invitation 
 of the king, and even then were exceptional. Besides these 
 doubtful instances there appear few indications of the Northern 
 tribes regularly honouring the Davidic shrine on Mount Zion 
 with their offerings. 
 
 In considering the place assumed by the prophets to the 
 religious community of Northern Palestine, it must be 
 remembered that the references will necessarily be few and 
 incidental. Annalists recording events, having in view only 
 the immediate descendants of their contemporaries, would say 
 nothing about the ordinary and habitual. It is only when 
 something out of the ordinary and therefore deemed worthy 
 of commemoration is connected with the habitual that any 
 notice of it is introduced. A succinct account of the reign of 
 our late king, comparable in length with the narrative of 
 the reigns of Jotham of Jerusalem, for example, or of 
 Jehoahaz of Samaria, would in all probability make no 
 mention of railways _ or motor cars, unless some disaster 
 connected with these modes of progression had to be referred 
 to. There is a striking passage which indicates that religious 
 dues which, according to the Levitical Law, were paid to the 
 priests, came in the Northern Kingdom to the prophets. In 
 2 Kings iv. 42, it is said, " There came a man from Baal- 
 Shalisha, and brought the Man of God bread of first-fruits." 
 According to Lev. xxiii. 20, the first - fruits (^^^^ bikkur) 
 were the perquisite of the priest ; but in this case the man 
 from Baal-Shalisha brings them not to the priest but to the 
 Man of God, the prophet in Gilgal. The incident is 
 introduced merely to bring out the miracle which Elisha 
 wrought, which made the " twenty loaves of barley and ears 
 of corn" provision for "a hundred men." We may deduce 
 from the purely incidental way in which it is narrated that 
 it was no isolated or out-of-the-way action on the part of the 
 man who brought the first-fruits, but was an instance of a 
 
PROPHETISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 91 
 
 common practice. Although there is no evidence to support 
 it, yet analogy would suggest that much of the tithe went to 
 the support of the schools of the prophets. There might in 
 short be something of the rivalry between the priests and 
 Levites on one side and the prophetic communities on the 
 other that existed in the Middle Ages between the Secular 
 Clergy and the preaching Friars. 
 
 When the first-fruits were brought to the priest he was 
 to " wave the first-fruits, a wave offering before the Lord " ; 
 but there is no reference to this when the man of Baal- 
 Slialisha brought his first-fruits to Elisha ; the priestly share 
 in the dedication is unnoticed. It seems further as if there 
 were evidence of a system of non-priestly worship connected 
 with the prophets. The most important reference is purely 
 incidental. When the son of the Shunamite woman died, 
 " She called to her husband and said. Send me, I pray thee, 
 one of the young men and one of the asses, that I may run 
 to the Man of God and come again. And he said. Wherefore 
 wilt thou go to him to-day? (2 Kings iv. 22, 23) it is neither 
 New Moon nor Sabbath." He would have regarded her 
 request as quite natural had it been made on either of these 
 days : hence there is implied that religious people in Northern 
 Palestine had a practice of visiting the prophets of the Lord 
 on New Moon and on the Sabbath, presumably, as these were 
 consecrated days, for some sort of religious service. We have 
 no information as to the nature of this service, but it cannot 
 have been sacrificial, or the Shunamite's husband would have 
 remarked on the absence of a victim. The nature of the 
 worship can only be conjectured. Yet by following out 
 analogies these conjectures may be regarded as having a 
 certain amount of probability. It may be assumed that prayer 
 was an essential part of this prophetic worship, as prayer is a 
 natural part of worship at all times; and as the prophets 
 were men of prayer. When Elisha is about to raise the 
 Shunamite's son, he prays; when his servant is terrified 
 by the sight of the Syrians surrounding Dothan again Elisha 
 prays that his servant's eyes be opened. Further as the 
 primary function of the prophet was exhortation, it is also 
 likely that on the occasion of such a gathering this would 
 not be foregone. When one examines the writings of the 
 
92 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 literary prophets, one finds it obvious that all the oracles 
 imply speech to a listening audience, an audience who had 
 come to hear ; such an audience, in short, as is implied in 
 the gathering of the pious. If it may be assumed, as is 
 indicated by the structure of the prophecies which have 
 come down, that they were spoken, it is difficult to imagine 
 where an audience could be collected except in a house. 
 For safety all the inhabitants of Palestine were gathered 
 together in towns ; and the traffic of the narrow streets of 
 an Eastern town would be seriously interrupted if a speaker 
 collected round him even a dozen auditors. A larger 
 number might be collected in the suq or market-place, but 
 there, besides the difficulty of finding a place sufficiently 
 elevated to command the audience, the presence of a number 
 of people not there for business would be even more 
 objectionable than in the streets. When Ezra wished to 
 read the Law publicly he had a pulpit of wood set up from 
 which to address the assembled people (Neh. viii. 4). It is 
 observed that it is in " the broad place that was before the 
 water-gate " that Ezra had gathered them together. There 
 would thus have to be some preparation before an 
 audience could be addressed. The prophet appears to have 
 received those who wished to hear the message of God in 
 a house, presumably his own, as may be seen from Ezek. 
 xxxiii. 30-32. " They speak one to another, every one to 
 his brother. Come, I pray you, and hear what is the word 
 that cometh forth from the Lord. And they come unto thee 
 as the people cometh, and sit before thee as my people, and 
 they hear thy words, but they will not do them : for with 
 their mouth they show much love, but their heart goeth 
 after their covetousness. And lo thou art to them as a 
 very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice and can 
 play well on an instrument: for they hear thy words, but 
 they do them not." From this it is clear that it was 
 regarded as the mark of God's people to come and sit before 
 the prophet as pupils before a teacher. If then the pious of 
 the people were accustomed to come to hear the exhortation 
 of the prophets, it would most likely be that they would do 
 so on days when no work could be done, that is to say, on 
 Sabbaths and New Moons. 
 
PROPHETISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 93 
 
 Although there is no distinct evidence of it, it may be 
 surmised that music formed part of the worship. It is 
 initially probable from the prominence given to music in 
 all worship. In the Chronicler's account of the Dedication 
 of Solomon's Temple,, music has a prominent place. "The 
 Levites arrayed in white linen having cymbals, psalteries, 
 and harps . . . and with them a hundred and twenty priests 
 sounding with trumpets" (2 Chron. v. 12). Further, music 
 was supposed to have an effect on the mind of the prophet, 
 rendering him more sensitive to the Divine influence (2 Kings 
 iii. 15). From the incident to which we have just referred, 
 the music would not improbably be partly instrumental. 
 
 Another element may have been present. The prophets 
 assume in their audience a knowledge of the Law, both its 
 precepts and its histories. So far as these precepts regarded 
 ritual we have already noted them. The technical terms of 
 ritual would naturally be preserved among the priests, but 
 Amos, in whose prophecies these terms are most found, did 
 not address himself to priests especially. Indeed if Amaziah's 
 may be regarded as a type of the priestly attitude to Amos, 
 it is one of antagonism. By blaming his audience for failure 
 in matters of ritual, and expressing his reproof in technical 
 language, the prophet assumes that they were in a position 
 to know these terms and what they meant We cannot 
 imagine that reading was by any means a general accom- 
 plishment in Northern Palestine. If they could not read, 
 the audience of the prophets must have learned these terms 
 by hearing the Law read.^ 
 
 ^ If the reading of the LXX. is to be adopted, there would be no doubt 
 in the matter. ''And they read the Law without, and called for public 
 professions '' (Amos iv. 5). This would indicate that it was considered 
 indecorous and savouring of ostentation to read the Law in the street ; 
 it was to be read indoors. However, as the question in the rest of the 
 passage is about sacrifices, the Massoretic reading is superior ; rnin 
 
 todah, " offerings of thanksgiving," is a rare word, and miFI torah, " the 
 
 Law," a common one ; moreover, Sip qara means not only " to 
 
 proclaim " but also " to read " ; as there was only one letter which 
 required to be changed to read f^n hutz, "without," instead of J'DH 
 
 hametz, "leaven," that would be regarded as a mistake and altered 
 accordingly. 
 
94 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 There are more references to the narratives in the Law. 
 It might be said that great general facts, like the Egyptian 
 slavery and the march through the desert, might be 
 conveyed down by tradition. National tradition does not 
 retain memories of events that are dishonouring; the fact 
 that they had been slaves in Egypt was not one on which 
 they could glorify themselves. Had it been left to tradition, 
 the Israelites would have identified themselves with the 
 " Shepherd Kings," and represented themselves as dominating 
 Egypt. The reader need only be referred to the Book of 
 Jubilees to see what Jewish imagination can effect in the 
 way of self-glorification ; and that, too, despite the records. 
 Yet there is no fact in their past history so frequently 
 referred to by the prophets and Psalmists as Israel's deliver- 
 ance from the Egyptian bondage. Thus Hosea xi. i, " I 
 have called my son out of Egypt"; xii. 13, "By a prophet 
 JHWH brought Israel out of Egypt"; ix. 10, "I found 
 Israel like grapes in the wilderness." In Amos the number 
 of the years of the wilderness wanderings is expressly 
 mentioned (v. 25), "Did ye bring unto me sacrifices and 
 offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel ? " 
 In this last case the reference to the wilderness wanderings 
 does not direct attention to anything of which the people 
 might feel pride, rather very much the reverse. If we may 
 regard Psalms Ixxx., Ixxxi., as Ephraimite in origin, as the 
 avoidance of all mention of Judah or Jerusalem seems to 
 indicate, not only is the deliverance from Egypt referred to, 
 but also the episode of Meribah in which Israel's rebelliousness 
 was peculiarly manifested. It seems unlikely that tradition 
 would retain memories so little to the credit of the people. 
 
 But further there are references to special events. In 
 Hosea xii., the leading incidents of the life of the patriarch 
 Jacob are referred to : v. 3«, " He took his brother by the 
 heel in the womb " {cf. Gen. xxv. 26 ; vv. 3^, 4^) ; " In his 
 manhood he had power with God, yea, he had power over 
 the angel and prevailed " {cf. Gen. xxxii. 24-28). In regard 
 to this passage, it has to be noted that the verb nYB> sarah, 
 which is translated in Genesis "Thou art a prince," occurs 
 in this passage in Hosea, and is rendered "had power"; 
 this verb is found only in these two passages. Further the 
 
PROPHETISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 95 
 
 word bbl yakol, " to prevail," occurs both in the Genesis 
 narrative and in Hosea's reference to the incident. These 
 resemblances -can most easily be explained by regarding 
 Hosea as referring to a written document, the words of 
 which were known. Certainly it is said in Hosea xii. a^b, " he 
 wept and made supplication to Him," and there is no word 
 of weeping in the Genesis narrative ; yet in the earlier part 
 of this chapter (xxxii. 7-12) there is given Jacob's prayer, 
 which surely has tears at the back of it ; at any rate it is 
 without doubt supplication. In the last clause of this verse 4 
 there seem to be references to the two visits Jacob paid to 
 Bethel : " He found him at Bethel, and there He spake with 
 us;" in the first Jacob was alone, in the next he had his 
 family with him (t/; Gen. xxviii. 13-19; xxxv. 10-12). The 
 whole episode of Jacob's residence with Laban is summed 
 up in Hosea xii. 12: "And Jacob fled into the country of 
 Syria, and Israel served for a wife, and for a wife he kept 
 sheep." Hosea thus expected his audience to be thoroughly 
 acquainted with the history of the patriarch whom they 
 claimed as their ancestor, even to the words of the narrative. 
 Another event in itself very striking and hence, it is to be 
 admitted, likely to be preserved by tradition was the destruc- 
 tion of the cities of the plain. These cities and their over- 
 throw are frequently referred to in the prophets Isaiah, 
 Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, as well as the two prophets of the 
 Northern tribes to which we have mainly restricted our 
 attention. Though politically divided the two portions of 
 the Israelite nation stood related to each other in regard to 
 religion, as distinct from ritual, much as do America and 
 Britain ; hence the prophetic usage in the one kingdom may 
 be regarded as holding with regard to the other also. Hosea 
 (xi. 8) mentions Admah and Zeboim, the two less prominent 
 of these cities. Amos speaks of Sodom and Gomorrah as 
 overthrown of the Lord (Amos iv. 11); and in doing so he 
 uses the verb ijan Jiaphak. This word occurs ninety-five times 
 in Scripture; of these in sixteen it means "overturn" or 
 "overthrow," and seven of these cases refer to "the cities 
 of the plain"; and of their destruction no other word is 
 used. The figure implied may be seen from 2 Kings 
 xxi. 13, "a man wipeth a dish, wiping it, and turning it 
 
96 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 upside down (j\Bn haphak). The narrative of the overthrow 
 does not supply any features that make that figure a specially 
 happy one. Of the numerous Hebrew words meaning "to 
 destroy," that this and this alone should be used implies that 
 it is a stereotyped usage ; a usage, the fixity of which can 
 most easily be understood by it having been read in a written 
 narrative. Another incident, the knowledge of which is 
 assumed, is the seduction of Israel to sin by the Midianites 
 and Moabites. Hosea says (ix. lo), "They went to Baal- 
 Peor and separated themselves unto that shame." Micah 
 also refers to what preceded that fall, the intercourse between 
 Balaam and Balak (Micah vi. S). The audience of the 
 prophets was thus expected to know the historical contents 
 of the Law till the people reached the banks of the Jordan. 
 
 The knowledge expected of them is not restricted to the 
 historical narratives in the Torah. Thus there is the promise 
 given to Israel by Hosea (ii. 15, 17), " I will give her . . . the 
 valley of Achor for a door of hope." Here there is reference 
 to the crime of Achan, and the suffering of Israel in conse- 
 quence until the iniquity was removed by the punishment of 
 the wrong-doer in the valley of Achor. By that execution 
 the valley of Trouble became a door of Hope. A knowledge 
 of the contents of the book of Joshua was thus taken for 
 granted. There is an equally incidental reference to a later 
 event in Hosea x. 9, " O Israel thou hast sinned from the 
 days of Gibeah." This implies a knowledge of the unsavoury 
 episode of the Levite whose concubine was murdered in 
 Gibeah ; when all Israel was gathered together to put away 
 the sin, even though it should mean the extinction of one of 
 the tribes of Israel. Another reference to history is interest- 
 ing from the light it throws on the Messianic hopes of Israel. 
 " Afterward shall the children of Israel return and seek 
 JHWH their God, and David their king" (Hosea iii. 5). 
 The authenticity of this last clause has been impeached 
 but without valid reason. Sir George Adam Smith would 
 be willing to drop " David," but the parallelism requires the 
 proper name here to balance the name JHWH in the clause 
 preceding, After he has been in his grave a couple of 
 centuries and more, David is regarded as the Theocratic 
 King by the pious. This is all the more remarkable from the 
 
PROPHETISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 97 
 
 contrast in which it stands to the views of David later enter- 
 tained by the Samaritans, as shall be shown in the sequel. 
 Cognate with this is the passage in Amos quoted by the 
 Apostle James to the Council of Jerusalem, " In that day 
 will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen . . . that 
 they may possess the remnant of Edom, and all the nations 
 which are called by my name" (Amos ix. ii, 12). The 
 glories of the Davidic Kingdom must have been known. 
 The tradition of the Northern Kingdom would not be eager 
 to retain in memory the glory of the founder of the dynasty 
 against which they had rebelled, any more than we might 
 expect Americans to preserve in careful honour the memory 
 of the Hanoverian sovereigns of England. 
 
 The above hypothesis is put forth tentatively, and in full 
 recognition of the weakness of each individual strand in the 
 argument, yet with some confidence that cumulatively the 
 force of it is not inconsiderable. In fact the prophetic worship 
 was in all essentials that of the synagogue of later days. 
 This being so an explanation will be to hand for the universal 
 prevalence of synagogue worship among the Israelites in the 
 age succeeding. If five times in every month all the pious of 
 Israel were directly in contact with the prophets, and were 
 open to be imbued with their sentiments, their influence would 
 be incalculable. The religious party in a nation is always one 
 to be taken account of; especially was this the case in Israel. 
 They had fallen to a low ebb when there were only " seven 
 thousand" who had not bowed the knee to Baal, but by 
 the fiery energy of Elijah followed by the more pervasive 
 influence of Elisha they had increased in numbers and in 
 zeal. 
 
 What tended to increase the influence of the prophets in 
 the Northern Kingdom of Palestine was the fact that they 
 were united in guilds ; or to give them the name usage has 
 made popular, "schools of the prophets." No description of 
 these "guilds" has been preserved, hence their constitution 
 and characteristics must be deduced from the casual 
 references of writers too familiar with them to think of 
 speaking of them in any other way than incidentally. They 
 seem to have originated with the Prophet Samuel. When 
 David flees from Saul and takes refuge with Samuel in 
 
 G 
 
98 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Naioth of Ramah, we see an organised community with a 
 recognised head. This is the impression the reader gets 
 from the narrative : " Saul sent messengers to take David : 
 and when they saw the company of the prophets prophesying, 
 and Samuel standing as head over them" (i Sam. xix. 20).^ 
 The "Naioth" appear to have been temporary booths, 
 possibly not unlike the reed dwellings that the Arabs 
 occasionally erect for themselves. A sidelight is thrown 
 on the structure of these "booths" by the incident related 
 in 2 Kings vi. 1-7. A prophetic community found " the place 
 where they dwelt too strait for them," and they determine 
 either to remove en masse or to send out a colony. Their 
 first step is to go to the valley of the Jordan to cut down trees. 
 This shows that the buildings intended were wooden. In 
 Palestine at the present time no permanent dwellings are of 
 wood ; the lower storey of a house is vaulted, and only the 
 second storey, if there is one, is roofed with wooden beams 
 supporting brushwood overlaid with mud. The trees in- 
 tended to be cut in this case must have been small, because 
 there are in fact no really large timber trees to be found in 
 the Jordan valley, and the beams they purposed cutting were 
 such as a man could easily carry on his shoulder. These 
 beams would form the posts round which the reeds would be 
 wattled. Not unlikely the interstices would be filled up with 
 mud. These " booths " would form a village, and in the 
 centre of it a hall which would serve as a synagogue. The 
 prophetic community were assembled together under the 
 presidency of Samuel ; this implies a meeting-place. It is 
 said that when the messengers of Saul came to Naioth " they 
 saw the company of the prophets prophesying." It is difficult 
 to understand precisely what this means. Graetz thinks 
 that they were chanting and that Samuel acted as choir- 
 
 1 The name given to the residence of these prophets is to be noted, 
 " Naioth in Ramah." Ewald would directly regard this as meaning 
 a school (Ewald, Hist, of Israel, iii. 49, Eng. trans.) ; in this view he 
 has the support of the Targum which translates the term by X2S?!;K n''3 
 
 Beth Ulphana, " the house of instruction." Graetz maintains that the 
 " Bama " or High Place of Rama was outside the town and that 
 David fled for refuge to that as an asylum (Graetz, Gesch. der Judert, 
 i. 203). The probability is it means " booths " as Driver conjectures 
 (Driver, Sam. p. 124). Gesenius translates "habitations." 
 
PROPHETISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 99 
 
 master (Graetz, Gesch. der Juden, loc. cit). Although music 
 seems to have had a peculiar suitability to the exercise of 
 prophetic gifts, one would think there was more meant by 
 prophesying than merely chanting. There appears to have 
 been an element of excitement that proved infectious not 
 only to Saul's messengers but to himself also. Similar 
 phenomena have been frequently manifested in seasons of 
 religious revival. 
 
 The position of Samuel " standing as head over them " 
 (i Sam. xix. 20, R.V.) is a thing to be noted specially. 
 There had been prophets and prophesying before, but 
 now for the first time they were organised with a head 
 over them. If Samuel effected such a change in the constitu- 
 tion of the prophetic order as is implied in the institution 
 of the prophetic " guilds," the prominent place assigned him 
 elsewhere in Scripture is explicable.^ 
 
 Thus in Jer. xv. i, Samuel is put in the same line 
 with Moses : " Then said the Lord unto me, Though Moses 
 and Samuel stood before me, yet my mind could not be 
 toward this people." Also in Psalms xcix. 6, he is put 
 alongside of Moses and Aaron as representative of the 
 worshippers, while Moses and Aaron were representatives 
 of the priests. " Moses and Aaron among His priests, and 
 Samuel among those that call upon His name." Jeremiah's 
 exaltation of Samuel to the level of Moses, unless his 
 eminence had already been acknowledged, would have pro- 
 duced on Jeremiah's audience the same jar of incongruity 
 that du Maurier's aesthete's coupling of Shakespeare with 
 
 ^ The reverse process has been suggested, viz., that the Deutero- 
 nomist glorified Samuel through him to glorify the prophetic order, 
 and declared him the founder of the order, and the anointer of the 
 first two kings, but that originally he had been merely the local seer 
 of an obscure town. If he were so obscure an individual why was 
 he chosen as the originator of the prophetic order? Why was the 
 origin of it not carried back to Moses ? Wellhausen and Kiinen recon- 
 struct the history of this period to suit their hypothesis, irrespective of 
 documentary evidence. Higher criticism is the only science (i") which 
 occupies itself with fitting the facts to suit its theories, rather than 
 its theories to suit the facts. When any statement which is found 
 in the documents contradicts the theory, it is promptly ruled out of 
 court and declared to be an interpolation, and ascribed to the 
 Deuteronomist or some other redactor. 
 
100 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Postlethwaite as a poet, or Velasquez with Maudle as a 
 painter, does on a modern. If so, Samuel's memory did 
 not owe its exaltation to the Deuteronomist, who at the 
 earliest, if the critical hypothesis is right as to the origin 
 of Deuteronomy, was a contemporary of Jeremiah. A great 
 deal of the difficulty in understanding the history of Samuel 
 arises from the .impossibility which the Western intellect 
 experiences in apprehending the naive conditions and habits 
 of the primitive East. The head of the Corporation of a 
 fairly sized city in Palestine was accustomed to collect dues 
 in kind from the market women, and stuff the carrots and 
 cucumbers exacted into his capacious garments. One 
 knowing such things as that is less surprised at Saul being 
 prepared to offer Samuel a sixpence for information about 
 the strayed asses, and is less inclined to draw arguments 
 from that as to the obscure position occupied by Samuel. 
 How far the order of the prophets was organised under 
 Samuel there is no evidence to show. That Samuel knew 
 that a company of prophets would be met by Saul when 
 he came to Bethel, and that they would have with them 
 various instruments, implies a knowledge of probable move- 
 ments which suggests an organism, the arrangements of 
 which were regulated. Still the knowledge of the presence 
 of the prophets might be given to Saul as an evidence of 
 preternatural clairvoyance, to render credible to him "the 
 matter of the kingdom " ; but the word hebhel translated 
 "company" appears to be a technical use of a word which 
 ordinarily means '' a cord," and secondarily " torture," as 
 cords were so frequently used for this purpose, hence all 
 " pain." Another secondary meaning was " a territory," from 
 cords being used to mark off boundaries. Only in the 
 passage which we are considering does it mean "a 
 company " ; the use then seems technical, and technical 
 terms imply organisation. The extent to which this organi- 
 sation was carried there is, as has been already said, no 
 means of knowing. For the period of nearly two centuries 
 which separates the age of Samuel from that of Elijah, 
 though there are many indications of prophetic activity, 
 there is little that can be called evidence of organisation. 
 Nathan and Gad appear as prophets to be in a manner 
 
PROPHETISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 101 
 
 court officials. In the days of Solomon, although Nathan's 
 ministry continued after the death of David, and Ahijah 
 and Iddo also prophesied then, there is no evidence that 
 these prophets had much influence in the immediate 
 entourage of the king. Indeed Ahijah favoured Jeroboam 
 who rebelled against Rehoboam. At the same time, in second 
 Chronicles, these prophets are represented as the historio- 
 graphers of the reign of Solomon (2 Chron. ix. 29). When 
 the prophet of Judah came to Bethel to denounce Jeroboam's 
 schismatic worship, we can more easily understand his yield- 
 ing to the invitation of the old prophet of Bethel despite the 
 Divine command, if the prophetic order were to some extent 
 organised, and the Bethel prophet could give to him of 
 Judah signs by word or attitude that he belonged to the 
 " guild." 
 
 When Elijah is about to ascend into Heaven, we have 
 distinct notice of these prophetic communities in terms 
 that indicate that they were well-established institutions. 
 Further, Elijah appears to exercise a certain authority over 
 them. When he has gone up to Heaven in a fiery chariot, 
 the allegiance of the prophetic communities is transferred 
 at once to Elisha. There does not appear to have been 
 any method of election ; his close association with Elijah 
 made the acknowledgment of Elisha as his successor some- 
 thing of a foregone conclusion. 
 
 There might almost seem to have been something of 
 the nature of a revolution in the prophetic schools during 
 Elijah's lifetime. The four hundred prophets who urged 
 Ahab to go up against the Syrians at Ramoth-Gilead, and 
 promised him victory, seem to have been under the 
 presidency of Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah. They were 
 not Baal-prophets for they prophesied in the name of JH WH ; 
 but such men as Micaiah the son of Imlah, and also Elijah 
 himself were apart from this organisation. Such prophets 
 as Elijah and Micaiah may be regarded in the light of 
 non-jurors. The death of Ahab in battle against the 
 Syrians at Ramoth-Gilead, and the practical discomfiture 
 of the armies of Israel and Judah before the troops of 
 Benhadad, when the four hundred courtly prophets had 
 promised the king complete victory in the name of JHWH, 
 
102 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 would serve to discredit them and exalt Micaiah and Elijah 
 with those who followed them. 
 
 Under Elisha the prophetic " guilds " are seen to be 
 a powerful organised association. The individual com- 
 munities are numerous ; two of them are in close proximity, 
 Gilgal and Jericho ; these towns are only some three miles 
 apart. There was another at Bethel a score of miles off. 
 They are large, the community at Jericho can send out 
 from their numbers "fifty strong men" (2 Kings ii. 16); 
 the neighbour community of Gilgal finds its accommodation 
 too scanty for its numbers, and has to send out colonists 
 to found another dwelling-place (2 Kings vi. i). Like the 
 mediaeval monks they appear to have assumed a special 
 dress (Zech. xiii. 4). It might almost seem as if the prophets 
 put some mark on their faces by which it could be seen 
 that they were of the " sons of the prophets," like the Hindu 
 worshippers of Siva and Vishnu. After the battle of Aphek 
 when a prophet comes to rebuke Ahab for his unseasonable 
 leniency, he disguised himself by putting ashes on his face. 
 When he relates his parabolic tale the king does not 
 recognise him for anything else than he pretends to be, 
 an ordinary soldier who has got into trouble with his 
 superior officer, but he "took the ashes away from his 
 face " ; then it was that the king " discerned him that he 
 was of the prophets" (i Kings xx. 41).^ 
 
 It is to be observed that it is not said that Ahab recognised 
 the individual, but that he was of the prophetic order. If 
 there was such a mark, there is no means of fixing what 
 it was. That there is no notice of it elsewhere proves 
 nothing; no one, however many the stories of Indian life 
 he has read, would be able to tell the difference between 
 the distinguishing mark of the worshipper of Siva and that 
 of the worshipper of Vishnu ; they are too well known to 
 the writers for them to think of describing them. The " rough 
 garment" which would-be prophets donned, as implied in 
 
 1 So the Authorised Version ; the Revised has " disguised himself 
 with his headband over his eyes." The Authorised Version has followed 
 the Vulgate and Luther ; the difference does not affect our argument, 
 it only points to the fact that as among the Hindus the distinguishing 
 mark was on the forehead. 
 
PROPHETISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 103 
 
 the words of Zechariah (xiii. 4), to notify their assumption 
 of the prophet's office, may have been an imitation of Elijah 
 with his girdle of leather. It may be noted that John the 
 Baptist, the last of the prophets, " had his raiment of camel's 
 hair and a leathern girdle about his loins." 
 
 The constitution of individual prophetic communities 
 must be considered. Each of these communities appears 
 to have dwelt in a small village. Though in thus dwelling 
 together they resembled the monks of later days, they were 
 not strictly ccenobitic, as they had separate dwellings, each 
 dwelling occupied by a family (2 Kings iv. 5, 6) ; if one 
 family got into debt it had no claim on the assistance of 
 the rest of the community (iv. i); they have no community 
 of goods. At the same time they have common meals at 
 which, when he is present, the " president " of the order 
 acts as "house-father," presumably superseding for the 
 time the head of the local community (2 Kings iv. 38). 
 If we are right in the conclusions at which we arrived earlier, 
 the dwellings in which the prophetic families were housed 
 were slight insubstantial buildings, possibly wattle and daub. 
 There would be a larger central building in which the 
 community could assemble for worship, and at all events 
 the male members for the common meal. There is much 
 in all this that resembles the Essene community at Engedi, 
 as described by Josephus (Jos., B. J. II. viii. 5); and Philo 
 quoted by Eusebius {Pref. Evan. viii. 11 ; Eng. trans, iv. 
 219); but in one particular the "schools of the prophets" 
 differed from the Essene community beside the Dead Sea 
 in this that as we have seen above they were not celibate. 
 
 The prophetic communities were united into one organisa- 
 tion, the head of which was a person to be considered in the 
 kingdom. He is always attended by a special servant. 
 While Carmel seems to have been his ordinary residence he 
 had also a house in Samaria. Elisha is sometimes to be 
 found in Gilgal sometimes in Dothan. He seems to have 
 made frequent journeys between Carmel and Samaria (2 
 Kings iv. 9). There is evidence that the organic develop- 
 ment was carried yet further. In the account of the famine 
 in Samaria during the siege by Benhadad, it is said : " Elisha 
 sat in his house and the elders sat with him " (2 Kings vi. 32). 
 
104 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 These elders could not be the elders of the city ; for had these 
 been the elders of the city thus in consultation with the 
 prophet, independent of the king, it would have been regarded 
 as constructive treason. Saul reckoned it evidence of con- 
 spiracy against him that Ahimelech had consulted JHWH for 
 David (i Sam. xxii. 13). It would seem necessary to assume 
 that they were the elders of the prophetic order. The 
 narrative, to which reference has just been made, reveals also 
 something of the place in the political scheme of Northern 
 Israel which the head of the prophets occupied. When 
 Jehoram learns the state of distress to which Samaria is 
 reduced, he first determines to execute the prophet, as if it 
 were his blame that the Syrians were pressing Israel so 
 hard. Then repentant he follows his messenger attended by 
 the lords of his court (2 Kings vii. 2). It was Elisha who 
 engineered the overthrow of the House of Omri, when he 
 sent one of the sons of the prophets to anoint Jehu at 
 Ramoth-Gilead (2 Kings ix. 1-3). When Elisha lay a-dying 
 Joash came to him and declared him to be the " chariot of 
 Israel and the horsemen thereof" (2 Kings xiii. 14). 
 
 While the prophetic order occupied such a prominent 
 place in the Kingdom of Samaria, it fills no space at all in 
 the politics of the Davidic Kingdom. There is only the 
 incidental notice in Amos vii. 14 to prove that the "schools 
 of the prophets '' even existed in Judea ; indeed even that 
 reference may be regarded as doubtful. When Amos says 
 that he has not been in the prophetic schools, he does not 
 necessarily refer to any schools, if such there were, in Judea, 
 since his province as a prophet was the Northern Kingdom 
 and the assailant he is answering belongs to Israel ; it may 
 well be that it was the schools in Samaria to which he 
 referred. While individual prophets had great personal 
 influence in the court at Jerusalem, none of them could send 
 a messenger prophet to anoint a claimant to the throne as 
 did Elisha. Both the priesthood and the kingship were 
 more powerful in the South ; both king and priest could 
 claim Divine sanction to their authority. The priests were 
 the descendants of Aaron "who was called of God " (Heb. v. 
 4): the king could claim to be the anointed of JHWH. In 
 the North, the priests had been chosen by Jeroboam " of the 
 
PROPHETISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 105 
 
 lowest of the people" (i Kings xii. 31): and of the successive 
 dynasties which flitted across the stage in the Ephraimite 
 Kingdom none remained long enough to enjoy anything of 
 the prestige of the race of David, to whom the pious even 
 of the Kingdom of Israel gave a certain quasi allegiance 
 (Hosea iii. 5). 
 
 Arguing from analogy, these prophetic communities would 
 not be idle. While like the Essenes the ordinary industries 
 of the cornfield and the vineyard occupied certain of them, it 
 seems likely that they would find literary occupation also. 
 The monks of the Middle Ages afford an analogy ; to them 
 we owe the preservation of all our Latin classics. Still more 
 striking is the analogy of the construction of the Anglo- 
 Saxon Chronicle by the monks of the various monasteries 
 in England. As has been shown above there is evidence of 
 a mode of worship conducted by the prophets, not unlike 
 that of the later synagogue ; further from the knowledge 
 which the literary prophets expected to be familiar to their 
 audience, and from references involving terms that implied 
 the intervention of writing, it seemed probable that reading 
 of the Law was part of this service, and not unlikely portions 
 of the prophetic historical books were read also. Who wrote 
 these books so read ? It would seem only in accordance 
 with analogy that it should be the bne Nabhiini, " sons of the 
 prophets." As is well known to every one who has any 
 knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, the most important of 
 the books classified as historical in the Septuagint, and 
 following it in all modern versions, were by the Jews 
 attributed to the prophets. If the prophets were the 
 historiographers the attribution would be intelligible, but if 
 not, not. In Chronicles the authorities for the various reigns 
 are usually the writings of the successive prophets. Thus the 
 authorities for the history of David are the books of Samuel, 
 Nathan, and Gad (i Chron. xxix. 29); for that of Solomon, 
 Nathan, Ahijah, and Iddo (2 Chron. ix. 29) ; Shemaiah and 
 Iddo for the reign of Rehoboam (2 Chron. xii. 15). It 
 might be maintained that the books of Samuel and Kings 
 had no connection with the writings of the prophets quoted, 
 but this is met by 2 Chron. xxxii. 32 : " The rest of the acts 
 of Hezekiah, and his goodness, behold, they are written in 
 
106 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, in the book of the 
 Kings of Judah and Israel." Assuming that this is correct, 
 the account of the reign of Hezekiah given in the book of 
 Kings was written by Isaiah. But there are embodied in 
 the canonical book of Isaiah, four chapters parallel with those 
 in Kings ; to a great extent the one is the dittograph of the 
 other.^ 
 
 The consideration of the books so reckoned by the Jews 
 confirms the attribution. Joshua was regarded as a prophet, 
 hence his book was in the Canon. In the book of Judges 
 prophets, men of God, continually intervene. The prophetic 
 character is most observable in the four continuous books 
 called in the Septuagint " the Four Books of Kings " — Samuel 
 and Kings of the Hebrew Bible. The first book of Samuel 
 begins with the birth of the prophet ; throughout the book 
 
 ' From this it follows, if the authority of the Chronicler is to be 
 accepted, that, against the practically unanimous judgment of critics, the 
 historical chapters of Isaiah are authentic. The same critical authorities 
 deny the historical value of Chronicles, declaring these books not to 
 have been compiled till after the reign of Alexander the Great because 
 Jaddua, who is alleged by Josephus to have met Alexander, is mentioned 
 in Neh. xii. ii ; and Nehemiah is assumed to be part of the book 
 of Chronicles, or to be from the hand of the same author. All the 
 evidence for this vouchsafed by Dr Driver is to say that the author is 
 " to all appearance identical with the Chronicler'' (Driver, Introd., Lit. 
 O. T.,\t. 511). Cornill (Introd., Can. Books of O. T., p. 249) would prove 
 it from the identity of the first verses of Ezra with the last of Chronicles. 
 " Hence the conclusion long ago deduced is that the book of Ezra- 
 Nehemiah is the continuation of Chronicles, and originally formed in con- 
 junction with it one continuous historical work, so that the Chronicler 
 would thus be the final author also of Ezra-Nehemiah." That it is the con- 
 tinuation of Chronicles may be admitted without agreeing to the identity 
 of authorship. The repetition of the last verses of Chronicles in the 
 beginning of Ezra rather points the other way ; an author would feel 
 himself under no obligation in continuing a narrative to repeat what he 
 had already written, juxtaposition in the manuscript would be deemed 
 enough. It might, however, occur to a continuator to tack on his work to 
 that which he was continuing by some such device. If that is so, Ezra- 
 Nehemiah might be written a century after Chronicles. Even if the 
 critical assumption be granted, certain names might be added to the 
 priestly genealogy long after the book itself was completed, a possibility 
 which Canon Driver acknowledges {lib. cit. p. 512, n. 2), and practically 
 abandons the probative force of these names by adding " the other marks 
 of late composition still remain," but without, however, having the frank- 
 
PROPHETISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 107 
 
 he is prominent and even after his death he intervenes. In 
 second Samuel, which is occupied with the reign of David, 
 the numerous campaigns of the successful warrior are not 
 narrated with anything like the fulness with which his sin in 
 the matter of Uriah the Hittite, and the rebuke he sustains 
 at the mouth of Nathan the prophet, are recorded ; or his sin 
 in numbering the people, and the terrible threefold alternative 
 offered him by God through the Prophet Gad. Prominence 
 of prophetic action is seen very markedly in first and second 
 Kings. Nearly a third of the space of these two books is 
 taken up with events occurring during the reign of the 
 dynasty of Omri. So powerful is that dynasty that to 
 Assyria Jehu, who overthrew it, is regarded as Jahua pal 
 Khumri, "Jehu the son of Omri." From the stele of Mesha 
 
 ness to omit this clause from his argument. But was Jaddua the contem- 
 porary of Alexander ? This meeting of the High Priest and Alexander is 
 declared by these same critics to be unhistorical, when evidence is brought 
 from it for the authenticity of Daniel. The sole evidence that it was 
 Jaddua who met Alexander is Josephus, who as is well known drops a 
 whole century from his history at this point, identifying Darius Codo- 
 mannus with his great-grandfather Darius Nothus. As already mentioned 
 the Talmud relates the same incident (Yoma, 6912), but says it was Simeon 
 hatz-Tzaddiq, according to Josephus, the grandson of Jaddua. But further 
 to repeat an historical argument given elsewhere (see pp. 29-30 and iii- 
 112), Jaddua was the nephew of Manasseh whom Nehemiah chased from 
 his presence because he had married the daughter of Sanballat of Samaria. 
 This occurred in 432 B.C. Is it likely, especially when we consider the 
 Jewish custom of early marriage, that a nephew of this Manasseh should 
 a century later be filling the office of High Priest, a dignity that in 
 ordinary circumstances went by primogeniture? There is thus no 
 evidence for the lateness of Chronicles to be deduced from Neh. xii. 
 II ; consequently no suspicion of its historicity can be based on that. 
 Indeed if the canon laid down by Josephus be applied, not only 
 Chronicles but Ezra-Nehemiah would have to be dated long before 
 Alexander: he declares {Contra Apionem, i. 8) that only those histories 
 written before the death of Artaxerxes the son of Xerxes were received 
 into the Jewish Canon. That this represents the principle on which the 
 authorities, whoever they were, selected the sacred books may be, if 
 not proved, at least rendered probable, by considering the books 
 included in the Canon and those excluded from it. Although their 
 critical decisions as to date and authorship might be greatly at fault, the 
 rule which Josephus lays down appears to be that which regulated their 
 selection. Hence the evidence of the Chronicles as to the prophetic 
 origin of Kings may be accepted. 
 
108 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 of Moab we learn something of the prowess of Omri and his 
 son Ahab, how they had conquered Moab when his father 
 reigned. At the battle of Karkar the Assyrian King, 
 Shalmaneser II., sustains a check from the league of monarchs 
 of whom Ahab of Israel was one. Nothing of all this is told in 
 the books of Kings ; they are occupied with what Elijah and 
 Elisha did and said, and the monarchs are taken account of 
 only when their activity crosses the line of that of the 
 prophets. The sin of Ahab in the matter of Naboth's 
 vineyard is more important than the alliance which he made 
 with Benhadad, and the check which Assyria sustained in 
 consequence. Though the dynasty of Jehu lasted twice the 
 number of years that did that of Omri, yet the history of it 
 only occupies half the space in the book of Kings. There 
 are no outstanding prophetic figures round which to collect 
 narratives. To gather the civil history of Israel from the 
 prophetic histories, is like attempting to reconstruct from the 
 pages of Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History the political history 
 of the Roman Empire from the death of Augustus to the 
 accession of Constantine. 
 
 Although the influence of the prophets was so much 
 greater in the Kingdom of Israel than in that of Judah, yet 
 the Samaritans have not one of the books which owe their 
 origin to the prophets. Though Elijah, whose deeds fill so 
 large a space in the history as recorded in Kings, was a 
 Northern prophet, and his greatness so impressed the 
 Kingdom of Judah that the Jewish people believed that he 
 would precede the Messiah, yet the Samaritans have no worthy 
 traditions of him, or of Elisha (see p. 158). The contents of 
 the prophetic books might, one should have thought, have 
 secured their acceptance among the Samaritans. They speak 
 of Joshua as King Joshua in the late production which goes 
 by the title of " the Samaritan Book of Joshua " ; yet the 
 ancient canonical book of Joshua they do not possess. 
 Everything about Joshua was fitted to ensure admiring 
 memory on the part of the Israelites of the North ; he was 
 an Ephraimite, he was a successful warrior, and his grave 
 was among them, So obvious have all these things proved, 
 that the Samaritans have had to concoct a book compiled 
 partly from the canonical Joshua and partly from the wild 
 
PROPHETISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 109 
 
 efforts of Samaritan imagination. If we pass to the book 
 of Judges it is only to find further reasons why the prophetic 
 books should have shared with the Pentateuch the reverence 
 of the: Samaritans. The Judges whose prowess is given in 
 most detail are all members of the tribes that were part of 
 the larger Samaria. Barak belonged to Naphtali ; his 
 colleague and inspiration, Deborah, " dwelt under the palm- 
 tree in Mount Ephraim" (Judges iv. 4, 5); Gideon belonged 
 to Abiezer in the tribe of Manasseh (vi. 11). It was from 
 Gilead that Jephthah went forth to deliver Israel from the 
 tyranny of the Ammonites (xi. 1). Samson belonged to the 
 tribe of Dan (xiii. i, 2). The two episodes which form an 
 appendix to the book of Judges are both connected more or 
 less closely with the Ephraimite tribes. Micah, the theft of 
 whose idols by the Danites is the subject of the first of these, 
 "was a man of Mount Ephraim." It was in Mount Ephraim 
 that the Levite sojourned, the murder of whose concubine 
 occasioned the action against Gibeah related in the second 
 of them. The first of these episodes was perpetuated in the 
 memory of the North by the shrine set up in Dan by 
 Jeroboam. And the reference in Hosea already noted 
 shows how the second had impressed the inhabitants of 
 Samaria (Hosea ix. 9). The opening chapters of first Samuel 
 are occupied with transactions which take place in Mount 
 Ephraim and Shiloh. If the rest of that book and second 
 Samuel is occupied with the adventures of David, which 
 mainly took place in Judah, yet the books of Kings are 
 fully more occupied with the history of the Northern 
 Kingdom than with that of the South, except at the end of 
 second Kings when the Northern Kingdom had passed out of 
 existence. It is in these books of Kings that, as already 
 noted, the history of the great prophets of the North, Elijah 
 and Elisha, is narrated. What can be the reason, then, of the 
 Samaritans excluding these books from their Canon, and 
 only retaining the Priestly Book, the Torah ? 
 
 History, as it seems to us, supplies the answer to this, 
 as it does to many similar problems. When the Assyrians 
 removed all those who would naturally be occasions or 
 centres of rebellion, the prophets would certainly be among 
 those most carefully chosen for deportation. The colonists 
 
no THE SAMARITANS 
 
 would sedulously guard against the advent of any prophets 
 from the South to excite the " natives " to rebellion. More- 
 over, the Southern prophets never had the influence that 
 those of the North possessed ; the schools of the prophets 
 were inconspicuous institutions in Judah, if they existed at 
 all. Isaiah and Micah found their sphere of activity in their 
 own neighbourhood. In the days of Jeremiah the case of 
 Judah occupied the attention of the prophets to the exclusion 
 of everything else. Moreover, during the long reign of 
 Manasseh, the prophets and all that prophecy stood for 
 were thrust into the background. Hence the likelihood of 
 the prophets of Judah filling the blank left in Israel by the 
 deportation of their own prophets is reduced to a minimum. 
 When the colonists desired from Esarhaddon that they be 
 instructed in " the manner of the God of the land," he sent a 
 priest, or priests, to teach them, as the whole idea of worship 
 among the Assyrians was ritual : the prophetic side of the 
 religion of Israel, and above all the prophetic worship, was 
 a thing that would never be thought of by the Assyrian 
 monarch. The prophets and their schools in Palestine would 
 be regarded by the Assyrian government much as an associa- 
 tion of Dervishes in Egypt would be looked upon by that of 
 Britain. With the priests would be sent a book of the Law. 
 Esarhaddon and his son Asshurbanipal were diligent col- 
 lectors of religious formulae and ritual directions as is seen 
 by the contents of their library. No other books would be 
 sent — the prophetic books, which told of the deeds of the 
 Judges and of the imperial glories of the times of David and 
 Solomon least of all. The antagonism of the Israelite priests 
 to the prophetic order precludes any chance of those sent to 
 teach the correct ritual with which to worship JHWH ever 
 suggesting to their pupils, the colonists, or to the people left 
 in the land that there were other sacred books. This would 
 explain why the Samaritans have none of the historical books, 
 though they contain the narratives of the marvels wrought 
 by Elijah and Elisha, nor the works of the literary prophets, 
 although Hosea, whose prophecy is the first given in the book 
 of the twelve minor prophets, belonged to the North. 
 
 The alternative explanation is that Manasseh, to give 
 him the name which Josephus assigns him, only brought the 
 
PROPHETISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 111 
 
 Torah when he came to Samaria to his father-in-law. There 
 are two theories as to the date at which the son-in-law of 
 Sanballat fled to Samaria ; one which accepts the chronology 
 of Josephus with its omission of a century and its confusion 
 of Artaxerxes Longimanus with Artaxerxes Ochus, and 
 Darius Nothus, the son of the former, with Darius Codo- 
 mannus, the successor of the latter ; the other identifies 
 Manasseh with the grandson of Eliashib whom Nehemiah 
 tells us he drove from his presence because of his marriage 
 with the daughter of Sanballat (Neh. xiii. 28). The Assouan 
 papyri prove, as stated above, Chap. II. pp. 29-30, that there 
 was a Sanballat in Samaria contemporary with Nehemiah 
 the cup-bearer of Artaxerxes Longimanus, as appeal is made 
 by the oppressed Israelites in Assouan to the '' sons of 
 Sanballat " who have a position of authority in Samaria ; 
 this appeal is made in the reign of Darius Nothus, the son 
 and successor of the Artaxerxes of Nehemiah. Although it 
 is not impossible, nor indeed improbable that there was a 
 second Sanballat, grandson of the first, it yet is highly 
 improbable that, after the drastic measures which Nehemiah 
 and Ezra took against those who had married other women 
 than Jewesses, within a century "many of the priests and 
 Levites had entangled themselves in such marriages," and 
 that again a son of the High Priest should have married a 
 daughter of Sanballat of Samaria and, like his uncle, have 
 been driven forth with those who had done like him. 
 
 While Josephus (Ani. XI. v. i-S, 7; 8) largely incorpor- 
 ates the narrative of the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, he 
 dates the occurrences under the reign not of Artaxerxes but 
 under that of his father Xerxes, whose invasion of Greece is 
 related by Herodotus. In so doing he comes into conflict 
 with the history of the reign of Xerxes as given by Diodorus 
 Siculus and other authorities. In the seventh year of his 
 reign, according to Josephus, Xerxes commissioned Ezra, 
 apparently from Babylon, to go to Jerusalem for the restora- 
 tion of the worship of the God of Israel there. But according 
 to Herodotus (ix. 108, 109), Xerxes was either in Sardis, 
 whither he betook himself after his defeat at Salamis, or at 
 Susa, to which capital he proceeded after a delay of eighteen 
 months or two years. His stay in both places was disgraced 
 
112 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 with scandalous intrigues, Nehemiah, Josephus says, was 
 cup-bearer to Xerxes, and was sent by him to Jerusalem in 
 his twenty-fifth year ; but Xerxes had been assassinated in 
 the twentieth year of his reign. It only emphasizes the 
 blunder to read of the twenty-eighth year of Xerxes. 
 
 The narrative of Josephus, besides, does not hang together ; 
 Sanballat gets the favour of Alexander (Anf. XI. viii. 4), and 
 having permission from him erects the temple on Mount 
 Gerizim. When Alexander goes to Jerusalem immediately 
 after the seven months' siege of Tyre, during the course of 
 which Sanballat had gained over Alexander and joined him 
 with seven thousand of his countrymen, an unexplained 
 change takes place. In connection with this visit Josephus 
 relates the meeting of Alexander with Jaddus (Jaddua) the 
 High Priest, and the favour with which he henceforward 
 regarded the Jews. Then after he had " settled matters in 
 Jerusalem, he led his army to the neighbouring cities. The 
 Samaritans seeing that Alexander had so greatly honoured 
 the Jews determined to profess themselves Jews." Neither 
 the Samaritans nor Alexander seem to be aware of any 
 treaty made by Sanballat, although the seven thousand men 
 are mentioned as present. The truth is, the story related by 
 Josephus is, as far as Jaddua is concerned, not historical. 
 
 If the second possible date of Manasseh's migration is 
 assumed other difficulties emerge. It is to be observed that 
 in the Biblical record there is no word of Manasseh's 
 departure to his father-in-law when Nehemiah chases him 
 from his presence, although it is extremely probable. Of 
 course there is no word either that he took the Torah with 
 him, or had any need to do so. According to the ordinarily 
 received critical theory, the Priestly Code had been but 
 recently brought from Babylon by Ezra. In accordance with 
 an overstrict interpretation of this code Manasseh had been 
 deprived of the priesthood, yet on this theory he carries 
 this Priestly Code with him to Samaria. The difficulties in 
 regard to this action of Manasseh we consider elsewhere. 
 If, however, it be assumed that he did convey the Pentateuch 
 to the remnant left from the Assyrians, and to the descendants 
 of the colonists whom the Assyrians had introduced other 
 difficulties emerge. Why did he not take the prophetic 
 
PROPHETISM IN NORTHERN ISRAEL 113 
 
 books with him also ? He would wish to ingratiate himself 
 with the people among whom he was to make his abode. 
 The book of Joshua, as has been seen above, was one in 
 which the Samaritans who claimed to be Ephraimites would 
 be specially ready to delight, as it recorded the deeds of 
 an Ephraimite through whose prowess and conduct Israel 
 had conquered the Canaanites. The difficulty is not lessened 
 but increased if the critical hypothesis be adopted, according 
 to which the canonical book of Joshua was the result of 
 the same process of compilation and redaction, which it 
 is alleged is seen in the Pentateuch. When he took the 
 five books why did Manasseh leave the sixth, which would 
 be at least as interesting ? The motives that would naturally 
 have led to the conveyance of the book of Joshua to Samaria 
 would apply to all the historico-prophetic books, with the 
 exception of the last nine chapters of second Kings. Indeed 
 the omission of the seventeenth chapter of that book might 
 have been enough to bring the whole into harmony with 
 the feelings of Northern Israel ; especially if there had been 
 an editorial variation on the monotonous condemnation of 
 the kings of Samaria. There was no antagonism between 
 the priestly and the prophetic orders in Judah then ; Haggai 
 and Zechariah, prophets though they were, encouraged Joshua 
 the High Priest in rebuilding the temple and restoring the 
 sacrificial ritual. Manasseh had thus no conceivable sub- 
 jective motive for excluding the books associated with the 
 prophets ; as little could there be any external motive. If 
 Manasseh was able to persuade the Samaritans to abandon 
 their customary rules of sacrificial ritual and adopt the 
 Pentateuchal Law, he would have had small difficulty in 
 getting them further to accept as sacred oracles the whole 
 prophetic literature. On the assumption that Manasseh 
 brought the Law to Samaria, it is impossible to explain 
 why he did not bring also at least the historical books 
 associated with the prophets. 
 
 If, however, the Samaritans had, when he came to them, 
 the Pentateuch already, and had sacrificed, as they had 
 claimed in the days of Zerubbabel to JHWH in accordance 
 with its precepts for a couple of centuries and more, but 
 had not, for such reasons as have been indicated above, 
 
 H 
 
114 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 admitted the other books, the action of Manasseh can easily 
 be understood. As they had accepted him as High Priest, 
 to the supersession of their own priests, the successors, 
 possibly the descendants, of those sent by Esarhaddon, 
 he for his part was willing to be content with the limited 
 Canon of the Samaritans. It would thus seem that the 
 hypothesis which we have advanced is the only one which 
 will explain the phenomena. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE RITUAL OF SAMARITAN WORSHIP 
 
 In a previous chapter it has been shown that the ritual 
 followed by the Northern Israelite tribes, although the 
 sacrifices were offered at the " High Places " by irregular 
 priests, was mainly the same as that in the central shrine 
 in Jerusalem, in which legitimate Aaronite priests officiated. 
 The priests sent by Esarhaddon would doubtless care- 
 fully adhere to this ritual. They would have the guid- 
 ance of the sacred Torah, with which, as we have seen 
 ■reason to believe the Assyrian authorities would be careful 
 to provide them to keep them right. When, on the fall 
 of the Ninevite Empire Josiah assumed, as Davidic king, 
 the rule over all Israel, it is recorded that "the altar that 
 was at Bethel which Jeroboam the son of Nebat had made 
 he brake down, and burned the High Place, and stamped 
 it small to powder and burned the asherah. And all 
 the houses of the High Places that were in the cities 
 of Samaria which the kings of Israel had made, Josiah 
 took away, and did unto them according to all that he had 
 done in Bethel. And he slew all the priests of the High 
 Places that were there upon the altars" (2 Kings xxiii. 15, 
 19, 20). It will thus be seen that sacrificial worship upon 
 the High Places had spread over all the land, and priests 
 were attached to each of these local shrines. This must 
 have followed as the result of the teaching of the priests 
 sent by Esarhaddon. To meet this the reformation of 
 worship, which had begun in Jerusalem, Josiah extended 
 over the whole of Palestine. The death of Josiah at Megiddo 
 would tend to throw the sanctity given to Jerusalem into 
 abeyance. The subsequent fall of the city and the destrue- 
 ns 
 
116 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 tion of the temple were fitted to destroy it altogether. The 
 action of the eighty men mentioned in Jeremiah (xli. 5) as 
 bringing, with the signs of mourning, " offerings and incense 
 to the House of JHWH, who had come from Shechem, 
 Samaria, and Shiloh, proves, however, that the belief in 
 a central shrine was not dead. Whether their intention 
 was, as seems most probable, to lay their offerings on the 
 site of the brazen altar amid the ruins of the temple, or if 
 it is maintained as it is by some that Jeremiah had conse- 
 crated the High Place of Mizpah to take the place for the 
 time of the ruined temple, it was to the central shrine they 
 brought their gifts, and so still the belief is there.^ When 
 the society that had gathered round Gedaliah the son of 
 Ahikam was broken up by his murder, the practice would 
 cease. With Ishmael's act of treachery, and the migration 
 to Egypt of the " captains " under Johanan, son of Kareah, 
 all civil government ceased, and so all safety for travellers. 
 
 There is no direct evidence to guide the investigator 
 in deciding what form worship took in the province of 
 Samaria during the half century or so that elapsed between 
 the death of Gedaliah and the issuing of the decree of Cyrus, 
 and the coming of Zerubbabel in accordance with it. It 
 probably was a renewal of the worship on the High Places 
 as the " adversaries of Judah and Benjamin " — the colonists 
 sent from Assyria — claim to have sacrificed to JHWH since 
 the days of Esarhaddon. As we have seen reason to believe 
 that these colonists were only a minority, probably a small 
 minority of the inhabitants of Samaria and Galilee, yet 
 as we also saw they probably would be the wealthier and 
 more influential portion of the community ; they thus might 
 presume to represent the whole people — the native Israelites 
 as well as themselves. It is to be noted that their worship 
 of JHWH is by sacrifice. Further, and more important 
 for our argument, it is to be noted that by their appeal 
 to be allowed to assist in building the temple at Jerusalem 
 
 1 Mizpah does not seem to have been a High Place of such special 
 eminence that it should be supposed to take the place of the ruined 
 temple. Mizpah was but little out of the way to Jerusalem from 
 Shechem and Shiloh, and the governor was there to whom it was 
 well to be respectful. 
 
THE RITUAL OF SAMARITAN WORSHIP 117 
 
 they acknowledged that their mode of worship was only 
 to be regarded as a temporary expedient, to cease, or at all 
 events to fall into the background, when the temple on Mount 
 Zion was erected and legitimate sacrifices offered there once 
 more. Though after their destruction by Josiah the High 
 Places had been restored, yet his reform had not been 
 without effect ; even while they offered sacrifices and burned 
 incense on the High Places they acknowledged in their 
 hearts that Jerusalem was the place where men ought to 
 worship. Unless we assume some such feeling as this, the 
 action of the Samaritans is unintelligible. There was nothing 
 to hinder them ignoring the Jews and continuing to offer 
 sacrifices on the High Places, according to the teaching 
 of the priests sent by Esarhaddon. Certainly this had been 
 broken in upon by Josiah, but his reign over all Israel had 
 been but short, and they had been obliged to go back to 
 this worship while the Jerusalem Temple lay in ruins. There 
 was nothing to hinder them continuing to sacrifice in the 
 High Places unless the belief that legitimate sacrifices could 
 only be offered on Mount Zion. It would seem that they 
 acknowledged the Deuteronomic Code as binding. We have 
 already seen from the technical language used by Amos 
 that the Israelites of the North knew the Priestly Code as 
 well. Consequently it must have been the whole Torah 
 which was brought by the priests from the east. 
 
 It was clearly a later development when the Samaritans 
 came to believe that Mount Gerizim was the place chosen 
 by God for the one national shrine of Israel. It was a 
 further step when this belief was made the distinguishing 
 tenet of Samaritanism. Not impossibly it was Manasseh 
 who first promulgated this doctrine. In Deuteronomy 
 although the Divine purpose that Israel should have one 
 national altar was declared, and the duty of reverencing it 
 was impressed on the people, the choice of the place was at 
 some future time to be made by God. When the choice 
 was to be made, or how the place chosen was to be indicated, 
 was not revealed. It was open to any one to maintain that 
 Gerizim rather than Zion was the place God meant. 
 Certainly the selection of the valley which divided Mount 
 Gerizim from Mount Ebal as the place where the people were 
 
118 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 to be assembled — when one half the tribes should stand on 
 the slopes of Gerizim to recite the blessings and the other 
 half on the opposite slopes of Ebal to recite the curses of 
 the Divine Torah — might not unnaturally be supposed to 
 point to one or other of these twin mountains as " the place 
 which the Lord your God shall choose out of all your tribes 
 to put His name there" (Deut. xii. 5). The further fact 
 that on Gerizim was the blessing to be put (xi. 29) would 
 naturally suggest that it, of the two, was that most favoured. 
 The selection of Ebal as the mountain on which the stones 
 with the Law engraved on them were to be set up, seemed 
 to contradict what had preceded, so that the falsification of 
 the record seemed a not unnatural suggestion. That being 
 amended, some holder falsarius introduced the name Gerizim 
 as the place Divinely selected. This interpolation probably 
 occurred not later than the days of Manasseh, not impossibly 
 at his instance as suggested above. 
 
 In the interval between the repulse which the Samaritans 
 received from Zerubbabel and the arrival among them of 
 Manasseh, the Samaritans, colonists and natives alike, fell 
 back on the worship of the High Places, and sacrificed on 
 them : a worship without sacrifice would be unintelligible 
 at least to the Assyrian colonist.s. At the same time there 
 seem to have been proffers of friendship, and manifestations 
 of a willingness on the part of the authorities in Jerusalem 
 to reconsider the action of their predecessors. Nor were 
 there wanting indications of a continued wish on the part 
 of the Samaritans to share in the worship of the Jerusalem 
 temple. Only on this supposition can it be understood how 
 Tobiah, who bore the nickname of " the Amm9nite," could 
 have a chamber in the temple itself^ The intermarriages 
 between the Samaritans and the priestly caste in Jerusalem 
 confirm the truth of the above suggestion. 
 
 With the arrival of Ezra first, and then of Nehemiah 
 in the reign of Artaxerxes, all this friendly intercourse 
 ceased, and the Samaritans were once more excluded, and 
 this time finally, from the temple at Jerusalem. It may be 
 
 ' Nicknames of this kind are not uncommon. We have referred 
 above to the case of Ludovico Sforza, called // Moro, the Moor, because 
 of his complexion, although of pure Italian descent. 
 
THE RITUAL OF SAMARITAN WORSHIP 119 
 
 that some vague remembrance of this is the reason why 
 Samaritan tradition, as handed down by Abu'l Fath, declares 
 that sacrifices ceased in the reign of Surdi (Artaxerxes), 
 when the Israelites returned from captivity. According to 
 the story of Abu'l Fath, when the Persian King would offer 
 sacrifices on Mount Gerizim, it is revealed that JHWH no 
 longer desires bloody sacrifices, but that henceforth prayer is 
 to be regarded as the only sacrifice acceptable to Him. All 
 this looks like a confused remembrance of the real events. 
 When in the reign of Artaxerxes the final company of 
 returning Jewish exiles under Ezra arrived at Jerusalem, 
 they opposed the Samaritans having access to the temple 
 there. Still more vehement became this opposition when 
 Nehemiah came as governor and backed it up. Of course 
 it was successful, and the Samaritans ceased to be able to 
 offer legitimate sacrifices. Until the temple was erected on 
 Mount Gerizim, and they could transfer their allegiance 
 thither, to the pious Samaritans legitimate sacrifice had ceased. 
 That sacrifice was revived on Mount Gerizim is certain, at 
 all events when Manasseh retired to Samaria, and the 
 temple was erected. Josephus, who relates the flight of 
 Manasseh and the occasion of it, and would have been glad 
 had he been able to record that he never offered sacrifice 
 on the altar in the schismatic temple, does not make such 
 an assertion, implies that Manasseh did act as sacrificing 
 priest. In the time of our Lord, sacrificial worship and 
 burning of incense continued on Mount Gerizim. The 
 Samaritan woman, to repeat what has been already noted, 
 when she says, " Our fathers worshipped in this mountain," 
 implies, from what she adds of the Jewish claim that men 
 ought now to worship in Jerusalem, that the descendants of 
 these Samaritan fathers still sacrificed there (John iv. 20). 
 In the case of the ten lepers cleansed by our Lord (Luke 
 xvii. 11-19), the Samaritan, as well as the nine Jews with 
 him, is told to show himself to the priests, presumably to 
 offer the sacrifices incumbent on the cleansed leper. 
 
 At all events sacrifices have now long ceased, possibly 
 the cessation began during the Roman persecutions; 
 certainly they do not seem to have been offered under the 
 Mohammedans. But as already noted elsewhere, Benjamin 
 
120 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 of Tudela and Sir John Mandeville assert that in their day 
 the Samaritans offered sacrifice on Mount Gerizim. Against 
 this, as just mentioned, is the statement of Abu'l Fath, that 
 all sacrifices ceased in the Persian period. Though the 
 date is wrong, yet as he wrote in the fourteenth century, the 
 very same century in which Mandeville visited Palestine, 
 and only two centuries after the visit of Benjamin of Tudela, 
 probability is in favour of his view. He was himself a 
 Samaritan, and spoke from within ; further, he had no 
 motive to deny that sacrifices were offered, had they been ; 
 the evidence of Abu'l Fath must be preferred to that of those 
 European travellers, to this extent at all events, that in his 
 day sacrifices had so long ceased that the occasion of their 
 cessation had passed out of memory. 
 
 As with the Jews, so now at all events with the 
 Samaritans, public worship has become entirely that of the 
 synagogue. The contrast between the present conditions of 
 the cognate nationalities is very great. While the Jews 
 have synagogues in every city of importance in the civilised 
 world, the Samaritans now have only one, that in Nablus. 
 Formerly the Samaritans had many more than this one 
 synagogue. Pietro della Valle found synagogues of the 
 Samaritans in Cairo, Gaza, and Damascus, in addition to 
 that in Nablus ; others are referred to by other authorities 
 as existing elsewhere. These synagogues have all been 
 destroyed, and the communities that worshipped in them 
 massacred by the Mohammedans ; that in Gaza was anni- 
 hilated only in the first quarter of last century. As has 
 just been said, the one solitary synagogue left to the 
 Samaritans is to be found in the small quarter of the city 
 in which they dwell, a poor despised remnant. The cluster 
 of cramped houses, which form the Samaritan quarter, is 
 situated in the south-west of Nablus, on the slope of the 
 base of Mount Gerizim. In going to the synagogue the 
 visitor passes through a small neglected garden to a stairway 
 much like that by which an ordinary house is reached in 
 those irregularly built Palestinian towns, in which the houses 
 cling to the sides of steep hills. After mounting the stair 
 the visitor enters a small white-washed apartment with a 
 stone floor, which is covered with matting. Dr Mills says 
 
THE RITUAL OF SAMARITAN WORSHIP 121 
 
 it is 37 feet 5 inches in length ; he does not state the 
 breadth, but if his plan has been drawn to scale, that mlist 
 be about 19 feet. As the synagogue is lighted merely by 
 . a small window in the roof, and the visitor has just left the 
 dazzling light of the Syrian sun, his feeling is of obscurity 
 almost amounting to darkness. In ordinary cases the 
 visitor is not permitted to pass much beyond the threshold, 
 but is met by the priest and shown one or two of the 
 manuscripts which they possess. These manuscripts are 
 brought out of a recess called the niuzbah or altar. As 
 already mentioned, the Samaritans, like the modern Jews, 
 regard prayer as taking the place of the sacrifices formerly 
 offered on the muzbah of their temple, so now they offer 
 their prayers towards this representative of the ancient altar. 
 Pendent from the vaulted roof there hangs in front of the 
 sacred altar a veil of white linen damask, on which are sewn 
 pieces of coloured linen cut so as to form a pattern. The 
 synagogue is so planned that the worshippers, in turning 
 their faces to the veiled recess, turn them also towards 
 Mount Gerizim, the Qiblah of the Samaritans. As the 
 altar cloth in an Anglican church is changed according to 
 the festival, or the saint, to whom the Sunday is consecrated, 
 so is the veil in the Samaritan synagogue in accordance with 
 their festivals. Behind this veil only the High Priest and 
 the second High Priest are allowed to go. As already 
 indicated, within this recess are preserved the copies of the 
 Torah possessed by the Samaritans. They claim that this 
 muzbah is of the exact dimensions of the altar which Moses 
 made. While internally the measurements of the recess 
 are much below the dimensions given in Exodus (xxvii. i), 
 if the measurements are made externally the discrepancy 
 is not so great. Mysteriously there hang in the synagogue 
 chandeliers, much like those found in Mohammedan 
 mosques ; as the Samaritans only visit their synagogue on 
 Sabbath when it is illegal to kindle a light, it is difficult to 
 see what purpose these chandeliers serve. 
 
 The ritual observed by the Samaritans in their synagogue 
 worship is in all essential points very much the same as that 
 of the Sephardim, the originally Spanish Jews who came 
 to Palestine fleeing from persecution. Like all Orientals on 
 
122 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 entering a sacred place, the Samaritans put off their shoes 
 when they go into their synagogue. They assign as a reason 
 for this action that Moses was commanded to remove the 
 shoes from off his feet " for the place on which thou standest 
 is holy ground." Dr Mills mentions that when the Samaritans 
 enter the synagogue, they put on a religious dress of white 
 calico ; these dresses are kept in the synagogue. The Jews 
 use the Tallith in a similar way ; this the Samaritans do not 
 use. They have three services on the Sabbath ; the first on 
 Friday at sunset, when as with the Jews, the Sabbath begins; 
 the next and longest early on Saturday morning ; the last on 
 Saturday afternoon, a little before sunset. With tarbush on 
 head they sit cross-legged on the ground unless when the 
 sacred name occurs, then they prostrate themselves. When 
 in the reading of the Law certain phrases are pronounced, 
 every one brings his hand down over his face and beard. 
 
 The essential part of the service is, with the Samaritans 
 as with the Jews, the reading of the Law. It is divided into 
 portions, analogous to the Jewish perachoth, called qatzin. 
 These divisions are so arranged that the whole Law is read 
 through in course of a year. It ought to be said that 
 strictly speaking on the Sabbath the priest does not read the 
 passage for the day, but recites it. Dr Mills describes his 
 tone as being harsh and barking ; that must have been an 
 individual peculiarity as no other observer has noticed this. 
 Liturgic prayers are also recited to which responses are given. 
 They do not make use of the Psalms, but they have certain 
 hymns sung to weird tunes ; to these they attribute great 
 antiquity, declaring that the seventy elders whom Moses 
 appointed each composed a tune. They do not introduce 
 instrumental music into their worship, indeed do not cultivate 
 it, as they usually hire Mohammedan musicians when they 
 have festivals in which they desire such an accompaniment. 
 
 Among the Askenazim not only is the synagogue used 
 daily for prayers, but it also becomes something of a club in 
 which the Jews belonging to it meet, some to read, some to 
 talk ; each synagogue having a library, more or less extensive, 
 of theological literature. Unless on festivals the Samaritans 
 do not visit their synagogue during the week, except when 
 tourists are conducted to see it. 
 
THE RITUAL OF SAMARITAN WORSHIP 123 
 
 The Samaritans observe the Sabbath with greater 
 strictness than do the Jews. The Jews have devised various 
 modes of evading the extreme strictness of the legal enact- 
 ments ; of none of which do the Samaritans avail themselves. 
 The Law forbids the kindling of a fire on Sabbath ; the Jews 
 employ Gentiles to do this for them, as also to do other things 
 which, conducive to comfort, are forbidden to a Jew. By the 
 device of erubin, the Jew can extend the bounds of his house 
 indefinitely, and from these reckon his Sabbath day's journey. 
 The Samaritan's only Sabbath day's journey is from his 
 house to the synagogue. From Friday evening at sunset to 
 the sunset of Saturday, no light is to be seen in any 
 Samaritan dwelling. During that period no work is done, 
 not even opening a letter. They expect the Law to be 
 observed with equal strictness by all within their gates. The 
 Samaritans do not, as do the Jews, introduce the Sabbath by 
 repeating the Qiddush, nor close it with the Habdalah. As 
 the Rabbinists ascribe the introduction of these ceremonies 
 to the days of Haggai and Zechariah, this, were the authority 
 of the Talmud of any value, would imply that the Samaritans 
 had received not only the Law but the synagogal reading of 
 it before the time of Ezra. 
 
 To a nomadic, pastoral people, the phases of the moon 
 were of necessity a matter of special interest and importance. 
 Moonlight meant the need of careful watching against 
 possible marauders, on the one hand, and on the other the 
 opportunity of commodious march, if a change of camp were 
 desired. The reappearance of the faint sickle of light would 
 necessarily be greeted with rejoicing. The festival of New 
 Moon must have been very early celebrated by the Jews, 
 nomads as they originally were. The solemnities enjoined 
 by the Law are to be found in Num. x. lO; xxviii. ii. 
 Singularly, these regulations are attributed to the latest 
 stratum of the Priestly Code. Naturally it might have been 
 expected that a ceremony so very ancient would have been 
 among the first to have its details legally fixed. As it is, 
 the existence of the feast is assumed in the passages which 
 have been referred to as already well known. In i Sam. 
 XX. 24, it is the occasion of a family festival at which all the 
 members of the king's household are expected to be present, 
 
124 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 and the absence of David a thing to be resented. It is to be 
 observed that ceremonial purity is necessary to taking part 
 in it. When the Shunamite woman, as we have said in a 
 previous chapter (2 Kings iv. 23), wishes to go to Elisha, her 
 husband implies that her desire would have been intelligible 
 had it been New Moon. Ezekiel and both the first and 
 the second Isaiah assume this solemnity as one regularly 
 maintained. Hosea mentions it as a sign of the desolation 
 coming upon Israel that her New Moons would cease (Hos. 
 ii. 11). Amos refers to the New Moon as a religious service 
 of which the ungodly were easily wearied. Blowing of trumpets 
 was an important part of this solemnity. In Psalm Ixxxi. 3, 
 the call is made to " Blow up the trumpet in the New Moon." 
 This is the more interesting as this Psalm has originated in 
 the Northern Kingdom ; Israel, Jacob, and Joseph are named, 
 but there is no word of Judah or Zion. The celebration of 
 New Moon is retained by the Samaritans but without the 
 blowing of trumpets. Alike under the Christian and 
 Mohammedan rule the Samaritans would find it expedient 
 to make their acts of worship as little conspicuous as possible. 
 Now the whole service is confined to the synagogue. They 
 call the feast Rosh Hodesh, " the beginning of the month." 
 Although now the date of the New Moon is fixed astro- 
 nomically, watchers are appointed who announce when they 
 have seen it. Thereafter on the following afternoon they 
 assemble in the synagogue. The service consists of a 
 recitation of certain prayers and reading of the portions of 
 the Law which bear on the solemnity. During the service 
 the ancient roll of the Law is exhibited for the reverence of 
 the worshippers : the whole service lasts about two hours. 
 The Samaritans regard this festival as set apart specially 
 for the worship of JHWH as the Maker of all things. 
 
 To the Samaritans as to the Jews, the most important 
 annual festival is "the Passover." In comparing the Jewish 
 Passover ritual with the Samaritan, it ought to be remem- 
 bered that the feast of the modern Jews which they call the 
 " Passover " is not, strictly speaking, a celebration of the 
 ancient feast of deliverance, it is rather an observance which 
 keeps that feast in remembrance ; in the hope that soon they 
 may keep it in its fulness in Jerusalem. The Samaritans 
 
THE RITUAL OF SAMARITAN WORSHIP 125 
 
 maintain that they have celebrated the Passover with its 
 true rites from the beginning. It is certainly the case that, 
 with the exception of forty years during which they were 
 debarred from celebrating it on their sacred mountain, they 
 have done so, consequently the Samaritan mode must bear a 
 closer resemblance to the ancient celebration than the Jewish. 
 Yet there are many points in which the Samaritans have 
 diverged from the way the feast was observed in the days of 
 Hezekiah. 
 
 One of these points is the mode of reckoning the date on 
 which the Passover is to be held. The Samaritan year, like 
 the Jewish, consists of twelve lunar months, alternately of 
 twenty-nine and thirty days. While in both too great 
 divergence from the solar year is avoided by the introduc- 
 tion of a second Adar as an intercalary month, yet, as the 
 Samaritans have not adopted the Metonic cycle, the Veadar 
 is not interpolated according to a fixed principle, but by 
 comparison with the Greek Christian Calendar. As a result 
 of this the date of the Samaritan Passover frequently differs 
 from that of the Jews. Sometimes, as in the year 1898 when 
 the present writer saw it, the Samaritan Passover was the 
 later by nearly a calendar month. The method by which 
 the Samaritans fix the date on which they ought to hold the 
 Passover is, according to a communication which the present 
 writer had from the High Priest, stated in the following 
 words : " It is to be held on the evening before the Full 
 Moon of the Greek Nisan." Nisan mainly coincides with 
 our April, but as the Greek Christian Calendar is pre- 
 Gregorian, there is a difference of twelve days between the 
 first of our April and the first of the Greek Nisan ; conse- 
 quently the Samaritan Passover occurs, at the earliest, on the 
 evening before the full moon after 12th April. The result is 
 that there is very considerable difference between the times 
 at which it is celebrated when these are reckoned according 
 to our Western calendars. When Dean Stanley saw it, the 
 feast fell on the 13th April, but when the present writer saw 
 it the date was 5 th May. As the Calendar of Meton, which 
 adjusted the relation of the lunar to the solar year by a cycle 
 of nineteen years, dates from 432 B.C. and is adopted by 
 the Jews, its adoption must go back to the Greek period. 
 
126 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Probably they did so early in that period, as in the 
 Maccabaean struggle the years are given according to the 
 Seleucid era and the months have Macedonian names. The 
 Samaritans must then have broken away from the Jews 
 during the Greek period. The Samaritan dependence on the 
 Calendar of the Greek Church must date from the times of the 
 Byzantine emperors, therefore too late to have any bearing 
 on the question of the relative date of the Samaritan schism. 
 
 Connected with this is another peculiarity in which the 
 Samaritans differ from the Jews, i.e., the adjustment of the 
 Passover to the Sabbath. With the Jews the Passover Law 
 supersedes that of the Sabbath, with the Samaritans it is the 
 reverse. With the Samaritans should the Passover fall on 
 the Sabbath, then it is celebrated on the preceding day ; not 
 at sunset on the Friday, the day before, when according to 
 Eastern reckoning, the Sabbath began, but at midday. This 
 was the case when Dr Mills was present at the observance in 
 i860. The Jews ha.d an arrangement by which they avoided 
 the Passover occurring on the day preceding the Sabbath. 
 The Samaritan adjustment — it at all events is clear — is quite 
 independent of the Jewish ; therefore it must be dated after 
 the separation. Other differences will be considered in con- 
 nection with the actual observance of the solemnity. 
 
 Some day before the 14th Nisan, which has been arranged, 
 as has been said above, to fall on the evening before the full 
 moon of the Greek Nisan, the whole Samaritan community, 
 except those ceremonially unclean, shut up their dwellings in 
 Nablus and ascend Mount Gerizim. They encamp in a cup- 
 like hollow to the west of the mounds that cover the ruins 
 of the ancient Samaritan temple. The tents are arranged 
 approximately in a circle, while apart, separated by a 
 hundred yards or so from the rest, is one solitary tent. 
 What strikes the observer is the dazzling whiteness of the 
 tents. Like the Jews, before Passover, the Samaritans either 
 cleanse specially, or renew most of their domestic utensils ; 
 probably the tents share in this cleansing and renewal. The 
 tent pitched apart from the others is so placed that any 
 worshipper becoming mortally ill, may in the article of 
 death be removed thither, by the hands of Moslems, lest the 
 sacred camp should be defiled by the presence of death. 
 
THE RITUAL OF SAMARITAN WORSHIP 127 
 
 The need for this was seen in the Passover celebration at 
 which the writer had the fortune to be present ; a woman 
 whose death seemed imminent was removed to this tent by 
 some Moslems who were there as sight-seers. Her death 
 was not so near as was anticipated, as she was still living on 
 the afternoon of the following day. It is a singular com- 
 mentary on this practice that the Samaritans assert that no 
 one ever dies on Mount Gerizim, during the stay of the 
 people on it for the Passover. 
 
 On the morning of the day preceding the Passover, a 
 trench of some ten or twelve feet long, and a couple of feet 
 broad and deep^ is dug to the north-east of the encampment ; 
 it is filled with brushwood as fuel. Next, a pit which has 
 been lined with stones is opened ; into it, too, brushwood is 
 cast. Both are kindled, and throughout the day the fire is 
 kept up, replenished with fuel from time to time. On the 
 trench are placed a couple of caldrons full of water. Between 
 these and the encampment there are laid on the ground a 
 number of thin posts, each with a cross-piece affixed to it 
 near the top. Near these posts is to be seen the group of 
 lambs which are to be sacrificed ; the number of these is 
 usually seven. They must all have been born in the month 
 Tishri of the preceding year ; they are usually purchased on 
 the lOth of the month just before going up. to the mountain. 
 Towards the afternoon some fifteen or twenty men of the 
 Samaritan community, headed by the High Priest, take up a 
 position near the mounds that mark the ruins of the temple. 
 The High Priest stands on a low stone, while the rest of the 
 worshippers form a semicircle in front of him. He then 
 recites liturgic prayers and passages from the Torah bear- 
 ing on the festival ; in this the other worshippers join, but 
 they all read from books. At certain points in the reading 
 the worshippers draw their hands over their faces and stroke 
 their beards ; this action, as has been noted, they use in their 
 synagogue worship. The hymns introduced into the service 
 are chanted in a musical recitative.^ 
 
 ' See Chap. I., p. 13. 
 
 2 No importance would seem to be attachable to the colour of the 
 garments even of the High Priest, as different observers have given 
 different accounts of this. 
 
128 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 After they have finished chanting, the worshippers leave 
 the temple mounds and move in a body to the point on the 
 hill where are the caldrons and the smoking pit. The 
 lambs are now brought forward, each lamb held by one or 
 two men. The " congregation " form themselves into a small 
 circle round the men with the lambs, the High Priest also 
 being within the circle. The recitation is now recommenced, 
 and continues until the sun nears the horizon, when the 
 words are repeated, " And the whole assembly of the congre- 
 gation of the children of Israel shall kill it (the Passover lamb) 
 in the evening." At once all the lambs are thrown on their 
 sides by the young men holding them ; then the shohet 
 passes rapidly along from Iamb to lamb cutting the throat of 
 each with two deft strokes. In less than a minute with 
 scarcely a struggle the lambs lie dead. Round the High 
 Priest gather the men who have just held the lambs to kiss 
 his hands, the older men of the congregation the High Priest 
 kisses on the cheek. The men now sit down in groups 
 round each lamb, while boiling water is brought from the 
 caldrons and poured over the lambs to soften the skin ; they 
 then begin to pluck off the wool. In a little while the wool 
 is all plucked off, and the skin is left bare as the palm of the 
 hand and as white as parchment Next, the lambs are aiifixed 
 by their hind legs to the thin posts to which we have already 
 referred, and rapidly disembowelled ; the feet are quickly 
 ■ removed, and the right foreleg, the priest's portion, is cut off. 
 Dr Mills says that they are burnt along with the entrails. 
 The liver, which is kept separate in the disembowelling, is 
 thrust into the body of the lamb. While this is going on, 
 the High Priest continues his chant. As group after group 
 finishes, the lambs are twisted round the posts referred to 
 and laid one after another on a hurdle. When this has been 
 completed the High Priest takes up his position beside the 
 carcases and begins anew to chant. The shohet then goes to 
 the side of the pit in which fire has been kept burning all 
 afternoon, and those who had previously held the lambs come 
 forward and stand beside the heap of carcases. The shohet 
 standing beside the fire calls out in Arabic, wahed, " one " ; a 
 lamb from the heap is handed to him and by him the long 
 post or spit is thrust into the glowing pit in such a way that 
 
THE RITUAL OF SAMARITAN WORSHIP 129 
 
 it stands upright. He then calls out fnain, " two," and the 
 next is carried to the pit and thrust into it ; and so on until 
 the whole seven are placed. Care is taken that none of the 
 lambs rests on the wall of the pit lest it should be in the 
 slightest degree broiled. The top of these posts or spits 
 comes within three inches or so of the level of the ground. 
 When all this is duly completed the hurdle is brought and put 
 on the mouth of the pit ; on it is then placed grass, and there- 
 upon mud, till not the slightest puff of smoke or steam escapes. 
 
 When the lambs are thus disposed of the High Priest retires 
 to his tent ; the chanting meanwhile is continued under the 
 leadership of the second High Priest. While this is going 
 on a huge sheet is spread on the space between the caldrons 
 and the temple mounds. 
 
 At the expiry of a period of time marked by the comple- 
 tion of the chanting of certain hymns, the High Priest who 
 has retired to his tent is informed and comes from it to the 
 pit. At the same time the second High Priest distributes 
 the unleavened bread and hyssop — the bitter herbs of Exodus. 
 Seven new baskets, resembling those in- which carpenters 
 carry their tools, are brought forward. The pit is now 
 uncovered, and the lambs are taken up one by one and 
 deposited in the baskets. When brought up the lambs 
 appear burnt black. When, as frequently happens, one of 
 the lambs falls off the spit in being brought up, one of the 
 worshippers descends into the pit to bring up the fragments. 
 The baskets with the roasted lambs are taken to the sheet 
 and placed at separate points on it. Groups of men gather 
 round each lamb ; some squat on the ground, others sit on their 
 heels, while others again stand and stoop over those sitting. 
 In accordance with the command in Exod. xii. ii, every man 
 was girt as if for a journey, with shoes on feet and staff in 
 hand. To those of the women and children who are seated 
 outside portions of the lambs are conveyed ; also portions 
 are carried to the tents for such of the women and children 
 as have not come out. The unleavened bread and hyssop 
 are now made use of along with the lambs. When they have 
 finished eating, every fragment of bone, wool, or flesh is 
 gathered together and burnt in obedience to the command 
 that nothing be left " until the morning." 
 
130 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Dr Mills says that when any of the community, either 
 from illness or ceremonial impurity, are unable to observe 
 the Passover at its proper date, " they may do so on the same 
 day of the following month, that is the month lyyar." This 
 presumably means that the date is adjusted to the second 
 month of the Greek Christian Calendar, as that of the regular 
 Passover is to the first. This permission is in accordance 
 with the provision for a similar contingency to be found in 
 Num. ix. 9-12. Dr Mills adds: "This Passover is not 
 celebrated on Mount Gerizim." 
 
 There are several features in this celebration of the 
 Passover in which it differs from the Jewish practice as 
 related in the Talmud. Many of these points are of such 
 minuteness that they are manifestly the product of Rabbinic 
 refinements ; these may be passed over. Some equally 
 minute features have been introduced by the Samaritans, as 
 for instance, that the lambs should have been born in the 
 month Tishri of the preceding year ; this may be mentioned 
 as showing the independence of the tradition represented by 
 the Samaritans. What confirms this is the fact that the 
 Samaritans reckon the date on which the Passover should -be 
 celebrated in a different way from the Jews, and the further 
 fact that while with the Jews, the Sabbath law has to give 
 way to the regulations regarding . the observance of the 
 Passover, with the Samaritans as mentioned already, it is 
 the Passover that gives way to the Sabbath. On the other 
 hand they have none of the Jewish regulations which prevent 
 the Passover from being observed on Monday, Wednesday, 
 or Friday. It has been thought that the Samaritans had, at 
 the bidding of Ezra, revolutionised the worship they had 
 received from the priest sent by Esarhaddon " to teach them 
 the manner of the God of the land," and introduced the Priestly 
 Code. The way in which the Samaritans have adjusted 
 matters shows a complete independence of the Jews. At the 
 same time it has to be observed that in fixing a second 
 opportunity for observing the Passover, they follow an 
 injunction which is found in Num. ix. 9-12, a passage 
 declared to belong to the latest stratum of priestly legislation. 
 
 The point in the twenty-four hours at which the lambs 
 should be slain is differently interpreted by the Samaritans 
 
THE RITUAL OF SAMARITAN WORSHIP 131 
 
 and the Jews. The phrase which designates the time in 
 Exod. xii. 6 is a peculiar one, D^^iyn pa {bin hd arbayim), 
 " between the two evenings " ; it is found only in the middle 
 books of the Pentateuch. The Jews take this to mean " the 
 afternoon," from midday to sunset ; the Samaritans regard it 
 as meaning precisely at sunset, as if the one evening were 
 while the sun neared the horizon and the other the gradually 
 decreasing light which follows set of sun. This, too, is a case 
 in which the independence of the Samaritans is obvious. It 
 would seem further that the Samaritan interpretation is the 
 more natural and primitive. The reason the Samaritans have 
 for celebrating the Passover on the midday of Friday, when 
 otherwise it would fall on the Sabbath, has not transpired. 
 
 In the actual roasting of the lambs, there are points in 
 the Samaritan practice which are worthy of notice. The 
 description given by Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with 
 Trypho, of the spit used in roasting the Paschal lamb suits 
 the spit at present used by the Samaritans. He sees in the 
 shape which results from the small cross-piece the symbol of 
 the cross of our Lord. Justin assumes that he describes what 
 had been wont to take place in the temple in Jerusalem 
 while it was yet standing ; in this he possibly was right. At 
 least he does not record any correction of his description by 
 Trypho : the old practice is continued by the Samaritans. 
 The roasting of all the lambs of the community in a common 
 oven points to a practice which must have originated in a 
 village community, and in a country where fuel was scarce. 
 In this it may be noted that there is a break away from the 
 mode in which the first Passover was celebrated. The killing 
 and roasting must, in that case, have all taken place within 
 the house. The Samaritan method seems to point to a time 
 in which in the Northern Kingdom every village had its 
 bamah, " High Place," and its common oven. The use of a 
 pit as an oven appears to be a primitive trait. If we com- 
 bine the Biblical notices with what is found in Josephus, the 
 Jewish Passover may be realised in a manner. The lambs were 
 slain in the temple between three and five in the afternoon, 
 and carried to the houses of the worshippers where they were 
 roasted. The Samaritan mode points to a different origin. 
 It is the case that for forty years the Samaritans were ex- 
 
132 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 eluded from their Holy Mountain, and had to celebrate their 
 great feast in their own quarter ; how this was done there is 
 no means of knowing, as no European observer seems to have 
 been present on any occasion during the period of their 
 banishment. While it is most probable, it is not absolutely 
 certain, that the rites they used after their return were 
 precisely the same as those of the period before their 
 banishment. One feature has apparently been dropped 
 within very recent times. Dr Petermann and Professor 
 MacEwen, as also some other observers, speak of the blood 
 being taken and applied to the forehead of the onlooking 
 children, and sprinkled on the sides of the tent doors ; later 
 observers have noted nothing of this. Dr Montgomery says 
 on the authority of Moulton that this practice was given up 
 on account of the Moslems. 
 
 Closely connected with the Passover, with the Samaritans, 
 as with the Jews, is the Feast of Unleavened Bread. During 
 the whole period of the " Days of Unleavened Bread " they 
 are in tents on the top of Mount Gerizim. All leaven is 
 removed from their tents. The unleavened cakes, masat 
 (the Hebrew matzoth) are thin, almost as thin as parchment, 
 and baked without salt ; save for this last peculiarity they 
 resemble the bread of the Arabs. This feast lasts from the 
 13th Nisan to the 2ist. On that day, "the great day of the 
 Feast," they form a procession and go through the village of 
 Makkada. Dr Montgomery says that when the procession 
 reaches the sacred site they halt, having read through the 
 book of Deuteronomy on their way. Dr Mills represents the 
 reading of the Law as taking place on Mount Gerizim, and 
 speaks of special emphasis being given to the blessing of 
 Joseph (Gen. xlix. 22-26). Colonel Warren identifies the 
 village of Makkada with the Cave of Makkedah, where the 
 kings defeated in the battle of Bethhoron hid themselves. 
 The Samaritans make more of this feast than do the Jews ; 
 the additions seem to be late. 
 
 Like the Jews, the Samaritans celebrate the Feast of 
 Pentecost, called in Deuteronomy (xvi. 10) "the Feast of 
 Weeks " ; it was essentially a freewill offering, " the tribute 
 of a freewill offering of thine hand according as the Lord thy 
 God hath blessed thee." It is reckoned as seven weeks from 
 
THE RITUAL OF SAMARITAN WORSHIP 133 
 
 Passover, that is, forty-nine days, or inclusively, fifty days, 
 hence its name " Pentecost," in Arabic, khamsin. There is a 
 difference between the Jewish and the Samaritan method of 
 reckoning the weeks. The Samaritans count them in accord- 
 ance with Lev. xxiii. 1 1, from "the morrow after the Sabbath," 
 the day when the priest had offered, as a wave-offering, the 
 sheaf of the first-fruits of the harvest ; that is from the first 
 Sabbath in Passover week. The Jews reckon from the 
 morrow of the Passover, regarding the Passover itself as a 
 Sabbath. As in their reckoning of the weeks of Pentecost 
 the Sadducees agreed with the Samaritans, it may be regarded 
 as the primitive ; when the Jews diverged it is impossible to 
 say. Among the Samaritans this feast is celebrated by a 
 service in the synagogue, followed by a procession to Mount 
 Gerizim, where the priest recites the passage for the day 
 which contains the law concerning harvest. In the syna- 
 gogue prominence is given to the decalogue, during the 
 reading of which candles are held round the desk while the 
 priest reads. . 
 
 Both Jews and Samaritans have a civil as well as a 
 sacred year. The civil New Year is celebrated on the 1st 
 of Tishri, approximately the ist of October. With the Jews 
 this is a time of great rejoicing, everyone appears in his most 
 gorgeous raiment ; in the synagogue a trumpet is blown, in 
 accordance with Lev. xxiii. 24, whence it is called the " Feast 
 of Trumpets." In some places where a sea is in sight they 
 turn their backs toward it and cast a stone over their shoulders, 
 in symbol of their sins cast behind their back into the depth 
 of the sea, in order to begin the New Year with a clean sheet. 
 With the Samaritans it is regarded as a season for repentance, 
 and for preparation for the Great Day of Atonement. In 
 harmony with this idea it is sanctified by a prolonged service 
 in the synagogue which lasts six hours, during which the 
 whole Law is read. It is regarded as a Sabbath and no work 
 is done on it. Bearing on this difference in mode of celebra- 
 tion, and on the idea behind it is Ezra's action as recorded in 
 Neh. viii. 9, " Ezra the priest said unto all the people . . . 
 ' Mourn not nor weep.' For the people wept when they heard 
 the words of the Law." It seemed no easy matter to get the 
 people to give over their weeping, for Ezra had to repeat his 
 
134 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 exhortation and the Levites had to go among the people to 
 still them. This day, the first day of the seventh month, i.e., 
 Tishri, was the commemoration of setting up anew the altar 
 " upon his bases " (Ezra iii. i, 3) nearly a hundred years before. 
 The primitive idea evidently was the Samaritan one to look 
 upon it as a day for repentance and sorrow for sin in prepara- 
 tion for Kippor, " the Great Day of Atonement." The Jewish 
 habit of casting their sins behind their backs indicates the 
 same notion still surviving. 
 
 As with the Jews, so with the Samaritans the principal 
 event of the month Tishri is the Great Day of Atonement 
 on the tenth day. In the annual series of solemnities it 
 is next in importance to the Passover. As sacrifices have 
 long ceased to be offered by the Samaritans, there is no 
 ceremony analogous to that of the Scapegoat. As further 
 they have no longer either brazen altar or Ark of the Covenant ; 
 nor is there any longer a Holy of holies, if the Samaritans 
 ever had that, into which the High Priest can go bearing the 
 blood to sprinkle it on the Mercy-seat; all the ceremonies 
 of the day are resolved into prayer and fasting. In this 
 they are unlike the Jews, who retain a suggestion of the 
 sacrificial element so prominent originally in the Great Day 
 of Atonement ; on the eve of the loth of Tishri, among the 
 orthodox Jews, for every man a cock, for every woman a 
 hen is killed. Among the Samaritans there is no similar 
 survival. On the afternoon of the 9th of Tishri — the day 
 preceding the Great Day of Atonement — every member of 
 the Samaritan community solemnly bathes in running water. 
 Thereafter they all partake of a meal which must be finished 
 half an hour before sunset. From that time till after sunset 
 the following day, neither food nor drink may be partaken of. 
 Even infants have, to share in this rigid fast; neither age 
 nor sickness procures exemption. Dr Mills adds : " The 
 day is looked forward to with no little anxiety." 
 
 Half an hour before sunset, the whole body of the 
 Samaritan community assemble in the synagogue and begin 
 the recitation of the Law. Throughout the whole night, in 
 total darkness, proceeds this recitation, partly spoken, partly 
 chanted, amid great excitement. The recitation of the Law 
 is mingled with liturgic prayers and penitential hymns. In 
 
THE RITUAL OF SAMARITAN WORSHIP 135 
 
 early morning the worshippers form a procession to visit 
 the tombs of their prophets. These are not as might be 
 supposed Elijah and Elisha, Hosea and Jonah, prophets 
 who by birth and mission belonged to the Northern tribes ; 
 these are not reverenced nor even known. The position 
 occupied by Moses in the theology of the Samaritans pre- 
 cludes any other being regarded in the light of what is 
 ordinarily reckoned a prophet. In a subordinate way Aaron 
 is reckoned a prophet, but neither his tomb nor that of 
 Moses can be visited. Tombs in the neighbourhood of 
 Nablus are assigned to Joseph, Eleazar, Ithamar, Phinehas, 
 Joshua, Caleb, and the seventy elders, especially prominent 
 among these being Eldad and Medad. On the morning 
 of the Day of Atonement these tombs are visited, and some- 
 thing like worship is offered at each tomb to the saint who 
 slumbers beneath. About noon they return to the synagogue 
 and resume the recitation of the Law. 
 
 When the afternoon is well gone, and the last chapters 
 of Deuteronomy have been recited with appropriate prayers, 
 there comes the concluding solemnity of the day — the 
 exhibition of the Law. The two priests who have been 
 reciting the Law alternately now go behind the veil which, 
 as mentioned above, hangs before the sacred recess, and 
 bring out the two oldest copies of the Law in their wrappings 
 of light blue velvet, embroidered with texts from the Law 
 in Samaritan characters. These are opened out and the 
 silver cases in which they are enclosed are seen. These 
 in turn are thrown open and the venerable rolls are revealed. 
 The priests take them out and hold them up to view, then 
 all the congregation prostrate themselves with prayers and 
 hymns. After some time spent in repeated prostrations, 
 the people press forward to touch, to stroke, or even' in 
 favoured circumstances to kiss the sacred roll. When these 
 rolls are replaced in their coverings, the liturgy of prayer 
 and chanting continues till after sunset ; then the solemnity 
 of Kippor, or, as the Samaritans pronounce it, Kibburim, 
 is ended. The latter part of the service has a resemblance 
 to the Jewish simhath-torah (rejoicing of the Law), which, 
 however, is connected not with the Day of Atonement but 
 with the Feast of Tabernacles. 
 
136 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 On the day following the Great Day of Atonement, the 
 Samaritan community commences to prepare for the Feast 
 of Tabernacles, which is held on the iSth of the same month. 
 They begin to construct booths in their courtyards of branches 
 from the palm, the citron, the terebinth, and the willow. 
 As the Law requires, the whole community dwell for seven 
 days in these booths. On each of these days service is held 
 in the synagogue, morning and evening ; during the day they 
 form a procession and ascend Mount Gerizim " in honour of 
 JHWH." No servile work is done during this week, nor 
 is business of any sort transacted. As with the Jews, " the 
 eighth day" (Num. xxix. 35) is held as a specially solemn 
 one. They assemble in the synagogue, when the priest 
 recites a liturgy special to the day. With this end all the 
 primitive feasts for which a claim for being of Mosaic 
 appointment may be made. Like the rest of the 
 Samaritan solemnities it is greatly simpler than its Jewish 
 equivalent. 
 
 The Samaritans celebrate a Feast of Purim, not as do 
 the Jews on the 14th Adar, but on the latter three Sabbaths 
 of Shebat, the month preceding. As the Samaritans have 
 annexed to themselves so much of Jewish history, it would 
 not have been surprising had their traditions declared that 
 they along with the Jews were the objects of Haman's 
 conspiracy. With them, however, it has nothing to do with 
 Esther or Haman ; according to the Samaritans it com- 
 memorates the commission of Moses to deliver Israel out 
 of Egypt. It follows from this that they do not regard the 
 name as having any connection with "lots," or with the 
 Persian word pareh, " to divide." They say that the word 
 purim means "rejoicings." It may have a connection ety- 
 mologically with ^xs pa!ar, " to flourish, to ornament " ; it 
 certainly occurs at the time when flowers are most abundant 
 in Palestine. The Samaritans admit that there is rto 
 authority for this feast in the Law. It is possible that 
 Purim is really a primitive, perhaps even a Canaanitish feast, 
 to which a sacred meaning was given ; much as the Roman 
 Saturnalia baptised unto Christ became our Christmas. It 
 is to be noted that the Samaritan Feast of Purim coincides 
 very nearly with the Jewish Rosh-hash-Shana rAilanoth, 
 
THE RITUAL OF SAMARITAN WORSHIP 137 
 
 "the New Year of the Trees," both in date and general 
 character ; both occur in " Shebat," and both are festivals 
 of joy. 
 
 Besides these public services, in which the whole people 
 take part, there are rites that are connected more with the 
 individual and with family life. Of these the most important 
 among the Samaritans, as with the Jews, is circumcision. 
 On the birth of a son a messenger is sent to announce the 
 fact to the father, if he is not at hand. Although the 
 Samaritan nation is perishing for lack of mothers, it is at 
 the birth of a son that there is rejoicing. Thereafter, on 
 the eighth day, comes the initiatory rite of circumcision. 
 With the Samaritans it is observed with greater simplicity, 
 and at the same time with greater strictness than among 
 the Jews. Among these latter, as may be seen in the 
 Jewish Encydopcedia, it is a rite of great complexity. Some 
 of the features have been added recently for hygienic reasons, 
 as the placing of all the instruments in boiling water, and 
 the use of sterilised lint in dressing the wound. The main 
 ritual differences are (i) The presence among the Jews of 
 Sandakim, " sponsors," one of whom holds the child while 
 it is being circumcised ; with the Samaritans there are no 
 Sandakim; with them the mother holds the child. Cere- 
 monially both mother and child are unclean, consequently 
 so would any one be who held the child. (2) The cruel 
 addition of the " rent," regularly practised by the orthodox 
 Jews, is omitted by the Samaritans as by the Karaite Jews. 
 (3) The Samaritans, in this also in agreement with the 
 Karaites, perform the rite on the eighth day even though 
 that day should be a Sabbath. Among the orthodox Jews 
 the rite may be postponed, by Sabbaths and feasts even, to 
 the twelfth day. (4) With the Jews it is a special official, 
 a mohel who operates ; he is generally a Rabbi. With the 
 Samaritans it is the priest who circumcises. (5) With the 
 Jews it is generally performed in the synagogue, with the 
 Samaritans now it is performed in the family ; anciently 
 as the story of Germanus shows, it was performed in the 
 synagogue. At this ceremony, as with the Jews, the child 
 receives its name ; also as with the Jews, the Samaritan 
 child gets two names, one a sacred name, usually Biblical, 
 
138 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the other a Gentile name, necessarily Arabic, with a surname 
 by which he is known to the public. 
 
 The marriage ceremony is like all Samaritan ceremonies 
 simpler than the Jewish ; there is no canopy, no breaking 
 of the glass. When the day arrives which has been appointed 
 for the wedding, usually a Thursday, the luckiest day in the 
 week in the estimation of the Samaritans, the priest sends 
 two messengers to bring the bride to the house of the bride- 
 groom, where the ceremony is performed by the priest, 
 the two messengers being official witnesses. The service 
 consists in reading appropriate portions of the Law in 
 Hebrew ; in the same language liturgic prayers are recited, 
 and hymns suited to the occasion are chanted. With the 
 Samaritans there is not as with the Jews a ceremony of 
 betrothal ; however, a few days before the marriage the 
 priest sends the bride from the bridegroom her betrothal 
 ring. As among all Orientals marriage is a matter of 
 business arrangement, not affection, the essential part of the 
 marriage is the reading of the contract and the accepting of 
 its terms by the two parties. The choice is restricted as 
 they may not marry any but one of their own creed. 
 Although there is nothing in their creed to forbid it, 
 polygamy is practically unknown among the Samaritans ; 
 probably the fact that women are in the minority may to 
 some extent account for this. Divorce is also rare for 
 possibly the same reason. The marriage of an uncle with 
 his niece, common among the Jews, is forbidden to the 
 Samaritans. The Levirate Law, which is still among the 
 Jews regarded as theoretically binding, though neglected 
 in practice, is held and practised among the Samaritans ; 
 but with a distinct and important variation. The Samaritans 
 maintain that were a man to marry the widow of his uterine 
 brother the command in Lev. xviii. i6; xx. 21, would be 
 transgressed. Instead of a man having to marry his 
 widowed sister-in-law, the most intimate and trusted friend 
 of the deceased is expected to make the widow his wife. 
 This he is required to do unless he has already two 
 wives ; a position of things which practically can never 
 occur. It ought to be noted that here, as in so many 
 other points, the Samaritans are in agreement with the 
 
THE RITUAL OF SAMARITAN WORSHIP 139 
 
 Karaite Jews. The Jews have still in a restricted way the 
 Halitza ceremony, referred to in Ruth iv. 7, by which the 
 brother-in-law is relieved of his obligations ; this, however, 
 the Samaritans have not. It is clear from Matt. xxii. 24-28, 
 and the parallel passages, Mark xii. 18 ff., Luke xx. 27 ff., 
 that the Jews of our Lord's day interpreted the Levirate 
 Law in the same way in which it was understood in the days 
 of Ruth, and as it is by the Jews of the present day. The 
 Samaritan interpretation of "brother" must be regarded as 
 a secondary formation due to a desire to harmonise the 
 passages in Leviticus with Deut. xxv. S-io. The custom 
 of Levirate marriage appears to be primitive (Gen. xxxviii. 
 8-1 1 ). As is the case generally in the East, and indeed 
 among the Jews wherever they may be, marriage takes place 
 at an early age, the husbands being from fourteen to sixteen 
 years old, and the brides from ten to twelve. To conclude 
 concerning marriage ; there is a marriage feast at which 
 music is performed, usually by Moslem musicians. The bride- 
 groom is expected to be particular to attend the synagogue 
 on the following Sabbath, when a special prayer is recited on 
 his behalf. 
 
 It is sometimes said that the Samaritans do not bury 
 their dead themselves, but employ Moslems or Christians to 
 perform the rites of sepulture. This opinion appears to have 
 been a deduction from the fact that the Samaritan remnant 
 claim that they are all priests. Historically the priestly 
 family, the Aaronic family, died out more than a couple of 
 centuries ago; hence even their High Priest is strictly speaking 
 only a Levite. In reality only the High Priests, first and 
 second, are debarred from touching a dead body ; at the same 
 time it is true that the Samaritans generally employ Christian 
 or Moslem undertakers. On the occasion of serious illness 
 selected passages from the Law are read, round the bed, not 
 by the priest lest he should be rendered unclean by the 
 patient dying, but by some one appointed for the purpose. 
 When the Samaritan is in articulo mortis he is expected to 
 gather up the last remnants of his strength to repeat the creed 
 of the Israelite: Elwem Eloenu Elwem aed, " JHWH is our 
 God, JHWH is One." When it is seen that recovery is not to 
 be hoped for, bystanders begin to recite the Law and continue 
 
140 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 until death comes. When this has supervened the body is 
 carefully washed in clean water, as with the Jews. After this 
 purification is completed the recitation of the Law is resumed, 
 and continued to Num. xxxi. Along with these readings 
 certain prayers are also recited. The body is then wrapped 
 in a shroud and placed in a coffin. It is to be observed that 
 the Samaritans are the only natives of Palestine who enclose 
 their dead in coffins. They do so, they say, because the body 
 .of their father Joseph was put in a coffin in Egypt (Gen. 1. 
 26). Dr Mills says : " They do not pray on behalf of the 
 dead . . . believing that at death the individual's fate is 
 forever settled " {Modern Samaritans, p. 205). This, however, 
 is scarcely accurate, at least for the Samaritans of a somewhat 
 earlier date. Heidenheim {Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift, i. p. 
 420) has preserved a prayer distinctly for the soul of one 
 departed. Either the extant Samaritans have abandoned 
 the opinions of their fathers, or the prayer represents merely 
 a sectional view. Confirmatory of Dr Mills' statement is the 
 fact which he mentions that the Karaite Jews, who agree 
 with the Samaritans on so many points, like them omit the 
 Jewish qaddish which, though its contents do not bear this 
 out, is supposed to benefit the dead. It may be that, knowing 
 Dr Mills' Protestantism and consequent disbelief in the 
 validity of such prayers, his informant out of Oriental 
 politeness professed to agree with him. One thing is certain 
 there is no formal ritual of mourning, they do not sit so many 
 days on the. earth as do the Jews ; nor is it their custom, like 
 the Mohammedans, to revisit the graves of their friends and 
 inform them of the events of the past year. The present 
 Samaritan cemetery is situated to the west of the city. 
 Their ancient burying-place, Dr Mills was informed, was not 
 far from the eastern end of the valley. 
 
 Besides those ceremonies connected with the individual 
 which occur only once in a person's earthly existence, there 
 are daily rites of religion. The Samaritans have not the 
 Jewish ceremonial washing, which has more to do with ritual 
 than with cleanliness ; their first religious act is the repetition 
 in Hebrew of a long morning prayer, a similar prayer is offered 
 at night. Besides these, there are ceremonial purifications 
 such as those in Lev. x. and xv., e.g., touching a dead body, 
 
THE RITUAL OF SAMARITAN WORSHIP 141 
 
 or coming in contact with the ceremonially unclean, or with 
 the carcases of unclean animals; there are also those cases 
 connected with sex. The leading distinctive characteristic 
 of the Samaritan ceremonies, when compared with those 
 of the Jews which correspond with them, is their greater 
 simplicity ; therefore it may be presumed that they represent 
 a condition of things much more primitive than is found even 
 in the Mishna. It is a question that presses ; why did the 
 Samaritans, when they had taken the Priestly Code with all 
 its additions from the Jews, not continue to follow them in 
 their further developments? If it should be said, that the 
 burning of the temple on Mount Gerizim by John Hyrcanus 
 made a breach that was ineffaceable, then why did not the 
 Samaritans extend to the memory of Hyrcanus a hatred 
 similar to that which the Jews have for Titus? Samaritan 
 tradition on the contrary declares that John became a convert 
 to the Samaritan faith ; this probably is an echo of his 
 conversion to Sadduceanism. Indeed Abu'l Fath fails even 
 to chronicle the fact that John Hyrcanus did burn the temple 
 on Gerizim. 
 
 The following summary of the differences between Jews 
 and Samaritans in Passover ritual, was communicated to 
 the writer by Professor Dalman : — 
 
 (i) In both the lambs are a year old, but the Jews count 
 from the Nisan of the previous year, which makes the lambs 
 quite a year old ; the Samaritans reckon from Tishri, the 
 lambs being thus just six months old. 
 
 (2) Among the Samaritans, women and children partake 
 of the lamb ; Jews admit that it was originally so with them, 
 now it is a permitted privilege to them not an enjoined 
 duty. 
 
 (3) The Samaritans reckon " betwixt the evenings " from 
 the sky becoming yellow before sunset, till the red has quite 
 disappeared after sundown ; with the Jews it meant afternoon 
 and before nightfall. 
 
 (4) With the Samaritans the slaying of the lambs takes 
 place beside the pit-oven in which they are to be roasted ; 
 among the Jews the lamb was slain in the temple and 
 
142 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 removed for roasting. It is possible that this is an accidental 
 difference, due to the circumstances of the Samaritans. 
 
 (5) The Samaritans allow the blood to flow, but dip 
 hyssop in it for sprinkling ; the Jews did not sprinkle after 
 the first celebration in Egypt. The Jews do not slay the 
 lamb now. 
 
 (6) While the Jews flayed the lamb, the Samaritans 
 pluck off the wool and leave on the skin. 
 
 (7) To disembowel the lamb it is fastened to an upright 
 post supported by two men. The Jews fastened it to a 
 cross-beam supported by posts. 
 
 (8) The burning of what remains was by the Jews left 
 over to the following day ; the Samaritans do it that night. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE SAMARITAN VIEW OF SACRED HISTORY 
 
 Unlike every form of heathenism or Nature religion, 
 Judaism, like its two daughter faiths, Christianity and 
 Islam, claims to be essentially historic. , That God had 
 called Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees, and led him into 
 the land of Canaan ; further, that when he had entered into 
 the landj God had revealed Himself to him, and promised 
 it as an inheritance to his seed ; these were regarded as 
 definite historic events, and upon these primarily the whole 
 religion of Israel rested. The next stage in the evolution of 
 the religion of Israel was connected indissolubly with another 
 event or series of events. Israel having gone down into 
 Egypt, and having been oppressed there, had been led out 
 of the " House of Bondage " with signs and wonders by 
 Moses : that God had appeared to them in cloud and fire 
 on Mount Sinai, and had there given Israel a Law: that 
 God had led them through the wilderness, and brought the 
 people to the east bank of Jordan, in sight of the land 
 promised to their fathers, these were facts on the historic 
 reality of which the religion and the national existence of 
 Israel rested. The enactments of the Torah, moral or ritual, 
 had their validity and sanction from their historic setting. 
 But the history of the Torah terminates with the encamp- 
 ment of Israel in the plains of Moab over against Palestine, 
 the death of Moses, and the appointment of his successor, 
 Joshua. 
 
 If the claim of Israel to be the people chosen of God — 
 the people in whom all the nations of the earth were to be 
 blessed — was true, their history could not end at this point. 
 The initial promise given to Abraham that his seed should 
 
144 IHE SAMARITANS 
 
 inherit Canaan, a promise that had been given again to his 
 descendants in Egypt, had not been fulfilled. All the wonders 
 wrought in Egypt and at the Red Sea, all the marvels of 
 the journey through the wilderness would be meaningless 
 displays of power unless there were something more. The 
 crossing of the Jordan, and the conquest of the Land of 
 Promise under the leadership of Joshua, is a necessary 
 sequel to the encampment in the plains of Moab. But even 
 this cannot be the end. If Israel is the peculiar Treasure of 
 JHWH, the people cannot be suffered to be lost in the 
 chaos of nations dwelling in Canaan. If the function of 
 Israel was to preserve for the world faith in the One 
 Supreme God, who had revealed Himself to Abraham — and 
 this was the belief of the Samaritans as well as of the Jews — 
 then even when they had gained their inheritance and been 
 planted in Canaan they would still need to be preserved that 
 they should not be seduced by the practices of the heathen 
 around them, or overwhelmed by their military prowess, and 
 so their testimony be lost. From the analogy of the previous 
 Divine dealings with Israel, the subsequent history would 
 be also sacred, as the history of the intercourse of JHWH 
 with His people and the discipline through which He passed 
 them to fit them for the function which He had assigned 
 them. 
 
 The agents whom God used to confirm Israel in their 
 covenant relationship were the prophets. On the one 
 hand their exhortations to faithfulness to the God who 
 had brought them up out of Egypt, and their denunciations 
 of any failure to maintain purity of worship and morals, 
 tended to keep them in the right way ; but also on the other 
 hand by recording the history they showed how faithfully 
 JHWH had fulfilled His side of the Covenant, and therefore 
 how great was His claim on the faithfulness of Israel. The 
 advent of the Prophet as a functionary in the Divine treat- 
 ment of Israel was foretold in Deut. xviii. 15: "The Lord 
 thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst 
 of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me ; unto him ye shall 
 hearken." While this prophecy found its absolute and 
 complete fulfilment in the Mission of our Lord, the whole 
 prophetic order was in a lesser degree also its fulfilment. 
 
THE SAMARITAN VIEW OF SACRED HISTORY 145 
 
 The order was itself a prophecy which found its fulfilment 
 in Christ. As may be learned from Josephus {contra 
 Apioneni), the belief of Israel in the truthfulness of their 
 history was grounded on the fact that the writings in which 
 its events were recorded, were the work of prophets. As 
 might be expected from their authorship, these writings 
 regard the history of Israel from the Divine standpoint ; 
 it was a record of JHWH's providential dealings by which 
 He always preserved in Israel a seed to serve Him. These 
 prophetic records begin with the book of Joshua, and are 
 continued in Judges, Samuel, and Kings. As has already 
 been seen, none of these books occur in the Canon of the 
 Samaritans. A probable reason for this has been indicated 
 in a previous chapter. 
 
 While the Samaritans maintain that the Pentateuch 
 alone is sacred and canonical, they seem conscious to some 
 extent of the incompleteness of their Canon, if they would 
 successfully maintain the claim which they make to be the 
 true Israel. The history of the people chosen of God could 
 not end on the east of Jordan, in sight of " the land flowing 
 with milk and honey " which had been promised to them 
 before they left Egypt, but not put in their possession. To 
 complete the sacred record, not only must the promise be 
 related, but also it must be told how that promise \vas 
 fulfilled. Hence it would seem to be needful to maintain 
 that at one time the Samaritans must have had some 
 authoritative account of the conquest of the land. The 
 high esteem in which the Samaritans hold Joshua, placing 
 him just behind Moses and caUing him King, confirms this 
 probability. In the hymns in which most of the theology 
 of Samaria has been preserved to us, we have references to 
 events which took place in the conquest. The fact that 
 when Esarhaddon sent priests to teach the colonists "the 
 manner of the God of the land " they were not accompanied 
 by prophets, as has been said above, may have had something 
 to do with the want of prophetic literature among the 
 descendants of the Northern tribes. Further there must be 
 borne in mind the wholesale destruction of Samaritan 
 manuscripts from the days of Hyrcanus downward, not 
 to speak of the earlier havoc wrought by the Assyrian 
 
 K 
 
146 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 conquerors. The repeated inquisitions for manuscripts 
 ordered by the Christian emperors of Byzantium, followed 
 by their destruction, are especially to be deplored. 
 
 At the same time there have come to us several books 
 which contain the traditional beliefs of the Samaritans as to 
 the course of the Divine dealings with them. They are all 
 late, none of them earlier than the tenth century of our era, 
 yet they may be regarded as containing the genuine tradi- 
 tions of the Samaritans as to their sacred history. As might 
 be anticipated from their being the product of Orientals, the 
 records are twisted and modified to enforce a moral lesson, 
 or flatter national vanity. Still' when allowance has been made 
 for this, their general agreement may permit the inquirer to 
 assume that in these writings we have the ideas entertained 
 by the Samaritans of the tenth Christian century, of the 
 course of the Divine discipline of Israel. 
 
 The earliest of these is a meagre chronicle discovered by 
 Neubauer while on a visit to Palestine. It is quoted as 
 authoritative by Abu'l Fath who refers to it as Tolideh. It 
 begins with a mode of calculating the feasts, and then proceeds 
 to give the succession of the Samaritan High Priests, starting 
 the genealogy with Adam. It is in Hebrew and in Samaritan 
 characters. As the list of High Priests terminates with the 
 tenth century, that century may be assigned as that of its 
 composition. It is accompanied by an Arabic version. At 
 various points notes are added as to contemporary events ; 
 the Babylonian captivity is said to have occurred during the 
 pontificate of Aqabiyah ; the arrival of Alexander of Macedon 
 happened in that of Hizqiah. More interesting to us as 
 Christians is the statement that " in the days of Jehonathan 
 was put to death Jesu, son of Mariam son of Joseph the 
 carpenter, in Jerusalem in the days of Tiberius, King of 
 Rome, by the hand of Palita the governor." Although 
 Eleazar son of Amram (1149) claims to be the author, yet 
 from the habit the Samaritan scribes have of completing such 
 genealogies and bringing them up to date, the earlier portion 
 of Tolideh may go back to a time before the "rule of the Sons 
 of Ishmael " ; so the Samaritans designate the Mohammedan 
 Era. 
 
 More important because much fuller though later is what 
 
THE SAMARITAN VIEW OF SACRED HISTORY 147 
 
 is known as the Samaritan book of Joshua. It was published 
 by Juynboll in Leyden in 1848 from a codex which is in the 
 Library of Leyden University. It had belonged to Joseph 
 Scaliger, having been sent to him from Samaria. The 
 language is Arabic but the script is Samaritan. It is 
 divided into fifty chapters; the first twenty-five of these 
 agree fairly well with the course of the history given in the 
 canonical book of Joshua ; it begins the record of events from 
 the story of Balaam. Although it cannot justly be called a 
 mere midrash, as Dr Montgomery regards it, there are 
 midrashic additions and details. The twelve chapters 
 which follow relate the history of Shobach, the son of 
 Haman, King of Persia, which is certainly a typical midrash. 
 With chapter xxxviii. begins a new division of the book. It 
 opens with a long account of the happy condition of Israel in 
 the period of Ridwani (of Divine Favour). There follows a 
 compendious account of the rulers from Joshua. Only two 
 of the nine Judges, which are all that the author recognises, 
 'Abil (Othniel) and Shimsham (Samson) are named. With 
 the latter the " age of" Ridwani (Favour) ends. Eli built a 
 temple at Shiloh and left Mount Gerizim ; in anger at the 
 action of the people JHWH removed His Tabernacle and hid 
 it in a cave. What follows has the appearance of discon- 
 nected scraps ; there is an account of Eli and Samuel and of 
 the death of the former on learning of the captivity of the 
 ark ; then an account of Buchtinosor (Nebuchadnezzar) who 
 is called King of Persia, follows ; without any reference to 
 intervening monarchs Alexander the Great is next intro- 
 duced ; another hand continues the narrative with an account 
 of Adrinus (Hadrian) and his destruction of Jerusalem. The 
 whole ends with the story of Germanus and Baba Rabba. 
 Dr Juynboll thinks it has been written in Egypt ; he would 
 date it at the middle of the fourteenth century. 
 
 Another chronicle, by far the most valuable, is that of 
 Abu'l Fath. It is an account of the history of the world from 
 Adam downwards and till the establishment of the rule of 
 " the Sons of Ishmael " beyond el-Hegira to the year A.D. 756. 
 An account of his authorities is inserted in his narrative ; 
 some of these are not open to us now, but in addition to those 
 he mentions he has had access to the canonical books ; but he 
 
148 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 seems to have got this access directly or indirectly through a 
 Greek medium, as may be seen from the form certain proper 
 names assume. An example of this is Bukhtinosor, the 
 Samaritan equivalent for Nebuchadnezzar, which has clearly 
 been derived from the Greek 'NafiovxaSovocropoi; if the unac- 
 cented first syllable is dropped, and the la? sound sharpened into 
 ( then the Samaritan form results ; this could not so naturally 
 be derived from either of the Hebrew forms of the name. A 
 similar instance is Elias for the Hebrew Eliyahu. The 
 Annals of Abu'l Path has been edited by Vilmar in Arabic 
 from four codices. There are additions to these which carry 
 the narrative considerably further down than does the original 
 author. It is written in the medium Arabic which has been 
 adopted by the American translators of the Bible into 
 Arabic. A feature of Abu'l Fath is that he lays great stress 
 on chronology, always giving the number of years from one 
 critical point to another. He emphasizes the division of 
 historic time into the two great periods of Ridwani (Favour) 
 and Phanuta (Declension). The latter he divides into three : 
 (i) from Eli to Alexander the Great ; (2) from Alexander the 
 Great to Mohammed ; (3) from Mohammed onwards. But his 
 chronological statements do not always agree with each other, 
 and are often very much at variance with facts. Still as he 
 claims to have got his facts from the High Priest, the Annals 
 may be regarded as authoritative as to the Samaritan view 
 of sacred history. 
 
 A more extensive chronicle was found by Adler and 
 published by him in the Revue des Etudes Juives, with 
 notes and a translation into French. The latter portion of 
 it, whatever may be said for the earlier and what may be 
 presumed to contain the more primitive elements, is very 
 recent, terminating in the reign of Abdul Hamid and the 
 year of our era 1900. It follows closely in the beginning 
 the Tolideh published by Neubauer, but amplifies it from all 
 manner of sources. Very little is given of the conquest of 
 the land by Joshua; it is merely said that it happened 
 under the pontificate of Eleazar. As the first portion of the 
 history has been derived from the Pentateuch, the narrative 
 of events which follow the death of Joshua is drawn from the 
 canonical books of Judges and Kings. Although there is 
 
THE SAMARITAN VIEW OF SACRED HISTORY 149 
 
 nothing of the venomous hatred of Samuel and David which 
 is to be seen in the Samaritan Joshua and Abu'l Fath, the 
 writer appears to have made little use of the books of 
 Samuel. Ezra, Nehemiah, and even Esther are mentioned. 
 Of necessity the course of events is altered to suit Samaritan 
 predilections. Ezra gets the Torah by stealing it from the 
 Samaritans, and alters it in passages. Unlike all the other 
 Samaritan historians this annalist relates the conquest of 
 Samaria by Shalmaneser. He does not, however, omit the, 
 alleged deportation of " the children of Joseph " as well as 
 those of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar ; it is to be observed that 
 he gives the name of the Babylonian king in the form it 
 assumes in Hebrew. The kings of Rome are mentioned in 
 connection with the pontificates with which the reign of each 
 was supposed to be contemporary. The writer has drawn from 
 Hebrew sources written in the square character ; thus Paraq 
 stands for Baraq in the list of the Judges ; E3 // and 3 beth 
 could only be confused in the square script. It is written in 
 Hebrew with a considerable infusion of words borrowed from 
 Arabic, Samaritan, and Aramaic. For the mediaeval period 
 it depends largely on Abu'l Fath, and therefore its value as 
 giving a view of what the Samaritans believed in regard 
 to the course of sacred history is really secondary. 
 
 More recently discovered than any of the above is the book 
 which Dr Gaster published a few years ago under the belief 
 that it stood in the same relation to the canonical book of 
 Joshua that the Samaritan recension of the Pentateuch 
 stands to the Massoretic. A very little examination shows 
 that it is by no means ancient : D^ijJ 'olam is used in the sense 
 
 of world (Gaster, Josh. i. i), a meaning which that word 
 has in Rabbinic, Aramaic, and Arabic, but never has in 
 Scriptural Hebrew ^ : when Joshua is said to return " to his 
 place" the word used is 133 cano which really means, when 
 used of a person, "his office," as of Pharaoh's cup-bearer 
 (Gen. xl. 13) ; the correct word would have been S'O'^'q meqomo 
 (Gen. xxxi. 55). It is perfectly true that Dr Gaster's book 
 
 ' Although it has the authority of both English versions, the 
 rendering oi'olam as "world," in Eccl. iii. 11, is incorrect. The LXX. 
 rendering is iiuva. " The age " would be a more correct translation. 
 
150 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 of Joshua is not simply the Arabic of Juynboll's Samaritan 
 book of Joshua translated into Hebrew : it is the canonical 
 book copied by a Samaritan with modifications to give it the 
 appearance of being an original recension. The scribe that 
 copied must have done so from an exemplar in square 
 character for he writes bashti instead oi paskti: as already 
 remarked only in the square script is / liable to be confused 
 with b. The introduction of the absurd episode of Shobach 
 is itself enough to prove its recency. It appears to be a 
 forgery written by some fairly well-educated Samaritan to be 
 palmed off on the European public as the genuine Samaritan 
 recension of the book of Joshua. Therefore for the purpose 
 of the present inquiry it is practically valueless. 
 
 Such are the authorities open to the student who would 
 investigate the views of the Samaritans on the historic 
 evolution of the Divine plan in regard to Israel. As might 
 naturally be expected from the high respect accorded to 
 Joshua, the history of the conquest of Canaan is that on 
 which most effort is expended. In regard to this the 
 Samaritan Joshua and the Annals of Abu'l Fath must be 
 our most reliable sources. The latter is closer to the record 
 as it is found in the canonical book of Joshua, while the 
 Samaritan Joshua introduces speeches edifying and other- 
 wise, and omits disagreeable facts ; the Annals are not guilty 
 in either matter to the like extent. There is no doubt from 
 the evidence extant that the Samaritans at the time the 
 Annals were written, though they did not regard the Jewish 
 Joshua as authoritative, yet looked upon its view of the 
 events of the conquest as essentially correct. The Jordan 
 was crossed on dry land by the dividing of the waters, and 
 the people celebrated the Passover in Gilgal, which, however, 
 Abu'l Fath calls Galilee. The visit of the spies to Jericho, 
 its siege and capture are all related as in Scripture. The 
 sin of Achan and the failure before Ai, which in the Annals 
 is called Huti, is duly recorded. It may be observed that 
 to make the guilt of Achan more heinous, in the Samaritan 
 Joshua it is asserted that the gold which Achan stole was 
 taken from the temple of the principal god of the city of 
 Jericho, and the weight of it was enormous ; there is nothing 
 of this in the Annals. The trick by which the Gibeonites 
 
THE SAMARITAN VIEW OF SACRED HISTORY 151 
 
 became the allies of Israel is related, and also the battle of 
 Beth-horon in accordance with the canonical narrative. The 
 standing still of the sun at the command of Joshua is given 
 in prose, not as in the canonical Joshua in verse. The 
 incident of the cave of Makkedah is not omitted, nor the 
 humiliation of the five kings whose necks were trod upon 
 by the leaders of the tribes of Israel, with the hanging 
 subsequent. The assigning of the territories to the different 
 tribes is related in a summary, which does not designate 
 as does the canonical Joshua the various cities to be found 
 within the boundaries of each. The Samaritan account has 
 the appearance of being handed on by hearsay through 
 some person or persons who had read the Jewish book of 
 Joshua. The Samaritan book of Joshua indulges in marvels 
 in regard to the battle of the waters of Merom, or as the 
 author designates it, Mairun ; the sun delays its setting and fire 
 from Heaven falls on the assembled Canaanites and discomfits 
 them. A feature is added to the account of the battle which 
 would indicate some acquaintance on the part of the writer 
 with the prophecy of Ezekiel. " A mighty river descended 
 from the Blessed Mountain (Mount Gerizim) and watered 
 all the plain " ; in its waters " King " Joshua and all the 
 princes of Israel purified themselves after the battle. What 
 became of this river, how and when it disappeared, " Joshua " 
 gives no hint. One more element is given to the picture 
 of these early times, which throws a light on the beliefs of 
 the Northern Israelites at least of later times. On the top 
 of the Blessed Mountain was a temple erected, while at the 
 same time the Tabernacle was also preserved there. 
 
 At this point there is introduced both in " Joshua " and 
 the Annals, as also more recently in Gaster's Joshua, the 
 story of Shobach the son of Hamam, King of Persia. 
 Hamam had been slain by Joshua among the other kings. 
 Shobach determined to avenge his father and sent letters to 
 all the kings of the earth. Among these kings was a giant 
 the son of Japhet. All these kings — in number thirty-six — 
 send a letter to Joshua full of threatenings, and saying, as 
 guaranteeing their ability to make their threats good, that 
 they have 60,000 cavalry, and infantry without number. 
 Joshua assembles all the princes of the people and reads to 
 
152 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 them the answer which he is about to send to this challenge. 
 It contains threats like those in the letter to which it is 
 an answer, and to emphasize these he proceeds to give a 
 narrative of all that God hath done for Israel in the past. 
 When they receive the answer of Joshua the assembled 
 kings are stupefied, so stupefied that speech fails them ; they 
 are utterly overwhelmed at the prospect of the destruction 
 awaiting them. But the mother of Shobach sends a message 
 to them to be of good courage. She is a sorceress, and 
 calling other magicians to her aid, she prepares to receive 
 Joshua and his army. According to the Samaritan " Joshua," 
 this army amounts to 300,000 men, but Gaster's Joshua puts 
 it at the more moderate figure of 2000. When Joshua 
 arrives at Ajalon, he and his army are surrounded and shut 
 in by the magical arts of Shobach's mother, with seven walls 
 of iron, and Joshua himself is struck with stupor. Eleazar 
 the priest who had accompanied the Host of Israel sends a 
 letter by a dove to Nabih, Joshua's cousin, who abode on 
 the other side of Jordan, to inform him of the straits in which 
 they are. When he learns the plight into which the Host 
 of Israel have fallen Nabih hastens to their relief; the fire 
 of God descends, and Nabih slays Shobach with a wondrous 
 arrow, which, shot up into the air, comes down with such 
 force that it pierces right through the whole body of Shobach 
 and sinks twelve cubits into the earth. 
 
 Juynboll says that this story is also found in the book 
 "Juchasin," written in Spain in the year 1502 by Rabbi 
 Abraham ben Samuel Zacut. A later Rabbi, R. Samuel 
 Sholam, adds that he had seen this story in the Annals of 
 the Cuthseans. As it is found in Abu'l Path it might be 
 thought that it was thence derived, but Juynboll points out 
 that Shobach in "Juchasin " is made the son not of the King 
 of Persia but of the King of Armenia. The only Shobach 
 mentioned in Scripture is the Captain of the Host of Hadarezer, 
 King of Syria, mentioned in 2 Samuel (x. 16-18) ; he is slain 
 in battle by David. Whence the story— it traverses all the 
 bounds of possibility too violently to be regarded as a 
 legend — it is impossible to say ; it has all the marks of wild 
 exaggeration which characterise the products of Arabian 
 imagination. As it appears among the Moslems also, it 
 
THE SAMARITAN VIEW OF SACRED HISTORY 153 
 
 may be dated some time after the Mohammedan conquest of 
 Palestine. 
 
 The story of Shobach does not seem to be part of the 
 original Samaritan book of "Joshua." It has been added 
 by a later hand as the story of Susanna and the Elders, and 
 that of Bel and the Dragon were to the canonical " Daniel." 
 In style it is quite unlike the earlier portion of the book. 
 There is a want of agreement between the narrative and 
 the actions of Joshua. Although nothing is said of any 
 campaign of Joshua beyond the limits of Canaan, yet the 
 story assumes that he has killed Hamam, King of Persia. 
 Notwithstanding that Persia was so far removed from Canaan, 
 Shobach addresses the remnant of the " Canaanites " as if 
 he were one with them. The introduction into the story 
 of the Gibborim (Giants) who merely appear by letter might 
 almost indicate that in this there are other elements to 
 be traced, viz., that Joshua had a conflict with the Anakim 
 related in some ancient book of legends in terms as wonder- 
 ful as the story of Shobach. 
 
 If the book of Joshua had been known among the 
 Northern tribes before the deportation in which all the 
 prophets and scribes, as well as all the wealthier inhabitants 
 of the land and so all the reading public had been removed, 
 the book would have to be handed down by tradition. It 
 became the traditional memory of what had once been 
 written. Such a history would explain many of the phenomena 
 presented by the book before us, its additions of speeches 
 intended to be edifying or instructive, and episodes which 
 seem to glorify the hero. A similar phenomenon is seen 
 if the earlier form of a Scotch ballad is compared with a 
 later; as for instance the later version, "The Three Ravens," 
 compared with the grim original ballad, " The Twa Corbies." 
 A similar process may be seen at work in the story-tellers 
 of Arab villages to-day. It is certainly the case that similar 
 results would have followed had some Samaritan read the 
 Jewish book and related what he had read in a loose para- 
 phrastic manner; but the enmity between the nations 
 renders that unlikely. 
 
 If, as is maintained, the book of Joshua is the result of 
 the same literary activity as produced the Torah, hence that 
 
154 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 there are the same component parts arranged in similar 
 strata of J, E, D, and P, so that there is a Hexateuch rather 
 than a Pentateuch ; then why did Manasseh only bring five 
 of the six authoritative books ? ^ If, however, the Samaritans 
 did not get the Law from Jerusalem, nor receive it from the 
 hands of a runaway priest, banished for his transgression of 
 that Law which he brought with him, but had long before 
 received it through the priests sent by Esarhaddon, who 
 did not bring, probably were not allowed to bring, the 
 prophetic books with their tales of the valour of Barak, of 
 Gideon, of Samson, and of the glories of David and Solomon ; 
 this would explain the vague, confused knowledge of the 
 history of post-Mosaic times, possessed by the Israelites of 
 the North. As Joshua was the great hero of Ephraim, the 
 leading tribe of the North, it was but natural that the 
 memory of his deeds, and what was written in the book 
 which treated of him, would be more permanent than any 
 other portion of the prophetic tradition. 
 
 After finishing the episode of Shobach, the compiler of 
 the Samaritan "Joshua" introduces a description of the 
 prosperity and holiness of the people under the rule of 
 Joshua, which may be compared to the Talmudic account 
 of the spiritual privileges enjoyed by the Jews under the 
 pontificate of Shimeon hatz-Tzaddiq. " Then the Israelites 
 observed the Sabbath, and the new moons, and the feasts ; 
 celebrating the Sabbatic year, intermitting all cultivation of 
 the earth for one complete year in seven, having neither 
 sowing nor reaping ; yet everyone had enough. Further, 
 the Israelites paid the tithe to the Levites of all their 
 animals, fruits, and crops. Of these tithes the Levites in 
 turn paid a tithe to the High Priest." All the requirements 
 of the Law are compendiously gone over, with the assertion 
 that then the Israelites fulfilled them. One case of obedience 
 may be dwelt on, as it exhibits their strict interpretation of 
 the Law of one Sanctuary. " Nor was there any sacrifice of 
 goats, sheep, or oxen, save on the altar placed in the 
 Blessed Mountain." These were the customs of Israel in 
 
 1 If the critical hypothesis is correct that at first the Hexateuch was 
 one book and only later was divided off, his conduct is even more 
 inexplicable. 
 
THE SAMARITAN VIEW OF SACRED HISTORY 155 
 
 the days of Ridwani, when JHWH was favourable to His 
 people. 
 
 After his ' death, Joshua was buried, says the book of 
 the Samaritan "Joshua," in Kefr Ghwaira; according to 
 Abu'l Fath it was in " Temne which is Ghwaira." There 
 v/ere nine kings who, according to the Samaritans, followed 
 Joshua. The first of these, according to "Joshua," was 'Abil 
 the son of the brother of Caleb. The derivation of this from 
 Othniel is due to a series of scribal blunders by a copyist 
 of the Arabic text. In Abu'l Fath Othniel becomes 
 Nathanel, a name that very frequently recurs in the lists 
 of Samaritan High Priests. The first element in the name 
 Othniel had early ceased to be used in Hebrew, consequently 
 the name had become meaningless : hence the change to 
 the similarly ending Nathanel, a name at once common and 
 intelligible; a change made all the more easily that the 
 Samaritans had ceased to distinguish the gutturals. Accord- 
 ing to " Joshua " the next " King '' is Tarfia. From the fact 
 that he makes war against the Ammonites, he may be 
 identified with Jephtha. The transmutation here, as in the 
 case of 'Abil and Othniel, is to be explained by the trans- 
 position of dots above and below in the initial and 
 penultimate letters in the Arabic. Nothing is said of the 
 pathetic story of his daughter, nor of his quarrel with the 
 Ephraimites. No other name of the nine " Kings " who 
 succeeded Joshua is given except the last, Shimsham 
 (Samson). The united reigns of these nine amount to 215 
 years ; this with the 45 years of Joshua's reign makes the 
 total of the rule of Judges to be 260 years. A much more 
 detailed account of the succession of the Judges is to be 
 found in Adler's Chronicle. According to it the successors 
 of Joshua are in order : Nathanel, Ehud, Pharaq (Baraq). 
 Gideon and his defeat of the Midianites is recorded, but 
 there is no mention of Abimelech, or of his massacre 
 of his brothers. The Judges which follow him are 
 Tola, Jair, Jephtha : the last named is declared to have 
 belonged to the tribe of Judah. According to the 
 Chronicle, each successive " King " was appointed by the 
 reigning High Priest. As may be seen, the Chronicle of 
 Dr Adler is much closer to the canonical book of Judges 
 
156 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 than are either the Samaritan " Joshua " or the Annals of 
 Abu'l Fath. 
 
 When Shimsham was Judge, Eli, son of Japhani of the 
 seed of Ithamar usurped the High Priesthood from Shishir 
 the son of Uzzi, who at his father's death was a child ; he, as 
 the descendant of Eleazar, in whose line the High Priesthood 
 ought, by legitimate right, to have run, had the right to 
 the dignity. Having left the temple on Mount Gerizim, 
 Eli erected a temple in Shiloh, where he offered sacrifices 
 on the altar he had set up. As a punishment to Israel for 
 consenting to this, JHWH hid the Tabernacle, which Moses 
 had made in the wilderness, in a cave. Thus began Phanuta, 
 the period of Declension and disfavour. The history of Eli 
 is known to the writer of "Joshua" and Abu'l Fath. In 
 addition to the usurpation of which he is accused, he is 
 declared to be a magician. The immorality of which his 
 sons Hophni and Phinehas are guilty is recorded. The 
 enemies of Israel, the inhabitants of Jaffa and Beit Jibrin, 
 encouraged by the division of the people, assembled them- 
 selves and advanced against Shiloh. As the army of Eli 
 gives way before the foe, the golden Ark is sent to the 
 camp. Nevertheless the Israelites are defeated, and the 
 sons of Eli are slain, and the Ark of God taken. On receipt 
 of the news Eli falls back and dies. This is, feature by 
 feature, taken from the account in the first book of Samuel. 
 The history of Samuel sustains a strange transformation. 
 A boy of four years old, his father brings him to Eli to 
 train for service in the temple, because he is so bad 1 
 Samuel is a Levite, an Aaronite indeed, yet he is descended 
 from Korah who rebelled against Moses and Aaron. There 
 is nothing said of his victory over the Philistines, or the 
 subsequent recovery of the Ark. As Samuel was educated 
 by Eli to be a powerful magician, possibly the victory of 
 Ebenezer would be put down to magic. One of his evil 
 deeds is that he anointed Saul to be King. When Saul is 
 slain Samuel adds to his criminality by anointing David. 
 Abu'l Fath gives a compendious account of David and his 
 history. The strongly sacerdotal character of the Samaritan 
 religion, and consequently of their records, is shown by the 
 fact that it is specially singled out as an enormity that 
 
THE SAMARITAN VIEW OF SACRED HISTORY 157 
 
 David exercised the Priest's office and offered sacrifice. His 
 sin in the matter of Uriah the Hittite is dwelt upon, but no 
 word is said of his repentance. The subsequent immorality 
 of David's family is also narrated as if it increased David's 
 own criminality. The glamour that surrounds the name of 
 Solomon in the East protects his memory to some extent, 
 notwithstanding that he had endeavoured to change the 
 Qiblah of the children of Israel from Gerizim to Jerusalem. 
 His action in this matter is minimised by the statement that 
 he erected the Jerusalem Temple on the foundations laid by 
 David his father. Adler's Chronicle enters into more detail 
 in regard to Solomon and his reign. His numerous wives 
 and concubines are mentioned, and how in his old age they 
 led him to worship false gods. 
 
 The story of the rebellion of the Northern tribes against 
 Rehoboam under the leadership of Jeroboam, is related by 
 Abu'l Fath much in the very terms of Scripture. How when 
 Rehoboam came to Nablus to receive the kingdom, he was 
 desired by the people to lighten the burdens which Solomon 
 his father had laid on them ; how he had asked a delay of 
 three days ; how in the interval the old men who had been 
 the servants of his father had counselled him to yield to 
 the people's request then, assuring him if he did so they 
 would be his servants forever; how, notwithstanding, he 
 forsook the counsel of the old men, and answered the people 
 roughly is all related, even to the unsuccessful mission of 
 Adoram, almost in the terms in which the events are told in 
 the book of Kings. The Samaritan historian must have had 
 the canonical book before him when he wrote. The account 
 given of Jeroboam follows in the beginning very much the 
 succession of events to be found in Kings. Abu'l Fath makes 
 Jeroboam the Wazir of Solomon, and tells that, being dis- 
 contented he fled into Egypt. After he was selected by the 
 Israelites at Nablus as king he set up two calves. This calf 
 worship is attributed to his residence in Egypt. While in 
 the Scripture narrative these calves are set up not only in 
 Dan but also in Bethel, in the Samaritan records Bethel is 
 replaced by Sebastiyeh (Samaria). The reason of this is 
 easily seen ; Bethel according to the Samaritan belief was in 
 Mount Gerizim. 
 
158 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Whereas before this, after the secession of Eli, there 
 were three sections of the people of Israel, now there were 
 four. There were, first, the Samaritans, the people of Joseph 
 and Phinehas who faithfully worshipped God on Mount 
 Gerizim ; next there were the schismatic Jews who followed 
 Eli to Shiloh and then David to Jerusalem ; and then those 
 who followed the heathen remnant in the land and worshipped 
 idols. Now to these was added a fourth class, those who 
 followed Jeroboam and sacrificed to the calves. 
 
 It might be thought that something of the stirring history 
 which followed in Samaria would have left some trace ; the 
 conflict between Tibni and Omri, and the almost imperial 
 dominion of Jeroboam II. But there is no word of these in 
 " Joshua," or in the Annals of Abu'l Fath. As the history is 
 related in these authorities so much from the religious side, 
 it might have been at all events supposed that the deeds of 
 the great prophets Elijah and Elisha would have been dwelt 
 on with interest. The great mysterious figure that rules over 
 the imagination of the Jews to this day is only noticed in 
 a travesty of his history. " This Elias was drowned in the 
 Jordan and died ; and they claim that after his death he was 
 taken up into Heaven and received the keys of Heaven that it 
 should not rain upon unbelievers. And they say that he went 
 to Sarafend (Zarephath, N.T. Sarepta) and found a woman 
 baking bread, and when she was not looking stole the bread, 
 and the baby child of the woman died from hunger ; when 
 the woman came out and reproached Elias with the death of 
 her son he called to the child and he got up " (Abu'l Fath, 
 p. 54). Abu'l Fath then proceeds to moralise on the sin of 
 lying in the name of God. The Greek form which the name 
 of the prophet assumes is to be noted as an evidence of the 
 source through which the story had come — not directly from 
 the Hebrew, but through some garbled version from possibly 
 Egyptian tradition. The form of the phrase as to shutting 
 up Heaven suggests the two witnesses in Revelation (xi. 6). 
 There is less said about Elisha, whose name also is hellenised 
 into Elusus. It seems a clear evidence that the prophets had 
 no influence on the Samaritan traditions, when the story of 
 Elijah was only known through such an absurd version and 
 the prophet designated by a Greek name. The reason which 
 
THE SAMARITAN VIEW OF SACRED HISTORY 159 
 
 we have suggested elsewhere may explain this. At all events 
 an independence of the Jews is manifested in this as in other 
 beliefs and practices of the Samaritans. 
 
 Although Adler's Chronicle gives a fairly accurate account 
 of the successive kings of Israel and Judah who reigned after 
 the schism, it has been obviously derived from the canonical 
 books of Kings : the Samaritan " Joshua " and the Annals of 
 Abu'l Fath, which more truly represent Samaritan belief, 
 overleap three centuries without notice, and immediately after 
 the account of Jeroboam take up the conquests of Buchtinosor 
 (Nebuchadnezzar). In the Tolideh (Neubauer's Chronicle) 
 Nebuchadnezzar is made contemporary with the Samaritan 
 High Priest Aqabiah. It is to be observed that in the 
 genuine Samaritan Annals there is no reference to the siege 
 of Samaria by Shalmaneser, or its capture by Sargon and 
 the subsequent deportation of the leading inhabitants. The 
 only deportation which they recognise is that of Nebuchad- 
 nezzar. It is admitted that the primary objective of 
 Nebuchadnezzar was Jerusalem. The story of its capture 
 is drawn in a somewhat confused fashion from the canonical 
 Scriptures. Yumaqim (Jehoiakim) first submitted to the King 
 of Babylon, or of Persia according to "Joshua," and after 
 an interval of twelve years, according to " Joshua " — three 
 according to 2 Kings xxiv. i — rebelled. Nebuchadnezzar 
 came again to besiege the city, and took it : he put out 
 the eyes of Yumaqim. There is here an obvious confusion of 
 Jehoiakim with his brother Zedekiah. Nebuchadnezzar is 
 said to have taken Yumaqim to Bei.san, not far from the 
 Jordan, and there blinded him. As to the actual fate of 
 Jehoiakim there is some uncertainty : cf. 2 Kings xxiv. 
 1-6 with 2 Chron. xxxvi. 6, and Jer. xxii. 19 ; xxxvi. 30. 
 After the capture of Jerusalem, Abu'l Fath declares that 
 the conqueror proceeded to Sebastiyeh (Samaria) the seat, 
 according to Samaritan authorities, of the worship of the 
 Golden Calf, and destroyed it. From there he came to Nablus, 
 where he published a decree that after an interval of thirty 
 days all the Samaritans must prepare to go into captivity. 
 Aqabiah the High Priest, when this decree was promulgated, 
 determined to secure the sacred vessels of the temple from 
 desecration. In the days of Eli's secession, as noted above, 
 
160 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the ancient Tabernacle was hidden away from the sight of 
 Israel ; .but when this takes place there is no mention of 
 the sacred vessels. According to "Joshua," when Aqabiah 
 thought about this, a cave suddenly opened before him in 
 Mount Gerizim ; into this cave Aqabiah collected everything 
 in the temple, and on the door of the cave he inscribed a full 
 account of all the vessels placed within it. The cave closed 
 up as miraculously as it had opened, and the inscription 
 which the High Priest had written vanished. Only when 
 the Thaheb (the Samaritan Messiah) shall appear will these 
 vessels be found. 
 
 It is not impossible that along with the Jews Nebuchad- 
 nezzar may have carried away to Babylon some of the 
 Northern Israelites. The territory of these Northern tribes 
 had been taken possession of by Josiah, and the inhabitants 
 appear to have acquiesced in his rule. Although it is 
 unlikely that Pharaoh Necho would allow his vassal Jehoiakim 
 to possess the extensive dominions assumed by Josiah, yet 
 not improbably there was some connection maintained 
 between the Israelites of the Northern tribes and Jerusalem. 
 We have no information as to what arrangements Necho 
 made for the government of his Asiatic dominions during 
 the short time he possessed it : as little do we know of those 
 made by Nebuchadnezzar when he wrested Syria from 
 Egypt. Although no word of it appears in the Jewish 
 records, which are wholly taken up with Jerusalem, it is by 
 no means impossible that from the territory which had 
 formerly been Samaria a deportation had taken place similar 
 in extent to that from Jerusalem. When, as noted earlier, 
 " fourscore men came from Shechem, from Shiloh, and from 
 Samaria to bring offerings and incense to the house of 
 JHWH" (Jer. xli. 5), they must have been representatives 
 of a very considerable number of the inhabitants of the 
 territory of the Northern tribes who were like-minded, and 
 whose loyalty to Babylon might therefore be doubted. 
 There is no likelihood that the rebellion of Zedekiah was an 
 isolated act ; he would have as allies some of the neighbour- 
 ing princes, who like himself were tributary to Babylon, and 
 like him had been seduced by hope of help from Egypt to 
 attempt to throw off the yoke. If Samaria was not under 
 
THE SAMARITAN VIEW OF SACRED HISTORY 161 
 
 the rule of Jerusalem, still the tributary sovereign who ruled 
 there would not improbably join in the confederacy against 
 Babylon. If so, similar treatment would be meted out to the 
 Samaritans as to the Jews. Should there be found as full an 
 account of the campaigns of Nebuchadnezzar as of those of 
 Sennacherib and Esarhaddon, discovered in Nineveh, many 
 such questions might be decisively answered. It is therefore 
 by no means impossible that a modicum of genuine tradition 
 has mingled with imaginative variations on confused 
 memories of the contents of the Jewish records. 
 
 When the Israelites were carried captive by Nebuchad- 
 nezzar, who it ought to be noted is regarded as King of 
 Persia, they took with them the Sacred Roll of the Law 
 which had been written out by " Abishua, the son of Pinhas, 
 the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, at the door of the 
 Tabernacle." This "great roll," as Abu'l Path calls it, 
 Aqabia hid in the meadow of Niniveh, merj Ninwe. The 
 Israelites stayed many years in captivity, seventy according 
 to Abu'l Path in Persia and learned " Persian letters." This 
 habit of regarding the King of Babylon as King of Persia 
 indicates a date at latest in the period of the Sassanide 
 domination. Colonists are sent to replace the deported 
 inhabitants ; these, however, complain to Surdi (Artaxerxes), 
 according to the Samaritans the successor of Buchtinosor, 
 of the adverse circumstances in which they are placed. The 
 result is that 300,000 of the Israelites are sent back into 
 their own land, the Samaritans under the leadership of 
 Sanballat and the Jews under that of Zurbil (Zerubbabel). 
 When they reached Palestine the question had to be deter- 
 mined as to where was the Israelite Qiblah, toward which 
 place ought the Israelites to pray, toward Jerusalem or 
 toward Mount Gerizim ? Zurbil and the Jews maintained 
 that it was the former, whereas the Samaritans with Sanballat 
 at their head held that it was the latter. The sacred books 
 of the Jews named no place, but those of the Samaritans 
 unequivocally designated Mount Gerizim. The king ordered 
 the question to be decided by ordeal; the Torah in each 
 recension was to be thrown into the fire ; that which was 
 unconsumed to be regarded as the true. The Jewish Torah 
 was at once completely consumed but that of the Samaritans 
 
 L 
 
162 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 leaped three times from the flames. Before it was thrown in 
 the third time Sanballat, after having prayed that he might 
 be pardoned, spit upon the roll, presumably to render it less 
 combustible. When the roll a third time leaped from the 
 fire it was found that only the place on which he had spit 
 had been consumed. One cannot help thinking that this 
 midrash has been invented to explain the evidences presented 
 by the Nablus Roll that it had been at one time exposed to 
 the fire. Where an ember has burned a hole approximately 
 round is explained by the story of the spitting. 
 
 When Surdi (Artaxerxes) was convinced of the truth of 
 the Samaritan religion he ordered that sacrifices should be 
 offered on his behalf on the altar upon Mount Gerizim. 
 Having received these orders the Samaritans drove away 
 the heathen colonists who had been sent by Nebuchadnezzar 
 and purified the temple. Nothing is said of the sacred 
 vessels — it may be presumed that they were brought out of 
 hiding by the High Priest. The Samaritans were preparing 
 to offer many sacrifices of thanksgiving, but the High Priest 
 was warned by God in a dream that bloody sacrifices were 
 no longer to be offered during the period of Phanuta. 
 Hence, according to Abu'l Fath, from the time of the 
 captivity sacrifices have ceased to be offered. It need 
 scarcely be reiterated that the cessation of sacrifices on 
 Mount Gerizim has been antedated by something like a 
 millennium. 
 
 The annalist at this point inserts a list of the kings of 
 Persia but a somewhat eccentric one. To Surdi (Artaxerxes) 
 succeeds Kesra (Cyrus), his somewhat remote predecessor. 
 His successor is Zerdusht (Zoroaster), a notion derived from 
 the Oriental opinion that only kingly authority can introduce 
 a religion. He is followed by Ahashverosh (Xerxes); to 
 him succeeds Artahast (a variation on Artaxerxes) ; and 
 then comes Darius, presumably Codomannus. A note may 
 be added at this point that according to Neubauer's Chronicle 
 a High Priest marries the daughter of Darius. " Joshua " 
 makes Alexander the Great the. immediate successor of 
 Buchtinosor. 
 
 The first period of Phanuta which began with the 
 secession of Eli ends -with the arrival of Alexander the 
 
THE SAMARITAN VIEW OF SACRED HISTORY 163 
 
 Great. Both "Joshua" and Abu'I Fath annex the account 
 Josephus gives of the meeting between Alexander and the 
 High Priest, and how Alexander declared that in a dream he 
 had seen a man habited as was the High Priest while he was 
 yet in Pella, and that he had encouraged him to invade 
 Persia. Only instead of Jaddua, the Samaritan chronicles 
 have, of course, the Samaritan High Priest Hizqiah. The 
 Talmud also has the story ; but according to it, as we have 
 said above, the High Priest who meets Alexander is not 
 Jaddua butShimeon Hatz-Tzaddiq, his grandson, a version 
 in better agreement with chronology. A story is told of 
 Alexander in "Joshua" and Abu'I Fath which has all the 
 characteristics of Talmudic wit. Alexander, led away by his 
 flatterers, demands that a statue be erected to him on Mount 
 Gerizim, and having issued this decree departs to Egypt for 
 three years. The High Priest and all the rulers of the 
 people are overwhelmed by the demand that they should 
 desecrate the Blessed Mountain by erecting a statue and 
 they pray to God. In a dream a way is revealed by which 
 they may appease the king, and yet not break the law 
 against the making of images : all the boys born during the 
 king's absence are named "Alexander." When he is told 
 of it the king is amused at the artifice and is satisfied. 
 Following a story to be found in Quintus Curtius and 
 Diodorus Siculus, Alexander is said to have been poisoned 
 by Antipater (Abu'I Fath, p. 89), a thing Hogarth (Philip and 
 Alexander, p. 276) does not regard as at all beyond credence. 
 At this point, Adler's Chronicle introduces an account of 
 an attempt by Ptolemy to secure the treasures in the temple 
 on Mount Gerizim which was frustrated by Daliya the High 
 Priest, a story which suggests derivation from that of the 
 similar attempt of Heliodorus on the Jerusalem temple 
 treasures in 2 Maccabees. Abu'I Fath refers to the story 
 related by Josephus of the debate in the presence of Ptolemy 
 Philometer as to the rival claims of Jerusalem and Gerizim 
 (Jos., Ant. XIII. iii. 4), but in the Samaritan version the 
 conclusion is the reverse of that given by the Jewish 
 historian ; not the Samaritans, but the Jews, are put to 
 confusion. Certainly with the present text of the Samaritan 
 recension, the supporters of the claims of Gerizim would have 
 
164 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the advantage in any such discussion of having the Mountain 
 actually named as that in which God's Name was to be 
 placed. It is to be observed that according to Josephus' 
 account, the Samaritans who had gracefully allowed the Jew 
 to state his case first were never allowed an opportunity to 
 represent theirs, but were put to death out of hand. 
 
 That Josephus was to some extent known among the 
 Samaritans is rendered probable by the account Abu'l Fath 
 gives of the three sects of the Jews. He says that they are 
 Pharisees, Sadducees, and Hasidim (p. 102), the last name 
 being put instead of the Essenes. These the annalist 
 practically identifies with the Samaritans. In this con- 
 nection it may be noted that Epiphanius mentions the 
 Essenes as a Samaritan, as well as a Jewish sect. The 
 mention of the Sadducees and Pharisees necessarily suggests 
 John Hyrcanus and his war against the Samaritans. Abu'l 
 Fath asserts that though Hyrcanus conquered and destroyed 
 Samaria, he was unable to take Nablus or to destroy 
 the temple on Mount Gerizim. According to Josephus, 
 Hyrcanus did destroy the temple on Mount Gerizim 
 after it had stood 200 years (Jos., Ant. XIII. ix. i). The 
 annalist appears not to have got his account from Josephus, 
 as he gives the name of the king not in the Greek 
 but in Semitic form, Jehukhanan. His breach with the 
 Pharisees and his becoming a Sadducee on account of the 
 insult offered to the memory of his mother by Eleazar the 
 Pharisee, gave occasion to the belief which seems to have 
 been entertained by some Samaritans, as may be seen in 
 Abu'l Fath, that after Hyrcanus became old he admitted the 
 truth of the claims of the Samaritans to be the genuine 
 Israelites, and offered sacrifices on Mount Gerizim, through 
 the Samaritan priests, as he was not himself allowed to 
 approach the Holy Mountain.^ The obvious resemblance 
 in some prominent doctrines between the Sadducees and the 
 Samaritans probably occasioned this mistake. 
 
 1 This statement seems to be at variance with Abu'l Path's earlier 
 assertion that sacrifices ceased in the days of Surdi (Artaxerxes). It 
 may be that the offerings presented by Hyrcanus were minhoth, 
 unbleody sacrifices. But finical attention to consistency is not a con- 
 spicuous attribute of Oriental historians. 
 
THE SAMARITAN VIEW OF SACRED HISTORY 165 
 
 After a slight leap over intervening events the period of 
 Augustus is reached. Herod is referred to as having been 
 made king by Augustus. Cleopatra is introduced as favouring 
 the Samaritans and advancing to their aid against the Jews ; 
 she is called the daughter of Dionysius. This is an echo of 
 the truth for her father assumed the title of Dionysus 
 (Bacchus). Cleopatra did certainly interfere in the affairs 
 of Palestine, as it had been bestowed upon her by Antony. 
 Augustus, however, took Alexandria and forced Cleopatra 
 to put herself to death ; all the dominions possessed by her 
 in Palestine, the land of the Philistines and the Mountain oi 
 Galilee, being given to Herod. Notwithstanding his efforts 
 to conciliate the Samaritans, the fact that stands out in their 
 memory is the slaughter that he wrought among them. Of 
 this there is no evidence to be found in the pages of Josephus. 
 This belief in Herod's cruelty to the Samaritans is possibly 
 due to the annalist drawing his materials from Christian 
 Greek sources. 
 
 The influence of these authorities is very clearly seen 
 in the account which Abu'l Fath gives of our Lord. 
 " Jehaqam was High Priest thirty-two years, and in his 
 days was born ham-Meskiach, son of Miriam, betrothed 
 to Joseph the Carpenter." The title given to our Lord 
 is the Hebrew word for " Christ " with the Hebrew article 
 before it ; the word for " betrothed " is a hybrid word 
 composed of Hebrew and Arabic elements. The birth 
 of our Lord is treated as an event of importance and dated 
 as occurring in the i sooth year of Phanuta ; that is 
 250 years after Alexander the Great came into Palestine. 
 As Alexander's march through Palestine on his way to 
 Egypt took place 332 B.C., the Samaritan date is eighty-two 
 years too early. Abu'l Fath continues : " He was born 
 in Bethlehem and exercised His prophetic office in 
 Nazareth." " Herodes," he further tells us, "purposed to 
 slay ham-Meshiach, but He escaped from his hands." Abu'l 
 Fath knows the names of some of the twelve Apostles, 
 and tells of the destination to which they were sent. Boutros 
 (Peter) was sent to Rome; Andrew and Matthew were 
 sent to the South ; Thomas to the land of Babel ; Philphos 
 (Philip) to Qerouan and Africa ; James to Elia — can this be 
 
166 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Elia Capitolina (Jerusalem) ? — and Simon to the land of the 
 Berbers. Finally ham-Meshiach was crucified and His twelve 
 disciples with Him in elQods (Jerusalem), while Tiberius was 
 king in Rome. This happened during the High Priesthood 
 of Jonathan, the son of Nethanel. Our Lord's baptism 
 is known ; it is to be noted that the Baptist is declared 
 to be a disciple of ham-Meshiach. This confused mixture 
 of accuracy and inaccuracy shows very prominently Greek 
 influence. All the names of the Apostles show that they 
 have come to the annalist from a Greek source. Peter 
 appears, in the Arabic transliteration of the name, as 
 Boutros, instead of assuming as in the Peshitta its Aramaic 
 form " Kefa." More remarkable are the forms which the 
 names James and John assume — Ya'qobos and Yohannes. 
 The termination in s shows that the Greek form has 
 influenced the writer ; yet the insertion of the he in Yohannes 
 and the ain in Ya'qobos shows that the Semitic form was 
 not entirely forgotten. It ought to be noted that these 
 phenomena are to be seen in the Palestinian Lectionaries 
 discovered and published by Mrs Lewis ; these peculiarities 
 are not manifested in the Peshitta. The Greek terminal 
 s is seen in Tomas, which is used instead of Thauma of 
 the Peshitta. Philphos, the form Philippos assumes, 
 indicates that the Greek doubled / had been softened into 
 ph; the ordinary Arabic equivalent for / is 3 as seen in 
 Boutros (Peter), Boulos (Paul). While in the Lewis-Gibson 
 Lectionaries most of these peculiarities are to be observed, 
 the Hebraistic ham-Meshiach does not appear. Matti, the 
 form which Matthew assumes, again is purely Hebrew ; this 
 in the Lectionaries is Mattai. Had the text of Abu'l Path 
 been vowelled it is not impossible that it would have been 
 the same. These peculiarities may be regarded as dating 
 from pre-Mohammedan times. 
 
 Although the Samaritans suffered so severely at the 
 hand of Cerealis, during Vespasian's campaign against the 
 Jews, there is no reference to this in any of the Samaritan 
 annalists; nor indeed is there any note of the capture 
 of Jerusalem by Titus. In Adler's Chronicle Sianos 
 (Vespasian) is said to have rebuilt Caesarea; and in 
 Neubauer's he is said to have destroyed Dora. One might 
 
THE SAMARITAN VIEW OF SACRED HISTORY 167 
 
 have expected that the Samaritans would have gloated 
 over the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the shrine 
 which contended with that on Mount Gferizim for the * 
 dignity of being the Qibla of Israel. So far as Samaritan 
 records are concerned the terrible tragedy of the siege 
 and fall of Jerusalem might never have occurred. 
 
 The war of Bar Cochba, of which so much less is known 
 than of the campaign of the Flavian Emperor and his son, 
 has impressed itself much more on the imagination of 
 the Samaritans. All the legends gather round the name 
 of Adrinus (Hadrian). Although it is doubtful whether 
 the Jews were in possession of Jerusalem during the war 
 of Bar Cochba, indeed whether the city had been rebuilt 
 after its destruction by Titus, it is represented alike in 
 the Annals of Abu'l Fath and in " Joshua " as undergoing 
 a siege at the hands of Adrinus. Abu'l Fath and " Joshua " 
 relate a midrash of the capture of Jerusalem which vies 
 in absurdity with the Talmudic account of what occasioned 
 the war related by Josephus, and the fall of Jerusalem. 
 A Jew from Galilee passing through Samaria on his way 
 to the temple at Jerusalem to offer two pigeons, lodged 
 for a night in the house of two Samaritan brothers named 
 Ephraim and Manasseh. These brothers removed the 
 pigeons from the box in which the Jew was carrying his 
 offering and in their place inserted two rats. The trick 
 was discovered in the Temple Court. The Jewish authorities 
 sent and seized the delinquents and compelled them to 
 become slaves of the Jerusalem Sanctuary. When Adrinus 
 besieged Jerusalem, these two revealed to Adrinus a sub- 
 terranean passage by which one could enter and by which 
 Jerusalem itself could be revictualled. According to 
 "Joshua" this passage was stopped, and the inhabitants were 
 reduced to such straits that as in the earlier siege under 
 Titus they devoured each other ; and they were compelled 
 to surrender. Hadrian when he entered the temple saw 
 images, presumably the figures of the Cherubim, and rebuked 
 the Jewish High Priest for idolatry. This is a curious 
 travesty of fact ; to represent Hadrian, the great builder 
 of temples and setter up of statues to deities of every 
 nationality, as rebuking the Jewish High Priest for idolatry ! 
 
168 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 This tale is told with even more of ornament in Adler's 
 Chronicle. After the surrender a multitude of the Jews were 
 • slain, the Holy Place burned with fire, and the city itself 
 destroyed. The Samaritan brothers were sought out and 
 honoured, and a house with four pillars was erected in which 
 were set up the statues of the two. Hadrian then proceeded 
 to Nablus and issued a decree forbidding any Jew to settle 
 in Shechem. Indeed Hadrian carried his favour for the 
 Samaritans so far that he made them rulers over the Jews. 
 He visited the temple on Mount Gerizim, and saw the 
 worship there. In further proof of this special favour, 
 he conveyed to Mount Gerizim the brazen gates which 
 Solomon had set up in the temple in Jerusalem. From 
 thence Hadrian proceeded to Alexandria; while he was 
 there he is related to have occupied himself with the 
 persecution of the Christians. When Hadrian returned 
 to Palestine the Samaritans lost his favour when he learned 
 that after he had left the priests had purified the temple 
 from the pollution entailed by his presence in it. In 
 consequence of this indignity, as he reckoned it, he came 
 to Samaria, laid Nablus waste, burnt the temple on Mount 
 Gerizim, crucified the scribes and judges of the Samaritans, 
 and left their bodies unburied. Where the sacred temple 
 had stood, Hadrian erected a temple to Caesar. It may 
 be noted that amid the traces of temple foundations still 
 to be found on the top of Mount Gerizim, remains of this, 
 erected by Hadrian, may be found. Thfe reign of Hadrian 
 is regarded as an important period, and it is reckoned 
 to have been 45 1 3 years from the Creation. 
 
 To the reign of Hadrian the writer of "Joshua," as 
 mentioned above (ii. 19), ascribes the destruction of the 
 literature of the Samaritans. He thus relates the extent 
 of the calamity : " In these days was lost the Book of 
 the Future Life which the Samaritans had possessed from 
 the time of Favour' {Ridwan) ; there were lost the prayers 
 which the priests recited, suitable to the character of each 
 sacrifice, and the hymns which they were in the habit 
 of chanting in the days of Ridwan. All these, written out 
 by the hands of the successive High Priests, had been 
 preserved religiously from the times of the prophets through 
 
THE SAMARITAN VIEW OF SACRED HISTORY 169 
 
 various generations down to that day. Further, there was 
 lost the Book of the Priests which the Samaritans had, 
 in which their succession was carried back to Pinhas 
 (Phinehas). After this calamity, no ancient copy of 
 these books has been found ; nor has there survived any 
 chronological table except the Law, and the book which 
 contained the lives of the High Priests" ("Joshua," chap, 
 xlvii., last par.). According to this writer, Hadrian died 
 from a sore disease affected with every sort of pain. 
 
 With an approach to accuracy singular for a Samaritan 
 historian Abu'l Fath calls Antoninus " the son and successor 
 of Hadrian." Adrinus held the kingdom forty years, and 
 after him reigned his son Antoninus (p. 117); the length of 
 the reign thus assigned to Hadrian is close upon double what 
 it actually was. "Joshua" gives his reign as twenty-one 
 years, a number which is in practical agreement with that 
 in Dio Cassius, Spartian, and the various historians of the 
 period. Antoninus, according to Abu'l Fath, not only showed 
 favour to the Samaritans but himself honoured the Law 
 by reading it not merely in Hebrew but also in the Targum, 
 and by fulfilling all its requirements. It is well known 
 that the Jews enjoyed during the rule of the Antonines very 
 special privileges ; these privileges would not improbably 
 be extended to the Samaritans. The Samaritan chroniclers 
 make no distinction between Antoninus Pius and his 
 successor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Commodus suc- 
 ceeded his father Marcus Aurelius ; unlike his pre- 
 decessors he persecuted the Samaritans. A disputation 
 which Alexander the Aphrodisian, the Aristotelian com- 
 mentator, had with the Samaritan High Priest, according 
 to Abu'l Fath (pp. 118, 119), was the occasion of the rage 
 of Commodus against the Samaritans. The account in 
 the Annals of the persecution is almost identical in features 
 with that ascribed to Hadrian in "Joshua," even to the 
 destruction of the literature of the Samaritans. Possibly 
 the real criminal was Commodus, and Hadrian's greater 
 name attracted to it the evil reputation of his successor. 
 
 After this, the history becomes very confused. Abu'l 
 Fath names many emperors but rarely in their true order. 
 The invasion of the Mohammedans is introduced before 
 
170 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the rise of the Sassanide Empire of Persia. Late in the 
 history does he refer to the followers of Dusis (the 
 Dositheans) and their creed. Later still he introduces 
 Shimeon the Wizard (Simon Magus) in connection with 
 a love affair. Although from the connection in which 
 he appears, Abu'l Path would seem to place Simon Magus 
 in the third century of our era, he yet represents him as 
 disputing not only with the Christians but with Philo 
 of Alexandria. As to the Dositheans, Epiphanius regards 
 them as a Samaritan sect and attributes to them a strict 
 observance of the Jewish rites. 
 
 The framework on which all these notices of history, 
 internal and external, depends is the succession of the High 
 Priests. Although it is asserted both in " Joshua " and in the 
 Annals of Abu'l Path that the list of the High Priests was 
 destroyed in the persecutions which the Samaritans sustained 
 at the hands of the emperors, whether Commodus or Hadrian, 
 yet they have given the names of the successive holders 
 of the office. This list appears with least admixture in 
 Tolideh (Neubauer's Chronicle). The reader is struck 
 in perusing it with the number of names that are unlike 
 those in ordinary cases borne by Israelites. A very common 
 name among the High Priests is " Aqbun," a name not 
 to be found in Scripture or in Josephus. Again there 
 is Baba, another name which recurs ; this has the appearance 
 of being of the nature of a nickname. The word means 
 " the gate " in Aramaic, and its Aramaic origin is emphasized 
 by the presence in its termination of the sign of the 
 Aramaic status emphaticus. One of the most marked of 
 those who bore the name, Baba Rabba, is introduced 
 into history in connection with the story of Garmanus, 
 already referred to. Of him it is said in Tolideh 
 (Neubauer's Chronicle) : " This Baba thrust out and expelled 
 all the enemies of JHWH from the land of Canaan and 
 reigned forty years." While the occurrence in this list 
 of names which have not the sanction of Scriptural use, 
 might be regarded as in some sort an evidence of a possible 
 tradition being behind it, on the whole the list may be 
 regarded as concocted and no more worthy of credence than 
 the list of the kings of Scotland which, a couple of centuries 
 
THE SAMARITAN VIEW OF SACRED HISTORY 171 
 
 later than Abu'l Fath, George Buchanan placed at the 
 beginning of his history. 
 
 One point that emerges is the importance of history 
 in regard to the Samaritan religion. All history is viewed 
 by Abu'l Fath from the Divine standpoint. So far as Israel is 
 concerned it is divided into two portions; Ridwan the 
 period of Divine Favour which came to an end with the 
 secession of Eli, and Phanuta, the period of declension 
 and of consequent Divine Disfavour. This latter period 
 will end with the coming of the " Thaheb " (the Restorer) — 
 the Samaritan name for the Messiah — he who is to restore 
 all things to the state in which they were during 
 "Ridwan." The Israelites arrived in Palestine 2754 years 
 after the Creation, and for 260 years enjoyed Divine Favour. 
 The termination of "Ridwan" is therefore dated A.M. 3014. 
 There was a tacit expectation that six millennia would 
 elapse before the "Thaheb" should appear, consequently 
 that the period of "Phanuta" would last about three 
 thousand years. This naturally suggested a division into 
 three subordinate periods of a thousand years. The first 
 of these, the Age of Divisions and Captivities, ends with 
 the coming of Alexander the Great. His arrival in Palestine 
 is dated by the Samaritans at A.M. 4100. Our Lord's birth 
 is placed by them rather too early, at 250 years after the 
 advent of Alexander.^ The Age of the Greeks, which begins 
 with Alexander, ends with Mohammed, whose date is 
 reckoned as A.M. 5050, 'that is to say 700 years after the 
 birth of Christ ; but as the Samaritans had made our 
 Lord's birth about eighty years too early, their date for 
 Mohammed is a very close approximation to "el Hegira." 
 The reign of "the Sons of Ishmael" ought by analogy 
 to have lasted only a thousand years^ but it has already 
 overpassed that period by more than three centuries. 
 
 A survey of the Samaritan view of history shows that 
 like the Jews they regarded the course of history as under 
 
 ' In the Talmud (San. lo-jb, Sotah 47a) Jesus is said to have been 
 born in the reign of Alexander Jannaeus (103-76 B.C.). This is in closer 
 agreement with Samaritan date than is our ordinary reckoning. The 
 Seder had-Doroth gives both the Talmudic date and the common 
 Christian one. 
 
172 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the direct government of God. Like the Jews, they looked 
 on Israel as the Heritage of JHWH, who arranged all 
 the periods of the world's history with a special view to 
 the needs of Israel whether of prosperity or of chastisement. 
 The termination of the history of the world was the coming 
 of the Thaheb and the inauguration of the Millennium which 
 ends with the final Judgment. According to the Jewish 
 Apocalyptic Literature, the coming of the Messiah and 
 the Last Judgment are events closely connected. Whereas 
 according to the Samaritans the Thaheb was to live no 
 years, the age that is to say of Joshua — he was not to attain 
 the age of Moses ; after his death a lengthened period ensues 
 and then comes the end of the world. 
 
 Another aspect of the question which impresses the 
 student is the independence of the Samaritans in relation 
 to the Jews. When they do borrow from the Jewish records 
 it is not directly but through the Greek. There have already 
 been references to this in regard to the form that some of 
 the Hebrew names assume. Elias, as already observed, is 
 a marked instance of this ; the natural form which the 
 Hebrew Eliyahu would assume when transferred to Arabic 
 would be Eliyah.i Even more marked is Elusus for Elisha, 
 which can be transferred letter by letter into Arabic. Their 
 whole view of sacred history is antagonistic to that of the 
 Jews in regard especially to all events subsequent to the 
 secession of Eli. We have thus on the one hand the-necessity 
 strongly felt of exhibiting the Divine side of history as an 
 essential part of the Religion of Israel ; on the other the 
 effort made by human imagination to supply the lack of a 
 true account of events. When a comparison is made of the 
 Annals of Abu'l Path, the soberest of the Samaritan histories, 
 with the Bible narratives, the reader at once feels how far 
 removed the first is from actuality and from the period in 
 which the described events are alleged to have occurred. An 
 indirect testimony is thus given to the trustworthiness of the 
 records of the Religion of Israel. 
 
 ' The name Elias in the Greek form is not uncommon among 
 Arabs belonging to the Orthodox or Greek Church at the present day. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE THEOLOGY OF THE SAMARITANS 
 
 It is the contention of the late Professor Robertson Smith, 
 in his introduction to The Religion of the Semites, that all 
 religion begins in ritual. This, however, is only true of the 
 overt expression of religious feeling. The rites and cere- 
 monies, in which religious emotion expressed itself, 
 themselves require an explanation, and that can only be 
 found in thought. These vague inchoate thoughts contained 
 in them the essence of a theology. There must have been a 
 reason why men so universally adopted sacrifice as part of 
 their religious worship. Whether the deity is regarded as 
 the host and the worshippers his guests, or the deity is 
 regarded as invited to a feast provided for him by his 
 worshippers, or whether we hold the traditional idea of 
 expiation as underlying all sacrifice, each of these implied 
 certain ideas as to deity and the relation in which his 
 worshippers stood to him. These vague thoughts would 
 probably never find expression in distinct memorable 
 phrases, and therefore would tend to evaporate as men 
 became more and more absorbed in the business of living, 
 to the growing exclusion of thought. The ritual remained, 
 its ceremonies became stereotyped ; all the more so that 
 there was no thought behind them to keep them fluid. 
 When time advanced and men began to unite themselves 
 in communities there was leisure to think, to put questions 
 and endeavour to find answers for them, to put a " because " 
 over against every "why." These explanations would 
 naturally take the form of stories — myths. Mythology is 
 the theology of childhood. There necessarily were further 
 steps of evolution ; in Greece this resulted in philosophy, but 
 
 173 
 
174 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 in Israel God Himself intervened by His prophets, and 
 cleared away these hard and fast ceremonies and got behind 
 to their moral meaning. It was mainly emotional, the 
 prophet's message ; rites and ceremonies, myths and legends 
 were all thrown into the fiery alembic of inspired emotion. 
 But behind those burning utterances there were loftier 
 thoughts concerning God, Man, and Duty, than unaided 
 humanity ever had as yet attained to. As a further step, 
 these thoughts had to be separated and arranged. The 
 silver had been purified, it had to be drawn forth into ingots 
 of thought. The thoughts behind the visions of the seers 
 had to become a theology. 
 
 In regard to the Samaritans, whatever prophetic litera- 
 ture the Northern tribes may have had, besides the books 
 of Hosea, Amos, and Jonah, and the prophetic histories 
 preserved in the books of Kings, has been lost. We have 
 only the desiccated remains of their ritual, of which we have 
 already treated ; but we have something of their theology. 
 The works of one Samaritan theologian have come down to 
 us, who in his treatises and commentaries, translated into 
 terms of thought the floating traditions and opinions of his 
 people. This Marqah, to give him what is probably a 
 Latinised version of his name, appears to have lived in the 
 third century of our era. Before his birth an angel foretold 
 it, and said that he should be called Moshe (Moses) ; but as 
 this was too sacred a name to be given to any one even at 
 the command of an angel, the matter was compromised ; he 
 was called Marqah, a name the letters of which have the 
 same numerical value. In his views he is mystical and 
 Qabbalistic. Another source for the theology of the 
 Samaritans is to be found in their hymns, some of them 
 supposed to be older than our era. Collections of these 
 have been made by Gesenius and others. And yet a third 
 source is the Samaritan Targum or paraphrase of the Law. 
 
 Although the Samaritans resisted so strenuously , all the 
 violent efforts put forth by pagan and Christian emperors to 
 convert them, they did not escape wholly the influence of those 
 among whom they lived. In the epistle which they sent to 
 their brethren in England, the Samaritans thus declare their 
 creed : "My faith is in Thee, oh JHWH, and in Moses the 
 
THE THEOLOGY OF THE SAMARITANS 175 
 
 son of Amram Thy servant, in the Holy Law, and in Mount 
 Gerizim, the Bethel, and in the day of Vengeance and 
 Recompense." To this is to be added the doctrine of Angels 
 and Demons. Dr Mills thus summarises the articles of the 
 Samaritan creed: "One only God JHWH, one only Law- 
 giver, Moshe (Moses), one only Divine book, the Torah (Law), 
 one only Holy Place, Mount Gerizim, the true Beth El." 
 These are primitive ; the doctrines of Angels, of Immortality, 
 and of the Last Judgment are, in the opinion of Dr Mills, 
 later additions. 
 
 In considering the creed of the Samaritans, the student 
 must always remember that with the Samaritans, as with most 
 primitive nations, religion is not so much a personal matter 
 as a national. Their primary belief is that they are the 
 only chosen people of God, bound to Him by seven 
 successive covenants : («) of Noah (Gen. ix. 8-17), {b) of 
 Abraham (Gen. xvii. 4-14), {c) of the Sabbath (Exod. xxxi. 
 12-17), C"^) of the Ten Commandments (Exod. xx. 2-17), {e) of 
 Salt (Num. xviii. 19), (/), of the Passover (Exod. xii. 2 ff), 
 (^) of the Priesthood (Num. xxv. 12, 13). These covenants 
 they are bound to keep ; they not only separate them from the 
 Gentiles, but since the defection of the days of Eli, from their 
 kinsmen the Jews also. They call themselves Samaritan 
 Israelites. 
 
 Samaritan theology may be considered under the heads 
 of (I.) The Doctrine of God; (II.) of Creation; (III.) of 
 Man ; (IV.) of Angels and Demons ; (V.) of Revelation ; 
 (VI.) of the Messiah; (VII.) of the Last Things. 
 
 I. Of God. — The Samaritans of the present day are 
 zealous monotheists. This zeal has doubtless to some 
 extent been conserved, and even in a sense promoted by 
 the influences surrounding them from the rule of the 
 Christian emperors. When the Byzantine power gave way 
 to " the rule of the Sons of Ishmael," to quote the phrase so 
 frequently used by Samaritan scribes in dating their manu- 
 scripts, the Samaritans were confirmed in their monotheism. 
 It would seem to suggest the idea of Mohammedan influence 
 on their theology, that the Samaritans have introduced into 
 some of their hymns a formula which has in it an echo of 
 
176 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the opening words of the creed of Islam : " There is not a 
 God save one." This cannot be pressed, as these hymns are 
 of various dates, some appear even to be pre-Christian. How- 
 ever, the possibility of interpolation has always to be kept in 
 mind. But monotheism so permeates these poems, one and 
 all, that this element in their theology is not to be attributed 
 to Moslem influences. As an example may be taken the 
 opening words of the so-called prayer of Moses : " Magnify 
 His Holy Name; One is JHWH, and to be glorified, and 
 there is not one beside Him, alone in the Heaven above and in 
 the earth beneath ; there is not one beside Him, He is alone. 
 Blessed be JHWH our God, Whose name is to be glorified 
 and rightly to be praised." To this strict monotheism would 
 Gesenius attribute the fact that, in their recension of the 
 Pentateuch whenever cni'K is regarded as a plural noun, and 
 so joined to a plural verb in the Massoretic, the Samaritans 
 correct it into the singular. Of these cases there are three 
 in Genesis ; these most likely are due to blunders of the 
 Massoretic scribe, as for instance Gen. xx. 13, "God 
 (D^i7N) caused me to wander lynrt from my father's house"; 
 clearly this is a blunder, caused not unlikely by the copyist 
 mistaking he for vav, which, as already remarked, are very 
 like in Samaritan script as seen MSS. ' In all these cases, as 
 the Samaritan is supported by the Septuagint, its reading is 
 probably the original. In one instance, Exod. xxii. 9, there 
 is a fair case for rendering D^'^^X " judges " with the Peshitta. 
 To pass from the doctrine of the unity of God, and 
 consider the attributes ascribed to Him. There is PERSON- 
 ALITY ; how far the Israelites either of the North or the 
 South recognised the possibility of an " impersonal God " 
 may be questioned. At all events Abu'l Fath and the 
 Samaritan "Joshua" alike attribute personal attributes to 
 JHWH ; there is no trace in their hymns, or in Marqah, of 
 the notion that the passages in which " wrath " is ascribed 
 to Him is to be looked upon as an anthropomorphism, and 
 resolved into a figure of speech ; in this they follow the 
 usage of the Pentateuch. The idea so prominent among 
 the Israelites, of a covenant relationship between JHWH 
 and the children of Jacob, implies a person with personal' 
 
THE THEOLOGY OF THE SAMARITANS 177 
 
 preferences. In regard to other Divine attributes, which the 
 sons of Israel were more ready to overlook, from their 
 tendency to degrade JHWH to be merely a national deity, 
 such as Spirituality, Omnipresence, and Eternity, 
 these are expressed with great clearness in the hymns of the 
 Samaritans. A striking example of this is to be found in a 
 hymn translated by Montgomery {The Samaritans, p. 208) 
 from Gesenius' Carmina Samaritana (p. 100). 
 
 " There is nothing like Him, or as He is ; 
 
 There is neither likeness nor body. 
 None knows who He is but He Himself ; 
 
 None is His Creator or His fellow. 
 He fills the whole world. 
 
 Yet there is no chancing upon Him. 
 He appears from every side and quarter, 
 
 But no place contains Him. 
 Hidden yet withal manifest. He sees 
 
 And knows everything hidden. 
 Hidden nor appearing to sight, 
 
 Nothing is before Him, and after Him nothing." 
 
 To this belief in the absolute and supreme spirituality of God 
 does Gesenius ascribe various differences between the Samari- 
 tan Pentateuch and that of the Massoretes, in which anthropo- 
 morphisms, which appear in the latter, are changed in the 
 former into phrases less objectionable. The examples which 
 he brings forward are neither numerous nor striking. That 
 which appears most plausible is Deut. xxix. 20, in which the 
 Massoretic text is mnns JW which Gesenius translates /2/;Ma:/ 
 nasus Dei, " the nose of God smokes " ; for this the Samaritan 
 reads nin^-IS "in^ and Gesenius renders exardescit ira Dei, 
 "the wrath of God (JHWH) waxes hot," It is to be noted 
 that the word which Gesenius translates in the first case 
 "nose" is the same as that which in the second case he 
 renders "wrath." As the LXX. supports the Samaritan 
 reading, the change may be ascribed to the Massoretic 
 scribe. Dr Montgomery has noted the fact, that while 
 agreeing on these essential points with the Jews, the 
 Samaritans do not like them repeat the shema\ " Hear, oh 
 Israel, JHWH our God is one JHWH," or perhaps better 
 "JHWH is our God, JHWH is one"; they prefer the less 
 
 M 
 
178 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 explicit statement of the Moslems, " There is no God but 
 God " ; a preference due to the presence around them of 
 fanatical Moslems. 
 
 As a side evidence of the spirituality ascribed to God by 
 the Samaritans may be adduced the fact that they taunted 
 the Jews with having images in their temple at Jerusalem 
 (Sam. Jos. chap, xlvii.). The ground for this accusation is prob- 
 ably to be found in the figures of cherubim, which probably 
 adorned the second temple as they did the first (see Chapter 
 VI.). The taunt is late, and is founded, as taunts usually 
 are, on a misrepresentation. It is an evidence of how austere 
 their spiritualism was that the presence in the Holy Place of 
 those symbols of Divine majesty was deemed a lessening of 
 the absolute spirituality of JHWH. The Samaritan taunt 
 was retorted with greater unfairness by the Jews. They said 
 that the Samaritans worshipped not God but Ashima ; a name 
 that had the venom in it of suggesting ashem, " guilt." Some 
 have maintained that it was a modification of the name 
 Semiramis (Montgomery, The Samaritans, p. 381, n. 18). 
 It is supposed that the fabulous queen whose adventures are 
 narrated by Diodorus Siculus is a Syrian goddess who was 
 worshipped by the Hamathite colonists. The taunt is late, 
 and long before it was uttered the Hamathite worship had 
 given place to that of JHWH. Another explanation for 
 this taunt may be suggested, which seems simpler. As the 
 Jews to avoid pronouncing the sacred name whenever it 
 occurs read adhonai, so the Samaritans read in these cases 
 hash-shem, " the name," or as the Samaritans would pronounce 
 it ash-shem. Another accusation which the Jews make, with 
 equal lack of truth, and with even less excuse, is that they 
 worshipped a dove. The Samaritans indignantly deny that 
 there is any justification for this assertion. One might almost 
 be tempted to think that some Jew had blundered into the 
 Christian church, which in the reign of Zeno occupied the 
 place on Mount Gerizim of the Samaritan Temple, and 
 seeing the symbol of the Holy Spirit, ignored the change of 
 the temple into a church, and asserted that the Samaritans 
 worshipped the image of a dove. The truth is that the 
 Samaritans avoid, as carefully as do the Mohammedans, any 
 representations of men or animals even in their houses. 
 
THE THEOLOGY OF THE SAMARITANS 179 
 
 Their single remaining synagogue is devoid of all ornament 
 whatever.^ 
 
 The Apocalyptists, who represent a phase of Jewish 
 thought prevalent in the second century before our era, had 
 described JHWH as localised in Heaven, and having a 
 visible outward form. In Enoch xlv. and xlvi. there is given 
 a picture of Heaven in which the Eternal is represented as 
 a white-haired old man, and with Him is the Son of Man, 
 " who had the appearance of a man and a face full of gracious- 
 ness." The post-Christian, but yet Jewish " Ascension of 
 Isaiah," describes seven successive heavens in the highest of 
 which dwells JHWH. All such localisation and consequent 
 limitation is sedulously avoided by the Samaritans. God 
 with them is not restricted to time or place. A striking 
 example is quoted by Montgomery from Gesenius' Carmina 
 Samaritana (iii. 1 3), speaking of the place of Divine power : 
 " No ocean is there, nor sea, nor the very heavens them- 
 
 1 This calumny is probably believed by the Jews still. As late as 
 1836 in the Hebrew Review, vol. iii., p. 400, it is asserted: "It cannot 
 be denied that the image of a dove was an object of adoration to the 
 Samaritans, inasmuch as the representation of that bird is still found in 
 their synagogues.'' The French Consul at St John d'Acre, who in 1807 
 sent an account of the Samaritans to Bishop Gregoire, states : "Above 
 the pulpit in which they read the Law, there is the image of a bird, 
 which they call Achinah, 2l name peculiar to the sect. When they name 
 the most High they do not, like the Jews, call Him Adonai, but either 
 Achinah or Shema. This last word is the Aramaic KDK' ' the Name,' 
 which is often used by the Jews likewise to express the Supreme Being." 
 
 Monsieur Courances, French Consul at Aleppo, writes to Bishop 
 Gregoire about the same time : " In the Samaritan synagogue at Naplosa 
 (Nablus) there is a stage on which they read the book of the Law. This 
 book is hidden behind a veil, which no one but the Ckackam, principal 
 teacher, may withdraw. At the sight of the book, on which the image 
 of a dove is engraved, all the members of the congregation rise from 
 their seats." 
 
 It may be observed that these two accounts do not agree; in the one 
 the image of the dove is " above the pulpit," in the other " the image of 
 a dove is engraved " on the book of the Law. One may be permitted 
 to surmise that either the consuls were themselves Jews, or without 
 going to Nablus contented themselves with information supplied them 
 by Jews. The title given to the High Priest of Chacham deepens 
 suspicion ; this title is not known among the Samaritans but it is 
 common among the Eastern Jews. The writer here thanks Rev. W. 
 Marwick for directing his attention to this article. 
 
180 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 selves." As to Omniscience; Marqah in his Commentary 
 begins by an ascription of praise to JHWH in which he 
 declares: "There is no secret hid from JHWH; He knows 
 alike that which was, that which is now, and that which shall 
 be." When, in His revelation of Himself to the Patriarchs, 
 JHWH appears, in the narrative of Genesis, to assume 
 spatial relations, Marqah sees in these Theophanies the 
 presence of angels who have been created for the occasion. 
 Some of the Samaritan doctrinal statements seem to be 
 specially directed against Christianity and the doctrine of 
 the Trinity. Thus in the long poem in Heidenheim's Biblio- 
 theca Samaritana, No. XXI., it is said: "I am that I am, 
 the One, there is no plurality ; what I made was according 
 to plurality. There is no place to Him so that plurality 
 should be possible. He is JHWH and not to be measured 
 as if He were set up according to number. Alone He is in 
 what He made, and another He knows not. He has no 
 instruments, no hands, no equal, no attribute." 
 
 At the same time Marqah occasionally to a certain extent 
 hypostatises the Kabhodh JHWH, "the Glory of the Lord," 
 in a way that at least suggests the Logos of Philo. Speaking 
 of God's revelation of Himself by fire on Mount Sinai, the 
 fire is called (p. 431^) "the great fire from JHWH"; in the 
 following page it is called "the fire of the Glory." Later, 
 when describing the passage of the Red Sea, he says : " And 
 Moses ascended up, and the Kabhodh (the Glory) raised him 
 out of the defile, and firom the depth of the Red Sea." 
 Another attribute of Deity which he also hypostatises is 
 Qesita, "truth" ; thus, p. 51a, " Moses stretched out his hand 
 over the Red Sea, and the Truth said to him, ' I will declare 
 thy greatness in all the generations of the world.' " Occasion- 
 ally it appears as if the former of these attributes, the 
 Kabhodh JHWH, occupied the place of "the Angel of the 
 Presence." 
 
 The earliest source of our knowledge of the theology of 
 the Samaritans is the Samaritan Targum. It is written in 
 a dialect of Aramaic, and is dated about the third century 
 of our era, but probably represents the interpretations and 
 renderings in vogue at least a couple of centuries earlier. 
 More markedly than even the Jewish Targum does the 
 
THE THEOLOGY OF THE SAMARITANS 181 
 
 Samaritan reject anthropomorphisms ; But while it does so, 
 it does not, as do the Jewish Targums, endeavour to main- 
 tain the separation of God from the world by introducing 
 the Memra JHWH. Gesenius recognises a tendency to 
 save the Divine dignity by changing, in certain circum- 
 stances, JHWH of the Massoretes into mal'ak JHWH, " the 
 Angel of the Lord " ; in the Divine interviews with Balaam 
 (Num. xxiii. 4), while the Massoretic has " God met " Balaam, 
 the Samaritan has " the Angel of God " met him. In the 
 following verse where the Massoretic has : " And the Lord 
 (JHWH) set a word in the mouth of Balaam," the Samaritan 
 has matak JHWH did so. In the more anthropomorphic 
 passage, Gen. xviii. 33, after Abraham has finished pleading 
 for Sodom, it is said : " The Lord went his way " ; and this 
 appears in the Samaritan text of the passage ;>, in the Targum 
 it becomes " The Angel of the Lord departed." All this 
 evidences the desire of the Samaritans to emphasize the 
 incommunicable glory, the ineffable dignity of JHWH the 
 God of Israel. 
 
 While the Jews developed their theology on similar 
 lines, the Samaritans attained the same results by a different 
 road, and expressed them in different and in more emphatic 
 ways. Both endeavoured to save Divine supremacy by 
 conserving His spirituality, but they have proceeded along 
 different lines. Both reveal the essential monotheism of the 
 religion of Israel. The evidence borne by the Samaritans to 
 this is the more striking that in their case the remnant of 
 legitimate Israelites had such an infusion sent to them of 
 influential colonists, all of whom were idolaters. 
 
 II. Of Creation. — The opening chapters of Genesis 
 rendered it impossible that the Samaritans, holding as they 
 do the sanctity of the whole Torah, should do other than 
 maintain the doctrine that JHWH had created the world; 
 whether in the absolute sense of Creation out of nothing, or 
 in the more limited sense held by Philo, of framing and 
 ordering. The Work of Creation occupies a more prominent 
 place with them than with the Jews. Among the few early 
 inscriptions of the Samaritans which have come down to us 
 is one in which over against the decalogue are set the " Ten 
 
182 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Words" of Creation. A very considerable number of the 
 Samaritan hymns begin with what are called Creation verses, 
 i.e., verses in which God is specially addressed as having 
 made the world. It is difficult to reach the idea of absolute 
 Creation, the mind is always prone to insert into the mental 
 picture a primordial " stuff," on which the Deity exercised 
 His mighty power, and from it framed the earth and the 
 Heaven. All primitive Creation myths manifest this 
 peculiarity. Thus, in the Babylonian Creation Epos, it is 
 from the carcase of Tiamat that Marduk frames the world 
 of Heaven and earth. Similar to this is the Scandinavian 
 myth of Odin framing the world from the bones and the 
 flesh of the Giant Ymir. Even Philo, with the account of 
 Creation before him, has to presuppose primordial matter, 
 which is to some extent refractory, over which the power of 
 the Creator though great was not unlimited ; hence the . 
 possibility of evil. The Samaritans avoided this. In one 
 of their hymns, LXIX. of Heidenheim's collection, men are 
 called upon to give " praise and glory to Him who created 
 the world by the word of His mouth, who made man," "who 
 caused the world to appear from that which was not." To 
 avoid the appearance of making matter eternal, a view that 
 might be maintained from the Torah itself, the Samaritans had 
 various devices. If the first verse of Gen. i. is regarded as 
 the title of the section, then it might be maintained that 
 " Tohu-wa-Bhohu " (without form and void) was primordial 
 matter, existing but as a confused, undistinguished mass ; 
 the reducing of this to order might be taken as Creation, 
 this and no more. One method was to assert clearly that 
 God created " Tohu-wa-Bhohu." Marqah represents the 
 Egyptians calling upon JHWH and addressing Him as the 
 Creator of " Tohu-wa-Bhohu." A bolder course is taken by 
 one of their hymn writers ; JHWH is identified with "Tohu- 
 wa-Bhohu." To explain this, Heidenheim suggests some 
 connection of this phrase with the Egyptian deity Thoth. 
 Though this view presents no etymological difficulty, there 
 is nothing in the attributes of Thoth which connects him 
 with creation. The term seems to have a closer affinity in 
 thought with the "Bythos" of the Valentinian Gnostics. 
 Marqah appears at times as if he had imbibed some of the 
 
THE THEOLOGY OF THE SAMARITANS 183 
 
 Gnostic emanational ideas, as when he speaks of the seven 
 things which God has "chosen and separated from His 
 Godhead " (p. 6%b), " from whom everything comes, to whom 
 it returns " (p. 144a). The fact, however, that will and choice 
 are attributed to JHWH at once changes the character of 
 the process. Creation can be nothing else than emanation 
 by Divine volition. This view is confirmed by this other 
 saying, " By a word " — the expression of volition and thought 
 — "is the world renewed." Though this is not expressly 
 stated by him, from some of Marqah's sayings, it would seem 
 at any rate that he held that the world was created for the 
 manifestation of the Seven Things which God had " separated 
 from His Godhead," afrish yathon VElahuthah, "Light, the 
 Sabbath, Mount Gerizim, Adam, the Two Tables of Stone, 
 the Great Prophet Moses, and Israel." This view is akin 
 to the Talmudic idea that the world was created for the 
 Law; and the Christian thought, that it was created to 
 manifest the Divine Glory in the work of Redemption. The 
 Samaritan is in reality a more detailed expression of the 
 Jewish idea. If one may take Marqah as the type of 
 Samaritan theology in general, there was a significance 
 seen in the very letters of the story of Creation. The account 
 begins with the word B'reskitk, and the first letter of that 
 word is the second letter of the alphabet ; this is to show 
 that God first created the Abyss. Marqah declares that had 
 the first letter of the story of Creation been " aleph," the first 
 letter of the alphabet, no change would have been possible. 
 
 This last phrase referring to the possibility of change, 
 introduces another view held by Marqah, and probably by 
 other Samaritans as well, that there were several successive 
 creations. This is not in the sense in which Genesis is 
 ordinarily interpreted, that the Work of Creation was 
 accomplished by successive steps ; that after the creation 
 of the Abyss came the inflashing of light and then the fixing 
 of the dividing firmament, and so forth throughout the days. 
 His view is not that God accomplished the Work of Creation, 
 so to say, piecemeal, but that complete worlds passed away, 
 and were followed by others; Marqah founds his view on 
 Deut. xxxii. 7, which he renders, instead of " Remember the 
 days of old," " Remember that the world will die," reading 
 
184 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 yamHth instead of the Massoretic fmoth. There is no trace 
 of this view in the hymns ; it may have been the result of 
 contact with Greek thought, especially of the Stoic type. At 
 the same time Marqah does not seem to have contemplated 
 a succession of identical worlds as did the Stoics, in each of 
 which are repeated in the same order the same events as had 
 occurred in all its predecessors. He does not seem to have 
 elaborated his theory to any extent. We must bear in mind 
 that the Universe, to the ancients, was a very small affair, if 
 compared with what astronomy unveils to us. Thus, in 
 2 Peter iii. 5-7, the writer seems to regard the destruction 
 of the world by fire which accompanies the last things as 
 equivalent to the destruction wrought by the flood. It is to 
 be observed that Marqah, too, has the " great fire which shall 
 devour the wicked, but which upon the righteous shall have 
 no power." One would compare also St Paul (i Cor. iii. 13), 
 " the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is." 
 
 By the Samaritans, as by the Jews, the created Universe 
 was regarded as threefold ; Heaven, Earth, and Sheol. On 
 the last they do not dwell much. As to the Heavens, 
 they have, according to one hymn, seven, and according to 
 another, nine Heavens. While the highest of these, the 
 seventh or the ninth, is regarded as the most glorious, and 
 indeed called the " abode," yet the Samaritans do not localise 
 God in it. We have already referred to the " seven things " 
 which before Creation were separated from Himself by 
 Deity. While Light may be pictured as coming forth from 
 God before aught else definite existed, it is difficult to con- 
 ceive what figurate conception they could form of a pre- 
 existent "Sabbath" or "Mount Gerizim," not to speak of 
 " the Two Tables " of the Law and/' the People Israel." The 
 pre-existence of Adam is to be found in the Jewish Qabbala 
 in the form of " Adam Qadmon." Something not unlike this 
 appears in Christian theology in the doctrine sometimes 
 maintained of the Pre-existence of the Human Nature of 
 our Lord. The belief in the existence of Moses before the 
 Creation of the World is in harmony with that in regard 
 to Adam. 
 
 As the " Ten Words of Creation " already referred to 
 throw a light on the views entertained by the Samaritans 
 
THE THEOLOGY OF THE SAMARITANS 185 
 
 of that work, it may be as well to give a translation of them 
 as they appear on the Nablus Tablet. 
 
 In the beginning God created. 
 
 And God said : " Let there be Light." 
 
 And God said : " Let there be a Firmament." 
 
 And God said : " Let the waters be gathered together." 
 
 And God said : " Let the Earth bring forth grass.'' 
 
 And God said : " Let there be Luminaries." 
 
 And God said : " Let the waters swarm." 
 
 And God said : " Let the Earth produce." 
 
 And God said : " Let us make Man." 
 
 And God said : " To you have I given it ! And God 
 
 saw all the work which He had made, and behold it 
 
 was very good." 
 And God said : " I am the God of your Fathers, the God 
 
 of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob." 
 
 It is impossible not to contrast this with the grotesque 
 Babylonian story of the Creation. Marduk chosen by the 
 other gods to slay Tiamat, the mother of them all, leaps 
 into the mouth of his grandmother and splits her up, and 
 makes the earth of the lower portion, and the sky of 
 the upper. Notwithstanding the general Canon that the 
 simpler form of a legend is the more ancient, the Germans 
 and their slavish followers here would have us believe that 
 from this grotesque story the Hebrew story has been evolved. 
 For my part I should as soon believe that Darwinism 
 was evolved from the story of " Jack and the Beanstalk." 
 Even admitting the etymological identity of Tehom with 
 Tiamat, this personification of "the Abyss" would seem 
 to be a secondary formation, like that which occurred in 
 the Middle Ages ; the theologians talked of the mouth of 
 Hell, and the artists of that time drew it as the mouth of a 
 gigantic dragon. 
 
 Before leaving the Samaritan theological views of 
 Creation it is worth while to observe the parallelism of 
 progress, with the difference of result in minor points. Both 
 Judaism and Samaritanism start from the same document, 
 the Law of Moses, both reach the idea of absolute Creation ; 
 of the two, the Samaritans maintain it the more rigidly. The 
 
186 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 form in which it is conceived by the Samaritans, Emanation 
 by Will, is not Jewish. The difference may be regarded 
 as evidence of their independence of Judaism. 
 
 III. Of Man. — The genius of the Hebrew was but little 
 analytical ; it was introspective, but more in a religious than 
 in a psychological sense. As a consequence, the Samaritan 
 theologians do not treat their readers to disquisitions on the 
 constitution and faculties of Man. There is more than 
 a hint that they believed in the pre-existence at all events 
 of Adam. As has been already seen, Adam was one of 
 the seven emanations of Deity which preceded Creation; 
 he comes exactly in the middle of the list, after Light, 
 the Sabbath, and Mount Gerizim, but before the Tables 
 of the Law, the Prophet Moses, and the People Israel. 
 At the same time they do not indulge fancies like that in 
 which the body of the Adam Qadmon was divided into 
 portions associated with the different " Sephiroth " of 
 Deity. In the "Ten Words" of Creation, the creation 
 of Adam occupies the eighth place, the last of the strictly 
 creative words ; the last two are the gift of creation to Adam, 
 and the statement of the covenant with Israel. As to 
 the Constitution of Man ; the Samaritans regard Man 
 as having a spiritual as well as a material nature, as being 
 composed of Soul and Body. In hymn No. XXI. ii of 
 Heidenheim's collection, it is said of Adam that God made 
 him "from water and fire, from spirit and dust." Marqah 
 has a passage of a similar purport. In that hymn to which 
 we have already referred, it is declared : " He arose as the 
 son of twenty years, perfect in knowledge and speech." The 
 body of Adam was made from dust, but that dust was taken 
 from Mount Gerizim. The placing of Adam in the Garden 
 of Eden and the creation of Eve are related as in Genesis. 
 They have a doctrine of the Fall but it is not elaborated. 
 In the poem to which we have already referred, it is 
 significant of the idea they have of God that it is the angels, 
 not the Lord God, who say : " Behold Adam is become 
 as one of us to know good and evil." After the Fall, Adam 
 wandered away from God for a century, during which 
 he begat the Jinns ; he, however, returned to God and He 
 
THE THEOLOGY OF THE SAMARITANS 187 
 
 blessed him. He, with Abel, Enoch, and Noah, is regarded as 
 a being of special sanctity. At the same time the Samaritans, 
 no more than the Jews, have any real notion of the nature 
 of sin, or of the connection which the all but universally 
 expressed sense of alienation from God, and consequent 
 need of reconciliation with Him, has with the sin of Adam. 
 According to Dr Mills the Samaritans believe firmly in 
 the immortality of Man. They hold that " the soul at death 
 leaves the body and enters another world, and a different 
 state of existence." Strikingly they ground their faith 
 in this on Exod. iii. 6. " I am the God of Abraham, the God 
 of Isaac, and the God of Jacob," the passage which our Lord 
 quoted against the Sadducees. It will be seen that the 
 theological anthropology of the Samaritans was limited in its 
 scope; the question of Freedom of the Will never seems 
 to have emerged, nor any of the questions connected with 
 Original Sin. 
 
 IV. Of Angels. — Because the Samaritans like the 
 Sadducees received as canonical only the books of Moses, 
 patristic opinion assumed that they agreed in everything. 
 Reland, influenced probably by this, contends that the 
 Samaritans do not believe in angels. The Fathers, however, 
 were not agreed in this, for Epiphanius while saying that the 
 Sadducees and the Samaritans agreed in denying the 
 doctrine of the Resurrection, declares that they differ as 
 to the angels, the Samaritans affirming their existence, 
 although the Sadducees denied it. It is difficult to under- 
 stand how either, with the account of Jacob's vision before 
 them of the " Angels of God ascending and descending," 
 denied their existence. Logic, however, has little to do with 
 religion — it belongs to a sphere above logic. Whatever may 
 have been the case with the Sadducees, as to the Samaritans 
 we have ample evidence that they did believe in angels 
 and do. In the Samaritan Targum the plurality of the 
 angels is retained ; had the Samaritans by the time it was 
 written ceased to believe in them, the phraseology would 
 have been altered so as to explain them away. In the 
 Samaritan book of Joshua, all Israel, with Joshua at their 
 head, are represented as praising God who had created the 
 
188 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 heavenly spirits, ruhani (genios caelestes). Further, when 
 Joshua calls the people to renew their covenant with JHWH, 
 he calls the angels to be witnesses {md lakitai). Dr 
 Montgomery has gathered together, chiefly from the hymns 
 in Heidenheim's collection in the Bibliotheca Samaritana, 
 a number of designations of the angels, as " Host of 
 Heaven," the " Exalted Ones," " The Congregation Above," 
 etc. In their avoidance of anthropomorphism, and their 
 desire to exalt JHWH, the Samaritans were necessitated 
 to introduce angelic beings as intermediaries between the 
 Almighty and His creatures. When, as already remarked 
 in the Massoretic, it is said (Num. xxiii. 4) " God met Balaam," 
 in the Samaritan it is "the Angel of God found hini"; 
 further, in verse 16 of the same chapter in the Massoretic 
 it is "The Lord (JHWH) met," in the Samaritan "the 
 Arigel of JHWH"; with this the Targum agrees. 
 Although the Samaritans have nothing of the extensive 
 hierarchy of angels found in the Talmud and the 
 Qabbala ; nor of that to be found in the Apocalyptists, 
 e.g. book of Enoch ; nor have been influenced by the 
 angelologies of the QurSn, yet, as may be seen from a 
 hymn published by Heidenheim in his Quarterly, some 
 of the Samaritan theologians assigned to the angels a 
 very extensive and diversified sphere of activity. Some of 
 them wait on God in His temple, watch over the 
 morning and evening sacrifices, and attend to the other rites 
 of worship ; while others fulfil Divine commissions in all parts 
 of the Universe, or convey orders to yet other angelic 
 servants of the Almighty, Although in the " Ten Words of 
 Creation" there is no mention of the angels, yet they 
 are declared to be the first created of all the creatures 
 of God. At the same time it would seem that, as with 
 ourselves, among the present Samaritans the doctrine of the 
 angels has fallen into the background, as Dr Mills takes 
 no notice of the Samaritans having any views on the 
 subject. 
 
 Although the Samaritans have not, as above observed, 
 the Cherubim, Seraphim, and Ophanim of Judaism, Rabbinic 
 Qabbalistic and Apocalyptic, nor the yet more complicated 
 hierarchy of the type of Dionysius the Areopagite, yet they 
 
THE THEOLOGY OF THE SAMARITANS 189 
 
 regarded certain angels as occupying a position of superiority 
 to the others. There were four to whom they assigned supreme 
 honour ; in this they agree with the angelology of the book 
 of Enoch, although the names given to these archangels do 
 not resemble those found in Enoch. In the book of Daniel 
 two angelic names occur, Michael and Gabriel. In the Apoc- 
 rypha are found other two, Raphael in Tobit (v. 4), and Uriel 
 in 2 Esdras (iv. i). These are the names which are found in 
 the book of Enoch. Among the Samaritans there appears to 
 be some uncertainty as to the names to be ascribed to these 
 rulers of the Heavenly Host. Petermann says {Reisen, i. 283) : 
 " They (the Samaritans) recognise four ruling angels which are 
 named ; Phanuel is the first, and under him Anusa, Kabbala, 
 and Nasi." The first of these is found in Enoch liv. 6, occupy- 
 ing the place in which Uriel generally stands ; it appears to 
 be derived from the account of Jacob wrestling with the angel 
 (Gen. xxxii. 23) ; the name Jacob gave to the place is trans- 
 ferred to the Being with whom he wrestled, who is called 
 among the Jews, " the Angel of the Presence." " Anusa " is 
 the first word of the Egyptian cry of fear when they found 
 that their chariot wheels had been removed. The word 
 really means "Let me flee" (Exod. xiv. 25) ; the Samaritans 
 seem to have regarded it as a proper name. Dr Montgomery 
 thinks that Anusa is derived from Enosh, which appears in 
 Qabbalistic literature as a form of Enoch. The Scriptural 
 authority claimed for " Kabbala " is Num. iv. 20, where V^33 
 
 {Kaball'd) is translated in the A.V. " when they (the sacred 
 vessels) are covered " ; in the R.V. it is rendered, after 
 Gesenius and Fuerst, " in a moment." There may be some- 
 thing in the conjecture that, despite the difference of spelling, 
 it is related to Qabbala {ih^p), "the secret doctrine," as if 
 
 this angel were the custodier of the Divine secret counsels. 
 The last angelic name, "Nasi," means "Prince," but is 
 derived from the name which Moses gave to the altar which 
 he erected to God after his victory over Amalek, " Jehovah- 
 Nissi." Instead of the last name Dr Montgomery gives, 
 following Heidenheim {Bib. Sam. Lit. xlvi.), " Zilpa," a name 
 which appears elsewhere as that of Leah's maid. He says 
 he cannot trace its origin. Like the Jews, the Samaritans 
 
190 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 associate the angels with the stars, though not in so definite 
 and prominent a way. 
 
 A belief in good angels necessitates a corresponding 
 belief in evil spirits. The demonology of the Samaritans is 
 not extensive, nor is it developed hierarchically as is that of 
 the Talmud. Petermann, who got information orally, says 
 that the Samaritans named Azazel, Belial, and Jasara as 
 devils. From its occurrence in connection with the " Scape- 
 goaf and the " Great Day of Atonement" (Lev. xvi. lo), the 
 origin of the first is obvious. The second name is probably 
 derived from the apparently personal use of the term in 
 Deut. xiii. 13 (14), " the children of Belial." It may be noted 
 that under the form " Beliar " this name occurs as leader of 
 the devils in " The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs," in 
 the " Ascension of Isaiah," and the " Book of Jubilees." The 
 third name Dr Montgomery would connect with tzat^ak, 
 " the hornet " (Deut. vii. 20) ; as neither Petermann nor 
 Montgomery has given the name in Hebrew or Arabic 
 characters, nor any reference, the correctness of the etymology 
 cannot be affirmed ; the function assigned to the " hornet " 
 in the passages where it occurs, driving out the enemies of 
 Israel before them, scarcely suits the common idea of 
 diabolic agency. Dr Cowley, in an article in the Jewish 
 Quarterly (viii. 571), refers to a being called " Mehablah, who 
 corresponds somewhat to Satan." The creation of the evil 
 spirits the Samaritans connect with "the darkness" over 
 which the Spirit of God brooded ; the descendants of Cain 
 also became evil spirits. The rebellious angels were yet 
 another source for the hosts of evil. In this last they agree 
 with the demonology of Enoch and of Jude. The demonology 
 of the Samaritans is thus rather indefinite in character, but 
 their belief in magic as exhibited in the story of Shobach as 
 it is related in Abu'l Fath and in the Samaritan " book of 
 Joshua," must have been profound : evil spirits under the 
 controlling power of magical formulae erect a sevenfold iron 
 wall which hems in Joshua and the host of Israel. This 
 last exhibits affinities to the stories of the ' " thousand and 
 one nights." 
 
THE THEOLOGY OF THE SAMARITANS 191 
 
 V. Or Revelation. — Not only has every people a belief 
 in Divine Beings, but also considers it possible to learn from 
 them what their will is. It might be that the worshipper 
 gained this from the flight of birds, from the entrails of 
 sacrificial victims, or from the configuration of the stars. 
 The precise way in which the deities arranged matters so 
 that their will was revealed in this manner, was never 
 explained. It was more intelligible when the gods were 
 supposed to reveal their wishes by dreams and oracles. It 
 was a higher stage in religious development when the 
 Hebrews held that JHWH their God had revealed His will 
 in a written Law. There was reason in the distinction made 
 by Mohammed between those religions which had sacred 
 books and those which had none. A book which contains a 
 revelation naturally suggests a human intermediary who has 
 received the Divine message and committed it to writing. 
 To the Samaritans, Moses was the only " Mediator " between 
 God and humanity, meaning by that the Samaritans. The 
 Samaritans have prophets whose graves they visit ; these, 
 however, are none of the prophets associated with the 
 Ephraimite tribes. The want of any prophetic book of 
 history parallel with the books of Samuel and Kings is a 
 phenomenon to be noted in view of the relation in which 
 the Samaritans stood to the Jews. The fabrication of the 
 Samaritan " book of Joshua " appears to be an attempt to 
 meet this want. Moses, as we have said, is the one great 
 prophet through whom JHWH revealed His will. He alone 
 had seen God and had spoken with Him face to face ; he had 
 received the Law from JHWH. Not impossibly the unique 
 honour given to Mohammed by the Moslems, not to speak 
 of the Divine Nature ascribed to our Lord by the Christians, 
 would tend to exalt Moses to the solitary pedestal which he 
 occupies in the faith of the Samaritans. 
 
 The sacred Torah does not owe its sanctity to the fact 
 that it was communicated to Israel by Moses. As we have 
 already seen, the Law was regarded as emanating from 
 Deity before the creation of the world. The very Tables of 
 Stone on which the Law was written lay in the primeval 
 fires until they were delivered to Moses. While they have 
 Scripture for saying that the Law was engraved on these 
 
192 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Tables by the " finger of God," Samaritan opposition to 
 anthropomorphism appears in this that they make lightning 
 the finger of the Almighty. Whether this highest sanctity 
 was ascribed to the whole Law or only to the Ten Words is 
 Tiot quite certain. A special sanctity was certainly ascribed 
 to the Decalogue, as is evidenced by the fact that it has been 
 so frequently found inscribed separately. Highly as the 
 Samaritans reverence the Law, they do not descend to the 
 blasphemous absurdity of the Rabbin, who represent the 
 Almighty occupying a portion of every day in studying the 
 Law. The Law is reverenced by them as being JHWH's 
 sole revelation of Himself to man. Moses was regarded by 
 Marqah as evolving the whole Torah from the Ten 
 Commandments. 
 
 As the unique position occupied by the Law emphasized 
 the dignity of Moses, through whom it had come to Israel, 
 it laid the Samaritans more open to Moslem and Christian 
 influences. Yet these may easily be exaggerated. Marqah's 
 creed seems almost an echo of that of Mohammed : " There 
 is only one God, and there is no prophet but Moses the son 
 of Amram." It is really independent ; it contains a double 
 protest, on the one hand against the Christian doctrine of 
 the Trinity, and on the other against the many claimants to 
 the prophetic office, who latterly appear to have been pre- 
 tenders " wearing a rough garment to deceive." In reality 
 Islam does not seem to have exercised as much influence on 
 the Samaritans during the time of the rule of the "Sons of 
 Ishmael" as Christianity did in the earlier period when 
 it was supreme. Although in pre-Christian times the 
 Samaritans expected a Messiah, as we shall see, in later 
 times some as ben Manir called " Moses " the " Messiah." 
 He is called the " first of creatures," a designation which 
 suggests what is said of our Lord in Col. i. 15, "The first- 
 born of every creature." Pre-existence is ascribed to Moses 
 as it is to Jesus in Christian theology, but not as to Christ, 
 an eternal pre-existence. In a hymn which appears in 
 Heidenheim's Bibliotheca Samaritana, there is a prayer 
 in which Moses occupies a place almost equivalent to that 
 of Christ, in the phrase which concludes our Christian 
 supplications " For Christ's sake." After references to God's 
 
THE THEOLOGY OF THE SAMARITANS 193 
 
 goodness the writer says, "Oh Lord JHWH, turn from the 
 heat of Thy wrath and be appeased for the sake of Abraham, 
 Isaac, and Jacob, and for the labour of Thy servant Moses " 
 {ubKamal 'abhadh"ka Mosheh). As may be seen the other 
 patriarchs receive a certain amount of honour, but it is sub- 
 sidiary to that given to Moses : he was before Creation an 
 emanation of the Supreme God, he is above all the organ 
 of Divine revelation ; " faithful in the house of God." 
 
 VI. Of the Messiah. — When our Lord had His conver- 
 sation with the " Woman of Samaria " at Jacob's Well, and 
 impressed upon her the need of a spiritual religion, she 
 appealed to the national expectation of the Messiah "who 
 would teach them all things." Confirmatory of this is the 
 fact that in the Carmina Samaritana there are many 
 references to the coming of one who should restore unity 
 to Israel and subdue " seven nations " ; the reference of the 
 latter statement being to the " seven nations " whom Joshua 
 subdued. Although Messiah is not the name ordinarily 
 given to Him whom they expect, they sometimes so speak 
 of Him as in the Ludolf letters (III.) the Samaritans say, 
 " The Messiah has not yet arisen." The name by which He 
 is generally designated is " Thaheb." There is considerable 
 discussion as to the precise meaning of this title. The root 
 of the word appears to be the Aramaic equivalent of the 
 Hebrew 1W shubh changed into 3nn thahebh; here the tav takes 
 the place of shin in accordance with the character of the 
 Samaritan, and he the place of vav. Thus the root contains 
 the idea of " returning." In the participle, in which the vav 
 reappears, the word assumes a subjective sense and means 
 repentance. This suggests that the work ascribed to the 
 Thaheb was not wholly that of a military conqueror, who 
 would in a material sense " restore the kingdom to Israel." 
 It is to be noted that while 1\^ shubh occurs in the Hebrew 
 Pentateuch close upon i8o times, only once is it rendered in 
 the Samaritan Targum by any derivative of 3nn thahebh ; 
 sometimes the Hebrew root itself appears. 
 
 The emphasis of the Samaritan idea of the Messiah lies 
 in a different direction from that of the Jews. The Thaheb 
 is one who will restore spiritually the people of Israel to the 
 
 N 
 
194 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 covenant relation to JHWH, which so far as obvious signs 
 are concerned they have meanwhile lost, and politically give 
 them dominion over the nations. As a preliminary to this, 
 he will reunite Judah to Ephraim. On the ground of 
 etymology it has been held by some that there was a belief 
 among the Samaritans that the Thaheb would be a re- 
 incarnation of Moses ; of this there seems no proof. A 
 Christian writer, Eulogius, says that the Samaritans expect 
 a reappearance of Joshua ; that also remains unconfirmed 
 from Samaritan sources. Although "anointed Royalty," 
 the prominent element in the Jewish conception, is 
 secondary in Samaritan theology, it is not absent; Joshua 
 is called a king, and so are such of the judges as they 
 recognise. Kingship had not such a hold on the Israelites 
 of the North as it had among the Jews ; the imperial glories 
 of David and Solomon and the long succession of sovereigns 
 of the Davidic race gave kingship a glory which the ever- 
 changing dynasties of the Ephraimite tribes never could 
 have. Moreover, for a short while under the Hasmonaean 
 and Herod ian rulers kingship was in name revived. The 
 prophetic idea of the successor of Moses was looked upon 
 as more essential. A very interesting addition to our know- 
 ledge of Samaritan Christology was given to the world by 
 Dr Merx at the Stockholm Congress of Orientalists in 1889, 
 in the form of a pre-Christian hymn in honour of the Thaheb. 
 It is clearly assumed that this " Thaheb " of the Samaritans 
 is inferior to Moses; while Moses lived 120 years, the life 
 of the "Thaheb" was to be only no years, the years of the 
 life of Joshua. Though in this hymn the conquering side of 
 the Restorer's work is that which is most prominent, the 
 prophetic side is that which is first referred to; as pre- 
 liminary to his conquering progress " JHWH will call him and 
 teach him His Law, and clothe him with His prophecy." At 
 the same time,he is pre-eminently a conqueror D''lii "lE'SJ inx !I7D?1 
 " And he shall reign over eleven nations." His kingdom, 
 however, was only to be a temporary one, much like the 
 Messiah expected by the cultivated of the orthodox Jews. 
 As, however, he was at the same time to be " The prophet 
 like unto Moses " his resemblance to the Messiah expected 
 by the Samaritan woman is striking ; an anointed one who 
 
THE THEOLOGY OF THE SAMARITANS 195 
 
 yet was a heavenly teacher who would show his people 
 all things. 
 
 A later Scriptural notice of the Samaritans reveals 
 another aspect of their Christology. When the evangelist 
 Philip came to Samaria, he found Simon Magus occupying 
 a position of great influence among the inhabitants of that 
 district. He evidently had veiled his claims by using 
 mysterious indefinite terms in regard to them. His followers 
 went further, they declared him to be "the mighty power 
 of God." This would imply not only that Simon claimed 
 to be the "Thaheb," but that the "Thaheb" according to 
 his claim was a much loftier personage than one who was 
 about to repeat in his own person the glories of Joshua ; 
 rather he seems to have claimed to be the incarnation of 
 the " Logos " of Philo, in short a Samaritan Jesus Christ. 
 Indeed, Jerome in his Commentary on Matt. xxiv. repre- 
 sents Simon as saying, " I am the Word of God." This, 
 however, must have been written long afterwards, if 
 Jerome's account is accurate, as Jerome further represents 
 him as claiming to be the " Paraclete " — a claim that implies 
 a dependence on the fourth Gospel. It is possible that the 
 latter designation had been drawn from a work of some 
 follower of Simon, and therefore not necessarily represent- 
 ing Samaritan thought. Even if the words were really 
 Simon's they might represent a change in his own views 
 consequent on his intercourse with the Christian apostles 
 and evangelists. On being rejected by the Apostles Simon 
 may have redefined his position, and declared himself no 
 longer the Messiah ; that by his baptism he had acknowledged 
 Jesus to be, but claimed to be the Paraclete promised by 
 Jesus. Though the word parakletos is solely Johannine, so 
 far as the New Testament is concerned, it yet may have 
 originated with our Lord Himself. The modification our 
 Lord's words have sustained in passing through- John's 
 memory may have been less than we are sometimes in- 
 clined to think; the term Paraclete, as applied to Christ's 
 promised successor, who should complete His work, might 
 have become part of the ordinary language of the Christian 
 Church, though this, because no other of the New Testament 
 writers had found occasion to use if, has not been recog- ■ 
 
196 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 nised. This view is favoured by the fact that the term 
 had got into Rabbinic. 
 
 Like the Jews and not a few of the Christian Fathers, 
 the Samaritans expected the Thaheb at the beginning of 
 the seventh millennium of the world's history. According 
 to their own reckoning, which is very uncertain as to 
 the post-pentateuchal period, this date is long past; 
 Dr Montgomery tells of a letter sent off by the Samaritan 
 community in 1808 which was dated by them "Since the 
 Creation 6246 years." Petermann who visited Nablus 
 in 1853 found the Samaritans expecting the advent of 
 the " Thaheb " in five years. When Dr Mills, who visited 
 them in 1 860, interrogated ihem they postponed the date to 
 1 910. When they now may expect him it is impossible 
 to say, as they are reticent on the subject ; they probably 
 have now reverted to the opinion of Scaliger's corre- 
 spondents, " God only knows the time when the ' Thaheb ' 
 will appear." They expect him to be of the seed of Joseph. 
 They meet the difficulty that in their community there are 
 no descendants of Joseph by expressing their belief that 
 somewhere, east or west, there are Samaritan communities 
 in which will be found descendants of Joseph who have kept 
 their genealogy. From one of these communities will come 
 the deliverer^ the "Thaheb." The Jews have an idea of 
 a Messiah ben Joseph, who will precede the Messiah ben 
 David, and will fulfil the prophecies of a suffering Messiah. 
 
 VII. Of the Last Things. — With the Jewish Apoca- 
 lyptists the appearance of the Messiah was expected to be 
 the immediate precursor of the Last Judgment and the end of 
 the world. The Samaritan view differs from this ; the reign 
 of the "Thaheb " is supposed merely to begin the Millennium. 
 When this period of peace and righteousness, and for the 
 people of God, prosperity, comes to an end, the abounding 
 wickedness of the Gentiles will move JHWH to wrath ; as 
 before the Flood, " the whole earth had corrupted its way 
 before the Lord," so after the Sabbatic millennium. One 
 cannot fail to observe the resemblance which this bears to 
 the scheme of history presented in the Apocalypse of St 
 . John. After Satan has been bound a thousand years, he 
 
THE THEOLOGY OF THE SAMARITANS 197 
 
 is to be loosed a little season, when he will "come forth 
 to deceive the nations " (Rev. xx. 3, 8). The eschatology of 
 the Samaritans had therefore several points of resemblance 
 to that of the Early Church ; the coming of the Messiah was, 
 according to neither, the immediate precursor of the Last 
 Judgment, and between the Millennium and that solemn 
 event there is to be a period of falling away. 
 
 Eschatology has an individual as well as a general 
 reference. In regard to the individual, it has to a certain 
 extent been considered under " Man " ; it has been shown 
 that the Samaritans held that the soul was immortal, but 
 also that there was a resurrection of the body. In the 
 earliest expression of their faith which the Samaritans sent 
 " to their brethren in the West " there is certainly no clause 
 which affirms the Resurrection, yet from the presence in it of 
 a clause which states their belief " In the day of Vengeance 
 and Recompense," it would seem necessarily to follow. 
 Certainly the Samaritans affirmed their belief in the resur- 
 rection of the body in their conversations with Dr Mills 
 {^Modern Samaritans, p. 219). One of their proof texts was 
 " I, even I am He, and there is no God with me, I kill 
 and I make alive" (Deut. xxxii. 39). The doctrine is fully 
 developed in Marqah. It is to be observed that Origen 
 in his Commentary on Matt. xxii. 23-33, assumes that, like 
 the Sadducees, the Samaritans deny the Resurrection. So 
 Epiphanius, speaking of the Sadducees, says : " They reject 
 the Resurrection of the dead, thinking like the Samaritans." 
 The received date for Marqah is between these two Fathers. 
 As Marqah's evidence is from within, it is to be preferred. 
 
 Abisha's description of the Last Day would seem to 
 have been influenced by the Revelation of St John. " Then 
 will be annihilated all beings from man even to cattle and 
 birds, from grass and herbs to forest trees and fruit trees. 
 All hard and stony rocks, all valleys and mountains will 
 then disappear, only the sacred mountain will remain in 
 the midst of its gardens, a place of refuge for all. Then 
 shall all flesh perish from fear of the God of Israel. Then 
 speaks the Kabodh JHWH 'the Glory of the Lord,' the 
 Memra, the Logos, 'See now that I even I am He, and 
 beside me there is no God.' When He has spoken, every 
 
198 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 place will heave in which the dead have been buried. Then 
 the earth itself shall split up, and out of it shall ascend 
 an odour, the odour of the returning Israelites, an odour 
 like the smell of myrtles. They stand there bearing 
 the infirmities, which they had when they were put in 
 their graves. The prophets and the priests will be there, and 
 among them Moses. And Moses shall pray for his people, 
 and Aaron and his sons shall offer propitiation. The 
 people shall then be divided, the pious shall go into the 
 Garden of Eden, they shall be in one part, in another 
 part the wicked shall stand smoking before the fire. Moses 
 shall pray for them, and they shall all be turned into dust." 
 This conditional immortality applies only to the children 
 of Israel, as is seen by what follows. Heidenheim says that, 
 according to the Talmud, the dust of the wicked forms 
 a footstool for the righteous in Paradise. "When the 
 Gentiles shall rise out of their graves they shall be naked, 
 smelling vilely. Their faces shall be covered with blackness. 
 They have no saviour nor any one to set them free from the 
 flames of fire ; this fire shall burn them in deepest sheol." 
 According to this account of the Last Things, the number of 
 those who are permitted to enter into the Garden of Eden 
 must be extremely limited ; only the pious among the children 
 of Israel are to have that privilege, the Wicked of the 
 children of the Holy People are, as has been seen, to be 
 turned into ashes. To all nations, lasting, presumably 
 everlasting, tortures are assigned. The Samaritans of half a 
 century ago were, according to Dr Mills, not quite sure 
 whether the life after the Resurrection would be everlasting 
 or not ; they declared that this would depend entirely on 
 the will of God. Amram, Dr Mills' informant, admitted 
 that the question had never been put or considered in their 
 theology. The limited number of those the Samaritans 
 admit to their Paradise is necessitated by the limited 
 boundaries they assign to it. As, according to their belief, 
 the primitive Eden was situated within the limits of Mount 
 Gerizim, so too the Paradise of eternal blessedness is placed in 
 this same Holy Mountain. It may be noted that the Samaritan 
 theologians do not dwell as does Mohammed on the elements 
 that constitute the bliss of Paradise ; in regard to this they 
 
THE THEOLOGY OF THE SAMARITANS 199 
 
 are wisely reticent. As to the place of punishment the 
 Samaritans are equally silent. 
 
 Summary. 
 While in regard to theology the views of the Jews and 
 the Samaritans are essentially one, there are not a few 
 minor points in which they differ. The primary doctrine of 
 Israelitism is, and always has been the unity and spirituality 
 of God. The Samaritans manifest a greater sensitiveness 
 than the Jews to anything that would seem to impinge on 
 either of these sides of the doctrine concerning God. Such 
 doctrines, to be received at all, must be grasped in all their 
 sharpness. The Samaritans appear to have stereotyped their 
 monotheism at a time when the two sections of Israelitism 
 had separated from each other. It may be said that when 
 the priest from Nineveh preached JHWH and His worship 
 to the heathen colonists, these colonists endeavoured to 
 combine the new faith with the old idol worship (2 Kings 
 xvii. 33). We must bear in mind that all primitive religions 
 were essentially monotheistic, but as in Roman Catholic 
 countries the saints get more prayers than God, so among 
 the nations, the lower gods usurped the honours due to the 
 Most High. The contrast then, in the case of these colomstSj 
 was between an absolute monotheism in which the Supreme 
 alone was worshipped and believed in, and a Supreme God 
 believed in merely in a vague way, but not worshipped 
 because He was too good ever to do them hurt and too great 
 to care about their acts of worship. The heathen gave his 
 worship to lower gods who were nearer him, who were 
 malevolent enough to will to hurt him, and at the same 
 time near enough to appreciate his prayers and sacrifices. 
 The syncretism must soon have broken down. When the 
 Samaritans, as we already had occasion to remark, offered 
 Zerubbabel to assist in the rebuilding of the temple at 
 Jerusalem, they claim to have been^ worshippers of JHWH 
 from the days of Esarhaddon ; the Jews in refusing their 
 assistance do not deny the purity of their worship or assert 
 the intrusion of any polytheistic elements into it. Having 
 got rid of the subordinate deities, with the zeal of new 
 converts, they carry out their new faith to its logical 
 
200 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 conclusions ; hence they become even stricter in their 
 monotheism and in their rejection of everything like idolatry. 
 The case of Islam is in point. The unitarianism of the 
 Moslem is more in evidence than that of the Jew, and their 
 rejection of everything approaching to image-making. No 
 pictures of men or animals are to be found in the house of 
 an Orthodox Moslem. Originally the Moslems had been 
 image- worshippers ; the Kaaba was full of idols. In like 
 manner the Samaritans obeyed the Second Command- 
 ment with absolute literalness : while the Jews introduced 
 Cherubim into the adornment of the temple in Jerusalem, 
 the Samaritans built theirs bare of all such adornment. 
 Indeed they taunted the Jews with their failure to keep the 
 Law in all its purity. This could scarcely have dated from 
 the time of Ezra, nor does the mood of mind harmonise with 
 the placid adoption wholesale of the Ezrahitic additions to 
 the Law. 
 
 The Samaritan effort to maintain the absoluteness of 
 Creation manifests a similar effort after the logical. The 
 doctrine of the angels affords the clearest proof of the 
 primitive character of Samaritan theology. It is clear that 
 Samaritan angelology dates from a period before Ezra 
 brought "the names of the angels from Babylon." Later 
 they seem to have imitated the Jews in giving names to the 
 angels, but these generally are formed on a totally different 
 principle from that which rules in Jewish angelic nomencla- 
 ture. The Samaritans have formed their angelic names 
 ingeniously from texts of Scripture. The Jews on the other 
 hand have taken attributive statements concerning Deity and 
 added to them the syllable el, e.g., Uriel, the Light of God 
 or God is my Light ; Raphael, God the healer. If the 
 Samaritans got the Law from Manasseh after Ezra had 
 brought the names of the angels, why were the angelic 
 names not received also ? So too with the evil spirits, the 
 Samaritan names are quite different from the Jewish. It is 
 evident that Samaritanism represents a type of Israelitism 
 which existed before the angels were named. Samaritan 
 Christology is also independent of the Jewish. The title 
 " Thaheb " regards the work of the promised deliverer from 
 a point of view totally different from that of the Jews. The 
 
THE THEOLOGY OF THE SAMARITANS 201 
 
 eschatology of the Samaritans, conditioned as it is by the 
 place assigned to Mount Gerizim, is in marked contrast to 
 that of Judaism, but it is manifestly a later growth. 
 
 Supplementary Note. 
 
 It may be observed that no use has been made in the 
 foregoing of Dr L. Wreschner's pamphlet, Samaritanische 
 Traditionen mitgeteilt und nach ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicke- 
 lung untersucht, because the views of the writer have been 
 so overladen with Jewish prejudice that his conclusions are 
 practically valueless. He assigns reasons, in themselves 
 not at all cogent, for maintaining that all the Samaritan 
 differences from orthodox Judaism are late, without con- 
 sidering arguments which seem much stronger, pointing 
 to an opposite conclusion. Thus he assumes that the 
 Samaritans rejected the traditional text of the Pentateuch, 
 and never takes any account of the possibility that the 
 Samaritan text is in many cases the primitive, prior to 
 that adopted by the Jews. Exaggerating the resemblance 
 between the Sadducees and the Samaritans into an identity, 
 he argues that it is more likely that the Samaritans borrowed 
 their doctrines from the Sadducees than that " the important 
 sect of the Sadducees, sprung from the soil of Judaism," 
 should adopt from an inconsiderable foreign sect explanations 
 of the Law. Nor is a third possibility noted that the resem- 
 blances between these two sects are due to similar causes 
 operating independently. The source of both is sacerdotalism: 
 the Sadducees were the priestly party among the Jews, and 
 the Samaritans, as they got their revived knowledge of 
 the Law through the priests sent by Esarhaddon, had no 
 indication given them of the spiritual aspirations which 
 tradition had carried down along with the precepts of 
 the Law, the custodiers of which were the Prophets. So 
 too Wreschner would account for the many resemblances 
 between Samaritanism and the doctrines of the Karaites : 
 the Samaritans borrowed from the Karaites. The origin 
 of the similarities appears to be totally different ; the 
 Karaites by rejecting the interpretations of the Law intro- 
 duced by the Pharisaic Rabbin reached a position in point 
 of doctrine in many cases identical with that of the 
 
202 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Samaritans who had never accepted them. He assumes a 
 heathen origin for some of the Samaritan peculiarities, e-g.^ 
 the restriction of the Levirate Law to the case of a virgin 
 betrothed whose husband had died before the marriage 
 was consummated ; this Wreschner considers borrowed from 
 India, without indicating any way in which this variation 
 had been introduced into Samaria from so remote a source. 
 It may be noted that the authority for this being a doctrine 
 of the Samaritans is the very suspicious one of a Talmudic 
 treatise. Dr Wreschner arguing from the way in which 
 the Samaritans escaped the persecution which Epiphanes 
 directed against the Jews — a fact known only from the 
 biased evidence of Josephus — deduces that the Samaritans 
 very readily adopted the views of others. He utterly 
 ignores the terrible persecutions which the Samaritans 
 endured at the hands of the pagan emperors of Rome, 
 and the persecutions still more terrible which they suffered 
 from Christian Byzantine emperors. From these persecu- 
 tions the Jews were exempt. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE EVOLUTION OF THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT 
 
 It is impossible to go back historically, to the origin of 
 writing. By the very nature of the case there could be no 
 record of the time when man first found out a way to make 
 his thoughts permanent. Possibly from the beginning of 
 that earlier time when man learned to communicate to others 
 his thoughts and feelings by audible signs, by speech, the 
 words would be emphasized and explained by gestures, signs 
 which appealed to sight. But to convey thought beyond the 
 range of the voice, still more to hand it on to the future, 
 something more was needed, hence the step was taken of 
 depicting visible signs; not only making thought visible but 
 permanent. The sound of a voice is dissipated when spoken, 
 but litera scripta manet. The earliest stage of writing was of 
 necessity hieroglyphic — things were represented by the 
 pictures of them ; an ox would be expressed by the roughly 
 drawn picture of an ox. An action would be suggested by 
 drawing the figure of a person performing it; as running, 
 by a person running. An emotion, though more elusive, 
 could be depicted by showing a person in the attitude 
 naturally assumed by one under it, as grief by a figure 
 sitting with the hand on the forehead. Such a written 
 language would be quite independent of vocal speech. The 
 picture of a horse would be recognised everywhere for what 
 it was, but while an Englishman would call it " a horse," a 
 Frenchman would name it '' un cheval," and a German " ein 
 pferd." Such a written language, totally divorced from 
 speech, is easily conceived, but as a matter of fact, Chinese 
 is the only language that is to any serious extent ideographic. 
 Among Western nations, numerals are the only ideographs 
 
 203 
 
204 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 in general use ; to them all the numerical signs, Roman and 
 Arabic, have the same meaning, but are designated by very 
 different words. 
 
 Although by means of conventions its scope could be 
 considerably extended, it would soon be found very difficult 
 to express anything but the simplest facts by an ideographic 
 language. The vocal signs that existed alongside the visible 
 had, by convention, a greater capacity for conveying shades 
 of meaning ; hence arose the practice of giving vocal 
 language visible signs, instead of expressing thought directly 
 by more or less conventionalised hieroglyphs, doing so 
 indirectly by visualised words. When the name of a thing 
 was composed of syllables, each of which was significant, it 
 was natural that these would be represented each by the 
 picture of the thing signified. This stage is found represented 
 both in Egypt and Assyria. Convention came in to extend 
 the meaning of the picture when it represented a syllable. 
 When each syllable was thus depicted, the unity of the word 
 which they formed was indicated by subjoining a separate 
 sign, which showed whether it was a person or a place that 
 was intended. A further step in analysis was taken when 
 the initial sound in a name was all that was supposed to be 
 represented by the picture. In this an approach was made 
 to strictly alphabetic writing ; but only an approach, as the 
 same sound was often represented by different signs, while 
 again the same signs might represent different sounds. 
 
 Meantime a process of simplification and conventional- 
 ising was going on in regard to the hieroglyphic symbols, 
 especially in Assyria. The fact that the alluvial plain of 
 Babylon did not supply stone but did a fine clay which 
 could be formed into tablets, on which a fine pointed wooden 
 chisel might be used, led to modification of the hieroglyphic 
 pictures in one direction. Egypt, which had no strata of 
 fine clay, had the papyrus reed, the pith of which supplied 
 another material for writing on ; this led to modification in 
 another direction. Characters were not so naturally inscribed 
 on it by a chisel as by a reed pen dipped in ink. In the 
 hieratic and demotic script of Egypt, the hieroglyphs tended 
 to assume curved lines instead of the upright and horizontal 
 wedges affected in the plains of Babylon. The Hittites 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT 205 
 
 who also had a hieroglyphic language did not invent for 
 themselves a cursive script but adopted the Assyrian, 
 cumbrous as it seems to us. 
 
 This, however, must be developed a little more in detail. 
 In regard to Assyria, while in the earliest form of the 
 cuneiform, there was a resemblance though distant to the 
 object presumed to be represented, every generation 
 lessened the likeness until at length there was not the 
 slightest suggestion of the original hieroglyph. As an 
 example ^ even when laid on its side zX] has the 
 faint suggestion of a " house " ; it can also be understood 
 how a| the figure of a " house," with four lines introduced, 
 might suggest reduplication, and so a " great house " ; 
 but when the symbol becomes :© the resemblance has 
 wholly disappeared. Another example may be adduced ; 
 
 2^ as the rough suggestion of a foot, may quite naturally 
 be used as the symbol for " to walk " ; it might retain its 
 suggestiveness even when laid on its side so CCJ ; but all 
 resemblance has disappeared in ~y of the later cunei- 
 form. This difficulty is not lessened when a word written 
 in this later cuneiform is developed ideographically ; thus 
 
 J} "water" placed within ifl "mouth" becomes ?g5f 
 and means "to drink." To the end, ideograms intrude 
 themselves into Assyrian, not infrequently drawn from 
 Sumerian, at times representing not the idea but the sound 
 of the Sumerian word. At the same time there were 
 alphabetic signs representing the consonants. Even the 
 earliest extant cuneiform inscriptions manifest a consider- 
 able divergence from the purely ideographic. The process 
 implied must have involved a lengthened period of time of 
 which there is no record. 
 
 In the case of Egypt the process is more under the eye 
 of the observer. The artistic skill of the Egyptian people, 
 and possibly the material they used, induced them to per- 
 petuate their picture writing to a much later period, and in 
 a much purer form than was the case in the valley of the 
 Tigris and the Euphrates. Down to the times of the Roman 
 emperors, sacred inscriptions were engraved in hieroglyph. 
 Parallel with the hieroglyphic there were two other scripts, 
 the "hieratic" and the "demotic." The former, the 
 
206 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 " hieratic," is nearer the hieroglyphic ; it was used for 
 documents of importance, such as royal proclamations and 
 sacred edicts. The other, further removed from the hiero- 
 glyphic, was used for more ordinary purposes, hence its name 
 "demotic." The difference between these scripts is due to 
 desire on the part of the scribe to write rapidly. It is 
 interesting to observe the process by which the " demotic " 
 was evolved. Thus / (or r) was represented in hieroglyphic 
 by a lion couchant £:si 5 '^^ the Prisse papyrus, that 
 became ?to ; in the later "hieratic" it became n,i , and 
 in the " demotic " >a^ . But throughout the whole process 
 ancient Egyptian never became perfectly alphabetic ; there 
 were always occasions in which a word or a portion of a 
 word would first be pictured and then spelt. 
 
 While the two great empires, the Assyrian and the 
 Egyptian, bounded Palestine to the south and the north- 
 east, there was on the north another powerful empire, the 
 Hittite, the importance of which has been realised only in 
 comparatively recent times. Still more recently have the 
 many attempts at deciphering their inscriptions been crowned 
 with anything like success. The writing of the Hittites is 
 distinctly hieroglyphic ; but while the Egyptian hieroglyphics 
 were incised, those of the Hittites were carved in relief 
 Indeed, in every way there is the greatest contrast between 
 the two systems of hieroglyph ; the Hittite figures are 
 coarsely drawn and of squat proportions, whereas elegant 
 proportions and clear sharp outlines are the characteristics 
 of those of the Egyptians. Another peculiarity of Hittite 
 hieroglyph is that there is a much closer portraiture of the 
 object which formed the hieroglyph, than is to be found in 
 the idealised hieroglyphs of Egypt. The truth of what is 
 here advanced may be seen on looking at the illustrations 
 of Hittite inscriptions to be found in Wright's Empire of 
 the Hittites, and elsewhere. Dr Sayce (Murray's Dictionary 
 of the Bible, "Hittites") says that the Hittites only used 
 hieroglyphics for monumental purposes, and instead of 
 modifying them into a more current form for ordinary 
 occasions, they adopted the Assyrian cuneiform. 
 
 The origin of the Semitic script in all its varieties has 
 been sought in each of these modes of writing. The Semitic, 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT 207 
 
 or as it is sometimes called the Phoenician script had an 
 extensive vogue geographically ; from the Taurus Mountains 
 on the north it extended in various forms to Syene 
 (Assouan) in the south, and from the banks of the Tigris 
 on the east to Carthage and Marseilles on the west. The 
 essential point in which the Semitic script differed from 
 those of the great empires around was this ; while they 
 remained more or less hieroglyphic, it was from the first 
 alphabetic. An approximation to this alphabetic stage 
 had been made, as we have already seen, by all three 
 languages above referred to ; in regard to the Assyrian and 
 Egyptian, this may be said with certainty, and in regard 
 to the Hittite with a high degree of probability. The final 
 step was taken of affixing one sign and one only to one 
 sound and to one only, by one or other of the northern 
 Semite races. This people evolved the alphabet, which in the 
 names of the letters and the order in which they follow each 
 other has been predominant in all essentials from the days 
 of David and Solomon, if not earlier, down to the present 
 time. Before the alphabetic writing was adopted correspond- 
 ence in all the northern Semitic area seems to have been 
 carried on in the cuneiform character and in the language of 
 Babylon. Cumbrous as this mode of writing seems to us, 
 it was not only used for official communications, as the Tell 
 Amarna tablets show, but also for ordinary epistolary cor- 
 respondence. At the same time it is relatively certain that 
 the spoken language of Canaan, at the time when the Egyptian 
 governors were corresponding with the chancellory of Khu- 
 en-aten, was not Babylonian but a form of Hebrew. While 
 this is so, the probability is that when they committed any- 
 thing to writing, the script used would be cuneiform. Hence 
 there is a plausibility in Colonel Conder's contention that in its 
 earliest form the Pentateuch was not written, in the ordinary 
 sense of the word, but was impressed in cuneiform characters 
 on clay tablets with small chisels. Later in the year in 
 which Conder published his book. The First Bible, Dr Otto 
 Winckler advocated the same view in a magazine article. 
 Since it has thus received German support this opinion is, 
 according to Dr Sayce, that generally held. There is, how- 
 ever, a difficulty in allowing to this more than, at most, a 
 
208 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 high degree of probability. It is not to be assumed as 
 certain that in some elementary form the Semitic script was 
 not known and used. The earliest examples of this mode 
 of writing show that a long history of selection and simplifica- 
 tion stands behind them. Centuries before Ahab reigned in 
 Israel or Mesha in Moab the process must have begun, by 
 which the script in question was evolved. 
 
 Whence was the Semitic script descended ? Hommel 
 (Gesch. Bab. u. Assyr., pp. 50 ff.) maintains that it was 
 derived from the cuneiform. In this there is no inherent im- 
 probability. Whatever province it was in which this script 
 took its origin, it yet was one within the bounds of the 
 ancient Babylonian Empire. It suits, too, with Hebrew 
 tradition, which records that Abraham the ancestor of the 
 Hebrew people came from Babylonia, from Ur of the 
 Chaldees. The general vogue of the language is proved 
 by the fact already noted that even when writing to the 
 Egyptian king, whose officials they were, the Egyptian 
 governors of Palestine wrote as we have seen in cuneiform 
 characters and in the Babylonian language. When, however, 
 it is tested letter by letter, Hommel's view is not confirmed. 
 His additional opinion of how the step was taken is even 
 less plausible. He thinks that some tribe of wandering 
 Bedu struck with the wonders of writing, adopted the 
 signs used by the Babylonians and simplified them into 
 an alphabet. But the question as to who evolved the 
 alphabet is quite different from the source from which 
 it was evolved. Hommel chooses out eight characters 
 as proving the source of the Hebrew alphabet to have been 
 in Babylon. These are 0^ alpu, an "ox";. ^ bitu, a 
 " house " or " tent " ; /- gimmidu, a " gift " ; ^ or ^ daltu^ 
 a " door " ; Q]j katu, or idu, a " hand " ; ^ inu, an " eye " ; 
 ^ nunu, a "fish"; <^ or ^s risu, a "head." He adds 
 other two as possible instances of derivation; jjjj mi, 
 probably " water " ; g ^ of indeterminate meaning. The 
 first of these eight first mentioned signs is not unlike 
 ^ aleph, since both are roughly drawn ideograms of the 
 same object, but even so the Semitic does not seem to be 
 derived from the Babylonian; it is drawn differently. In 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT 209 
 
 regard to the second what resemblance there is, is distinctly 
 fainter and suggests a different object ; while the Babylonian 
 symbol resembles a " booth," the Semitic suggests a " tent " 
 ^., . The form of the third letter in Babylonian /— is 
 only like the later Maccabaean >V and the Samaritan form 
 of the letter, not the earlier angular '\ which is an attempt 
 to indicate the head and neck of a "camel." Only the 
 contracted form of the fourth has any resemblance to £^ 
 daleth in the angular, which is an attempt to indicate a 
 " tent door," an object naturally triangular. Hommel's fifth 
 example — the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet — appears 
 to be the rough representation of the fingers of a hand ; but 
 still liker is it to the sign put on Moslem houses all over 
 the nearer East, to avert the evil eye ; the yodh /T/ of 
 the angular script rather suggests the closed fist. Between 
 the Babylonian ^ nunu and the angular ^ nun there does 
 not seem to be much resemblance, though both having the 
 same name must have been derived from the hieroglyph 
 of a " fish." As to inu, an " eye," if it were reversed and set 
 upon its apex, it would be almost identical with V ayin 
 in Samaritan; but is quite unlike the earlier form of the letter 
 which is O almost our " o," the letter which occupies 
 the corresponding place in our alphabet. Still less is there 
 any connection observable between Hommel's eighth 
 example and the twentieth letter of the Semitic alphabet ; 
 if 4!^ risk is the name of that sign it resembles not ^ 
 resh but (p qopk. The other two are really not to be 
 taken into consideration at all. After all due estimate of 
 the evidence, the resemblances and differences, etc., we feel 
 ourselves, in regard to Dr Hommel's theory, obliged to come 
 to a verdict of " not proven " with a distinct leaning towards 
 a negative decision. 
 
 The theory advanced by Dr Roug^ that the Semitic 
 script was derived from Egypt has also considerable initial 
 probability, though not so much as has that of Hommel. 
 The Egyptians had made a closer approximation to the 
 attainment of an alphabetic system than had the Baby- 
 lonians. There was an intimate connection between Egypt 
 and Palestine throughout the whole historic period. The 
 lengthened stay of the people in Egypt would naturally 
 
 O 
 
210 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 have led the Israelites to imbibe much of Egyptian culture. 
 Still, Israel was only one branch of the Semite race, and 
 not to appearance that with which the alphabet originated. 
 The connection of Egypt with Palestine began long before 
 the exodus of the Hebrews from the land of Egypt. For 
 two generations the country had been, at the time when 
 the Tell Amarna tablets were incised, under the dominion 
 of Egypt. Certainly the tablets found in Tell Amarna 
 are in cuneiform character and in the Babylonian tongue, 
 as has been already stated ; but though ofificial diplomatic 
 correspondence was carried on in Babylonian, as at present 
 such correspondence in Europe is in French, it does not 
 follow that the people, who certainly spoke a variety of 
 Hebrew, wrote in cuneiform. From the advance made 
 by the Egyptians towards a true alphabet, it might seem 
 not at all unlikely that when the Canaanites were devising 
 an alphabet they should be influenced by Egypt, and by 
 the semi-alphabetic signs used by its people. Roug6 
 wrote a book to prove the correctness of his theory of 
 the dependence of the Semitic alphabet on Egyptian 
 "demotic." He does not claim to have been the first to 
 make this suggestion. In his book, to which reference has 
 just been made, he surveys several of these systems accord- 
 ing to which the Phoenician or Semitic alphabet was derived 
 from Egypt. He goes back to antiquity to find support 
 for his theory, and on the authority of Eusebius, quotes 
 Sanchuniathon as attributing to Thoth, the son of Misor 
 (Egypt), the invention of letters ; this Roug6 regards as 
 indicating that there was a tradition among the Phoenicians 
 that they had got their alphabet from Egypt. He, however, 
 gives no indication of the process by which the Semitic was 
 derived from the Egyptian. It is true M. Rouge lays down 
 elaborate rules and principles on which it is necessary 
 to proceed in deducing the Semitic signs from the Egyptian, 
 and illustrates his scheme by numerous tables and figures. 
 Yet a careful study of the evidence he adduces fails to 
 produce conviction. Thus Rouge thinks that ^ is derived 
 from 2^ , but no resemblance can be perceived between 
 this and the earliest form a/e/>k assumes on the monuments, 
 e.g., ^ and >^ . Further this "demotic" form sprang 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT 211 
 
 from the hieroglyph '^ a, an "eagle"; the Hebrew 
 word for an eagle is nesker, a word that does not contain 
 the letter aleph, and therefore does not supply the required 
 initial. In all the list there are only two letters where form 
 and sound do at all support M. Rouge's contention. The 
 Egyptian for an " owl " is em ^ ; it becomes first 2, 
 and then 3 which has some resemblance to "^ , the 
 form mem assumes on the ancient Semitic monuments, 
 but the resemblance is far from striliing. A more favourable 
 example is LjJ skehet, "papyrus growing"; here form and 
 sound agree with the Semitic shin. But both mem and 
 shin are roughly drawn hieroglyphics, significant in the 
 Semitic tongues ; mem is a modification of mayim, " water," 
 and its form on the Moabite Stone y suggests this ; skin 
 is sken, a "tooth," and again the earliest form the 
 letter takes is a rough delineation of W a row of sharp 
 teeth. This earliest form, instead of being liker its alleged 
 Egyptian source, as seen on the Prisse papyrus, is much less 
 so than that to be seen in the square character skin B*. In 
 the " hieratic " and " demotic " scripts, the Egyptian form of 
 shehet assimilates more to the Semitic m,em than to shin. 
 What resemblance there is, is merely fortuitous. 
 
 There remains Colonel Conder's theory that the Semitic 
 alphabet was derived from the Hittites. In this case as in 
 the others there is a certain initial plausibility in favour 
 of the suggestion. The Hittite Empire would naturally 
 impress itself on the mind and imagination of the whole 
 northern portion of South-western Asia, the region wherein 
 the alphabet with which attention is occupied sprang up. 
 One of their subordinate capitals, Carchemish on the fords 
 of the Euphrates, threatened to dominate the whole of 
 Mesopotamia. On the west, the whole force of the Egyptian 
 Empire had to be put forth under its greatest monarchs to 
 prevent them holding in possession all Palestine. As far 
 south as Hebron there was a colony of Hittites, with whom 
 Abraham became confederate. This great and widespread 
 influence would render plausible the theory which would 
 seek the origin of what has been called the Phoenician 
 alphabet in the signs of the Hittite syllabary. Colonel 
 
212 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Conder has, in his article on " Writing," in Murray's 
 Dictionary of the Bible, expounded his theory at some 
 length ; only somewhat confusingly, in his table of " Com- 
 parative Alphabets," he replaces the term " Hittite " by 
 "Syrian." His theory depends on the correctness of his 
 transliteration of Hittite inscriptions ; but nowhere has his 
 system found acceptance. According to Colonel Conder, 
 both the name of the letter and the object which its form 
 indicated were drawn from the language of the Hittites. 
 He maintains that daleth as the name of a letter does not 
 signify a " door " but a " bucket," and sees a greater resem- 
 blance to that object than to a tent door in the triangle 
 which represented the letter in the earliest inscriptions. The 
 name for a skin bucket was in Hittite, according to Colonel 
 Conder daltu, but skin buckets assume several shapes even 
 if daltu be the Hittite word for it. Moreover, if one looks at 
 the table given in " Murray," it is found that the parallel 
 signs do not always suit, e.g., the tenth symbol in the Hittite 
 column seems decidedly more like the hieroglyphic source 
 of the eleventh Semitic sign than of the tenth ; on the other 
 hand, the Hittite eleventh suggests the Hebrew tenth. 
 Against this apparent plausibility which may be admitted 
 with reservations is to be set the fact that the Hittite 
 language was not alphabetic, and further it was not developed 
 in the alphabetic direction even so far as was the Babylonian 
 and Egyptian ; for its cursive script it depended on Assyrian. 
 
 Thus it would seem to be impossible to deduce the 
 Semitic script from any one of the suggested sources, the 
 Babylonian, the Egyptian, or the Hittite. All three 
 manifested a tendency towards becoming alphabetic, but 
 each and all they stopped short of the iinal step. Who then 
 took the step? The answer to this can only be found by 
 interrogating the alphabet itself. As the people who 
 invented the alphabet would primarily desire to inform 
 their own people of their thoughts and wishes, the objects 
 they would choose to employ as alphabetic signs would be 
 those that were familiar. Hence we can deduce something 
 of the habits of the nation from the objects with which they 
 were constantly in contact. 
 
 Something may be deduced from the general character 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT 213 
 
 of the symbols employed and the mode in which they are 
 delineated. The presence of fine clay in the Mesopotamian 
 valley suggested the use of tablets and of impressing the 
 symbols on them by chisels ; this led to a modification of 
 the forms of the symbols. On the other hand, as we 
 have seen, in Egypt the want of clay and the presence 
 of the papyrus suggested the use of its pith as a sub- 
 stance to receive the graphic symbols. This led to the 
 employment of a reed pen dipped in ink. This tended 
 to modify the form of the symbols in another direction. 
 From the angular shape assumed by the letters in the 
 earliest instances of the Semitic script, they appear to have 
 been scratched with an instrument having a hard sharp point 
 on a surface of stone. This would exclude both Egypt and 
 Mesopotamia, and point to the hilly district lying between 
 the region of the two rivers and the Mediterranean as the 
 dwelling of the inventors. The region would fit in with the 
 suggestion of Hommel that it was the wandering Bedu 
 who, impressed with the wonders of writing as they saw 
 them in Babylon, adopted the idea, but modified and 
 improved it into the alphabetic form. But the nomad had 
 no motive to induce him to write ; the tales and songs with 
 which he and his friends entertained each other had been 
 handed down by tradition in memory from his ancestors, 
 and he was ready in his turn to convey them in the same 
 way to his descendants ; books would seem to him a useless 
 encumbrance and writing a futile accomplishment. There 
 were, however, traversing this desert tract of country, 
 wanderers certainly but not unlettered Bedu, the Midianites, 
 whose caravans conveyed the trade of Mesopotamia to 
 Egypt and that of Egypt to Mesopotamia. Another people 
 has been suggested, the Phoenicians ; they, like the 
 Midianites, were traders, and dwelt on the western edge of 
 the region above indicated. 
 
 The geographical localisation of the inventors of the 
 alphabet to which we have been led by considering the form 
 of the letters and the medium used by the inventors, is 
 confirmed by looking at the language or languages in giving 
 permanence to which they were employed. This language 
 is Aramaic, with its cognate Hebrew. The region occupied 
 
214 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 by this language has been indicated above. It had flowed 
 down into the rich plains of the land between the rivers. 
 That the inhabitants of Babylonia and Assyria as far back 
 as the time of Sargon spoke and wrote Aramaic is evidenced 
 by the weights in his palace. On them, while on the one 
 side is the formal legal inscription which recounts the names 
 and titles of the sovereign in cuneiform, to which is added 
 the statement of the weight, on the other in Aramaic is the 
 simple statement of its relation to the sheqel whether part or 
 multiple : on a British coin, on the one side the names and 
 title of the king are given in Latin, and on the other in 
 English the value of the coin. The docquet on the wrapper 
 which contains a Babylonian contract table is usually in 
 Aramaic, while the contract itself is in Babylonian. In 
 Scotland, while up to the middle of last century certain 
 documents necessary in the purchase of landed property 
 were written in Latin and in black letter, the docquet 
 was in English and written in the ordinary engrossing 
 hand. From this it is clear that the ordinary language of 
 the people was Aramaic even in Nineveh and Babylon, 
 and the script commonly used was that of the Semitic 
 peoples north and west of these cities. The script is the 
 same in Sinjirli and on the Moabite Stone. 
 
 On the principle which has just been laid down, it will 
 be advantageous to see what light is thrown on the origin 
 of the Semitic alphabet by the objects from which the 
 hieroglyphs behind the letters have been taken. The first 
 letter, as has already been remarked, is aleph and means 
 " an ox." In comparing the Semitic alphabet with the 
 cuneiform, the resemblance has been noted which the figure 
 had to the roughly drawn head of an ox — a likeness to be 
 found in the script of the Cretan inscriptions. The ox 
 was the animal most used in agriculture. The Laws of 
 Hammurabi show how much importance was placed on 
 agriculture in Babylonia. On the other side of the desert, 
 the Phoenicians were regarded as such adepts in the art of 
 husbandry that works on this subject were translated from 
 Phoenician into Greek. If our supposition is correct that 
 beth is intended to represent a " tent," this would indicate 
 nomadic life ; the form the letter assumes in Minoan might 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT 215 
 
 suggest rather a built house, but the Minoan form is 
 distinctly a secondary formation, whatever its actual date. 
 The third letter gimel, which seems to be a rough portraiture 
 of a camel's head and neck, carries a little further the 
 suggestion of the alphabet originating with a nomadic 
 people. The figure which Evans gives in the Scripta Minoa 
 represents a human leg bent at the knee. This, however, 
 proves only that to the Cretans, unfamiliar with the camel 
 as they were, the sign for gimel suggested a bent knee ; 
 much as are the initial letters to chapters of illustrated books 
 conjured into forming an illustration of what is coming. 
 The common meaning of daleth is a " door " ; from the 
 triangular shape it is clearly a tent door that was in the 
 mind of the artist. This also supports the nomadic origin 
 of the alphabet. 
 
 If Gesenius is right in considering the name of the fifth 
 letter, he, as connected with the exclamatory he, " behold," 
 and in his further conjecture that it is intended to represent 
 a " lattice " seen in profile, an upright with three sloping lines 
 2( represent with fair accuracy the slats of a lattice affixed 
 to the upright side of the window. Sir Arthur Evans in the 
 Scripta Minoa would connect it with heth, of which he would 
 regard it as a modification, and consequently would attach 
 to it the same meaning ; this, however, will be considered 
 later under that letter. Vav the sixth letter means a " nail," 
 a meaning borne out better by the corresponding letter in 
 the Minoan script {^Scripta Minoa, i., pi. vi.). This would 
 suggest wooden structures and carpenters to erect such ; 
 but the form it assumes on the " Moabite Stone " and in the 
 Siloam inscription \\ more naturally suggests a tent-peg, 
 the division at the top indicating the crutch of a small 
 branch, a thing very frequently used for this purpose. This 
 harmonises more with the nomadic idea. The seventh letter 
 zain has a name significant in Aramaic, Eastern and Western, 
 but not in Hebrew; it means a "weapon." In the Baal- 
 Lebanon inscription it is J which has the suggestion of a 
 feathered dart ; the other and later forms, as on the Moabite 
 Stone, appear to have resulted from emphasising the cross 
 lines. The form of this letter found in Crete points to 
 another weapon as that intended ; it seems to have been a 
 
216 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 double-headed battle-axe. {Scripta Minoa^ pi. v., this form 
 is also said to occur in South Semitic.) But as weapons were 
 used equally by nomads and husbandmen no evidence is 
 afforded as to which were the inventors. The eighth letter 
 heth is usually held as meaning a " fence " ; its form, two 
 upright parallel lines joined by two or three horizontal ones, 
 constant from the Ba'al-Lebanon inscription to the lettering 
 on the Maccabaean coins, and but slightly modified in the 
 Samaritan and in the script of Assouan, quite suits this. 
 The root is not found either in Hebrew or in Aramaic, but 
 in Arabic "1^^ occurs which means "to surround with a 
 fence." This points to enclosed fields and agricultural life : 
 there is no suggestion of a " zareba " of cut thorns in any 
 form the letter assumes. The ninth letter teth affords no 
 evidence, as there is great dubiety as to the object intended 
 to be represented.^ The letters which follow, j/oa^ and kaph, 
 the " closed fist " and the " open palm," are not distinctive. 
 This applies also to ain, pe, qoph, resk, and shin, as all 
 representing parts of the body. Lamed an " ox-goad " 
 suggests agriculture ; nun a " fish " and tzade a " fish-hook," 
 point to residence beside either the sea or a great river. In 
 neither case is the implied hieroglyphic very evident ; 
 Hommel suggests as above noted that nun t^ is derived 
 from the Babylonian ^ , but the line chosen does not seem 
 to be suggestive of the original form. The sharpness of the 
 angles at the turns in the figure precludes Sir Arthur Evans' 
 suggestion of a " serpent." Unless it is intended to be a 
 shorthand representation of a person fishing with a rod, the 
 early form of tzade \^ has no resemblance to a " fish-hook." 
 The complete lack of any maritime symbols as a " ship " or 
 an " oar " or a " sail " renders it more likely that the home of 
 the inventors of the alphabet is to be found on the banks of 
 the Tigris and the Euphrates, rather than on the seashore. 
 The recent discoveries in Crete have led to the general 
 acceptance of the opinion, strongly maintained by Sir 
 Arthur Evans, that the alphabet which we have denominated 
 Semitic really originated in the island kingdom of Minos. We 
 
 1 The Minoan form certainly represents a chariot wheel and the 
 Sinjirli shape is not unlike it, but the form on the Moabite Stone is less 
 like it. The meaning of the word is uncertain. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT 217 
 
 do not think the proof which he advances at all convincing. 
 The lack of any symbol, among those used as alphabetic, 
 having a connection with maritime matters, militates also 
 strongly against the Minoan claim to the origination of 
 the alphabet. As the Minoan language is as yet un- 
 known, there is no evidence that behind the signs were 
 significant words the initial sounds of which were indi- 
 cated. The picture of a house is unmistakable, but while 
 beth is a " house " or " tent " in Semitic, there is no proof that 
 the Minoans had a word for a house with the same initial.^ 
 The fact that one of the names is significant in Aramaic 
 though not in Hebrew points in the same direction. The 
 Phoenicians — the only rivals of the Aramaeans — spoke 
 Hebrew. The probability seems to be that it was one of 
 the tribes that conveyed the produce of Assyria to Egypt and 
 vice -versa, but who had their home in the high land over- 
 looking Mesopotamia, and pursued agriculture in the intervals 
 of trade, who invented the alphabet. It is to be observed 
 that even yet the vowels were not expressed, the ahevi letters 
 were only used for very exceptional circumstances when 
 the vowel sounds were emphatic. In Semitic languages 
 vowel sounds are somewhat indefinite, noticeably is this the 
 case in regard to Arabic. It seems as if they regarded the 
 vowels as a sort of indefinite sound-stuff modified by the 
 consonants. 
 
 The order of the letters in the Semitic alphabet is not 
 to be considered unimportant. The number of alphabetic 
 poems. Psalms and others, in the limited Hebrew litera- 
 ture show the attention that was directed to this. In 
 Ps. cxix. the alphabet is repeated in groups of eight verses, 
 each of which begins with one letter. Besides this Psalm, 
 there are seven other alphabets in the book of Psalms, 
 one of these requiring two Psalms for its completion, 
 Ps. ix. and x. Of these seven, only two are, in our present 
 text, perfectly regular, cxi. and cxii. ; these have this pecul- 
 iarity that each letter is followed only by half a verse. While 
 in our present text Ps. xxxvii. is defective as it wants the 
 letter y ain, in the Septuagint a verse occurs, omitted in the 
 Massoretic, which supplies the missing letter. The remain- 
 * This question is discussed more fully in Appendix III. 
 
218 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 ing four alphabets in the Psalms are defective. Ps. ix. and x. 
 appear to have been intended to form together one alphabet, 
 but in the first of these daleth is omitted, and in Ps. x. the 
 verses which follow the lamed verse on to the twelfth are 
 not alphabetic. It would be beside the present argument 
 to dwell on the other instances. The book of Lamentations 
 has four alphabets ; three of these are irregular by transpos- 
 ing ain and pe. The alphabet which occurs in Prov. xxxi. is 
 normal. When these poems were written the order of the 
 letters was fixed. As most of the Psalms written in this style 
 are attributed to David, the order of the alphabet must have 
 been regarded as very old. Whether Jeremiah wrote the 
 book of qinoth (Lamentations) or not, the book is certainly 
 old ; if not pre-exilic, it was written under the agony of the 
 exile ; though three out of the four alphabetic poems have the 
 slight irregularity above referred to, the evidence for the 
 common order furnished by the general agreement greatly 
 outweighs this. 
 
 Another sign of the fixity in the order of the letters of 
 the alphabet, and the importance attached to it, is the use 
 made of it in cryptic writing. For instance, there was athbash 
 in which the last letter of the alphabet was put for the first, 
 and the second last for the second, and so on through the 
 alphabet ; an example of this is to be found in Jer. xxv. 
 26 and li. 41, in which ^E'E' Sheshnk stands for ba Babel. 
 Another of these cryptic modes of writing is called album ; 
 in it the alphabet was divided into two, and the first letter of 
 the alphabet was put for the twelfth, the second for the 
 thirteenth, and vice versd; an example of this is supposed 
 by Rashi to be found in Is. vii. 6, " the son of Tabeal " 
 really standing for " the son of Remaliah," as the " son of 
 Tabeal " was an utterly unknown person. All these devices 
 implied that the order of the alphabet was fixed. The device 
 of giving numerical values to the several letters according to 
 their place in the alphabet implies the same fixity ; only the 
 date at which this came into use cannot be determined. The 
 Phoenicians had separate signs for numbers, as may be seen 
 on the Sarcophagus of Ashmunazar. On the Maccabaean 
 coins letters are regularly used for numerals. 
 
 Since the order of the alphabet had become fixed, and 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT 219 
 
 this order had come to be looked upon with something akin 
 to reverence, it might be expected that there would be some 
 principle behind it. There do seem to be at least traces 
 of a systematic arrangement. In the first four letters, N 3 J l, 
 there is first a weak letter, then a labial, then a guttural in 
 the English use of the word, and last a dental. Further, the 
 latter three are mutes. In the group of letters which follows 
 we have a similar succession, with this difference that in the 
 third place there is a sibilant. The letters of this group 
 would, were they English letters, be called aspirated, with 
 the exception of the last, D teth, which is the hardest of the 
 Unguals, or to use another nomenclature, the dentals. 
 Singularly enough, theta, the letter which in the Greek 
 alphabet occupies its place is an aspirated letter. Another 
 peculiarity which suggests itself is that the sibilant t zain 
 has among sibilants the flat sound associated with mutes. 
 A possible reason for excluding zain from the first group 
 was that if it occupied the third place it made with beth the 
 ill-omened word fa buz, "contempt," and the equally ill- 
 omened word T3 baz, " a prey." Again, the aspirated sibilant 
 ^ shin, if placed in the third place among the aspirates, made 
 with the following letters the ill-omened DnE' shahat, " to slay." 
 
 This might be the reason why the first group of letters has 
 no sibilant, and why shin is relegated to the end of the 
 alphabet. As a last group we have the weak letter ain — in 
 Samaritan it is a "servile" letter — ihs. pe a labial, next tzade 
 a sibilant, qoph a guttural, and last of all tau a dental. The 
 arrangement followed in the liquid group may have been the 
 result of intrusion from another alphabet which began 
 with the liquids. The Romans seem to have originally had 
 such an alphabet, and hence called the letters elementa. The 
 letter n resh was probably the last to be added to the list of 
 letters. The Egyptians made no distinction between it and /. 
 The Japanese and the Chinese are under the same disability 
 at the present time. The intrusion of the elementa appears 
 to have wrought disorder in the process of the symmetrical 
 evolution of the alphabet, so far as the middle portion of it 
 is concerned. It is not unlikely that the primitive form of 
 the alphabet had been long enough known for the phrase 
 
220 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 to come into use, which made aleph and tau stand for the 
 beginning and end of anything. If this were so, there 
 would be a reason why shin when displaced, and resh when 
 received into the alphabet, should neither of them be placed 
 after tau. 
 
 This is to be taken merely as an attempt to investigate 
 the principles that might have underlain the order of the 
 letters in the Semitic alphabet. It is impossible to say when 
 the process was completed. If the correctness of the tradition 
 which attributes to David the majority of the alphabetic 
 Psalms may be assumed, then in his days the alphabet had 
 already long attained its present fixed order. In that case, 
 the process of arranging and rearranging must have taken 
 place in the preceding centuries. Not impossibly these 
 alterations might in some part have been the work of 
 the Phoenicians, who would be under the necessity of 
 recording their transactions in a form in which the terms 
 of them might readily be recalled. If there actually was 
 an elementary alphabet used by any of the nations of the 
 Mediterranean basin, they would be the most likely to come 
 into contact with it. 
 
 As we have already indicated, the Semitic alphabet 
 underwent several modifications in the course of its long 
 history. Of the time when these changes took place, or the 
 place where they did so, there is no indication. The earliest 
 inscriptions give the impression that they stand at the end 
 of a long process. Within the period of which we have 
 inscriptions a process of modification may be traced. The 
 most ancient specimens of this script have been incised 
 on stone or scratched on metal ; the Sinjirli inscriptions, 
 however, are exceptions, they are carved in relief. The 
 incising tends to emphasize the sharpness of the angles. 
 These angles are not so sharp in Sinjirli, as the chisel in 
 leaving the letters in relief would be liable to remove the 
 points of the angles. Even when incised the letters had 
 a tendency to become curved ; this may be seen by com- 
 paring the lamed on the Ba'al-Lebanon fragment with the 
 same letter in the Siloam inscription. There was thus 
 probably, alongside of the monumental writings, engrossing 
 with reed or stylus on some less recalcitrant material than 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT 221 
 
 rock or stone. This angular script lasted till close upon 
 the time of Alexander the Great. The latest extant 
 example of this script is the inscription on the sarcophagus 
 of Ashmunazar which is generally dated at approximately 
 400 B.C. 
 
 The earliest inscription as yet known which has been 
 preserved, has been scratched on the fragments of a bronze 
 bowl found in Cyprus. It has been dedicated to a deity 
 called Ba'al-Lebanon by one who denominates himself 
 the "servant of Hiram King of the Sidonians." If we 
 may identify this Hiram with the friend of Solomon the date 
 of the inscription would be about 950 B.C.^ The next 
 important inscription is that on the stele of Mesha, King 
 of Moab. As Mesha was the younger contemporary of 
 Ahab, the date of his inscription may be set down as 
 approximately 850 B.c. The excavations that took place 
 in the foundations of Ahab's palace have brought to light 
 jar handles and ostraka, with inscriptions in the same script. 
 The series of inscriptions found in Sinjirli extend over 
 a considerable period ; but as Panammu, who writes the 
 most important of them, describes himself as the servant 
 of Tiglath-Pileser, the probable date of his inscription is 
 a hundred years later than that of Mesha, about 750 B.C. 
 The last inscription to which reference may be made in 
 this connection is that found in the conduit in Siloam. 
 As the conduit in which it was found had been made by the 
 order of Hezekiah under fear of the invasion of Sennacherib, 
 its date can be pretty definitely assigned to 700 B.C. 
 
 A comparison of the alphabets (p. 222) shows an increas- 
 ing tendency to prefer curved lines to straight ones, and to 
 soften sharp angles into curves. This means the growing 
 influence of scribal writing on the script of the epigraphist. 
 Another symptom of the same influence is the preference for 
 a continuous line over a broken one. These tendencies 
 
 1 One of the leaders, along with Hezekiah, of the rebellion against 
 Sennacherib, was Lull of Tyre, "king of the Sidonians" (Winckler, 
 Babylonia and Assyria, p. 256, Eng. Trans.). It is evident then that a 
 " King of Tyre " might at the same time be " King of the Sidonians " — 
 when Tyre held the hegemony among Phoenician cities, the Tyrian 
 king would be King of the Sidonians. 
 
222 
 
 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 1 
 
 f« 
 
 e 
 « 
 
 ■c 
 
 i 
 
 0) 
 
 E 
 
 (8 
 
 z. 
 
 1 
 
 X 
 
 c 
 o 
 
 c 
 
 1 
 
 o 
 
 m 
 
 o 
 
 1 
 
 <a 
 o 
 
 s 
 
 o 
 
 CO 
 
 ID 
 o 
 
 E 
 
 s 
 
 o 
 
 oo 
 
 § 
 
 C 
 
 < 
 
 ID 
 
 C 
 
 E 
 < 
 
 o 
 
 m 
 § 
 
 C 
 OS 
 
 s 
 
 C 
 CO 
 
 E 
 
 < 
 
 i 
 1 
 
 m 
 
 X 
 
 B 
 
 a 
 
 c 
 
 n 
 
 E 
 
 J? 
 
 Alaf 
 
 Aleph 
 
 ^ 
 
 -F 
 
 Af^ 
 
 ><\V 
 
 2^ 
 
 JC' 
 
 /v 
 
 « 
 
 /«' 
 
 Bit 
 
 Beth 
 
 ^ 
 
 5 
 
 a 
 
 J7:?:5 
 
 9 
 
 9 
 
 a 
 
 3 
 
 > 
 
 Gaman 
 
 Gunel 
 
 — 
 
 -1 
 
 '\ 
 
 A -^ 
 
 A 
 
 -w 
 
 1 
 
 J 
 
 ^ 
 
 Dalath 
 
 Daleth 
 
 <I 
 
 4 
 
 4 
 
 1 »r 
 
 ^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 T 
 
 <T 
 
 I 
 
 He 
 
 -^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 '3^^ 
 
 /A'T*-^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 -^iv 
 
 n 
 
 ^ 
 
 Bar 
 
 Vav 
 
 t 
 
 Y 
 
 1 
 
 7 ; 
 
 r 
 
 t 
 
 'K 
 
 1 
 
 f 
 
 Zen 
 
 Zain 
 
 s 
 
 :*: 
 
 ; ( 
 
 -v 
 
 
 '^ 
 
 T 
 
 ^ 
 
 It 
 
 Heth 
 
 ^ 
 
 M 
 
 ^s 
 
 nr> 
 
 "^t 
 
 8 
 
 ^ 
 
 n 
 
 Pfs 
 
 Tit 
 
 feth 
 
 
 
 ® 
 
 
 fe>6 
 
 €> 
 
 
 ^' 
 
 D 
 
 <3 
 
 Yud 
 
 Yodh 
 
 I 
 
 ^- 
 
 %^ 
 
 A A * 
 
 trf 
 
 ? 
 
 -77 
 
 ^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 Kaf 
 
 Kaph 
 
 H 
 
 ^^ 
 
 J 
 
 77;j 
 
 y 
 
 / 
 
 ;3 
 
 3-1 
 
 r 
 
 Labad 
 
 Lamed 
 
 L 
 
 ^ 
 
 / 
 
 a^ 
 
 4 
 
 u 
 
 Z 
 
 -V 
 
 < 
 
 Mim 
 
 Mem 
 
 K^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 7 
 
 !>j)^ 
 
 V 
 
 D 
 
 rj 
 
 00 
 
 r 
 
 Nun 
 
 Nun 
 
 h 
 
 ; 
 
 J 
 
 );j> 
 
 ^ 
 
 ) 
 
 
 M 
 
 ^ 
 
 Simcat 
 
 Samech 
 
 ^ 
 
 w 
 
 
 ^3 
 
 y 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 D 
 
 ^ 
 
 In 
 
 Ain 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 V V V 
 
 o 
 
 V 
 
 c 
 
 :/ 
 
 
 
 Fi 
 
 Pe 
 
 (7> 
 
 7 
 
 J 
 
 V:? 
 
 7 
 
 
 2 
 
 5^ 
 
 > 
 
 T^ade 
 
 Tjadi 
 
 r 
 
 ^t- 
 
 ^*7 
 
 vr 
 
 ^ 
 
 -^ 
 
 777 
 
 ^r 
 
 r^ 
 
 Kof 
 
 Koph 
 
 </^ 
 
 ? 
 
 ? 
 
 r;»/> 
 
 y 
 
 7 
 
 T 
 
 ? 
 
 Y 
 
 Rish 
 
 Resh 
 
 <? 
 
 i 
 
 '^ 
 
 •^v-y 
 
 *\ 
 
 <1 
 
 ^ 
 
 -^' 
 
 "^ 
 
 Shin 
 
 Shin 
 
 w 
 
 w 
 
 wvc 
 
 v v 
 
 (o^ 
 
 w 
 
 Ul 
 
 ^ 
 
 *0*^ 
 
 Taf 
 
 Tav 
 
 + 
 
 X 
 
 X 
 
 A/»A 
 
 h 
 
 X 
 
 iV 
 
 ;^ 
 
 /V 
 
 Table Showing Script of Semitic Languages. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT 223 
 
 may be clearly seen if the beth of the Ba'al-Lebanon 
 inscription, or that on the stone of Mesha be compared 
 with examples of that letter in the inscription on the sarco- 
 phagus of Ashmunazar. In the earlier examples the letter 
 is built up of four straight lines ; but in the inscriptions 
 on the sarcophagi of Ashmunazar and of his father Tabnit, 
 it is formed of one curved line. The letter daleth exhibits 
 the same tendency, though in a less degree. The preference 
 of the scribe for continuous lines over broken ones may 
 be seen in the way the letter qoph varies from a circle 
 with a line through it, as it appears in the Ba'al-Lebanon 
 inscription, to the circular curve ending in a straight 
 line found in that of Siloam, and finally to the yet more 
 dashing curve by which the letter is delineated on the sarco- 
 phagi of Sidon. One letter, mem, does not exhibit this 
 progress towards a form which admitted of more rapid 
 writing ; its last form implies the use of more strokes 
 than did the earlier. It will be observed that the forms 
 which some of the letters assume in the Siloam inscription 
 differ much from those which these letters have in other nearly 
 contemporary inscriptions, aleph, gimel, vav, and tzade being 
 marked instances. This may be due to local influences ; 
 the mem assimilates somewhat to the Sidonian form. Both 
 aleph and betk seem to be to some extent anticipations 
 of the later forms of the Maccabsean coins and the Samaritan 
 inscriptions. The Ashmunazar inscription shows several 
 peculiarities, which it may be observed are also to be found 
 in the slightly earlier inscription on the sarcophagus of 
 Tabnit. The gimel has a shape which has none of the 
 suggestion so obvious in Mesha's inscription, of the head and 
 neck of a camel, and becomes almost identical in form with 
 the Greek lambda ; zain has no longer any resemblance to a 
 dart as in the Ba'al-Lebanon inscription, as little to the 
 Minoan double battle-axe, but has become very like the 
 Greek zeta. The use oi zain to indicate the ends of sentences 
 and occasionally of words is to be noted ; this is a peculiarity 
 found on several Sidonian inscriptions as on that of Jeho- 
 melek. King of Gebal. The most noticeable change is to be 
 seen in the letter yodh, which has assumed a shape closely 
 akin to that met with in Samaritan MSS. ; sometimes it is 
 
224 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 almost exactly like the letter shin turned upside down. The 
 shape oisamech is also peculiar, but its genesis from the form 
 earlier prevalent is easily intelligible, the desire to lighten 
 the labour of writing by making the line continuous. The 
 most remarkable variation is to be found in the letter tau. 
 Instead of the simple cross as seen on the Moabite Stone and 
 in the Siloam inscription, and as figured by Evans in the 
 Scripta Minoa, the letter in most of the Phcenician 
 inscriptions is formed of an upright line sloping slightly 
 to the right at the top ; near the top on the right of the 
 upright there is a little hook turning downwards. A similar 
 form is found on a weight figured in Lidzbarski {Nord. Sem. 
 Epig. Tfl., xxvi. i) brought from Asia Minor and dated by 
 him fifth century B.C. It is to be observed that the lamed in 
 the Phoenician shows a marked tendency towards the shape 
 it assumed in the Samaritan. The Sidonian script is thus 
 a preparation for that of the Maccabaeans and the 
 Samaritans. 
 
 After the inscription on the sarcophagus of Ashmunazar, 
 the next specimens of Hebrew script are the inscriptions on 
 the MaccabjEan coins. The earliest of these was struck in 
 the pontificate of Simon, the last survivor of the sons of 
 Mattathias. More than a quarter of a millennium separates 
 the date of Ashmunazar from that of Simon the Maccabee ; 
 during the interval a complete change has passed over the 
 ^ character of Hebrew writing. The script of the Maccabaeans, 
 for inscriptions on coins, remained for the most part un- 
 changed to the time of Bar-Cochba. To the casual observer 
 the Maccabaean resembles that to be found in the older 
 Samaritan MSS. This likeness is confirmed by a circum- 
 stance related by Moses ben Nahman (1194) of himself; he 
 found in Akka a coin with an inscription which he could not 
 read himself, but which he got some Samaritans resident 
 there to read for him. At the same time a comparison 
 between the two scripts shows that though they are very 
 like they are by no means identical. When both are com- 
 pared with the later Sidonian it is seen that while in some 
 points the Maccabaean differs less from the later Phoenician 
 than does the Samaritan, in some other points the re- 
 semblance between the Samaritan and the later Phoenician 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT 225 
 
 is greater. That there should be very considerable differ- 
 ence is only to be expected ; from Ashmunazar to the earliest 
 Maccabaean coins is, as has just been said, an interval of more " 
 than two centuries and a half; from the latest coins of Bar- 
 Cochba to the earliest Samaritan inscription is a period at 
 least as long ; from that to the earliest manuscript of un- 
 questioned date is probably twice or thrice as long a space 
 of time. Though on the Jewish coins the forms of most of 
 the letters remain unchanged from the accession of Simon 
 to the death of Bar-Cochba, a period of 270 years, yet one 
 or two of the letters have been modified, notably gzj he^ 
 ^ ^ vav, z \ tzade, and pY qoph, as may be seen on the table. 
 
 If the script of the earlier of the Samaritan codices now 
 to be found in the libraries of Europe and America is com- 
 pared with that of the few Samaritan inscriptions extant, it 
 will be found that, considering the difference between writing 
 with a reed on parchment or paper, and engraving with a 
 chisel on a limestone slab, the characters are practically 
 identical ; yet the period from the engraving of the one to 
 the writing of the other was, as stated above, nearly three- 
 quarters of a millennium. This fixity of script is a 
 phenomenon to be observed. Within the same time the 
 Jewish writing of Hebrew had evolved the square character, 
 which is found in our Hebrew Bibles, the Rabbinic or Rashi 
 character, and still later, the cursive script. Why the 
 Samaritans selected the particular script they have, and 
 conserved that with such tenacity is difficult to explain. It 
 has to be admitted that within the last century a deteriora- 
 tion has set in, as may be seen on the table in the second 
 column of Samaritan. 
 
 As already remarked, the present Samaritan script was 
 the result of evolution. It has been noted that it has a 
 double affinity, to the later Sidonian on the one hand, and 
 on the other to the Maccabaean. When looked at more 
 closely it is seen that in regard to nine letters there is 
 greater resemblance on the part of the Samaritan to the 
 Maccabaean. In the case of six of these, aleph, betk, daleth, 
 unem, nun, and tau, the resemblarjce is obvious and applies to 
 the whole Maccabaean period ; in regard to other three, gimel, 
 £aph, lamed, the resemblance is only to the script on the later 
 
 P 
 
226 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 coins. In the case of four letters the Samaritan form is more 
 akin to that on the Sidonian sarcophagi, that is, he, yodh, heth, 
 qopk ; of these the most striking is yodh, which in the Mac- 
 cabsean is like the he of the Samaritan script, with the lower 
 bar turned to the right instead of to the left, thus resembling 
 the form it has on the Moabite Stone. In the Samaritan as 
 in the Sidonian the yodh is, so to say, thrown on its face. 
 The heth of the Maccabaean coins closely resembles the same 
 letter on the Siloam inscription. The qoph of Samaritan 
 inscriptions and manuscripts is formed in the same way as 
 that on the Sidonian sarcophagi ; while that on the Mac- 
 cabaean coins has quite a different genesis. The upright 
 shape of the Maccabaean letter makes it more akin to the 
 earlier forms, though most of them have a cursive look awant- 
 ing in the Maccabaean. With regard to resh, the Maccabaean 
 coins figure that letter occasionally, with a slight inclination 
 to the left of the foot of the upright as if a line were starting 
 from thence ; in the Samaritan MSS. this is clearly drawn, 
 but it does not appear in the epigraphic form of the letter. 
 While the shin of the Samaritan inscriptions resembles 
 closely that on the Ashmunazar sarcophagus, the manuscript 
 form differs from it considerably. There are seven letters 
 whose form is peculiar to the Samaritans : vav, zain, teth, 
 samech, ain,pe, tzade. In the case of four of these there are 
 no Maccabaean examples extant, viz., zain, teth, samech, and 
 pe ; in regard to these it may well have been that, as in the 
 case of the nine letters first mentioned, the resemblance 
 between them and the Samaritan was also great. One point 
 may be noted : the form of vav found on the Samaritan 
 inscriptions must have been that conveyed by the Sidonians 
 to Greece, as may be seen from the shape of the digamma, 
 which is perpetuated in our own letter F. 
 
 It is clear from the above comparison that the Samaritan 
 script closely resembled that used by the Jews in the time of 
 the Maccabees, and that both scripts differed considerably 
 from the earlier angular script found all over South-western 
 Asia. While the Jewish scribes modified the script which 
 they used, influenced possibly by their intercourse with Egypt, 
 until at length the square character resulted with which all 
 are familiar, the Samaritans retained the. more epigraphic 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT 227 
 
 style which had been common at the time of the Maccabsean 
 struggle. There must have been some reason which rendered 
 this form of the Semitic script in a manner sacrosanct to 
 them. It must have been some occurrence which associated 
 a document written in that script, presumably a copy of the 
 Divine Torah, with a crisis in their religious history. As the 
 script of the Maccabsean coins underwent some changes, 
 slight but definite, it may be possible to find some indication 
 of the approximate date when the manuscript was written 
 which has dominated the later Samaritan script. In com- 
 paring the earlier and later forms of the letters on the Mac- 
 cabsean coins it will be seen that the most striking change is 
 in the letter he. On the coins of Simon the Maccabee the 
 letter assumes a form like a Roman E reversed — a form 
 between that on the Sidonian sarcophagi, and that on the 
 Samaritan inscriptions. With the coins of John Hyrcanus 
 a markedly different form appears, one that is in a sense a 
 precursor of the coming square character. Another letter in 
 which there is a difference of earlier and later is vav. A 
 form figured in Madden {Hist. Jew. Coinage, ^^. 43,44) has an 
 upright, curving a little to the left at the top, and about the 
 middle a line passing through the upright ; the coins on which 
 this form appears are dated first, second, and third years of 
 Simon. This shape is closely akin to what is to be found in 
 Samaritan MSS. and still more to the epigraphic form. With 
 Simon's fourth year of coinage another shape appears, a 
 perpendicular surmounted by the letter s. As has been 
 remarked, it must have been from a form cognate to the first 
 of these that the Greek digamma and our Roman F have 
 sprung. The \Q.t\.^x yodh on the Simonian coins resembles at 
 once the shape that letter has on the Sidonian sarcophagi 
 and that on the Samaritan inscriptions. The coins of John 
 Hyrcanus show that letter in a form not unlike our z ; later 
 coins show it like that on the Moabite Stone. This points to 
 the script which has become consecrated among the Samari- 
 tans as dating from the earlier portion of the pontificate of 
 Simon the Maccabee. This would be explained if a copy of 
 the Torah written in that script had been preserved, in a 
 way so marvellous that it seemed miraculous, in the temple 
 of Mount Gerizim, during one of the numerous occasions in 
 
228 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 which that temple had been burned. The most celebrated 
 of these was that, when John Hyrcanus, as related by Josephus, 
 conquered Samaria, destroyed the city, conquered Shechem 
 (Nablus), and burned the temple on Mount Gerizim "two 
 hundred years after it was built." Such manuscripts as were 
 preserved in the temple would not, at least most of them, 
 have been recently penned. Hence, if one MS. was saved 
 from the conflagration, that it should have been written 
 during the pontificate of Simon or even earlier is by no means 
 improbable. This, however, is not to say that the present 
 Nablus Roll is the MS. so saved. 
 
 The Jews admit the Samaritan script to be older than the 
 Ashurith which they now use. The Talmudic account of this 
 {^San., pp. 2 1 3, 22fl) is as follows : " The law was first given to 
 Israel in the ^Ibri character and the holy tongue ; again it was 
 given in Ashurith writing and the Syrian tongue. The Israel- 
 ites chose the Ashurith writing and the holy tongue, and left 
 to the Hediotce the 'Ibri writing and the Syrian tongue. Who 
 are the Hediota ? Rabbi Chasda says ' the Cuthzeans ' (the 
 Samaritans)." It is to be observed that the Talmudists 
 made no distinction between the script of Samaria and that 
 yet earlier found on the Moabite Stone. It is a proof of the 
 extreme conservatism of the Samaritans that for so many 
 centuries they have not altered their mode of writing. 
 Although the Jews changed their script repeatedly the, 
 Samaritans did not imitate them. The Samaritans claimed 
 to have worshipped JHWH from the days of Esarhaddon, 
 and their claim was not disallowed ; they must have had 
 some ritual and liturgy ; is it likely that they, so conservative 
 in regard to the writing used in the Torah, would change all 
 that at the bidding of a priestly scribe who refused even to 
 have their assistance in rebuilding the temple, and regarded 
 intermarriage with them as equivalent to marriage with 
 heathen ? At the same time it must be remembered that 
 this Jewish tradition concerning the date of the introduction 
 of the square character is certainly incorrect. The square 
 character was not introduced for more than half a millennium 
 after Ezra. 
 
 But besides the characters there are other peculiarities of 
 Samaritan writing. In Hebrew inscriptions of the age of 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT 229 
 
 the Antonines the writing is continuous, as in the Bni Hezir 
 inscription and in that at Kefr Bir'im ; there is nothing to 
 mark the termination of a word or sentence. In earher 
 specimens, as in the Mesha inscription, that in Siloam, and 
 those in Sinjirli, a dot is inserted between each word. This 
 peculiarity is to be observed in all Samaritan MSS. and also 
 in the inscriptions ; in the latter it is a colon that frequently 
 appears rather than a period. The Samaritans thus seem 
 to have perpetuated an ancient mode of separating words 
 which had been abandoned by the Jews. Sentences in 
 Samaritan MSS. are marked off by colons, and the end of 
 paragraphs is shown by three or four dots reinforced by a 
 line, sometimes placed horizontally, sometimes standing 
 perpendicularly. 
 
 Another peculiarity of Samaritan writing, which points 
 to development on lines independent of the Jews, is the 
 way Samaritan scribes took to make the lines of writing fit 
 exactly over each other. In the inscription of Mesha, King 
 of Moab, the lines, except at the circular top, terminate 
 approximately over each other ; when, however, the line 
 ends in the middle of a word, as happens in regard to the 
 very first line of that inscription, the word is completed in 
 the next, irrespective of syllables. In more recent Hebrew 
 MSS. the device of literce dilatabiles, letters that might be 
 elongated, was used to fill up the line to the margin in such 
 a way that there should be no words left unfinished to be 
 continued in the line following. The way the Samaritan 
 scribes attained the same end was different : they left a 
 space, larger or smaller as might be needed, before the 
 margin was reached, and passing over this space combined 
 the last two, or sometimes the last three, letters of the last 
 word into a group close up to the margin. When the end 
 of a paragraph was reached no attempt was made to fill up 
 the line; an arrangement of dots and lines indicates that 
 it has terminated. In most manuscripts there is at the end 
 a separate paragraph generally short, in which the scribe 
 informs the reader of his identity, when and where he wrote. 
 In this, too, the Samaritan scribes had a method of their own. 
 A page or two before the end of the manuscript the column 
 was split for the breadth of rather more than a letter ; this 
 
230 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 space was ruled off by lines drawn with a stylus ; one or 
 two letters of a word may be on one side of this space and 
 the rest of it on the other. When the eye is carried 
 down the column every now and then a letter is intruded 
 into the space otherwise left blank. It is soon observed 
 that these letters are formed into groups, marked off by a 
 tiny line. It is further noticed that these groups form words, 
 and if read continuously the words join into a sentence or 
 sentences. These sentences convey the information usually 
 found in a colophon, and constitute what is technically called 
 the tarikh ; it contains the name of the scribe, it may be 
 also the name of him at whose instance the manuscript has 
 been written, the place where and the date when it was 
 penned ; the latter stated according to the years " of the rule 
 of the children of Ishmael," that is to say, "el Hegira." 
 There are several other peculiarities of writing; as they 
 have no vowel signs, words might sometimes be ambiguous, 
 thus !>« may mean "God" or "not," according as it is 
 vocalised ; so when it means " God " a line is placed over 
 it. This also is done when a word is shortened. 
 
 The most ancient form of books appears to have been 
 rolls. In Nablus there are several rolls of the Torah, 
 including the one which the Samaritans claim to have been 
 written by Abishua, the great-grandson of Aaron. The 
 numerous manuscripts in Europe and America are all 
 codices or made up in book form. They are made of 
 vellum, parchment, or paper. One thing the Samaritan 
 scribes are very particular about in all these codices is 
 that the writing should begin on the right-hand page. In 
 this way there is always a blank page to the outside. The 
 most of the codices are in folio, but not a few are in quarto ; 
 the famous copy in Paris, which Pietro della Valle brought 
 to Europe, and by it renewed the knowledge of the 
 Samaritan Pentateuch, is a quarto. 
 
 , Most of the codices are written in parallel columns, two 
 columns on the page. Generally the one column contains 
 the Hebrew text while the other has the Samaritan Aramaic 
 Targum ; sometimes instead of the Aramaic there is the 
 Arabic version. In one manuscript there are three columns 
 on the page, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. It ought to be 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT 231 
 
 noted that almost in every case, even in the case of the 
 interpretation being in Arabic, the character used is 
 Samaritan. 
 
 After considering the mode of writing it is needful to 
 attend for a little to the mode of reading ; the letters written 
 may be the same but may be very differently pronounced. 
 This possibility is made obvious when one hears a passage 
 of classic Greek read first by an English scholar and then by 
 a modern Greek. In such a case it will be seen that not 
 merely are the vowels differently pronounced, which is the 
 difference between the Latin of Scotland and that of England, 
 but that many of the consonants, as pronounced by the one, 
 would be unintelligible to the other. The primary source of 
 this difference was the pronunciation of the letters of the 
 Greek alphabet adopted by Erasmus, whose teaching 
 England received in this matter, the vocalic differences 
 being caused by the change in vowel values in England 
 itself. The state of matters in Palestine, when Ezra arrived 
 there from Persia, was in regard to Hebrew not unlike that 
 in Europe in regard to Greek at the time of the Revival of 
 Letters. Hebrew had become practically a dead language, it 
 had ceased to be the language ordinarily spoken ; Aramaic 
 had dispossessed it. If the Samaritans had not the Torah till 
 it was brought them by Manasseh, in Ezra's recension, they 
 would have no traditional mode of reading Hebrew. If they 
 received the Torah from Ezra through Manasseh they would 
 also have received the Jewish mode of reading it. With 
 Semitic conservatism they might have been expected to 
 have perpetuated this. With the Jews the consonantal pro- 
 nunciation of Hebrew is the same whether the Jews who 
 speak it are Russian or Spanish. From this it may be 
 deduced that the primitive sounds of all the consonants 
 have been fairly well preserved. It might be thought that 
 Origen's transliteration, where that has been preserved, might 
 have shown how Hebrew was pronounced in his day ; but the 
 uncertainty as to the way in which Greek was then pronounced 
 renders this less available. The transliteration of proper 
 names gives some information ; it is obvious from these that 
 the Hebrew of that time was not wholly devoid of gutturals ; 
 such names as 'Axad/3, " Ahab," and 'Oxv^la^, " Ahaziah," 
 
232 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 prove this. If it may be presumed that the modern Greek 
 pronunciation of gamma was that in use in Alexandria at 
 the time when the Septuaginfwas translated ; we learn that 
 ain in Hebrew had, like the same letter in Arabic, a double 
 pronunciation, consequently sometimes represented by the 
 simple vowel and sometimes by gamma ; compare DiDV A/Mw?, 
 " Amos," and my Va^a, " Gaza" ; in Arabic the first is am 
 the second ghain. It is clear that Hebrew as pronounced 
 by the Jews had the gutturals. 
 
 One marked peculiarity of the way in which the 
 Samaritans pronounce Hebrew is that they drop all the 
 gutturals, or which is the same thing, pronounce them all as 
 aleph. This peculiarity explains not a few of the variations 
 of the Samaritan recension of the Pentateuch from the 
 Massoretic- A singular result of this may be observed ; not 
 a few of the Samaritan alphabetic poems begin not with 
 aleph but with ain. Benjamin of Tudela, as mentioned in an 
 earlier chapter, found that in his day they had the same 
 disability. This Samaritan peculiarity is a thing which 
 itself needs an explanation. Reference has been made to 
 the ordinary English pronunciation of Latin ; the explanation 
 of that is simple, all the vowel and consonantal sounds are 
 harmonised to English usage. The same thing applies 
 mutatis mutandis to the German way of pronouncing Latin. 
 In every case the tendency is to assimilate the pronunciation 
 of the dead language to that of the living language of the 
 people. But in the present case the language of the people 
 is Arabic, a language which is even richer in gutturals than 
 Hebrew. The Samaritan pronunciation of Hebrew so far 
 from being assimilated to Arabic is in direct and absolute 
 contrast to it. The fact that Arabic is a language closely 
 cognate with Hebrew makes this resistance to a natural 
 tendency all the more striking. It is only to be explained 
 by the conservatism that is connected, especially in the 
 East, with everything related to religion or worship. Since 
 the Samaritans neither received nor perpetuated the Jewish 
 pronunciation of Hebrew, they must themselves have had a 
 customary pronunciation of that language. This would seem 
 to imply that they had the Torah before the days of Ezra. 
 
 There is a fact which has a bearing on this subject. The 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT 233 
 
 Assyrians and Babylonians spoke a North-Senaitic language, 
 cognate to Hebrew ; they, like the Samaritans, assimilated 
 most of their gutturals to aleph. It has been sometimes 
 asserted that all the gutturals were so assimilated ; but this 
 was not the case, for they had the strong guttural n heth, 
 as proved by such names as Sennacherib (Eavaxdpt^os, 
 Herod, ii. 141)^; the Greek transliteration here shows that 
 the guttural was pronounced. Had the statement been 
 absolute it might have been maintained, that this assimila- 
 tion of the gutturals with alepk by the Samaritans was merely 
 the perpetuation in Palestine by the colonists of the mode of 
 speech which they had used in their own original land, and 
 which they applied to the reading of Hebrew. But not only 
 is it not accurate as to Assyrian, the colonists spoke not 
 the monumental Assyrian but Aramaic, which retained 
 the gutturals. 
 
 Another fact, however, has to be noted. The language 
 of Phoenicia was Hebrew : the tradition is generally admitted 
 to be correct that the Phoenicians gave Greece the alphabet. 
 It is clear that when they conveyed it to Greece they had 
 ceased to pronounce the gutturals. As the Phoenician 
 alphabet had no signs for the vowels and had no sounds 
 for four of their signs, the Greeks put vowels into all these 
 vacant places ; so alepk became o, a, he became e (short e), 
 heth became r\ (long e), and ain became o (short 0). It was 
 not that the Greeks were without gutturals in their speech ; 
 they had to add to the Kadmean alphabet four supple- 
 mentary letters, one of which was x <^hh equivalent to heth of 
 the Semitic alphabet. Another of the gutturals they repre- 
 sented by the rough breathing. To some extent gamma 
 later had a sound akin to ain; this, however, was a later 
 development of Hellenic phonetics. As the Phoenician 
 alphabet is found in the Minoan remains in Crete (Scripta 
 Mima, pp. 88, 89), it must have been conveyed thither 
 not later than 1400 B.C. (Leaf, Homer and History, p. 39), 
 centuries before the building of Solomon's Temple. The 
 introduction of this fashion of assimilating the gutturals 
 to aleph, akin to the English inability to pronounce ch in 
 " loch," might set in with the affinity made by the House of 
 ' The name appears in the Septuagint as 7:evvaxvpl'fi- 
 
234 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Omri with the royal family of Tyre. This would explain 
 how it was that while the North dropped the gutturals 
 the Southern tribes retained them. Hence it would follow 
 that, at all events from the time of Ahab, the Israelites of 
 the North read Hebrew in a way not unlike that in which 
 the Samaritans now do, and therefore would read the Torah 
 so, if they had it. This would be perpetuated if the priests 
 sent by Esarhaddon brought the Torah with them. If the 
 Samaritans got the Sacred Law from Jerusalem in Hebrew — 
 a language which had ceased to be spoken — why did they 
 not adopt the Jewish mode of reading it? Manasseh would 
 read the Law as the Jews did. The Galilaeans seem to have 
 had the same peculiarity as had the Samaritans, hence 
 Peter's speech betrayed him in the court of the High 
 Priest's house. 
 
 In regard also to the begadhkephath letters, those that 
 were regarded as aspirated unless they had the daghesh lene, 
 the Samaritans, now at any rate, are subject to a certain 
 amount of disability. Of these letters they only aspirate 
 beth and pe ; the others they always pronounce as if 
 dagheshed. The Jews of the time when the Septuagint was 
 translated appear to have had no difficulty in regard to 
 the aspiration of the " dentals." In fact they aspirated them 
 more frequently than they ought to have done, if the extant 
 rules are to be regarded as then binding ; not only have we 
 " Japheth " but also " Thogarma." There is no distinct indi- 
 cation of the date at which this inability began, hence' it is 
 not of so great importance. It may be noted that all foreign 
 Jews labour under the same disability, even those in Damascus. 
 This may be largely due to their surroundings in the case of 
 Jews in Teutonic or Romance countries. It has, however, 
 little bearing on the present argument. 
 
 Petermann in his valuable Hebrcsische Formenlehre nach 
 der Aussprache der heutigen Samaritaner (p. 4) says : " Earlier 
 the Samaritans had several books in which the rules for 
 reading Hebrew were set down ; but according to the 
 assurance of the High Priest these have been lost. Now 
 there are only fragments of a book entitled Qanun ibn Dartha 
 f'lmaqra, ' Qanun son of Dartha on reading,' and fragments 
 of a commentary on it." Dr Petermann at the conclusion of 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SAMARITAN SCRIPT 235 
 
 the book above referred to has given a transliteration of 
 Genesis as it is read by the Samaritans at the present time. 
 We subjoin the first five verses of the first chapter of 
 Genesis : — 
 
 (i) Barashet bara eluwem it ashshamhn wit aaretz. (2) 
 Waaretz ayata t^u uUu waashek al fani t'Am urA eluwem 
 amra'efat al fani ammim ; (3) uydumer eluwem yai or uyai 
 or ; (4) uyere eluwem it a' or kitov, uyebdel eluwem bin cUdr ubin 
 aashek ; (s) uyiqra eluwem la' or ydm ulaashek qara lila uyai 
 erev uyai beqarydm aad. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF THE SAMARITANS 
 
 It is generally recognised that the language of a people reveals 
 much of its history ; thus Dr Max Miiller saw the pastoral 
 life of our Aryan ancestors proved by the fact that the root 
 from which the words for " money," " wealth " in so many 
 tongues springs, is ultimately connected with cattle, as 
 pecunia from pecu, "cattle," and portrays the idyllic scene 
 of the primitive household in. which the "daughter" 
 iduhitar) is the milkmaid, and the "brother" (brahtar) is 
 ready to help. Not merely is there revealed the primitive 
 condition of society in which a language arose, but also 
 something of national history may be culled from the 
 predominant words used by a people. The close political 
 relations maintained between Scotland and France, over 
 against England, may be evidenced by the number of 
 French words, names of common things, that are or were 
 in use in Scotland but unused in England. Another example 
 is pointed out by Sir Walter Scott in Ivanhoe, as shov/n by 
 " ox " and " beef," " sheep " and " mutton," " calf" and " veal." 
 When the animals in question were in the fields and under 
 the charge of their herds they had Teutonic names, but 
 when they became viands on the tables of the masters of 
 those herds they received French names. This is evidence 
 that there was a race of serfs who spoke a Teutonic tongue 
 ruled by a race of nobles who spoke a variety of French. 
 But the last of these examples shows that such evidence can 
 go deeper ; that the word for the flesh of the calf is " veal " 
 not " veau," proves that the conquest had taken place after 
 the "t" in vitulus had dropped out of speech, but before 
 
 236 
 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 237 
 
 the " 1 " had been in speech commuted into " u " ; that is 
 to say between the ninth and the fifteenth century. But the 
 English language as a whole proves something more ; its 
 Teutonic structure, and the majority of its commonest words 
 having an Anglo-Saxon origin prove that though the 
 majority of the words of its vocabulary are Romance, 
 the Teutonic element was ultimately the predominant. 
 
 In making historical deductions from the phenomena of 
 language, several things have to be borne in mind. While 
 a word borrowed has to submit to the laws which regulate 
 the development of the language into which it has been 
 introduced, the language from which it has been taken 
 has been changing also; thus, in the word "mutton" 
 the " 1 " that was sounded in it when the word came to 
 England was commuted in this country into"t" and in 
 France into " u," as in " mouton." Hence, in making 
 deductions from words in one language to words of the same 
 root in another, these laws must be taken into account. 
 Further mere isolated examples must not have any stress 
 laid on them, as the peculiarity which such a case exhibits 
 may be due to some accidental circumstance, and prove 
 no general tendency. We have dwelt all the longer on this 
 as the argument in the present chapter will be based on the 
 phenomena of language, and there is no work so far as we 
 are aware which deals with the logic of language, save in the 
 most general way. 
 
 In considering the evidence for the history of the 
 Samaritan religion, and of its relation to that of the Jews, 
 to be derived from the successive languages used by the 
 Samaritan people, Arabic may be put aside. The Samaritan 
 community is too small — it would take but a small village 
 to accommodate them — to have any reaction. They are 
 totally submerged in the Arabic speaking population 
 around. It is nearly thirteen centuries since, by the victory 
 in the battle of Jarmuk, the land of Palestine passed from 
 under the rule of the Byzantine Empire and fell into 
 the dominion of the Arabs ; or as the Samaritans themselves 
 call it, "the kingdom of the Sons of Ishmael." Some 
 centuries would elapse before Greek and Aramaic — which 
 had been for nearly a millennium, the one the public, the 
 
238 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 other the domestic language of the people — would yield 
 place to the speech of the conquerors. It seems, however, 
 ultimately to have done so completely ; within little more 
 than half a millennium all attempts at literature made by 
 the Samaritans appear to have been in Arabic. The most 
 important of these are the works already referred to, and used 
 as authorities in regard to the Samaritan view of sacred 
 history, the " Samaritan Book of Joshua " and " the Annals 
 of Abu'l Fath." Both these books have been written in what 
 may be called middle Arabic, neither affecting the Euphuistic 
 elegancies of High Arabic nor falling into the vulgarity 
 of Low. In fact these authors, as above said, use the kind 
 of Arabic which the American translators of the Holy 
 Scriptures have made use of. It has been noted in regard 
 to the latter of these two writers that in some cases he shows 
 the influence of Hebrew in his language, as when speaking 
 of our Lord he calls Him hameshiach instead of either 
 the Arabic al-Messih or the Aramaic Messiha. The effect 
 that Arabic has had on the Samaritans has no evidential 
 value as to their relation to the Jews and their religion ; 
 hence for our present purpose it may be put aside. 
 
 It may be regarded as practically certain that during 
 the period of the Greek domination, works in Greek would 
 be composed and published by Samaritans, especially by 
 those resident in Egypt. No fragment of any such works 
 has been preserved. However, one never knows what the 
 dust heaps of Egypt may yet have in store for us. This much 
 is so far certain, that the Samaritan community in Egypt 
 had a translation of the Law for themselves, known to the 
 Fathers as the Samariticon ; indeed one Jewish writer 
 maintains that the Septuagint is merely a revisal of this, and 
 thus would account for the numerous points of resemblance 
 between the text behind the version of the LXX. and 
 the Samaritan recension. Nevertheless, it would seem 
 that the Israelite community in the province of Samaria 
 have left no trace of the extent to which their hel- 
 lenisation had gone. Consequently Greek also must be 
 counted out. 
 
 There remain, therefore, the two Semitic tongues to be 
 considered, Hebrew and Aramaic, represented respectively 
 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 239 
 
 by the Hebrew of the Torah (the Pentateuch), in the 
 Samaritan recension, and the Samaritan Targum or Aramaic 
 paraphrase of it. As the recension of the books of the Law 
 possessed by the Samaritans is necessarily earlier than 
 the Targum upon it, it will be advantageous to consider 
 it first, and see what evidence it affords of the relation 
 subsisting between the two divisions of the Israelite 
 nation. 
 
 Gesenius, in his famous dissertation de Pentateuchi 
 Samaritani Origine Indole et Auctoritate, devotes the 
 seventh of the eight classes into which he divides 
 the variants, which distinguish the Samaritan recen- 
 sion from that of the Jewish Massoretes, to the con- 
 sideration of " forms of words accommodated to the 
 Samaritan dialect." Assuming as he does without proof 
 that the Jewish recension is the primary, and that therefore 
 all - variations are due to intentional alterations by the 
 Samaritans, he under this head enumerates instances in 
 which he believes the Samaritan scribes altered the text to 
 suit the peculiarities of the Hebrew spoken by the inhabi- 
 tants of the Northern province. This implies the possibility 
 of investigating wherein Samaritan Hebrew differed from 
 that of Jerusalem. 
 
 The history of these differences and their origin must 
 be studied. When the Patriarchs came into Palestine they 
 found Hebrew the language in possession. This is seen by 
 the place-names as Shechem " a shoulder," Succoth " booths," 
 Zoar "little," Kadesh "sanctuary," and many more. The 
 language spoken by the Patriarchs themselves when they 
 came from Mesopotamia may have been Aramaic, or 
 Hommel may be right in holding that it was some primi- 
 tive form of Arabic. However that may have been, they 
 easily learned the tongue of the people of the land ; all the 
 more easily that between Hebrew and Aramaic the differ- 
 ences had not been emphasized by developments on both 
 sides in contrasted directions. Even as late as the days of 
 Tiglath-Pileser, as may be seen in the Sinjirli inscriptions, 
 the differences between the two languages are much slighter 
 than they afterwards became. When the Israelites went 
 down into Egypt they were a large community, and one 
 
2^0 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 that kept themselves separate from the Egyptians at the 
 first ; latterly, the contempt and hatred which the Egyptians 
 had for them, enforced it; hence they did not acquire the 
 tongue of Egypt. When they returned to Palestine, Hebrew 
 was still the language of the people of the land, as seen by 
 such personal names as Adonizedek. 
 
 In the North, Hebrew had been fully developed by the 
 Phcenicians, and with them it had become alphabetic. This 
 alphabet they had conveyed to the Greeks and Cretans. We 
 have already adverted to the evidence which the Greek 
 alphabet affords that the Phcenicians, in that prehistoric 
 time in which they had passed on their alphabet to the 
 Hellenes, had ceased to pronounce the gutturals. As it 
 seems probable that none of the other Palestinian races 
 laboured under this defect (else the gutturals would have 
 disappeared from the spoken tongue of the Jews) ; there were 
 already two dialects of Hebrew in Palestine, one of these 
 was peculiar at all events to a portion of the north of 
 Palestine. Hence there is an inherent probability in the 
 assumption of Gesenius that the dialect spoken in Samaria 
 differed from that in Jerusalem. One may demur to the way 
 in which he takes for granted that the Torah was originally 
 written in the Southern dialect, and was assimilated by in- 
 tentional alterations to that of the North; the alterations 
 may as readily have been due to the desire of the Jewish 
 scribes to assimilate the language of the sacred Law to their 
 Southern speech. 
 
 When, under the seventh of his classes of variants — points 
 in which the Samaritan recension of the Pentateuch differed 
 from that of the Massoretes — Gesenius discusses " Samaritan- 
 isms," he has to admit that these are singularly few. Had 
 the dissertation been written a few years later, or had it 
 been republished by the author, he would have lessened 
 the number yet more by omitting some of those he notes. 
 The first subsection of these variants contains those due to 
 interchange of gutturals. Had Gesenius already published 
 the collection of Samaritan hymns which he found in London 
 when he wrote his dissertation, we may be sure he would 
 have omitted this subsection, since he must have seen 
 ^;hat while five of these eight hymns were alphabetic. 
 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 241 
 
 and therefore that the alphabet had a fixed order, there 
 was not one of them but was irregular in regard to 
 the place of the gutturals. In the first of these, there 
 are three ain verses in all of which the letter is mis- 
 placed ; it occupies the positions of aleph, he, and heth, and 
 he occupies the legitimate place of ain. There could be no 
 intentional variation in this case, but it was necessarily a 
 blunder due to pure inability to distinguish between the 
 gutturals. That in the Samaritan recension " Hararat " 
 appears instead of " Ararat," proves merely that the 
 Samaritan scribe inserted the he, which he did not pro- 
 nounce, instead of the aleph, which he equally did not 
 pronounce; or the delinquent may have been the Jewish 
 scribe who dropped the he and inserted an aleph. In regard 
 to the majority of the instances in the Torah which Gesenius 
 brings forward, they are found only in one manuscript, which 
 Walton, or the editor of the Paris polyglot which he copied, 
 perversely chose to put as the text. This is the case in 
 regard to "lya for "ixa in Gen. xxiii. i8, natJ' for y3B' xxvii. 19, 
 isn for KISK xxvii. 33, to take no more. Gesenius recognises 
 a liability on the part of the Samaritans to confuse the ahevi 
 letters, a liability which rather indicates accident than in- 
 tention. Sometimes the Samaritan form is the more 
 primitive, as ''''3 instead of ''D (Gen. xlv. 12), in which case the 
 variation has more probably come from the Jewish scribes 
 than from those of Samaria. The elliptical sentence. Gen. 
 xiii. 9, which may be rendered literally from the Massoretic : 
 " Is not the whole land before thee ? separate thyself now 
 from me ; if the left I will go to the right, if the right I will go 
 to the left." To make this intelligible the English versions 
 insert, " if thou wilt take." On the other hand, the Samaritan 
 implies another insertion and would read, " If you prefer the 
 left I will take the right " ; in the Samaritan there is no 
 creation of a new verb or couple of verbs for the transaction. 
 In the following subsections, Gesenius takes up the various 
 grammatical elements and considers the variants under 
 them. Pronouns are among the earliest forms of speech 
 to be distinguished. Gesenius points out the differences 
 which subsist between the two dialects in regard to them. 
 The first instance he brings is •'flK atti instead of ns att for 
 
 Q 
 
24:2 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the 2nd pers. fem. In all probability, Gesenius is right in 
 regarding this as a Northern peculiarity, because the cases 
 outside the Torah in which it occurs, are all in narratives con- 
 cerning events and persons in the North ; thus Jud. xvii. i, is 
 in regard to Micah's mother; i Kings xiv. 2, is in the narra- 
 tive of Jeroboam's wife ; the other instance is in regard to the 
 Shunammite woman, 2 Kings viii. i. In his grammar and 
 his dictionary, Gesenius admits that the Samaritan is the 
 primitive form. This renders it probable that the alteration 
 was due to the Southern scribes. If it is the case, as some 
 maintain, that originally there were no matres lectionis, then 
 although a word was written without the 1 it would be pro- 
 nounced with it. The plural of the 2nd pers. fem. broadens 
 the final vowel by making the vowel not seghol but tsere, 
 written plenum; probably the softer pronunciation is the 
 earlier. In regard to the suffix of the 2nd pers. fem. the 
 vowel is strengthened by the ' yodh; this tendency to 
 multiply matres lectionis is a sign of relative recency, as in 
 the inscriptions these are few. The Hebrew verb distinguishes 
 the gender in the second person ; in ordinary Hebrew this 
 pers. fem. in the pret. sing, terminates in n tau with the shva ; 
 in Samaritan it terminates in ''yodh, a form most likely primi- 
 tive. An instance of the insertion of the ' yodh, when the 
 vowel is not in Southern Hebrew at all cognate with it, is to 
 be seen in Gen. iii. 21, and constantly elsewhere when the 
 word recurs, the Samaritan has niiJT'a kithnoth instead of the 
 Massoretic niJna kathnoth. It may be remarked that there 
 is an uncertainty as to the vowelling of the word ; sometimes 
 it was pronounced kuthoneth, sometimes k'thon'th. The 
 word y^LToav shows that the i sound was in the first 
 syllable when Greeks borrowed the word. This seems to 
 indicate that the Samaritan pronunciation is a survival of 
 the primitive. 
 
 Gesenius brings forward a number of individual cases of 
 what he considers examples to the point. Many of them 
 are due to the fact that the Samaritans did not pronounce 
 the gutturals ; and a scribe, writing to the dictation of one 
 reading from the Torah, would, if he were not specially 
 attentive, be liable to confuse one guttural with another, 
 utterly without intention in the matter. Some of the 
 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 243 
 
 examples, however, seem to imply a real difference of a 
 kind that may be looked upon as dialectic. One example 
 may be sufficient to show this ; in Gen. xi. 6, the 
 Massoretic has l»r yaz'mu from DDr samam ; instead of 
 this the Samaritan has WW yazmanu as if derived from a 
 root pt zaman. 
 
 Without considering all the examples which Gesenius 
 has produced, it must be admitted that he has proved the 
 correctness of his presupposition that there were distinct 
 differences between the Hebrew of Samaria and that of 
 Jerusalem, and further, that these are to be observed in the 
 two recensions. The study of these reveals the fact that 
 while some of these differences would seem to indicate that 
 the more primitive linguistic forms have been preserved in 
 the Samaritan, others show that in the Massoretic at times 
 are found the earlier forms. This proves that Hebrew 
 developed along one line in Samaria and in Jerusalem along 
 a somewhat different one. 
 
 The differences which resulted from the dropping of the 
 gutturals has been considered in another connection. There 
 are, however, a series of cases which are placed by Gesenius 
 in another category of variants. His first class is " Readings 
 which have been corrected by the Samaritan scribes in 
 conformity with the rules of ordinary grammar." In the 
 Pentateuch, according to the Massoretic recension, and in the 
 Pentateuch alone, the 3rd personal pronoun Kin hu! is com- 
 mon in gender so far as the k'thibh — " what is written " — is 
 concerned ; it is vowelled for reading as if it were written 
 N'n hi' when the pronoun refers to a noun feminine. In the 
 Samaritan, the feminine pronoun is written as it is to be read. 
 The Massoretic reading is due to a blunder in the MS. which 
 the Massoretes made their model, the blunders of which 
 they have perpetuated. The origin of the blunder is not 
 difficult to discover. In the earliest inscription in which the 
 square character appears, that of Kefr Bir'im, there is no 
 distinction between 1 vav and '' yodh. The MS. used by the 
 Massoretes must have been written in that script, and copied 
 by scribes who did not write to dictation but followed with 
 the eye what was before them. The Samaritan scribes were 
 under no such liability to mistake, as in the script of Samaria 
 
244 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Oy yodh is quite different from '=» vav ^ ; hence they are not 
 so much to be regarded as having corrected the Massoretic 
 text in this point, as having avoided the blunder of its 
 writers. Another case of Massoretic blunder due to the 
 same cause is '-h\ walad in Gen. xi. 30, instead of "n^ yalad 
 as it appears in the Samaritan. Another difference has a 
 slightly more complicated history. In Gen. i. 24 occurs what 
 Gesenius in his grammar remarks as an early form of the 
 construct inifi haitho ; the early sign of the construct appears 
 rather to have been "i yodk, as seen in such names as 
 Melchizedek, Gabriel, etc. But primitively as seen from the 
 inscriptions the final yodh was very generally omitted ; 
 consequently the Samaritan scribe wrote the ordinary 
 construct, and the scribe who wrote the Massorete mother 
 manuscript copied the yodh as vav, and this has been per- 
 petuated. Another set of cases is where the Massoretic 
 has the pronominal suffix of the 3rd mas. ri oh instead of 
 the ordinary 1 0, as has the^ Samaritan. A case might be 
 made out for this being an earlier form, as it is found on the 
 Moabite Stone ; it is, however, simpler to regard it as also 
 due to blunder on the part of the Massoretic scribes. 
 If, as is probable, one of the manuscripts in the ancestry of 
 the Massoretic model was written in the Samaritan script, 
 and the copyist had confused vav and he, these letters 
 resembling each other in that script, the mistake would be 
 easily explained. The suffix in he on the stele of Mesha 
 may represent ah not oh and so be an Aramaism like the 
 plural in nun. 
 
 Even if we neglect those differences which are due to 
 scribal blunders, there still remain differences numerous 
 enough to show that there was a distinction between the 
 Northern and Southern Hebrew, scarcely great enough to 
 be called a dialectic difference yet still quite distinct. There 
 is a difference between the English written or spoken by an 
 educated American and that spoken or written by an 
 educated Englishman, but it is too slight to be regarded as 
 a dialectic difference. Because an American speaks of 
 1 While this is the case almost universally, in some carelessly written 
 MSS. yodh is written in a way that it can only with difficulty be dis- 
 tinguished from vav or he (Gesenius, Carmina Samaritana, p. 6). 
 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 245 
 
 " railroad cars " and says that he " feeds corn to his horse," 
 while an Englishman speaks of "railway carriages" and 
 "feeds his horse with corn," these differences cannot be 
 dignified by being spoken of as "differences of dialect"; 
 but they prove that in both nations the English language is 
 a living one, and able to react on circumstances. On a 
 similar principle we may argue that Hebrew was a living 
 language in the North as well as in the South when the two 
 recensions diverged. But even in the time of Ezra and 
 Nehemiah the language ordinarily spoken by the people 
 was Aramaic, into which the Hebrew of the Law had to be 
 translated in order that the people could understand the 
 sense (Neh. viii. 8). If this was so in the South, much more 
 would it be the case in the North. The colonists sent 
 into the territory of the Ephraimite tribes by Sargon, 
 Esarhaddon, and Asshur-bani-pal would have Aramaic as 
 their only common language, and the remnant of the 
 Israelities would have to learn something of it to hold inter- 
 course with them ; this process began in the North a century 
 and a quarter before the fall of Jerusalem. If the inhabitants 
 of Northern Palestine received the Law at the hands of 
 Manasseh, the son-in-law of Sanballat, in the days of Ezra 
 and Nehemiah, still more if the flight of Manasseh took place 
 in the time of Alexander the Great, as, following Josephus, 
 most of the higher critics maintain, their relation to the Law 
 in Hebrew would be very much that of the Italians of the 
 Renaissance to the Greek classics and the New Testament. 
 If they accepted whole-heartedly this Torah as divine, they 
 would be as earnest, when they multiplied the copies of the 
 Law, in their endeavours after a fastidious accuracy, as were 
 the scholars employed by Lorenzo the Magnificent in 
 copying the classics ; it would be too sacred for them to 
 modify the wording. It is more natural to believe that the 
 alterations were made, on the one side or the other, while 
 Hebrew was the spoken language of both peoples. The 
 modifications which, according to Gesenius, have been made 
 in the Torah by the Samaritans, are of the kind one sees in 
 a Scotch song published in London ; the language of the 
 song is brought into closer adjustment to the Southern 
 usage. In this case, both dialects are living. 
 
246 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 There is, however, another language which claims to be 
 Samaritan — Samaritan Aramaic. As we have just been main- 
 taining, in all probability by the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, 
 and certainly by the beginning of the Greek domination, 
 Aramaic, not Hebrew, was the tongue ordinarily spoken in 
 Samaria. As this was the case, there would necessarily arise 
 the same need for interpretation and explanation as there 
 was in Jerusalem ; hence the Samaritan Targum. 
 
 The time is past in which even scholars could regard 
 Aramaic as a dialect of Hebrew, and a dialect of a later 
 date. Aramaic is an ancient language, and one still spoken 
 by the Nestorians beside the upper waters of the Tigris and 
 the Euphrates. Aramaic and Hebrew must originally have 
 been identical. There probably were connecting dialects ; 
 for instance, the Hebrew of the Mesha inscription has many 
 Aramaisms in it, e.g., the plural in nun. The earliest extant 
 Aramaic inscriptions, those of Sinjirli, are so Hebraistic that 
 it was at first doubtful how they should be regarded, whether 
 as Hebrew or Aramaic. They were set up, some of them, 
 in the reign of Tiglath-Pileser. In Scripture, there are in 
 Aramaic six chapters in Daniel, and in Ezra what is 
 equivalent to three. If they were written at the date they 
 claim, they are more recent than the Sinjirli inscriptions 
 by approximately two centuries. Slightly later than the 
 chapters in Ezra are the Assouan papyri. In the main, 
 the Aramaic of these documents is identical with that of 
 Daniel. Later still is the Targum of Onkelos.^ Although 
 the Targums were begun in Ezra's time, they were not com- 
 mitted to writing till probably near the end of the second 
 century A.D. The traditional interpretation was handed 
 on from meturgeman to meturgeman ; and thus, although it 
 would sustain modifications, these would be relatively slight, 
 and there would always be an archaic flavour in the style. 
 
 ' Some scholars maintain that the Aramaic of Onkelos is the same 
 as that of Daniel and Ezra. It is difficult to imagine how, if they have 
 really read both Onkelos and the Aramaic of Daniel, they can hold 
 such an opinion. One may be permitted to think that the necessities of 
 a theory to which they are committed have overborne their judgment. 
 The difference is greater than that between the English of Shakespeare 
 and that of Macaulay. 
 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 247 
 
 Extempore prayers among ourselves usually prefer the 
 idioms of the Prayer Book or the Bible to that of the English 
 of everyday speech. Notwithstanding that the Aramaic 
 of Onkelos is archaic, the difference between it and the 
 Aramaic of Daniel and Ezra is very marked. The Aramaic 
 of the Bible is much more akin to that of the Assouan 
 papyri. 
 
 At the same time, the Aramaic of the Bible may be 
 regarded as one in dialect with that of the earlier Targums ; 
 thus, Chaucer and Cowper use the same English; the 
 differences between them are due to time ; whereas the 
 difference between Burns and Cowper, who were contem- 
 poraries, is one of dialect. There are two leading dialects 
 of Aramaic, Eastern and Western, otherwise called Syriac 
 and Chaldee. If the date of the Peshitta on the one hand, 
 and of the Targums on the other, be taken as the point of 
 comparison, the difference most clearly marked is that in 
 regard to the preformative of the 3rd sing, and plural 
 mas. imperfect (future); while in Chaldee it is, as in 
 Hebrew, ^ yodh, in Syriac the preformative in these cases is in 
 J nun ; in the Mandaean subdialect ^ lamed is the preforma- 
 tive in the substantive verb.^ From this it is evident that 
 the Aramaic spoken in Samaria was Western, as it had 
 \}aeyodh preformative. It has no trace, as has the Aramaic 
 of Daniel and Ezra, of having ever been Eastern, or having 
 had the Syriacisms rubbed off in course of successive 
 transcriptions. Not only does the Aramaic of the Samaritan 
 Targum differ from Biblical Aramaic but it differs also from 
 that of the Jewish Targums. 
 
 Although not representing so truly and scientifically the 
 
 ■ The '' lamed " preformative to the substantive verb is found in 
 Daniel and Ezra. Driver regards it as a phonetic variation on nun. 
 Dr Bevan would explain it by the Jewish avoidance of a combination of 
 letters that would suggest the Divine Name, hence they write It2 for 15 
 instead of n"^ as this is a Divine Name. There are, however, hundreds of 
 instances of the substantive verb in the Targums in the 3rd mas. sing, 
 and plural imperfect ; and in no one instance does the ") preformative 
 appear. Dr Bevan's theory proves too much, and therefore proves 
 nothing. In Daniel, there are cases in which, judging by the rendering, 
 the text behind the LXX. of Daniel must have had the nun preformative, 
 e.g., ii. 5-7. 
 
248 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 philological connections of a language, its vocabulary exhibits 
 the commercial and social relations of those that speak it. 
 Moreover, it is that with which the student first becomes 
 acquainted. The great amount of intercourse between 
 Britain and France may be proved by the fact, that though 
 English is a Teutonic tongue, the majority of the words 
 which make up its vocabulary are of French origin. And 
 the comparatively limited intercourse with Germany during 
 the formative period of the language is shown by the paucity 
 of those that owe their origin to words borrowed from German 
 fully developed. Perhaps even more cognate examples are 
 Turkish and Modern Persian ; though the one is an agglutin- 
 ative tongue and the other Aryan, yet so large is the infusion 
 of Arabic in both languages that an Arabic scholar can 
 occasionally divine the purport of sentences in these languages 
 by Arabic alone. In the case of both of these languages, it 
 is the fact that both peoples had adopted a religion which had 
 originated in Arabia, and its Sacred Book, the Qor^n, was 
 written in Arabic. If the Samaritans received their religion 
 from Judea, their language would exhibit traces of this. 
 
 The vocabulary of the Samaritan Targum differs very 
 much from that of Onkelos. Not a few of the words, indeed, 
 seem strange to Aramaic. It may be that some of these 
 may be due to the blunders of ignorant scribes, writing in a 
 time when Aramaic had ceased to be spoken, miscopying 
 what was before them. The second word in the Targum 
 DD^^ talmes is one that has no Semitic root ; it is used to 
 translate Ni3 (5«rfl, " to create." It may, indeed, be connected 
 with xht tzelem, " an image," though this does not seem a 
 natural etymology ; it cannot, at any rate, be the result of 
 blunder, as more than once again the word occurs. The first 
 word nmKttp qemautha is supposed by some to be derived 
 from the more ordinary Dli? qedem,\hG omitted T daleth being 
 compensated for by doubling the D mem; the objection to 
 that etymology is that d and m are sounds that do not 
 naturally coalesce. It perhaps may be connected with D?p 
 qum. Then there are words used in Samaritan Aramaic in 
 other than the sense in which they appear in other forms of 
 Aramaic, and especially in the Jewish Targums; thus pVV 
 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 249 
 
 tzdaq means to "cry out" to "shriek" in Jonathan ben 
 Uzziel, but in the Targum of Samaria it means to " name," 
 e.g.. Gen. i. 5. " God called the light day." The word used 
 both in Onkelos and the Peshitta is sni? q'ra. These things 
 show that Samaritan Aramaic developed along lines totally 
 independent of the evolution of the Jewish and Edessene. 
 
 More important as to the philological affinities of a 
 language than the vocabulary are its grammatical forms ; 
 and of these, the pronouns require very much to be studied. 
 As in most Semitic tongues, pronouns have two forms, 
 separable and inseparable, the latter being the oblique 
 cases of the former. If the list of the forms of the ist 
 pers, pronoun sing, is taken from Petermann and Nicholls, 
 of the four forms two coincide with the Hebrew, ''3:k anoki 
 ^VA ani, one with the Targum of Onkelos KJS ana (this latter 
 is noted by both grammarians as rare), and one peculiar to 
 the Samaritan njs aneh ; what is the commoner form of the 
 1st pers. pronoun ^ing., either in Targumic, Chaldee, 
 or in Syriac, is rare in Samaritan. In the plural of the 
 first person, so far as spelling goes, the Hebrew is followed 
 almost to the exclusion of the Targumic, but the pronuncia- 
 tion does not differ so much, 13n3X anachnu (pron. anaanu), 
 pn^N anachnan {anaanan), pK anan. The tendency is thus in 
 the Samaritan to a greater affinity to the Hebrew than is 
 shown in the Targumic. In regard to the 2nd pers. sing, 
 the same tendency is seen in the dropping of the nun. The 
 plural mas. is in better agreement with the Aramaic of the 
 Targums. The 3rd pers. sing. mas. and fern, is nearly the 
 same in Hebrew and Aramaic, only that frequently in the 
 latter the final unpronounced aleph is also unwritten. The 
 relation between the two may be seen in the paradigm on 
 following page. 
 
 A study of these forms shows that the Aramaic of 
 Samaria and that of Judea developed along independent 
 lines. It confirms the statement above that, on the whole, 
 the Samaritan has a greater affinity for the Hebrew than 
 has the Targumic. 
 
 It has already been mentioned that the Semitic pronoun 
 had no oblique cases, but that these were expressed by in- 
 separable pronouns in the form of pronominal suffixes. 
 
250 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 W S e 3 
 
 U 5£;- as:' Xi %■ 55. %■ ^ n 
 
 •n,. *^^- 'n- ir.. #^., r-.. 'v. ■^^ 
 
 ^^ n I... C .=.. "^ ^ ^ 
 
 5S 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 B 
 
 
 
 
 
 s 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 J3 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 cd 
 
 
 
 a 
 
 
 C 
 
 
 
 3 
 
 c 
 
 •g 
 
 g 
 
 a 
 
 
 s 
 
 rt 
 
 
 
 s 
 
 f3 
 
 
 
 
 
 n! 
 
 ifl 
 
 tt 
 
 J3 
 
 J3 
 
 %;■ 
 
 X' 
 
 X' 
 
 r:- 
 
 r: 
 
 *^l 
 
 *T' 
 
 n- 
 
 a 
 
 V' 
 
 C- 
 
 E 
 
 e- 
 
 
 
 2'- 
 
 «1 
 
 J- 
 
 
 
 3S 
 
 
 
 n- 
 
 
 W 
 
 'v, 
 
 
 ■a 
 
 ft:: 
 
 
 
 • F^ 
 
 P* 
 
 
 c 
 
 13 
 
 
 rt 
 
 n! 
 
 OJ 
 
 K 
 
 
 
 
 
 X- 
 
 X: 
 
 ■ X 
 
 
 n- 
 
 *^. 
 
 E 
 
 r: 
 
 '=;■■ as as 
 
 
 
 
 
 E 
 
 G 
 
 
 
 
 
 V 
 
 <aj 
 
 
 
 
 
 J3 
 
 ^ 
 
 3 
 
 
 ■ 
 
 
 
 
 c 
 
 
 jy 
 
 
 nJ 
 
 ^ 
 
 •fl 
 
 g 
 
 c 
 
 d 
 
 1 
 
 
 ni 
 
 c 
 
 4-> 
 
 
 OJ 
 
 
 rt 
 
 C\l 
 
 n) 
 
 k 
 
 r:: 
 
 
 X." 
 
 X< 
 
 S5i 
 
 y.' 
 
 
 S; 
 
 1^:. 
 
 rt 
 
 c:- 
 
 E = 
 
 E = 
 
 ir: 
 
 a 
 
 i: 
 
 
 ^' 
 
 ■ n 
 
 iz; 
 
 •^ 
 
 c 
 
 
 
 
 
 <: 
 
 rt rt 
 
 
 
 
 H 
 
 n! 
 
 jS rt 
 
 
 3 
 
 
 Pi 
 
 '5 
 
 s t: 
 
 s 
 
 
 
 < 
 
 n) 
 
 rt rt 
 
 ta 
 
 3 
 
 ■■'- 
 
 at- 
 
 3£i- X< 
 
 as> 
 
 n 
 
 ir. 
 
 n. 
 
 nJ ^1^ 
 
 E- 
 
 ir 
 
 tZ' 
 
 
 
 i^M 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 X 
 
 
 
 fi 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 <u 
 
 
 E 
 
 
 3 
 
 rt 
 
 rt 
 
 
 u 
 
 
 a 
 
 ^ 
 
 c 
 
 . 
 
 a 
 
 a 
 
 n! 
 
 
 s 
 
 3 
 
 <(U 
 
 n! 
 
 in 
 
 
 w 
 
 e 
 
 s 
 
 
 n 
 
 
 £! 
 
 8 
 
 s 
 
 01 
 
 rt 
 
 ea 
 
 rt 
 
 U 
 
 V 
 
 xr 
 
 Y.V 
 
 Xi 
 
 X' 
 
 n=- 
 
 tZ' 
 
 
 £■•■ 
 
 JTJ- 
 
 
 £:• 
 
 a 
 
 'I; 
 
 i g S E S S !§ 
 
 'S 'O *- TS 
 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 251 
 
 Fundamentally, there are two relations which require to be 
 expressed by oblique cases — the possessive and the objective 
 — in classic nomenclature, the genitive and accusative ; the 
 Semitic grammarians, approaching the question from a 
 diiiferent point of view, call them nominal and verbal suffixes, 
 the former representing the pronoun in the adjectival or 
 possessive form, the latter, the accusative or objective form. 
 In this somewhat complicated system it will be seen by the 
 student that the Samaritan occupies generally an inter- 
 mediate position between Hebrew and Chaldee. In regard 
 to verbal or objective suffixes, the ist pers. sing, is the same 
 in all three; in the 2nd, the Chaldee is slightly liker the 
 Hebrew ; but in the 3rd, the Samaritan and the Hebrew are 
 alike, while the Chaldee differs. The same may be said of 
 the plural suffixes ; the Hebrew and Samaritan are alike, and 
 the Chaldee differs from both. The singular suffixes to 
 nouns singular show, on the whole, a closer resemblance of 
 the Samaritan to the Chaldee than to the Hebrew, but the 
 plural suffixes to nouns singular in the Samaritan are 
 practically identical with those in Hebrew, whereas the 
 Chaldee differs considerably. The same judgment must be 
 come to in regard to the pronominal suffixes to nouns 
 plural ; the Samaritan forms are practically identical with 
 the Hebrew, but differ from the Chaldee. 
 
 Another series of words in which linguistic affinities may 
 be sought is the numerals. A study of the table of numerals 
 shows that while the Samaritan conforms in the units to the 
 Chaldee, generally speaking, and differs from the Hebrew, 
 in regard to the decades (twenty, thirty, forty, etc.) the 
 affinity of the Samaritan is closer to the Hebrew. In 
 both Hebrew and Chaldee the decades are expressed by 
 changing the unit into the plural, as J?315< arba\ "four," 
 in both languages, so " forty " becomes in Hebrew CWiN 
 arba'im, and in Chaldee it becomes pJJ3"iN arbe'in ; the 
 Samaritan here agrees with the Hebrew and has cya'nN 
 arba'im. As the unit "three" in Samaritan is the same 
 as in Chaldee, of course the first part of the term for 
 " thirty " is the Chaldee term, but the termination agrees 
 with the Hebrew. In regard to a " hundred " the Samaritan 
 is unlike either Hebrew or Chaldee, which agree with each 
 
252 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 other. A " thousand " is the same in all Semitic languages. 
 It is thus seen that in regard to numerals, as in regard 
 to pronouns, the Samaritan is much closer to the Hebrew 
 than is the Chaldee of the Targums. Occasionally double 
 forms appear ; in such cases, not infrequently, the one 
 is the Hebrew form and the other the Chaldee. 
 
 The study of the verbal paradigms reveals parallel 
 phenomena in the case of verbal forms. The singular 
 Preterite of the Samaritan is identical with that of the 
 Hebrew verb, but differs from the Chaldee in several 
 particulars. The vocalisation is different ; while in 
 Samaritan, as in Hebrew, the first syllable is open with 
 qametz, in the Chaldee the first syllable has the sKva vocale. 
 The plural is nearly in as close agreement with the Hebrew ; 
 the Hebrew, however, has no feminine of the 3rd plural which 
 the Samaritan agrees with the Chaldee in having. The ist 
 pers. plu. ends in na in Samaritan and Chaldee, while the 
 Hebrew ends in nu ; but in regard to the first syllable, there 
 is agreement all through between the Samaritan and the 
 Hebrew. In the Future or Imperfect, the singular persons 
 are consonantally closely alike in all three, except that the 
 Chaldee retains the final nun in the 2nd fern. All three 
 differ as to the vocalisation of the second syllable. The 2nd 
 and 3rd pers. mas. of the Samaritan agrees consonantally with 
 the Hebrew, but in the 2nd and 3rd plural fem. it agrees with 
 the Chaldee. In the Infinitive there are in Samaritan 
 two forms, the one agreeing with the Hebrew, the other 
 with the Chaldee. Consonantally, Samaritan, Hebrew, 
 and Chaldee agree in the Imperative, save in the plural 
 fem., in which the Chaldee differs from the other two by 
 ending in akph instead of he. In regard to the participles 
 all three are different. As Samaritan is clearly a form 
 of Aramaic, the arrangement of the conjugations follows 
 the Chaldee ; the passive conjugations are distinguished by 
 the syllable ns ith prefixed to the root. While this is the 
 rule, instances occur of Niphal, as Gen. x. 25, niphlagat ; 
 so also, instead of ithpael in some codices the pual form 
 appears, as Exod. xxix. 33, yisulla. Before a scribe would 
 drop into such a form it must have been used by the 
 Aramaic speaking people about him. There is even a case 
 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 253 
 
 in which the Hophal conjugation is used instead of 
 the more legitimate Ittaphal, Lev. x. 13, ufqedet. In 
 Biblical Aramaic there are instances of the Hophal, as 
 Dan. vii. 11, hubad. Another verbal peculiarity in regard 
 to ain-vav and ain-yodh verbs is that the letter ain is 
 introduQed in the preterite DVP qam, Gen. iv. 8, "ijn dar. 
 Num. xxxii. 40. 
 
 Primitive relationships also afford evidence of linguistic 
 affinities ; father — mother, son — daughter, brother — sister, 
 husband — wife. The first of these pairs is the same in all 
 Semitic languages. In regard to the second pair, while bar 
 is the common Aramaic word for a " son," ben occasionally 
 appears in Samaritan. The Samaritans manifest their 
 independence in that they have evolved a regular plural 
 for bar ; instead of the usual benin they have frequently barim. 
 The Samaritan word for "brother" is not ah, the word 
 so generally used in Semitic languages, but telim. As 
 to " husband " and " wife " the second is represented by the 
 same word as in the Aramaic of the Targums. In regard to 
 " husband," the Samaritan generally prefers geber to bdal, 
 while the Targum of Onkelos prefers the latter to the 
 former. 
 
 The particles of a language are the words which most 
 distinctly mark its relationships. The common adverbs, 
 prepositions, and conjunctions remain with a minimum 
 of change in the historical development of a language. 
 Hence it is that in these may be found the clearest evidence 
 of external interference : thus, when in English we find that 
 so common a word as " very " is a Latin interloper which has 
 displaced the Teutonic sehr, we may deduce this to be the 
 result of external interference by a people speaking a tongue 
 derived from Latin. When the lists of Samaritan adverbs 
 to be found in Nicholls' Samaritan Grammar is compared 
 with those in the Targums, it is found that only a minority 
 of them are common to both subdialects of Aramaic. The 
 majority of the Samaritan adverbs are not found in the 
 Targums, and several Targumic adverbs are not found 
 in the Samaritan. There are instances of Hebrew adverbs 
 being found in the Samaritan which do not occur in Targumic, 
 e.g., h lu, " would that." Certainly the great majority of prep- 
 
254 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 ositions and conjunctions are common to both forms of 
 Western Aramaic ; yet even in these classes of particles 
 there are cases in which the Samaritan has prepositions 
 which the Targumic does not employ, as 1133 kebun, "over 
 against," "'fia katii, " below," nyp se'ad, " as far as." There 
 are some which the Samaritan has in common with Hebrew, 
 as 7SK etzel, " near." The same is the case with conjunctions ; 
 there are several Samaritan conjunctions that are not found 
 in Onkelos ; as for instance pa baran, " lest," ''tap mait, 
 "because." There are some conjunctions which Samaritan 
 has in common with Hebrew which yet are not found 
 in Onkelos, e.g., DS zm, " if." Certainly, the inseparable 
 prepositions are the same in Samaritan as in Chaldee, but 
 this is not very significant, as they are common to all 
 Semitic languages. The enclitic conjunction ^ u or \ ve is 
 also common to Hebrew and Arabic as well as to Aramaic. 
 
 There are cases in which Hebraisms occur in all the 
 Aramaic versions of the Scripture. The most noticeable 
 of these is T\1 yat or yath, the sign of the accusative. It had 
 almost disappeared from Aramaic by historic times ; it 
 occurs only once in Daniel as the support of an oblique case 
 of a pronoun (Dan. iii. 12). It is to be noted that the 
 equivalent D} vath occurs only once in the Sinjirli inscrip- 
 tions, and in a similar grammatical connection, as the support 
 of a pronominal oblique case; nhl vaiko (Hadsid i. 28). This 
 represents the Hebrew DN eik, and occurs in the Targums, 
 and in the Peshitta also, where ei^ is found in the 
 original. There are, however, other phenomena in the 
 Samaritan Targum which exhibit the special relation in 
 which it stands to the Hebrew original. Samaritan has, 
 as has every other form of Aramaic, the status emphaticus, 
 which serves for the definite article, but in addition it on 
 occasion uses the Hebrew article in "H ha: thus in 
 Gen. i. 27, " man " as the species is written DINn ka'adam. 
 More striking than this, as evidence of the influence of 
 Hebrew on Samaritan, is the occasional occurrence of the 
 vav conversive, e.g., Gen. i. 3, "inj 'n;i vayehe nahar, "and 
 light was," and Exod. x. 8, iW^II vaya'sar, " was brought in." 
 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 255 
 
 The first example is in Petermann's text but not in Brull's, 
 the latter in Brull's but not in Petermann's ; but when 
 copyists show a tendency to fall into such Hebraisms, it is 
 evidence that these were not uncommon in the speech of the 
 people. 
 
 But the Targum is not the only specimen of Sam.aritan 
 Aramaic which has been preserved. There are collections of 
 hymns which will fall to be considered under the head 
 of the Literature of the Samaritans. Apart, however, from 
 the consideration of them as literature, attention may 
 be directed to the form the language assumes when it 
 occurs not in a translation from Hebrew but in independent 
 original compositions. In them there is manifested, even 
 more strongly than in the Targum, the tendency to mingle 
 the two languages ; when a hymnist intends to write Hebrew 
 he drops unconsciously into Aramaic, and vice versd. The 
 second hymn in Heidenheim's collection is on the whole 
 Hebrew, yet the first word ''a']n^ yithrabbi, " be magnified," 
 is Aramaic; the verb is common to Hebrew and Aramaic, 
 but the conjugation is Aramaic, and the word terminates 
 as the Aramaic form does. The next three words are 
 Hebrew EHisn Dl^'n nt se hash-shem haq-qodesh, " this is the holy 
 
 name," although the order is scarcely that of classic Hebrew ; 
 and it is to be noted that instead of the Aramaic status 
 emphaticus the Hebrew article is employed. The clause that 
 follows ends in the word n333 {kabhed in the niphal), a 
 Hebrew grammatical form which, as already mentioned, 
 sometimes occurs in Samaritan ; but further, although the 
 root is an Aramaic one, in the form of k'bkad it means, 
 not as it does here, " to be honoured " but " to be angry." 
 No. IV. of the same collection begins in Hebrew, but before 
 the sentence ends, drops into Aramaic ; the last word, 
 although common to both Hebrew and Aramaic, is in an 
 Aramaic conjugation. In short, many of these hymns have 
 the aspect of an uneducated Scotsman's English or an 
 Englishman's Scotch; in both cases there is, as here, a 
 perpetual liability to leave the dialect intended and begun, 
 and drop into the other with which the writer or speaker is 
 better acquainted. 
 
256 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 The phenomena which have just been noted — the 
 Hebraistic features in the Samaritan grammar, the introduc- 
 tion of Hebrew words and constructions into Aramaic 
 compositions, and the liability to pass from one language 
 to the other — are worthy of special consideration. All 
 the more is this the case, when, along with them the state of 
 matters in Judea is brought under review. The people of 
 the Southern Kingdom were ignorant of Aramaic at the 
 time of Sennacherib's invasion, for Eliakim and Shebna 
 requested Rabshakeh to speak to them in Aramaic in order 
 that their conference might not be understood "by the 
 people that were upon the wall." A similar condition 
 of ignorance in regard to the language of diplomacy 
 may be supposed to have prevailed among the inhabitants 
 of Northern Palestine at the same date, as the few 
 colonists sent by Sargon would not be numerous enough 
 to affect the language of the people generally. While 
 this was the case as long as the kingdom of Judah still 
 stood, when both North and South fell under the Persian 
 rule, the circumstances, linguistically, of the two divisions 
 of the land must have been very similar. In both, the 
 original language of the population had been Hebrew, 
 and still to a certain extent was so. In both there had 
 been intruded an element whose language was Aramaic. 
 The few colonists sent by Sargon had their numbers aug- 
 mented by the much larger number sent by Esarhaddon. 
 and later still by others sent by his son and successor 
 Asshur-bani-pal. Not impossibly, these would be supple- 
 mented by natives of Syria and of other countries whose 
 language was Aramaic. There is no record of Nebuchadnezzar 
 sending colonists into Judea, after the Assyrian manner; 
 but members of neighbouring Aramaic speaking nations 
 drifted in and seized lands and heritages the lawful pro- 
 prietors of which had been slain, were captives, or had gone 
 down to Egypt. The probability is that in both districts 
 the language spoken was Aramaic, with a large admixture 
 of Hebrew. There is no probability that the colonists sent 
 into the territories of the Northern tribes pronounced 
 Aramaic without the gutturals as the Samaritans did 
 Hebrew. Although the Assyrians had in their own 
 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 257 
 
 cuneiform language only one guttural, n heth, yet from 
 the evidence of the Sinjirli inscriptions in which there is no 
 uncertainty as to N aleph and V ain, or as to n he and n heth, 
 we may be reasonably sure that they made use of all the 
 gutturals in speaking Aramaic. But the habit of the 
 conquered people overbore the custom of the colonists sent 
 by the Imperial power. Taking somewhat of.the position 
 of the Assyrian colonists in the North, in the South were 
 those who returned from the Babylonian captivity. They 
 would be accustomed to speak Aramaic in public, and in 
 intercourse with their neighbours in Babylonia, but almost 
 certainly among themselves they spoke' Hebrew in com- 
 parative parity. There is this peculiarity to be noted, these 
 returned captives would necessarily speak Syriac, that is 
 to say Eastern Aramaic, not Western or Chaldee. But the 
 Targums of Onkelos and of Jonathan ben Uzziel are in 
 Chaldee. Intercourse with the people of the land who 
 naturally spoke Chaldee would gradually rub off the 
 orientalisms of the new-comers and assimilate their dialect 
 to that of those around them. 
 
 The resemblance between the two communities was so 
 great, at once in external circumstances and linguistically, 
 that an assimilation of language might have been supposed 
 to have resulted, all the more because they were near 
 neighbours and professed to worship the same God, and, 
 before the arrival of Ezra, had been united together through 
 frequent intermarriages. If they received the Law by the 
 hands of Manasseh, it would seem to have been natural that 
 they would at the same time have adopted the Southern 
 pronunciation of the Hebrew, and the Southern Targum. 
 
 In both the South and the North Hebrew must still have 
 been understood, as is evidenced by the fact that in the reign 
 of Darius, the prophets Haggai and Zechariah, and later still 
 Malachi, delivered their message in Hebrew with something 
 like purity. If the Samaritans received all the Ezrahitic 
 additions to the Law with unquestioning docility, how was 
 it that they did not assimilate their mode of pronouncing the 
 sacred language to that of those whose teaching they had 
 accepted ? It may have been that Hebrew was used only in 
 regard to sacred things, much as Latin in the Middle Ages. 
 
 R 
 
258 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 This probably continued down through the Persian period 
 until the domination of the Greeks set in. The language 
 became debased, as may be seen in Ecclesiastes. If the original 
 Hebrew of Ecclesiasticus may be judged by the manuscript 
 so opportunely discovered, it is written in a much nearer 
 approach to classic Hebrew than is the language of 
 Ecclesiastes, Probably the style of Ben Sira represents an 
 endeavour to restore Hebrew to its pristine purity, a move- 
 ment akin to the Atticistic style of the Greek writers of the 
 age of the Antonines. It is singular that though Hebrew 
 was known so late, it has influenced the language of the 
 Targums so little. It might have been expected that, 
 as the Targums were handed on, not by writing but 
 traditionally, from one meturgeman to another, the influence 
 of Hebrew would have been all the more observable; but 
 the traces are few, compared with what are to be found in 
 the Targum of the Samaritans. 
 
 Another phenomenon is worthy of note. Although it 
 was late in the second century when the Targum of Onkelos 
 was committed to writing, and the Roman rule was, so far 
 as language was concerned, a continuation of the Greek, 
 there are practically no evidences of Hellenic influence in its 
 vocabulary. In this, the Targum of Onkelos differs from 
 the Peshitta of the New Testament ; in it, such connectives 
 as N7N alia, " but," and 13 gar, " for," indicate the influence of 
 
 Greek. The Samaritan Targum shows less trace, but it has 
 some, as for instance, DiM genos, which is the Greek yevo? 
 
 (Gen. i. 12). The preposition "Jia katti,"hG\ow," is derived 
 
 from Kara. Yet certainly, considering the length of the 
 Greek predominance, it is singular that it has left so little 
 trace. The Hellenic influence was dominant for close upon a 
 millennium ; yet the Arabic domination, which has lasted for 
 three centuries more, has produced even less effect on the 
 Aramaic of Samaria. 
 
 All this emphasizes the independent position of the 
 Samaritans in relation to the Jews. It has been noted how 
 much more prominent the Hebrew element is in Samaritan 
 Aramaic than in the Aramaic of Judea, which expressed itself 
 in the Targum of Onkelos. This difference may have been 
 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 259 
 
 due to the fact that the colonists who brought Aramaic with 
 them came to Samaria in successive relays, with considerable 
 intervals of time between each. Each several detachment 
 would be swallowed up of the people among whom they had 
 been sent to dwell. When a new band of colonists arrived, 
 they would find those who had preceded them absorbed 
 among the Israelites, speaking a sort of Hebrew and worship- 
 ping JHWH with somewhat uncertain rites. In such circum- 
 stances, the original colonists may not infrequently have 
 become more vehement partisans of the native cause than 
 the natives themselves. The descendants of the English 
 colonists in Ireland became Hibernis Hiberniores — more 
 partisanly Irish than the Irish themselves. One result of 
 this is that the Aramaic in use in Northern Palestine became 
 very much Hebraized. Judging by their hymns, the language 
 of the Samaritans became somewhat of an amalgam. 
 
 The Samaritans maintained this linguistic separation 
 from their brethren of Judea, despite that, under the 
 Empire of Rome, Judea and Samaria were usually under 
 one governor. Herod had Samaria added to his dominions, 
 and united — Archelaus inherited them. When the Romans 
 sent Coponius first, and others till Porcius Festus, as pro- 
 curators, the two provinces were united under their rule. 
 Notwithstanding that they had the same religion, were under 
 the same civil authority, they maintained not merely in- 
 dependence of the Jews but even an enmity to them, so 
 that the Samaritan woman said to our Lord, "The Jews 
 have no dealings with the Samaritans." Josephus in his 
 history exhibits the attitude of the Jew to the Samaritans : 
 he has no good word to say of them. This hatred they 
 repaid with interest. That being so, their testimony to the 
 contents of the Mosaic Law must be regarded as that of 
 independent witnesses, not the mere parrot-rote repetition 
 of pupils who imitate their master. 
 
 Literature of the Samaritans. 
 
 The consideration of the language of the Samaritans 
 leads naturally to a survey of their literature. All the later 
 Samaritan literature, that is to say, all after the twelfth 
 
260 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 century of our era, has been written in Arabic. Even the 
 so-called Samaritan "Book of Joshua," to which reference 
 has been made in a previous chapter, is written in the tongue 
 of " the Sons of Ishmael." The historian who is the principal 
 source of our knowledge of the views entertained by the 
 Samaritans as to sacred history, Abu'l Fath, wrote his 
 Annals in the same language. All this, though written by 
 Samaritans, is to be reckoned not as Samaritan but as 
 Arabic literature. Similarly, during the rule of the Greeks, 
 and under the dominance of Rome and its continuation by the 
 Caesars of Byzantium, there were Samaritan books composed 
 in Greek the names of which may have come down to us. 
 Even if these works were discovered in Egypt among heaps 
 of papyri and ostraka, they would be regarded not as 
 specimens of Samaritan literature but as that of later 
 hellenism. It is therefore entirely to such literary remains 
 as are still to be found in Samaritan Hebrew or Aramaic 
 that our attention will be directed. 
 
 The amount of this is exceedingly scanty. Some time 
 in the second century of the Christian era there must have 
 been a wholesale destruction of Samaritan writings. In the 
 Samaritan " Book of Joshua," above referred to, this disaster 
 is attributed to the reign of Hadrian ; Abu'l Fath, however, 
 describes this destruction as taking place more than half a 
 century later, in the reign of Commodus, the son and suc- 
 cessor of Marcus Aurelius. The study of the Samaritan 
 Chronicles reveals in them such an amount of chronological 
 confusion that little reliance can be laid on particulars. 
 When it is noted that in them Adrinus (Hadrian) is declared 
 to be the successor of Alexander the Great, and he of 
 Buchtinosor (Nebuchadnezzar), it becomes evident how little 
 trust is to be placed on the chronology of Samaritan tradition. 
 All that is clear is, that somewhere in the second century A.D., 
 the Samaritans had to endure a severe persecution, and that 
 in that persecution the destruction of the sacred books was 
 a special object of their persecutors. As the agents of the 
 Imperial police would be unable to read the Samaritan 
 character, all books in Samaritan would be seized and 
 destroyed, as well as the copies of the Torah of which they 
 were more immediately in search. The result was (so the 
 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 261 
 
 Samaritans say) that the Torah alone was saved, and, 
 according to some authorities, with it the list of the succes- 
 sive high priests ; this, however, is doubtful. 
 
 Although the destruction has not been so absolute as 
 this would indicate, very little has survived. The most 
 important of these literary survivals is the Samaritan 
 Targum.^ As it is a translation, it has a larger infusion of 
 Hebrew than it otherwise might have had. As a transla- 
 tion, it is more faithful than even Onkelos. To show the 
 difference, let the curse on the serpent (Gen. iii. 14, 15), as 
 it appears in the Samaritan Targum, be compared with the 
 version in Onkelos. In the Samaritan it is : " And the Lord 
 God said to the serpent, because thou hast done this, thou 
 art cursed above all cattle and every beast of the field. . . . 
 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and 
 between thy seed and her seed ; and he shall bruise thy 
 head and thou shalt bruise his heel." On the other hand, 
 Onkelos renders : " I will put enmity between thee and the 
 woman, and between thy son and her son. He will re- 
 member thee and what thou didst to him at the beginning, 
 and thou wilt be watchful of him at the end." Another 
 passage which involves some difficulty is Gen. iv. 7. The 
 Samaritan rendering is : " If thou doest well, thou shalt be 
 absolved ; if thou doest not well, at the door sin croucheth ; 
 at thy hand is its remedy, and thou shalt rule over it ; " but 
 Onkelos is much more paraphrastic ; " If thou doest thy work 
 well, thou shalt be pardoned ; if thou dost not do thy work 
 well, to the day of judgment thy sin shall be reserved, when 
 vengeance shall be exacted from thee, if thou do not repent ; 
 but if thou repent, it shall be remitted to thee." An example 
 in which Onkelos is, though paraphrastic, not so much so, 
 is verse 23 of the same chapter — the song of Lamech. 
 It may be compared with the straightforward rendering of 
 
 ' Dr Paul Kahle {Textkritische u. Lexikal. Bemerk. zum Sam. Penta- 
 teuch Targum) thinks that there never was, among the Samaritans, a 
 generally recognised Targum like that of Onkelos among the Jews. He 
 is led to that conclusion by the number and nature of the various readings 
 found in such fragments of Samaritan Targum as have turned up from 
 time to time. His conclusion, though important, has no direct bearing 
 on our inquiry as to the Samaritan language and doctrine. 
 
262 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the Samaritan. Other instances for comparison might be 
 suggested, e.g., the Blessing of Jacob, especially the sections 
 in regard to Judah and Joseph (Gen. xlix. 8-12, 22-26). On 
 the whole, the Samaritan Targum is written in a simple 
 direct style. 
 
 There are several collections of hymns extant ; some of 
 them appear to be early, dating from pre-Christian times. 
 There was a collection of these hymns made by a certain 
 Mattura, whose date is difficult to fix. Heidenheim has 
 published a collection of hymns which he thinks is really 
 that of Mattura. These hymns are all liturgic, without much 
 poetic or religious feeling. They are of various dates, as has 
 just been intimated — some earlier, some later. The earliest 
 are written in fairly good Hebrew, with an occasional 
 admixture of forms drawn from Samaritan Aramaic ; they 
 are largely centos of phrases from the Pentateuch, and are 
 mostly fragmentary. They are all anonymous, save that 
 the names of Moses and Joshua are placed as titles. There 
 were, in all probability, collections of hymns earlier than any 
 still extant ; these, however, have been lost in the persecution 
 referred to. The hymns in the collection published by 
 Heidenheim in the Bibliotheca Samaritana, which are in 
 Hebrew, probably are survivals from those earlier groups. 
 Heidenheim divides the hymns of the collection which he 
 has published into three classes, (i) The first, those in 
 rejatively pure Hebrew, he would ascribe to the period 
 beginning with the time when the Jews rejected the help 
 of the Samaritans, which these had offered when the former 
 had returned from captivity and were engaged in rebuilding 
 the temple at Jerusalem. The erection of the temple on 
 Mount Gerizim, in consequence of this, led naturally to the 
 composition of hymns, suitable to the ritual which they had 
 set up. (2) The second class were composed during the period 
 in which the Samaritans separated themselves doctrinally 
 from Sadduceanism. This revolution in the Samaritan out- 
 look was apparently due to a considerable extent to the 
 influence of Christianity. The language in which these 
 hymns are written is New Hebrew, with a yet greater 
 admixture of Aramaic forms. (3) The third class is formed 
 from hymns during the period beginning with the eighth 
 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 263 
 
 Christian century, in which Arabic was beginning to 
 replace Aramaic and Greek as the predominant language, 
 alike of the home and the market-place. The hymns 
 show some slight traces of Arabic influence in their 
 language. 
 
 This collection, which Heidenheim has published, is 
 preceded by a lengthened introduction in Hebrew. It is 
 really a cento of verses extracted from Genesis, and relates 
 the history of the Patriarchs from the call of Abraham to 
 the carrying down of Joseph into Egypt. It ends with the 
 statement: "And JHWH was with Joseph and he found 
 (favour in the eyes of his master) and JHWH blessed the 
 house of the Egyptian, and he left ^ all that he had in the 
 hand of Joseph ; and Joseph was a goodly person and well 
 favoured." This termination suggests that the true end of 
 the " Introduction " has been lost. While the call of Abraham 
 forms a natural beginning to such a sketch, the slavery of 
 Joseph does not form an equally natural conclusion. The 
 sketch is interesting, as it presents some variations from the 
 narrative in the received text, Massoretic or Samaritan. As 
 an instance, alike in the Massoretic and the Samaritan, 
 Abraham is said (Gen. xii. 6) to have " passed through the 
 land to the place Shechem, to the plain (or 'oak') of 
 Moreh " ; in this introduction it is to the " height " of Moreh 
 that he comes ; this merely involves the change of K aleph 
 into V ain, a change all the more easy to make as, by the 
 Samaritans, neither letter was pronounced. 
 
 As an example of these hymns, that numbered II. in this 
 collection may be taken. It is called " The Prayer of Moses," 
 and is in fairly good Hebrew. Its language has already 
 been referred to. A translation is subjoined to give a 
 specimen of Samaritan hymnology : — 
 
 Magnify this holy name ; one is JHWH and to be glorified ; 
 
 There is none beside Him in the Heaven above or upon the earth 
 
 beneath ; 
 There is none beside Him. 
 Blessed be JHWH our God, whose name is glorious and rightly to be 
 
 praised. 
 
 ' The text reads, by blunder, lajJ^I " and he served." 
 
264 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 May our heart be circumcised, and the heart of our seed ; 
 Let us fear Him and love Him ; 
 
 Let us learn and observe the ten words of the Covenant 
 Which He spake in Horeb from the midst of the fire, 
 In the day of the assembly. 
 
 JHWH God merciful and gracious, forgiving to us and to our fathers, 
 
 Our rebellion, in Thy grace, everything in which we have sinned, 
 
 Transgressed, gone astray before Thee. 
 
 Ah Lord, I am that I am, remember Thy servants, 
 
 Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, O Lord, in their labour. 
 
 Turn not away from us on account of our hardness, our wickedness, and 
 
 our sins ; 
 We are sinners before Thy Majesty, and transgressors before Thy 
 
 Greatness. 
 Thou art JHWH a God merciful and gracious ; 
 Go now with us, O Lord, in our midst. 
 For a hard stiff-necked people are we. 
 And forgive us our iniquities and our sins ; 
 And give to us our inheritance, O Lord, the merciful. 
 For Thy great name, deliver us from everything false. 
 And save us from every abomination, and cleanse our souls from every 
 
 abomination, 
 And sanctify our bodies from all uncleanness. 
 And forgive to us and to our fathers our rebellion, in Thy mercy, 
 From everything in which we have sinned, erred, and transgressed 
 
 before Thee. 
 O Lord, we will circumcise our hearts. 
 And shall return to Thee with our whole heart and soul ; 
 And we shall love Thee with all our heart, with all our soul, and with 
 
 all our might. 
 For good to ourselves we will beseech Thy favour, and Thy goodness, 
 
 Thy compassions, and Thy favours. 
 Consecrate us to observe Thy ceremonies, and Thy statutes, and Thy 
 
 commandments, and Thy judgments at all times. 
 
 That will give some idea of the character of those hymns. 
 It may be noted that some of these poems referred to above 
 — as for instance, No. IV. — begin with a quotation from the 
 Pentateuch in Hebrew (Deut. xxxiii. 4), then immediately 
 lapse into Aramaic. Others, while wholly Aramaic, yet admit 
 numerous Hebraistic forms ; others, intended to be Hebrew, 
 admit Aramaic forms and constructions. At times, as above 
 noted, the Arabisms may be observed. In regard to verse 
 forms, there seems to be no case of the parallelism which- we 
 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 265 
 
 find in Hebrew poetry, maintained through a poem. In 
 three, IX., X., XI., there is use of a refrain, as in Ps. 
 cxxxvi. A very considerable number are in rhyme; not 
 rhyming couplets, but using one rhyme through a stanza 
 of a dozen lines or more. Thus No. XII., a short poem of 
 twelve verses and twenty-four lines, has only one rhyme, the 
 syllable W nu. All scholars are aware that a similar frequency 
 of pronominal suffixes occurs in Hebrew; and that many 
 passages in the Prophets have so great an appearance of 
 rhyming, that some have been led to regard this as not 
 merely, like alliteration in English poetry, an adornment, 
 but of the constitutive essence of the versification. Study 
 soon reveals that the Hebrew prophets did not build up their 
 poems by the help of similarly ending lines. It is different 
 with the Samaritans ; they show that rhyme is with them no 
 casual occurrence, by placing the rhyming syllables one over 
 the other in a column, with a blank space of varying length 
 between it and the rest of the word of which it is the 
 termination. Some of these poems combine with rhyme the 
 acrostic character so frequent in the Hebrew Psalms.^ An 
 example of this is to be found in XXI., which has twenty- 
 two stanzas of varying lengths, each of which begins with the 
 letter which follows in alphabetic order that with which its 
 predecessor began. Like not a few of the Samaritan 
 alphabetic poems, it begins with J? ain instead of N aleph, an 
 irregularity due to the Samaritan inability to pronounce the 
 gutturals. It is a hymn for the Great Day of Atonement, 
 and is attributed to the seven daughters of Jethro, the father- 
 in-law of Moses. Each stanza of this long poem of 665 lines 
 has only one rhyme ; the rhyming syllable in the first stanza 
 is al, in the second is yah, and so on : it is to be noted that 
 the fifth stanza, the rhyming syllable of which is J?"i ra\ 
 carries on the assonance with m, m and N"i. It recounts 
 the history of the Pentateuch in liturgic form. Several 
 other of these hymns are, like this, at once alphabetic and 
 
 ' In mediaeval times the Jews sometimes produced poems of this 
 construction, e.g. the hymn Agdamuth, written by Meyer ben Izhaq 
 in the eleventh century ; the first forty-four of its ninety-nine lines 
 are both rhyming and alphabetic. It rhymes throughout on the 
 syllable xn. 
 
266 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 rhyming. Although there is no parallelism, the lines in 
 many of the poems are divided by a pause into two approxi- 
 mately equal parts ; in this way there is a rhythmic effect 
 produced. 
 
 Earlier by sixty years than Heidenheim's publication 
 were the Carmina Samaritana given to the world by 
 Gesenius. He found a collection of Samaritan hymns in the 
 British Museum, but through misplacing of the leaves the 
 whole had the aspect of confused fragments. As some of 
 them were accompanied hy an Arabic translation and some 
 were not, and several were alphabetic, he was enabled to 
 discover that there were twelve separate hymns. There 
 were in the University of' Gotha where he was professor, 
 certain Samaritan MSS. which he collated. Eight of the 
 twelve hymns, the first seven and the twelfth, he has published 
 with a Latin version ; a summary is given of the remaining 
 four. Six of those he has given are alphabetic ; but unlike 
 the alphabetic hymns published by Heidenheim, the alpha- 
 betic succession is not restricted merely to the first letter of 
 each stanza ; but if the stanza has four lines, it is every 
 second line; if two, each line. Gesenius would date those 
 hymns, which he has published, as composed possibly after 
 the persecution inflicted on the Samaritans by Justinian, or 
 that endured in the beginning of the Mohammedan rule. 
 The probability is that they belong to various epochs, as 
 they do not all indicate recency of persecution. The 
 prevalence of rhyme in some would indicate a predominant 
 Arabic influence. 
 
 A specimen may be given of the nature of these Carmina 
 Samaritana by a translation of a few of the opening stanzas 
 of the first of them : — 
 
 There is no God save one : (i) Creator of the World, 
 
 Who can measure Thy Greatness .' Thou hast wrought in majesty 
 
 In the space of six days. 
 
 (2) In Thy Law, great and true, We read and become wise ; 
 
 In each of those days Thou didst magnify Thy creative Power. 
 
 (3) Made great in Thy Wisdom, They proclaim Thy Excellency. 
 They reveal Thy Divine Power ; Nothing is unless to magnify 
 
 Thee. 
 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 267 
 
 (4) Thou hast created Thy glorious works Without weariness. 
 Thou hast drawn them forth from nothingness, In the space of 
 
 six days. 
 
 (5) Thou hast created them perfect ; There is not defect in one of 
 
 them. 
 Thou hast shown forth their perfection to be seen, Because Thou 
 art the Lord of Perfection. 
 
 (6) Thou didst rest without weariness On the seventh day ; 
 Thou madest it a crown For the six days. 
 
 (7) Thou didst call it holy, Thou madest it head, 
 
 The time of every convocation, Chief of all holiness. 
 
 (8) Thou didst make it a covenant Between Thyself and Thy 
 
 worshippers ; 
 Thou didst teach them To guard its observance strictly. 
 
 (9) Happy they who celebrate the Sabbath, Who are worthy of its 
 
 blessing. 
 Its holy shade makes them breathe again, Free from all labour 
 and fatigue. 
 
 (10) With glorious gifts Our Lord has honoured us. 
 
 He gave to us the Sabbath day At length we rest since God has 
 prepared quiet. 
 
 The poet next glorifies the Law and Moses through 
 whom it had been revealed. 
 
 The last verse may be translated as exhibiting the place 
 ascribed to Moses : — 
 
 (22) An Ocean of Speech, Did Divine Excellence make Moses, 
 
 The end of Revelation is Moses, The end of the Revelation of 
 our Lord. 
 
 Of the rest of these hymns the most interesting is one 
 by a certain Abu'l Fath^ relating the sufferings endured by 
 the Samaritans from their persecutors ; it is numbered V. 
 in Gesenius' collection. We subjoin a few stanzas from 
 it:— 
 
 (5) If there is no helper for us, He Himself will afford us aid. 
 O merciful King, Pity our humiliation. 
 
 ' It is not clear whether this is the historian or not. 
 
268 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 (6) We are Thy servants, The sons of Thy Servants ; 
 
 Be it far from Thee That Thou shouldest forget Thy covenants with 
 our ancestors. 
 
 (7) We take refuge in Thy favour From the midst of our mighty 
 
 oppressors. 
 
 The above examples may be held as sufficient to give an 
 idea of the hymns of the Samaritans. 
 
 Some poetic fragments, hymns for circumcision, marriage 
 songs, etc., were discovered by Merx in the library of Gotha, 
 but do not call for remark. The same scholar also found a 
 poem on the Thaheb, the Samaritan Messiah. Its value is 
 more theological than literary. 
 
 The prose literature of the Samaritans is mainly repre- 
 sented by the theologian Marqah. As with the last cited 
 poem, the value of his treatises is mainly theological. The 
 style is rather rhapsodical than even rhetorical. Marqah's 
 Book of Wonders begins thus : 
 
 " Great is the might of the Omnipotent. 
 Let us clothe ourselves with fear lest we be destroyed. 
 No secret is hid from Him, and all is in His power. 
 He knows what is, what was, and what will be. 
 Of Himself is His might. He has need of no other." 
 
 If this is compared with the treatises in the Mishna, which 
 were probably nearly contemporary with Marqah's literary 
 activity, the wide difference between their literary atmosphere 
 is observable. Marqah had not gone to school with the 
 Jewish Rabbis. 
 
 In verse, the Samaritans owed little to the Jews. The 
 ruling feature of Jewish versification was parallelism, but 
 there is no trace of it as a constituent part of the verse of 
 the Samaritans. On the other hand, the Samaritans used 
 rhyme as a vehicle for their poetic expression of which the 
 Jews did not make use until late times. Both they and the 
 Jews had a favour for the alphabetic acrostic ; and both 
 occasionally used the refrain. Still these are not the 
 essentials of verse ; in all three, the Samaritans followed 
 other models than the Jews. If they did not follow the Jews 
 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 269 
 
 in matters of literary form, still less were they likely to do so 
 in religion. 
 
 Literary activity has ceased for centuries among the 
 Samaritans. Latterly they have been especially im- 
 poverished. All their later work, as mentioned above, has 
 been in Arabic. 
 
 [Paradigms of Verbal Forms 
 
in 
 
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 270 THE SAMARITANS 
 
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LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 271 
 
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272 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 
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LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF SAMARITANS 273 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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374 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 
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CHAPTER X 
 
 COMPARISON OF THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH WITH 
 THE MASSORETIC 
 
 About three centuries ago an Italian nobleman, Pietro della 
 Valle by name, determined to make a prolonged tour in the 
 East. In the beginning of his journey he passed through 
 Constantinople ; while there he was entertained by the 
 French Ambassador, a man interested in scholarship ; he 
 suggested to Delia Valle that he should, if possible, secure 
 a copy of the Samaritan Recension of the Pentateuch. 
 Mindful of this, when he reached Cairo, Della Valle 
 endeavoured to induce some member of the Samaritan 
 community there to sell him a copy of their Torah, but not 
 one would part with a copy on any consideration. He pro- 
 ceeded to Gaza, but with the Samaritan community there 
 his efforts were equally fruitless. The same was the case in 
 Nablus. At length in Damascus he succeeded in procuring 
 two copies, one of which found its way to the Royal Library 
 in Paris, now the Bibliotheque Nationale, where it still may 
 be seen. The other was sent to the Vatican. The text, as 
 represented, by the Parisian copy, was printed under the 
 editorship of Morinus, a pervert from Protestantism. The 
 controversy between Roman Catholic and Protestant had at 
 that time reached an acute stage. The Thirty Years' War 
 had just begun, and the two parties were specially embittered 
 against each other. Morinus, emphasizing the difference 
 between the two recensions, demanded of the Protestants 
 which of the two represented the genuine Word of God, 
 claiming that the Church alone had the authority to decide. 
 He was answered by numerous Protestant scholars, all of 
 whom maintained that the Samaritan Recension was late 
 
 276 
 
276 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 and worthless. Some like the younger Buxtorf, in their 
 eagerness to rebut the claim to antiquity put forward in 
 favour of the Samaritan drawn from the script in which it 
 was written, went so far as to declare, against the evidence 
 of the Jews themselves, that the Law was originally written 
 in the square character. These discussions, which went on 
 for a couple of centuries, proceeded mainly on a priori grounds, 
 and were therefore for scholarship practically valueless. At 
 length a serious attempt was made to estimate scientifically 
 the nature and extent of the differences between the two 
 recensions. Little more than a century ago, in the year 
 1 815, Gesenius, in proceeding to the degree of Doctor of 
 Theology, presented, as his Thesis, a short treatise entitled, 
 de Pentateuchi Samaritani Origine Indole et Auctoritate, to 
 which there has already been reference. In it he removed 
 the question into a new region ; putting their theological 
 bearings to one side, he proceeded to examine the differ- 
 ences themselves, their number, extent, and character. 
 Gesenius, good Protestant as he was, assumed without 
 further ado that the Massoretic text was the primitive, and 
 that the Samaritan text arose from it by intentional variation. 
 As nearly all the more recent investigators have been non- 
 Catholic, and the majority of them Jews, it is not surprising 
 that the same assumption has been implicit in them all. It 
 scarcely needs argument to show that such a procedure is 
 eminently unscientific. In the pages which follow we shall 
 endeavour to avoid any presumption in favour of one or 
 other. 
 
 It is very difficult to see why, in determining the relation 
 between the Samaritan and the Massoretic, the critical 
 school, who treat the Massoretic text with such slight respect 
 sometimes, are so enamoured of it, when the question as to 
 the relative priority or the dependence of the one on the other 
 has to be considered. The Massoretic text appears to have 
 been gradually evolved. The distinction between the qri 
 and the k'thib, between what ought to be read and what 
 is written, is familiar to every one ; even the youngest 
 student of the Hebrew Scripture is soon made aware of 
 this. The origin of this requires to be explained. That 
 which has to be "written" has frequent blunders which, 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 277 
 
 however, are in the main corrected in the qri, that which 
 has to be "read." This perpetuation of blunders which 
 are known, and duly corrected in each copy, seems only 
 explicable on the idea that some one roll of the Law, some 
 one roll of the Prophets, and some one roll of the K'thubhim 
 had for some reason become sacrosanct, perhaps from having 
 been the property of some much venerated Rabbi ; its very 
 blunders, though recognised to be blunders, are hallowed by 
 the^ roll in which they occur. Another manuscript, or 
 perhaps two, suggested the correct reading. There may be 
 a well-grounded suspicion that many blunders may have 
 been retained because the manuscripts which supplied the 
 qri agreed in the blunder with that which was copied in 
 the k'thibh. That this singular amalgam of blunders and 
 corrections was the result of a process may be proved 
 by comparison of the Massoretic with the text behind 
 the older versions. Although the Torah was regarded 
 as the most sacred portion of the Scripture, and therefore 
 one should have expected that it would be most carefully 
 copied, and most sedulously kept free of errors ; yet in 
 the Pentateuch there are a larger number of recognised 
 blunders in proportion than in any other part of Scripture. 
 When the versions are brought into comparison, it is 
 found that the older the version the further it is from 
 the Massoretic. The oldest version is that of the LXX. 
 The differences between the text behind it and the Masso- 
 retic are extensive and well known. An interval of several 
 centuries separates the Septuagint from the next Greek 
 translations. With regard to two of these, by Aquila and 
 Symmachus, only fragments have been preserved, and these 
 mainly in quotations ; hence no absolutely trustworthy 
 evidence can be drawn from them as to what relation 
 the text from which they translated bore to the Massoretic. 
 In regard to Theodotion, we have the advantage of 
 possessing a complete book, the book of Daniel, in his 
 translation. The result of a study of Theodotion serves 
 to show that while his version has been made from a text 
 much nearer to the Massoretic than that behind the Septua- 
 gint, it still was one which diifered considerably from it. 
 Nearly contemporary with Theodotion, but not improbably 
 
278 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 somewhat earlier, is the Peshitta of the Old Testament. 
 Theodotion's version seems to have been made in the 
 first half of the second century of our era, which is a 
 not improbable date for the Peshitta of the New Testament ; 
 but the language of the Peshitta of the Old Testament 
 appears to be older, so it may quite well be dated in 
 the latter half of the first century. The relation of the 
 Peshitta to the Massoretic is much closer than is 
 Theodotion's. The latest of the older versions is the 
 Vulgate, the work of St Jerome, written in Palestine in the 
 fifth century ; its evidence is specially valuable. Jerome 
 was a scholar and gave all diligence and used every 
 assistance to get the exact text and the precise meaning 
 of every passage. Over and above his version, he wrote 
 commentaries on a number of the books of the Old 
 Testament, and in these there are many textual notes ; we 
 can thus form a pretty clear idea of the text in his day. 
 In regard to the Psalms we have not only his revision of 
 the Latin Psalter then in use — a version of the Septuagint — 
 but the version which he made direct from the Hebrew, 
 and thus can measure the change which the Hebrew 
 text had undergone in the interval. While the text which 
 Jerome used is much closer to the Massoretic than that 
 behind Theodotion, it still is far from being absolutely 
 identical with it. For one thing, the distinction between qri 
 and k'thibh does not seem to have been known to him 
 or to the Rabbin, his instructors, in Palestine. There are 
 two cases in which the qri is most illuminative in which the 
 scribe of the k'thibh has written \h lo, " not," instead \'? lo, 
 " to him " ; in both cases the blunder is corrected by the 
 gri The instances are Is. ix. 3 and Ps. c. 3. In regard to the 
 first of these, " Thou hast multiplied the people and hast 
 not increased the joy," Jerome in his commentary recognises 
 the difficulty but shows no knowledge of the way of escape to 
 be found in the qri. He would explain the apparent con- 
 tradiction by instancing the perpetual grief of the Apostles 
 over the impenitence of Israel, though converts were 
 multiplied. With regard to the Hundredth Psalm, Jerome's 
 own version is placed in a column parallel to that in which 
 is printed his amended version of the LXX. In his own 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 279 
 
 version he renders the clause in question — Deus, ipse 
 fecit nos et ipsius sumus. The conclusion to which we feel 
 obliged to come is that in Jerome's days the Massoretic text 
 had not been reached. The fact that the Peshitta, though 
 probably earlier than Theodotion, is closer to the Massoretic, 
 suggests that the model manuscript on which the kHhibh 
 is based must have been written in Babylon. The close 
 agreement of the Targum of Onkelos may be explained 
 by its Babylonian origin, or at least sanction. From this 
 it will be seen that the Massoretic text is late and not by 
 any means very accurate. There is therefore no ground 
 for assuming, as do so many of the students of the Samaritan 
 question, that the Massoretic represents the primitive 
 text. 
 
 The variants which exist between the Samaritan 
 and the Massoretic are very numerous, but of very 
 different value. The student may find a convenient list 
 of them in the beginning of Bagster's Hebrew Bible. It 
 labours under one disadvantage, that it has been made from 
 the text in Walton's Polyglot, which is very defective ; the 
 editor seems to have had a perverse preference for the worse 
 reading in every case. The number of the differences may 
 be estimated when it is seen that they occupy fifty pages in 
 the beginning of Bagster's Hebrew Bible. Another list 
 available for the student is that by Petermann appended 
 to his Versuch einer Heb. Formenl. nach der Aussprache der 
 heutig. Samaritaner and occupies io8 pages. The disadvan- 
 tage with regard to Petermann's list is that the Samaritan 
 text implied in it does not in every case agree with the text 
 of Genesis, which he has transcribed to show the Samaritan 
 pronunciation. With the two, however, the student is in 
 a position to consider the variants. Blayney's transcrip- 
 tion of the Samaritan of the Polyglot text is valuable still, 
 although it occasionally adds blunders of its own to those 
 of Walton's text. Much better is the careful text of von 
 Gall. 
 
 As a suitable introduction to the study of these differences 
 between the Samaritan and Massoretic texts, since it will 
 exhibit the general nature and relative frequency of them, 
 it would seem advisable to take a limited portion of the 
 
280 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Pentateuch, note in it the successive examples of diverg- 
 ence as they occur, and then consider their nature. As the 
 portion of the Hebrew Scripture most likely to be familiar 
 to those who read the original, the first chapter of Genesis 
 may be taken. As it is convenient we may make use of 
 Bagster's list. The first difference noted is that the 
 Massoretic begins with a large 2, whereas in the Samaritan 
 the opening 3 is of the same size as the other letters. So 
 natural is it to us to emphasize the beginning of a book or 
 of a section of a book by using a large, perhaps ornamental, 
 letter that the large 1 would not be recognised as a peculiarity, 
 were it not for the Massoretic note which draws attention to 
 it. On looking through the Hebrew Bible it will be found 
 that only other three books. Proverbs, Song of Solomon, and 
 first Chronicles begin with large letters. The next variant is 
 found in verse 1 1, where in the Samaritan 1 " and " is inserted 
 before fy aj/i^z, " a tree " ; the English versions insert " and " 
 here. It is to be noted that this "and" is supplied in all 
 versions, ancient and modern. In the same verse ' in 
 yntD mazrid , " a seeding seed " is dropped in the" Samaritan ; 
 
 this involves a change of conjugation from Hiphil to Piel. 
 Elsewhere in Scripture there is no instance of the participle 
 of either conjugation of this verb ; the imperfect of the 
 Hiphil occurs in Lev. xii. 2, the preterite Pual, the passive 
 of the Piel, is found in Is. xl. 24, As the variation involves 
 no change of meaning, the versions do not decide. In verse 
 14 there are four variants ; first the Hebrew word for " lights " 
 is written plene in the Samaritan with all the matres 
 kctionis niniKD instead of rinto as in the Massoretic ; second, 
 
 in the Samaritan there is a clause added T^^"^ ^J' f>^rh leka'eer 
 
 ^al ha'aretz, "to give light upon the earth,'' which is not in the 
 Massoretic ; in this the Samaritan has the support of the 
 LXX., according to the text of Brooke and Maclean, and the 
 Vulgate ; fourth, the Samaritan writes the vowels in 'othoth, 
 " signs," pUne in both cases, whereas in the Massoretic 
 the matres lectionis are omitted. The only difference in 
 verse 15 is that the Samaritan writes both syllables of the 
 word " lights " plene, but the Massoretic so writes only 
 the first. In the next verse the Samaritan writes the word 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 281 
 
 just mentioned as it has already done ; the Massoretic has no 
 vav at all. There are three other differences due to blunders 
 of the scribes of some Samaritan MSS., but the best do not 
 have them, although Walton has them in the Polyglot ; they 
 are not parts of the genuine Samaritan text. The second 
 syllable of the word gadhol is plene in the Samaritan. 
 Verse 20 varies from the rule ; generally the Samaritan has 
 a tendency to fill in the matres lectionis, while with the Masso- 
 retic the tendency is to omit ; in this verse the word for 
 " flying " is written plene in the Massoretic but defective in 
 the Samaritan. There are three variants in the next verse ; 
 two of them are merely the insertion of vav ; the third 
 is D instead of tJ' but it is found only in one MS. ; it is a 
 blunder of hearing. For the Jussive form of the imperfect 
 Hiphil of the verb 23T in the Massoretic the Samaritan has 
 
 in verse 22 the simple imperfect of the Hiphil. There is in 
 verse 24 what Gesenius regarded as an archaic construct 
 in 1 in the Massoretic ; this the Samaritan omits. It 
 is possible that what was originally written was the 
 ordinary archaic construct in ^ modified by blunder into 1. 
 from the practical identity of these two letters in the early 
 square script, as evidenced by the Kefr Bir'im inscription. 
 In Samaria the archaic form had fallen out of use. There is 
 another thing to be noted, which suggests another possible 
 explanation ; the vav omitted is compensated by the 
 insertion of the article before pN aretz, a change which 
 further assimilates the construction to that of later classic 
 Hebrew as seen in the following verse. This would suggest 
 that the supposed archaism is due to the blunder of a Jewish 
 scribe, who, copying into square character a manuscript in 
 Samaritan script, and mistaking he for vav, letters very like 
 in some forms of Samaritan, transferred what was the article 
 prefixed to eretz to the end of the preceding word. This 
 explanation is rendered all the more probable by the fact 
 that so the clause is identical with the parallel clause in 
 verse 25. In verse 26 while the Massoretic writes wn^io'ia in 
 one MS. the Samaritan drops the vav. In verse 28 the 
 Samaritan correctly has shureq instead of kibbutz in the 
 word nE'33 and the article is inserted before mn and after ^b, 
 
282 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 In the next verse, the Samaritan omits and the Massoretic 
 inserts the article in precisely similar circumstances. In the 
 30th verse the Samaritan has the article before bpn but 
 has not 1 in the first syllable ; the Massoretic omits the article 
 but writes the first syllable plene. As the first three verses 
 of chapter ii. belong really to the same document as 
 chapter i., the variant in them may be noted. There is 
 only one, but it is more important than those preceding; 
 where, in verse 2, the Massoretic has " seventh " and the 
 Samaritan has " sixth," in this supported by the LXX. and 
 the Peshitta. As mentioned above, Petermann gives a 
 slightly more numerous list of variants, though omitting 
 some that are in Bagster's list. While these differences are 
 fairly numerous, they are in the main unimportant ; indeed, 
 only a very few of them cause any difference in translation. 
 
 Although in the main so unimportant, these variants are 
 so numerous and differ so much in value and character that 
 a classification of them is necessary ; to be understood, they 
 must be grouped. This necessity becomes all the more 
 obvious when study is extended over the whole Pentateuch. 
 Gesenius saw this, and in his famous dissertation made an 
 elaborate classification of these variants, which has been the 
 basis of all subsequent attempts. He arranged them in 
 eight classes, (i) Emendations to make the text agree 
 with the laws of ordinary grammar. (2) Glosses or explana- 
 tions received into the text. (3) Conjectural emendations 
 of passages which labour under some verbal difficulty, real or 
 imaginary. (4) Readings corrected or supplemented from 
 parallel passages. (5) Larger additions interpolated from 
 parallel passages. (6) Emendations of passages which 
 labour under some difficulty as to matters of fact, chiefly of 
 a historical kind. (7) Forms of words altered into agree- 
 ment with the Samaritan dialect. (8) Finally; Passages 
 conformed to the theology and modes of interpretation 
 peculiar to the Samaritans. 
 
 The great and undeniable debt which Semitic scholarship, 
 especially so far as it relates to Samaritan, owes to Gesenius 
 must not make us blind to the defects of the above 
 classification, or shun the duty of criticising it. It must be 
 remembered, on the one hand, that he wrote a hundred 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 283 
 
 years ago when the bitterness of the controversy between 
 Protestantism and Catholicism had not quite disappeared ; 
 and on the other, that during the century which has elapsed 
 many things, bearing on the subject under consideration, 
 have been discovered. 
 
 The first thing to be noted as obvious in this classification 
 is the unscientific assumption, which has been referred to 
 above, that the Massoretic text is the primitive. Gesenius, 
 in an earlier portion of his Thesis (p. i6), asserts that the 
 Samaritan text was derived from a manuscript written in 
 square character, brought to Samaria in the age of Alexander 
 the Great. Had he known certain facts when he was 
 composing his Thesis, which came within his ken later, or had 
 he properly estimated facts which were open to his know- 
 ledge, he would have seen that these two assumptions were 
 in conflict one with another. If the MS. was written in 
 square character, it could not have been conveyed to Samaria 
 in the days of Alexander, as that script was not introduced 
 till half a millennium after the Macedonian Conquest. 
 Historical difificulties connected with that date fall to be 
 considered elsewhere. Gesenius had the Maccabaean coins 
 within his reach, and might have known that the inscriptions 
 on them were in a script akin to that of the Samaritan 
 manuscripts, and consequently that centuries after Alexander 
 the Jews themselves did not use the square character. 
 
 Even a cursory study of this classification shows it to be 
 very defective, merely as a classification. In fact, it has as 
 many defects as a classification can have. It is in the first 
 place defective, because it takes no note of the huge majority 
 of variants which are due, not to intention, but to accident. 
 It is redundant ; class $ is contained under class 4. It has 
 no principle according to which the classes are arranged, and 
 consequently it is confused ; the eighth class — passages con- 
 formed to Samaritan tenets and modes of interpretation — 
 differs more in motive from the other classes than they do 
 from each other ; much more, for instance, than the third and 
 sixth, or the fourth and fifth differ from each other. The 
 classes i, 3, and 6 all contain emendations to escape difficul- 
 ties, grammatical, verbal, or historical ; the fourth and fifth 
 contain cases in which supplements are made to the text from 
 
284 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 parallel passages, and differ from each other only in the^ 
 size of the supplement. Class 2, like classes 4 and 5, consists 
 of additions to the text, but the source of these additions is 
 not parallel passages. 
 
 Defective as is the classification of Gesenius, still more so 
 is that of Kirchheim, as given by Deutsch in his article on 
 the "Samaritan Pentateuch" in Smith's Dictionary of- the 
 Bible. His classes are thirteen: (i) Additions and altera- 
 tions in favour of Mount Gerizim. (2) Additions for the 
 purpose of completion. (3) Commentary. (4) Change of 
 verbs and moods. (5) Change of nouns. (6) Emendations 
 of seeming irregularities. (7) Permutations of letters. (8) 
 Of pronouns. (9) Of gender. (10) Letters added. (11) 
 Addition of letters which are prepositions, conjunctions, the 
 article, etc. (12) Junction of words that are separated in the 
 Massoretic, and separation of those that are joined. (13) 
 Chronological alterations. The enumeration of the classes 
 in this classification is sufficient to condemn it ; comment is 
 scarcely needed. The want of any class for blunders, as 
 distinct from intentional alterations, the utter want of any 
 principle of classification, the want of any attempt at equi- 
 pollence of classes, or distinction of one from another, so 
 that one should not overlap another, all these things make 
 the classification of Kirchheim' even worse than that of 
 Gesenius. Perhaps the worst attempt at classification is 
 that of Kohn. It was suggested by him as an improvement 
 on that of Gesenius by being a condensation of it. He 
 reduces the classes of Gesenius to three: (i) Words which 
 are expressed in Samaritan forms. (2) Diverse corrections 
 and emendations. (3) Glosses and corruptions feigned on 
 account of religion. It will be observed that the second 
 class really contains all the others. Like the classification 
 of Gesenius on which it was intended to be an improvement, 
 this of Kohn's assumes that the Massoretic is always correct, 
 and further, that all variations from it are due to intention. 
 It is clear that no classification can be satisfactory that makes 
 these two preliminary assumptions. 
 
 As Unity of Principle is necessary to any logical scheme 
 of classification, a little consideration will show that the most 
 natural principle for this purpose must be founded in Origin ; 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 285 
 
 that is to say, that the variants should be classified in 
 accordance with the sources from which they resulted. This 
 at once suggests a primary division into two leading classes ; 
 first, Variants due to Accident, and next, Variants due to In- 
 tention. The first class of variants, those due to Accident, 
 are usually denominated Blunders, and neglected. In many 
 cases " blunders " may be neglected ; if the object be to find 
 out the true text of a classic, blunders may very generally be 
 neglected. Yet even in regard to this, at times the true text 
 may be arrived at as being that from which given blunders 
 could most easily spring. But to the critic who desires to 
 discover the conditions under which the MS. which he is 
 studying was produced, " blunders " are often invaluable. 
 Thus in Greek manuscripts, the phenomenon of itacism 
 proves that the MS. which shows many traces of it had been 
 written to dictation, and that the reader spoke a dialect of 
 Greek which made no distinction between r) and et, etc. In 
 short, as blunders are usually due to external circumstances, 
 they not infrequently throw some light on the nature of 
 these circumstances, consequently they sometimes may 
 supply the critic with a clue to the date of a document, and 
 to its place of origin. 
 
 Variants due to Accident. — To understand the origin of the 
 accidental differences which characterise the two recensions 
 — the blunders, whether made by Samaritan or Jewish scribes, 
 which distinguish the one from the other — we must consider 
 the conditions under which ancient manuscripts were pro- 
 duced. The picture which rises before the mind of a modern 
 reader, when manuscripts and copyists are spoken of, is of a 
 youth, large-eyed and emaciated, with a single roll before 
 him, copying it, by the light of a suspended lamp, into 
 another parchment roll. This was doubtless the way many 
 of the copies of classical authors were made by the mediaeval 
 monks. The majority of the MSS. of an older date present 
 many phenomena, which cannot be explained on the sup- 
 position that this was the way in which they were produced. 
 Mistakes due to the confusion of letters that resembled might 
 be understood on this supposition ; but it would not explain 
 how words and letters, which as written had no resemblance, 
 were confused one with another, when they sounded alike. 
 
286 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 This implies that the majority of ancient MSS. were written 
 by amanuenses to dictation. It must be remembered that 
 though books were dearer in the early centuries than they 
 are now, they yet were much cheaper than they would have 
 been had they been copied directly. A publisher in the first 
 Christian century managed things differently ; he had a score 
 or more of slaves, who were trained scribes, and further, he 
 had a reader, who dictated from a manuscript before him to 
 the scribes who wrote. There would thus be a considerable 
 saving of time and labour in the production of MSS., and 
 consequently a cheapening of their price. If the reader in 
 such a manufactory of MSS. spoke at a time indistinctly, or 
 if any of the copyists had defective hearing, one letter might 
 easily be mistaken for another, and words having a general 
 resemblance might be confused ; all the more readily as the 
 scribes would write mechanically, without any regard to the 
 meaning. Further, the MS. before the reader might have 
 become somewhat rubbed, or it may have been indistinctly 
 written at first, and the distinctions between resembling 
 letters so little emphasized, that one might easily be mis- 
 taken for another. The reader, too, would become liable to 
 read mechanically, and words that had a general resemblance 
 might be confounded in defiance of sense. These mistakes 
 of the reader would be repeated in all the twenty copies. 
 Again, if two successive sentences began with the same 
 words, or ended with the same words, a confusion might be 
 caused which would result in the omission of one of them. 
 Yet another source of blunder has to be considered. When 
 a sentence begins in a way that suggests a customary end- 
 ing, though as a matter of fact it ends differently, reader 
 and writer alike are liable, from inattention, to follow the 
 customary. When the passage read is a long one, a scribe 
 may omit a word or two, or again might inadvertently use 
 a synonym for the word really dictated. We have thus under 
 the head of Accidental Variants to consider those due to 
 mistakes (i) of hearing; (2) of sight; (3) of defective attention, 
 (i) A comparison of the Samaritan text with that of 
 the Massoretes reveals the fact that the gutturals Knnj? are 
 specially liable to confusion. Thus, one of the sons of 
 Benjamin is called csn "Huppim" (Gen. xlvi. 21) (Masso- 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 287 
 
 retic), but in the Samaritan the name is written D''QK ; in this 
 case, N and n are interchanged. Another example of this 
 is to be found in Gen. j^xvii. 36 ; instead of RJi^N as in 
 the Massoretic meaning " reserved or left," the Samaritan 
 has ri^^n "delivered," "snatched away from." Although, 
 
 as it is the more picturesque version, there might be a 
 primd facie probability in favour of the Samaritan, the fact 
 that the LXX. is against it, may be held as decisive. This 
 confusion of the gutturals is more strikingly seen in the 
 Samaritan hymns, many of which are alphabetic; many 
 of them begin with V instead of N. This is due to the 
 fact, commented on in a previous chapter, that the 
 Samaritans omit the gutturals when they read Hebrew. 
 When the extant Samaritan MSS. were written, Hebrew had 
 ceased to be understood, at least by the class from which 
 the scribes would be taken, consequently the guttural they 
 wrote, to the silence of the reader, might be chosen at times 
 haphazard. Sometimes gutturals are inserted by the 
 Samaritan scribes in cases where they do not appear in the 
 Massoretic, as in Gen. xlvi. 16, where the Samaritan has 
 pynVK for the Massoretic |3VK; or again, a guttural present 
 in the Massoretic is omitted by the Samaritan as in 
 Gen. xlviii. 16, instead of the Massoretic IK^iD "angel," 
 the Samaritan has "po "' a king." Though the Israelites 
 of the Southern Kingdom did not labour under the same 
 disability in regard to the gutturals that the Samaritans 
 did, even with them there is an occasional uncertainty 
 in the matter of these letters. In Exod. iii. 2, the Masso- 
 retic reads napa " in a flame," instead of n'z.rh'^, as in 
 the Samaritan. Another case of an inserted or dropped 
 guttural is to be found in Exod. xiv. 27, " And the Egyptians 
 fled n»p: against it " Snvn^h (literally " to meet it "). Instead 
 
 of nasim the Samaritan reads D''J?DJ nas'im "marching." 
 Although the Massoretic is supported by the versions, a 
 fair case might be made out for the Samaritan. In this 
 instance either the Massoretic has dropped an ain, or the 
 Samaritan has inserted it. 
 
288 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Deutsch accuses the Samaritans of confusing the ahevi 
 letters. This accusation is due to ignorance or forgetfulness ; 
 the first two of these letters are gutturals ; the confusion 
 in regard to the latter two is to be sought among the Jewish 
 scribes rather than among those of Samaria. Cases, where 
 in the Samaritan he and vav are confused, are due to the 
 likeness of these two letters in the Samaritan script.^ 
 Other groups of letters are liable to be confused ; thus the 
 " Unguals " daleth, tetk, and tau are at times confused in 
 individual MSS. among the Samaritans. An example of 
 this is to be found in Gen. x. 3, where instead of ns'") 
 
 (Massoretic), the Samaritan has isi. In Gen. xv. 10 Walton's 
 text has 11133 instead of nna as in the Massoretic. As B' and D 
 became identical in sound, it is not to be wondered at that 
 in some cases they are interchanged as in Gen. xlii. 25, 
 where in Walton's text IpD stands for 1pE> of the Massoretic. 
 As it involves another class of consonants, Gen. xxxi. 33 
 may be referred to; in Walton's text, instead of E'sn 
 
 " to search," which is in accordance with the Septuagint (the 
 word is omitted from the Massoretic) there is found E'an " to 
 
 bind." In this case, Walton's text has the support of only 
 one MS. These are specimens of the variants to be ascribed 
 to mistakes in hearing ; such mistakes, however, it ought 
 to be understood, are not confined to the Samaritan scribes. 
 (2) We have now to consider the second class of accidental 
 variations ; those due to mistaking one letter for another 
 which resembles it in appearance. Pairs of letters so like as 
 to be confused in one script are not at all liable to be con- 
 fused in another ; thus n and n are very like in the square 
 character, but in the Samaritan they are unlike ^"JB^ : still 
 less are these letters like in the script of the Hasmonaean 
 coins ^B ; in the angular script which preceded these 
 last - na'med scripts, the unlikeness is also marked ^-^ . 
 Yodh and tzade are very similar in Samaritan -WWjbut do 
 
 1 Confusions in that script sometimes involved more of these letters. 
 Gesenius in his introduction to his Carmina Samaritana (p. 6) speaks of 
 a manuscript in which the three letters he, vav, and yodh are so 
 much alike ut cegre dignoscantur "that with difificulty they can be 
 distinguished." 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 289 
 
 not resemble each other in the square character O V), nor 
 in the early angular Zl" . Some letters are like in two 
 scripts ; thus da/eik and resA (1 n) resemble each other in 
 the square character, and also in the angular a'A ^ but the 
 likeness is not so great in the Samaritan Cfg. Further, 
 the evolution of the angular script was a process, the various 
 stages of which may be traced. From the date of the Moabite 
 Stone, inscribed in the days of Jehoram the son of Ahab, to that 
 of the inscription on the sarcophagus of Ashmunazar, the 
 contemporary of the younger Cyrus, is a period of nearly 
 half a millennium. Examination shows that, while some 
 of the letters remained unchanged, others altered very 
 materially. 
 
 As a stream, ere it reaches the sea, is prone to carry along 
 with it, and hold in solution something of all the different 
 soils through which it has passed ; so a manuscript of the 
 Old Testament Scripture in the square character, however 
 late, may bear in it traces of each successive transcription, 
 and of each successive script. The origin of mistakes in a 
 manuscript which seem to be due to confusions of letters like 
 each other in an ancient script, is not disproved by the presence 
 in it of blunders due to resemblances in characters which 
 belong to a later script. Although every individual manu- 
 script must be dated by the latest script found in it, the 
 matter of the document, the contents of the writing inscribed 
 on it, must have its chronological position fixed by the 
 earliest. 
 
 Some critics, and among the rest, as has already been 
 observed, Gesenius, maintain that certain of the differences 
 between the two recensions are due to confusion of letters like 
 each other in the square character, and consequently they hold 
 that the Samaritan Pentateuch was copied into the Samaritan 
 script from a manuscript written in the square character. 
 This opinion can only be defended on the presumption that 
 the Samaritan script is more recent than the square, which 
 no one can maintain in face of the fact that the Jews 
 themselves maintain the contrary (6"a«^. 2 1*5). The letters 
 singled out by Gesenius as those which have been con- 
 fused in transcription in consequence of their likeness in 
 
 T 
 
290 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the square character are 1 daleth and i resh, n he and n heth, 
 1 vav and '' yodh. As to the first of theSe pairs, they are like 
 not only in the square character but also in the angular. 
 Such differences as may be due to confusions of these letters 
 must be ascribed to transcription from a manuscript in the 
 script of the Moabite Stone, not from one written in the, 
 square character, which would be too late. The cases in 
 which he and heth are confused are due to mistakes of 
 hearing, not of sight. There remain only yodh and vav. 
 These letters do not resemble each other in any other script 
 than the square. A careful examination of the instances of 
 such confusion proves that they are all due to the blunders 
 of the scribe to whom we owe the manuscript which is per- 
 petuated in the k'thibh of the Massoretic text. In a wery 
 considerable number of cases, the blunder is acknowledged 
 by the qri being in agreement with the Samaritan ; in some 
 other cases, the Septuagint bears evidence to the correctness 
 of the Samaritan reading. The first instance selected by 
 Gesenius is peculiarly unfortunate for his contention ; in 
 Gen. X. 28 he maintains there has been a confusion between 
 the letters in question, as the Samaritan reads bTV eval, and 
 
 the Massoretic reads 73ij? uval. In the parallel passage, 
 
 I Chron. i. 22, the Samaritan reading is found. The LXX. 
 had the same reading in their Hebrew, as they render Ei/aX. 
 In chapter xxxvi. 14, the ^^« corrects a blunder of the k'thibh, 
 in writing tr'^j)'' instead of ^T. with the Samaritan and the 
 
 LXX. Another case in which the Massoretic has vav and the 
 Samaritan yodh is Gen. xlvi. 30 ; the Massoretic has the inf. 
 ^n^KT instead of the ist pers. pret. ; the similar clauses in Gen. 
 
 vii. I ; xvi. 13 ; the probability is that there the change was on 
 the side of the Massoretic. A similar case is Exod. xiii. 22, in 
 which the Massoretic reads B'^D'' instead of K'lD'' as does the 
 
 Samaritan, supported in this by the LXX. and adopted by 
 the R.V. In this case the difference of meaning between the 
 two words does not alter the sense of the passage ; it amounts 
 to the same thing whether J HWH (understood) is considered 
 the nominative and the verbal form taken as the Hiphil, so 
 that the clause read, " He did not remove the pillar of cloud," 
 or, as in the Samaritan, the verb be taken in the Kal and 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 291 
 
 the clause read, " the pillar of cloud departed not." In another 
 passage in which the same difference exists, Exod. xxxiii. ii, 
 every version, including the TargumofOnkelos, supports the 
 Samaritan ; it would look something like nonsense to in- 
 troduce JHWH as " not removing " Joshua from the taber- 
 nacle. In regard to proper names, no decision can be come 
 to when both recensions are consistent. In the case of 
 Peniel (Gen. xxxii. 30) the Samaritan has Penuel, but 
 though the Massoretic has Peniel in verse 30, in the follow- 
 ing verse it has the Samaritan form ; it appears also in 
 Judges viii. 8. There is thus no instance in which it can be 
 proved that the Samaritan scribes have confused vav with 
 yodh ; on the other hand, there are several instances in 
 which confusion of these letters by Jewish scribes can be 
 demonstrated. Hence, there is no evidence that the Samaritan 
 text is dependent on a mother text in the square character. 
 
 There are in the text of Walton's Polyglot, especially as 
 represented by Blayney's transcription, a number of cases in 
 which the differences from the Massoretic appear to be due 
 to confusions of letters similar only in the Samaritan script. 
 Every one of these may be proved to be Confined to one or 
 two MSS. They are not given in Petermann's transcription, 
 nor are they found in his list of variants ; von Gall has them 
 not. It follows from this that the variations involving 
 mistakes due to the Samaritan script are late, and have 
 originated long after the two recensions had separated. 
 There are indications that one at least of the ancestors of 
 the manuscript, from which the kHhibh of the Massoretic 
 has been copied, was written in the Samaritan script. These 
 are not so numerous as to suggest that the common ancestor 
 of both recensions was written in it. 
 
 Older than the Samaritan character is the script which 
 is found in Hebrew and Aramaic inscriptions all over South- 
 Western Asia, from the Euphrates on the east, the Taurus 
 Mountains on the north, Cyprus on the west, and the 
 Arabian desert on the south. It is to be admitted that all 
 the examples of this script are inscriptions; and that no 
 manuscripts, either on parchment or papyrus in this script, 
 have been preserved. The ostraka recently found in the 
 foundations of Ahab's palace show it in a somewhat cursive 
 
292 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 form. A careful study of the Siloam inscription shows that 
 the script in which it is written has had, for its model, 
 writing with a reed on papyrus or ostrakon. It has also 
 to be acknowledged that the script of the papyri found in 
 Assouan and Elephantine differs very much from that of 
 the Mesha and Siloam inscriptions. There is, however, no 
 indication that this Egyptian script was ever generally used 
 in Palestine ; further the Samaritan script does not seem to 
 have sprung from it. 
 
 Are there traces, in the variants which separate the 
 recension of the Massoretes from the Samaritan, of these 
 being caused by confusions of letters in this angular script ? 
 The pair of letters most frequently confounded are T daleth 
 and "I resh. As mentioned above, Gesenius brings forward 
 confusions in regard to these two letters as evidence that 
 the mother MS. of the Samaritan Recension was copied from 
 one written in the square character. But the Jews them- 
 selves regard the Samaritan script as older than the square 
 character ; hence it is out of court. The script next earlier 
 is that found on the Maccabaean coins. It is, as is well 
 known, closely akin to the Samaritan script. In it, the two 
 letters in question are not confusingly alike, as may be seen 
 by comparing them on the tables of alphabets (p. 222). 
 The latest date advanced for the conveyance of the Jewish 
 Pentateuch to Samaria is the reign of Alexander the Great 
 {circa 332 B.C.). The earliest examples of what may be 
 called the Samaritan script are the coins of Simon the 
 Maccabee {circa 140 B.C.), nearly two centuries after 
 Alexander. The latest instance of the angular is the 
 inscription on the sarcophagus of Ashmunazar, of which 
 the date is 399 B.C., or two generations before Alexander. 
 But the angular script itself has a long history ; hence in con- 
 sidering resemblances of letters and consequent confusions, 
 the date at which certain characters were like must be taken 
 into account. In all forms of the angular, however, daleth 
 and resh closely resemble each other. The first instance 
 of confusion of these is in Gen. x. 4 where D''3l'i " Dodanim " of 
 
 ' * T 
 
 the Massoretic appears as in the Samaritan D'anil " Rodanim." 
 In this case, the Samaritan has the support of the LXX. ; 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSOEETIC PENTATEUCH 293 
 
 further, when the name recurs in i Chron. i. 7, it has 
 the Samaritan form. Although it was the Palestinian 
 reading as early as the fourth century, since it is adopted 
 by Jerome, the Massoretic text is clearly incorrect ; indeed 
 this is admitted by Gesenius. Another passage in which 
 in its difference from the Massoretic, in regard to these 
 two letters, the Samaritan has the support of the LXX. is 
 Gen. xlvii. 21. In E.V. the passage is rendered : " As for the 
 people, he removed them to the cities from one end of the 
 border of Egypt even unto the other end thereof." The 
 Samaritan reads : " The people he enslaved from one end 
 of the boundary of Egypt to the other end thereof." The 
 difference involves the third and fifth words DHDJ)? inx luyn 
 instead of as in the Massoretic Q'^-\v'? IflK TDyn, As will be 
 seen, the difference in the first of these words is in the last 
 letter, which is "i resk in the Massoretic and T daleth in the 
 Samaritan. In the last, the difference is greater ; not only 
 is there the confusion between "i and T in the radical before 
 d; of the plural, but either the Massoretic has dropped a 3 
 or the Samaritan has inserted it. Jerome supports the 
 Samaritan ; a fact indicating that the Palestinian text in 
 his day agreed in reading with the Samaritan. The Peshitta 
 follows the Massoretic, a fact which must be held as 
 supporting the idea, above indicated, that the Massoretic 
 originated with the Babylonian school. The Samaritan 
 reading carries on the process narrated in the preceding 
 verses ; the Egyptians had successively sold their cattle and 
 their land to Pharaoh, the next step was to sell themselves. 
 In verse 25 they acquiesce in their bondage: "Thou hast 
 saved our lives, let us find grace in the sight of my Lord 
 and we will be Pharaoh's servants." The Massoretic implies 
 that the Egyptians had not dwelt in cities before the 
 governorship of Joseph. The periodic flood of the Nile 
 would necessitate life in cities, or at least villages, from the 
 very first. Another passage involving the same word is 
 Lev. xviii. 21 : "Thou shalt not give any of thy seed to make 
 them pass through ' the fire to Molech." The Samaritan 
 reads : " Thou shalt not give of thy seed to be enslaved to 
 Molech (or to a king)." The Septuagint renders : " Thou 
 shalt not give from thy seed to serve the ruler (dpxovTi)." 
 
294 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Jerome renders: "Thou shalt not give of thy seed to be 
 consecrated to the idol Molech." This was evidently the 
 Palestinian reading of the fourth century A.D., as Jerome 
 follows the Massoretic vocalisation in the last word. It is 
 needless, however, to go over all the interchanges of these 
 two letters — interchanges which Gesenius holds to be the 
 "most frequent of all." Before we leave consideration of 
 these cases, however, there are two passages in which the 
 difference appears to be due to the resemblance of these 
 letters, but' which is really to be explained otherwise. In 
 Gen. xlix. 7, instead of iliK " cursed," the Samaritan has ^nK 
 " mighty " ; this does not seem due to accidental confusion 
 but rather to intention, to avoid bringing the tribe of Levi 
 under a curse. The other case, Gen. x. 19, is somewhat 
 confused, and appears rather to be the result of defective 
 attention, started possibly by confounding 1 and X Even if 
 there were no other cases, those we have adduced prove 
 that the mother roll must have been written in the angular 
 script. But, as shown above, the angular script had a 
 lengthened history during which some of the letters under- 
 went considerable modifications, consequently investigation 
 must be pursued further. The two letters the confusion of 
 which has just been considered, while very like in the 
 Ashmunazar inscription, and in those of Sinjirli, differ 
 observably on the Moabite Stone, and in the Ba'al-Lebanon 
 inscription. As Ashmunazar died only sixty-six years 
 before the advent of Alexander in Palestine, the evidence 
 afforded by mistakes involving 1 and T is rather palaeographic 
 than historic. 
 
 There are, however, other letters in the angular script 
 which resemble each other closely, and do so in the angular 
 alone. Thus mem and nun do not resemble each other 
 at all either in the square character or the Samaritan, but do 
 so in the earlier form of angular, as seen in the Ba'al- 
 Lebanon, Mesha, and Siloam inscriptions. The likeness 
 is not so great as to be confusing on the Tabnit and 
 Ashmunazar sarcophagi, which are four or five centuries 
 later. The most frequently recurring instance of the con- 
 fusion of these two letters appears in the name of Jacob's 
 youngest son; in the Samaritan he is invariably called 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 29S 
 
 Benjamim, whereas in the Massoretic he is as regularly 
 denominated Benjamin. Although this variation must have 
 originated in a blunder on one side or other, the fact that 
 both forms have a significant and suitable etymology may 
 explain the perpetuation of both ; if the Massoretic name 
 means "the Son of the Right Hand," i.e., the favourite, 
 the Samaritan means "the Son of Days," either referring 
 to him as the son of his father's old age, or a prophecy 
 of love tha't, though so early bereft of his mother, his life 
 would be long. Another instance is Pithon in the Samaritan 
 for Pithom (Exod. i. ii); as in this case the Massoretic form 
 is in closer agreement with the Egyptian, it is probably 
 the primitive. In Num. xxxii. 35 is another case ; one 
 of the towns assigned by Moses to the tribe of Gad is called 
 Shophan in the Massoretic, but Shuphim in the Samaritan. 
 In this case, the Septuagint shows Sophar, a reading that 
 on the whole rather points ta the Massoretic ; the Peshitta 
 has Shuphom; Jerome agrees with the Massoretic. One 
 more case may be instanced which is interesting as involving 
 not only a confusion of mem and nun but also of caph 
 and vav. The passage is Deut. xii. 21 ; while the Masso- 
 retic reads Dltf? lasum, "to place," the Samaritan has )3b6 
 leshakkin, " to cause to dwell." As has been shown above, mem 
 and nun resemble each other in the script of the Moabite Stone 
 and of the Siloara inscription ; but further, capA and vav are 
 also resemblant in that script, though not so closely, y and Y . 
 A confusion between another pair of letters is seen in 
 Num. XXX. 9, where the Samaritan has is '0, " or," and the 
 Massoretic DNI veik, the sign of the ace. ; here the letters 
 confused are tau and vav; the iau of the Ba'al-Lebanop 
 inscription resembles the vav of that of Siloam ; vav does not 
 occur in the Ba'al-Lebanon inscription. 
 
 There is in Gen. xxxi. 53 what seems to be a 
 confusion between ' yodk and "i resk, letters which do not 
 markedly resemble each other in any known script ; 
 onus in the Massoretic becoming Dm3K in the Samaritan. 
 It will be seen later, however, that this is really a blunder 
 springing from another source. 
 
 From all this it may be regarded as certain that at 
 the time when the two recensions diverged, the mode of 
 
296 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 writing commonly used was akin to that of the inscription on 
 the stele of Mesha of Moab, and of the Siloam inscription ; 
 in other words, the mother roll from which ultimately both 
 the Samaritan and the Massoretic have been copied must 
 have been written in the angular script. But this script, 
 as has been already remarked, had a history. When it 
 was introduced cannot be fixed even approximately. The 
 earliest inscription extant shows an alphabet that has long 
 passed beyond the hieroglyphic stage. The sweeping curves 
 to be found in even the earliest of these indicate that the 
 stone-cutter was reproducing a mode of writing which had 
 attained its form from having been written with a reed 
 on parchment or papyrus. It seems probable that while 
 the chiefs were corresponding with the Egyptian court 
 in the diplomatic tongue of Babylon, and using the cunei- 
 form script on clay tablets, native scribes were evolving, for 
 native needs, the characters inscribed on the jars of the wine- 
 cellar of Ahab. The progress of evolution may be seen 
 in regard to some of those letters liable to be confused ; 
 thus daleth is in the Ba'al-Lebanon inscription and that 
 on the Moabite Stone a simple triangle, and so less likely 
 to be confused with resh which always has the right-hand 
 side prolonged. But in Sinjirli a hundred years later, 
 and in the Siloam inscription about fifty years later still, the 
 two letters by the modification of the daleth have become 
 indistinguishable. In regard to mem and nun; these are 
 like in the earliest forms of the angular script as in. the 
 Sinjirli inscriptions, that of Siloam, and that on the Moabite 
 Stone, whereas, in the inscriptions on the sarcophagi of Tabnit 
 and his son Ashmunazar, there is little resemblance between 
 them. This would imply that somewhere between the time of 
 Ahab, the contemporary of Mesha, and the fall of the Northern 
 Kingdom the divergence took place. The common exemplar 
 from which both recensions have sprung must be dated still 
 earlier ; but how much so we have no data to go upon. 
 It is held by Colonel Conder that the earliest form in which 
 the Pentateuch appeared was in cuneiform on clay tablets; 
 in this view he has been followed by Dr Winckler, without 
 acknowledgment. This, however, must have been in a 
 period long previous to the divergence of the recensions. 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 297 
 
 (3) There now remains the third class of unintentional 
 variations to be considered, those due to defective attention. 
 These are not so important, both because they are very 
 generally restricted to one or two MSS., and are not common 
 to the whole recension, and because no deduction as to date 
 can be made from them ; inattention is confined to no 
 century. These mistakes take various forms ; sometimes 
 transposition of letters in a word, sometimes of words in 
 a sentence. If the reader did not know Hebrew very well, 
 he" might reverse the letters by mispronunciation ; or read- 
 ing carelessly, might change the order of the words ; or 
 the scribe writing mechanically, hearing correctly enough, 
 might yet modify what he heard. These are some of the 
 more common forms in which these variants occur. Thus, 
 in Gen. xxviii. 20, the Samaritan of Walton's text has pDV 
 ya'baq, instead of IpT ya'qob ; in this case, the great majority 
 of the Samaritan MSS. support the Massoretic. A similar 
 case is found in Num. iv. 6 in which the Massoretic has in 
 beged, but the Samaritan of Walton's text 213 bedag ; in 
 this case also the great majority of the Samaritan MSS. 
 support the Massoretic. The same may be said of Num. xix. 3 
 in which in the Polyglot text DHB' shahat, " to slay," of the 
 Massoretic is replaced by nOE* shatah, " to spread " ; in this 
 case, the Polyglot text has the support of only one MS. 
 In the case of Deut. xii. 17, Walton's text, on the authority 
 of one MS., has the meaningless l^N? le'lok, instead of 'i'2'^ 
 le'kol, "to eat." In the case of t^"iS (Samaritan) and pKS 
 (Massoretic), Paran (Gen. xxi. 21, Num. x. 12), a good deal 
 could be said for the Samaritan reading being the more 
 probable ; " the place of wild asses " rather than the " place of 
 beauty." In this case, therefore, the change may be laid to 
 the door of the Massoretic. In Exod. xl. 3 there is a case of 
 transposition of letters, but it is not impossible that it 
 has been the result of intention; the Samaritan has JTisa 
 kdpporeth, " Mercy-seat," while the Massoretic has na'ia 
 paroketh, " vail " ; in this it has the support of all the 
 versions. The clause is rendered in the A.V. : " Thou shalt 
 cover the ark with the vail " ; instead of the last word, the 
 Samaritan has " with the Mercy-seat." It is obvious that the 
 
298 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 "vail" did not cover the "ark," and that the "Mercy-seat 
 did. Moreover, the verb 'Hap sukak, " to cover," is used of the 
 cherubim (i Kings viii. 7). The omission of any reference 
 in the Massoretic to the Mercy-seat which occupied such an 
 important part in the great Day of Atonement is to be noted. 
 It would seem probable that the transposition of the letters 
 is due to a blunder of an ancient Jewish scribe. This variant 
 suggests that the divergence of the two recensions took 
 place before the translation of the Septuagint. 
 
 There are a few instances in which the order of the 
 words has been changed. In Gen. xii. 16 the Massoretic, as 
 rendered by the A.V., is : " He (Abraham) had sheep and oxen, 
 and he-asses and men-servants, and maid-servants and she- 
 asses, and camels." The Samaritan reads : " He had sheep and 
 oxen, exceeding much property, and men-servants and maid- 
 servants, and he-asses and she-asseSj and camels." Although 
 the LXX., the Peshitta, and the Vulgate support the Mas- 
 soretic, the order is evidently the result of blunder. This 
 would tend to support the opinion that the divergence of 
 the two recensions is to be dated before the translation of 
 the Torah into Greek. The next cases. Gen. xxxiv. 12 and 
 Exod. xxix. 18, involve no change of meaning. In Lev. 
 vii. 29 there is a transposition which involves a change in 
 construction but not of meaning. There are several un- 
 important variants which may be passed over. The order 
 in which the daughters of Zelophehad are named in Num. 
 xxxvi. 1 1 is different in the Massoretic from that in which 
 they appear in the three other instances in which they are 
 enumerated ; the Samaritan has the same order in all four 
 cases. Although the LXX. to some extent agrees with the 
 Massoretic, the variation seems to have been the result of 
 inattention on the part of the Massoretic scribe or reader. 
 One more instance of transposition may be referred to, 
 Deut. iii. 19 ; in this case, the Massoretic has arranged the 
 terms in the natural order : " Wives, little ones, caWe," 
 whereas the Samaritan puts " little ones " first. In this case, 
 the blunder has been on the side of the Samaritan scribe. 
 There are other but less important instances of alteration 
 of order in the names of the nations that were to be cast 
 out before the children of Israel, e.£^., Exod. xxiii. 28. 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 299 
 
 Another class of unintentional variation due to inattention 
 are those in which synonyms are interchanged. The most 
 frequent are those in which the prepositions '?V and ha are 
 put the one for the other. Though they are not precisely 
 synonymous they are nearly so ; it is impossible to give more 
 than examples in which either !>« of the Massoretic is repre- 
 sented by b]} in the Samaritan, e.g., Gen. xxxvii. 35, xlii. 25, 
 Exod. xxviii. 7, or the converse as in Exod. xxv. 37. Another 
 set of approximate synonyms is formed by "IDK 'amar, and 
 ■I3T dabhar, e.g., Exod. ix. i (Samaritan) has niDN instead of 
 maT as in the Massoretic, whereas in Lev. xx. i the con- 
 verse appears. Two terms, the interchange of which has 
 caused some controversy, are the Divine names D'^ri-'N 
 "Elohim" and njn; "JHWH." The cases of this substitu- 
 tion are not very numerous, not numerous enough to affect 
 seriously the question regarding the Pentateuchal documents, 
 e.g., Exod. iii. 4 (Samaritan) has D'nf'N " Elohim " instead of 
 nini "JHWH," and in Exod. vi. 2 the converse is found. 
 Other instances might be noticed, as Exod. i. 18, in which 
 the Samaritan has "Pharaoh," while the Massoretic gives 
 "King of Egypt"; and ii. 10, in which ncHar, "youth" 
 (Samaritan), represents yalad, " boy " (Massoretic). These 
 variations may most easily be explained by a momentary 
 inattention on the part of the reader or scribe, whether 
 Jewish or Samaritan. 
 
 Another class of variants is that in which either ordinary 
 additions, which in a given case ought to be omitted, are 
 inserted ; or conversely, a customary addition may be omitted 
 where it ought to be inserted. A not infrequent addition to 
 the covenant name JHWH is "thy God"; in Deut. vi. 12 
 and 18, the Samaritan inserts this, but the Massoretic omits 
 it. In regard to the land of Canaan, the epithet " good " is 
 followed by the further epithet " broad " in Exod. iii. 8 in 
 both recensions; in Deut. viii. 7 the Samaritan alone has 
 the second epithet, agreeing in this with the Septuagint. 
 Sometimes the additions are of greater length ; in Gen. i, 14 
 the Samaritan, in agreement with the LXX., inserts as the 
 primary purpose of the " greater lights " being set in the 
 firmament "to give light upon the earth" as in the verse 
 which follows ; Jerome and the Peshitta agree with the 
 
300 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Massoretic. Another case is specially interesting, as it is 
 one of the few in which Gesenius acknowledges that the 
 Samaritan has preserved the correct reading. In Gen. iv. 8, 
 after the words rendered, " And Cain talked with Abel his 
 brother," the Samaritan inserts, " Let us go into the field " ; 
 all the versions in this support the Samaritan. In Gen. 
 xliii. 28 the Samaritan and the LXX. narrate that when 
 Joseph's brethren informed him that his father was yet alive, 
 he answered, " Blessed be that man with God." ^ As there 
 does not seem to be any motive for the insertion of the 
 phrase, a phrase which might be omitted without marring 
 the sense, it probably is genuine as it might have been 
 accidentally omitted by the Massoretic scribe. Where two 
 successive clauses begin with the same word, the reader 
 might unconsciously omit one of them ; thus, in Exod. iii. 22, 
 the word nx», occurring in two successive clauses, seems to 
 have led to the omission of the words, " A man shall ask of 
 his neighbour" preceding "and a woman shall ask of her 
 neighbour." The insertion may of course have been occa- 
 sioned by the reader feeling it difficult to understand how 
 all the " borrowing " could be done only by women ; and 
 so may have been an intentional addition. 
 
 In Gen. x. 19, there is a passage which, while difficdlt to 
 understand in either recension, seems explicable in both cases 
 only on the supposition of more than one cause of blunder 
 being at work. The Massoretic text is rendered in our 
 A.V. "The boundary of the Canaanite was from Zidon as 
 thou comest to Gerar unto Gaza, as thou goest to Sodom 
 and Gomorrah, and Admah and Zeboim, even unto Lasha." 
 The confusion in the passage is to some extent hidden in 
 this rendering, as the word for " comest " is the same as is 
 translated "goest" in the following. The probable meaning 
 is that " as thou goest Gerarwards " was equivalent to going 
 to the south, and that the southward progress was to stop 
 
 ' A very similar phrase occurs not infrequently in the Tarikh of 
 Samaritan codices of the Torah, or in the records of their purchase 
 when the name is mentioned of some deceased ancestors of the scribe 
 or purchaser. This fact may be regarded as militating against the 
 authenticity of the sentence. But the fact that it is found in the 
 Septuagint is strong evidence in its favour. 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 301 
 
 at Gaza, whence the boundary line turned eastward to the 
 valley of the Jordan. The expression found in the Samaritan 
 is : " The boundary of the Canaanite was from the river of 
 Egypt to the Great River, the river Euphrates, even unto 
 the hinder sea." In copiparing these two, one thing is clear ; 
 to begin with, H^D has been confused with D''"iV» ; here then 
 daleth and resh and mem and nun have been mistaken one 
 for the othen The concluding phrase in each of the versions 
 recurs elsewhere ; the concluding enumeration of the cities 
 of the plain in the Massoretic is in the stereotyped order 
 which is found in Deut. xxix. 23, and with the addition of 
 the royal names in Gen. xiv. i ; the concluding phrase of the 
 Samaritan is found in Gen. xv. 18. Whichever is the primi- 
 tive, the latter portion of the other is due to scribal inattention, 
 ending a sentence not in accordance with what was the true 
 ending but with a customary formula. Although it might be 
 argued that because m.innahar began with the same letter as 
 Mitzraim, it might be passed over by the reader ; still the 
 balance of probability seems to be that it was the Samaritan 
 reader who took refuge in a formula. 
 
 The varieties of accidental variants, which we have just 
 been considering, have differing degrees and directions 
 of evidential value. Mistakes due to deficient attention, 
 whether on the part of the reader or the scribe, have, as 
 has already been indicated, little value as evidences of date, 
 since mistakes due to this cause do not differ in character 
 from age to age. Mistakes due to mishearing, as they reveal 
 peculiarities of pronunciation, which may to some extent be 
 dated, have more value. It is, however, mainly to mistakes 
 due to confusing one letter with another like it that most 
 definite information may be gleaned. In regard to the 
 chronology of Semitic scripts, there is now a body of 
 inscriptions extending over more than a millennium. 
 
 Variants due to Intention. — All variations of one recension 
 ' from the other are not to be put down to inadvertence ; in 
 not a few cases, the intention of the scribe or reader may be 
 traced. When, however, the term "intention" is used, there 
 are to be included semi-conscious acts of tongue and eye 
 in dictating from a manuscript, and the equally semi-conscious 
 action of the hand of the scribe in writing to dictation. A 
 
302 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 person reading from a document written in an archaic style 
 would be prone to correct ancient grammatical constructions 
 into those in common use. Thus a person reading from a 
 manuscript written in the language of our Authorised 
 Version would be prone, when he came to cases in which 
 the relative " which " was used of persons, to correct it into 
 " who." The scribe, writing to dictation, if accustomed to 
 spell correctly according to modern usage, would be apt to 
 continue to do so, although he may have got . general 
 directions as to the antique mode of orthography. This is 
 the result of habit; and habit is the result, built into the 
 system, physical and mental, of repeated acts of intention, 
 which have been completed in action. Variants with such 
 an origin may be looked upon as the indirect products of 
 intention. But there are also cases of difference which must 
 be due to direct intention. 
 
 The variations between the Samaritan Recension and that 
 of the Massoretes due to purpose, direct or indirect, may be 
 arranged under three heads: — (i) Grammatical corrections 
 of archaic spelling, verbal forms, and forms of nouns, usually 
 classed under accidence and syntax. (2) Logical corrections. 
 Under this head would be classified the removal of contra- 
 dictions actual or only apparent, by modification of 
 statement, or by additions. In the case of words which 
 had fallen in repute so that the employment of them 
 involved a sin against propriety, these were changed into 
 others not under this condemnation. Such alterations might 
 be regarded as due to rhetoric, were it worth while to form 
 such a class. (3) Doctrinal or theological corrections. Under 
 this category fall to be considered not only such phrases as 
 have a special bearing on the tenets of the Jews or 
 Samaritans respectively, but also such as they held in 
 common, as the Unity, the Spirituality, and absolute 
 Supremacy of JHWH. In considering each of these classes 
 of variants, it is incumbent on the investigator to beware of 
 assuming that it necessarily was the Samaritan which varied 
 from the Massoretic, as if it were the primitive form of 
 the text. 
 
 (i) Intentional Variants affecting Grammar. The fact 
 that syntax, accidence, and orthography, all three, are the 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 303 
 
 result and expression of custom, renders it possible that 
 geographical situation as well as point of time may have 
 had to do with any given variation. There are evidences 
 that in the days of Queen Anne certain words were 
 pronounced differently from what they are now, differences 
 which affected the spelling ; for instance, such words as 
 " frolic " and " public '' had a final k added to emphasize the 
 last syllable. Such features are liable to be removed in 
 reprints. Sometimes peculiarities of spelling are regulated 
 by geography, such words as " theatre " and " labour " are 
 spelt differently in Britain and America ; in reprints in one 
 country of books published in the other, these differences are 
 usually removed. Similar differences seem to have existed 
 between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms of Israel. 
 The peculiarity which differentiates the Samaritan orthog- 
 raphy from that of Judea is its predilection for the 
 introduction of matres lectionis, especially 1 vav and * yodh 
 to emphasize the u and o sounds, and the e (ee) and a (ay) 
 sounds respectively. While in the majority of cases the 
 Samaritan has these when they are wanting in the 
 Massoretic, there are fairly numerous instances of the 
 converse. The presence of matres lectionis is rarer the 
 further back investigation is carried, till in the earliest 
 inscriptions they are almost entirely absent. This would 
 imply the relative recency of the Samaritan. Another 
 peculiarity of the Samaritan, grammatical rather than ortho- 
 graphic, is the more regular use of ns eth the sign of the 
 accusative ; though there are cases in which the Massoretic 
 has this while the Samaritan omits it. According to 
 Petermann's list, there are in Genesis twenty-five cases in 
 which the Samaritan inserts DN when it is omitted in the 
 Massoretic, and there are three cases of the converse. 
 Another common particle is the conjunction l"and"; in 
 Hebrew, when there is a list of substantives or adjectives, it 
 is the rule to insert 1 before each substantive or adjective, 
 not merely before the last member of the list, as in the 
 classic and modern European languages. Breaches of this 
 rule are more frequent in the Massoretic than in the 
 Samaritan; thus Gen. vi. 9, according to the Massoretic, 
 the verse reads, " Noah was a man just, perfect in all his 
 
304 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 generations"; the Samaritan inserts "and" between "just" 
 and " perfect " as do our English versions. So in the 
 following verse, " Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and 
 Japhet," the Samaritan inserts " and " before " Ham." While 
 in this matter the Samaritan is generally more in accordance 
 with ordinary Hebrew grammar, there are cases of the 
 converse; thus, in Gen. ix. 5, the Massoretic reads ''and at 
 the hand of every man's brother," while the Samaritan omits 
 "and." The tendency to omit particles is observable in 
 every language as it grows in age. It would therefore seem 
 more probable that the Jewish scribes omitted these particles 
 with a subconscious intention than that the Samaritans 
 inserted them. As to pronouns, the change of the usage 
 in the two recensions took place as much in the southern 
 district of Palestine as in the northern. In regard to the 
 1st pers. pron. sing., while generally agreeing with the 
 Massoretic the Samaritan sometimes prefers the longer form 
 when the Massoretic has the shorter, e.g.. Gen. xiv. 23.1 
 A more frequent example of the preference shown by the 
 Samaritan for the older and more lengthened forms is seen 
 in the ist and 2nd pers. pron. plur., in preference to the 
 shorter as found in the Massoretic ; this is noted by Gesenius, 
 as in Gen. xlii. 11, Exod. xvi. 7, 8, Num. xxxii. 32. The 
 Samaritan prefers the longer form of the 2nd pers. sing, 
 fem. ''riN atti instead of riK att ; this form is declared by 
 Gesenius to be archaic. As already observed, all the cases 
 where atti occurs in the rest of Scripture are connected with 
 the North, except in two poetical passages in Jeremiah and 
 Ezekiel. What was an archaism in Judah and the South was 
 perpetuated in the ordinary speech of the North. In these 
 cases, the correction and modernisation has taken place in the 
 Massoretic, not in the Samaritan. The identification of the 
 3rd pers. pron. fem. with the 3rd mas. in the Massoretic is due 
 to a blunder on the part of the scribe of the k'thibh. There 
 are other pronouns in which the Samaritan differs from the 
 Massoretic. While in the Massoretic nan and Dn are used 
 indiscriminately, the longer form is in the Samaritan generally 
 represented by the shorter ; thus, in Gen. vi. 4, vii. 14, the 
 
 ' According to the Polyglot text which Blayney follows without note ; 
 von Gall has <JN. 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 305 
 
 Massoretic has TOn hemma and the Samaritan on em. 
 There is another pronominal form which is practically 
 restricted to the Pentateuch, ^N el for n^K eleh ; in the 
 Samaritan it is invariably the longer form that is used. 
 The evidence thus appears to be contradictory ; though the 
 longer forms are usually the more ancient and the shorter the 
 more recent, the Samaritan prefers the shorter form of the 
 3rd pers. pron. plur. but the longer form of the dem. pron. plur. 
 mas. No conclusion as to date can be drawn from these 
 peculiarities, which are probably due to localisms. 
 
 In regard to pronominal suffixes, it would seem that the 
 suffix of the 3rd mas. n oh is really due to mistake on the 
 part of the scribe of the k'thibh, who, copying from a 
 MS. in Samaritan script, confused vav and he, as the 
 Samaritan always has the regular suffix in 1 vav. The rule 
 with the prepositions ^J? and h^ is to insert tsere with yodh 
 between the preposition and the suffix. In a number of 
 cases in the Massoretic, the vowel is written defective, but 
 never so in the Samaritan. This, however, is merely a 
 matter of orthography ; it only shows that the Samaritan 
 was more carefully accurate than the Massoretic. 
 
 There is a difference in regard to nouns which forms 
 a distinction between the two recensions. In the Massoretic, 
 the noun "lyj ndar, " a youth," is epicene in the Massoretic 
 of the Pentateuch ; not, however, in the Samaritan in which, 
 whenever the reference is to a young woman, the word is put 
 in the feminine. It is to be observed that the qri makes 
 the same correction of the Massoretic k'thibk as does the 
 Samaritan. 
 
 Gesenius occupies a considerable section of his treatise 
 with instances in which he assumes the Samaritan scribes 
 to have assimilated the grammar of the Pentateuch to that 
 of Samaria. He never considered the converse possibility, 
 that the assimilation took place from the other side. We 
 have elsewhere considered the question of the relative 
 priority of koth'noth, " coats," in the Massoretic and kitlCnoth 
 of the Samaritan, and concluded that on the whole the 
 Samaritan was the more likely to be the primitive form. 
 Another case is q'dishim (Samaritan) for q'dosktm of the 
 Massoretic. In this case, there probably was a difference 
 
 u 
 
306 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 in the way the word was pronounced in the South and 
 the North ; there is no means of fixing which is the 
 primitive ; if the Samaritan suggests Aramaic affinities, the 
 Massoretic hints at Arabian. It is to be observed that 
 according to von Gall's text in every case noted by Gesenius 
 the word Di^lp is written defective. There is one case in 
 which the contention of Gesenius appears to be justified ; 
 in Gen. xi. 3, by identifying hhner, " bitumen," with homer, 
 "clay," the Samaritan has lost the point of the distinction 
 between the two substances when used as mortar. Gesenius 
 enumerates several other instances of what he regards as 
 grammatical variations introduced by the Samaritan ; some- 
 times one recension, sometimes the other, exhibits the more 
 primitive form. From this it would seem probable that 
 a process of change was going on both in the North and the 
 South. 
 
 (2) Intentional Variations involving Logical Content. 
 The same mental mood, which led the scribe, Jewish 
 or Samaritan, to replace obsolete grammatical forms or 
 modes of spelling by those in common use, led him occasion- 
 ally to make changes of a more important character in 
 which more than mere form was involved. Sometimes the 
 change is occupied with individual words, omitting words , 
 that had become obsolete and so unintelligible, supplying 
 words that seemed necessary to complete the sense, 
 changing terms for their synonyms either where a repeti- 
 tion is presupposed (that the repetition should be 
 obviously exact), or to vary the phraseology to avoid 
 monotony. Sometimes where terms are ordinarily asso- 
 ciated, if at a time one of these occurs alone, the other 
 may be supplied. It is to be noted that all these cases 
 may come under the category of the results of inattention, 
 and be the consequence not of intention but of blunder 
 through unconscious cerebration. The most important 
 alterations are those made from a sense of what ought 
 to be. Since there is always a dubiety as to the origin 
 of variants belonging to the class at present under con- 
 sideration, much time need not be occupied with them. 
 As an example of a term which is ordinarily united with 
 another, but which is omitted in one recension, supplied in 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 307 
 
 the other, Exod. vi. 27 may be taken ; in the Massoretic 
 of that passage, it is said, "These are they which spai<e 
 to Pharaoh, King of Egypt, to bring out the children of 
 Israel from Egypt " ; the last clause in the Samaritan is 
 " the land of Egypt " ; in this case the insertion might 
 be due to the mechanical completion of the customary 
 phrase, or the reader might think the omission due to 
 blunder and intentionally supply what had been omitted. 
 Of course, mutatis mutandis, this applies also to the Masso- 
 retic reader or scribe. An instance of the converse is found 
 in Exod. xi. 6 where the Massoretic has, " And there shall 
 be a great cry in all the land of Egypt," but the Samaritan 
 omits "all the land of." The arguments used in regard to 
 the former passage apply to this also. 
 
 There are a few cases in .which foreign words and 
 names appear to be modified so as to give an appearance 
 of intelligibility in . Hebrew. The most interesting case is 
 in regard to the name that Pharaoh gave to Joseph 
 (Gen. xli. 45), which seems to have been modified in both 
 recensions to emphasize the root tax tzaphan, "to hide," 
 from the idea that the name meant " revealer of secrets," as 
 Onkelos and the Samaritan Targum translate it. Jerome 
 renders it " Salvator Mundi." 
 
 The most important logical differences are those that rest 
 on a theory of what ought to be. The earliest instance 
 is Gen. ii. 2, where the Massoretic names " the seventh day " 
 as that on which God finished the work of Creation, whereas 
 the Samaritan, in this agreeing with the LXX., says " the 
 sixth day." On whichever side lies the responsibility of the 
 alteration, it must have been the result of intention. Either 
 the Massoretic scribe or reader, finding " the sixth " set down 
 as the day on which the Creator " finished His work," argued 
 that the work could not be considered " finished " until " the 
 sixth day " was ended, and therefore " the seventh " begun, 
 altered the numeral accordingly ; or the Samaritan scribe or 
 reader, thinking that any work must be reckoned as finished 
 on the last day in which he that wrought the work was 
 engaged with it, changed the " seventh " of the MS. before 
 him into "sixth." The probability is in favour of the 
 Samaritan being the original, as both the LXX. and the 
 
308 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Peshitta have this reading. Jerome here follows the 
 Massoretic. 
 
 In Gen. iv. 8 — a case already referred to — after the words 
 rendered " And Cain talked," or to translate the word in its 
 ordinary meaning "said unto Abel his brother," the 
 Samaritan followed by the LXX., the Peshitta, and the 
 Vulgate, adds, "Let us go into the field," This has been 
 regarded as an addition to the text in order to complete the 
 sense ; the natural explanation, however, is that the Masso- 
 retic scribe, misled by the word " field " standing at the end 
 of both clauses, omitted the first of them ; hence this ought 
 rather to be reckoned among the blunders than among 
 intended variations. 
 
 More important are the variants in regard to the ages of 
 the antediluvian patriarchs. According to the Massoretic 
 " the days of the life of Adam " were exceeded by the years 
 of three of his descendants, Jared, Methuselah, and Noah ; 
 whereas in the Samaritan his life is longer than that of any 
 of those dying before the Flood. Even in the Massoretic 
 there is a general decline in age to Mahalaleel, with the 
 exception of Cainan, whose life, while shorter by two years 
 than his grandfather's, is seven years longer than that of his 
 father. The Samaritan carries on the process of a progres- 
 sively diminishing lifetime, Enoch being the only exception. 
 Behind this arrangement there seems to be in the mind of 
 the scribe the theory that the growing moral degradation 
 would express itself in growing physical degeneracy, and 
 that this would be exhibited in the shortening of life. In 
 this the Samaritan has the support of none of the 
 versions. 
 
 Another set of variants in which the Samaritan has not 
 the support of the versions appears in the genealogy of the 
 post-diluvian ancestors of Abraham (Gen. xi. 10-26). To 
 bring this second genealogy into line with the earlier, to 
 the years of the Patriarch's life after the birth of his eldest 
 son, is subjoined the total number of the years of his life. It 
 is possible that on the MS. from which the Samaritan was 
 copied, a previous scribe had noted at the side of the column 
 containing the text the total years of the life of each patriarch 
 from Shem downwards, and that his successor had engrossed 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 309 
 
 it in the text. But it seems more probable that the Samaritan 
 scribe or reader regarded this summation as a thing which 
 ought to be there, and so supplied it. This at all events is 
 more probable than that the summations should have been 
 omitted either by accident or intention. 
 
 When the plagues of Egypt are recorded, in the Massoretic 
 sometimes the actions of Moses and Aaron are described when 
 the command is given them to go in to Pharaoh, sometimes 
 it is given as the history of what they did. Thus in Exod. 
 vii. 15-18, God commands Moses and Aaron to give to 
 Pharaoh His message, and tells them to say to Pharaoh 
 that if he will not let the people go, " I will smite with 
 the rod that is in mine hand upon the waters which are in 
 the river, and they shall be turned into blood." It is to be 
 presumed that they did deliver this warning, but it is not 
 expressly stated that they did so. In verse 19, without any 
 word of Pharaoh's rejection of the warning, JHWH com- 
 mands Moses and Aaron to carry the threat into execution. 
 The lack is supplied by the Samaritan. This occurs also in 
 the account of the plagues of frogs, flies, murrain, and hail. 
 In the account of the eighth plague, that of the locusts, it is 
 related that Moses and Aaron went in to Pharaoh, and 
 threatened him with the coming of the locusts, but there is 
 no word of JHWH having commanded them so to do; it is 
 to be presumed that they had been so commanded, but it is 
 not stated. Here again the Samaritan supplies the lack. 
 The fact that in none of the versions the Samaritan additions 
 are found, may seem conclusive against their authenticity : 
 further there is the critical maxim that, other things being 
 equal, the shorter reading is to be preferred. Too much 
 stress must not be laid on these arguments against the 
 Samaritan, because Oriental literature is too simple and 
 nafve to expect deductions to be made. Thus in regard to 
 Pharaoh's dream, it is first related in full when it appeared 
 to the king ; then when Joseph comes before him, Pharaoh 
 himself tells it in almost the same words. This is precisely 
 parallel with the method pursued by the Samaritan writer 
 in the narrative of the plagues. Whether this is a case of 
 omissions by the Massoretic or insertions by the Samaritan 
 the divergence is the result of intentional variation. 
 
310 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 There are also cases of intentional variations from 
 harmonistic reasons. One of these may be given. When 
 the Egyptian army is pursuing. the Israelites, and has shut 
 them in, with mountains on either side of them and the sea 
 before them, cowering in terror the Israelites cry out (Exod. 
 xiv. 12), " Is not this the word that we did tell thee in Egypt ; 
 let us alone that we may serve the Egyptians, for it is better 
 for us that we should serve the Egyptians than that we 
 should die in the wilderness." In the Massoretic text there 
 is no account of this complaint ever having been made, but 
 in the Samaritan there is an addition made to Exod. vi. 9. 
 Moses had been telling the people that God would deliver 
 them, and bring them to the heritage which He had promised 
 to their fathers ; " but they hearkened not to Moses from 
 anguish of spirit and for cruel bondage " ; at this point the 
 Samaritan adds, " and they said to Moses, Let us alone that 
 we may serve the Egyptians, for it is better for us to serve 
 the Egyptians than that we should die in the wilderness." 
 Although the versions agree with the Massoretic something 
 may be said for the Samaritan. Another instance may be 
 stated. A passage from Deuteronomy has been introduced 
 into the account of Jethro's advice to Moses and his accept- 
 ance of it (Exod. xviii. 25), modified into the narrative style 
 of Exodus in' which Moses is always a person spoken of. 
 This is done in preparation for the statement of Moses him- 
 self (Deut i. 9-18). Less important and less numerous are 
 the alterations made from reasons of propriety. In most of 
 these cases, the Samaritan has put in the text what the 
 Massoretic has in the qri. 
 
 (3) Intentional Variants involving Questions of Religious 
 Doctrine. While changes which involve theological differ- 
 ences may be regarded as "logical," there is a difference 
 sufificiently important to make it advisable to consider such 
 cases under a separate head. With regard to logical variants, 
 it is the form that is considered — the formal agreement of 
 part with part ; in the case of the theological variants, it is 
 the matter — the content — that is important. The variants of 
 this class have resulted from an effort to remove from the 
 record everything which is, or seems to be, out of harmony 
 with the religious systems of the readers contemplated. As 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 311 
 
 the doctrinal systems of the Jews and the Samaritans were 
 in most essentials identical, these changes might as well have 
 proceeded from the Jews as from the Samaritans. This may 
 be seen by comparing the Samaritan Pentateuch with the 
 Targums of Onkelos and of the pseudo-Jonathan. There is 
 one point in which the Samaritans most distinctly differed 
 from the Jews, the sanctity which the former ascribed to 
 Mount Gerizim. 
 
 («) Variants due to Doctrines common to the Jews and 
 the Samaritans. The most prominent doctrine of Judaism, 
 and therefore of the Samaritans, was the Unity of God. 
 This doctrine is emphasised grammatically by the plural 
 noun Elohim, when used of the Supreme, being joined to a 
 singular verb. There are, however, four cases in the Mas- 
 soretic Pentateuch in which the verb is plural, all which are 
 corrected in the Samaritan. The first of these is Gen. xx. 13.^ 
 When Abraham tried to explain to Abimelech his equivoca- 
 tion regarding Sarah, he begins, " When God caused me to 
 wander " lynn the verb in this case is plural. All the versions 
 have the singular ; Onkelos has the plural, but inserts another 
 nominative for the verb ; he renders, " When the peoples went 
 astray, etc." The reading of the Massoretic may be excused 
 on the ground that Abraham, speaking to a polytheist, ac- 
 commodated himself to him. Most probably, however, the 
 plural is a mistake of the Massoretic scribe, who, reading 
 from a MS. written in Samaritan script, substituted 1 vav for 
 n he, as these characters are very like in Samaritan MSS.^ 
 This implies the Samaritan reading to be primitive. The 
 same explanation is applicable to Gen. xxxv. 7. Another 
 explanation may be given of Gen. xxxi. 53. Laban and Jacob 
 swear by the " God of Abraham and the God of Nahor," and 
 call upon God to judge between them ; in this case, the verb 
 is in the plural in the Massoretic but in the singular in the 
 Samaritan. The alteration seems to have been made by the 
 Jewish scribe unwilling to admit that the God of Nahor was the 
 same as the God of Abraham. Another instance is found in 
 
 1 This passage has already been referred to (Chap. VII., p. 176) in 
 connection with Samaritan theology. 
 
 2 For this, Gesenius himself is evidence in his prolegomena to the 
 Carmina Sainaritana, p. 6. 
 
312 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Exod. xxii. 8, 9, treating of theft of goods entrusted to 
 another; in such a case, the person who had received the 
 goods, from whose custody they were stolen, was to be 
 brought DNii'xn-i'K which may mean either "to the judges" 
 
 or "to God." The former rendering is that of the A.V., 
 following the Peshitta and Onkelos ; the Samaritan, by 
 putting the verb in the singular, assumes the second to be 
 the meaning; in this it is foll6wed by the LXX. and the 
 Revised. From the fact that in verse 11 in an analogous 
 case "the oath of JHWH " being between the parties is 
 supposed to conclude the matter, the alteration must be put 
 to the credit of the Jewish scribe. 
 
 Belonging to the same class is the tendency to remove 
 anthropomorphisms. These alterations are not so numerous 
 as in the Targums. An example of this occurs in Exod. 
 XV. 3, where JHWH is called nenbp ^•'H "a. man of war"; 
 this in the Samaritan is iiiinbB2 nu^J " hero of war,'' a term 
 applied to spiritual beings. 
 
 To maintain the majesty of JHWH, there is a tendency 
 to introduce intermediaries between the Almighty and those 
 with whom He has to do. When Balaam is brought to 
 the mountain-top to curse Israel (Num. xxiii. 4), in the 
 Massoretic it is said, " And God met Balaam " ; in the 
 Samaritan it reads, " The Angel of God found Balaam." 
 See also verse 16 of the same chapter. In these 
 instances Onkelos has " The word from the presence of 
 the Lord," These cases have already been noted in 
 another connection. 
 
 (3) Variants due to Doctrines peculiar to the Samaritans. 
 All the essentially Samaritan doctrines centre round the 
 supreme sanctity ascribed to Mount Gerizim. There are 
 passages in the Samaritan Recension of the Pentateuch which 
 afifirm the unique position occupied by Gerizim ; these are 
 not found in the Massoretic. Sometimes the difference 
 extends merely to a single word. The earliest instance of 
 this appears in Gen. xxii. 2, where the Samaritan has " Moreh " 
 nsnio and the Massoretic "Moriah" njib. (Dean Stanley 
 
 here prefers the Samaritan reading.) When Abraham 
 entered Palestine, he first settled at Shechem, at the foot 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 313 
 
 of Mount Gerizim ; hence there is nothing intrinsically 
 improbable in the idea that the mountain on which Isaac 
 was to be offered should be " one of the mountains " in " the 
 land of Moreh" instead of "the land of Moriah." The 
 Peshitta in this case agrees with the Massoretic; but Jerome 
 renders in terrain visionis, a rendering which shows that 
 he probably had the Samaritan reading. Consonantally, 
 the Massoretic name suggests "contumacy" as that of the 
 Samaritan suggests "vision." The reading of the LXX. 
 suggests that in the text before the Alexandrian translators 
 the first letters were transposed, for they translated 
 rhv yrjv ii\lrrj\i]v, " the Highland." Dean Stanley appears to 
 think that geography suits the Samaritan reading; in his 
 mapping out the days' journeys, in order to show that 
 his theory squares with geography, the Dean forgets that 
 Abraham was accompanied by a laden donkey, and that 
 consequently his rate of travel would be at the ordinary 
 muleteer's pace of three miles and a half an hour, and 
 six hours a day. At that rate, starting from Beersheba 
 and betaking himself to the Philistine Plain, it would be the 
 morning of the fifth day, not the third, before he saw Mount 
 Gerizim. Had Abraham been in Hebron, it would have 
 been a different matter. Hebron is a full day's journey, at 
 muleteer's pace, from Jerusalem ; another long day would 
 enable him to reach Lubban (Lebonah) from which Mount 
 Gerizim would be in sight. It is clear then that if Abraham 
 came from Beersheba it must have been Moriah to which 
 he came, not to Mount Gerizim. 
 
 Sometimes the belief in the sanctity of their Holy 
 Mountain has led the Samaritans to make more extensive 
 additions to the text There is inserted at the end of the 
 decalogue (Exod. xx. 17): "And it shall be when JHWH 
 thy God shall bring thee to the land of the Canaanite which 
 thou art entering in to possess it, that thou shalt set up for 
 thee great stones and shalt plaster them with plaster ; and 
 thou shalt write upon the stones all the words of this law ; 
 and it shall be when ye have crossed the Jordan that ye shall 
 set up these stones, which I command thee this day, on 
 Mount Gerizim. And thou shalt build there an altar to 
 JHWH thy God ; an altar of stones, thou shalt not lift iron 
 
314 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 upon them. Of whole stones shalt thou build the altar of 
 JHWH thy God. And thou shalt offer upon it sacrifices to 
 JHWH thy God; and shalt sacrifice peace-offerings and eat 
 there and rejoice before JHWH thy God. That mountain is 
 on the other side of Jordan westward (after the way of the 
 going down of the sun) in the land of the Canaanite who 
 dwells in the desert over against Gilgal, beside the oak of 
 Moreh over against Shechem." This passage, as is readily 
 seen, agrees in the main with Deut. xxvii. 2-7 ; the most 
 striking difference is that the mountain on which the stones 
 are to be set up is Gerizim not Ebal. Another difference 
 is that the land is called the " land of the Canaanite," and 
 there is not a repetition of the description of it as " a land 
 flowing with milk and honey " ; this clause appears in its 
 place when the passage is repeated in Deuteronomy by the 
 Samaritan. It is to be observed that in the 12th verse of the 
 chapter in Deuteronomy, Gerizim is the Mount of Blessing, 
 whereas Ebal is that of Cursing; it might easily seem 
 more natural that on the Mount of Blessing the memorial 
 stones should be set up. The Massoretic scribe might as 
 readily have made the change out of hatred to the 
 Samaritans, as the Samaritan to glorify Mount Gerizim. 
 The fact that, in the parallel passage in Deuteronomy, none of 
 the versions agree with the Samaritan in reading Gerizim for 
 Ebal may be regarded as conclusive. The insertion of this 
 passage at this point, when "the children of Israel" were 
 gathered at the foot of Mount Sinai, has not the geographical 
 suitability which it has in Deuteronomy when it was 
 delivered by Moses within sight of the twin mountains, Ebal 
 and Gerizim, and where the superior height of Ebal would 
 be observable. From such a position it would seem natural 
 that on Ebal, as the most conspicuous mountain visible on 
 the other side of Jordan, there should be set up the law- 
 inscribed stones. Another result of this tendency is that, 
 in the Samaritan, all the twenty passages in Deuteronomy in 
 which the future national shrine is designated as "the place 
 which JHWH thy God shall choose'' have the verb in the 
 preterite. This use of the preterite has an evident reference 
 to the designation of Gerizim in Exod. xx. 17, Deut. v. 21, 
 xxvii. 4, as the national sanctuary. In this change of the 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 315 
 
 future into the preterite, the Samaritan is without the 
 support of the versions. 
 
 Even had the evidence from the versions not been so 
 strong, the fact that, throughout the history of the Northern 
 tribes, as recorded in the books of Kings, although there 
 probably was a High Place on Mount Gerizim, it is not 
 important enough to be mentioned, while Bethel, Dan, and 
 Gilgal are repeatedly referred to, seems conclusive against 
 the designation of " Gerizim " being part of the original text 
 of the Torah. That David and Solomon chose Jerusalem as 
 their capital, and Mount Moriah beside it as the site on 
 which to erect the national shrine, might be explained by 
 tribal preference ; but even so it is hard to explain why the 
 " Man after God's own heart " should deliberately arrange 
 that his son should build the temple, not on the site 
 prescribed by God but near his own palace on Mount Zion. 
 When Jeroboam headed the revolt of the Ten Tribes, why 
 did he not point to the passage in the Torah, and erect a 
 temple on Mount Gerizim which could claim a sanction 
 superior to that of Zion, rather than endeavour to prevent 
 the worshippers from going to Zion by erecting shrines at 
 Bethel and Dan ? No one of the successive usurpers that 
 mounted the throne of Israel ever thought of strengthening 
 his position by building a temple on Mount Gerizim. These 
 interpolations must have been made at earliest when Manasseh 
 fled to his father-in-law Sanballat. Gesenius would place 
 them much later, because the Talmud does not note them. 
 The silence of the Talmud is no evidence ; one needs only 
 to read the Talmudic account of the Septuagint, and the 
 alterations the translators are alleged to have introduced 
 into the Torah to see that. Most of the variations which 
 the Talmud says were introduced into the Septuagint are 
 not to be found in it, as may be seen by any reader 
 of the LXX. ; on the other hand, there are scores of 
 differences met with in every chapter which are not 
 referred to. 
 
 To sum up : the relation of the two recensions to each 
 other does not seem to be one of dependence, either of the 
 Samaritan upon the Massoretic or vice versd. As to the 
 date of the divergence, a study of the various classes df 
 
316 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 variants throws some light on this. The first leading class 
 of variants comprises those due to mistake. Of these, the 
 first group is formed by those due to mistakes in hearing. As 
 has been seen, these are largely the result of the fact that 
 the Samaritans did not, as they do not now, when reading 
 Hebrew, pronounce the gutturals. This loss of the gutturals 
 cannot have occurred under the Arab domination, or in 
 consequence of it, for Arabic is peculiarly rich in gutturals. 
 The Samaritans have spoken Arabic now for more than a 
 millennium, and in doing so pronounce all the gutturals they 
 eschew in reading Hebrew. Nor could it have occurred 
 under the rule of the Greeks ; they had the x and the rough 
 breathing, not to speak of y, which, by the time of the 
 Lagids, was pronounced like the Arabic ghain, as it is by the 
 modern Greeks. Under the civil rule of Rome, the cultural 
 influences were wholly Hellenic. Under the Persians, 
 Aramaic was the language in which the rulers communi- 
 cated with their subjects ; it, too, is rich in gutturals. The 
 Assyrians, though occasionally said to have no gutturals, 
 had at least n, as may be seen in the names Sennacherib 
 and Esarhaddon. This peculiarity must thus go back before 
 the days of Sargon. The Phoenicians were a nation who 
 spoke Hebrew and like the Samaritans did not pronounce 
 the gutturals. When they gave the Greeks the alphabet, 
 they must have had no gutturals, as the Greeks had to make 
 use of various devices to find symbols for their gutturals, 
 while they occupied the guttural places in the alphabet by 
 vowels, adopting for their symbols those used in Semitic 
 languages for the omitted gutturals. In the time of 
 Ahab, the Northern tribes were closely associated with 
 the Phoenicians and had largely adopted their worship 
 of Baal. That may be said to be an indication of a 
 probable date.^ 
 
 As to mistakes of sight, the second group of unintentional 
 variants, these have had various origins. As has been shown 
 above, all instances due to confusion of letters closely 
 resembling in the square character, have been blunders 
 made by Massoretic scribes. Those due to confusions 
 
 ' This we have already indicated elsewhere in connection with the 
 Samaritan pronunciation of Hebrew. 
 
SAMARITAN AND MASSORETIC PENTATEUCH 317 
 
 arising from resemblances in the Samaritan script are 
 restricted to only a few of the Samaritan MSS. Inquiries 
 are thus driven back to the script which preceded the 
 Samaritan. It has been shown that some of the confusions 
 have been due to resemblances only to be found in this 
 angular script and to early forms of it, such as that on the 
 Moabite Stone, in the Ba'al-Lebanon inscription, and in that 
 in the Siloam conduit. This may be held as showing that 
 in the ancestry of the manuscripts of the Samaritan Penta- 
 teuch there has been a stage in which the MSS. were written 
 in an early form of the above-mentioned angular script. As 
 this script has been found on the jar handles in the founda- 
 tions of Ahab's palace, it would imply that the divergence 
 must be dated as far back as the reign of the dynasty of 
 Omri. 
 
 Mistakes due to inattention have not so much evidential 
 value, as there is no chronology of carelessness. Yet, as has 
 been seen, there are cases in which, to a limited extent, 
 temporal data may be deduced : such are those in which the 
 Samaritan has the better reading although all the versions 
 agree with the Massoretic. This would prove that the 
 divergence took place before the translation of the 
 LXX. This fact, however, is now admitted, even by 
 those who put the date of the Samaritan Recension at 
 the latest. The earliest date claimed for the Septuagint 
 is the reign of Ptolemaeus Philadelphus, which began 
 nearly half a century after Alexander's march through 
 Palestine, and this, according to Josephus, synchronised 
 with the flight of Manasseh from Jerusalem to Sanballat 
 his father-in-law in Samaria, when it is alleged he took 
 the Torah with him. 
 
 The intentional variants, whether due to desire to 
 accommodate the grammar to later usage, to harmonise 
 statements which seemed to be discrepant, or to conform 
 the letter of the Torah more to their doctrinal ideas, 
 while interesting, have less value as evidences of date. 
 The fact that in both recensions there are archaic forms 
 surviving, while both have removed several, proves not only 
 the age of the whole document but dialectic differences 
 between the North and the South. Since both sets of 
 
318 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 archaisms are wanting in the rest of Scripture, something 
 may be deduced as to the relative age of the Torah in 
 relation to the other books. Variations due to harmonistic 
 or theological intentions seem to be always owing to the 
 Samaritan scribes. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE RELATION OF THE SAMARITAN RECENSION 
 OF THE PENTAtEUCH TO THE SEPTUAGINT 
 
 The wisdom of the choice which Alexander the Great made 
 of a site for the new capital of Egypt was manifested by 
 the rapidity of its growth, and the great size to which 
 it attained. It attracted all nationalities to it, so that 
 it soon became the commercial and intellectual metropolis 
 of the Greek world. Among the nationalities represented 
 were the Jews. If we are to believe Josephus, they were 
 out of all proportion the most numerous and influential. 
 They formed one of the three great divisions of the inhabitants, 
 the other two being Egyptians and Greeks. The Israelite 
 inhabitants of Egypt were not confined to the colonists 
 invited by Alexander, or to those compulsory colonists 
 conveyed to Egypt by Ptolemseus Lagi as captives, on 
 his conquest of Judea. There were Israelite communities, 
 probably many of them, like that the existence of which 
 we have learned from the Assouan papyri. From the days 
 of Solomon downward, Egypt was the common refuge of 
 every one who fell into bad odour in his home in Palestine. 
 Before the advent of Alexander their language seems to 
 have been Aramaic, although the presence of such large 
 bands of Greek mercenaries, as are mentioned by Herodotus, 
 would tend to make Greek very generally known among the 
 business class, to which the Jews naturally belonged. At 
 all events, surrounded by Greeks on every side, they very 
 soon abandoned the Aramaic they had been accustomed 
 to speak for the language of the conquerors. 
 
 While the Jews were, then as now, eager people of 
 
 319 
 
320 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 business, they at the same time were zealous for their 
 religion, and maintained it by the worship of the synagogue. 
 As in Palestine, the reading of the Law in Hebrew would 
 be accompanied by an interpretation in Aramaic. The 
 general abandonment of Aramaic for Greek would soon 
 render it as unintelligible as was the Hebrew of which it 
 was the explanation. Certainly many of the Jews in Egypt 
 continued to understand Aramaic, and wrote it, as is proved 
 by the evidence of the ostraka and papyri which are so 
 frequently turning up. Yet it would seem that in Alexandria, 
 where Greek was the language of business and of social 
 intercourse, many even of the learned class among the Jews 
 understood neither Hebrew nor Aramaic. Philo, a learned 
 and religious man, appears to have known no Hebrew, 
 and as little Aramaic. A translation was therefore needed. 
 When, however, it is remembered how extremely conserva- 
 tive all nations are, and in particular the Jews, in matters 
 of religion, it would seem unlikely that they would of their 
 own motion have thought of rendering the Law into Greek. 
 It seems at least a probability that some external authority 
 had stepped in. In a Jewish community as large as that 
 in Alexandria which had a separate constitution, with an 
 Alabarch, and probably a sanhedrin, questions of law 
 would be continually emerging, and these would have to 
 be decided by reference to the books of Moses. As the 
 Jewish residents in Alexandria did not understand Hebrew, 
 and the Aramaic Targum was not committed to writing, 
 a translation was imperatively necessary, and would be 
 demanded by the Egyptian authorities. 
 
 The story given by Aristeas and Aristobulus, that 
 Ptolemseus Philadelphus, moved by Demetrius Phalereus, 
 desired to add to his great library the Law of the Hebrews, 
 and summoned seventy-two men from Jerusalem, selected 
 by Eleazar the High Priest, to translate it, appears to be 
 a highly ornamented version of a transaction that had some 
 foundation in fact. We find the narrative also given in 
 Josephus, repeated in a confused form in the Talmud, and 
 in a shape scarcely less confused declaimed by the Christian 
 Fathers. The greater care manifested in the translation 
 of the Law, and its superior accuracy as a version, when 
 
PENTATEUCH TO THE SEPTUAGINT 321 
 
 compared with the translations of the other books of the 
 Hebrew Scriptures, makes the tradition at all events plausible, 
 that the Law at least was translated into Greek at the 
 instance of authority. At the same time, it does not 
 seem likely that Philadelphus would send to Jerusalem 
 for men to translate the Law into Greek, unless they were 
 to be regarded as assessors to the Alexandrian translators, 
 as guardians of the genuine Hebrew text, and guarantors 
 for the accuracy of the translation. Something may be said 
 for Eichhorn's theory that the seventy-two elders were 
 the Sanhedrin of the Jewish community of Alexandria. 
 
 Whatever its historic origin, all over the Greek speaking 
 world wherever there was a Jewish community — and that was 
 practically in every important city of the Roman world — 
 this Alexandrian translation was welcomed and generally 
 used. It would seem to have been used in the synagogal 
 readings, probably replacing the Targum. Even in 
 Palestine, it may have been so used, at all events in 
 synagogues formed for the accommodation of Greek speak- 
 ing foreign Jews. A striking evidence of the general use of 
 the Septuagint in Palestine is the fact that the evangelist 
 Matthew, while he always translates from the Hebrew when 
 he himself quotes from the Prophets or the Law, when 
 our Lord is the speaker it is always from the Septuagint 
 that He quotes. This cannot be explained by the fact that, 
 as Matthew wrote in Aramaic, the Greek of the New 
 Testament is a translation ; for whoever the translator — 
 it probably was Matthew himself — he must have had some 
 reason for the distinction which he made ; and the only 
 likely reason is that it represented a fact. The Apostle 
 Paul's use of the Septuagint in all his Epistles shows how 
 universal was the acquaintance with it among the Jews 
 all over the Greek speaking world, and that was practically 
 the whole Roman Empire. Peter, who addresses his first 
 Epistle to the whole Diaspora, also makes exclusive use of the 
 Septuagint in his quotations from the Old Testament. 
 
 The relation of later Talmudic Judaism to the Septuagint 
 is somewhat uncertain. Some of the Rabbin regard the 
 translation of the Law into Greek as a disaster comparable 
 to the dishonour done to the temple when Pompey pressed 
 
 X 
 
322 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 into the Holy of Holies. Others again decided that while 
 it was not lawful to translate the Torah into the tongues 
 of the Gentiles, an exception ought to be made in regard 
 to the tongue of the Yavanim. " Rabbi Shimeon ben 
 Gamliel said it is permitted to translate the Law but only 
 into Greek " (Megilla, gh). The Talmudic account is founded 
 on the story of Aristeas but modified more Talmudico. It 
 immediately precedes the dictum above given. Tolmai 
 brought from Jerusalem severity and two elders and said 
 to them, "write for me the Torah of Moses your Rabbi"; 
 and they did so, but they varied from the original in fifteen 
 different cases. Everybody knows that the points in which the 
 Septuagint of the Pentateuch differs from the Massoretic are 
 far more than fifteen. Singularly enough, of theseififteen cases, 
 only three indubitably agree with any of the actual differ- 
 ences. The fifteenth case is interesting from its mingling of 
 sense and nonsense. They did not, says the Talmud, write 
 the word amebeth^ "hare,"' because the wife of Tolmai was 
 so called, so they wrote instead tzeerath ha-regaleem, 
 "smallness of feet." The latter word seems an attempt to 
 transliterate,, and at the same time make something of 
 sense in Hebrew of the odd word xoipoy pvKXio<;, which the 
 LXX. have used instead of XayaS9, which happened to be 
 the name of Ptolemseus Soter's father ; the word tzeerath 
 appears to have been added to complete the sense. It may be 
 observed that the Talmudists do not seem to know the 
 difference between transcription and translation, and speak 
 as if the changes were made in the Hebrew. The above 
 is from the Talmud Babli ; in the Talmud Yerushalmi the 
 number of differences is reduced to thirteen. According 
 to it, arnebeth was the name of Ptolemy's mother. 
 
 Along with the Jews there was a considerable body of 
 Samaritans in Alexandria, who continued bitterly opposed 
 to those who were so close to them, who had the same sacred 
 books, and worshipped the same God with the same rites. 
 There are references by Origen to a Samariticon which 
 seems to mean a version of their recension of the Torah in 
 Greek. It has been maintained that there was no Greek 
 version of the Samaritan Hebrew, but that the Greek 
 quotations referred to the Samariticon are merely transla- 
 
PENTATEUCH TO THE SEPTUAGINT 323 
 
 tions of the differences of this Hebrew from the received 
 text. It seems hardly probable that the Samaritans 
 would remain without having in Greek the Law accord- 
 ing to their recension. Moreover Origen, had it been 
 the Hebrew, would have transliterated, at least occasionally. 
 In the work of Abul-Fath, the Samaritan annalist, there is 
 an account of the translation of the Torah into Greek. 
 Tolmai (Ptolemy) sent to the Samaritan High Priest, as 
 well as to the Jewish, and got scholars both from Samaria 
 and from Jerusalem to render the Law into Greek. The 
 two bands were lodged in separate quarters, and when their 
 work was completed, each party presented the result to the 
 king. According to the Samaritan annalist, Ptolemy declared 
 the Samaritan version to be the superior.^ 
 
 It is well known that in a very considerable number of 
 instances the Septuagint agrees with the Samaritan against 
 the Massoretic. When attention is directed to these alone, 
 by a natural psychological law, these differences from the 
 Massoretic and resemblances to the Samaritan bulk more 
 largely in the eye than they have any legitimate claim to 
 do. It is overlooked that these cases are balanced by the 
 more numerous cases in which the Samaritan agrees with the 
 Massoretic against the Septuagint. There are also cases in 
 which the LXX. and the Massoretic agree against the 
 Samaritan ; there is still another set of cases in which all 
 three differ from each other. As a consequence of this, all 
 
 1 The present writer received from the Samaritan High Priest 
 another account. While the Jews sent seventy-two translators the 
 Samaritans sent five, each of whom made an independent translation ; 
 they all agreed, not verbally (he did not claim that), but in meaning they 
 did so ; moreover that all five copies were preserved with them in 
 Nablus. Not to seem incredulous, I declared these would be immensely 
 valuable, and asked if they had showed them to any scholar. " Yes," 
 he said, " they had been shown to Dr Merx." My answer was that if 
 Dr Merx had seen them, every scholar in Europe and America would 
 have known about them in three months, and in six, examination papers 
 would be set upon them. To this he returned no answer — only smiled 
 benignly at me through his beard and remained silent. Although the 
 latter portion of the High Priest's statement is palpably untrue, there 
 yet seems a likelihood that the first part of it represented one form of 
 the Samaritan tradition. 
 
324 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the theories that have been devised to explain the relation- 
 ship of the Samaritan and the LXX. which take into account 
 only the instances in which they agree against the Mas- 
 soretic are insufficient. Another point is that these theorists, 
 largely Jews, fail to remember a fact already dwelt on — the 
 comparative recency of the Massoretic text ; this tends to 
 limit their views and vitiate their conclusions. 
 
 A study of the Massoretic text reveals not a few 
 phenomena which tend to lower very considerably its 
 critical value. The fact that the written text is a slavishly 
 accurate copy of a blundering manuscript which by some 
 chance gained a certain amount of interest, does not make 
 for respect of the critical methods of the editors who adopted 
 it, though they corrected from at least one other MS. 
 When it is remembered that the Massoretic text received 
 its final form some eight hundred years after that used by 
 the LXX., and approximately a millennium after the date of 
 Nehemiah, when according to a majority of critics, Manasseh 
 conveyed to the northern portion of Palestine what became 
 the Samaritan Recension, the relative value of the Massoretic 
 becomes very considerably lowered. When study reveals 
 the eminently unscientific methods of the Massoretes, it 
 would seem to be an assumption in the highest degree 
 hazardous to take it as representing the genuine text of the 
 Torah. The Palestinian text of 280 B.C. must have differed 
 considerably from that even of the days of Origen. 
 
 There is an uncertainty on the other side as to the precise 
 text of the Septuagint. Our earliest manuscripts, if a few 
 papyrus fragments are excepted, date from the fourth and 
 fifth Christian centuries; that is to say, manuscripts that 
 have passed through the transcriptions of five or six 
 centuries. In imitation of the Jewish Rabbin, Christian 
 scholars have, in relation to the Greek of the Old Testa- 
 ment, been in the habit of perpetuating one text, that of the 
 Vatican Codex, removing only the more obvious blunders. 
 The text of the Codex Alexandrinus exhibits many differ- 
 ences from that of the Vatican. We must also take into 
 account the changes introduced by editors. It is not known 
 what method Lucian pursued in his recension of the Septua- 
 gint text as only fragments of its results have been preserved. 
 
PENTATEUCH TO THE SEPTUAGINT 325 
 
 More, however, is known of the methods followed by Origen. 
 Unfortunately he appears to have regarded the Hebrew 
 text of the Old Testament which he found in Palestine as 
 correct, and consequently he was always liable to alter the 
 Greek so as to conform it to the Hebrew of Palestine. 
 Hence our present text of the Septuagint is in closer 
 agreement with the Palestinian text, which immediately 
 preceded the Massoretic, than was the original. Thus, 
 on the side of the Greek as well as of the Hebrew, 
 the question of the relationship of the Septuagint to the 
 Massoretic text is involved in uncertainty. Whatever 
 the point of time from which the existence of the Sama- 
 ritan text as distinct from the Judaic began, its true 
 history is quite unknown. Holding as we do that the 
 original Samaritan text is to be dated in the time of Ahab 
 at latest, we have nevertheless to admit a drastic revision 
 of it. Presumably with the arrival of Manasseh, as we have 
 already suggested, to give the New Temple the sanction of 
 scriptural authority, there was the insertion of the passages 
 in Exodus and Deuteronomy in which Mount Gerizim is 
 designated as the place in which there was to be erected 
 the stone on which the Law was to be inscribed. Probably 
 also then it was that the future in Deut. xii. 5, 14, 26, etc., 
 was changed into the preterite, so that it should no longer 
 be " the place which the LORD thy God shall choose to put 
 His name there " but " the place which the LORD thy God 
 hath chosen." It may also have been then that the ages of 
 the antediluvian patriarchs were adjusted to Samaritan ideas 
 of fitness, and the genealogical table of the descendants of 
 Noah made symmetrical with that of those who lived before 
 the Flood. The Textus Receptus of the Samaritan Penta- 
 teuch, which is taken for granted in most discussions of the 
 questions involved, is that of Walton's Polyglot. It seems 
 to have been printed from one manuscript, and that a very 
 defective one. In the main it agrees with the MS. numbered 
 by Kennicott 183 (designated G by v. Gall), but occasionally 
 Walton inserts a blunder which 183 avoids. In these cir- 
 cumstances any absolute conclusions from it are impossible. 
 If, however, the comparison, in regard to the Septuagint 
 on the one side, is to cases where the Alexandrine text 
 
326 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 agrees with the Vatican, and on the other where the 
 Samaritan text is well supported by diplomatic authority, 
 conclusions may be arrived at of at least probable accuracy.^ 
 In studying and estimating the differences between the 
 Septuagint and the Massoretic text on the one side, and 
 those between either and the Samaritan on the other, the 
 first thing that strikes the reader is that a large number of 
 the differences between the two Hebrew texts cannot be 
 transferred to the Greek. As has been already observed 
 elsewhere, the great majority of the differences between the 
 Massoretic and the Samaritan are due to the insertion or 
 non-insertion oivav andj/odk, that is to say, due to the use 
 in one but not in the other of two different, but equally 
 correct modes of spelling. It is for instance quite as correct 
 to write nitlN as n^iN, or for that matter niis or n'liN. These 
 variations cannot be rendered in Greek, the words are 
 the same whether they are written with the vowels plene 
 or not. In regard to such variants the statement of 
 Ginsburg has to be borne in mind. Quoting from Jehudah 
 Chayney ibn Ezra, he says, " It is perfectly certain that the 
 presence or absence of the ahevi letters is entirely due to 
 the idiosyncrasy of the scribes" (Introd., p. 137). Many 
 other variants are due to the fact that the fem. 3rd pers. 
 pron. is by the Massoretic generally written the same 
 as the masculine, whereas in the Samaritan the distinction 
 of gender is maintained. As has been already shown, this 
 is in all likelihood due to a blunder of the scribe to whom we 
 owe the k^thibh of the Massoretic text. That difference can 
 as little be represented in the Greek. On the other hand, 
 while in ordinary cases of translation the order of the words 
 of a sentence in the original can rarely be more than guessed^ 
 anyone reading the Pentateuch in the Greek of the LXX. 
 will not fail to observe how closely the order of the Hebrew 
 words is followed to the neglect of the normal Greek order. 
 The general Hebrew order is to begin the sentence with the 
 verb, then take the subject, and last the object ; whereas in 
 the Greek, as in English, the general rule is to place the 
 
 ^ On account of the war and the consequent impossibility of getting 
 books from Germany, I have only been able to make use of von Gall's 
 edition in regard to Genesis (1917). 
 
PENTATEUCH TO THE SEPTUAGINT 327 
 
 verb about the middle of the sentence, with the nominative 
 first and the object last. Observation will show the reader 
 that the great mass of the sentences in the Septuagint 
 Pentateuch begin with the verb, except where, as in Gen. 
 iv. I and vi. 8 (9), the subject is placed first in the Hebrew. 
 The only cases in which the Hebrew order is not followed 
 are where, for an indication of emphasis, the subject is placed 
 at the beginning. In this way the order of the words of a 
 sentence, which is sometimes different in the two recensions, 
 may show the agreement of the Greek with one rather than 
 the other. 
 
 By writers on the Samaritan question, as has been hinted 
 above, the resemblance between the Samaritan and the 
 Septuagint has been greatly exaggerated, and limiting 
 considerations have been overlooked. If the problem were 
 simply to account for resemblances between the Samaritan 
 and the LXX. against the Massoretic, and if there were no 
 disturbing instances in which one of the two agreed with 
 the Massoretic against the other, or where all three were 
 different, the discussion of the question would be very much 
 simplified. For one thing, the theories possible would be 
 reduced to three: either (i) the Samaritan originated by 
 retranslation from the LXX. ; (2) or the LXX. was a 
 translation from the Samaritan ; or (3) both the Samaritan 
 and the LXX. were drawn from a common source, which 
 differed from the Massoretic. There might be, besides, the 
 theories which regard the resemblances as secondary pheno- 
 mena; that the Samaritan was modified from the LXX., or 
 the LXX. from the Samaritan. The first three are regarded 
 by Kohn as all that are possible. 
 
 The first of these theories, i.e., that the Samaritan origin- 
 ated by retranslation from the LXX., is attributed to Frankel, 
 though scarcely quite accurately. Whoever was its author, 
 the theory is an impossible one. Had there been any excuse 
 for it, the Jews would certainly have reproached the 
 " Cuthaeans " with drawing their Torah from the Yavanim; 
 yet among the many contemptuous statements made by the 
 Jews of " the foolish people who dwell in Shechem," this is 
 not one of them. Irrespective of the numerous cases in 
 which the differences between the Samaritan and the 
 
328 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 Massoretic are of a nature which cannot have been trans- 
 lated from the Greek, there are cases in which the Septuagint 
 agrees with the Massoretic against the Samaritan. Thus in 
 Gen. xvii. 17 ; while the Massoretic has the verb lb'' in the 
 Niphal, so that the sentence reads " Shall a son be born to 
 one who is a hundred years old," the Samaritan has the 
 Hiphil so that it read, " Shall I who am a hundred years old 
 beget a son?" In this case the LXX. supports the Masso- 
 retic against the Samaritan. Another instance is Gen. 
 xix. 12 in which the Massoretic has, in regard to the Divine 
 messengers who had come to destroy Sodom, DB'JK 'anaskim, 
 " men," while the Samaritan has' Diasfe marachim, " angels " : 
 in this case also the Septuagint follows the Massoretic in 
 preference to the Samaritan. There are, further, instances 
 in which the Samaritan and the Massoretic are agreed 
 against the Septuagint. There is an instance of this in the 
 1 6th verse of the chapter before us. Gen. xix.; here the 
 LXX. has ayyeXoi, whereas the Massoretic and the Samaritan 
 have D^E'JN 'anashim?- 
 
 There is an element of something like absurdity in this 
 hypothesis, as in a comparatively short period after the Law 
 was translated into Greek in Alexandria, that language 
 became commonly known, the lingua franca, in the dominions 
 of the Diadochi ; consequently to translate any work from 
 Greek into Hebrew was needless. 
 
 Another hypothesis referred to by Gesenius (JDe Penta- 
 teuchi Samaritani Indole, etc., p. 1 3) and Kohn {^De Pentateucho 
 Samaritano, p. 29) and credited by them to a certain Rabbi 
 Asaria de Rossi, a Mantuan Jew of the sixteenth century, is 
 that the Alexandrian Greeks, moved by hatred of the Jews, 
 corrupted the version of the LXX., and so changed the 
 sacred Torah. Only Jews, a people thrown in upon them- 
 selves by their ritual separation from other peoples, could 
 have been vain enough to think that they or their Law, 
 barbarians as they were in the eyes of the Hellenic peoples, * 
 would be important enough for the Greeks to attempt to 
 adulterate it ; or that, whatever their hatred of the Jews, they 
 
 ' Blayney has 'anashim apparently supported by all his MSS. ; vori 
 Gall does not give malachim among his various readings. 
 
PENTATEUCH TO THE SEPTUAGINT 329 
 
 should take such an indirect way to injure them. Moreover, 
 it implies no very high esteem for the Jews of Alexandria 
 that they would suffer any Gentile to insert interpolations into 
 their Law. Had any one, Greek or Egyptian, determined to 
 introduce false elements into the Greek version of the Jewish 
 Law, he would have done this to a greater extent and to 
 more purpose than merely to introduce the unimportant 
 variations from the Massoretic to be found in the Septuagint, 
 and derived from it in the Samaritan. 
 
 A modification of the two hypotheses just mentioned is 
 held by Frankel, who supposes that the Samaritans inter- 
 polated passages into their recension of the Law from the 
 Septuagint. It is difficult to understand what motive would 
 induce them to make these interpolations. As has been 
 pointed out by Kohn, this hypothesis does not serve mUch, 
 as there are many difficulties in the relation between the 
 two left unsolved. The treatment of the genealogies of the 
 patriarchs, for instance, is very different in the Samaritan 
 and in the LXX. All the differences between the Masso- 
 retic and the Samaritan connected with the consecration 
 of Mount Gerizim are, of course, left untouched. 
 
 The converse of these above hypotheses, which all 
 assume the dependence direct or indirect of the Samaritan 
 Recension on the Septuagint, Dr Kohn with all the emphasis 
 of extended type maintains in his inaugural dissertation. 
 These are his words (p. 36) : " The Samaritan Codex, although 
 a false {mendosa), manufactured (emendata), interpolated 
 {adulterata) edition of the Jewish Codex, is nevertheless the 
 foundation of the Alexandrine version." He thinks that 
 the Septuagint, as we have it, does not accurately represent 
 the version in its original form. Had the Greek text been 
 preserved in its primitive form, it would have been found 
 to be further removed from the Massoretic and nearer the 
 Samaritan. In agreement with an opinion which has been 
 hinted at earlier in the present chapter, he holds that the 
 efforts of Origen to bring the Greek of the Septuagint into 
 closer conformity with the Palestinian Hebrew, and with 
 the other Greek versions which had been constructed with 
 a view to represent more accurately the Hebrew, have 
 largely changed its character. He maintains that Lucian 
 
330 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 and Hesychius continued the process. Other scholars have 
 regretted the work of Origen and his successors, as destroying 
 the authenticity of the Septuagint by conforming it to the 
 then Palestinian Hebrew text. Kohn further thinks that 
 the Alexandrine text as printed by Grabe more nearly 
 represents the genuine Septuagint than does the ordinary 
 Vatican text. His hypothesis as stated by himself is " that 
 the LXX. version of the Pentateuch is not a first hand 
 {primitivam) genuine production, but that it has been con- 
 cocted {confectd) in accordance with some Grzeco-Samaritan 
 version" (p. 38): or as he puts it otherwise, "The LXX. 
 translators in translating made use of a Samaritan Greek 
 version." The history of this Samaritan version, according 
 to him, was of this sort. There- was a large community 
 of Samaritans in Egypt, and especially in Alexandria, 
 who quickly adopted the manners and language of the 
 Greeks, but still did not wholly abandon their religion. For 
 their use a translation was made from their recension of 
 the Law. When they had for their own needs made this 
 translation, the Jews who were staying alongside of them, 
 and began to feel the same need as they, were willing 
 to make use of their version, as their religion and that of 
 the Samaritans was the same. This they did for some time, 
 till they observed that it had in it many blunders ; they then 
 determined to have a translation of their own. They had, 
 however, been so accustomed to the Samaritan version that 
 it influenced their translators in making one for themselves. 
 It was thus only an emended edition of the Samaritan that 
 resulted. 
 
 There are, however, several difficulties in way of adopting 
 this hypothetical history. It is known that the Jewish 
 community in Egypt, and above all the Alexandrian, was 
 very large and influential ; but we have no reference to 
 a Samaritan community at all commensurate with that 
 of the Jews, nor any notice that they sooner, than the Jews, 
 hellenised. There is further the chronological difficulty; 
 there is not time before the date of the translation of the 
 Septuagint, and after the founding of Alexandria, for the 
 Samaritans to become so hellenised as to need a translation 
 of the Law, and thereafter for the Jews to have become 
 
PENTATEUCH TO THE SEPTUAGINT 331 
 
 so habituated to it that they were unable to escape its 
 influence in translating for their co-religionists. This 
 hypothesis is quite at variance with every Jewish tradition, 
 whether preserved in Josephus or the Talmud. It has, 
 moreover, no support from any record of Samaritan tradition. 
 Such a fact as that the Jews had to depend on them for their 
 Greek version of the Torah would not readily have dis- 
 appeared from Samaritan memory. 
 
 Some of the evidence Kohn adduces in favour of his 
 view might be used to support a totally different thesis — 
 namely — not that the LXX. was translated from the 
 Samaritan Recension-, but that the translators used a 
 manuscript written in Samaritan characters. He deduces 
 that the LXX. had before them a Samaritan MS. because 
 they read (Exod. xiv. 2) for rrcnri ha-Hiroth, " the caverns," 
 
 '^■'yD'!!' ha-Hatzeroth, " the courtyards," being led into the 
 
 blunder by the resemblance between yodh and tzade in the 
 Samaritan script. As the Samaritan text has not this 
 reading, this is, so far from being an evidence in favour 
 of his thesis, rather against it. Further, the resemblance 
 between these letters is not so great in the form which these 
 letters assume in MSS. as in the Samaritan alphabet 
 devised for the Polyglots. Yet once more, as eTvavXi^, the 
 word in the Septuagint is a translation, not a transliteration, 
 of the name in question, which is Egyptian (the presence 
 of the Egyptian definite article />t is evidence of this) ; any 
 deduction from it as to the precise form of the word in 
 the Hebrew text is highly hazardous. The meaning of the 
 Egyptian word intended is very doubtful. It is extremely 
 difficult to identify accurately a word in one language from 
 the transliteration of it in another. But even the Greek 
 word presents difficulties. The Greek term is in the singular, 
 but the Hebrew which Kohn suggests is plural. Sayce thinks 
 that the " dwelling," eVauXjy, in question was a country house 
 of Pharaoh, and he maintains that the Pharaoh had such 
 a country house at Thukot (Succoth). With so much of 
 dubiety, the evidence for a various reading of the sort 
 Dr Kohn asserts is scarcely demonstrative. He brings 
 forward another instance of mistake due to resemblance 
 
332 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 of Samaritan characters; Qaao^av is the transliteration of 
 pSN Ezbon (Gen. xlvi. i6). This he regards as due to 
 
 the resemblance between alepk and tau, in the Samaritan 
 script. This, however, only proves what is otherwise 
 not unlikely, that the Hebrew manuscripts used by the 
 translators were written in Samaritan characters. The 
 inscriptions on the coins of Simon the Maccabee are in 
 a script closely akin to the Samaritan epigraphic script. 
 Further, the Samaritan text here has pyaVN 'Etzb'aon; the 
 inserted 3? ain would certainly have left its trace as it has 
 in irv^X EXeafct/o, Eleazar, and in oy^a ^aXaa/n, Balaam. If 
 this example proves on the one hand that the translators of 
 the Septuagint used a manuscript in Samaritan character, it 
 also shows that it was not an exemplar of the Samaritan 
 Recension. 
 
 The third hypothesis ol those classified by Dr Kohn : 
 That the LXX. and the Samaritan were drawn from one 
 vitiate source need not detain us long. This hypothesis 
 might explain the phenomena if these embraced only differ- 
 ences of the two in common from the Massoretic. It is not 
 so good an explanation when it is discovered that very 
 frequently, as mentioned earlier, one of the two agrees with 
 the Massoretic against the other. Not infrequently, all three 
 differ. 
 
 It would seem that the only possible hypothesis which 
 will meet all the difficulties is that all three recensions — 
 the Samaritan, the text behind the Septuagint, and the 
 Massoretic — are independent offshoots from one original, the 
 oldest of these being the Samaritan, and by far the most 
 recent the Massoretic. If chronology were the only thing 
 to be taken into account, the probability would be that the 
 Massoretic had diverged furthest from the original. The 
 evidences, however, of exceptional care and conservatism 
 may to a considerable extent modify this conclusion. When 
 the state of the Egyptian Hebrew MSS. of the other books 
 of Scripture is considered, a suspicion is thrown even on the 
 books of the Law, although it would doubtless receive 
 exceptional treatment. Consequently, the MSS. behind the 
 Septuagint may have varied more than the others. The 
 
PENTATEUCH TO THE SEPTUAGINT 333 
 
 number of blunders of which the Samaritan scribes have been 
 guilty, especially as compared with the accuracy with which 
 the Massoretes have perpetuated even blunders, is significant 
 — though some Samaritan MSS. have been carefully executed. 
 Taking all things into consideration, the Samaritan text may 
 be regarded on the whole as the best, the Massoretic next, and 
 last the LXX. 
 
 In order to investigate the matter independently and 
 form an estimate of the relationship between the LXX., the 
 Samaritan, and the Massoretic, probably the simplest method 
 will be to take a couple of consecutive chapters in Genesis. 
 As those with which most people are best acquainted, the 
 chapters that first suggest themselves are the opening 
 chapters of the book. Gen. i. 9, after the phrase i5*''n;i " and 
 
 it was so," the LXX. inserts " and the water which was 
 under heaven was collected into its meeting-places and the 
 dry land appeared." This addition is found neither in the 
 Samaritan nor the Massoretic. In Grabe's edition there is 
 the marginal sign which shows that it was not in the 
 Palestinian Hebrew in Origen's day. After the words 
 " and it was so " the addition is pleonastic ; but if those 
 words were omitted, it would be quite in the Oriental 
 manner to repeat, after the command, its fulfilment. In 
 verse 14, the Samaritan and the LXX. insert "to give light 
 upon the earth"; in some MSS. of the LXX. there is the 
 further addition, in which it has the support of the Armenian, 
 Ethiopic, and the Palestinian Aramaic translations from the 
 LXX. " To rule the day and the night." This last phrase is 
 neither in the Samaritan nor in the Massoretic. The majority 
 of the remaining cases of variation between the Massoretic 
 and the Samaritan in chapter i. are such as do not show in 
 translation. The first variant in chapter ii. is in verse 2, 
 "sixth" instead of "seventh"; in this the Samaritan and 
 the LXX. are agreed against the Massoretic. Chapter ii. 4 
 reads in the LXX., " This is the book of the generation of 
 the heaven and earth," whereas the Massoretic and Samaritan 
 have " These are the generations of the heavens and the 
 earth." Inverse 12, the Samaritan adds after "gold" the 
 word " exceedingly," which is found neither in the LXX. nor 
 
334 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 in the Massoretic. The 19th verse reads in the Samaritan 
 and the LXX., " The LORD God further created from the 
 ground every beast of the field " ; the Massoretic does not 
 insert " further." In verse 24 there is a case in which there 
 is a quotation in the New Testament (Matt. xix. 5 ; Mark 
 X. 8) which follows the LXX. and the Samaritan inserting 
 "twain," reading against the Massoretic "and they twain 
 shall be one flesh." 
 
 When the results are summed up, it is seen that in four 
 cases the Samaritan Recension agrees with the Septuagint 
 against the Massoretic ; in three cases the Samaritan and 
 the Massoretic are agreed against the LXX. ; and one case 
 in which the LXX. and the Massoretic agree against the 
 Samaritan. It is to be observed that the instances in, which 
 the Septuagint stands alone involve greater differences than 
 when either of the other two stand alone, with the exception 
 of ii. 2, in which the Massoretic alone has "seventh." 
 There is here no proof of any one of those recensions being 
 dependent upon either of the other. In these two chapters 
 there is every possible combination of two against one, an 
 evidence' of complete inter-independence. 
 
 In order that the induction should not have too narrow 
 premises, the above method may be applied to the first 
 twelve verses of chapter x,, which is made up largely of 
 proper names. In verse 2 the LXX. inserts E\to-a between 
 lojuav and Qo^eX against the Samaritan and the Massoretic ; 
 however, the Samaritan and LXX. agree against the Mas- 
 soretic in reading T1DID Moa-o'x instead of ^OQ, In verse 3 
 the Samaritan has IS''"! 1 against the Massoretic ns''"i which is in 
 
 this case supported by the LXX. ; in verse 4 by dropping 
 n in Elishah the Samaritan stands alone ; the Massoretic is 
 in opposition to the Samaritan and the LXX., in reading 
 Wi'n against Q^ifi of the Samaritan and 'VoSiov of the LXX. 
 
 This is one of the few instances in which Gesenius thinks the 
 Samaritan reading to be the better. In verse S the LXX. 
 stands alone in having " land " instead of " lands." In verse 
 6 the LXX. alone reads Mesrain and Phoud instead of 
 
 1 This is according to Walton's text ; von Gall does not give it among 
 his various readings. 
 
PENTATEUCH TO THE SEPTUAGINT 335 
 
 Mitzraim and Phut ; the first of these variants may be 
 regarded as due to the resemblance between mem and nun 
 in the earliest form of angular. In verse 8 the LXX. in 
 reading " Nebrod " instead of " Nimrod " merely gives 
 evidence of a defective pronunciation on the part of the 
 translator who dictated the version. In verse 8 by rendering 
 eyevvncre the LXX. supports the Samaritan Ti^in against the 
 Massoretic '\b\; the LXX. inserts "God" after "Lord" in 
 
 opposition to the Samaritan and Massoretic. In verse 12 
 the LXX. by confusing daleth and resh and mem and nun 
 reads Dasem. instead of Resen. This affords evidence 
 that the MS. used by the LXX. had in its ancestry a MS. 
 written in the angular script. In these twelve verses, there 
 are five cases in which the LXX. stands alone against the 
 Samaritan and the Massoretic ; three in which the Mas- 
 soretic stands alone ; two in which the Samaritan is opposed 
 to the LXX. and the Massoretic. In these verses also there 
 is therefore no evidence of any special connection between 
 the LXX. and the Samaritan. There does seem to be proof 
 that while the actual manuscript from which the Pentateuch 
 was translated had been written in the Samaritan script 
 it was not a Samaritan MS. but one that had a different 
 descent. One thing to be noted is that in very few cases 
 have the confusions of letters which have occasioned the 
 variants been traceable to the Egypto- Aramaic script of the 
 Assouan papyri. Not improbably synagogue rolls of the 
 Law would be written in the Samaritan script, and these, 
 being the ancient Hebrew writing, might be regarded as 
 sacred, much as the Jews at present, who, though they write 
 the synagogue rolls in the square character, write their 
 letters in a much more cursive script. 
 
 The decision just arrived at, that there is no special 
 relationship between the Samaritan and the LXX., is con- 
 firmed by a study of the more striking differences between 
 the Massoretic and the Samaritan. In the antediluvian 
 genealogies all three recensions differ. No one has ventured 
 to assert that the LXX. copied its version of the ages of the 
 pre-diluvial patriarchs from the Samaritan. Nevertheless, 
 Dr Kohn says "that in almost every case {paene semper) 
 
336 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 where the two Hebrew recensions differ the Septuagint 
 agrees with the Samaritan." He does not discuss this 
 notable exception, a fact all the more remarkable from 
 the chronological differences involved. He grants that 
 the additions which refer to Mount Gerizim have not 
 been admitted into the Septuagint, but explains this by 
 saying that these errors had been observed, and formed the 
 occasion for the revision of the Greek translation. There 
 could, however, have been no principle involved to prevent 
 the Egypto- Hellenic translators from inserting the summation 
 of the ages of the patriarchs that immediately followed the 
 Flood. Yet although this summation is found in the 
 Samaritan it is not transferred to the LXX. 
 
 Dr Kohn devotes several pages to further proof of his 
 thesis. He brings example after example in which the 
 LXX. agrees with the Samaritan, and from this would argue 
 the dependence of the former on the latter. He does not 
 even consider the possibility that all three recensions — 
 the Massoretic, the Samaritan, and the Hebrew behind the 
 Septuagint — spring from a common source. As above 
 noted he, like most Jews, is so blinded by national prejudice 
 that he regards it as an axiomatic truth that the Massoretic 
 text must always be assumed to be correct. Such a prejudice 
 as this renders him practically incapable of coming to a 
 correct conclusion on the question at all. What is meant 
 will be best seen by an example. In Gen. xlix. 6, Jacob, 
 in speaking of Simeon and Levi, says, " O my soul, come not 
 thou into their council ; unto their assembly my glory be not 
 thou united " (R.V.). The Samaritan of the last clause might 
 be rendered " In their assembly let not my liver become 
 hot." ^ If the insertion of vav be neglected, the differences 
 are two ; by the change of daleth into resh the verb translated 
 "joined" becomes "grows hot." Further, the verb in the 
 Massoretic is in the feminine, although 123 is masculine. The 
 meaning of the figure, on either rendering, is not very clear ; 
 the word translated "honour" may as well be rendered 
 " liver " ; the " liver '' to the Hebrew had much the same 
 meaning which we attach to "heart." The idea suggested 
 
 1 Gesenius would render kabhdd, "liver," in Ps. xvi. 9; Ivii. 9 (E.V. 8)j 
 cviii. 2 (E.V. 1). 
 
PENTATEUCH TO THE SEPTUAGINT 337 
 
 by the Samaritan is of a person getting excited in an 
 assembly of heated persons. This is as intelligible as the 
 Massoretic reading ; so the blunder may as well be on the 
 one side as the other. The LXX. certainly takes kabhdd 
 to mean " liver " (the meaning which appears to suit best 
 with the rest of the clause in the Samaritan), but with regard 
 to the critical verb tehad or yahor it would seem by the intro- 
 duction of sustasis as if the LXX. followed the reading of the 
 Massoretic The evidence in this case is scarcely convincing 
 that the LXX. followed the Samaritan. 
 
 Another instance brought forward by Dr Kohn is, as it 
 seems to us, inappropriate, It is said in Exod. xiii. i8, 
 " And the children of Israel went harnessed " (armed, R.V.) 
 D'^e'ion hamushim ; the Samaritan scribe wrote D^E''''Dn 
 hamtshtm, which may either mean " by fifties " or " in the fifth 
 generation," which latter is the meaning the LXX. has pre- 
 ferred. In general, when there is difference between the two 
 recensions of vav in the one and yodh in the other, the 
 blunder has been made by the Jewish scribe copying from a 
 MS. in the early square character. Hence it is probable that 
 the Samaritan text, which agrees with the Septuagint, is 
 correct. It was promised to Abraham (Gen. xv. i6) that 
 "in the fourth generation" his seed should return to 
 Palestine from the land of bondage ; a prophecy that would 
 be fulfilled, if, while the great majority of the mature 
 members of the nation were of the fifth generation, a con- 
 siderable number of the generation preceding still survived. 
 Even among ourselves, cousins-german may be separated 
 from each other in age by more than half a century. 
 According to the chronology of the Samaritan Recension 
 and of the Septuagint, the residence of the children of Israel 
 in Egypt was 215 years.^ Whether or not the reading of 
 the Samaritan Recension is correct, there is no proof that the 
 reading of the LXX. was derived from it. A manuscript in 
 the Maccabaean script would distinguish too clearly between 
 vav ^xvAyodh for a scribe to confuse them. 
 
 1 In Gen. xv. 13, the stay of Israel in Egypt is put at 400 years, 
 an estimate that certainly does not harmonise on our chronology with 
 " the fourth generation." Possibly the generation was reckoned by the 
 extreme limits of individual life, in which case the century might 
 
 Y 
 
338 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 What Dr Kohn calls " a wonderful example of how badly 
 the Greek interpreters understood the Samaritan Codex" 
 is found in Num. xxi. 30, which is rendered by the English 
 Versions, " We have shot at them ; Heshbon is perished even 
 unto Dibon, and we have laid them waste even unto Nophah, 
 which reacheth unto Medeba." It may be observed in 
 passing, that with regard to the first clause, the Samaritan 
 and the Massoretic are agreed practically, save that the 
 Massoretic by dropping the n he at the end of 'abadh, has 
 made Heshbon, contrary to Hebrew usage, masculine. In 
 the latter clause the differences are that the Samaritan reads 
 esh, "fire," instead of asher, "which," and 5)^ ' al, "upon," 
 instead of nj? adh, " to," The rendering of the LXX. is very 
 different from either. " And their seed shall perish from 
 Esebon unto Daibon ; and their women have yet kindled 
 a fire against Moab." While it is true that the word 
 translated " we have shot at them " is identical, consonantally, 
 with a word which would mean "their lamp," and it is also 
 true that in regard to David, and David alone it is used four 
 times (i Kings, xi. 36, xv. 4 ; 2 Kings viii. 19:2 Chron. xxi. 7) 
 in a sense which indirectly means "progeny," we doubt if 
 this be the true occasion of the LXX. rendering. We would 
 venture to hazard another explanation. In the script of the 
 Assouan papyri nun is not unlike zain, and fodk is like am ; 
 the reader, when a manu.script, ancestor of that used for the 
 translation into Greek, was being transcribed, unable to 
 understand the rare word before him, resolved it into zaram, 
 "their seed." The Samaritan Targum derives the word 
 in question from rilm, "to lift up," and renders "we have 
 lifted up to destroy Heshbon unto Dibon." Dr Kohn assum- 
 ing without any evidence that the Samaritan reads venaskim, 
 " and women," instead of vannashim, " we laid waste," holds 
 that the LXX. followed it. As neither text was vowelled 
 
 be reckoned to a generation. It has been asserted, on what evidence 
 we know not, that the earliest Babylonian year was reckoned from 
 solstice to solstice, consequently every year consisted of approximately 
 six lunations. The 400 years of Abraham's vision would then roughly 
 coincide with the period of their stay according to the chronology of 
 the Samaritan and the LXX. It may be noted that in this hypothesis 
 the ages of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would cease to be abnormal. 
 
PENTATEUCH TO THE SEPTUAGINT 339 
 
 in those days, the LXX. reader would have been liable 
 to make the blunder, if blunder it be, as much from the 
 Massoretic as from the Samaritan. The more important 
 variation of " Moab " for " Medeba " calls for explanation. 
 In the script of the papyri, yodA and da/e(/i, written carelessly 
 might coalesce into a form not unlike a/epA. The ^ asher' adh 
 of the Massoretic is a blunder ; the qri marks the resh 
 doubtful, and the daleth of 'adh differs from lamed by the 
 thin line rising from it, which often disappears in MSS. ; and 
 thus, if the word was originally *al, it becomes 'adh. So far 
 from this example proving the dependence of the LXX. on 
 the Samaritan, all it does prove is that the MS. from which it 
 was translated had in its ancestry a manuscript written in the 
 characters found in the Assouan papyri, and therefore from 
 a source independent of both the Massoretic and Samaritan. 
 
 Several of the instances that follow in Dr Kohn's list, 
 however interesting they may be in relation to the genesis of 
 the LXX. rendering, have no bearing upon the relation of 
 the Samaritan to it, as the Greek may as readily have been 
 translated from the one as from the other. Sometimes the 
 evidence he brings would prove too much and therefore 
 proves nothing. In Deut. xxvii. 26, Dr Kohn argues that 
 the LXX. has translated from the Samaritan because the 
 latter inserts kol, " all," before dibre hat- Torah, and the former 
 renders Trao-t Toh Xoyoty. By parity of reasoning, it would 
 follow that the English Authorised was also translated from 
 the Samaritan : " Cursed be he who confirmeth not all the 
 words of this law to do them." Luther translates Verflucht 
 sei,wermcht alle Waerte dieses Gesetzes erf uellet ; therefore his 
 version also must have been translated from the Samaritan. 
 
 The instance in Deut. xxxii. 35 involves more elements 
 than Dr Kohn adverts to. It is rendered in the Authorised, 
 "To me belongeth vengeance and recompense." The 
 Samaritan has instead of h^ li, "mine," D'vi? lyom, "to 
 the day " ; this clause is made dependent on DM3 kaniis 
 (v, 34), "to collect,"^ the Divine wrath is laid up in store 
 
 * As D1»3 kamiis, the word in the Massoretic, occurs only in this 
 
 - T 
 
 passage it is probably to be regarded as a blunder, due to the likeness 
 of mem and nun in the angular. 
 
340 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 " to the day of vengeance and recompense." The probability 
 that the Massoretic is at fault is confirmed by the fact that 
 the LXX. while it agrees with the Samaritan in reading lyom 
 differs from it by reading D^B'S ashallem instead of D^B' shillem; 
 the verb " I will repay " instead of the noun " recompense." 
 In the epigraphic script of the Samaritan vav and aleph are 
 somewhat like. This supports the thesis maintained above, 
 that the LXX., though translated from a manuscript written in 
 Samaritan, or what is practically the same thing, Maccabaean 
 characters, was not translated from an exemplar of the 
 Samaritan Recension. 
 
 Among the instances which Dr Kohn advances, there are 
 some in which the Massoretic has omitted, by homoioteleuton, 
 a clause or portion of a clause. An example of this is found 
 in Deut. xiii. 6 ; which, speaking of temptations to idolatry, 
 commands that even the nearest and dearest should be 
 slain, if they should endeavour to tempt them to worship 
 other gods ; the verse begins : " If thy brother, the son of 
 thy mother, or thy son, etc.," so it stands in the Massoretic. 
 There is a want of completeness in this, for it would seem 
 to imply that solicitations to idolatry, when offered by a 
 paternal half-brother, would not be guilty or punishable 
 actions. The Samaritan and the LXX. avoid this : " If there 
 tempt thee thy brother, the son of thy father or the son of thy 
 mother, etc.," the enclitic pronoun being the same, and the b 
 sound and the m sound being so closely cognate that the 
 scribe who wrote to dictation might readily miss the former of 
 the two terms. The blunder must have been an ancient one, 
 as it is found in the Peshitta, not to speak of Jerome. It 
 is, however, needless to follow Dr Kohn through all his 
 examples, none of which really proves any dependence of the 
 LXX. on the Samaritan Recension. While one or two of 
 them render it almost certain that the translation was made 
 from a manuscript in Samaritan script, they at the same 
 time, by the differences they exhibit, show that, as said 
 above, this MS. was not an exemplar of the Samaritan 
 Recension. 
 
 One passage, Exod. xviii. 6, 7, is worth being looked 
 into because of certain peculiarities. It almost seems as if 
 Dr Kohn had forgot that his thesis was to prove the depend- 
 
PENTATEUCH TO THE SEPTUAGINT 341 
 
 ence of the LXX. on the Samaritan, because this instance 
 might be cited as evidence of the converse, of its complete 
 independence. Jethro had come to meet Moses and to bring 
 to him the wife who it appears had deserted him when he 
 went back to Egypt Verse 6 : " And he said unto Moses, I, 
 thy father-in-law Jethro, have come unto thee, and thy wife 
 and her two sons with her." Verse 7 : " And Moses went to 
 meet his father-in-law, and did obeisance, and kissed him, 
 etc.," yet in the previous verse Jethro had already talked 
 with him. Jerome avoids the difficulty by a paraphrase. 
 The difficulty is really due to the introduction of ijn ani, 
 "I," instead of nan hinneh, "behold," as in the Samaritan, 
 which therefore might be rendered " One said to Moses, 
 Behold, thy father-in-law Jethro has come," etc.^ The 
 LXX. appears to have had "ibK? lemor, " to say." In verse 7 
 the LXX. follows the Massoretic exactly and omits the 
 phrase nB'b^ PMoshe, " to Moses," found in the Samaritan ; an 
 addition which saves the dignity of Moses by saying that 
 Jethro did obeisance to his son-in-law. This would prove 
 that the Alexandrian translators had their own text, which 
 sometimes agreed with the Massoretic and sometimes with 
 the Samaritan. 
 
 As an indirect method of throwing light on the question 
 of the relation in which the Septuagint stands to the 
 Samaritan Recension, it will be advantageous to consider 
 the peculiarities of the Alexandrian version. It has been 
 seen above that many of the differences between the LXX. 
 and the Massoretic, and also between it and the Samaritan, 
 have been due to mistakes of hearing, consequently that it 
 is nearly certain that the translation was written to dictation 
 — one man reading the Hebrew while another translated as 
 he wrote. There seems to have been a tradition which 
 implied something of this sort. In contradistinction to the 
 account given by Irenaeus, according to which each one 
 of the seventy-two translators occupied a separate cell, 
 Epiphanius tells that they were distributed in thirty-six 
 cells, two in each, an arrangement which would suit a 
 method of translating such as has been indicated above. 
 
 » This is the rendering of the Peshitta. 
 
342 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 The effect of mistakes of hearing will naturally be more 
 observable in the transliteration of proper names, than in 
 cases of real translation. In considering this, the fact that 
 there are peculiarities of two languages to be taken into 
 account complicates the problem ; not only has the 
 pronunciation of Hebrew to be considered but also that of 
 Greek. As, however, the pronunciation of a language is 
 perpetually changing, the mode of pronouncing given letters 
 at a given time must, where it can be ascertained, be thought 
 of. It has already been noted that the Samaritans pro- 
 nounced no gutturals ; the question will accordingly present 
 itself: Are there any traces of mistakes attributable to this 
 fact to be seen in the LXX. ? It is evident that the person, 
 whose office it was to read the Hebrew, did pronounce some 
 of the gutturals. In regard to the letter V am, it seems certain 
 that two sounds were expressed by one sign. In Arabic 
 there are two sounds of the letter, one little more than a 
 catch in the breath, the other a burred r, such as one hears 
 in Northumberland. This latter is distinguished from the 
 character for ai'n by being dotted, and is called ghain. 
 One phenomenon which strikes anyone who studies the 
 transliteration of Hebrew names into Greek, is the appar- 
 ently capricious way in which ain is represented sometimes 
 by no consonant at all, sometimes by y gamma. It is 
 necessary at this point to consider the pronunciation of 
 the Greek gamma. The Greek priests in Palestine at the 
 present time pronounce that letter precisely like the 
 Arabic ghain. There are two names which, as written in 
 Hebrew, begin with the same syllable p?DJ? and nnbj? the 
 
 one is transliterated by the LXX. A/j.aXeK (Amalek) and 
 the other To/no/ipa (Gomorrah), which as adopted by Jerome 
 have been passed on to us. Another example is specially 
 worthy of note, as the modern Arabic name represents the 
 distinction above mentioned. The southmost of the Philistine 
 cities is in Hebrew ntj? transliterated Ta^a (Gaza) in Greek, 
 but in Arabic the opening letter is ghain, and so pronounced. 
 These differences have usually been preserved by Jerome ; 
 there are, however, exceptions to this. The daughter of 
 Jezebel, wife of Jehoram of Judah, in Hebrew n^^TO becomes 
 
PENTATEUCH TO THE SEPTUAGINT 343 
 
 ToOoXia (Gotholia) in Greek, but Jerome writes the name 
 Athalia, a fact that indicates a change in the pronunciation. 
 When the letter in question occurs in the middle of a word 
 there is the same variety in transliteration, thus Dy^a becomes 
 in Greek BaXaan (Balaam) ; but Chedorlaomer in Hebrew 
 ''PJ'?))'^? is Greek XoSoWoyofiop (Chodollogomor) ; in the 
 Vulgate this appears as Chodorlahomor, from which our 
 English has been modified, following Luther. Another 
 example may be taken from the names of these four kings ; 
 Tidal ?J?nn. which the LXX. mistaking T for 1 have rendered 
 QapyaX (Thargal), Jerome Thadal, Luther more accurately 
 Thedeal. The strongest guttural n Aeik is normally repre- 
 sented by X as Jinan becomes Xe/Spcoi/ and nn Xer. Very 
 frequently, Aetk is represented by the soft breathing ; there 
 seems to have been no regulating principle employed. A 
 similar want of law or principle is observable in our own 
 language in regard to the silence or pronunciation of k in 
 words derived from Latin through French ; we have " habit," 
 " herald," " hautbois," in which k is pronounced, and " heir," 
 "hour," "honour," in which it is not, yet they all equally have 
 Latin roots and come to us through the French. A similar 
 usage seems to have sprung up in Egypt with regard to 
 the pronunciation of Hebrew. With regard to n ke, it is 
 frequently represented by the rough breathing, as 'Ayap 
 for IJn Hagar and 'OSo^pas for Dnin Hadoram. From the 
 above it is clear that the Septuagint was not translated by 
 one who read Hebrew as the Samaritans did, dropping all 
 the gutturals. 
 
 Another peculiarity of the Samaritans was that, like the 
 French and Germans, they could not pronounce ^k, but the 
 LXX. translator had no difficulty about Togarmah which 
 they wrote Qoyapfia, Thogarma, so also with Tarshish which 
 becomes Oa/oo-e/s, Tharsis. So we find QapyaX, Thargal. 
 Thus all evidence points to the fact that the reader for the 
 Alexandrian translator did not labour under the disabilities 
 as to pronunciation which affected the Samaritans. There 
 is therefore little likelihood that the Septuagint was merely 
 edited from a Samaritan version, or that the manuscripts 
 employed by the LXX. represented the Samaritan Recension. 
 
344 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 There are cases, as has already been observed, in which 
 both the Samaritan and the LXX. differ from the Massoretic 
 but do not-agree with each other. The amount of difference 
 sometimes varies in extent, being greater in one than in the 
 other. The most important instances of this are the gene- 
 alogies in Gen. v. and xi., to which a passing reference has 
 already been made. Even a casual consideration of the 
 genealogy of the antediluvian patriarchs reveals that there 
 must be a principle at the back of the variations. In dis- 
 cussing the relation of the Samaritan Recension to that of 
 the Massoretes, it was suggested that there was the idea that 
 there must have been a progressive shoi'tening of human life 
 from Adam downwards. Each son dies at an earlier age 
 than his father. Enoch and Noah are exceptional persons, 
 as of each it is said that he " walked with God " ; if they are 
 excepted, in the Samaritan genealogy, then the only other 
 exception to this is that Cainan has a longer life than Enos by 
 five years. The difference from the Massoretic extends only 
 to three of the patriarchs — Jared, Methuselah, and Lamech. 
 
 In the genealogy, as it appears in the LXX., there are 
 evidences of a principle at work differing from that which 
 influenced the Samaritan scribes. The peculiarity of the 
 Septuagint version of the antediluvian genealogy is that a 
 hundred years is added to the age of each of the first 
 five patriarchs before the birth of his eldest son. The 
 motive for this change may well have been apologetic. 
 The length of life ascribed to those who lived before 
 the Flood might easily be a stumbling-block to those 
 living among the critical and philosophic Greeks, who 
 would be ready enough to ridicule anything that emanated 
 from barbarian sources. An answer readily suggesting itself 
 would be that though the age was reckoned in " years," these 
 years were really only " months." This hypothesis was all 
 the easier to the Alexandrian Israelites, since the Hebrew word 
 for " year " njE* shana, really meant " repetition." The repe- 
 tition which would be earliest recognised, after the succession 
 of day and night, would be that of the phases of the moon. 
 Those who had little or no knowledge of artificial light 
 would be much more dependent on the light of the moon 
 than we naturally imagine. Moreover, in Egypt and South- 
 
PENTATEUCH TO THE SEPTUAGINT 345 
 
 Western Asia, moonlight has a splendour rarely seen in our 
 more cloudy atmosphere. This might easily lead to reckon- 
 ing by moons ; these, however, would be felt to be cumbrous 
 from their number, so they were grouped, sometimes in tens, 
 as in Rome, sometimes in twelves, as in Babylon. At this 
 point, a greater repetition was discovered, the succession of 
 the seasons. A study of the stars revealed the fact that 
 the constellations had a succession of times in which one 
 after another of them dominated the midnight sky. The 
 phenomenon of solstice would be observed. The agricultural 
 stage, when reached, would lead to the succession of the 
 seasons of seedtime and harvest being emphasized ; and the 
 fact that twelve moons so nearly coincided with the revolu- 
 tion of the heavens would lead to that being adopted. The 
 answer to the supposition that the " years " in the patriarchal 
 ages were only " months '' was open to one difficulty on the 
 received Massoretic text. If the age of the patriarchs at 
 the birth of their eldest sons is divided by twelve the result- 
 ant age is in many cases too young for paternity. Leaving 
 out Adam, since presumably he was created full-grown, Seth 
 was at the age of 105 a father. This number, if divided by 
 twelve, gives an age of eight years and nine months. The 
 ages of these antediluvians when their eldest son is born is 
 a diminishing quantity, till in regard to Mahalaleel it is 
 recorded that he was sixty-five years at the birth of Jared ; on 
 the mode of calculation above adopted he would only be five 
 years and five months old. If, however, a hundred months 
 are added, that is to say, eight years and four months, the 
 age becomes no longer an impossible one, at least, in the 
 precocious East. 
 
 In the genealogy of the post-diluvian patriarchs who 
 preceded Abraham, the LXX. is in closer agreement with 
 the Samaritan than in regard to the antediluvians ; both add 
 a century to the age of the patriarch as given in the Mas- 
 soretic before the birth of his eldest son ; this is the case in 
 regard to all those before Serug, and including him. Although 
 there is this agreement in the ages before Nahor, there are 
 yet differences enough to prove independence. The LXX. 
 adds to the life of the elder Nahor before he becomes a father 
 a century beyond his age, as given in the Massoretic. More- 
 
346 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 over, the LXX. inserts Cainan between Arphaxad and Sala 
 (Shelah). It is, however, in the latter portion of the lives of 
 these patriarchs that the greatest difference appears; only 
 in one case do the LXX. and the Samaritan coincide in 
 regard to this ; in both, Eber lives 270 years after the birth 
 of Peleg. In the Samaritan, there is on the whole a con- 
 tinuance of the shortening of life which had characterised the 
 antediluvian genealogy. Another point of difference is that 
 the LXX. gives no summation of the years of the life of these 
 post-diluvian patriarchs as the Samaritan does. It seems 
 obvious that the two recensions are quite independent the 
 one of the other. 
 
 The limitation which Dr Kohn sets to his theory of the 
 dependence of the LXX. on the Samaritan ought to be 
 remembered. He maintains that the Jews corrected the 
 more obvious errors of the Samaritano-Greek version, but the 
 smaller and obscurer variants were not observed. In the 
 case, however, of these genealogies the Jewish revisers of his 
 hypothesis do observe and do alter ; they do not, however, 
 endeavour to bring the Greek they are to use henceforward 
 into conformity with the Massoretic, but introduce an in- 
 dependent set of variants. If the Jewish scribes did not 
 retain the reduplications in the account of the plagues of 
 Egypt to be found in the Samaritan, they made, or found in 
 their MSS., various additions not to be found either in the 
 Samaritan or the Massoretic. When a catalogue of the 
 descendants of Jacob at the time they went down to Egypt 
 is given (Gen. xlvi. 20) after the sentence which occurs alike 
 in the Massoretic and the Samaritan, " And unto Joseph 
 were born in the land of Egypt, Manasseh and Ephraim, 
 whom Asenath the daughter of Potipherah the priest of On 
 bore to him," the LXX. adds, " And there were sons born to 
 Manasseh, whom his Syrian concubine bore to him, Machir, 
 and Machir begat Galaad. And the sons of Ephraim the 
 brother of Manasseh, Soutalaam and Taam, and the sons 
 of Soutalaam, Edom." There is nothing of all this in the 
 Samaritan. To some extent, the information may have been 
 got from I Chron. vii. 14-19, but the passage there is very con- 
 fused, as it appears in the rendering of the LXX., " The sons 
 of Manasseh ; Esriel, whom his Syrian concubine bore, and 
 
PENTATEUCH TO THE SEPTUAGINT 347 
 
 she bore also Machir the father of Galaad " ; then follows the 
 account of other sons. It is to be observed that in the 
 addition before us there is no word of " Esriel " (Ashriel). 
 The portion of the verse about Ephraim suggests the same 
 source, but the passage here is further from the Hebrew of 
 the Massoretic as it is reflected in the Greek of Chronicles. 
 Instead of the numerous sons attributed to him in i Chron. 
 vii. 20-27, there are only two, and their names are difficult 
 to identify with any of those in i Chron. vii. By somewhat 
 of a stretch Soutalaam may be recognised as intended to 
 represent Shuthelah ; as for Taam, it is very difficult to 
 imagine it as an attempt to transliterate Tahath. The 
 Greek in Chronicles is much closer to the Hebrew, writing 
 Sothalath and Thaath. It would almost seem as if the names 
 had been written down memoriter on the margin of some 
 early copy, and had slipped into the text. One thing is clear ; 
 the names have not been taken from the Hebrew direct, but 
 have been written down from a confused memory of the 
 Greek of Chronicles. 
 
 Further, in the later chapters of Exodus, according to the 
 Septuagint, there are changes in the position of the sections 
 when compared with the Massoretic which have no support in 
 the Samaritan. A great portion of the 39th chapter according 
 to the Massoretic and Samaritan occurs in the 36th of the 
 LXX. ; the rendering is by no means so close as in other parts 
 of the Pentateuch; the breast-plate is called logeion, "the 
 Oracle," which is rather an explanation of the use made 
 of the Urim and Thummim which were placed in it than 
 a translation of the word hoshen. Chapter xxxvii. of the 
 LXX. agrees in the main with chapter xxxvi. of the 
 Massoretic and the Samaritan, beginning at verse 91 
 chapter xxxvii. (LXX.) agrees in the main with xxxvii. of 
 the Massoretic and Samaritan. The opening verses (i-io) 
 of chapter xxxix. (LXX.) coincide with xxxviii. 24-30 (Masso- 
 retic and Samaritan). With xxxix. 42 (Massoretic and 
 Samaritan), agrees xxxix. 11 (LXX.), but two verses are 
 added which do not represent anything in the Hebrew 
 of either recension : " The rest of the gold which remained 
 of the offering, they made into vessels for ministering in 
 them before the Lord; and the blue that was left, and 
 
348 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the purple and the scarlet, they made into ministering 
 {leitourikas) garments for Aaron, in order that he might 
 minister in them in the holy place." 
 
 While in the above instances of dislocation, the Masso- 
 retic and the Samaritan are agreed against the LXX., there 
 are cases in which the Massoretic and the LXX. agree 
 against the Samaritan. The ten verses which describe the 
 altar of incense are placed in the Samaritan Recension 
 between the 35 th and 36th verses of chapter xxvi. of the 
 Massoretic, whereas the Massoretic and the LXX. place them 
 at the beginning of chapter xxx. 
 
 All this confirms the decision to which we have already 
 come, that the Septuagint was not translated from a 
 manuscript which was an exemplar of the Samaritan 
 Recension. On the other hand, the differences from the 
 extant Massoretic Recension are too many and too important 
 to render it at all probable that MSS. from Jerusalem were 
 those from which the translation was made. It may 
 be urged that as the Massoretic did not reach its present 
 form till the fourth or fifth century A.D., the text then in 
 use in Palestine would be older than the Massoretic by six 
 or seven hundred years, so that it might differ very much from 
 what it had been in the days even of Ptolemy Philometer. Still, 
 the rate of change, as measured by what is to be observed 
 between that behind Aquila and the Massoretic, is so slow, 
 that the difference from the text of Aquila and Symmachus 
 and that from which the Septuagint was translated need 
 not have been very great. That the Samaritan differs from 
 the Massoretic so much less than the LXX. is confirmatory 
 of this. From these grounds we are led to assume that 
 the LXX. was translated from MSS. already in Egypt, 
 which probably had a long Egyptian descent. 
 
 Can anything be discovered as to the character of those 
 manuscripts ? It is a matter of some importance to find out 
 so far as may be possible the character and age of the MSS. 
 used by the " Seventy," whoever they were, when translating 
 from the Hebrew. From the number of instances in which, 
 as shown by Dr Kohn, differences of the Greek from the 
 Hebrew can be explained by mistakes due to resemblances 
 of letters in the Samaritan script, it may be assumed that 
 
PENTATEUCH TO THE SEPTUAGINT 349 
 
 the MSS. immediately used by the Greek translators were 
 written in Samaritan, or what is the same thing, Maccabsean 
 characters. This, however, is a very different matter from 
 saying that they were exemplars of the Samaritan Recension. 
 The Jews certainly did not write in the square character 
 in the days of the Lagid supremacy. The coins of Simon 
 the Maccabee more than a century later had their inscrip- 
 tions in a script analogous to that of Samaria. As the 
 object of the superscription was to inform the public of the 
 value of the coins in question, it would be in the style of 
 writing ordinarily in use. If the translation was made 
 in the days of Philadelphus (approximately 280 B.C.), nearly 
 a century and a half before Simon first struck coins, the 
 MSS. used would be written in a similar script. Fully 
 a century before Philadelphus was the inscription cut on the 
 sarcophagus of Ashmunazar. The script on this last, though 
 distinctly angular, yet approximates to that on the Macca- 
 baean coins. Hence the script of even Jerusalem MSS. 
 would be very like that of the Samaritan codices to which 
 Dr Kohn refers. The differences are, as already stated, 
 too great for one to hold that the LXX. has been translated 
 from Palestinian MSS., and as there is no evidence that they 
 were Samaritan — indeed the evidence is distinctly hostile 
 to that view — we are forced to maintain that the translation 
 was made from a manuscript, or from manuscripts, already 
 in Egypt which had been copied from Egyptian codices. 
 This is confirmed by evidence which appears to prove 
 that the manuscript used had in its ancestry one written 
 in the script of the Assouan papyri. Further, there are 
 traces in the Septuagint of the influence of the earlier 
 angular script to be found on the Siloam inscription. 
 This would suggest that the ultimate ancestor of the 
 Egyptian MSS. was brought down into Egypt by Jere- 
 miah, at all events by some one about his date. The 
 number of exiles that were carried down into Egypt, by 
 Johanan the son of Kareah, along with Jeremiah, must have 
 been very considerable. They must have had the Law 
 and known its contents, as Jeremiah rebukes them for not 
 obeying it (Jer. xliv. 23)- If that is so, there is evidence of 
 the totality of the Law long before the mission of Ezra. 
 
350 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 If the script of the Assouan papyri was that in use in 
 Egypt, how is it that the characters confused belong to the 
 Samaritan or Maccabzean script ? The answer to this can be 
 found in the present habits of the Jews ; copies of the Torah, 
 engrossed for use in the synagogue, are written in square 
 character, whereas in the private letters, though written 
 in Hebrew, the script is totally different. The Assouan 
 papyri are copies of letters and deeds. From the Talmud 
 {Sank. 21 3) we learn that the script of Samaria was regarded 
 as that in which the Law had been given at first, and therefore 
 it might well be reckoned sacred. Before there were 
 regular synagogues, the Torah might be copied, like other 
 documents, in the script of Assouan ; hence the confusions 
 traceable to it, although the synagogue rolls would 
 always be written in Samaritan script — or to give it its 
 Talmudic name — Ibri character. 
 
 If the differences between the Samaritan and the Masso- 
 retic suggest a common source dating from a more or less 
 remote antiquity, it might be argued that the greater the 
 differences the greater the antiquity of the common source. 
 Then, as the differences of the LXX. from the Massoretic 
 are so much greater than the differences of the Samaritan, 
 it might be argued that the Septuagint is older than 
 the Samaritan ; that is to say, moved away from the 
 common source at a much earlier period. Whether or not 
 there is any truth behind the Talmudic legend of a statutory 
 copy which was regarded as the model to which all copies 
 of the Torah must conform, the chances of accuracy were 
 greater in Palestine than in Egypt. The knowledge of 
 Hebrew even among the Jews resident in Egypt would 
 not be that of Jews in Palestine or Samaritans who always 
 retained Hebrew alongside of Aramaic. Moreover, the 
 knowledge of the Law was much more diffused in Palestine 
 than in Egypt, consequently the possibility of blunders was 
 limited both in extent and degree. From this it follows that 
 the copying of Hebrew documents would not be so carefully 
 done in Egypt. Further, in translating, even if the 
 translators were Jews, they would not have the knowledge 
 due to what may be called customary knowledge to guide 
 them. Consequently in a given time the variants in the 
 
PENTATEUCH TO THE SEPTUAGINT 351 
 
 Egypto-Hebrew manuscripts would be greater than in 
 Palestinian ones, whether in Judea or in Samaria. 
 
 To sum up the result of the present investigation into 
 the relation between the Samaritan Recension and the 
 Septuagint ; it is clear that the one is no mere repetition of 
 the other ; they are independent witnesses, alike testifying 
 to the integrity of the Law (or, to give it the Greek name so 
 generally used, the Pentateuch) from a period long before 
 the advent of Ezra in Jerusalem. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE BEARING OF THE FOREGOING ARGUMENT ON 
 PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM 
 
 As will doubtless have been guessed by the reader all that has 
 preceded has been intended to lead up to certain conclusions 
 which have a bearing on the criticism of the Pentateuch. In 
 order that the force of the argument should be apprehended, 
 it will be well to sum up seriatim the various points involved 
 and discussed. In the iirst place it has been shown that the 
 claim of the Samaritans to be Israelites is well founded. 
 From the ordinary methods of the Assyrians, and from the 
 express statements of the inscriptions of Sargon, it is clear 
 that only a small portion of the people were deported. 
 Their home so closely contiguous to Judea places their 
 knowledge of Israelite ritual beyond dispute. The minute 
 points in which the Talmudists find fault with those whom 
 they call "the foolish people who dwell in Shechem" is 
 evidence of the general accuracy of their ritual. In the next 
 place, a study of the history of the Samaritans evidences the 
 faithfulness with which they held to the worship of JHWH 
 despite the most savage persecutions inflicted on them by 
 Jews, Romans, Byzantines, and Moslems. It has been 
 further seen that their Mosaism, their ritual of worship 
 in accordance with the Mosaic Law, did not begin under the 
 Persian rule, but stretched away back to times before the fall 
 of the Northern Kingdom. The evidence of the prophets 
 is clear on this point. Yet again, the apparent antagonism 
 between the worship of JHWH in the Northern Kingdom 
 and that on Mount Zion has to be explained. The source 
 of the difference is shown to be connected with the influence 
 of the prophets and of prophetism. As the Samaritans 
 
 352 
 
PENTATEUCH AL CRITICISM 353 
 
 claim to have maintained their original ritual of worship 
 from the times of Eleazar the son of Aaron to the present 
 day, it is necessary to study their acts of worship and their 
 ceremonial rites. As the religion of Israel, like Christi- 
 anity, rests upon history the views entertained as to sacred 
 history have to be ascertained. Religion expresses itself not 
 only in ritual but in forms of thought, that is to say, 
 a theology emerges. Consideration of Samaritan theology 
 shows it to consist of doctrines practically identical with 
 those of Judaism but attained by a different route. As 
 bearing on the age of the Samaritan Recension, it is needful 
 that the evidence of age afforded by the Samaritan script 
 be carefully considered. It was seen that certain symptoms 
 pointed to the mother roll, from which originally the 
 Recension took its rise, having been written in the script 
 of the Siloam inscription if not earlier. The peculiarities of 
 the Samaritan pronunciation of the Hebrew have a chrono- 
 logical bearing and must not be omitted from consideration. 
 The form Aramaic assumed when spoken and written by 
 the Samaritans has a bearing on the questions at issue, and 
 also their literature and the poetic form the Samaritans 
 affected. As the question of the relation of the Samaritan 
 Recension to the received Massoretic text is of the highest 
 importance for criticism, there has been a careful examination 
 of the resemblances and differences between them. It has 
 been long recognised that there are many and striking 
 cases in which the Samaritan Recension resembles the 
 LXX. ; that also has been compared. 
 
 After the foregoing recapitulation, the results of the 
 study may be more concisely summed up. The feature most 
 prominent is the independence of the Samaritans as regards 
 the Jews — an independence that assumed the form at times 
 of meaningless antagonism ; an independence which was 
 maintained although Judaism surrounded them on every 
 side, not only to the south in Judea, but to the north in 
 Galilee, and to the east across Jordan. Their stern faithful- 
 ness to the ritual and creed of the religion received from 
 their fathers, renders the idea of change of faith foreign 
 to them. When the ritual of the Samaritans is compared 
 with that of the Jews, while the essential identity is patent, 
 
 z 
 
354 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 there are many minor differences, and all these are on the side 
 of greater simplicity, and therefore of greater primitiveness. 
 This characteristic is specially obvious in regard to the most 
 essential rites of the religion of Israel, Circumcision and 
 the Passover. In regard to the latter the primitive character 
 is naturally more obvious. Although it is in some respects 
 difficult to discover the exact way in which the Jews 
 of the century before the destruction of the Temple 
 celebrated the Passover, yet much can be gathered from 
 Josephus and the New Testament ; the evidence of the 
 Talmud is not quite valueless although it is late. One 
 very marked difference is that while the Jews, in the period 
 before the destruction of the Temple, when they could still 
 celebrate the Passover, kept the feast within doors; the 
 Samaritans celebrate it out of doors on the top of Mount 
 Gerizim. Certainly the Jewish method is more like the 
 account given in Exod. xii., whereas the Samaritans appear 
 to have perpetuated the modifications which the ordinance 
 would have to undergo in the wilderness, when the house 
 was a tent and there were neither lintels nor door-posts 
 (Num. ix. 5 ; see also Josh. v. lo). The pit oven in which the 
 lambs are roasted among the Samaritans points to the 
 habits of a village community, or the encampment of Bedu 
 in circumstances in which they had to be careful of fuel. 
 This mode of roasting, as is proved by their monuments, was 
 practised neither by the Egyptians nor by the Assyrians. 
 The Samaritan mode of celebration has the look of being 
 a survival of the time before the central shrine was adopted 
 by the Israelites. The view they have of sacred history is 
 certainly a late travesty of the truth. It however evidences 
 the necessity the Samaritans felt to have their faith based like 
 that of the Jews and Christians on history of some sort. Yet 
 this must be said that the Samaritan travesty is not any 
 wider from the truth of fact than are the stories to be found 
 in the Talmud. As tp doctrine, the mutual reproaches which 
 Jews and Samaritans cast at each other, and the erroneous 
 accounts which they give of each other's faith, are con- 
 vincing evidence that neither borrowed from the other, to 
 any great extent. The Samaritan angelology is a case 
 in which this is obvious ; the names given to the angels 
 
PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM 355 
 
 by the Samaritans differ from the Jewish names ; indeed are 
 constructed on a different principle. 
 
 Another aspect of the questions involved emerges with 
 the consideration of the Samaritan script. The Talmud, as 
 has already been shown, acknowledged the Samaritan script 
 — the characters of the Samaritan alphabet — as being more 
 ancient than the square character used by the Jews ; indeed, 
 they seem to have regarded the script of Samaria as that 
 in which the Law was first given. This confirms the con- 
 tention that the Samaritan aspect of the religion of Israel 
 was not dependent on Judaism, and in not a few features 
 it is the more primitive. The aspect of independence is 
 exhibited from another side by the form which Aramaic, the 
 lingua franca of South- Western Asia, assumed in their lips ; 
 it is much more Hebraistic than is Jewish Aramaic — a 
 symptom that seems to indicate that the Samaritans 
 spoke Hebrew longer than did the Jews, and were less 
 exposed to foreign influences. The poetry of the Samari- 
 tans has features like that of the Jews, but what is 
 regarded as the essential characteristic of Jewish versifica- 
 tion — parallelism — they do not use ; they indulge very 
 largely in acrostics involving the whole alphabet, a poetic 
 form of which the Jews made occasional use; rhyme, of 
 which the Jews have no indubitable examples, at least 
 in the classic period of the Hebrew language, is a very 
 favourite mode with the Samaritans. 
 
 More important is the relation in which the Samaritan 
 Pentateuch stands to the Massoretic Recension. We have 
 seen that many of the differences between the two recen- 
 sions are due to blunders of the Jewish scribes ; while 
 others are due to mistakes on one side or other in conse- 
 quence of resemblances of letters, as has been observed in 
 an earlier chapter, in a script like that of the Siloam 
 inscription, or even an earlier. A comparison of the 
 Samaritan Recension with the Septuagint shows that though 
 the translation was made from a manuscript written in 
 Samaritan characters, it was not made from an exemplar 
 of the Samaritan Recension. There further seemed to have 
 been manuscripts written in the angular script, with at least 
 one in the script of Elephantine. 
 
356 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 One point is clear from all this: when the Samaritans 
 got the Torah it was complete in all its parts; if it is a 
 compilation, then the compilers had completed their work. 
 All the proofs alleged by critics that the Pentateuch is made 
 up of different documents are to be found in the Samaritan, 
 as much as in the Massoretic. It is certainly the case that 
 the Samaritan has, in a few instances, JHWH, when the 
 Massoretic has Elohim, and vice versd, but these are not 
 frequent enough to affect the issue seriously. The same 
 thing may be said of the Septuagint, although the variants 
 from the Massoretic are more numerous and important. 
 In these circumstances it is all-important to fix the date 
 at which the religious separation between the Jews and 
 the Samaritans took place. This is all the more important 
 that it will fix the latest date at which the alleged editing 
 can have taken place. 
 
 Before entering on the critical theory of the constitution 
 and origin of the Pentateuch, or — to give the collection of 
 documents in question the name most in favour with the 
 followers of Wellhausen and Kuenen — the Hexateuch, it 
 might be well to endeavour to realise how things would 
 appear to one untrammelled by previously formed opinions. 
 That the book in question was to be separated into super- 
 incumbent strata, the lines of stratification running through 
 the whole six subsidiary portions, would never occur to 
 him. After a perusal more or less careful he would be 
 inclined to regard the first book and the fifth as differing 
 from those three books that come in between. As decidedly 
 he would put the sixth book in a separate category. In 
 regard to Genesis, presuming the investigator here imagined 
 to have put to the one side all the claim it makes to be 
 a record of God's revelation of Himself to man, he would 
 find it composed mainly of legendary stories. These 
 narratives are connected chiefly with the lives of four 
 successive individuals, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. 
 The stories are simple and naive ; even when the scene 
 is transferred to Egypt, we seem to be sitting at a tent- 
 door hearing tales of his ancestors told by a hoary bearded 
 sheikh in the clear moonlight of the East. The three books 
 which follow are legal and ceremonial. They form a unity ; 
 
PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM 357 
 
 there is a historical preamble, and historical episodes, but 
 there is not much of the purely legendary ; with all their 
 contents these three books form one law-book. Were it 
 not for the formula in which JHWH is declared to be the 
 God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which occurs about 
 a dozen times in those books, mainly in the beginning of 
 Exodus, and a casual reference to Joseph in the first 
 chapter of Exodus, and a notice of the removal of his bones 
 in the thirteenth, these books might be regarded as totally 
 independent of Genesis, the literary atmosphere is so 
 perfectly different. The frequently recurrent phrase of 
 Genesis "the generations of" practically disappears in the 
 ceremonial books. Another phrase takes its place, and 
 occurs with greater frequency, " The LORD spake unto 
 Moses saying."' When the reader we have imagined 
 proceeds to Deuteronomy, he again is conscious of a change 
 of atmosphere. The whole book has the semblance of 
 having been spoken by one man, by Moses on the Plains 
 of Moab ; it is a recapitulation of the history and legislation 
 of the three preceding books with alterations. In its literary 
 form Deuteronomy agrees with not a few specimens of 
 Egyptian and Assyrian literature. Indeed the structure of the 
 book from a purely literary point of view strongly resembles 
 that of the Memoirs of Sunhit ; it, like Deuteronomy, begins 
 with a designation of the author and concludes the opening 
 paragraph with the word "saith." In regard to the sixth 
 book, the student we have presupposed would be conscious of 
 yet another change of atmosphere. It certainly implies the 
 books which have preceded, but it is widely different in style. 
 Though JHWH promises to be with Joshua as He 
 was with Moses, there is a distinct difference in the attitude. 
 The phrase so common in the Lawbook, vyedabber JHWH 
 el Moshe lemor, practically disappears; it is found only 
 once. Joshua does not enjoy the frequent intercourse 
 with JHWH that Moses did. While Moses is frequently 
 referred to, it is by a new designation, " Moses the servant 
 of JHWH." Another thing our investigator would not fail 
 to observe would be the disappearance of the archaisms 
 frequent in the preceding five books. All these resem- 
 blances and differences would seem to preclude the 
 
358 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 hypothesis of lines of stratification running through all 
 the six books. 
 
 This last named hypothesis is that, notwithstanding, 
 which has been adopted by the most influential school of 
 Biblical critics at the present time. This theory of parallel 
 documents was suggested, with much diffidence and after 
 much hesitation, by Astruc, a French physician of the 
 eighteenth century. While he had observed the stratification 
 mainly in Genesis, and pointed it out there, from dogmatic 
 reasons he carried it on into the opening chapters of Exodus. 
 His hypothesis was that Moses had before him two docu- 
 ments or sets of documents, the one characterised by the 
 use of the Divine Name JHWH, the other by the use of 
 Elohim, and that from these he made extracts, which he 
 introduced without change into his own narrative. This 
 peculiarly Eastern method of literary procedure was not 
 unknown among classic writers ; Diodorus Siculus has 
 extracted long passages from Polybius and other writers 
 without acknowledgment or alteration. Eichhorn, writing 
 about half a century later, recognised this stratification as 
 extending through all the books of the Pentateuch. Stahelin 
 and de Wette saw these documents in the book of Joshua 
 also. It was found by later students that matters would 
 be simplified critically if it were recognised that there was 
 not merely one but that there were two Elohists ; the one 
 annalistic like the Jehovist, the other drier in style and 
 interested more in ritual than in legends. This second 
 Elohist was designated P, and his work was described as 
 the " Priestly Code " ; the symbol of the Jehovist became J, 
 and of the Elohist E. By some scholars it was felt that 
 certain chapters in the "Priestly Code" suggested another 
 hand; these were segregated under the title of "The Law 
 of Holiness," and were designated by the letter H. Keener 
 sighted critics saw the hand of members of the Deuteronomist 
 school expanding statements ; as the writer of Deuteronomy 
 was represented by the letter D so those followers of his 
 were also symbolised by the same letter, only distinguished 
 from him by an added numeral. Later critics distinguished 
 later hands among the priestly writers, so there are P2 and P3. 
 There were also discovered to be second and third Elohists 
 
PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM 359 
 
 and second and third Jehovists. Such in rough is the 
 history of the origin and evolution of the critical theory 
 of the structure of the Hexateuch. 
 
 Having narrated the origin and development of the 
 ruling critical theory, it is needful to consider it as a 
 completed whole. Succinctly stated, it is the hypothetical 
 history of the origin and evolution of the Five Books of 
 Moses and the book of Joshua; or, as it is called, the 
 Hexateuch. In considering the relation of the Samaritan 
 Recension of the Torah to the critical discussions, the extent 
 assigned to it is the first question to be settled. It is an 
 essential part of the critical theory that it is a Hexateuch, 
 and that Joshua is an integral part of it. It is beyond 
 denial that the Samaritans never since the days of Sanballat 
 have had the canonical book of Joshua. The settling of 
 this question is to a great extent independent of the 
 Wellhausen hypothesis. Astruc never could have thought 
 of his theory had he begun his study with Joshua. By 
 Bennett (Polychrome Bible, "Joshua") the first two verses of 
 the first chapter of that book are ascribed to the Elohist, yet 
 the Divine Name introduced is JHWH, and it appears 
 twice. In fact very rarely in the whole book does Elohim 
 make its appearance, except as an attributive after JHWH. 
 
 Above, in a previous chapter, a reason has been 
 suggested why, with all the motives the Samaritans had for 
 holding Joshua in high honour, they yet had not the book 
 which related his exploits. Traditions of him remained, and 
 he was spoken of as " King Joshua." It is clear then that 
 if the Samaritans got the Law through the fugitive priest 
 Manasseh, whether he fled to Samaria in the days of 
 Artaxerxes Longimanus, or a hundred years later in the 
 days of Alexander the Great, " Joshua " was not regarded at 
 that time as part of the Law. Manasseh had no reason to 
 withhold it, and the Samaritans had every reason to wish 
 for its possession. As has elsewhere been pointed out, 
 Joshua was the great hero of the Northern tribes : legends 
 had gathered round him, and his tomb was with them. 
 
 It admits neither of doubt nor denial that the Jews put 
 the book of Joshua on a different plane from that on which 
 they placed the " Five Fifths of the Law," and a much lower 
 
360 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 one. It is regarded as a palmary argument against the 
 authenticity, and consequent historicity, of the book of 
 Daniel, that the Rabbin of the . third or fourth century 
 excluded it from the "Prophets" and relegated it to the 
 Kthubhim: yet the far earlier decision of the Jewish 
 teachers, that " Joshua " is quite separate from the Law and 
 is to be reckoned among the Prophets, is overridden without 
 scruple.^ The critical reason assigned for this exclusion is 
 that there is nothing in "Joshua" bearing on conduct. If 
 this were the principle which governed the inclusion of 
 matters in the Law, or exclusion from it, then Genesis ought 
 to have been excluded as well as Joshua; this argument 
 proves too much, therefore proves nothing. But it is not 
 strictly true. The treaty which Joshua is related to have 
 made with the Gibeonites is expected to regulate the 
 conduct of the Israelites in regard to these Gibeonites in 
 the days of Saul and David. Again, the territories to be 
 occupied by the different tribes were arranged by Joshua ; 
 this had an abiding effect on the conduct of the Israelites of 
 later days. The story of Naboth and his vineyard shows 
 the sanctity with which the pious Israelite endowed the 
 inheritance he had received from his fathers, and his relation 
 to it. Its want of relation to conduct cannot be the reason 
 for the exclusion of " Joshua " from the Torah. One further 
 reason is suggested, a literary one, why " Joshua " should be 
 considered part of the Law despite its exclusion from it by 
 the Jews. The Pentateuchal history stops at a very awkward 
 point ; Israel is encamped in the Plains of Moab, preparing 
 to cross the Jordan, and it needs the book of Joshua to 
 
 ^ The case against " Daniel " is peculiarly weak, its exclusion from 
 the Prophetic books is so very late. It is among the " Prophets " in the 
 Canon of Alexandria. Our Lord quotes Daniel as a prophet (Matt. xxiv. 
 15 ; Mark xiii. 14). Josephus includes "Daniel" among the " Prophets," 
 since the four books of the K'thubhim described by him cannot fit 
 "Daniel" (contra Apionem, i. 8); moreover, he distinctly calls him a 
 prophet {Ant. X. xi 7). In the Canon of Melito, which by its exclusion 
 of the Apocryphal books of the Alexandrian Canon shows its Jewish 
 origin, " Daniel " is reckoned among the Prophets (Euseb., Eccl. Hist., 
 iv. 26) ; his date is circa a.d. 180. The earliest notice of Daniel not being 
 among the Prophets is in Jerome's preface to Daniel written about two 
 hundred years after Melito. 
 
PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM 361 
 
 complete it. This is no argument, else the fact that 
 Thucydides ends his history in the middle of a sentence 
 would be proof that he wrote also the Hellenika which 
 continues the history and begins " After these things." This 
 much at all events is clear, that not only must the exclusion 
 of "Joshua" from the Law have been effected before the 
 flight of Manasseh to Samaria, but so long before that the 
 fact of its previous inclusion had disappeared from memory, 
 consequently long before the advent in Jerusalem of Ezra, 
 who by hypothesis brought the Law. 
 
 We have already considered the evolution of the ruling 
 critical theory, it is now necessary to describe the evolution 
 of the Pentateuch according to it. Somewhere about the 
 time when Jehoshaphat was reigning in Jerusalem, a Judaean 
 began to collect the legends of the origins of the Israelite 
 race. About a century later, an Ephraimite, when the 
 Northern Kingdom was tottering to its fall, if it had not 
 already fallen, commenced making a similar collection. The 
 Southern writer preferred to speak of God by His Covenant 
 name of JHWH, while the Northerner used the more general 
 term, Elohim. The Judaean document is designated by the 
 letter J, the Ephraimite by E. Not quite a hundred years 
 after the Northern Kingdom had fallen, during the reign of 
 Josiah, a Redactor combined the two narratives, dovetailing 
 one into the other. 
 
 These histories were prophetic in their origin, but in 
 Jerusalem prophetic activity found another outlet. Under 
 the zealous young king Josiah the Temple was undergoing 
 repairs so thorough that they involved the masonry of the 
 building. While these repairs were proceeding "the Book 
 of the Law " was found, or was alleged to be found. Hilkiah 
 the High Priest brought to Josiah the roll alleged to con- 
 tain the Law. According to the critics this was its origin ; 
 certain members of the prophetic school, seeing the evils 
 which resulted from the many High Places, composed this 
 book. It professed to be written by Moses, his last words ; 
 so it gave Mosaic authority to the reform which it was 
 desired to see instituted— a reform which would involve the 
 destruction of all those local High Places. When it was 
 written it was duly hid in the temple, with, it might be, the 
 
362 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 connivance of Hilkiah, in a place where it might opportunely 
 be found. As arranged it was found and produced the effect 
 desired. This book so found is the book of Deuteronomy in 
 the Pentateuch. The letter used to designate it is D. A 
 later Redactor combined this Law book with the book which 
 contained the narratives of J and E united, known as JE ; 
 he at the same time expanded the JE narratives and adjusted 
 them to Deuteronomy. The Deuteronomist was followed 
 by many of the same spirit who are credited with operating 
 on the other books of Scripture, and inserting passages which 
 do not suit criticism ; these are denoted by D2 and D3. 
 
 Such was the position of things when Jerusalem was 
 taken and Jeconiah and many of the inhabitants were carried 
 into captivity. Among these captives was the prophet-priest 
 Ezekiel. He was full of patriotic enthusiasm and eager to 
 keep Israel pure and separate from the heathen. Moved by 
 this desire, he and those influenced by him devised the 
 " Law of Holiness." This as already mentioned is denoted 
 by the letter H. In the "Law of Holiness" there is 
 republished from Deuteronomy, with variations, the list of 
 clean and unclean animals. The remainder of the book is 
 mainly occupied with marriage relationships. Later the 
 captive priests, guided it might be by remembrances of the 
 temple worship, supplemented this " Law of Holiness " by an 
 elaborate system of washings and sacrifices. The Law of 
 Holiness thus supplemented became the Priestly Code. 
 Meantime the combined document JE and D arrived from 
 Jerusalem at Pabylon. Whether after the book reached 
 Babylon or before it left Jerusalem, later Jehovists had made 
 additions and alterations ; according to some, later Elohists 
 also have left traces of their activities. We have thus to do 
 with a J2 and a J3 and possibly an E2 and an E3 besides a 
 relay of D's. The first chapter of Genesis is attributed to P, 
 but the second chapter is assigned to J with additions by J2. 
 The story of the Flood, with long passages attributed to P, 
 is largely assigned to J 2. Among the passages attributed 
 to J 2 are the opening verses of Gen. vii., in which there is 
 reference to the purely Levitical distinction of animals clean 
 and unclean ; in the account of Noah's sacrifice with which 
 the story of the Flood ends, also ascribed to J2, there is the 
 
PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM 363 
 
 same distinction brought into prominence. To P are 
 attributed most of the genealogies except those of Cain in 
 Gen. iv., and those of Cush and Eber among the genealogies 
 in chapter x. Such was the constitution of the Torah as 
 it was brought to Palestine by Ezra, according to the 
 Wellhausen theory. Even then it was not complete ; there- 
 after additions were made to it ; there are a series of priestly 
 writers P2, P3, and so on. 
 
 With all its undeniable cleverness, this theory of the 
 evolution of the Pentateuch inevitably suggests the cycles 
 and epicycles of the Ptolemaic astronomy ; as by the pre- 
 Copernican astronomers, epicycle was imposed on epicycle, 
 to explain aberrant phenomena, so by the critics are 
 new authors supposed, in order by them to explain 
 difficulties as they are realised. May it be thought dis- 
 respectful to the German professors and their followers to 
 suggest that they might take an example from astronomers, 
 who found a solution by abandoning their epicycles, and 
 betaking themselves to simplicity by seeking for a. new 
 centre ? Meantime a further hypothesis is needed to explain 
 the non-existence of any trace of the Torah in its more 
 primitive state before D or P had operated upon it. Of the 
 Epistles of Ignatius we have not only the long Greek 
 Recension but also the short Greek and the Syriac. In 
 Egypt, as proved by the Assouan papyri, there were ancient 
 Israelite communities ; it may be that some shorter recension 
 of the Torah may be found in the rubbish heaps left by their 
 villages. The original recension of the Hebrew of the 
 Egyptian book of Daniel must have been very different 
 from the Palestinian text. However that may be, it is 
 certain that when the Pentateuch reached Samaria it was 
 complete in all its complexity of parts. The differences 
 between the two recensions are slight, and can scarcely be 
 said to involve any critical points. The sole point on which 
 the Samaritan Recension can throw light is the date at 
 which this compilation, if compilation it is, was completed. 
 
 It is an essential part of the critical hypothesis that 
 Ezra brought the completed Law to Jerusalem. Since 
 the Samaritan Recension contains, as has already been 
 observed, all the constitutive elements of the Torah, J, E, D, 
 
364 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 and P, with all the series of these letters followed by 
 distinctive numerals, it follows of necessity, if this be so, that 
 the Samaritans only received the Law after the last of 
 these increments had been introduced into it. It is assumed 
 that Manasseh, to give him the name by which Josephus 
 designates the son-in-law of Sanballat, took with him, when 
 he fled to his father-in-law, a copy of the completed Torah. 
 It is not said that he did so either in Josephus or Nehemiah : 
 still let it be assumed that he did so. Josephus says that he 
 was the great-grandson of Eliashib, and brother of Jaddus or 
 Jaddua the High Priest, who, according to Josephus, met 
 Alexander the Great when he came to Jerusalem. Eliashib 
 was an old man when Nehemiah came as Tirshatha to 
 Jerusalem, as he had a grandson of age to be married. This 
 grandson, as has been noted in an earlier chapter, Nehemiah 
 chased from his presence because of his marriage ; this 
 occurred at latest in the year 433 B.C. Here we must ask 
 permission to repeat a historical argument which we have 
 given in a previous chapter in another connection. According 
 to Josephus, Manasseh, a nephew of this man repeats his 
 ofifence, something less than a century later, also with a 
 daughter of Sanballat, and is banished by the Sanhedrin as 
 was his uncle by Nehemiah. The unlikelihood of such an 
 exact repetition of persons and punishments is elsewhere 
 commented on. Another of his nephews is Jaddua, who, 
 according to Josephus, was High Priest when Alexander the 
 Great entered Palestine in the year 332 B.C. It is clear 
 that Jaddua could not have been the contemporary of 
 Alexander the Great unless Jonathan (called John by 
 Josephus, and Johanan in Neh. xii. 22) was very much 
 younger than the fugitive from Nehemiah ; but this is highly 
 improbable since the High Priesthood normally followed 
 the line of primogeniture. Josephus is not the only 
 authority for the meeting of Alexander with the Jewish High 
 Priest ; the Talmud (Yoma 6ga) describes the meeting, but 
 says that the High Priest was Simeon hatz-Tzaddiq, the 
 grandson of Jaddua.^ 
 
 1 Both Josephus and the Talmud, the latter inferentially, declare 
 Simon I. to be Simeon hatz-Tzaddiq ; but critical opinion asserts that 
 not he but his grandson Simon II. had the title; this grandson 
 
PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM 365 
 
 That Simon I. was High Priest at the time of Alexander's 
 invasion of Palestine is chronologically probable ; the date 
 of his grandfather's pontificate would probably be about 
 390 B.C., leaving forty years for the last years of the 
 High Priesthood of Eliashib, and the High Priesthood 
 of Joiada., He was succeeded by Onias I. the father of 
 Simon (Simeon) I. Alexander was in Palestine in 332 B.C. 
 
 Josephus dismisses with a single sentence {Ant XII. iv. 10) as a person 
 of no account. The sole authority quoted for this identification by 
 Cheyne, except a reference to the Talmud which is not decisive, is 
 Derenbourg {Hist, et Geog. de la Pal., p. 47). This latter asserts 
 this identification and supports it by a passage from Yoma. Derenbourg 
 declares that "nothing in the history of this pontif," Simon I., ''or in 
 the circumstances which surrounded him, either justifies or explains why 
 this title 'the Just' should have been given to him. . . . Simon the 
 Just lived in an extraordinary time when ancient institutions were 
 crumbling, and when the 'gradual enfeeblement of religious sentiment 
 in the priesthood was punished by visible signs of Divine displeasure." 
 Then follows the quotation from Yoma 691Z : " During the forty years of 
 the pontificate of Simon the Just, on the Day of Atonement the lot 
 for the goat destined for Jehovah always fell to the right hand ; after- 
 wards it was sometimes the right and sometimes the left. In his time 
 the red thread which surrounded the head of the goat destined for 
 Azazel became white, which indicated that the sins (uf the people) 
 had been pardoned ; afterwards it sometimes became white, and 
 sometimes did not. Under Simebn, the lamp lighted at the west of the 
 temple shone always ; after him it at times went out. While he lived, 
 the wood once arranged upon the altar, the flame remained always 
 strong and the priests had only to bring a few faggots of small wood 
 to fulfil their duty ; after him the flame often went down, the priests 
 were busy the whole day carrying wood to the altar.'' I submit that 
 all this proves precisely the opposite of what Derenbourg says it does. 
 What the Talmudic writer evidently means to teach is that the period 
 when Simon the Just was High Priest was one of strong faith and 
 unswerving faithfulness, which was rewarded by numerous signs of 
 Divine favour which ceased in the age which followed. Yet this is the 
 passage which Cheyne quotes as proving his point. Dean Stanley 
 {Jewish Church, iii. 247, note 4) says : " Derenbourg has conclusively 
 established that the Simon of Ecclesiasticus was Simon II." If that 
 is the critical idea of proof we shall not be surprised, should they direct 
 their attention to the history of the Tudor period, that they would 
 " establish " from Foxe's Book of Martyrs that Bishop Bonner was a 
 kindly ecclesiastic with a leaning toward Protestantism. Yet it is 
 something like an axiom of scientific (?) criticism that Simon II. is 
 Simon the Just. 
 
366 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 The evidence of Josephus is unreliable with regard to 
 this period, because, as elsewhere noticed, he drops a 
 whole century ; misled by the confusing succession of 
 kings who bore the names of Artaxerxes and Darius 
 almost alternately, he seems to have concluded that there 
 was only one Artaxerxes and only two Dariuses. The 
 efforts he had to make to adjust historic facts to his 
 shortened chronology have already been adverted to. The 
 existence of the Sanballat contemporary of Nehemiah is 
 confirmed by the Assouan papyri, in which the "sons of 
 Sanballat" are referred to as the authorities in Samaria. 
 If it was to the Sanballat of the reign of Artaxerxes 
 Longimanus that Manasseh fled, then the Darius of whom 
 permission was asked to build the temple on Mount Gerizim 
 was not Darius Codomannus, as assumed by so many, but 
 Darius Nothus, the son of Longimanus. The critics have 
 accepted as correct the assertion of Josephus that Jaddua 
 was the contemporary of Alexander. The authority of 
 Josephus is accepted on this point without question, yet 
 when he declares that Simon I. is Simon ho dikaios, it 
 is without any value. In short, to "scientific" criticism 
 Josephus, as an authority, is reliable or the reverse as it suits. 
 While the legal dictum as to the testimony of a witness, 
 falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, would if pressed put out 
 of court almost every witness as to any event in the more 
 distant past, yet with a witness like Josephus one must try 
 his testimony by probabilities, and consider whether his 
 own reputation or that of Israel were involved on one side 
 or other; whether, in short, he had any motive to depart 
 from strict accuracy. 
 
 Let it be assumed that the son-in-law of Sanballat, who 
 fled to Samaria, was the grandson of Eliashib whom 
 Nehemiah drove from his presence, that it was for him 
 that the temple was built on Mount Gerizim, and that 
 he arranged the ritual of worship set up in it, presumably 
 in accordance with that in Jerusalem to which he had been 
 accustomed. Let it be further assumed that he took the 
 completed Torah with him to Samaria and Shechem. Then 
 on the acceptance of this hypothesis certain results follow, 
 The Book of the Law, which Manasseh took with him 
 
PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM 367 
 
 to Samaria, must have been that edited by Ezra. In that 
 case, all the alleged post-Ezrahitic elements in the Priestly 
 Code must be dated earlier than this flight ; along with 
 them, most of the activities of the Deuteronomic Redactor 
 must also be antedated, as they are all in the Samaritan 
 Pentateuch. The enmity between the two peoples, and 
 the rivalry between the two shrines preclude the possibility 
 of these additions and alterations being inserted later. 
 
 Even without these additions, sufficient difficulties emerge 
 in regard to the Priestly Code as a whole, and its easy 
 acceptance by the priests in Jerusalem, before it could be 
 transferred bodily to Samaria. On the critical hypothesis, 
 practically the whole of Leviticus was made known for 
 the first time to the priesthood in Jerusalem by Ezra. For 
 about a century they had been sacrificing on the altar set 
 up by Zerubbabel on the site of the temple. For nearly 
 thtee-quarters of a century, in the rebuilt temple, there had 
 been maintained a regular ritual of sacrificial worship. 
 Suddenly Ezra, a priestly scribe, arrives from Babylon with 
 a new book of the Law. Priest though he is, he has never 
 taken part in a sacrificial act, indeed has never in all his 
 life seen a legitimate sacrifice offered. Yet this man comes 
 to Jerusalem intending to revolutionise all the ritual that had 
 been in use beyond the memory of the oldest inhabitants. 
 Though it is true Ezra had behind him all the authority of 
 the Great King, and was supported in every way by the local 
 governor Nehemiah, still his success seems almost incon- 
 ceivable. It needed all his own personal influence, backed 
 by all the authority of the Tirshatha to carry into effect 
 his interpretation of the marriage law. Important as this 
 was, a change in the ritual of worship was a more serious 
 matter. The Jews have always been specially conservative 
 in regard to everything connected with the temple worship. 
 When Aristobulus, the Hasmonsan High Priest, ventured 
 to introduce some slight change in the ritual, he was 
 pelted with citrons. Yet by hypothesis this extensive 
 change in ritual was carried through without the slightest 
 difficulty. It is true that the memory of those who had 
 seen the temple services might be invoked in Babylon, 
 but the last of them must have passed away long before 
 
368 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the days of Ezra. The elaboration of the sacrificial ritual 
 as seen in Leviticus is far beyond the power of memory 
 to carry over the half century during which there was 
 neither temple nor sacrifice to keep the memory green 
 and effective. The priests when they came to Jerusalem 
 with Zerubbabel would elaborate a ritual for themselves; 
 and this had already been hallowed by the experience of 
 more than two generations when Ezra arrived. Ezra's 
 success in the alterations which by hypothesis he in- 
 troduced does not seem likely. One has only to read 
 Josephus to see what slight matters, if the ritual of worship 
 were involved, were sufficient to rouse the Jews against 
 the power of Rome, a power much more tremendous than 
 that of the Great King. This alleged overriding of the 
 past by the single influence of Ezra is not to be explained 
 by the reverence which the Jews gave to Rabbin and Doctors 
 of the Law; for that was a thing of a much later day. 
 So far is Ezra from occupying the pre-eminent place in the 
 memory of the Jewish people, which necessarily he would 
 have had if the Wellhausen critics are right, his name is not 
 even included by ben Sira in his " Hymn of the Fathers." 
 Surely if Ezra, like a second Moses, had brought to the 
 Jerusalem Jews the laws of legitimate sacrifice, which though 
 revealed to Moses their fathers had lost, his name would 
 not have been forgotten when that of Zerubbabel and of 
 Joshua the High Priest, nay that of Ezra's contemporary 
 Nehemiah, are commemorated. For these historical reasons 
 we venture to think that it is highly improbable that the 
 Priestly Code is anything like so late as the time of Ezra. 
 
 Even should it be granted that despite all these im- 
 probabilities the priests in Jerusalem did submit to Ezra, 
 and were willing to alter their modes of worship and their 
 ritual of sacrifice at his bidding, yet the case of Manasseh 
 and the ritual on Mount Gerizim presents further difficulties 
 quite independent of those involved in the conservatism 
 of the Jerusalem priests. By a rigorous interpretation of 
 the newly promulgated law as to marriage, Manasseh is 
 banished from Jerusalem by the influence of Ezra and 
 Nehemiah. He would be little prone to inculcate in Samaria, 
 whither he had retreated, the newly introduced precepts, 
 
PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM 369 
 
 under which he had suffered the indignity of banishment. 
 Surely not the most credulous critic would believe this to 
 be at all likely. Would any one maintain the verisimilitude 
 of a tale which represented a Puritan, who had suffered at the 
 orders of Archbishop Laud fine and imprisonment, when 
 he had made his escape to New England, eagerly setting 
 about a propaganda in order to establish there a High 
 Church Episcopacy with all the Laudian ritual ? 
 
 Even if Manasseh had been so singularly constituted 
 as to be willing to convey to Samaria the Ezrahitic 
 Recension of the Law, another difficulty emerges on the 
 other side : would the Samaritans have been willing to 
 receive it ? Even if the name " Samaritan " be restricted to 
 the Assyrian colonists, yet even they could claim that for 
 two centuries they had been worshippers of JHWH, taught 
 by the priests who had been sent by Esarhaddon "the 
 manner of the God of the land." If we are right in maintain- 
 ing that the name had a wider application ; that not merely 
 were the colonists so called but also the Israelite majority 
 of the population, then their worship would be carried back 
 to a remoter past. In these circumstances, even the influence 
 of Sanballat would have proved insufficient to have enabled 
 Manasseh to carry out his reform. Would the Samaritans 
 be at all likely to listen to a priest urging them to abandon 
 a system of sacrificial ritual, which they had been taught by 
 accredited priests, and to which they had become accustomed, 
 and agree to adopt another from Jerusalem — one from which 
 the man who taught it himself had fled ? 
 
 If, on the other hand, Ezra had merely brought a copy 
 of the Law which the Jews recognised as sacred, but had 
 failed to observe with the strictness which Ezra demanded ; 
 if the sin-offerings, the peace-offerings, and the heave- 
 offerings were all quite well known, but the ritual appropriate 
 to each had not been quite rigorously attended to, and 
 Ezra had directed attention to these shortcomings, in that 
 case the matter becomes quite simple, and the submission of 
 the people quite intelligible. This would be the case with 
 regard to the Jews of Jerusalem. As to Samaria, if the 
 worship on her High Places was essentially the same as that 
 on Mount Zion, the adoption of that ritual in the newly 
 
 2 A 
 
370 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 erected temple on Mount Gerizim, when national worship 
 was concentrated there, would be perfectly natural. The 
 influence of Josiah's reformation would make it all the easier, 
 at least for the Israelite remnant who remembered, perhaps 
 very vaguely, what their fathers had said of the worship on 
 Mount Zion, to join in that on Mount Gerizim, if it retained 
 the more prominent features of the old worship. 
 
 The picture of the state of matters in Jerusalem presented 
 to us in Ezra and Nehemiah suits the conclusion to which 
 we have come. There is no suggestion that the people are 
 resisting or resenting the introduction of something new. 
 On the other hand Ezra utters no word of blame to the 
 people because of failure in the ritual of sacrifice, the thing 
 he does blame is their non-Israelite marriages. The Feast of 
 Tabernacles appears to have been neglected, but if Ezra 
 originated the " Priestly Code " the feast was not introduced 
 by him, as it forms part of the Deuteronomic legislation. 
 Only as we may see when the reference to it occurs in 
 Deuteronomy it seems to imply that the directions in 
 Leviticus have preceded. However this may be, the 
 adoption of the Levitical regulations by the Samaritans 
 without difficulty or demur in their temple worship implies 
 that the Priestly Code was known to them long before the 
 coming of Ezra to Jerusalem. 
 
 The evidence afforded by the Samaritan Pentateuch of 
 the relative age of the book of Deuteronomy has to be 
 looked into. Reference has already been made to the 
 marked difference of style and atmosphere which dis- 
 tinguishes the "Second Law" from the rest of the Torah. 
 There is therefore a certain a priori plausibility in the 
 critical hypothesis which assigns it a very different origin. 
 The critical theory is that Deuteronomy is " the Book of the 
 Law" found by Hilkiah in the temple during the repairs 
 instituted by Josiah. If this is correct it is clear that the 
 Samaritan Recension of the Pentateuch must be dated long 
 after the coming of the priests sent by Esarhaddon as it 
 contains Deuteronomy. But is there valid proof of its 
 correctness? It is unfortunate for this hypothesis that the 
 language of the narrative implies that the Law was well 
 known to be written in a book, and Hilkiah had no difficulty 
 
PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM 371 
 
 in recognising the book which he found, to be a copy of it. 
 It is in some way an individualised copy, for he calls it " the 
 Book of the Law." This recognition is all the more 
 mysterious that by hypothesis, the Jews have, at this time, 
 no law-book at all ; J and E had been united in one " Book 
 of Origins " but there was little of a legislative nature in it.^ 
 Had Hilkiah's message to the king been that they had found 
 a book of Moses, his words would have been intelligible. It 
 is true that Josiaih reads the book as if it were a new thing 
 in Israel ; yet the depth of his repentance would seem to 
 imply his belief that he and his people ought to have known 
 those statutes, the transgression of which had involved them 
 in such guilt, and had brought down upon them to such a 
 degree the wrath of God. The sole evidence adduced that 
 Deuteronomy was a pious fraud is, that the doctrine of that 
 book required that only in Jerusalem could legitimate 
 sacrifices be offered, and that this was acted on by Josiah 
 alone, and by him only after the finding of the book. This 
 assertion is not accurate on either side. Deuteronomy does 
 
 ' The combined document JE could never have been recognised as 
 a law-book. Imbedded in the mass of traditional narratives there is 
 certainly the "Book of the Covenant," in all about three chapters 
 (105 verses), preceded and succeeded by narrative. Moreover, though 
 there is nothing impossible in the Southern prophetic schools collecting 
 patriarchal legends, and those in the North following their example ; 
 and still less improbability, if after the fall of the Northern Kingdom, 
 it became to a certain extent civilly, and still more religiously, 
 joined to the Southern, a Redactor should arise who would combine 
 the two collections : there is improbability in another direction. 
 How did this collection ever get a Mosaic origin attributed to it ? 
 The separate collections would be perfectly well known, the dove- 
 tailing of these so as to form one narrative would also be public 
 property. Before JE could be received as Mosaic some legend 
 would have to be invented of its discovery in some secret place, 
 in a jar filled with oil of cedar, like that in which Joshua, in the 
 " Assumption of Moses," is ordered to conceal the revelation he had 
 just been given from the lips of the great lawgiver. There is not a 
 single hint of such a thing. By hypothesis the Jerusalem Jews had no 
 idea that there was extant any book of Moses, or any book of Mosaic 
 legislation, till Hilkiah found '■^ the Book of the Law." The critical 
 hypothesis is made all the more difficult by the fact that according to 
 it the publication of JE must have been nearly contemporaneous with 
 Hilkiah's discovery. 
 
372 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 not absolutely forbid sacrifice elsewhere than in Jerusalem. 
 
 It is expressly mentioned "if the place which the Lord shall 
 
 choose be too far"^ (R.V., Deut. xii. 21), then the Israelites 
 
 were to be free to kill and eat of their flock and of their herd. 
 
 This is clearly a sacrificial killing and eating, otherwise the 
 
 distance from the sanctuary would not be important. Hence 
 
 the temples at Heliopolis and Assouan, the erectors of which 
 
 were unconscious of any breach of the Law. Important or 
 
 public sacrifices were only to be offered at the national altar 
 
 which represented the unity of the nation. But further, 
 
 this change, whatever its scope, was not introduced by Josiah ; 
 
 a couple of generations before Josiah was born, Hezekiah 
 
 had instituted the same reform (2 Kings xviii. 4). Rabshakeh 
 
 endeavours to undermine the trust of the Jewish people in 
 
 God by referring to these reforms of Hezekiah and the 
 
 wholesale destruction of the High Places (Is. xxxvi. 7; 
 
 2 Kings xviii. 22). Mr Addis attributes these statements of 
 
 Hezekiah's destruction of the High Places to the Deuteron- 
 
 omist. If that useful individual wrote during the reign 
 
 of Josiah, all his readers would know whether or not he 
 
 spoke the truth when he attributed the destruction of the 
 
 High Places to Hezekiah. Burney (2 Kings, loco) would split 
 
 up the narrative into four different strands. But the writing 
 
 of these and the weaving of them together involves time, and 
 
 the Samaritan Recension of the Pentateuch must have been 
 
 complete in the days of Nehemiah. The conclusion cannot 
 
 be avoided that the law of one sanctuary is as old as 
 
 Hezekiah at the latest. 
 
 The Jewish tradition was that Deuteronomy was, in 
 accordance with its name, Mishneh hat- Torah, " The Republi- 
 cation of the Law," or in Greek Deuteronomion, whence our 
 " Deuteronomy." Although it is heresy even to hint such 
 a thing, yet it would seem that a fairly good case can 
 be made out for the traditional view. Reference has 
 
 ' Singularly enough, the A.V. of this verse appears to have been 
 translated from the Samaritan Recension, not the Massoretic — a 
 blunder which has been taken over from Luther, who seems to have 
 had the Vulgate in his mind but to have taken Jerome's elegerit for 
 perfect subjunctive instead of future perfect. The Douay agrees with 
 the R.V. 
 
PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM 373 
 
 already been made to the peculiar dramatic and topo- 
 graphic suitability of Moses in the Plains of Moab choosing 
 Ebal and Gerizim and the valley between them as the 
 theatre of the solemn ceremony of the blessing and the 
 cursing, and the unlikeliness of any Jerusalem Jew making 
 such a choice. There was a dramatic suitability in Moses, as 
 his solemn farewell of the people whom he had led so long, 
 repeating the heads of the Law he had enjoined on them, 
 and reminding them of the leading events in their previous 
 history under his command. But a Jerusalem Jew, obsessed 
 with the glories of David and yet more of Solomon, would 
 have difficulty in orienting himself to the implied circum- 
 stances. Further, his efforts after topographic and dramatic 
 fitness, even if most successful, would neither be recognised 
 nor appreciated. The magnifying of the valley of Shechem 
 above Mount Zion would tend to excite prejudice against 
 the moral lesson to be taught. A moral teacher, especially 
 if a Jew, as any one may learn from the Talmud, when 
 devising a tale which is to be the vehicle of instruction 
 would place every probability on one side in favour of the 
 moral to be inculcated. It must never be forgotten that the 
 artistic necessity of local colouring is a purely modern 
 thing. 
 
 Then there are numerous signs of what to a plain man 
 appear to be repetitions of what had already been narrated 
 in the earlier books of the Law. The historical sections 
 are avowed references to events recorded in Exodus and 
 Numbers ; in the J and E documents certainly, but thus far is 
 revealed the writer's intention to repeat what had already been 
 recorded. But P has historical portions also ; in Num. xxxiii. 
 1-49, there is an account of the journeys of the Children of 
 Israel ; in Deut. x. 6-^, there is an extract from it ; the 
 account of the journeys is assigned to P. In that same 
 chapter of Deuteronomy there is an account of the making 
 of the Ark of the Covenant which has all the appearance 
 of being a compendious reference to the fuller account 
 in Exod. xxv. 10-22 ; but that whole section in regard to 
 the Tabernacle and its furniture is part of the P document. 
 A more striking case is Deut. xxiv. 8-9, " Take heed in the 
 plague of leprosy, that thou observe diligently, and do accord- 
 
374 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 ing to all that the priests the Levites shall teach you : as 
 I commanded them, so shall ye observe to do." That 
 there is a reference to some commands already given to 
 the Levites is indubitable ; any one but a critic would 
 see these instructions to the Levites in the elaborate 
 directions given to the priests by which they were to 
 detect the disease, and the ceremonial restrictions under 
 which they were to place the person infected to be found 
 in Lev. xiii. and xiv. To avoid the deduction that there 
 is a reference to the Levitical Law concerning leprosy, 
 Dr Driver {Com. Deut., p. 275) thinks it enough to say : " The 
 Law, as it stands here, cannot be taken as a proof that 
 Lev. xiii. and xiv. existed in its present shape at the time 
 when Deuteronomy was written " ; however, he admits that 
 " it is sufficient evidence both that a Torah on the subject 
 was in the possession of the priests, and the principles 
 which it embodied were of recognised authority, and referred 
 to Divine origin." Here is a divinely revealed Torah, in 
 the hands of the priests, the principles of which were gen- 
 erally known — all this would suit Leviticus as a book known 
 and read ; Dr Driver advances no reason why it may not 
 be here intended ; and there do not seem to be any save 
 the exigencies of the Wellhausen theory. Again, the Feast 
 of Tabernacles is enjoined in Deut. xvi. 13-15, but no word is 
 said as to how it is to be observed, the audience addressed 
 are supposed to know all about the way in which it is to 
 be kept, of what the booths were to be made, and the holy 
 convocations connected with the feast. All these are fully 
 given in Lev. xxiii. 33-44, which Dr Driver assigns partly 
 to H and partly to P. He introduces two passages from 
 Exodus, ascribed to JE (Exod. xxiii. 16 ; xxxiv. 22), as if 
 they were the source of the Deuteronomic legislation ; but 
 these say nothing about " booths." He {Com. Deut., p. 197) 
 admits that the explanation of the term " booths " is given 
 in Leviticus ; why the Deuteronomic passage may not be 
 held as referring to it is difficult to see, unless that it is 
 contrary to the theory. These are by no means the only 
 passages that might be quoted, in which to all but critics, 
 there are references in Deuteronomy to the Priestly Code. 
 On any reasonable system of evidence it must be held as 
 
PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM 375 
 
 proved, that so far from the Priestly Code being composed 
 a century and a half after Deuteronomy, the converse is the 
 case, at least in regard to relative priority. Hence the 
 presence of Leviticus in the Samaritan Recension of the 
 Torah affords no reason for post-dating that recension. 
 
 But if the Law was brought by the priests sent by 
 Esarhaddon then the Book of the Law contained 
 Deuteronomy ; but this contradicts the hypothesis of the 
 critical school, that it was composed in the reign of Josiah 
 and was palmed off upon him as an ancient document. 
 Thus there is necessitated a further consideration of this 
 discovery of the Law. How was this book found ? There 
 is no evidence that at that early date there was a library 
 in the temple. It is against all criticism to believe even 
 in Nehemiah's library (2 Mace. ii. 13). If there had been 
 a library, of course the roll of the Law might have been 
 found by Hilkiah as Bryennios found the MS. of the Didache 
 in the library of the Patriarchate in Constantinople. But 
 if that were so, the individualising of the copy has to 
 be explained ; it is the Book of the Law, it is a copy defined 
 and separate from all other copies. Some people seem 
 to picture to themselves that among the rubbish of broken 
 utensils, worn-out robes, etc., which would be turned over, in 
 the course of the repairs a roll turned up, the like of 
 which they had not seen before, and was found to be 
 Deuteronomy. Still this leaves unexplained on the one 
 hand what made it so interesting and special, on the other 
 wherein consisted its novelty. 
 
 May not the suggestion of Dr Edouard Naville be worthy 
 of more consideration than it has received ? Arguing from 
 the custom among the Egyptians to place in the foundation 
 of their temples portions of the "Book of the Dead," he 
 maintains that the Book of the Law found by Hilkiah was 
 the copy of the Law placed in the foundation of the temple 
 by Solomon when it was founded. This would explain the 
 individualisation of the copy. The finding of it is explained 
 by the fact that masons were employed, which implies that 
 the structure of the building needed looking to. The stone 
 of which the temple was built was limestone, and no stone 
 is more unequal in its consistence ; sometimes it is hard 
 
376 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 and crystalline, at others it is soft and friable. It might 
 easily happen that some of the huge foundation stones 
 might be showing signs of decay. The replacing of them 
 might reveal the Book of the Law that had been placed 
 there by Solomon. That Solomon would follow the 
 Egyptian fashion is extremely likely from the affinity he 
 had made with that country in marrying Pharaoh's daughter. 
 If the practice continued, as it may well have done, the roll, 
 if roll it was, would, when found, be at once recognised. 
 There might be difficulty in reading it as the script 
 would have become by that time archaic. Hilkiah passes 
 it to Shaphan, a professional scribe, to decipher. The 
 effect the perusal has on Josiah is due to the interest excited 
 by the ancient copy coming to light ; he had known that 
 there was a law, but probably regarded it as a matter for 
 the priests. The archaic lettering, that compelled attention 
 to every word, would serve to deepen the impression 
 conveyed by the contents. 
 
 There is nothing to indicate that it was only Deuteronomy 
 that was found. We have seen reason to believe that the 
 writer of that book expected the P document to be known 
 to his readers ; the knowledge of J and E are yet more 
 clearly presupposed. So far as the narrative of the discovery 
 is concerned, the whole Torah might have been inscribed 
 on the roll which was found. The objection to this urged 
 by some, is that the whole Law could not be read in the ears 
 of the people (2 Kings xxiii. 2) in the course of a day. 
 This, however, is not strictly true, as the whole Penta- 
 teuch could be read through in sixteen hours.^ But there 
 is no need to press the word " all," as Orientals are not 
 so scrupulous in the use of words denoting totality ; it 
 would be enough if all the parts that mattered for the royal 
 purpose of making the people recognise their serious condi- 
 tion were read. But it must be observed that it is "all 
 the words of the Book of the Covenant" that were read. 
 
 1 The rate at which this is calculated is that at which the Scripture 
 is read in church. In the synagogue the rate of reading is much 
 more rapid. The Samaritans claim to read the whole Law, inter- 
 spersed with hymns, in the synagogue, between sunset and sunrise 
 (see Chap, V., p. 134), on the Day of Atonement. 
 
PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM 377 
 
 If this "Book of the Covenant" coincided with what critical 
 opinion has denoted by that title, then it could have been 
 read, at the rate above taken, in less than half an hour. 
 The effect this reading had on king and people was due, 
 not to the fact that the contents were absolutely novel, 
 but to the realisation for the first time that the precepts 
 were meant to be obeyed and had not been, and that in 
 consequence a curse was impending. 
 
 If the idea of Naville that the copy of the Law found 
 was that placed in the foundation of the temple by Solomon 
 be pressed, then the Torah must have been already sacro- 
 sanct in the days of Solomon. This inevitably leads us 
 back to the days of Samuel the Prophet at the latest. 
 As an alternative theory to the traditional view that Moses 
 wrote the whole Pentateuch, it might be suggested that 
 it was under the Inspiration and Guidance of Samuel that 
 the stories of Genesis were collected and the priestly and 
 Levitical duties systematised. If the book of Deuteronomy 
 in the main be assigned to Moses, and the other portions 
 directly assigned to him are put to the one side and admitted 
 to be Mosaic, at least in the main, then the Jehovist of 
 the South and the Elohist of the North, with the writer 
 of the Priestly Code are all to be dated between the Mosaic 
 period and the time of Samuel, and consequently all be 
 antedated by nearly three-quarters of a millennium. Samuel 
 had formed the schools of the prophets ; these a couple 
 of centuries later became powerful political instruments in 
 the hands of Elijah and Elisha. A similar development of 
 a political agent from a religious order is seen in the history 
 of the Egyptian monks of the fifth century. Religious and 
 contemplative at the beginning, under the guidance of Cyril 
 of Alexandria, and still more of his successor Dioscorus, they 
 became formidable instruments in ecclesiastical politics. 
 But the monks had other activities ; most of the greater 
 monasteries had libraries, and these were replenished mainly 
 by the pens of the inmates. Unless the " Sons of the 
 Prophets '' had some literary activity of this sort, it is 
 difificult to understand why they were gathered together 
 into communities. If, like the mediaeval monks, many of 
 the members of the prophetic schools became scribes, then 
 
378 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 the recording of the events in Genesis and Exodus might 
 readily be understood. 
 
 These prophetic compilations need not have been merely 
 the fixing in written form of popular legends floating about 
 among the people. For much that is recorded there may 
 have been documents. If Conder's theory is correct these 
 primitive documents would be written in cuneiform, and 
 some of them, at any rate, brought from Mesopotamia. It 
 seems extremely probable that the accounts of Creation, of 
 the Garden of Eden, of the Flood may have been on clay 
 tablets in the possession of Abraham, as also the genealogies 
 of the earlier patriarchs. In a similar way the histories of 
 Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and even Joseph may have been 
 preserved. Probably stone tablets would take the place of 
 those of clay, if not before, at all events during the Wilderness 
 journey. This may be regarded as indicated by the fact that 
 the " Ten Words " were written on " tables of stone " ; if so, 
 the events of the forty years would be in that way recorded. 
 Events connected with the conquest of Canaan not un- 
 likely would thus also be preserved in memory. The 
 statement of the boundaries of the different tribes, and the 
 towns assigned to them, has the aspect of being an official 
 document. The book of Judges certainly has more the look 
 of a collection of legends ; yet when it is compared with the 
 ordinary tales of Orientals, as seen in the " Thousand and 
 One Nights," the stories have a sobriety and restraint which 
 suggest documents behind. Moreover, the Song of Deborah, 
 the Story of Micah and the Danites, and that concerning 
 the matter of Gibeah, have all the appearance of having 
 existed independently, like the book of Ruth, which seems 
 to have been, at one time, conjoined to the book of Judges. 
 Later events would be recorded by the prophets as they 
 occurred. 
 
 There is a circumstance to be noted here, referred to 
 and somewhat developed in an earlier chapter, which has 
 a bearing on the chronology of the evolution of Pentateuchal 
 doctrines. While the writer of the book of Judges has no 
 scruple in. recording the deeds of Gideon under the name 
 of Jerubbaal, and as may be learned from the book of 
 Chronicles, Saul and Jonathan were deterred by no religious 
 
PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM 379 
 
 scruple from calling their sons by names involving " Baal," 
 in the next generation all this is changed, and "Baal" 
 (Lord) becomes bosketh, "folly." Israel began to obey 
 literally the precept of Exod. xxiii. 13, "Make no mention 
 of the name of other gods, neither let it be heard out of 
 thy mouth." This cannot be ascribed to scribal redaction, 
 otherwise " Jerubbaal " would not so freely appear in the 
 book of Judges. The reign of David appears to be the 
 dividing line ; before this the command was neglected, but 
 after his accession it is observed. With David too begins 
 reference to the Law; he urges his son Solomon (i Kings 
 ii. 3) to "keep the charge of the LORD thy God ... as 
 it is written in the Law of Moses." After this the references 
 to the Law are not infrequent in Kings. Of course all these 
 cases are called interpolations, and credited to the Deuter- 
 onomic Redactor. The sole evidence against these incrim- 
 inated passages is the exigence of the theory; equally of 
 course, this is not admitted. This method of ruling out 
 everything that tends to the disproof of a theory is surely 
 utterly unscientific. A free, and it is to be admitted a some- 
 what extensive application of it to Alison's History of 
 Europe would enable one to justify the assertion that in 
 that voluminous work there is no mention of Napoleon 
 Bonaparte, all the hundreds of pages devoted to his 
 exploits being ascribed to a Bonapartist Redactor. Only 
 a little step and the work so expurgated might be quoted 
 in support of Whately's Historic Doubts of Napoleon 
 Bonaparte. Before such a method can claim to be scientific, 
 those who use it must bring forward an analogous case in 
 which a whole literature has been adulterated wholesale 
 in the interest of certain opinions. 
 
 The subject, however, can be approached from another 
 side — from the side of Samaritan history. Earlier by a 
 generation than Josiah's renewal of his great-grandfather's 
 effort to secure unity of worship was the mission of the 
 Israelitish priests, under Esarhaddon's orders, to teach 
 the Assyrian colonists the " manner of the God of the land." 
 It is certainly not said that they brought with them a " Book 
 of the Law," any more than it is said that Manasseh carried 
 a copy with him to Samaria. The probability is rendered 
 
380 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 considerable in the case of the priests by the fact that, 
 as is well known, both Esarhaddon and his son Asshur-bani- 
 pal were great collectors of rituals of worship, and of 
 religious formulae. This tendency on the part of these 
 monarchs implies a similar tendency widely spread among 
 their subjects. If that is so, neither would Esarhaddon, who 
 sent these priests, nor would the colonists to whom they 
 were sent, regard them as properly equipped if they merely 
 could convey a verbal tradition as to the true ritual of 
 JHWH's worship, but had no authenticating documents. 
 When, a century and a half later, the Samaritans desire 
 to co-operate with the Jews in rebuilding the temple, they 
 claim that they have been worshipping JHWH since the 
 days of Esarhaddon, and their claim is not disallowed. It 
 has been shown to be impossible that Manasseh could 
 have conveyed to the Samaritans their first knowledge 
 of the Pentateuchal Law ; hence that Law must have been 
 brought to them at the latest by those priests from Assyria. 
 
 As, however, the Law which the Israelite priests brought 
 with them .from Assyria must have been that .with which they 
 had been acquainted, before they had been carried away into 
 captivity, the Mosaic Law must have been obeyed in Israel 
 before the fall of Samaria. This being so the question 
 falls to be answered : When did they get the Torah ? The 
 Mosaic Law could not have been introduced by the dynasty 
 of Jehu; even the greatest of that House, Jeroboam II., was. 
 at odds with the religious part of the nation. As has been 
 shown in an earlier chapter, from the prophecies of Amos, 
 the Mosaic ritual was quite understood in the time of 
 Jeroboam 11. Still less could Mosaism have been introduced 
 by the dynasty of the House of Omri, with their sympathy 
 with Baal-worship. The introduction of the worship by the 
 calves at Bethel and at Dan renders any share in this 
 revolution by Jeroboam the son of Nebat inconceivable. 
 So the line is led again by another route through Solomon 
 and David back to Samuel. The very eagerness with which 
 David and Solomon pressed towards the erection of a 
 central shrine proves the power over them of one of the 
 ruling ideas of the Deuteronomic legislation. Their desire 
 that the central shrine, the sacred hearth of the nation. 
 
PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM 381 
 
 should be a temple not a tent only emphasizes this. The 
 ritual of sacrifice followed by Solomon in the dedication 
 of the temple is in strict accordance with the Priestly Code, 
 even embracing the distinction between priests and Levites — 
 a distinction that, according to critical opinion, was not 
 recognised by the Deuteronomists ; Dr Burney (Kings, 
 p. los) admits that the whole dedication ceremony is from 
 the standpoint of P. As all Israel was present at the 
 dedication of the Great Temple to JHWH, all the ceremonies 
 would be observed and known to the whole people and 
 have been acquiesced in by them. This is corroborative of 
 Naville's suggestion that a copy of the Law, not merely 
 Deuteronomy as he says, but the whole Law, complete in 
 all essentials, was placed by Solomon in the foundation of 
 the temple. 
 
 The completed law-book would seem, as has been 
 shown above, to date back to the days of Samuel. But 
 Samuel and the prophets were not authors so much as 
 editors, so far as the Pentateuch is concerned. Further into 
 antiquity the search for origins cannot be carried, unless the 
 mounds of Egypt or the Tells of Palestine yield up from their 
 hidden hoards of ostraka, clay tablets, or papyri information 
 bearing on the question. There may have been collections 
 of tales of the patriarchs preserved among the different 
 tribes ; and these may have mainly been segregated in 
 Northern and Southern groups, comprising the E and the 
 J documents respectively. While the components of Genesis 
 may be divided perpendicularly and geographically into 
 those from the North and those from the South, there are 
 also traces of chronological strata. The traditions of 
 Abraham have more of the primitive about them, more 
 of the free air of the desert, than have the tales about 
 Jacob, still more than those of Joseph. Nothing more 
 perfectly primitive and Oriental can be conceived than the 
 narrative of Abraham's purchase of the Cave of Machpelah. 
 The contest in wits between Jacob and Laban is Oriental 
 and primitive, but the primitive element is not so marked 
 as in the Abrahamic narratives. A comparison of the 
 histories of Genesis with Arabic traditional tales, reveals the 
 brevity and still more the sobriety of the Bible narratives. 
 
382 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 This implies that they were early committed to writing ; 
 probably the writing was cuneiform and incised on clay 
 tablets originally : not impossibly in Canaan they adopted 
 the script of the region. In default of clay suitable for 
 tablets, the writing might be scratched on slabs of limestone, 
 or plates of metal. In regard to these primitive narratives 
 readers in these later days may see the influence of Divine 
 Providence in the selection, composition, and preservation 
 of them. 
 
 The stories of Creation and of the Flood probably were 
 brought with the patriarchs from Mesopotamia. They, 
 however, represent the tradition in a much more primitive 
 form than they appear in the Creation tablets of Nineveh. 
 Few narratives are more grotesque than the Babylonian 
 story of the Creation by the splitting of Tehom, the mother 
 of the gods, longitudinally into halves by her own grandson 
 Marduk. One can more easily see the evolution of the 
 Babylonian tale from the Hebrew than the reverse. The 
 Babylonian narrative is much the longer and more elaborate. 
 It is a maxim of criticism generally acknowledged, that 
 other things being equal the shorter and simpler form of 
 a legend is the more primitive. The likeness between the 
 Babylonian tradition of the Flood and the Hebrew story 
 of the Noachian Deluge is much greater than between the 
 two Creation stories; but this only brings out more 
 clearly the relatively primitive character of the Hebrew 
 narrative ; the Babylonian Noah brings into his ark with him 
 his wealth and his slaves, an evidence of a much more 
 developed state of society. Not unlikely the ethnological 
 tables of Gen.^ x. were also equally primitive, though as 
 they seem to reckon the nations from Palestine as a centre 
 they probably were not of Babylonian origin. Most of this 
 chapter is assigned to P and therefore must, in accordance 
 with the critical hypotheses, have been written in Babylon 
 notwithstanding its Palestinian outlook. 
 
 To thus placing the origin of the priestly document away 
 back in the earlier limits of historic time there are several 
 objections which have to be met. The most obvious and 
 important is that prominent persons, so far as their actions 
 are recorded in the historical books, ignore the prescriptions 
 
PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM 383 
 
 of the Levitical Law and Deuteronomic Code, and so it may 
 be argued that the Law was unknown. There is no word of 
 Elijah, zealous though he is for JHWH of Hosts, going to 
 worship at Jerusalem; the same thing must be said of 
 Elisha. Though the argumentum e silentio is not at any 
 time a safe one, yet with the full records of their lives given 
 in the books of Kings the absence of all reference to the 
 temple on Mount Zion is singular.^ Further, Elijah's sacrifice 
 on Carmel seems an intrusion on the priest's office. As to 
 this last the relation of the prophetic to the priestly office is 
 not defined ; we do not know how far the divinely inspired 
 seer might supersede the more customary action of the 
 priest. In the Divine economy there is always room for the 
 miraculous. This has been discussed above in a previous 
 chapter. 
 
 But the ignoring of a law cannot be assumed as evidence 
 that it was unknown, else it might be reasoned that the 
 decalogue, or at all events the second commandment is 
 unknown in all Roman Catholic Christendom. The second 
 commandment forbids the making of images and worshipping 
 them. Yet in every Catholic Church of any pretension there 
 are images of the Saints, especially of the Virgin Mother, 
 and before them kneeling worshippers. This is acquiesced 
 in by men of whose piety there can be no doubt, We never 
 read of St Anselm, St Francis of Assisi, or Blaise Pascal 
 denouncing this disregard of the Law of God. They excused 
 the practice by drawing a distinction between the worship 
 offered to the images of the Saints and that offered to God. 
 The prophets might justify their acquiescence in modes of 
 
 * The argumentum e silentio is peculiarly unsafe in regard to such 
 annals as are found in the books of Kings. Although the accounts of 
 the activities of the two conspicuous prophets Elijah and Elisha are 
 recorded with relatively great fulness, yet the incidents related are all 
 isolated to such an extent that their chronological succession is by no 
 means certain. They may well have repeatedly worshipped at the 
 shrine on Mount Zion and yet no note of this be preserved in the sacred 
 books. If they were habitual worshippers there, and it were the note 
 of the religious in Israel to do so iff. Tob. i. 4), still less likely would it 
 be to be recorded. The article in the Encyclopadia Britannica on 
 William Wilberforce of anti- slavery fame never mentions that he 
 attended church (see p. 82). 
 
384 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 worship which seem to us in flagrant opposition to the Divine 
 Law, by arguments as specious as do the Romanists their 
 Saint - worship and image - worship. Further, when it is 
 recollected how scanty is the knowledge we have of the state 
 of matters in the Northern Kingdom of Israel great caution 
 must be used in making deductions from such facts as are 
 known. 
 
 The Samaritans are a dwindling race ; indeed for aught 
 that is known their last community, that in Nablus, may 
 have been massacred during this war, as the numerous other 
 communities of the race have been before this, by the Turks. 
 It is well to retain what knowledge we have. So long as 
 they remain they are witnesses for the nature of the Religion 
 of Israel in primitive times. If, as has been said, the Jews 
 are a testimony to the truth of Christianity then the 
 Samaritans enhance that testimony by their own.^ 
 
 To summarise the preceding argument — the endeavour 
 has been to show that the Samaritans did not get the 
 Pentateuch from Ezra but had it before. The reasons for 
 this conclusion are as follows : (i) After the deportation of 
 the leading inhabitants by Sargon, the great mass of the 
 population left were still Israelites and therefore had the 
 Israelite Religion in its original form, whether its ritual 
 were regulated by legislation preserved in a book or not. 
 (2) Their history proves that they held to their faith with 
 great tenacity ; enduring persecutions of intense severity from 
 each successive sovereign power, whether heathen, Christian, 
 or Moslem, without abjuring it. (3) From the prophets Hosea 
 and more particularly Amos, it is proved that the Northern 
 tribes knew and practised the Mosaic ritual long before 
 the captivity of Samaria. They had at the same time a form 
 of worship under the presidency of the prophets, analogous 
 to that of the synagogue of later days. From these prophets 
 also there is evidence that the histories of the Torah were 
 known, as well as its ritual. (4) It must be assumed that 
 the mission of the priests from Esarhaddon is historical. 
 
 ' This was written in 191 7, but Rev. W. M. Christie, Tiberias, under 
 date 2ist March 1919, communicates the information that the Samaritan 
 community was reported safe, numbering 152, and in possession of all 
 their rolls. 
 
PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM 385 
 
 The respect the Sargonids had for written /ormulee of worship 
 suggests that the priests in question would be supplied with 
 these. Such a collection of ritual directions is found in the 
 Torah, the Pentateuch. (5) As it was not part of the Law, 
 the book of Joshua was not brought by the priests. Joshua 
 was a prophetic book and the Ninevite government suspected 
 the influence of the prophets ; hence none of the prophetic 
 books are in the Samaritan Canon. On the critical hypo- 
 thesis that Manasseh carried the Law to Samaria, his 
 omission to convey Joshua also is inexplicable. (6) The 
 alleged finding of Deuteronomy, in the reign of Josiah, which 
 would militate against this, is disproved («) by the narra- 
 tive of its discovery ; it is " TAe Book of the Law " which 
 Hilkiah says that they have found. Were it the copy of the 
 Torah, not merely Deuteronomy, which, in accordance with 
 Egyptian practice, Solomon had placed in the foundation ot 
 the temple, this individualisation would be intelligible, (i>) 
 Its contents prove that it could not have been written by a 
 Jerusalem Jew to give Mosaic authority to the Psalmist's 
 claim that JHWH had chosen Mount Zion to put His Name 
 there; while Zion is never mentioned, Ebal and Gerizim are 
 singled out for special notice, (c) Deuteronomy cannot have 
 been written before the Priestly Code because in certain 
 points it implies its existence, e.^:, the Law of Leprosy, and 
 the way to observe the Feast of Tabernacles. (7) While the 
 ritual of the Samaritans differs from that of the Jews only in 
 minute points, these all indicate the Samaritan to be the 
 simpler and more primitive. Consequently it is unlikely 
 that they borrowed from the Jews. (8) Although the script 
 of the Samaritans is practically identical with that of the 
 Jews of the time of the Maccabees, the two did not alter 
 in parallel lines. The Samaritan script has remained 
 fixed, while the Jews have evolved the square character and 
 the Rabbinic. (9) By comparing the two recensions we 
 have endeavoured to show that they parted company when 
 the manuscripts of both were written in a script like that 
 found in Ba'al-Lebanon inscription, which appears to be 
 contemporary with Solomon. (10) While it is almost 
 impossible to believe that Ezra, a Babylonian scribe, who 
 though a priest had never even seen a legitimate sacrifice, 
 
 2 B 
 
386 THE SAMARITANS 
 
 could persuade the Jerusalem priests to remodel the system of 
 ritual which they had practised for nearly a century in accord- 
 ance with a document brought by him from Babylon, it is 
 absolutely inconceivable, in the first place, that Manasseh, a 
 priest banished by the influence of Ezra, would convey Ezra's 
 Code to the place of his banishment, and endeavour success- 
 fully to enforce it on those around him there. In the next 
 place, it passes belief that the Samaritans, despite their 
 obstinate preference for their own customs, should accept from 
 this runagate priest the Ezrahitic Code, with all its varia- 
 tions from the ritual to which they had been accustomed 
 for centuries. They would, one should think, be all the less 
 likely to accept this teaching from him as in accordance with 
 it he had been banished. Some would post-date this flight of 
 Manasseh by a century in accordance with Josephus. Besides 
 the improbability in itself of this amended hypothesis, it is 
 involved in the century which Josephus mysteriously omits. 
 
 For these reasons we venture to maintain that it is 
 impossible to believe that the Pentateuch was only completed 
 with the arrival of Ezra at Jerusalem. 
 
 As a parallel historical instance is frequently more 
 illuminative than an abstract statement, we would suggest 
 that a condition of things similar to that when Ezra arrived at 
 Jerusalem from Babylon occurred at the rise of the Tractarian 
 movement in Oxford in the early thirties. Neither Pusey nor 
 Newman alleged that they had discovered a new and more 
 authentic prayer-book ; they asserted that the rubrics of the 
 book in use were not observed, that the discipline implied 
 in them was not enforced. Precisely similar was the attitude 
 assumed by Ezra in regard to the Law, especially that 
 relating to marriage with those of other nationalities. He 
 did not profess to introduce a new Law, but denounced the 
 non-observance of that given to their fathers at Mount Sinai. 
 
 Had the Tractarians in the beginning of the Oxford 
 movement produced a brand new prayer-book and called 
 upon all churchmen to adjust their worship to it, and to it 
 alone, they would never have been listened to. Still less 
 would Ezra have been obeyed in Jerusalem if Leviticus 
 had never been heard of before he produced it. Its novelty 
 would at once have condemned it. 
 
APPENDIX I 
 
 MANUSCRIPTS OF THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH 
 
 In regard to every ancient writing, which has passed from the 
 stage of manuscript to that of print, it is important that the 
 authorities on which the printed text is founded should be 
 known and estimated. In regard to the Samaritan Penta- 
 teuch this is all the more necessary that its variations from 
 the Massoretic text are usually minute. Recognising this, 
 Dr Blayney appends a list of MSS. in European libraries, 
 and therefore open to scholars, to the preface of his trans- 
 cription into the ordinary square character of the Samaritan 
 text of Walton's Polyglot. These have been extracted from 
 Kennicott's List of Hebrew Manuscripts. While Blayney 
 gives a description of each he does not seem to have 
 recognised the importance of the tarikh, i.e., the colophon 
 inserted in the text of Samaritan MSS., which gives the 
 name of the scribe, the date, and place of writing. In his 
 text while he follows Walton he notes the variations from the 
 polyglot text to be found in the different codices. Walton's 
 text appears to have been taken from only one manuscript, 
 and that a somewhat inaccurate one. About three-quarters 
 of a century later Immanuel Deutsch wrote his article in 
 Smith's Dictionary of the Bible on the Samaritan Pentateuch, 
 and appended to it a list of manuscripts borrowed from 
 Blayney's, leaving out one or two that were fragmentary and 
 adding two which seemed to have disappeared. One is a 
 fragment in the Ducal Library, Gotha ; the other is said to 
 be in the library of the Comte de Paris in London. Dr 
 Deutsch only mentions, even with these two, eighteen 
 manuscripts.^ 
 
 1 The writer has made every effort to get information about this 
 codex which Dr Deutsch alleged to be in the library of the Comte de 
 Paris in London, when he wrote in 1863. Thinking that the Count's 
 library might be broken up, and its treasures dispersed, it occurred to 
 him that it might be one of the codices in the Rylands Library about which 
 Freiherr von Gall was unable to get full information. He made inquiries 
 
 387 
 
388 APPENDICES 
 
 A decided contrast to this is the list Freiherr von 
 Gail inserts in the prolegomena to his edition of the 
 Samaritan Pentateuch. The extent of the list is the first 
 thing that strikes the reader. The Freiherr following the 
 method of designation adopted by New Testament critics 
 has used letters of the alphabet to denote the different MSS. ; 
 in this process he not only exhausts the whole Roman 
 alphabet, but has to draw on the German black-letter 
 alphabet to the extent of fifteen letters ; thus he catalogues 
 no less than forty "more or less complete" {mekr oder 
 weniger vollstdndige) manuscripts. Besides these, he denotes 
 some thirty groups of fragments of MS. rolls, and twenty- 
 five groups of fragments from MS. codices. Several of the 
 codices he has described very fully, transcribing into square 
 character not only the tarikh which- tells the name of the 
 scribe, where and when he wrote, but also the note frequently 
 appended which tells of the subsequent purchase of the 
 codex by some person of wealth, with his genealogy. There 
 is of course duly notified by Freiherr von Gall the number 
 of sheets of paper or parchment used in its composition, the 
 number of lines in the page, whether or not it is accom- 
 panied by the Targum or by an Arabic version in Samaritan 
 characters. Eleven of the forty MSS. are merely denoted, 
 not described ; the only information given is regarding the 
 place where it may be found and its present possessors : 
 concerning one of these not even these items can be given 
 as it has disappeared. Blayney relates that it had been 
 bought for Kennicott from a Jew of Frankfort. At the death 
 of Kennicott it was unfortunately sold and has in vain been 
 sought for since. It had been in the possession of Hottinger, 
 who as Kennicott has noted had added vari<z lectiones from 
 the Leyden MS. Scholarship has to thank Freiherr von 
 Gall for his careful list of authorities, and for designating the 
 different manuscripts by letters ; thus one is enabled to refer 
 succinctly to the different authorities for the text. It may 
 be regarded as a piece of Teutonism on the part of the 
 
 at the authorities of that library, but found as elsewhere shown that it 
 was not one of them. Knowing Dr Cowley's unrivalled knowledge in 
 regard to things Samaritan, the writer put his difficulties before him. 
 Dr Cowley very kindly made inquiries and discovered that the library 
 of the Comte de Paris had not been broken up. Further, he endeavoured 
 to get into communication with the Due d'Orleans, the son of the 
 Comte de Paris, but in vain. At Dr Cowley's advice the writer himself 
 sent, on 8th December 1918, a letterto the Due d'Orleans, as it was under- 
 stood he would have his father's library, respectfully asking about the 
 missing MS., expecting to have a note of some sort from the Duke's 
 secretary; up to the time of writing, 20th April 1919, he has had no reply. 
 
APPENDICES 389 
 
 Freiherr that he begins his list with a codex, the only 
 apparent reason for such a precedence being assigned to 
 which is the fact that it is in the possession of the German 
 University of Leipzig; and the letter A designates it. It 
 has no claim to precedence either on account of its age, its 
 history, or its completeness. One should have expected that 
 the codex brought to Europe by Pietro della Valle, as that 
 which first drew attention to the Samaritan Pentateuch, 
 would have been named and designated first. It might 
 possibly be answered that in New Testament criticism 
 Codex A has no intrinsic merits to explain its apparent 
 primacy. In the circumstances it may be convenient to 
 adopt the designations of the leading MSS. which Freiherr 
 von Gall has used ; the more so that another independent 
 text is not likely to be thought of for many decades to come. 
 The following is a condensation of von Gall's list : — 
 
 A. University Library, Leipzig; consists of i6o leaves 
 parchment ; 32 lines to the page. It is imperfect at the 
 beginning and end, beginning with Gen. xi. 31, and ends 
 with Deut. iv. 37. The cryptogram is not complete, but 
 as the scribe is the same who wrote the codex brought 
 to Europe by della Valle in which the cryptogram is complete 
 and gives the date, it may be assumed that this was written 
 about A.D. 1345. 
 
 B. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, cat. 2 (Kennicott, 363), 
 complete; consists of 254 leaves of parchment; 30 lines 
 to the page. It is dated " in the seven hundred and forty- 
 sixth year of the rule of the sons of Ishmael " ; a.h. 746 = 
 A.D. 1345. This manuscript was that, as said above, which 
 Pietro della Valle brought to Europe in 1616. Whether it 
 is earlier or later than that in Leipzig there is no means 
 of deciding. 
 
 C. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, cat. 2 (Kennicott, 333); 
 ff. 168 ; parchment ; 36-39 lines to page ; dated A.H. 885 
 (A.D. 1480-81). It begins Gen. i. 20. It has several lacunae 
 involving 6 ff. 
 
 D. Biblioth^ue Nationale, Paris, cat. 3 (Kennicott, 221) ; 
 ff. 284. It contains manuscripts of various dates ; some of 
 the leaves are paper, some parchment. Von Gall reckons 
 no less than eleven different hands. The date from the 
 cryptogram of D^", A.H. 577 (A.D. 1181-82) to this date, von 
 Gall would ascribe D^; D^ he would date the following 
 century. There is a note of purchase of D^; date, A.H. 885 
 (A.D. 1480-81). 
 
390 APPENDICES 
 
 E. Biblioth^que Nationale, Paris, cat. 4 (Kennicott, 364) ; 
 ff. 169 J not from one hand. The main portion of it from 
 Exod. i. I (f. 46(5) to end of Deuteronomy designated E^ ; 
 35 lines to page. Genesis he designated E^; 32 lines to 
 page. The date of E^ is A.H. 889 (A.D. 1484). At the end 
 of Genesis there is a note of purchase dated A.H. 986 
 (A.D. 1578-79). 
 
 F. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, cat. i (Kennicott, 334) ; 
 ff. 258; parchment; 24 lines to page. Begins Gen. xviii. 2 
 and ends Deut. vii. 5 ; it wants f containing Lev. xiv. 40 to 
 xvii. 4. The cryptogram is awanting, but von Gall would 
 date it thirteenth century. 
 
 G. Universitats Bibliothek, Leyden (Kennicott, 183); 
 ff. 170 ; of various origin and age. The beginning of Genesis, 
 ff. 1-4 (Gen. i. i to iv. 19), are by a very recent and European 
 hand. The scribe painted rather than wrote the letters, 
 without any knowledge of them, and paid no respect to 
 punctuation. From Gen. iv. 19 to Num. v. 22 (ff. S-m) 
 designated G^ ; 42 lines to page. From Num. v. 23 to xvi. 22 
 (ff. 1 12-122) G^; 40 lines to page. From Num. xvi. 23 to 
 Deut. xxxiii. 27 (ff. 123-169), G*; 41 lines to page. The 
 last i contains the end of Deut. from xxxiii. 28 to conclusion. 
 The cryptogram at the end of G^ is dated A.H. 751 
 (A.D. 1350). 
 
 H. Imperial Public Library, Petrograd ; ff. 134; parch- 
 ment; 39-41 lines. Main portion Gen. xxvi. 21 to Deut. 
 xiv. 23, designated H^ From Deut. xxiii. 7 to xxxiv. 12 
 by another hand, designated H^. The beginning and other 
 missing portions supplied by a modern hand, designated h. 
 Date of H\ A.H. 840 (A.D. 1436-37). 
 
 I. Imperial Public Library, Petrograd; ff. 226; parch- 
 ment. Gen. i. 16 to end of Deuteronomy; 32-35 lines. Written 
 in Cairo, a.h. 881 (a.d. 1476). 
 
 K. Ambrosian Library, Milan (Kennicott, 197). 
 
 L. Vatican Library, Rome (Kennicott, 503). 
 
 M. Vatican Library, Rome (Kennicott, 504), formerly 
 in the Barberini Library; ff. 266, of which 182 are old and 
 parchment, the rest paper written by a later hand. Three 
 columns on the page — Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic; 42-44 
 lines a column. Date of M^, A.H. 624 (A.D. 1226-27). 
 Various hands represented in the rest ; part dated A.H. 887 
 (A,D. 1482). 
 
APPENDICES 391 
 
 N. British Museum, London; ff. 254, 4to; parchment. 
 Contains the whole Pentateuch ; it is interleaved with white 
 paper; 31-32 lines; date, A.H. 764 (a.d. 1362). 
 
 O. British Museum, London. The whole Pentateuch with 
 Arabic version. 
 
 P. British Museum, London. Parchment ; ff. 97 ; contains 
 the whole Pentateuch; date, A.H. 845 (a.d. 1441-42); 45-52 
 lines. 
 
 Q. British Museum, London. Parchment; ff. 254, 4to ; 
 wants beginning and end of Pentateuch; f. i in tatters; 
 fragments of Gen. iii. 14 to v. 2 ; f. 2 begins v. 3 and ends 
 with Deut. xxix. 9.; date, A.H. 761 (a.d. 1359-60); 32-33 
 lines. 
 
 R. British Museum, London. Vellum ; ff. 223 ; date, 
 thirteenth century. 
 
 S. British Museum, London. Paper ; ff. 1 19. a.d. 1494 
 has some restorations. 
 
 T. British Museum, London. Paper; ff. 451, 8vo; 
 A.D. 1759. 
 
 U. British Museum, London. Paper; ff. 271, 4to; 
 date, 1356. 
 
 V. British Museum, London. Parchment ; ff. 199 ; 32 
 lines; date, a.h. 740 (a.d. 1339-40). Written by the same 
 hand as A and B. 
 
 W. Bodleian Library, Oxford (Kennicott, 61). Belongs 
 to a set of six copies of which N is also one. Von Gall traces 
 eleven hands at work ; approximate date seventeenth 
 century ; varies from 29 to 35 lines. Material partly paper 
 and partly parchment. 
 
 X. Bodleian Library, Oxford (Kennicott, 62). Parch- 
 ment ; very imperfect. It is mainly the work of two hands. 
 There is an Arabic version parallel with the Hebrew, written 
 in Samaritan characters. A portion of it is dated a.h. 931 
 (A.D. 1525). 
 
 Y. Bodleian Library, Oxford (Kennicott, 65). Parchment 
 mainly, compiled, and by various hands. It is of different 
 dates. Dr Cowley has identified the work of eleven different 
 scribes in all. One of these, Y^ is dated A.H. 741 (a.d. 
 1340-41). 
 
 Z. Bodleian Library, Oxford (Kennicott, 64). Partly 
 parchment, partly paper ; ff. 188. The portions in parchment 
 
392 APPENDICES 
 
 are ff. 3, 4, 170-177 ; the body of the codex ff. 5-169 are 
 in paper; another hand has supplied f. 2 and ff. 178-182; 
 The codex thus still incomplete appears to have been 
 brought to Europe and completed. 
 
 H. Bodleian Library, Oxford (Kennicott, 65). Parch- 
 ment, except from Deut. xxxiii. i to end; ff. 258; small 
 format, 5-2 inches by 4, from 24 to 33 lines. This codex 
 belonged to Archbishop Marsh, the gift of Huntington, who 
 had bought it in Nablus in 1690. The original MS. is dated 
 A.H. 911 (A.D. 1505). The leaf in paper was written the 
 same year as Huntington secured it. 
 
 IB. Bodleian Library, Oxford (Kennicott, 66). Parch- 
 ment ; ff. 132 ; very small format, 3-6 inches by 2. It begins 
 with Gen. iv. r, and ends with Deut. xxxi. 2. Dated 
 according to cryptogram, A.H. 721 (A.D. 1321). 
 
 C. Westminster College, Cambridge (England). The 
 gift of Mrs Lewis and Mrs Gibson. Mostly parchment; 
 ff. 380. It is in two columns on the page, Hebrew on the 
 right, Arabic in Samaritan characters left. Date by crypto- 
 gram, A.H. 909 (a.D. 1504); improved and completed, A.H. 
 1306 (A.D. 1888). 
 
 2). University Library, Cambridge (England). Parch- 
 ment ; ff. 244 (paper 1-4, 243, 244); dated A.H. 610 
 (A.D. 1213); 30 lines. 
 
 16. University Library, Cambridge (England); ff. 312, 
 of which 2-305 are parchment; f. i and ff. 306-312, modern 
 completion on paper. Gen. i. 11 to Deut. xxx. 11. There 
 are two columns on the page, Hebrew and Arabic version. 
 Dat6, A.H. 616 (A.D. 1219-20). 
 
 3f , Public Library, New York ; completed at beginning 
 and end with paper ; ff. 275 ; from ff. 3 to 269, parchment ; 
 26-29 lines ; date, A.H. 629 (a.d. 1231-32). 
 
 (5. The property of David Solomon Sassoon, Esq., 
 London. Parchment mainly, completed with paper. Very 
 small format, 4 inches by 3-2 ; ff. 450. Date a little doubt- 
 ful as cryptogram defective. Von Gall thinks it may belong 
 to the end of the fourteenth or the beginning of the 
 fifteenth century. 
 
 lb. (Kennicott, 299). Since the death of Kennicott in 
 1783 this MS. has disappeared. It was interleaved and 
 was dated 16 10. 
 
APPENDICES 393 
 
 3. The property of Dr Gaster, London. Parchment; 
 ff. 219, of which 13 are recent, and paper. Written in 
 Cairo; date, a.h. 915 (a.d. 1509-10). 
 
 Ik. Rylands Library, Manchester. Dated a.h. 608 
 (a.d. 121 i). 
 
 X, Rylands Library, Manchester. Has Arabic version. 
 Egypt; dated A.H. 729 (a.d. 1328).^ 
 
 HD. Rylands Library, Manchester. Has Arabic version 
 and vowel signs. 
 
 Through the kindness of my friends, Dr Rendel Harris 
 and the Rev. J. C. Nicol, M.A., Eccles, Manchester, I am 
 enabled to supplement the list of MSS. given by von Gall, 
 with a description of the codices in the Rylands Library, 
 Manchester. 
 
 Rylands No. I. (designated by von Gall 1R). Vellum. 
 Leaves 300 ; lines to page 26 ; total height 10-9 inches, 
 breadth 9-2; text, height 7-2, breadth 5-9. It is written in 
 bold Majuscular characters. The text begins on the outer 
 side of the first leaf This first page is largely illegible ; 
 it suffers also from the bottom of the first leaf having been 
 torn away ; the second page suffers also in that mutilation. 
 The. last four leaves consist of four fragments, arnounting 
 altogether to the equivalent of one full page. The third 
 last page ends with disconnected letters in Samaritan. This 
 codex has probably been written for liturgic use. 
 
 The Tarikh is as follows : — " I, Abi Berahhathah, son 
 of Ab Sason, son of ibn Moshe, son of Abraham, examined 
 and copied this holy Torah for the two brothers, Tobiah and 
 Asaph, sons of Sa'deh, son of Izhaq, in the year 608 of the 
 rule of the sons of Ishmael." This is equivalent in our 
 reckoning to A.D. 121 1. 
 
 Rylands No. II. (Library No. E. Designated by von 
 Gall %), Vellum. Double columns; Hebrew with Arabic 
 version. Leaves, 220 ; lines, from 45 to 50. Complete, 
 save that the first three leaves have been torn at the bottom. 
 Total height 13-8 inches, breadth ii-8; height of text varies 
 from 9 to 10- 1, breadth 8-3 to 8-6. 
 
 The Tarikh : " This holy Torah has been copied by the 
 slave, poor before his rich God, Habib, son of Yaqub the 
 copyist, son of Musellimal Nazir for Yaqub, son of Yukasah 
 
 1 This is a mistake in arithmetic on the part of von Gall ; the real 
 date is 1321. 
 
394 APPENDICES 
 
 (and it is two complete copies) in the month Muharram, 
 in the year 721 of the rule of the sons of Ishmael." This 
 gives the date in our reckoning A.D. 1321. Freiherr von 
 Gall notes that it was copied in Egypt. 
 
 Rylands No. III. (Library No. V. Designated by von 
 Gall /|1>). This codex has been compiled from fragments 
 in different handwritings, with many and extensive lacuna ; 
 some of these have been filled up from Blayney's transcrip- 
 tion, retranscribed into Samaritan characters. The frag- 
 ments from the different books of the Pentateuch are 
 segregated, and the different handwritings are indicated 
 by a distinguishing letter. Leaves 158; — Gen. 1-18, Exod. 
 19-62, Lev. 63-90, Num. 91-124, Deut. 125-158. The 
 different portions differ in height and breadth. Genesis 
 is uniform throughout; total height 9-3 inches, breadth 7-5 ; 
 text, height 6-4, breadth 5-5 ; lines to page 28. Exodus and 
 the other books are made up of fragments by many different 
 hands ; total height 10-3 inches, breadth 8-5 ; height of text 
 7 inches, breadth 6 ; lines to page, varying from 23 to 27. 
 There is no tarikk, consequently the date of the various 
 portions is a matter of conjecture. According to von Gall 
 it has an Arabic version. The last leaf is torn vertically, 
 and the greater part of the text is awanting. 
 
 Rylands No. IV. (not mentioned by von Gall). This 
 codex consists of 179 leaves ; total height 12 -8 inches, 
 breadth 9 ; text, height 8-4 inches, breadth varying, but 
 maximum 6-2. It contains Genesis and Exodus with Arabic 
 version in double columns, Hebrew and Arabic. Three 
 wanting at the beginning. This codex is in beautifully 
 clear handwriting. 
 
 IR. The property of W. Scott Watson, Esq., West 
 New York, N.J. Parchment; ff. 80. Grant Bey had also 
 ff 35 of this codex. The date of this codex has occasioned 
 a good deal of discussion. The date in the cryptogram 
 is A.H. 35 (A.D. 655-56). Even if h^v^v^ ''J3 rahcxh is taken 
 strictly, and the date is reckoned from the conquest of 
 Palestine, the matter is not seriously improved. From the 
 fact that the cryptogram has been somewhat carelessly 
 written, and possibly that jnsD WE' has been omitted, the 
 date then may be A.H. 735 (A.D. 1335). 
 
 ®, Originally in the possession of George Zeidan, a 
 Syrian Christian in Cairo. The exorbitant price of /20,000 
 was asked for it. Its date was declared to be A.H. 116 
 
APPENDICES 395 
 
 (a.D. 734). Dr Cowley from the cryptogram dates it 
 A.H. 901 (A.D. 1495). 
 
 p. Kgl. Bibliothek, Berlin ; contains ff. 279, two 
 columns on page, Hebrew and Arabic versions. It begins 
 with Gen. xi. 4, and ends with Deut. xxxiii. 28 ; wants 
 Deut. xxviii. 45-63; lines on page 40; date, A.H. 890 
 (A.D. 1485). 
 
 The above are the principal authorities made use of 
 by Freiherr von Gall in the preparation of his text. There 
 are besides numerous fragments of rolls and codices which 
 he describes with great particularity. These descriptions 
 and valuations must, however, be left to the scholar to consult 
 in the prolegomena which von Gall has appended to his 
 edition of the Samaritan Pentateuch. 
 
APPENDIX II 
 
 DESCRIPTION OF THE NABLUS ROLL 
 
 The most interesting of the manuscripts of the Samaritan 
 Pentateuch, if not the most important, is the Nablus Roll, 
 for which so high an antiquity is claimed. Although there 
 is a pretence of showing it to every band of tourists who in 
 their visit to the Holy Land pass through Nablus, this 
 precious manuscript is really shown to very few. The High 
 Priest and his colleague have several copies of the Law in 
 roll form ; one or two of these are exhibited. Even those 
 while shown by the priest are held in his hand, and no 
 opportunity is afforded the student of anything like an 
 examination of them. The semi-darkness of the synagogue 
 in which the exhibition takes place, a darkness intensified 
 by the brilliance of the light outside, would make any 
 examination difificult even for the exceptional tourist who 
 can read Samaritan. 
 
 As the silver case in which the Roll is kept is the first 
 thing the visitor sees, it may be well to consider it. Sir 
 William Muir in his Life of Mohammed, to show the relative 
 worthlessness of traditional evidence, brings together the 
 various traditions concerning the ring of Mohammed, its 
 history, its material, how he wore it, etc., and shows how the 
 traditions, though supposed to be those best authenticated, 
 contradicted each other. Scarcely less contradictory is the 
 evidence of travellers in regard to the case of this Samaritan 
 Roll. As to the material, Dr Mills, who twice visited Nablus, 
 in 185s and in i860, and stayed three months in Nablus on 
 the second of these occasions, says that it is silver. On 
 the other hand Dr Spoer who visited Nablus in 1906 says 
 " the case is ... of brass inlaid with silver." Similar varia- 
 tion is observable in the accounts that are given of the 
 ornamentation of it. 
 
 Without further analysis, the descriptions of various 
 observers may be given. Dr Mills thus describes how it 
 
 396 
 
APPENDICES 397 
 
 appeared to him. " Having removed its red satin cover, 
 which was ornamented with Samaritan inscriptions em- 
 broidered in golden letters, I found it was kept in a 
 cylindrical silver case which opened on two sets of hinges, 
 made so as to expose a whole column of reading. This 
 case was ornamented with relievo work descriptive of the 
 sacred contents of the Tabernacle." In a note he subjoins 
 a description by Grove in Vacation Tourists. " It (the 
 case) is a beautiful and curious piece of work ; a cylinder 
 of about 2 feet 6 inches long, and lo or 12 inches in 
 diameter, opening down the middle. One of the halves 
 is engraved with a ground-plan of the Tabernacle, showing 
 every post, tenon, veil, piece of furniture, vessel, etc., with 
 a legend attached to each. The other half is covered with 
 ornament only, also raised. It is silver, and I think — but 
 the light was very imperfect — parcel gilt." Although Mills 
 quotes the passage without comment, it would seem that 
 in some points it does not agree with his own description. 
 Dr Mills speaks of " two sets of hinges," implying that the 
 cylinder was divided into three, whereas Mr Grove speaks 
 only of " halves," e.g., " one of the halves," " the other half." 
 Further, the height assigned to the containing cylinder by 
 Grove does not suit the measurement Mills gives of the 
 height of the writing in the Roll, i.e., 13 inches, and 15 
 inches as the height of the Roll ; the margin of 1 5 inches 
 thus left for the case seems much too large. 
 
 In 1906 Dr Spoer published in X\\& Journal of the Oriental 
 Society (vol. xxvii., p. 107) an account of this case which 
 differs very much from the descriptions given above. It 
 is as follows: "The case is cylindrical, 20 inches long, of 
 brass inlaid with silver. It consists of three sections form- 
 ing a circle of 6\ inches in diameter. The middle section 
 is connected with the other two by three hinges on either 
 side. That the present hinges may be of later date than 
 the case itself seems probable from the fact that in two 
 cases they conceal letters forming part of the inscription. 
 Several letters are also missing from the perpendicular 
 inscription to the right of the lower central panel, where a 
 fragment of brass has been lost and a patch inserted. The 
 top and the bottom are closed by three segments of brass 
 forming a circle, so that the manuscript was completely 
 enclosed for its better protection. It is secured by long 
 brass hooks fastening into faceted knobs pierced with eight 
 holes. The top is decorated with a turreted border. 
 
 "Every section is divided horizontally into two panels, 
 
398 APPENDICES 
 
 separated by a band outlined in silver. A geometrical 
 design in silver decorates the centre of every panel ; it 
 consists of an arabesque, contained in a circle running out 
 into four ornamental spear-heads. 
 
 "The dividing line is i|^ inches in breadth inlaid in silver, 
 with an inscription in Samaritan characters enclosed in a 
 sort of cartouche, ending in ornamental spear-heads. This 
 inscription continues round the case, as does also a second 
 in smaller characters, in a continuous band, top and bottom. 
 Right and left of the lower central panel is an additional 
 inscription in small characters. All these are in Hebrew, 
 in the Samaritan alphabet. The words are separated 
 by dots." 
 
 There follow transcriptions and translations of the various 
 inscriptions. Two of these are quotations from Scripture — 
 from the priestly benediction (Num. vi. 24) — and the words 
 which Moses used when the Tabernacle was to move (Num. 
 X. 3S). Two of the inscriptions related to the manufacture 
 of the case. These are interesting, as giving the date when 
 it was made. " In the name of Yah — this case for the holy 
 writing was made in Damascus by the poor servant, the 
 least of the creatures of God, Abu haph-Phetach ben Yoseph 
 ben Yaqob ben Tzophar, of the tribe of Manasseh. May 
 Yah forgive his sins. Amen. In the year nine hundred 
 and thirty of the rule of the sons of Ishmael. At the hand 
 of Yitzhaq the . . . ." The inscription within the lower 
 central panel is as follows : " Written by Pin'has the son 
 of Eleazar." The equivalent date in our era to A.H. 930 is 
 A.D. 1524. In addition to his description Dr Spoer shows 
 photographs which illustrate his meaning ; there is a photo- 
 graph of each of the portions of the case. 
 
 When these descriptions are compared, there would seem 
 to be two if not three several cases. That seen by Mill and 
 Grove, if even they describe one and the same case, clearly 
 differs from that seen by Spoer. As already remarked, the 
 material of the case is different ; according to Spoer it is 
 brass inlaid with silver, whereas that seen by Mill and Grove 
 was silver. Moreover, as indicated above, there is at least 
 a possibility that Mill and Grove describe different cases. 
 
 Photographic evidence confirms the former of these 
 distinctions. In Dr Montgomery's work. The Samaritans, 
 there is a photograph of the case of the Nablus Roll, and 
 the ornamentation suits the description given by Grove 
 and Mills, but not at all that of Spoer. This photograph 
 is from a plate taken for the Palestine Exploration. Spoer 
 
APPENDICES 399 
 
 also has photographs as above mentioned which support 
 his description. But besides that published in Montgomery, 
 there are other photographs issued by the Palestine Explora- 
 tion Fund ; one of these exhibits the middle filled with a 
 continuous arabesque ; at the top and bottom an ornament 
 like an arcade occupying each about three-sixteenths of the 
 entire space — each arch filled with arabesque work. The case 
 is composed of three portions as is Spoer's. When the 
 Palestine Exploration photograph, of which we speak, is 
 examined, a little bit of a second side is seen which appears 
 to repeat that fully exhibited. It may be that what is shown in 
 Montgomery's plate is a third side ; it shows the edge of 
 another side which seems to have an arabesque, like that 
 on the P.E.F. photograph above referred to ; certainly the 
 satin covering is the same. 
 
 There are thus clearly two cases. That described by 
 Spoer, dated in the sixteenth century, and that described 
 by Mills and photographed by the Palestine Exploration 
 Fund ; this latter is to all appearance much the older. To 
 this may be added a statement made to the present writer 
 by Yaqub Shellaby, the High Priest in 1898, that Baron 
 Rothschild had presented them with a case for their Torah ! 
 This assertion is not worthy of much credit, as it was 
 associated with a number of imaginative statements. So 
 far as the present writer's memory goes, the case seen by 
 him on Mount Gerizim in 1898 coincides with that described 
 by Dr Mills and figured in the photographs of the Palestine 
 Exploration Fund. On the other hand a friend who visited 
 Nablus in 1910 thinks that the case he saw was like that 
 described by Spoer. 
 
 More important than the case is the manuscript within 
 it. Of this Mills gives a very careful account, although he 
 admits that he was not able to examine the whole of it. 
 His description is as follows : " The roll itself is of what we 
 should call parchment, but of a material much older than 
 that, written in columns 13 inches deep, and 7| inches 
 wide. The writing is in a fair hand, though not nearly so 
 large or beautiful as the book-copies which I had previously 
 examined. The writing being rather small, each column 
 contains from seventy to seventy-two lines, and the whole 
 roll contains a hundred and ten columns. The name of the 
 scribe is written in a kind of acrostic, and forms part of 
 the text running through three columns, and is found in 
 the book of Deuteronomy." In a note Dr Mills explains 
 that he did not himself see this, but that he gave it on the 
 
400 APPENDICES 
 
 authority of Yaqub Shellaby who had shown him the ancient 
 roll in secrecy, and despite very considerable obstacles. To 
 call the tarikh an acrostic is not perhaps a very intelligible 
 descriptive name, only it would be difficult to suggest a 
 better. " Whether it be the real work of the great-grandson 
 of Aaron, as indicated in the writing, I leave the reader 
 to judge ; the roll, at all events, has the appearance of a 
 very high antiquity, and is wonderfully well preserved con- 
 sidering its venerable age. It is worn out and torn in many 
 places and patched with re-written parchment ; in many 
 other places, where not torn, the writing is unreadable. 
 But it seemed to me that about twO'thirds of the original 
 is still readable. The skins of which the roll is composed 
 are of equal size and measure each 25 inches long and 
 15 inches wide" (Mills, Modern Samaritans, ^i^. 312, 313). 
 
 In 1 86 1 Dr Rosen conveyed in a letter to Dr Fleischer 
 a description of the Nablus Roll which he had received from 
 a Hebrew Christian, named Kraus, which is as follows : — 
 
 " The manuscript is a roll and consists of one and 
 twenty rams' skins, according to the assurance of the priest, 
 taken from rams offered as thank-offerings. These skins 
 are only written on the hair side : they are of unequal size, 
 so that while the majority have six columns of text, some 
 have only five : they are artistically bound together by 
 thongs of the same material. If, as the priest maintained, 
 it has been in use, though very carefully handled, for many 
 centuries, the effect is yet noticeable in its very bad condition. 
 The parchment which in many places is as thin as writing 
 paper, appears often torn and holed, and especially frequently 
 blackened in a way as if the ink had run over it. According 
 to Herr Kraus, there may at most be half of it still legible, 
 which in the meantime, since the text remains undoubted, 
 can scarcely be regarded as a hindrance to scientific 
 knowledge. Only one column of Deuteronomy (xix. 8, ff.) 
 is fully preserved and can be read from top to bottom 
 throughout. Since the whole text of the Pentateuch 
 occupies at the most 120 columns or sides (pages), and 
 each ram's skin, prepared for parchment, contains five 
 or six such columns, it is clear that the writing must 
 be very close. This indeed necessarily is the case, since 
 each column contains more than seventy finely written 
 lines : the spaces which frequently break in constitute a 
 further contraction of the space available for writing on. 
 The writing is about a line high, and about the same breadth 
 is the space between. A free space of at most a finger's 
 
APPENDICES 401 
 
 breadth is left between individual books. In short, the 
 space is very carefully used, and only before a paragraph, 
 or at the end of a column are the letters much separated 
 one from another, for the sake of rendering it possible 
 to begin a new line or column with a complete word." 
 
 Another interesting description was read by Dr Loewy 
 to the Society of Biblical Archaeology {Proceedings, 2nd 
 December 1879). It is from the pen of a Samaritan. Dr 
 Loewy found it among MSS. of the Earl of Crawford and 
 Balcarres. In the Proceedings it is a summary which 
 is given, so the narrative is in the third person. " The Roll 
 was opened by him on the 8th of dhel-kadi A.H. 1125 
 (a.d. 17 1 3), corresponding to the ninth month of the 
 Samaritan year." If this is reckoned from Tishri, the 
 beginning of the civil year, this would be the month 
 Sivan, equivalent to our May ; if from Nisan, the beginning 
 of the sacred year, it would mean the month Kisleu, nearly 
 our November. The rest of the date is given in accordance 
 with the Samaritan reckoning: — "the 6152nd year since 
 the creation of Adam, and 3352nd of the settlement of 
 the Children of Israel in the Land of Canaan. The Roll 
 is declared to be the identical copy which was written 
 by Abishua, the great-grandson of Aaron, as is attested 
 by the tashkil or intertextual chronogram. The writer, 
 Maslam ibn Marjan, observes that for more than a hundred 
 years no one had examined this copy of the Pentateuch. 
 Solemn religious preparation had been made by Maslam 
 before he ventured to peruse the sacred writing. When 
 he went to the synagogue for this purpose he was attended 
 by several of the synagogal officials and some of their 
 children. Immediately after the section commencing 
 ^' Hear, O Israel," etc. (Deut. vi. 4-9), he found the inscription 
 consisting of the following words : — 
 
 ,nin'' ,iiv-i ,Dn^ .h^n .pan ,pnN ,p ,ntv^s ,p .onrsj ,p ^v^-y^ ,''3n 
 ,-inn ,nsfiD ,i'nK ,nnD3 -fin^n ,iDDn ,in2n3 ,ni33i 
 
 .nin'- ,m. ,miK ,300 ,n'ni^nji5 ,tP3 ,px 
 
 ■" I Abishua, the son of Pinhas, the son of Eleazar, the son of 
 Aaron the High Priest— on them be the favour of JHWH 
 and His glory — wrote the Holy Book at the door of the 
 Tabernacle of the Congregation in Mount Gerizim in the 
 
 2 C 
 
402 APPENDICES 
 
 year thirteen of the possession of the Children of Israel of 
 the Land of Canaan, according to its boundaries round 
 about. I praise JHWH." 
 
 The tashkil concludes at the sentence, " If thou shalt 
 hear say in one of thy cities, which JHWH thy God hath 
 given thee " (Deut. xiii. 12). 
 
 Maslam describes his joy in discovering this chronogram. 
 He makes the observation that only the letters T and 1 were 
 missing from the tashkil. The reason that they are wanting 
 is that they occur at the bottom of the columns, and the 
 bottom of the folio had been worn away. The same reading 
 was collated afterwards by the witnesses who accompanied 
 Maslam ibn Marjan. This evidence disposes of the doubts 
 which Deutsch expressed as to the colophon being really 
 present at all. In his article in Smith's Dictionary of the 
 Bible, Dr Deutsch insinuated that the discovery which 
 Levysohn professed to have made was untrue. 
 
 In his edition of the Samaritan Pentateuch, Freiherr von 
 Gall gives Dr Cowley's explanation of the tashkil which is : 
 There was a High Priest who had two sons, Pinhas and 
 'Amram, who were also High Priests. The son of the latter, 
 the High Priest Ithamar, came in the year A.H. 602 (A.D. 
 1205-6) from Damascus to Shechem. A cousin of this 
 Ithamar might be the Abishua who wrote this mysterious 
 roll. The " thirteenth year of the rule of the Children of 
 Israel in the Land of Canaan and its limits round about" 
 would really mean, the emigration from Damascus "from the 
 limits round about " to Shechem in Israel. Something may 
 be said for the first part of this, although there is no need for 
 limiting the Pinhas, the father of the scribe, to one whose 
 father was Eleazar, as Eleazar was a stem name. The great 
 apostasy according to the Samaritans was when Eli 
 transferred the High Priesthood from the race of Eleazar 
 to that of Ithamar. It is difficult to accept the latter portion. 
 There is no trace of the emigration of a few Samaritans 
 from Damascus to Nablus ever being regarded as important 
 enough to form an era. The whole of the Samaritan 
 community in Damascus cannot have migrated to Shechem, 
 as four hundred years later there was a considerable 
 number of Samaritans still in Damascus. As only one 
 column in Deuteronomy can be read throughout, any 
 number of words and letters may have been lost over and 
 above the two letters which Maslam acknowledges, so any 
 number of hundreds may have preceded the "thirteen." 
 Nothing can be settled until the MS. is examined again. 
 
APPENDICES 403 
 
 Let us hope it has not been destroyed by the Turks or 
 removed by their masters. 
 
 There are, or in present circumstances it may be more 
 correct or at least safer to say, were in the Samaritan 
 synagogue two rolls, in addition to the most ancient roll 
 of which a description has been given above. These were 
 shown to tourists, first the one, then if the tourist, knowing 
 the practice the Samaritan priesthood had of showing a 
 more recent roll to save the sacred document from con- 
 tamination, should ask for the real ancient manuscript, 
 the second was brought. These have not been described 
 with any care. In regard to one of them I can say it is 
 taller than the ancient roll, and the case in which it is, or 
 was kept is severer in design than the more ancient case. 
 
 There are probably several other rolls, in the possession 
 of the Samaritans, of various ages and values. Of course 
 no one can tell what devastation has been wrought by the 
 Turks, or how many of these, if any, have escaped the mania 
 for unreasoning destruction which seems to affect not only 
 the Turks but even more their temporary masters the 
 Germans. 
 
 {The above was written in the summer of 19 17.) 
 
APPENDIX III 
 
 THE RELATION OF THE MINOAN ALPHABET TO 
 THE SEMITIC 
 
 The discoveries made by Sir Arthur Evans in Crete, and 
 the evidences afforded by them of an advanced civilisation 
 naturally excited considerable speculation. The thoughts 
 of scholars were directed to the traditional stories of the 
 realm of Minos preserved in Hellenic literature. On the 
 other hand archaeologists were prone to connect the Cretan 
 discoveries with those of Schliemann in Mykenae and Troy. 
 One peculiarity which had been observed in regard to the 
 civilisation of primitive pre-Homeric Greece was the singular 
 want of any signs of writing. M. Perrot (Perrot and Chipiez, 
 Primitive Greece (Eng. trans.), vol. ii., p. 462) says : " What most 
 strikes the historian who sets about to define pre-Homeric 
 culture, is its having been a stranger to writing. It knows 
 neither of the ideographic signs which Egypt and Chaldaea 
 possessed, nor of that alphabet which Greece will borrow 
 somewhat later of Phoenicia." In contrast with this Sir 
 Arthur Evans found, not only not a few inscriptions, but also 
 a collection of documents on tablets of half-baked clay. 
 Discoveries so important as those made in Crete, which 
 seemed to have a bearing in so many different directions, 
 classical and archaeological, were naturally liable to produce 
 an amount of mental excitement which would tend to the 
 exaggeration of their significance. The news of the discovery 
 of the foundations of Ahab's Palace in Samaria led to the 
 story being published that letters to Ahab were found which 
 had been sent to him from Shalmanesar II., and, greater 
 marvel still, from Asshur-bani-pal who lived some three 
 centuries after Ahab was in his grave. In estimating the 
 influence on our ideas of primitive times, which may be 
 derived from Cretan discoveries, care has to be exercised 
 lest this influence should be exaggerated. 
 
 One of the cases in which the conclusions of Sir Arthur 
 
 404 
 
APPENDICES 405 
 
 Evans must, we think, be scrutinised with special care is 
 that in regard to the origin of the Semitic, or as he calls it, 
 the Phoenician alphabet. What evidence he adduces is to 
 a^ large extent assumptive. He assumes that the Cretan 
 civilisation was contemporaneous with that of Mykense and 
 Troy ; but the lack of any evidence that the people of those 
 days had any mode of making their thoughts permanent, 
 whether ideographically or phonographically, appears to 
 prove definitely that the Minoan civilisation is later. The 
 finding of an alabastron with the cartouche of the Hyksos 
 King Khyan {Scripta Minoa, p. 30) does not prove that the 
 reign of Khyan falls within the Minoan period. Had there 
 been many of these alabastra, the inference would have 
 been a fairly valid one ; but in the circumstances the natural 
 deduction is that the Hyksos King had a date considerably, 
 perhaps very much earlier.^ The kinship of the Cretan signs, 
 presumed to be alphabetic, to those of Cyprus and Lycia does 
 not carry the inquiry much further. Appeal is made to 
 the story of Bellerophon as told by Homer. He was sent 
 by Proetus his father to Lycia, with a folded tablet addressed 
 to his stepmother's father, and on it were impressed 
 crrifj.aTa Xvypd, "destructive signs." It does not necessarily 
 follow from the fact that there were alphabetic symbols 
 among the Lycians that these a-ij/mara were other than vague 
 symbols, such as savages of a lower stage frequently use. 
 But even though Homer intended to suggest alphabetic 
 writing, it does not follow that at the date implied by the 
 story (so much earlier than that when the Homeric poem 
 was composed) any such thing was known. There thus 
 seems to be decided failure of anything like evidence for 
 a very early date to the Minoan script. 
 
 The lack of any tradition associating the Greek alphabet 
 with Crete or Minos is strong evidence against that being 
 its source. The more advanced the civilisation ascribed to 
 Crete, the greater the extent of its commerce, the more 
 pervading the political influence of the Minoan Empire, the 
 more 'difficult it becomes to explain why, if the Hellenes 
 got their alphabet from Crete, Crete never got the credit 
 
 1 In my study as I write, I have a brick from a temple mound in 
 Mugheir ; there is on it an inscription in the oldest form of cuneiform. 
 Were such a disaster to befall our Island Empire as befell that of Minos, 
 and were the archaeologists of the fiftieth century a.d. to find it in the 
 ruins of Edinburgh, they would scarcely be justified in deducing from 
 it that our civilisation belonged, not to the twentieth century a.d. but 
 to the twentieth B.C. 
 
406 APPENDICES 
 
 for it. On the other hand, the tradition is that they got 
 their alphabet from Phoenicia through Cadmus. Herodotus 
 records this tradition with all particularity (v. 58) : " The 
 Phoenicians who came with Cadmus . . . introduced into 
 Greece upon their arrival a great variety of arts, among the 
 rest that of writing." Confirmatory of this view are the 
 names given to the letters. All the original letters have 
 Semitic names, hellenised only to the degree necessary 
 to fit them for Greek accidence. Thus aleph becomes alpha 
 and beth, beta. If Sir Arthur is correct, and the Semitic, 
 or as he calls it the Phoenician alphabet, is derived from the 
 Minoan, why did Hellenic tradition pass over the nearer 
 source and ascribe the introduction of letters to the more 
 distant, if it were not the truth? 
 
 Another argument which seems to us conclusive is that 
 the names of the letters are significant in Semitic, and the 
 forms assumed by them are derived from pictographs of the 
 object. It is true that in some cases there is a doubt as to 
 the meaning of the name on the one hand, and a dubiety 
 on the other as to the object indicated. This, however, 
 applies only to some of the letters ; in regard to a number 
 there is practical agreement. Sir Arthur Evans himself 
 has no doubt of aleph being a pictograph of a'n ox's head 
 conventionaHsed. Equally general is the recognition that 
 beth represents a " tent," only the essential lines being 
 indicated. The fourth letter daleth in its earliest form 
 represents a " tent-door " ; it becomes in Greek delta. There 
 is some difference concerning the third, gimel. By Gesenius 
 it was supposed to represent a " camel " ; certainly the 
 earliest shape the character assumes has a striking re- 
 semblance to the head and neck of a camel. It was objected 
 by Colonel Conder that the vowels of the word gamal, 
 " camel," were not those for the letter ; but its name 
 in Syriac is vocalised as is the word for a "camel." In 
 the Greek name gamma the final / is not represented ; this, 
 however, may be due to the probability that the Phoenicians 
 called this third letter by the name gaman by which it was 
 known to the Samaritans ; the n sound is more fluid even 
 than / with which it is frequently interchanged. The camel 
 was not indigenous to Phoenicia or Palestine, so it may well 
 have been that the inhabitants of South- Western Syria got 
 the alphabet before they were acquainted with the animal ; 
 hence the Phoenicians changed the last consonant, and the 
 Jews the vocalisation. We venture to maintain that^me/ 
 represents a "camel," notwithstanding that Sir Arthur 
 
APPENDICES 407 
 
 Evans assures his readers that this view is generally 
 abandoned. The resemblance of the sign to a camel's head 
 and neck is the closer the nearer one comes to the origin 
 of the alphabet. This at once is clear on comparison of the 
 forms assumed by the letter on the Moabite and Siloam 
 inscriptions on the one hand, and that on the inscription 
 on the sarcophagus of Ashmunazar on the other. But the 
 camel was not used in Crete, probably was not known there, 
 consequently the sign was modified into the likeness of 
 a human leg. That this is not the primitive form is clear 
 from the fact that while in the primitive Semitic form the 
 approximately horizontal portion of the figure is markedly 
 shorter, suggesting the proportion of the relative lengths 
 of the camel's head and neck, a proportion lost in later 
 examples, in the Minoan the horizontal is practically equal 
 in length to the perpendicular {Scripta Minoa, p. 87). The 
 Cretan epigraphist knowing nothing of camels developed 
 the shape into a closer likeness to an object with which 
 he was acquainted, a human leg. A similar process is seen 
 in the initial letters of the chapters of an illustrated book, in 
 which the shape of the letter is altered and metamorphosed 
 to illustrate the contents of the coming portion of the 
 book. 
 
 Another example of what appears a similar process 
 of modification is to be found in regard to the letter zain 
 which in Minoan appears as ^ a two-edged battle-axe. 
 The meaning of the word seems to be a " weapon," and this 
 symbol would suit that meaning. The earliest form of this 
 letter in Semitic is ^ which occurs on the Ba'al-Lebanon 
 inscription ; this could not conceivably be developed from 
 the Minoan form. But on the other hand, when the 
 successive forms this letter assumes are followed, the 
 possibility of the Minoan symbol being evolved from the 
 Semitic is clear. The Ba'al-Lebanon figure appears to 
 be a conventionalised representation of a dart, barbed and 
 feathered; on the Moabite stone it becomes X and in 
 the Siloam inscription ^. Later still as on the sarco- 
 phagus of Ashmunazar the shape Z is preached clearly 
 from the desire to write the form quickly ; and from this the 
 Minoan is readily developed. 
 
 In the letter teth Evans sees a distinct case of the 
 Minoan character being clearly the primitive. It certainly 
 is the case that there is nothing like a consensus of opinion 
 
408 APPENDICES 
 
 as to either the meaning of the name or of the object 
 intended to be indicated. Gesenius suggested a " serpent," 
 for which he adduces an Arabic root now unused. The 
 earliest shape the letter assumes, a cross surrounded by a 
 circle, does not at all support this view. Various other 
 objects have been suggested as the hieroglyph behind this 
 letter, but without any striking probability in their favour. 
 The resemblance to a chariot wheel, the form the letter 
 assumes in Minoan, is very seductive. It has to be observed, 
 however, that the pictograph is in every case developed 
 beyond the mere suggestive outline used in true alphabetic 
 symbols. In short, it appears to be a case parallel with that 
 of gimel, an effort to give a meaning to a symbol which was 
 otherwise unintelligible. If the contention which we main- 
 tain elsewhere is correct, that the invention of the alphabet 
 is to be put to the credit of a tribe of trading Aram^ans 
 having their headquarters in the valley of the Tigris^ and the 
 Euphrates, then teth might be a word in use only among 
 them and significant of some object with which they, though 
 not their Hebrew and Phoenician customers, were familiar. 
 It is possible that similar has been the history of qoph which 
 by general consent is received to mean "the back of the 
 head " ; the word may have had that meaning to the Aramaean 
 inventors of the alphabet. There is no extant word in 
 any Semitic language having that meaning. In Hebrew 
 qoph means " a monkey with a tail " ; some of the forms 
 the letter assumes have a not very distant resemblance 
 to a view in profile of a monkey seated on a branch 
 with its tail hanging down. Were it found that in Crete 
 a word, nearly akin to the name of this letter, meant either 
 the back of the head or, as Sir Arthur Evans suggests, the 
 face without the features, something might be said for 
 the Minoan origin of the Semitic alphabet. Certainly in the 
 Aryan tongues the word for head has a superficial 
 resemblance to this, as seen in the Latin caput and the 
 German kopf; but the initial sound is quite distinct from 
 the k sound, one very difficult to pronounce, as exhibited 
 by the fact that in a great part of the nearer East it has 
 disappeared from pronunciation, being replaced by the 
 hemza. In some quarters it is pronounced as g^ a sound 
 that has been lost by the gimel in Syrian Arabic. The Greeks 
 did not retain it in their alphabet, although its presence as a 
 numeral proves that the Hellenic alphabet had it originally. 
 It is not impossible that some Aramaic inscription may 
 supply the missing word. 
 
APPENDICES 409 
 
 If the Cretans in their alphabetic symbols depicted the 
 same objects and gave them the same names as did the 
 Phoenicians, then they too must have been Semites. But 
 Herodotus reckons them Hellenes (Herod, i. 2). In Homer, 
 Idomeneus, the Cretan king, grandson of Minos, is prominent 
 among the Greeks in the Trojan War (ii. xiii. 439, etc.). 
 If, while the objects depicted in the Cretan alphabet were 
 the same as those in the Phcenician, the names were different, 
 yet in each case the initial sound was the same, the pheno- 
 mena would certainly be explained. Only such a fortuitous 
 coincidence is so highly improbable as to amount to an 
 impossibility. 
 
 The connection of the Hellenic alphabet with that of 
 Phcenicia is exhibited in another way. It is probable from 
 the close connection between Northern Israel and Phoenicia 
 that the latter would share with the former its incapacity 
 to pronounce the gutturals. It is evident that whoever gave 
 the Greeks the alphabet they must have laboured under 
 this disability. Hence the Greeks proceeded to use the 
 signs for the unpronounced gutturals for the vowels with 
 which they were most frequently united ; thus alpha became 
 the vowel a, and he became the vowel e and so on. Though 
 the alphabet introduced among the Greeks had no gutturals, 
 the Hellenic tongue had them in use, so they had to devise 
 means of indicating them ; hence the sound which he had in 
 the earlier Semitic tongue and in Hebrew was represented 
 by the " rough breathing," and for heth the letter ^ had to 
 be introduced. 
 
 We do not know if the Cretans laboured under the same 
 disability in regard to the gutturals as did the Phoenicians. 
 If they did not, then the Greeks did not get their alphabet 
 from them. If they did then they, no more than the 
 Phoenicians, could be the inventors of the alphabet. They 
 would not have invented symbols for sounds which they 
 did possess. 
 
 There are, further, other letters which appear at one time 
 to have been in the Greek alphabet, but which disappeared 
 only a little while before historic time. The sixth letter 
 had disappeared from the alphabet of classic Greek, possibly 
 because it represented a sound which was not used by the 
 Hellenes. 
 
 If vav was pronounced, as was not improbably the case, 
 as w, and the ancient Greeks, like their modern represen- 
 tatives, had not that sound, the disappearance of that letter 
 from the alphabet of writing, although its place was still 
 
410 APPENDICES 
 
 retained when the alphabet was used numerically, was a not 
 unnatural result. Metrical considerations have rendered it 
 not improbable that the digamma, as it was called from its 
 form, was in use when the Homeric poems were composed. 
 Hence the necessity felt for introducing ^ phi and v upsilon 
 to represent the /and v sounds. In the case of the first of 
 these letters, it as is well known has retained in the Latin 
 language the place it had originally in the Semitic alphabet, 
 and through it, occupies that position in the languages of 
 Western Europe.^ As to the latter letter it has to be 
 observed that in modern Greek upsilon is generally pro- 
 nounced as v; thus the word for "cross," while written as 
 it is in ancient Greek, is pronounced stavros. That the 
 transliteration into Latin of the Greek for " gospel " assumes 
 the form evangelium, and that for "preparation" becomes 
 parasceva, proves that at least in certain combinations 
 upsilon was pronounced v by the Greeks of the opening 
 centuries of our era. In passing, it may be observed that 
 the differences between the Greek and Latin alphabets, 
 taken along with the predominant resemblances between 
 them, indicates that though both have been borrowed from 
 the same source, each has received it independently. 
 
 We have elsewhere maintained that the Semitic alphabet 
 could not have been invented by the Phoenicians. The 
 arguments which led us to that conclusion apply equally 
 against the idea that it originated among the Cretans. The 
 Cretans, like the Phoenicians, were a maritime people ; indeed 
 as inhabiting an island they could not pretend to an imperial 
 position in any other way than by developing their seafaring 
 industry. That being the case it might have been expected 
 that the objects used to supply alphabetic symbols would 
 have been, to some extent at any rate, drawn from the 
 utensils of maritime industry. But neither in Crete nor in 
 Phoenicia have any of the alphabetic signs such a source. It 
 is not that things belonging to seafaring life could not be 
 conventionalised. Conventionalised sails are not infrequent 
 in Egyptian hieroglyph, and ships are found delineated in 
 the Minoan inscriptions, but they do not seem to have 
 served as signs of sounds. The Cretans must have had 
 words for "ships," "sails," "anchors," "oars," "helms," 
 " rudders," and so forth ; why were not some of these 
 
 1 It may be observed that the form alike of the digaimna and of the 
 Latin F is really that of the Samaritan vav turned to look from left to 
 right, instead of from right to left. 
 
APPENDICES 411 
 
 used to serve as the alphabetic sign to denote their initial 
 sound ? It can only have been that they had received the 
 alphabet from an external source, the invention of a people 
 partly agricultural and partly nomadic, who used camels 
 and tents, but were acquainted with more stationary modes 
 of life. If they know nothing of the great sea, they know 
 about fish and fishing. Everything points to the inventors 
 being a nomadic Aramaean tribe, whose home was on the 
 Mesopotamian border of the desert which separated the 
 land of the two rivers from Western Syria, and who were 
 engaged in conveying merchandise from Babylonia to the 
 shores of the Mediterranean. 
 
 We therefore, for the above reasons, venture to maintain 
 that Sir Arthur Evans has failed to make good his contention 
 that the Semitic alphabet has been originated by the Cretans ; 
 indeed we shall go as far as to say that he has not even 
 made his case plausible. Despite the weight of his authority, 
 we feel that the balance of evidence is in favour of the 
 conclusion above stated. 
 
APPENDIX IV 
 
 naville's theory of the original language 
 of the old testament 
 
 The science of Biblical archaeology owes so great a debt to 
 Professor Naville that even when we differ from him we do 
 so with reluctance, and with a deference which would lead us 
 to place the most favourable construction on any view which 
 he may propound. His identification of the "store cities" 
 built by the Israelites under the " taskmasters " of the 
 Pharaoh of the oppression, has been very generally accepted. 
 If his brilliant suggestion that the copy of the Law found in 
 the days of Josiah, during the repair of the temple, was that 
 which, in accordance with the Egyptian custom of placing 
 in the foundation of their temples a portion of the Book of 
 the Dead, Solomon had placed at the foundation of the 
 Jerusalem temple, has not been received with similar 
 respect, nor indeed been seriously discussed, the reason of 
 this may be sought in the dominance of the Wellhausen 
 hypothesis. If it was a copy of the whole Law which had 
 been so placed and so found, Ezra had no more to do with 
 the Priestly Code than Wellhausen himself. If it were only 
 the book of Deuteronomy, as Naville thinks, still the whole 
 theory is so involved in maintaining the book in question to 
 have been a forgery contemporary with its discovery, that it 
 would be shaken to its foundations. It will be readily seen 
 that it is from no lack of respect for Dr Naville, or for what 
 he has done in Egyptology, and for Biblical archaeology by 
 means of it, that we are not prepared to accept his theory as 
 to the original language of the Old Testament, as propounded 
 first in his book on Biblical archaeology, and later in his 
 Schweich Lectures. 
 
 His theory is that the Pentateuch was originally written 
 in cuneiform, and therefore on clay tablets. He thinks that 
 Abraham brought with him from Padan-Aram a number of 
 those containing the stories of Creation, the Flood, the 
 
APPENDICES 413 
 
 building of Babel, etc., and that tribal scribes continued in 
 Palestine the process of recording events on clay tablets. 
 When they went down to Egypt the patriarchs carried these 
 tablets with them. These would all be written not only in 
 cuneiform character but also in the language of Mesopotamia. 
 Moses, as learned in all the learning of the Egyptians, would 
 necessarily be acquainted with Assyrian, the language of 
 diplomacy. In his intercourse with his own people he would 
 come to know about those tablets, .and would arrange them 
 in a succession fitted to bring out the special position of privi- 
 lege occupied by Israel. Records thus preserved on tablets 
 would not be continuous, each would be a separate unit with 
 probably an introduction, which would recapitulate something 
 of what might be on other tablets and have a concluding 
 formula. Dr Naville holds that Moses recorded on similar 
 tablets the subsequent history in which he was the principal 
 actor, and also his legislation. Deuteronomy would form a 
 group of tablets apart. With the accession of Solomon 
 was introduced into Palestine the Phoenician script which, 
 however, was not used for the Law ; it was always transcribed 
 in cuneiform and in the Assyrian or Babylonian tongue. 
 When Ezra came he translated the Law into Aramaic, and 
 wrote it out in the Aramaean script. Later Rabbin trans- 
 lated the Law from the Aramaic of Ezra into Hebrew, or as 
 Naville would prefer to call it, Yehudith, "Jewish," which he 
 regards not as a language distinct from Aramaic but only 
 as a patois, differing from it merely as " Platt-Deutsch " 
 differs from the German of Luther or Schiller. As to the 
 other and later books he believes that some would be 
 impressed on clay tablets, and others scratched on potsherds 
 or written on parchment or papyrus. The script used, he 
 thinks, would not be the Canaanite but the Aramaean ; this 
 name he restricts to the script of the Assouan papyri. 
 
 Portions of this theory are worthy not only of considera- 
 tion but of general acceptance. Brought up as Abraham 
 was in a state so advanced in civilisation as was that of 
 Hammurabi, in which scribes were a class important enough 
 to require special legislation, he could not fail to value 
 writing ; nomad as he was if he could not write himself, 
 though that he should have that accomplishment is not 
 unlikely, he would yet have among his clansmen one or more 
 capable of exercising this art. Hence that the legends of 
 the Creation and the Flood would be impressed for him on 
 clay tablets, and conveyed by him to Palestine is extremely 
 likely. No one who was not " thirl " to the critical hypothesis 
 
414 APPENDICES 
 
 would fail to see that the Jewish form of these stories is 
 much more primitive than the Babylonian. Thus to take the 
 story of the Flood ; in the Babylonian form of the legend Par- 
 Nipishtim brings into the Ark with him not only silver and 
 gold but also slaves, whereas Noah in the Bible narrative takes 
 with him none of these, does not indeed seem to have them. 
 The Bible narrative dates from a period before men had begun 
 to use metals generally or to possess slaves. The clay tablets 
 which Abraham broughtwithhim may well represent the source 
 of the Bible story. A difficulty suggests itself at this point ; 
 the language of Babylonia at that time was not written in 
 a script that could be called in any strict sense cuneiform. 
 The Laws of Hammurabi were incised in a script which has 
 only a very distant resemblance to the cuneiform of the 
 times of the Sargonids. When it was impressed on bricks, 
 the figures of the characters were not made by fine chisels 
 but by a block of wood or stone on which the inscription 
 had been cut in relief, being pressed on the soft wet clay. 
 This may be seen from the multitude of bricks from the 
 temple mounds of Mugheir (Ur of the Chaldees) on which 
 there are identical inscriptions. 
 
 Further, it may be doubted whether the herdsmen of 
 Abraham and Isaac would retain the language of Babylon, 
 when in Canaan they were associating with their neigh- 
 bours who spoke a different tongue. It is quite true 
 that diplomatic correspondence some centuries later was 
 carried on even with Egypt in the language and script of 
 Babylon. In that case there is evidence, as Professor 
 Naville himself informs us, that the native tongue of the 
 writers was different from that in which they wrote. Unless 
 when writing legal documents, or diplomatic letters, the 
 inhabitants would write in their own tongue. As to the 
 script, the want of the fine clay would be a great, almost an 
 insuperable difficulty in using the cuneiform for ordinary cor- 
 respondence. About a century ago amongourselves parchment 
 was, while still used for legal deeds, never taken for ordinary 
 letters. Clay might be imported for the use of diplomats or 
 legal scribes, but natives in their letters would content them- 
 selves with the writing material within reach. It is doubtful 
 if the followers of Abraham would reckon the annals of their 
 wanderings to be worthy the expensive imported clay. Still 
 less would the Mesopotamian clay be available in the 
 wilderness. The "Ten Words" were engraved on tables of 
 stone, and therefore not on a material favourable to cunei- 
 form. Still as cuneiform inscriptions were incised on the 
 
APPENDICES 415 
 
 gypsum slabs of the palaces of Sargon at Khorsabad, and of 
 Sennacherib at Kuyounjik, the granite of Sinai might be 
 engraved with cuneiform symbols. 
 
 Before passing on to consider this theory further a note 
 may be inserted at this point, by way of caveat, against 
 accepting the assumption which Professor Naville makes, 
 that Assyrian was so like the language of Canaan that 
 Abraham and his herdsmen would have no difficulty from 
 the very first in conversing with the natives. To prove that 
 although both Assyrian and Hebrew, which is admitted to 
 be the same as Phoenician, belong to the same class of 
 Semitic languages but are yet very different from each other, 
 one has only to turn into Hebrew any few lines of the 
 examples given in King's First Steps in Assyrian. Com- 
 munication between the men of Abraham and the Canaanites 
 would be mainly through generally recognised signs ; a 
 method of intercourse to some extent in use in Palestine to 
 this day. 
 
 Closely akin to this assumption is the idea that the 
 literary language of South-Western Asia was Assyrian. 
 Dr Naville grounds this on the fact that while numerous clay 
 tablets emanating from Palestine have come down to the 
 present day, nothing survives in any other script or language. 
 The argumentum e silentio is notoriously inconclusive. It is 
 doubly so in the present case when the difference in durability 
 is considered between the tablets of kiln-burned clay and 
 sheets of brittle papyrus, or skins liable to decay, the only 
 materials for writing on available to the Palestinian in 
 ordinary cases. It is quite true that diplomatic corres- 
 pondence and legal documents were written in the script and 
 language of Babylon, a relic of the far back conquest ; but 
 from that it cannot be argued that there was no indigenous 
 literature. For centuries after Norman-French ceased to be 
 spoken in England, Acts of Parliament and certain legal 
 deeds were inscribed in that tongue. One may not argue 
 from this that neither Chaucer nor Wiclif lived or wrote in 
 English. Although no fragments of literature have been 
 preserved on contemporary parchment or papyrus, yet the 
 form of the letters in the inscription of Mesha of Moab 
 proves that a long process of evolution from pictograph lay 
 behind ; this in turn implies much practice in writing. The 
 style of the composition also indicates that the author of the 
 inscription was not unaccustomed to writing narrative. This 
 is confirmed by the Siloam inscription, the composition not 
 of a court-historiographer, as that of the Moabite Stone 
 
416 APPENDICES 
 
 probably was, but of the foreman of the excavators employed 
 by Hezekiah. 
 
 As evidence of the correctness of his hypothesis that the 
 Pentateuch was written on clay tablets with cuneiform 
 characters and in the Babylonian tongue, Professor Naville 
 adduces the phrase which recurs so frequently in Genesis, 
 " The Book of the Generations of, etc.," which he regards 
 as the terminal formula of a tablet. But this phrase is 
 restricted to Genesis alone of the books of the Law ; and not 
 even in that book does it occur with sufficient frequency to 
 justify his conclusion. Again, while the phrase in question 
 appears occasionally at the end of portions of the book of a 
 length to suggest transcription from a tablet, e.g. Gen. ii. 4, 
 on the other hand there are cases where the formula must 
 have been at the beginning not the end of the paragraph, 
 e.g. chap, xxxvi. i, 9; xxxvii. 2; it may further be observed 
 that the paragraphs in chap, xxxvi. are out of proportion 
 short to be the transcription of narrative tablets. Many of 
 the narratives in Genesis suggest by their form that to 
 some extent they had been transmitted as oral traditions. 
 
 In regard to the later books Dr Naville thinks that they 
 were sometimes impressed with chisels on clay tablets, and 
 at others scratched on stone or metal plates. This double 
 usage he thinks is implied in the account of the naming of 
 Maher-shalal-hash-baz (Is. viii. i). Naville recognises that 
 in this instance we have a case of engraving on a stone 
 tablet or metal plate, but thinks that when Isaiah speaks of 
 " a man's pen " he means to distinguish between the ordinary 
 writing which he is to employ in this case, and the legal 
 script which it might have 'been supposed would have been 
 used. This view, while not in itself improbable, really implies 
 nothing as- to how the rest of the prophecies of Isaiah were 
 written. That certain legal documents were a century ago 
 usually written in " blackletter " is no proof that people 
 wrote treatises in that script, or that books were printed in it. 
 Even of less probative value is the fact that in Gezer two 
 contract tablets in cuneiform have been found dated 649 and 
 647 B.C. respectively. At that time Palestine formed part of 
 the Assyrian Empire ; and so the diminished kingdom of 
 Judah whose king Manasseh was then a captive in Babylon 
 had been conquered by Esarhaddon. It was not extra- 
 ordinary that legal contracts should be written in the 
 language of the suzerain power ; but this fact would give no 
 information as to what literary activity there was among the 
 natives, or in what language it found expression. Another 
 
APPENDICES 417 
 
 script was in use in Gezer ; stones have been found with the 
 words engraved on them Tahoum Gezer, "the boundary of 
 Gezer." The language is Aramaic, and the characters are 
 what Dr Naville calls Phoenician. Aramaic was the second 
 official tongue of the Assyrian Empire ; much as in Ireland 
 four or five centuries ago, for certain government documents, 
 Norman - French was the language employed, in others 
 English, while the language of the people was Erse. An 
 outsider might argue that English was the literary language 
 of Ireland ; Shakespeare, it might be shown, represents 
 Macmorris the Irish captain in the army of Henry V. as 
 speaking English. From this it might be maintained that 
 the language of the Irish in Shakespeare's days was English ; 
 all the more so that he makes Frenchmen in that play speak 
 French. Reference might be made to those masters of 
 English — Swift, Burke, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Moore, and 
 hosts of others, all Irishmen. Yet there was all the while 
 the splendid Celtic literature, the value of which we are only 
 now beginning to estimate, dating from before the English 
 Conquest altogether. Dr Naville, it seems to us, has been 
 guilty of a similarly erroneous judgment to that which we 
 have attributed to the above supposed outsider. 
 
 Another point in the hypothesis advocated by Professor 
 Naville is the relation in which he assumes Hebrew to 
 stand to Aramaic ; he regards the former as being merely 
 a patois of the latter. The request which Eliakim 
 and those with him made to Rabshakeh (2 Kings xviii. 
 26) appears to imply that as "the people on the wall" 
 would not understand a speech delivered in Aramaic, it 
 was a language different from that which they ordinarily 
 spoke. The Scottish dialect is regarded as quite distinct from 
 literary English ; yet Gladstone had no difficulty, though 
 speaking in literary English, in rousing the Scottish people 
 in his Midlothian campaign to the utmost enthusiasm. 
 Notwithstanding, Professor Naville thinks the request of 
 Eliakim quite compatible with Hebrew being merely a 
 patois of Aramaic. It surely is not to be imagined that only 
 the ignorant rabble of Jerusalem crowded to the city wall 
 when the representatives of Hezekiah had their conference 
 with the Chancellor of the great king, the King of Assyria. 
 
 This subject may be approached from another point. It 
 may be admitted that it is difficult to determine precisely 
 the amount of difference which must be proved to_ exist 
 between two modes of speech, before it may be considered 
 clear that they are different languages and not merely 
 
 2 D 
 
418 APPENDICES 
 
 different dialects of the same language. Further, it is 
 obvious that the difficulty in the case before us is increased 
 by the fact that the different languages of the Semitic group 
 resemble each other so closely in their vocabulary and their 
 grammatical accidence. Still bearing all things in mind, it 
 seems impossible to maintain that the differences which 
 separate Hebrew from Aramaic are merely dialectic. In the 
 first place, both languages have syntactical peculiarities which 
 not only distinguish them from each other but from all 
 other Semitic tongues. On the one hand, in regard to 
 Hebrew, there is " the vav conversive " ; the strange idiom 
 by which the simple conjunction u or ve when preceding the 
 preterite of a verb makes it future, but when it precedes a 
 future makes it have a past sense. This peculiarity the 
 Aramaic does not share, as indeed does no other language 
 Semitic or other. On the other hand, Aramaic has a dis- 
 tinguishing characteristic which marks it off from Hebrew, 
 as also from other Semitic languages. Instead of the definite 
 article the Aramaic has the status emphaticus ; the syllable 
 ah or a is added to any substantive which is to be made 
 definite. This syllable is affixed in accordance with the 
 same rules as regulate the prefixing of the article ha in 
 Hebrew. Although in regard to accidence there is less 
 difference, still even there the distinguishing peculiarities 
 are marked. In conjugation the verb in both languages 
 conforms to the Semitic type, yet the Aramaic is much 
 more simple and symmetrical in the arrangement of its 
 "conjugations" or verbal forms. In Aramaic these are 
 alternately active and passive ; the latter being distinguished 
 from the former by having the syllable ith or eth prefixed. 
 In Hebrew the difference is mainly indicated by an internal 
 vocalic change as Piel becomes Pual in the passive, and 
 Hiphil, Hophal ; the passive of the Qal is formed by pre- 
 fixing the syllable ni. The preformative hith, analogous to 
 the ith and eth of Aramaic, is the sign not of the passive but 
 of the reflexive in Hebrew. If Hebrew is compared with 
 Eastern Aramaic a further difference emerges ; the prefor- 
 mative of 3rd per. masc. sing, and plur. impf is nun, not as in 
 all other Semitic languages, including Western Kxzxs\2Xc,yodh} 
 It may be added that while the Phoenician dialect of 
 Hebrew seems to agree in regard to its conjugations with 
 that of Jerusalem, the dialect of Moab seems to have had a 
 
 ^ In regard to the substantive verb the preformative is sometimes 
 lamed, as in the Mandsean subdialect of Eastern Aramaic and in the 
 Aramaic of the Bible. 
 
APPENDICES 419 
 
 more elaborate system akin to the Arabic. When the above 
 considerations are taken into account, it would appear to be 
 impossible to agree to Dr Naville's view and regard Hebrew 
 as simply a patois of Aramaic. The difference is greater 
 than that which separates French from Italian, or Spanish 
 from Portuguese ; surely Dr Naville would not consider 
 Portuguese a patois of Spanish, or French of Italian. 
 
 This leads to consideration of another point in Professor 
 Naville's theory of the evolution of the present text of the 
 Old Testament. According to his hypothesis Ezra not only 
 translated the Law out of Babylonian into Aramaic but 
 committed his translation to writing in the Aramaic script of 
 Assouan. It is difficult to understand why Dr Naville has 
 thought it at all probable that Ezra, who presumably was 
 acquainted with the Aramaic script in use all over Syria, 
 found alike in the inscriptions in Sinjirli, on the weights in 
 the palace of Sargon in Nineveh, and on the envelopes of 
 the contract tablets of Babylon, would so go out of his way 
 to use the script of Assouan in preference. In the greater 
 portion of the text both of his Schweich Lectures, and of 
 his book on Biblical archaeology. Professor Naville speaks as 
 if the Arameeans wrote their language only in the mode of 
 writing adopted by the Jews of Assouan to suit the writing 
 materials open to them in Egypt. There is no evidence 
 that when the Jews of Palestine and the Phoenicians wrote 
 Aramaic they did not use the characters used by the 
 Aramaeans around them. That scribes both in Jerusalem 
 and in Samaria would be able to decipher writings sent them 
 from Assouan is probable enough, but from this it does not 
 follow that when writing, not on papyrus but on parchment, 
 they would use any other script than that which he calls 
 Phoenician, but which was really the universal Semite script. 
 Ezra it may be presumed would write in Jerusalem, as he 
 had been accustomed to do in Babylon, with the characters 
 of ordinary Semitic. It seems to us that Dr_ Naville has 
 encumbered his theory unnecessarily with this additional 
 hypothesis that Ezra employed the script of Assouan. 
 
 The further portion of Dr Naville's theory that Ezra 
 not only transcribed the Torah into Aramaic script but 
 translated it into the Aramaic language involves a singular 
 reversal of the age-old opinion that the Aramaic Targums 
 were interpretations of the Law rendered necessary by the 
 fact that the Jews had largely abandoned Hebrew. Accord- 
 ing to Professor Naville's theory, the Aramaic was the 
 original and the Hebrew which has been so long regarded as 
 
420 APPENDICES 
 
 the original was really the Targum, the interpretation. His 
 presupposed history of the extant Hebrew text is a daring 
 hypothesis. Certain of the Jerusalem Rabbin translated 
 from Ezra's Aramaic successively the Law, the Prophets, and 
 the K'thubhim into the local patois of Judea. The theory in 
 question is so bizarre that in order to ensure ourselves 
 against misrepresenting it the very words in which it is pro- 
 pounded must be given. "When the Rabbis wished to give 
 to their religion, to their laws, to their national life which rests 
 entirely on their books, a thoroughly and exclusively Jewish 
 character, they made a dialectal modification ; they turned 
 their books into the language spoken at Jerusalem ; but 
 since that had no script, they had to invent one, and they 
 adopted a modified form not of the Canaanite but of the 
 Aramaic, the one real book-language which they already 
 \inew" {Archcsology of the Old Testament, p. 207). Another 
 feature in this hypothetical history may be drawn from the 
 Schweich Lectures : " As it came out of Ezra's hand, this law, 
 their sacred books, had no national garb, it was only a part 
 of the Aramaic literature. It was necessary to separate the 
 bo3ks of Moses and the Prophets from foreign writings, so 
 that they should become exclusively Jewish. The hated 
 Samaritans had that privilege, they could not be confused 
 with the Jews or with their other neighbours, since they had 
 their Pentateuch written in their own script and in their own 
 dialect, which differed but little from that of the Jews. I 
 believe the Rabbis did the same as the Samaritans" 
 (^Schweich Lectures, p. 76). There are three points here : 
 (i) The present Hebrew Scriptures are a translation from 
 Aramaic ; (2) The present Hebrew character is the invention 
 of the Jewish Rabbis, a modification of the script of the 
 Assouan papyri ; (3) That this double process was carried 
 out in imitation of the "hated" Samaritans. 
 
 To take these points seriatim : — (i) The extant Hebrew 
 Scriptures are a translation from the Aramaic. There are 
 already the well-known Targums, to restrict attention to the 
 Torah, the Targums of Onkelos, and of Jonathan ben Uzziel, 
 so-called, besides the variation of the latter, the Targum 
 of Jerusalem. Professor Naville has only indicated in the 
 most indefinite manner the period when he thinks the 
 Jerusalem Rabbin made their translation from Ezra's 
 Aramaic. As, however, he holds that Our Lord delivered 
 His discourses in Aramaic, and notes that He quotes the 
 twenty-second Psalm in Aramaic while hanging on the cross, 
 as evidence "that the sacred books must all have been in 
 
APPENDICES 421 
 
 ATamaic," it would seem that he holds that the Rabbinic 
 translation was made after the fall of Jerusalem. The 
 ordinarily received date of Onkelos is early in the third 
 century of our era ; Stenning {Enc. Brit, " Targum ") would 
 place it a century later. It evidently is the traditional 
 version handed down from meturgenian to meturgeman ; it 
 has greater affinities with the Biblical Aramaic than with the 
 Aramaic of the Talmud, or the Aramaic of the Palestinian 
 Lectionary. Does Dr Naville maintain that the so-called 
 Targum of Onkelos is really Ezra's version of the original 
 Mosaic cuneiform? If the Rabbinic Hebrew was introduced 
 in the beginning of the second century A.D., surely every 
 copy of Ezra's version would not have disappeared by then. 
 If it was still extant, there would be no need of another 
 Aramaic version. Consequently it would seem that Professor 
 Naville is obliged to assert the Targum of Onkelos to be 
 really the version which Ezra made from the cuneiform 
 tablets left by Moses. Hence the present Hebrew text of 
 the Pentateuch is a translation of the Targum. It would 
 seem to be an investigation by no means involving abnormal 
 ability or information to demonstrate which, the Targum of 
 Onkelos or the Massoretic Hebrew, was the original and 
 which the version. Every student of Hebrew knows JlK eth 
 
 the sign of the accusative. When the student passes to 
 Aramaic he finds that T\\ yath occupies the same position in 
 
 Onkelos, as also in the Peshitta, that is to say whenever eth 
 appears in the Hebrew then yath appears in the Aramaic, 
 Eastern or Western. When, however, the student directs his 
 attention to writings composed in Aramaic he finds this 
 particle practically absent. In Biblical Aramaic it occurs 
 only in Dan. iii. 12, and then only as supporting the oblique 
 case of a pronoun ; in the Sinjirii inscriptions the equivalent 
 particle ni vath occurs only once and in a similar grammatical 
 construction (Sinjirii Hadad, 28). In translations made from 
 Greek which has no such particle IT" yath is not found, as may 
 be seen by reading the Peshitta New Testament and the 
 Palestinian Lectionary. When one compares either the 
 Targum of Onkelos or the Peshitta with the Hebrew text, it 
 is at once seen that yath occurs always and only when eth is 
 found in the Hebrew ; just as Aquila represents the untrans- 
 latable particle by aw in his version. It would seem that 
 Aramaic had this particle originally, but it had fallen into 
 disuse as far back as the eighth century B.C. ; and it was 
 revived in the Targum much as the antique forms of the 
 Authorised Version were used in the translation of the 
 
422 APPENDICES 
 
 Bensly fragment of 2 Esdras when it was inserted in the 
 text of the Revised Version of the Apocrypha. Other 
 instances might be brought in which the Aramaic is con- 
 formed to the Hebrew, but what we have referred to is 
 patent to every reader. Confirmatory of the originality of 
 the Hebrew is the treatment of poetical passages in the 
 Targum. Wherever there is obscurity in the Hebrew there 
 is the endeavour to remove the obscurity in the Targum. 
 In Gen. iv. 7, we have in the Hebrew the difficult sentence 
 rendered in the Revised : " If thou doest well shalt thou not 
 be accepted ? and if thou doest not well sin coucheth at the 
 door; and unto thee shall be his. desire, and thou shalt rule 
 over him." This is without doubt very obscure. Onkelos 
 renders thus according to Etheridge's translation : " If thou 
 doest thy work well is it not remitted to thee ? and if thou 
 doest thy work not well, thy sin unto the day of judgment is 
 reserved, when it will be exacted of thee, if thou convert not : 
 but if thou convert, it is remitted to thee." It goes without 
 saying that the Targum is the simpler : while by no 
 possibility can the Hebrew be regarded as an attempt to 
 render the Aramaic ; the Aramaic is a paraphrase of the 
 Hebrew taking the word for " sin " as meaning " sin-oflFering," 
 and interpreting the enigmatic last clause as implying that 
 Cain would not lose his birthright as elder brother. A yet 
 more striking instance is found in the fifteenth verse of the 
 preceding chapter : " I will put enmity between thee and the 
 woman, and between thy seed and her seed : it shall bruise 
 thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." The version of the 
 Targum is clearly an attempt to explain the Hebrew : in no 
 way can the Hebrew be regarded as an attempt to give a 
 rendering of the Aramaic. It is as follows : " I will put 
 emnity between thee and between the woman, and between 
 thy son and her son. He will remember thee what thou 
 didst to him at the beginning, and thou shalt be observant 
 unto him at the end." No one can doubt that of these two 
 the Hebrew, not the Aramaic, is the original ; the Hebrew 
 is figurative and poetic, the Aramaic is plain prose ; that a 
 translator may turn poetry into prose is what is not 
 infrequently seen, but that prose in the original should 
 become poetry in the version is an unknown phenomenon in 
 the history of literature. There are numerous other "passages 
 in Onkelos exhibiting the same characteristics. 
 
 The assertion (2) that the modern Hebrew character is 
 the invention of the Jewish Rabbin, a modification of the 
 script of Assouan need not occupy much time as it is 
 
APPENDICES 423 
 
 supported by no proof; what resemblance there is, is due to 
 the fact that both scripts resulted from writing with a reed 
 pen on papyrus. The Greek transcription of the tetra- 
 grammaton shows that in early Christian times vav and yodh 
 were as indistinguishable in the script then in use among the 
 Jews as they are in the Kefr Bir'im inscription. In the 
 script of Assouan, on the other hand, these two letters are not 
 by any means strikingly like each other. The present square 
 character was the result of independent evolution. Had 
 Professor Naville's theory been correct, the Septuagint would 
 have been translated from a text written in the Aramaic 
 script of Assouan, and variations of the LXX. from the 
 Massoretic would have been shown mainly to have been due 
 to mistakes of letters like in that script ; but differences 
 attributable to this cause have not been numerous enough 
 to attract attention. On the other hand. Professor Kohn 
 rested part of the proof of his Thesis, that the LXX. trans- 
 lated from the Samaritan Recension, on the fact that some 
 of the variations could be explained by confusions of letters 
 like each other in the Samaritan script. Origan's interpreta- 
 tion of the "tittle" in Matt. v. i8, proves that the square 
 character was in use in the third century of our era; this 
 leaves but little time for the process Professor Naville's 
 theory presupposes. This second point may be dismissed 
 as unproved and improbable. 
 
 The remaining point (3) is that this translation from 
 Aramaic into Hebrew was made in imitation of the 
 Samaritans. The most rudimentary knowledge of -the 
 period in which this alleged translation was produced would 
 make the inquirer aware of the hatred and contempt with 
 which the Jews regarded their Northern co-religionists. In 
 the Talmud they are spoken of as "Cuthseans," and some- 
 times as " the foolish people of Shechem." That the despised 
 "Cuthseans" had translated the original Aramaic of the 
 Scriptures into Hebrew would, one should have thought, 
 have afforded the Jerusalem Rabbin an opportunity of 
 denouncing the " Cuthaeans " as guilty of another enormity, 
 rather than to suggest to them a thing which they themselves 
 ought to follow. But the very assumption that before the 
 Jews, the Samaritans had rendered the cuneiform inscrip- 
 tions' which contained the sacred Torah into Aramaic, and 
 further turned that Aramaic into "the local patois of 
 Jerusalem " is itself improbable. These assumptions involve 
 difficulties which in their very nature appear to us insyper- 
 able It is true that like the Jews the Samaritans have an 
 
424 APPENDICES 
 
 Aramaic Targum of the Law. Who made this Aramaic 
 version of Pentateuch? Certainly it could not be Ezra. If 
 Onkelos represents the original Aramaic of Ezra, the most 
 casual inspection of the Samaritan Targum reveals the 
 differences which separate these two. The Samaritan is 
 written in a different dialect of Aramaic, one which has 
 closer affinities to Hebrew. Further it has to be noted that 
 the Samaritan Targum is much closer to the Hebrew than 
 is that of Onkelos. This may be seen by comparing the 
 curse on the serpent from Onkelos as given above with the 
 Samaritan version : " I will put enmity between thee and the 
 woman, and between thy seed and her seed ; he shall bruise 
 thee as to the head, and thou shalt bruise him as to the 
 heel." Comparison may also be made with the Divine 
 exhortation to Cain as found in Onkelos and given above 
 with the Samaritan, which is as follows : " If thou doest 
 well thou shalt be accepted, if thou doest not well, sin 
 croucheth at the door and to thy hand is repentance (Castelli 
 conversio), and thou shalt rule over him." If for the moment 
 we accept Professor Naville's hypothesis, it may be admitted 
 that the translation of these passages into Hebrew would 
 result in something very like the Massoretic. As above 
 shown any attempt to render the Onkelos version of these 
 passages into Hebrew would result in something very 
 different from the received text. 
 
 This brings us to what appears to be the crowning 
 difficulty of accepting Dr Naville's theory. Is it con- 
 ceivable on the ordinary doctrine of probabilities that from 
 two such widely differing Aramaic versions a Hebrew text 
 should emerge which is practically identical, the same in 
 Samaria as in Jerusalem? Even if the improbable sup- 
 position is assumed that Ezra's Aramaic version as well 
 as the original Samaritan Aramaic have both utterly 
 disappeared, and so the present Targums are not those 
 from which the Hebrew version has been made, still it 
 must be maintained as amounting almost to an impossibility 
 that two independent versions in Aramaic, versions of the 
 assumed cuneiform text, should be so closely alike that 
 when independently translated into Hebrew the two versions 
 were all but absolutely identical. 
 
 After considering Professor Naville's theory in the most 
 favourable way, admitting to the utmost every probability 
 which can be urged in its favour, we are compelled to 
 conclude that it is not worthy of acceptance. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abbaside persecution of the Samaritans, 
 
 48 
 Aboda Zara quoted, 38 
 Abu'I Path, Chronicle of, described, 
 147-8 
 hymn on sufferings of Samaritans, 
 
 267-8 
 on cause of Samaritan rebellion under 
 
 Zeno, 45 
 on Christ's birth and life, 165 
 on Christ's disciples and apostles, 
 
 165-6 
 on date when sacrifices ceased on 
 
 Mount Gerizim, 120 
 on identity of the Essenes and 
 Samaritans, 164 
 Addis, Dr, on Hezekiah's destruction 
 
 of the High Places, 372 
 Adler, the Samaritan Chronicle and 
 its publication, 148-9 
 the Samaritan Chronicle, analysis 
 
 of, 155-9 
 concealment of the Sacred Roll of 
 the Law, 161 
 Alexander the Great, his intended 
 desecration of Mount Gerizim 
 averted by the influence of Hizqiah 
 the High Priest, 163 
 story of his destruction of Samaria 
 criticised, 31 
 Alexander, son of Aristobulus, defeated 
 
 by Gabinius, 37 
 Alexander Jannaeus and his widow held 
 Samaria as part of their dominions, 
 35 
 
 426 
 
 Alexandria, Jewish influence in the 
 city of, 319 
 use of Hebrew by Jews discontinued 
 there, 320 
 Alexandrian Version of Pentateuch, 
 
 peculiarities of, 341-2 
 Alphabet, the, evolved from hiero- 
 glyphics in Babylon and Egypt, 
 20+-5 
 the tables of, in Semitic script, 22 2 
 the Semitic, its relation to the Minoan 
 
 alphabet, Appendix, 404-11 
 Phoenician origin of the Greek, 233 
 regularity of the order of the letters. 
 in the, and the importance of 
 its fixity in connection with 
 cryptic writing, 218 
 Alphabetic poems in Hebrew literature, 
 217-18 
 in Samaritan, 266 
 Amos, his references to ritual worship 
 in Northern Israel, 78-9 
 his use of technical ritual terms, 80 
 Anastasius, Samaritan rebellion in 
 
 time of, 45 
 Angels, the doctrine of, whence derived, 
 
 74-5 
 Samaritan belief in, 187 
 Antagonism between the worship of 
 
 JHWH in Northern Israel and 
 
 on Mount Zion considered, 352 
 Antediluvians, the genealogy ' of, in 
 
 Samaritan Pentateuch reviewed, 344 
 Antiochus Epiphanes, treatment of the 
 
 Jews by, 33 
 Antiochus the Great, treatment of 
 
 Samaritans by, 32 
 
426 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Antonines, the, destruction of Samari- 
 tan literature under, 260 
 the review of Samaritan history 
 under, 41, 169, 260 
 Apocalyptists, the, their doctrine of 
 
 God as localised and visible, 179 
 Apollonius has Samaritans in his army, 
 
 34 
 Aqabiah, concealment of vessels of the 
 
 Tabernacle, 160 
 Aramaic, Biblical, compared with 
 Samaritan, 246-51 
 abandoned by Jews in Egypt, 
 
 especially in Alexandria, 320 
 gradual introduction of, into Palestine 
 
 by Assyrian colonists, 256-7 
 unknown in Southern Israel in time 
 of Sennacherib, 256 
 Aristeas, on the origin of the Septua- 
 
 gint, 320 
 Artaxerxes, ordered sacrifices to be 
 offered on Mount Gerizim, but 
 these forbidden, 162 
 Ashima, Jews assert that the Samaritans 
 
 worship, 178 
 Ashmunazar, the inscription on his 
 
 sarcophagus, 224 
 Askenazim, use of synagogues as a 
 
 sort of club by the, 122 
 Assouan papyri, their confirmation of 
 
 Biblical history, 29 
 Assyrian deportations,their design, 1 7-20 
 Astruc, his hypothesis of the existence 
 of two documents in the books of 
 Genesis and Exodus stated, 358-9 
 relation of his hypothesis to modern 
 Biblical criticism, 358-9 
 Atonement, description of the Great 
 Day of, as it is observed by the 
 Samaritans, 134 
 the Great Day of, the Jewish and 
 Samaritan modes of its observ- 
 ance reviewed and contrasted, 
 1 34-5 
 
 B 
 
 Baal, the name as a factor in Israelitish 
 nomenclature, its significance, 
 
 378-9 
 the name of the Supreme God of the 
 Canaaniles, 63 
 
 Baal, the name of local deities, 63 
 Baal-worship, its influence on Israel, 63 
 Baalim, impure rites in worship of the, 
 
 64-5 
 Baasha adopts measures to prevent the 
 
 Northern Israelites worshipping 
 
 in Jerusalem, 82 
 Babylonian story of the Creation, 185 
 Bagster, list of variants between 
 
 Samaritan and Massoretic texts, 
 
 279-82 
 Bar-Gochba, war of, in Samaritan 
 
 history, 167 
 Bashan, province of, held by the 
 
 kingdom of Syria, 3 
 Benjamin of Tudela, his account of 
 
 the Samaritans in twelfth century, 
 
 49-50, 120 
 Bennet, ascribes the first two verses 
 
 of Joshua to E, although JHWH 
 
 only divine name used, 359 
 Book of the Dead, portions of, placed 
 
 in foundation of Egyptian temples, 
 
 375 
 Booths, in connection with Feast of 
 
 Tabernacles,mentionedin Leviticus 
 
 and Deuteronomy, 374 
 Budge, Dr Wallis, on Egyptian 
 
 religion, 64 
 Burial of the dead, practice of 
 
 Samaritans at, 139 
 Burney, Dr, on narrative of Hezekiah's 
 
 destruction of the High Places, 372 
 Buxtorf, Dr, on recency of the 
 
 Samaritan Pentateuch, 276 
 asserts Pentateuch written in square 
 characters, 276 
 
 Calves, golden, the worship of, 
 considered, 71-2 
 worship of, how rendered, 76-7 
 kissing of, explained, 77 
 Canaanite cities described, 61-2 
 
 aboriginal tribes, corrupting influ- 
 ence of, 62-3 
 Carmina Samaritana, Gesenius on, 
 
 266-7 
 Cerealis slaughters Samaritans in the 
 time of Vespasian, 39 
 
INDEX 
 
 427 
 
 Cheyne, Dr, referred to, 365, note, on 
 
 Simon the Just 
 Chinese language, the only ideographic 
 
 tongue, 203-4 
 Christ, Samaritan account of, 165 
 Christian influence on Samaritan 
 
 religion, 192 
 Chronicles, books of, dates and his- 
 torical value considered, 106-7, "ots 
 Chronology of Josephus proved to be 
 
 inaccurate, 30 
 Circumcision, as observed by Samari- 
 tans, 137 
 contrast between Jewish and Samari- 
 tan rites, 137-8 
 Cities of the Plain, significance of the 
 prophetic reference to their destruc- 
 tion, 95-6 
 Coffins, use of, a peculiarity of the 
 
 Samaritans, 140 
 Colonists deported from Northern 
 
 Israel, who were they ? 20-2 
 Commodus Emperor, his persecution 
 
 of Samaritans, 1 69 
 Conder, Colonel, on the earliest form 
 of the Pentateuch, 207-96 
 localises the Avites near Nineveh, 21 
 on Hittite origin of the Semitic 
 script, 2 1 1-2 
 Covenants, the seven which bind the 
 
 Samaritans, 175 
 Cowley, Dr, on Mehablah, a Samari- 
 tan Satan, 1 90 
 Creation, Babylonian story of, 1 85 
 the doctrine of, taught by the 
 
 Samaritans, 1 8 1-2 
 tablets of Nineveh less primitive 
 
 than those of Genesis, 382 
 the ten words of, 184-5 
 Critical theory, higher summary of 
 
 argument against, 384-6 
 Cuthah identified by Dr Pinches as 
 Kutu, near Babylon, 21 
 
 D 
 
 D, symbol for Deuteronomist, 358 
 
 D (dalei/i) confused with R (resK), 
 
 292-4 
 Daliya, Samaritan High Priest frus- 
 trates Ptolemy's attempt to obtain 
 
 the temple treasures on Mount 
 
 Gerizira, 163 
 Dalman, Prof., on the difference 
 
 between Jewish and Samaritan 
 
 Passover rites, 141-2 
 Daliu, a bucliet in Hittite, according to 
 
 Conder origin oidaleth, 208-12 
 Daniel, book of, argument for its 
 
 inclusion in the Canon of O.T., 
 
 360, note 
 Dead, the, buried in coffins by the 
 
 Samaritans, 140 
 Death, how met by the Samaritans, 139 
 Decalogue, the, its authorship, 72-3 
 
 special sanctity of, 192 
 Degeneration, religions of the Canaan- 
 
 ites, 64 
 illustrations of its effect on Israel, 64 
 Deity, belief in a Supreme, universality 
 
 of, 84-5 
 Demonology among the Samaritans, 190 
 Deportation of conquered peoples by 
 
 Assyrian, its design, 17-21 
 bearing of, on the Jewish element in 
 Samaria, 17-20 
 Deuteronomy, date of, as suggested 
 by the Samaritan Pentateuch, 
 
 370-5 
 
 authorship, Mosaic, suggested by 
 
 choice of Mounts Ebal and 
 
 Gerizim for the ratification o' 
 
 Israel's covenant with JHWH, 
 
 6-7 
 higher critical account of its author- 
 ship, 65-6, 361-2 
 objections to the foregoing, 261-2 
 sacrifices in local High Places 
 
 sanctioned in, 66-9 
 not written to enjoin worship on 
 Mount Zion alone, 69-70 
 Deutsch on Samaritan version of 
 
 Pentateuch criticised, 288 
 De Wette carries the critical hypothesis 
 
 into Joshua, 358 
 Diodorus Siculus, Alexander the Great 
 
 poisoned by Antipater, 163 
 Dispute between Jews and Samaritans 
 before Ptolemy Philometer de- 
 scribed, 32-3 
 Doctrines common to Jews and 
 Samaritans, and their relation to 
 
428 
 
 INDEX 
 
 variants between the Samaritan 
 
 and Massoretic scripts, 31 1-2 
 Dove, image of a, alleged by Jews 
 
 to be worshipped by Samaritans, 
 
 179, note 
 Driver, Dr, on Wellhausen theory, 
 
 criticised, 373-4 
 
 E document, Ephraimite, 361 
 
 uses Elohim, 358 
 Ebal and Gerizim, why chosen by Moses 
 for ratification of Israel's covenant 
 with JHWH, 13-14 
 Ebal described, 14 
 on the stones on which the Law was 
 there engraved, 118 
 Ehud recognised as judge, 155 
 Eichhorn's theory as to the seventy-two 
 elders who translated the Septua- 
 gint, 321 
 development of Astruc's hypothesis, 
 358 
 Eli and Samuel, tendency to national 
 unity under, 26 
 caused the schism by usurping the 
 High Priesthood, 154 
 Eliashib, an old man when Nehemiah 
 came to Jerusalem, grandfather of 
 Manasseh, 364 
 Elijah's active ministry mainly west of 
 Jordan, 3 
 sacrifice on Carmel, bearing of on 
 
 ritual of Northern Israel, 77-8 
 unless had worshipped in Jerusalem, 
 Jewish honour of him inexplic- 
 able, 82 
 Elijah and Elisha in the Samaritan 
 chronicles, 158 
 may have worshipped in Jerusalem, 
 383, note 
 Elisha assumes a dififerent attitude to 
 Jehoshaphat from what he does to 
 Jehoram, 82 
 Elohim and JHWH interchanged, 299 
 Ephraim and Manasseh, Samaritans, 
 
 their trick, 167 
 Epiphanius on Samaritan heresies, 43 
 on Samaritan belief in angels, 187 
 
 Esarhaddon, appeal of deported 
 colonists to, considered, 22-3 
 
 Eschatology of Samaritans, its resem- 
 blance to John's Apocalypse, 196-7 
 
 Eternity of God, a Samaritan doctrine, 
 
 177 
 Evans, Sir Arthur, on Minoan script, 
 
 215-7, Appendix III., 404-11 
 Ezekiel and the origin of the so-called 
 
 Law of Holiness, 362 
 Ezra, on the illegality of Jewish inter- 
 marriage with Samaritans, 1 18 
 reason for thinking he was not the 
 author of the Priestly Code, 
 367-9 
 terminates friendly relations between 
 Jews and Samaritans, 11 8-9 
 
 Fetichism, African, descriled, 64 
 
 Fishing, the letter tzade pictograph of 
 a person fishing, 216 
 
 Flood, story in Genesis more primitive 
 than the corresponding story in 
 Babylonian records, 382-3 
 
 Foreigners resident in Galilee hostile 
 to the Jews, 35 
 
 Frankel's theory of a Samaritan inter- 
 polation of their Pentateuch from 
 the Septuagint, 329 
 
 Galilee, history of, under monarchy in 
 Samaria, 3 
 inhabitants, deported by Tiglath- 
 
 Pileser, 3 
 inhabitants, why they escaped per- 
 secution by Antiochus Epiphanes, 
 36 
 relation of, to Jewish revolt against 
 
 Antiochus Epiphanes, 35-6 
 stronghold of Judaism, 35 
 Garmun connives at circumcision, 42-3 
 Gaster's, Dr, Samaritan Book of Joshua, 
 
 149, 150 
 Genealogies, antediluvian, explained 
 as given in Samaritan text, 344 
 
INDEX 
 
 429 
 
 Genealogies in the Septuagint, 344, 
 345 
 variants in, as formed in the Samari- 
 tan Septuagint and Massoretic 
 versions considered, 345-7 
 Genesis, first chapter, variants between 
 Samaritan and Massoretic texts 
 noted, 280 
 first five verses, how read by Samari- 
 tans, 235 
 primitive character of ethnological 
 tables there, 382 
 Gerizim, Mount, described, 6-9 
 
 one of the seven things separated 
 
 from Godhead before all else, 183 
 
 how long sacrifices were offered in 
 
 temple there, 119-20 
 the true Bethel, 157 
 treated as God's appointed site for 
 national worship, when was it, 
 117 
 on Heavenly Paradise, and earthly 
 Eden, 198 
 Gesenius, classification of variants 
 between Samaritan and Massoretic 
 texts, 282-305 
 collection of Samaritan hymns by, 
 
 266 
 on Asaria de Rossi's theory of cor- 
 ruption of the LXX. by Alex- 
 andrian Greeks, 328-9 
 on differences between the Samaritan 
 , and Massoretic Pentateuch 
 reviewed and criticised, 305 
 on grammar accommodated to that 
 of the Samaritan dialect, 239-45 
 thesis on the Samaritan Pentateuch, 
 276 
 Gezer, antiquarian discoveries in, 61-2 
 Gibbon on Roman Empire under 
 
 Hadrian and the Antonines, 40 
 Ginsburg, on variants involving the 
 
 matres lectionis, 326 
 Glory of the Lord, hypostatised by 
 
 Marqah, 180 
 God, glory of, 175, 181 
 Graetz, on scene at Naioth when 
 
 Samuel prophesised, 98-9 
 Guerin, account of Nablus, 8 
 description of ruins on Ebal and 
 Gerizim, 13, 14 
 
 H 
 
 Hadrian, Emperor, in Samaritan 
 history, 167-9 
 erects a temple to Czesar on Mount 
 Gerizim, 168 
 Hadrian's original favour to the 
 Samaritans withdrawn, 168 
 rebukes Jewish High Priest for 
 idolatry, 167 
 Haupt, P., on our Lord's origin, refuted, 
 
 22, note 
 Hebrew, language spoken in Palestine 
 in time of the Patriarchs, 239-40 
 greater resemblance to Samaritan 
 
 than Jewish Aramaic, 258 
 language spoken both by Samaritans 
 and Jews in time of Haggai and 
 Malachi, 257 
 Heidenheim on Samaritan hymns, 262 
 in his collective poem on Unity of 
 God as taught by Samaritans, 
 180 
 Hellenic Empire, condition of Samari- 
 tans under, 31-2 
 Heraclius, resultless victories of, 46-7 
 Hermon, Mount, seen from top of 
 
 Mount Ebal, 14 
 Herod, alleged cruelty of, to the 
 Samaritans, 165 
 generous treatment of the Samaritans, 
 37-8 
 Hexateuch, the, how it looks to a 
 reader ignorant of higher critics, 
 356-8 - 
 critical theory of its constitution and 
 origin, 358-63 
 Hezekiah as Assyrian Viceroy, 
 probability of, 4, 14, 18 
 his Passover for all Israel, date of, 4, 
 16 
 Hierarchies, angelic, not recognised by 
 
 Samaritans, 188 
 Higher critical theory, argument 
 
 against it summarised, 384-6 
 Historic character of Samaritan 
 
 religion exhibited, 143-4 
 History of a people revealed in its 
 
 language, 236-7 
 Hittite writing, hieroglyphic nature of, 
 206 
 
430 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Hizqiah, the Samaritan High Priest 
 
 and Alexander the Great, 163 
 Hogarth on the death of Alexander 
 
 the Great by poison, 163 
 Hommel on the cuneiform origin of 
 
 the Samaritan script, 208 
 Hypothesis, higher critical, its origin 
 
 and development, 358-9 
 Hyrcanus, John, conquest of Samaria , 35 
 Samaritan temple burned by, 141 
 Samaritanism, alleged conversion to, 
 141 
 
 I 
 
 Ibri character, the name given to the 
 Samaritan in the Talmud, 350 
 regarded as that in which the Law 
 was first given. 
 Images not used in Samaritan worship, 
 
 200 
 Immortality of the soul, a doctrine of 
 
 the Samaritans, 187 
 Intermarriage between Jews and 
 Samaritans forbidden by Ezra and 
 Nehemiah, sketch of this incident, 
 28-30 
 criticism of this action, 29-30 
 Israel, deportation of under Sargon, 
 
 not universal, 15, 16 
 Israelite prophets, proof that they were 
 not evolved from the so-called 
 medicine man of the heathen, 84-5 
 religion, essentially historic character 
 of, 143-4 
 Israelites, differences between the 
 Northern and Southern tribes con- 
 sidered and explained, 26-7 
 number of under Joshua, 59 
 Israelitish disunion under the Judges 
 
 and its results, 60-1 
 Itacism, what it proves in regard to a 
 MS., 285 
 
 J 
 
 J document, Judaean in origin, 361 
 
 uses JHWH, 358 
 Jaddua, did he ever meet with Alex- 
 ander the Great, 107, note, 112 
 
 JE document, not a law-book, 371 
 Jerome on Samaritan practices and 
 
 tenets, 43 
 Jerusalem, fall of, not mentioned in 
 
 Samaritan history, 166-7 
 Jewish charges against the Samaritans, 
 178 
 sacred history superior to the corres- 
 ponding Samaritan history, 172 
 theology compared and contrasted 
 
 with Samaritan, 199-200 
 theory of the origin of the Samaritans, 
 
 15 
 Jews, sects of the, referred to by Abu'l 
 Path, 164 
 separation of the, from the Samaritan, 
 and the importance of fixing MS. 
 date, 356 
 Josephus, account of the Samaritan 
 submission to Antiochus Epiphanes, 
 33-4 
 bias of, against the Samaritans, 33 
 on the presence of Israelites in 
 Northern Palestine subsequent 
 to tlie deportations under Sargon, 
 :6-i7 
 proof of the unreliability of his 
 
 writings, 366 
 testimony as to the Essenes, 103 
 writings of, known to the Samaritans, 
 164 
 Joshua, absence of book of, from the 
 Samaritan Recension, its bearing 
 on the higher critical theory of the 
 origin of the Pentateuch, 359-fo 
 book of, assumed to be known by 
 Israelites according to the 
 prophets Amos and Hosea, 96-7 
 evidence that it was known to 
 
 Samaritans, lo-ll 
 no part of the Law when the Samari- 
 tans got their recension of the 
 Pentateuch, 359 
 placed by Jews on different plane 
 from the Five Books of Moses, 
 359-60 
 reason why it is excluded from 
 Samaritan canon, 97 
 Joshua, Samaritan book of, described, 
 146-7, 155-6 
 resemblance to the Jewish book, 150-1 
 
INDEX 
 
 431 
 
 Joshua, the Jewish leader, honour paid 
 him by the Samaritans, 145 
 
 Josiah's religious reformation, its bear- 
 ing on the Samaritan claims to be 
 of Israelite origin, 16-20 
 its influence on the Samaritan 
 people, 20-2, 1 1 5-7 
 
 Judea, kingdom of, described : its 
 pastoral character, 4 
 
 Judges, legends restraint in, 378 
 
 Justasa, a robber set up as iiing, 
 44 
 
 Justin II., severe oppression of Samari- 
 tans by, 46 
 
 Justin Martyr, his connection with 
 Samaria, 40 
 
 Justinian's oppression of Samaritans 
 and the rebellion it caused, 45-6 
 
 JuynboU, Dr, on Samaritan book of 
 Joshua, 147 
 
 K 
 
 Kabhodh (Divine Glory), hypostatised 
 
 by Marqah, 180 
 Kahle, Dr Paul, on Samaritan Targum, 
 
 267, note 
 Karaites resemble doctrinally the 
 
 Samaritans, 201 
 Khosrbu Purviz, his conquest of Pales- 
 tine, 46 
 many Samaritans crucified by, 46 
 Kingship, why more powerful in Davidic 
 
 kingdom, 104.-S 
 Kircheim's classification of variants 
 between the Massoretic and 
 Samaritan texts criticised, 284 
 Kohn, Dr, classification of the same 
 criticised, 284 
 on alleged corruption of Septuagint 
 
 by Alexandrian Greeks, 321 
 on possible theories to explain the 
 variances between the Samaritan 
 and the Septuagint texts of the 
 Torah, 327 
 on Samaritan Torah as foundation 
 
 of Septuagint, 329-35 
 criticism of the above theory, 335-41 
 
 Lammens, on assistance given to 
 Saracen conquerors of Palestine, 47 
 Lampridius on alleged introduction by 
 Heliogabalus of Samaritan rites 
 into the syncretistic-worship of the 
 God whose name he bore, 41 
 Lang, Andrew, referred to, 64 
 Law, the book of, discovered in temple, 
 Dr Naville's theory about it, 375-7 
 was it the whole Torah ? 376 
 an individualised copy of the law, 375 
 it was recognised to be the book of 
 the law although by hypothesis 
 the Jews had no law-book, 66, 
 375-6 
 the whole of it, known to Amos, 
 
 evidence for, 81-2 
 historic incidents refened to by Amos 
 
 and Hosea, 94-5 
 proof that it dates as far back as 
 Samuel, 381 
 Leaf, on knowledge of Phoenician 
 
 alphabet in Crete, 1400 B.C., 233 
 Levirate law, observation of, by 
 Samaritans, 138 
 differences between Jewish and 
 Samaritan observances, with 
 reasons for them, 139 
 Lewis, Mrs, her Palestinian Lectionaries, 
 
 166 
 Lidzbarski, quoted, 224 
 Lost ten tribes of Israel discussed, 15 
 
 M 
 
 M {mem) and N (jiun) confused, 294-5 
 
 Macalister, Dr, discoveries at Gezer, 
 61-2, 64 
 
 Maccabasan script, examined, 224-5 
 struggle, the Samaritan immunity 
 during it, 33-4 
 
 MacEwen, Prof., on sprinkling of the 
 Paschal lamb's blood on the fore- 
 head of children, etc., 132 
 
 M'Fayden, Prof., on Ephod and Tera- 
 
 • phim, 72-3, note 
 
 Madden, History of Jewish Coinage, 227 
 
432 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Magic, believed in by the Samaritans, 
 
 190 
 Magus, Simon, claim to be the Paraclete, 
 
 195 
 claim to be the Samaritan Christ, 195 
 Man, constitution of, as taught in 
 
 Samaritan theology, 186 
 Manasseh, the fugitive Jewish High 
 Priest, critical theory about him 
 reviewed, 364 
 his influence on the text of Samaritan 
 
 Torah, 325 
 probable author of the Samaritan 
 doctrine regarding Mount 
 Gerizim as God's appointed seai 
 of national worship, 11 7-8 
 reason why he excluded the book of 
 Joshua from the Samaritan 
 Torah, 153-4 
 Manasseh and his brother Ephraim 
 
 trick Samaritan worshipper, 167 
 Mandeville, Sir John, account of the 
 Samaritans in fourteenth century, 
 51-2, 120 
 Manir, ben, name given to Samaritan 
 
 Messiah, 192 
 Manuscripts, early, how they were 
 
 written, 285-6 
 Marqah, the Samaritan theologian, his 
 Book of Wonders, 268 
 date and teaching of, 174 
 Marriage ceremony, Samaritan and 
 
 Jewish contrasted, 138 
 Martyr, Justin, on the Paschal lamb, 
 
 131 
 Marwick, Wm., on Samaritan worship 
 
 of a dove, 179, note 
 Massoretic recension of Pentateuch, the 
 importance of determining its 
 relation to the Samaritan, 355 
 text, reasons for discounting its 
 
 critical value, 324 
 was it prior to the Samaritan ? 283 
 Mattura, his hymns referred to, 262 
 Maundrel, Henry, account of Samari- 
 tans in seventeenth century, 53-4 
 Menahem, estimate of population in his 
 
 time, 17 
 Men, Dr, on Samaritan Christology, 
 194 
 poem on the Thaheb, 194, 268 
 
 Messiah, Samaritan belief in the, 193 
 Millennium, the, in Samaritan doctrine, 
 
 196-7 
 Mills, Dr, description of Samaritan 
 synagogue at Nablus, 121 
 on dress worn by the Samaritans when 
 
 at worship, 122 
 on Samaritan creed, 175 
 on Samaritan disbelief in prayers for 
 
 the dead, 140 
 on Samaritan doctrine of the resurrec- 
 tion, 197 
 on Samaritan right to observe the 
 Passover at a later date when 
 unable to do so at the correct 
 date, 130 
 Mohammedan influence on Samaritan 
 religion, 192 
 influence on Samaritan theology, 
 175-6 
 Mohammedanism, rise and victorious 
 
 progress of, 47-8 
 Monotheism of the Samaritans, 175 
 Montgomery, Dr, hymn of Samaritans 
 translated, 177 
 on legal relation between Jews and 
 Samaritans as recognised by 
 Jews, 38 
 on persecution of Samaritans by 
 
 Abbaside khalifs, 48 
 on resistance of Samaritans to 
 Khosrou Purviz, the Persian 
 conqueror of Palestine, 46 
 on Samaritan Feast of Unleavened 
 
 Bread, 132 
 on Samaritan names for angels, 188 
 on Samaritan names for devils, 1 89 
 on story of Garmun and Baba Rabba, 
 42-3 
 Morinus and the Samaritan Pentateuch, 
 
 275 
 Morning and evening prayers offered 
 
 by the Samaritans, 140-1 
 Mosaism in Northern Israel, its vitality, 
 
 proof of, 58 ff. 
 Moses in Samaritan theology almost 
 equivalent to Christ in Christianity, 
 192-3 
 the one mediator of a divine revela- 
 tion, 191 
 prayer of, a hymn translated, 263-4 
 
INDEX 
 
 433 
 
 Mother roll of Massoretic and Samari- 
 tan texts written in angular script, 
 295-6 
 Music, its place in prophetic worship of 
 JHWH, 93 
 no, in Samaritan synagogue worship, 
 122 
 Mythology, the theology of childhood, 
 173 
 
 N 
 
 Nablus, city and valley of, described, 
 7-8 
 roll of Samaritan Pentateuch des- 
 cribed, Appendix II., 396-403 
 Nachman, Moses ben, notice of his 
 visit to Palestine in thirteenth 
 century, 51 
 recognises likeness of Samaritan to 
 Maccabaean script, 227 
 Nassau, R. H., referred to and quoted, 
 
 64 
 Naville's theory of the original language 
 of the Old Testament, Appendix 
 IV., 412-24 
 on the Roll of the Law found in the 
 time of Josiah, 375 
 Nazirites in Northern Israel, their sig- 
 nificance, 81 
 Nehemiah, date and historic value of, 
 106-7, note 
 his termination of friendly relations 
 between Jews and Samaritans, 
 119 
 his zeal against Jewish intermarriage 
 with the Samaritans considered 
 and criticised, 29 
 Neubauer's Samaritan Chronicle, its 
 discovery, 146 
 review and analysis of, 159 
 Nicaso, wife of Manasseh and daughter 
 
 of Sanballat, 29 
 NichoUs, Samaritan grammar referred 
 
 to, 253 
 Nomenclature, significance of Biblical, 
 especially as regards the use of 
 JHWH and Baal in Hebrew 
 proper names, 57-9 
 
 O 
 
 Objections to the higher critics' views 
 about the origin and development 
 of the Hexateuch stated, 363-4 
 Omnipresence of God, a Samaritan 
 
 doctrine, 177-80 
 Origen, influence of, in modifying the 
 text of the Septuagint, 325 
 on the resurrection as not taught by 
 
 Samaritans, 197 
 on Roman persecution of Samaritans, 
 its reason, 41 
 Original text of Samaritan Torah, 
 reason for dating it in Ahab's time, 
 325 
 Ox, the, was it a symbol of JHWH, 72 
 
 P, symbol of Priestly Code, 358 
 Palestine, condition of, in Joshua's day, 
 60 
 not fully subdued by Joshua, 60 
 the three nationalities settled there in 
 Joshua's time, 59-60 
 Paradigms of verbal forms, 270-4 
 Parallelism absent from Samaritan 
 
 poetry, 268 
 Passover, the, adjustment of it by the 
 Samaritans to the Sabbath, 126 
 contrast between the Jewish and 
 
 Samaritan, 130- 1 
 description of a Samaritan, 126-30 
 feast carefully observed by Samari- 
 tans, 124-5 
 ritual, summary of differences between 
 the Jewish and Samaritan forms, 
 141-2 
 Samaritan method of fixing its date, 
 125-6 
 Pattie, R. B., explanation of Hezekiah's 
 
 Great Passover, 16 
 Pentateuch alone canonical among the 
 Samaritans, 145 
 complete in all its parts when it 
 
 reached Samaria, proof, 363 
 critical theory as to its origin and 
 constitution criticised, 361-3 
 2 E 
 
434 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Pentateuch, portions of it, possibly due 
 to Samuel and the schools of the 
 prophet^, 377-8 
 read through by Samaritans between 
 
 sunrise and sunset, 376, note 
 reasons for believing the Samaritans 
 had a complete book before 
 the date of Ezra, 384-5 
 Samaritans, historical evidence ren- 
 ders probable its existence prior 
 to the date assigned to the Jewish 
 Pentateuch by the critics, 54-6 
 weakness of the critics' reasons for 
 including the book of Joshua in 
 it, 360-1 
 Personality of God, a Samaritan 
 
 doctrine, 176 
 Petermann, Dr, list of variants between 
 Samaritan and Massoretic texts, 
 279-82 
 on blood sprinkling in the Passover 
 
 ritual, 132 
 on Samaritan mode of reading 
 
 Hebrew, 234-5 
 on the four ruling angels in Samaritan 
 teaching, 189 
 Philo on the Essene community, 103 
 Polygamy though permitted unknown 
 
 among the Samaritans, 138 
 Population of Palestine in time of 
 
 Joshua, 59 
 Prayer offered by Samaritans both 
 
 morning and evening, 140-1 
 Priesily Code (so called according to 
 critics) brought to Jerusalem from 
 Babylon by Ezra, 362-3 
 difficulty of accepting the critics' 
 account of its prompt acceptance 
 at Jerusalem, 367-70 
 difficulty of P being received in 
 Samaria at the instance of 
 Manasseh, 368-9 
 evidence for its priority to Deuter- 
 onomy, 375 
 objections to its early date considered 
 
 and met, 382-4 
 proof that it must have been 
 known in Samaria before Ezra 
 came to Jerusalem, 370 
 Priests, why more influential in Southern 
 than Northern Israel, 27, 104 
 
 Procopius'account of Samaritan rebellion 
 under Anastasius, 45 
 on alleged Samaritan conversion to 
 Christianity, 46 
 Pronunciation of Hebrew letters con- 
 sidered, 231-2 
 Prophetic and Essene communities 
 compared, their points of resem- 
 blance and contrast, 103 
 denunciation of worship at the High 
 
 Places, cause of, 65-6 
 guilds under Elijah and Elisha, 101-2 
 responsibility for the books of Samuel 
 
 and Kings in the Canon, 107-8 
 role in Israelite religion, 144 
 worship (prophetic) and synagogue 
 worship practically identical, 97 
 worship included reading of the Law 
 
 and musical services, 93 
 worship of JHWH, its form in 
 Northern Israel, 91-3 
 Prophets alleged to be authors of 
 historical books of the Bible, 105-8 
 Prophets and priests, relations to one 
 another irf Northern and in 
 Southern Israel, 85-9 
 Prophets, customary badge or mark to 
 distinguish them, 102-3 
 description of how they occupied 
 
 their time, 105 
 in Northern Israel, how far their 
 influence tended to supersede 
 that of the priests, 89-92 
 in Northern Israel more powerful 
 
 than in the South, 27, 103 
 political impotence in Davidic King- 
 dom, 104 
 schools of the, described, 97-106 
 Ptolemaeus Lagi deports Samaritans to 
 
 Egypt, 32 
 Purim, Feast of, as observed by 
 Samaritans, 136 
 contrast between the Samaritan and 
 the Jewish observance, 136 
 
 Q 
 
 Qiblah, the Samaritan, 161 
 the Israelite, 161 
 the true decided, 161 
 
INDEX 
 
 435 
 
 R 
 
 Rabbin, on the unlawfulness of any 
 translation of the Law out of 
 Hebrew into a foreign tongue, 321 
 exception in favour of Greek, 322 
 on the variations the translators 
 introduced, 322 
 Religion, its relation to ritual, 173-4 
 Resurrection, Samaritan belief in the 
 
 doctrine of the, 197 
 Revelation of God's will, believed in by 
 all nations, 83-4 
 Samaritan belief in their possession 
 of, through Moses, 191 
 Rhyme, use of, in Samaritan hymns, 265 
 Ritual worship in Northern Israel 
 
 considered and described, 77-81 
 Rolls, the most ancient form of books, 
 
 230 
 Rouge, Dr, on Semitic script as derived 
 from Egypt, 209-1 1 
 
 Sabbath, the, strictly observed by 
 Samaritans, 123 
 Samaritan adjustment of the Pass- 
 over to, 126 
 Sakhra, a Holy Stone of the Samaritans, 
 described, 12 
 tradition regarding it, 12 
 Samaria, city and state of, described, 2 
 considered as an Assyrian Province, 
 
 its extent and character, 4 
 historic interest of, 5, 6 
 present extent and condition of, 7-9, 
 
 14 
 early history of, 25-7 
 record of its history under the 
 Hasmonseans and Herodians, 
 34-6 
 united to Judah under Herod, 37 
 Samaritan sea- coast occupied by 
 
 Philistines, 5 
 Samaritan Aramaic and the Targum 
 in that tongue considered, 246 
 compared with Hebrew and Chaldee, 
 246-55 
 Samaritan Hebrew literature, scanti- 
 ness of, 260 
 
 Samaritan aspect of Israelite religion, 
 
 independent of and more primitive 
 
 than that furnished by Judaism, 
 
 evidence of this, 355 
 
 Samaritan burial, method of, described, 
 
 139 
 Samaritan Canon, reason for non- 
 inclusion of literary prophetic 
 prophecies, 110 
 reason for the non-inclusion of the 
 books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, 
 and the Kings, 108-10 
 Samaritan claim to Israelite origin 
 considered, 14-24 
 claim to Israelite origin shown to be 
 well-founded, 352 
 Samaritan claim to a share in Jewish 
 temple worship, 23 
 creed outlined, 174-5 
 Samaritan disfavour with Romans, 
 evidence of, 41 
 history of the people, 25 ff. 
 history as affected by Bar-Gochba,40-i 
 history as suggesting the possession 
 of a copy of the whole law by 
 that people in the time of 
 Esarhaddon, 379-80 
 history as suggesting the existence 
 of the whole law in the time of 
 David and Solomon, 380-1 
 hymns collected by Gesenius, 174 
 independence of the Jews, 353-4 
 independence of the Jews, considered 
 in its bearing and value in regard 
 to the Judaic religion and its 
 sacred books, 25-6 
 Samaritan letter to Antiochus Epi- 
 
 phanes, 33-4 
 Samaritan literature in Aramaic and 
 Hebrew very scanty, 260 
 latest only in Arabic, 260 
 sacred, destroyed by Hadrian, 168-9 
 Samaritan Mosaism prior to fall of 
 
 Northern Kingdom, 352 
 Samaritan Passover, consequence of 
 difference of date compared with 
 the Jewish, 39 
 observance and its present site 
 described, 12-13 
 Samaritan Pentateuchal manuscripts 
 enumerated, Appendix I., 387-95 
 
436 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Samaritan Pentateuchal text, date of 
 
 divergences from Massoretic, 316-8 
 
 Pentateuchal text, was it copied from 
 
 an MS. in the square character ? 
 
 289-91 
 Pentateuchal text, was it a retrans- 
 
 lation of the Septuagint, 327-8 
 Samaritan pronunciation of the Hebrew 
 letters, peculiarity of, 232 
 rebellion under Zeno and its punish- 
 ment, 44 
 recension of Torah, evidence for its 
 
 antiquity based on the script in 
 
 which it is written, 355 
 relations to the Jewish revolt under 
 
 Nero, 39 
 ritual like that of the Jewish 
 
 Sephardim, 121-2 
 ritual worship before the captivity, 
 
 proof that it resembled the 
 
 ritual common in Judea even in 
 
 post-exilic times, 79-81 
 Samaritan Sanhedrin, 39 
 
 script compared with that of 
 
 Maccabaean inscriptions, 225-6 
 script, evolution of, 225-6 
 script, Jewish allegation that the 
 
 Law was first given in, 350 
 Greek version, was there a ? 32 
 sympathy with Romans under 
 
 Pompey, 37 
 Targum considered, 261 
 Torah, original text of, probably as 
 
 old as the date of Ahab at latest, 
 
 325 
 worship on Gerizim, a replica of 
 Jewish worship on Mount Zion, 
 30-1 
 writing, peculiar features of, 228-9 
 Samaritanism, proof that it is an earlier 
 type of Israel's religion than that 
 established in Judea by Ezra, 200 
 Samaritans, description of their physical 
 
 appearance, 24 
 Samaritans, feast of the New Moon still 
 
 celebrated by, 123-4 
 Samaritans, the, flight to Britain 
 alleged, 48 
 history of, under the Antonines, 41 
 history of, during the Crusades not 
 recorded, 48 
 
 Samaritans, history of, under the 
 Hellenic Empire, 31-6 
 persecution of, under Hadrian, 41 
 persecution of, under Christian 
 
 emperors, 41-2 
 persecution of, under the Eastern 
 
 Empire, 43-4 
 pertinacity of their faith and its 
 
 independence of the Jews, 46 
 seek refuge from persecution in 
 
 Persia, 46 
 welcome the victorious Saracens, 47 
 worship now confined to the Nablus 
 
 synagogue alone, 120 
 Samariticon, the, account of, 238 
 origin of Septuagint alleged from, 
 
 330-3 
 Samuel the prophet, his share in the 
 production of the Pentateuch, 
 377-8 
 Samuel and the prophets, editors not 
 
 authors of Pentateuch, 381-2 
 Sanballat, Governor of Samaria, 28 
 father-in-law of Manasseh, 1 1 1 
 his temple on Mount Gerizim and 
 its history, 9-10, 112-3 
 Sargon, his account of conquest of 
 Samaria and deportation of its 
 inhabitants, 18 
 Sayce, Dr, on Hittite writing, 206 
 
 quoted, 331 
 Scaliger, Joseph, and the Samaritan 
 
 book of Joshua, 147 
 Script, the angular, its development 
 
 described, 296 
 Scripts, the oldest known Hebrew, 
 
 what are they ? 291-2 
 Semitic script, whence derived ? 206-10 
 
 new theory of its origin, 212-20 
 Septuagint, the, differences between it, 
 and the Samaritan and Massoretic 
 recensions of the Torah, 323-4 
 evidence- that it was not edited from 
 a Samaritan recension of the 
 Torah, 343, 355 
 importance of, in Greek-speaking 
 
 world, 324 
 its origin considered, 320-4 
 relation of later Talmudic Judaism 
 
 to it, 321-2 
 uncertainty as to its text, 324-5 
 
INDEX 
 
 437 
 
 Septuagint, use of by our Lord and his 
 apostles, Paul and Peter, 321 
 was it translated from a text which 
 implies a copy of the Torah 
 brought into Egypt by Jeremiah 
 or in his time ? 349 
 witness to the integrity of the 
 Pentateuch at a date antecedent 
 to Ezra, confirmed by the 
 Samaritan text of Torah, 350-1 
 was there a Samariticon ? 32 
 Seven things, the, for which the world 
 was created according to Samari- 
 tan teaching, 183 
 Shechem, Valley of, its historic associa- 
 tions, 5-7 
 Shema, the, not repeated by the 
 
 Samaritans, 177 
 Shobach, story of the defeat and death 
 
 of, 1 5 1-2 
 Simon the Maccabee, coins of, inscrip- 
 tions in Samaritan characters, 
 
 349 
 probably High Priest at Alexander's 
 invasion, 365 
 Simon the Just, not identical with 
 
 Simon II., 365, note 
 Sin, original, doctrine of, not known 
 
 to Samaritans, 187 
 Smith, Robertson, Professor, quoted, 
 
 173 
 Solomon's ceremony at dedication of 
 
 temple quite in keeping with 
 
 the Priestly Code, 381-4 
 Spirituality of God, a Samaritan 
 
 doctrine, 177-8 
 Stafford, Roland G., account of 
 
 Samaritan Passover, 13 
 Stahelin and De Wette carry the 
 
 Astruc hypothesis into Joshua, 
 
 358 
 Stanley, Dean, quoted, 365, note 
 Stars, the, Samaritan association of 
 
 angels with, 1 90 
 Stones, the twelve, on Mount Gerizim, 
 
 described, 10 
 Story of Garmun and Baba Rabba, 
 
 42-3 
 Suetonius referred to, 40 
 Surdi, Samaritan name of Artaxerxes, 
 
 162 
 
 Tabernacle, the, symbol of national 
 
 unity in early Israel, 61 
 Tabernacles, the Feast of, as observed 
 
 by Samaritans, 136 
 Talmudic tract Kuthim contains dicta 
 
 regarding the relation of Jews and 
 
 Samaritans, 38 
 Targum, the Samaritan, described, 180 
 Temples, the, to JHWH in Upper and 
 
 Lower Egypt, a proof that sub- 
 ordinate shrines were allowed in 
 
 later Jewish history, 67-8 
 Testimony to a people's religion, what 
 
 gives it value and reliability, i 
 Thaheb, belief in the, 193 
 
 coming of the, or Messiah and the 
 
 end of the world, 172 
 date of his advent, 196 
 Theodosian Code, its penalties for 
 
 Samaritan worship, 44 
 Thukot (Succoth), Pharaoh had a 
 
 country house at, 331 
 Thursday, the luckiest day for a 
 
 wedding, 138 
 Tiamat, mother of the gods, split up 
 
 by Marduk, in Babylonian plan of 
 
 Arabia, 185 
 Titus not noticed in Samaritan history, 
 
 166 
 Tobiah the Ammonite, significance of 
 
 his having a chamber in the temple 
 
 at Jerusalem, 118 
 Tolidek, a Samaritan chronicle de- 
 scribed, 146 
 Torah, the, date of alleged bringing 
 
 of it to Samaria by Manasseh, 
 
 111-2 
 complete, known in Samaria, before 
 the return of Zerubbabel to Jeru- 
 salem, proof of this, 1 17 
 known to Samaritans before the days 
 
 of Ezra, 232 
 sanctity of, in Samaritan belief, 191 
 Tractarian movement in England, its 
 
 analogy to Ezra's reforms, 386 
 Tradition regarding the twelve stones 
 
 on Mount Gerizim, 10 
 Transjordanic province, its tenure by 
 
 Samaritans precarious, 2-3 
 
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