Identifying the Roofless Sacred Enclosure on the Balata Meadow

The book of Jubilees has an expanded version of Jacob’s second visit to Bethel [Jubilees XXXII: 16-36, an expansion of Genesis XXXV: 7]. The most notable addition is a statement that Jacob had intended to make the place a permanent sacred shrine, but was told by an angel not to do so. The angel’s words were: “Don’t build anything here, don’t treat this as a permanent sacred place, and don’t stay her. This is not the place”. There can be no doubt as to the precise meaning. The angel says that Bethel is not the unique place chosen by God as the permanent site for the Sanctuary [Mikdash] and Tabernacle [Mishkan]. He is not to go beyond what has already been done, the building of an altar, with the implication that even this is not to be permanent. What is not nearly so certain is what the author of the Book of Jubilees regarded as the rightful permanent sacred place. It is generally supposed that the implication is that it is to be Jerusalem, but this is a facile assumption not borne out by the wording. All that is said is that Jacob had intended to mark off the sacred ground by a permanent stone fence or set of stone markers. Nothing is added to imply that the construction would later be made more elaborate. “Jacob decided to set up an enclosure to the sacred ground, and to sanctify it as permanently holy”. [verse 22]. The implication of the words is that Jacob envisaged the eventual construction of a fane, not a temple. This emphasis on the sacredness of the ground rather than the sacredness of any permanent structure recalls the Samaritan viewpoint more readily than the viewpoint of a Jewish author.

The orthodox Samaritan position is that it is offensive to put up a stone building and call it by the Pentateuchal terms the Mishkan (Tabernacle) or the Mikdash (Holy Place). The offence of the Jerusalem Temple was compounded, in this view, by actually CALLING it Bet ha-Mikdash, the Sanctuary Building, a contradiction in terms. It is acceptable and in fact appropriate to put a stone wall round the sacred ground. At this point the Dositheans would have said the ground is only potentially Sacred without the Tabernacle, but would probably not have objected to it being marked off. It is acceptable and in fact necessary for practicality to put some kind of roof or awning over the Tabernacle. In short, any stone structure and any roof or awning is only to mark off the sacred courts and protect the Tabernacle from the weather. Samaritan orthodoxy says there never was a Samaritan temple, because their ancestors would not have been misguided enough to build such a thing. According to this view, the accounts of the destruction of the Samaritan temple are actually accounts of the destuction of the boundary fences and protective awnings and rooves. The archaeological evidence supports this view.[LONG NOTE HERE]].

The wording in Jubilees is unexpected. Why not a simple statement that an angel appeared to Jacob and told him the site of Bethel was not the site of the unique place? Why say Jacob formulated an intention that had to be explicitly rejected? It would be reasonable to read into the choice of expression a rejection of some sacred place known to the author. This is an effective way of strongly denying the validity of such a sacred place without naming it and without letting the reader know it actually exists and is connected with Jacob by those that recognise it. There is in fact ample attestation of sanctuaries on the Meadow.

The Dosithean reformer Sakta [Aramaic adaptation of Sextus], who can be dated to just after John the Baptist, set up a booth on the Balata Meadow. [[NOTE TO PROVE THE DATING]]. It is known that a pun was made on his name or title Sakta and the very similar Hebrew and Aramaic words meaning a booth. It is recorded that he declared the Mountain to be profane without the Tabernacle. This is only a repetition of the essential Dosithean dogma. He then said “From this booth we will go up to Mt. Gerizim”. A variant in the mss. has “Whoever has this booth will go up to Mt. Gerizim”. The documentation in Abu ‘l-Fateh. ابو الفتح here is translated from Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek, from an old document fragments of which were known to Origen secondhand or thirdhand. [[NOTE TO PROVE THIS STATEMENT]]. Graphically in Arabic the two sentences are nearly the same. My impression is that the second form is the original. [[NOTE ON THE READINGS OF THE MSS.]]. Either way, what is meant is that Sakta and his followers will be able to go up to Mt. Gerizim because the sacred place will have become holy or will be about to become holy. The significance of the booth is (a) that it is not a stone building; (b) that it is not an enclosure; (c) that being in it is a prerequisite for the manifestation of the Tabernacle on the Deuteronomic sacred place, or for the manifestation of the Vessels, which can be put in a newly made Tabernacle. Now it is known that all Samaritan denominations regarded the title “the Gate of Heaven” as belonging to the most holy part of the Mountain, the higher of the two peaks, said to be only fifteen cubits (exactly twenty-two and a half feet or fifty steps of convenient height) from the lowest heaven. Modern orthodoxy says Jacob’s words “This is none other than the House of God and I didn’t know, and this is the Gate of Heaven” mean that the House of God is the designated place for the Sanctuary on the Mountain, near where where Jacob was standing (but not exactly the same place), and the Gate of Heaven is the top of the higher peak. The two are not the same place, otherwise Jacob would have said “This is none other than the House of God and Gate of Heaven, and I didn’t know”.

I would guess that Sakta set Jacob and Bethel on the Meadow, set the sacred place designated to hold the Tabernacle on the Mountain where all other Samaritans set it, and set the Gate of Heaven on the higher peak where it was set by everyone else. Exegetically this works perfectly. If Jacob had meant to say that where he had slept was the House Of God and the peak was the Gate of Heaven, he would most naturally have said “This is the House of God and that is the Gate of Heaven”. It is exegetically necessary to take the second “this” as meaning “yon”, so we have to take the first “this” as meaning “yon”. So in Sakta’s view Jacob was not on the Mountain, so Bethel is not but on the Meadow, and Bethel is not the name of the Unique Place. Historically it is true that the word bethel can refer to a stele, and does not have to be a placename. [[ADD NOTE ON GREEK BORROWING BETYLOS]]. The view that Bethel was on the Meadow must once have been vey widespread, since the Samaritan Arabic Version calls the Meadow Marj al-Bahâ’ مرج البهاء “the Meadow of the Kavod”. [Glory in conventional translation. Epiphany of the Creative Power].

There remains the question of the function of the booth. My guess is that it was a physical necessity which for symbolic reasons could not be a stone building or even a tent, because a tent could be confused with the Tabernacle. (In Aramaic the same word has both meanings). Why it was needed was that Sakta had to be on the site of Bethel, waiting for something like what Jacob saw, as a signal that the Tabernacle was manifesting. This would explain why the hostile narrative emphasises that he never went up. As Jacob slept in the open, the most shelter that Sakta could have was this booth, if he was to emulate Jacob. The word sukkah when used in reference to the Festival of Sukkot, Tabernacles, Booths, means something that by definition is not completely weatherproof. The narrative says, as if proving Sakta’s error, that he never went up the mountain all his life. A more sympathetic statement might have been that his lifelong prayer was for the end of the Time of Turning Away, and that he was willing to sleep in rough shelter every night as part of his regimen. The account in Josephus mentioned in one of the notes to my article The Transmission of the Samaritan Joshua-Judges emphasises the gathering on the Meadow in preparation for the ascent. [[INSERT REFERENCE AND RE-WORD THE SENTENCE BEFORE]]. It does not actually say this was an immediate expectation. It only says their leader said he would take them up at an unspecified time and the Mosaic Tabernacle Vessels would appear at an unspecified time. It would not be incompatible with the wording to suppose they gathered every Pentecost [the date of the giving of the Torah] or on the first day of the first month [the date of inauguration of the Tabernacle] or on the date of occultation of the Tabernacle, and prayed for the end of the Time of Turning Away or Time of Error.

When the Priest Eli set up his sanctuary at Shiloh on the Meadow, he attracted very many supporters. [[SOURCE REFERENCE FROM SAMARITAN CHRONICLE AND I SAMUEL]]. His possession of what he said was the Ark is explained in the Samaritan narrative by saying it was a counterfeit. What is anomalous is that the narrative does not tell us how anyone could have imagined the Ark would be in a place other than the original. Even in the Jewish account in I Samuel there is no explanation of how the Ark was moved to Shiloh. The only workable solution to the Samaritan account is that Eli claimed that the place where Jacob had been standing was the same placre referred to in the words “This is none other than the house of God”. Why then are we not told this by the Samaritan chronicle? A reasonable supposition would be that even saying this would raise the question of whether the claim might be exegetically correct. It would also remind the reader of what I have argued must have been Sakta’s exegesis, setting Jacob and Bethel on the Meadow. Sakta’s exegesis would not have been a great threat, because he still agreed that the permanent place was on the Mountain. There was, however, one very visible sanctuary on the Meadow in the time of composition of the Samaritan chronicle, and visible in the time when Jubilees was composed. This one duplicated the form of the permanent sacred place. Its very existence raised the possibility of a line of exegesis that could equally have been applied to the Shilo sanctuary. [[QUOTE DETAILED DESCRIPTION COPIED BY EPIPHANIUS. QUOTE PROOF OF DATE OF ORIGINAL DESCRIPTION BEFORE 50 A.D.]]. We are not told how this sanctuary was regarded in its time, but that can be surmised with high probability from the earlier existence of an elaborate sanctuary called Bethel and identified with the place where Jacob slept. This structure called Bethel was standing in the time of Hosea. Its identification by those that recognised it with the place where Jacob slept can be deduced from Hosea XII: 5 “He (God through an angel) then finds him (Jacob) at Bethel, and there he speaks with us”. [[NOTE ON FUNCTION OF IMPERFECT TENSE HERE, and on the variant “with him” NOTE ON THE MANY FRAGMENTS OF THE BETHEL LITURGY IN HOSEA. NOTE ON THE IMPLICATIONS FOR FINDING THE ORIGIN OF THE LORD’S PRAYER IN THE LITURGY OF BETHEL]]. Whether the sanctuary called Bethel and visited by Hosea was in the same place as the structure described at secondhand by Epiphanius is uncertain, but either way, the antiquity of the identification of the place where Jacob stood, Bethel, with the site of the main permanent sanctuary is certain. The antiquity of the exegesis of Jacob’s words setting the permanent sacred place at Bethel, the place where Jacob slept, is therefore certain. The absolute date can be said to be as early as the first composition of the verse.

It has been said that the existence of two sacred places can be seen in the wording of the Book of Jubilees, with its strongly worded denial of the validity of a place that is quite literally unspeakable, because mentioning it even so as to deny its claims strengthened its claims. This wording seems to demand the assumption of a place regarded as illegitimate on the Balata Meadow, and a place regarded as legitimate on Mt. Gerizim. The date of Jubilees is uncertain. Its use of an otherwise unknown recension of the Torah, differing from the text now called Samaritan, and differing from MT and LXX, puts it no later than the start of the first c. B.C. The author must have known of the sanctuary described by Epiphanius and must have known the exegetical question related to its claim of legitimacy. It seems more attention needs to be given to the data in the section of the Samaritan chronicle corresponding to I Samuel but differing in detail. There is no need to go into the historicity of Eli or Jeroboam, or anything else in Samuel and Kings. The data in the Samaritan chronicle are ancient. Ancient is a relative term, but the general statement can be made that the chronicle belongs to the era that produced I Enoch and Jubilees.