Boid on the Samaritan Interpretation of the Torah

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. As far as I know, archaeology supports the orthodox view. There are scholars that say there was once a temple building, citing some conflicting archaeological evidence and depictions on coins. While admitting I haven’t had the time to read the material properly, it does seem to me that what might well have looked like the front of a typical Temple building, looking much like the front of the State Library of New South Wales or the National Museum of Australia [I like the name!] in Sydney, with steps leading up to a porch behind pillars and elaborate bronze doors, could still have been regarded as a convenience to keep the congregation dry. It was in fact a fane. Stephen was murdered for saying all this.

Now you will see why Coptic churches have stars painted on the ceiling, or why some Anglican churches have stars painted on the ceiling over what is actually called the Tabernacle, except that this is a box. Normally over the High Altar in an Anglican church there is a wooden replica of an awning held up by posts. Without going into detail here, the designs of such churches resemble the variety of Samaritan synagogue that was modelled on the Tabernacle and its courts.

Now, to get back to Jubilees. The point is that there are only three physical forms marking a sacred place known to the author. The first two are an altar or a stele. These don’t mark a unique place. What marks the unique place, the Deuteronomic Place Chosen by God, is its boundary fence. This is of course the attested Samaritan view.

At this point I have to thank you for forcing me to think these questions through, because I suddenly realised the significance of some ancient data on the Dositheans. 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. 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 text is an Arabic translation from Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek, from an old document fragments of which were known to Origen secondhand or thirdhand. Graphically in Arabic the two sentences are nearly the same. Without having collated all the mss.in regard to this passage yet, my first impression is that the second form is the original. Either way, what is meant is that he 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 the House of God 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 the House of God and Gate of Heaven”. Obviously putting Jacob on the mountain goes against the implications of the text. Any natural reading must set him and Bethel on the Meadow with the steep slope of the mountain just before him. This means that some people could have maintained they had a prooftext for locating the Unique Place on the Meadow, and identifying Bethel with the Unique Place. This would explain the roofless sanctuary seen by the source behind Epiphanios. My guess is that we now have confirmation of a statement in old but undatable Samaritan sources, that there was a false Bethel set up by Jeroboam, and a true Bethel on the mountain. It would be natural to suppose this other Bethel to have been on the Meadow, where the narrative most naturally puts Jacob. I therefore take back my naming of the sanctuary described by Epiphanios as Dosithean, because what the Dositheans had on the Meadow was deliberately and symbolically a temporary structure. They clearly located the Unique Place on the Mountain. The warning to Jacob in Jubilees, that the place is indeed sacred but not to be enclosed because it is not the Unique Place, could be Jewish in origin, but is more naturally seen as written by a Samaritan warning against the error of setting up the enclosure on the Meadow still standing in the first c. A.D. and described secondhand by Epiphanios. Both the Dositheans and their opponents would have agreed on the form of the warning. It would not have been written by a Jew because a Jew would not have thought it necessary to make the statement or put the statement in the form of a warning. A Jew would have been thoroughly aware of what was claimed for the Mountain, but would not naturally have thought about any sanctuary on the Meadow. Besides, the wording is abrupt. A more detailed statement with a reference to the future after the time of the Judges would be expected if the author had been a Jew, and some kind of supporting statement elsewhere in the book and connected with Moses would have been expected. I get the impression the author didn’t want to speak at all about the sanctuary on the Meadow, and says as few words as he can manage.

There remains the fact that any natural reading of the narrative puts Jacob and Bethel on the Meadow. I would guess that Sakta set Jacob on the Meadow, set the House of God 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 was standing 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 Jacob was not on the Mountain, 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 can be a description rather than a placename. This is the explanation of an anomaly in the orthodox exegesis, which, although setting Jacob at Bethel on the Mountain, does not identify Bethel with the place where the Sanctuary is meant to be.

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 he could have was this booth. 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 his 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. 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. 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.