The Samaritan Temple at Mount Gerizim
When the men of Judah returned from Babylon to rebuild the House of the Lord in Jerusalem, the people of the land — those whom the king of Assyria had brought from Babylon and Cuthah and Avva — came to Zerubbabel and…
Biblical Narrative
When the men of Judah returned from Babylon to rebuild the House of the Lord in Jerusalem, the people of the land — those whom the king of Assyria had brought from Babylon and Cuthah and Avva — came to Zerubbabel and to the heads of the fathers' houses and said: Let us build with you; for we seek your God, as ye do, and we sacrifice unto Him since the days of Esarhaddon king of Assyria. But Zerubbabel and Jeshua said: Ye have nothing to do with us to build a house unto our God; we ourselves together will build unto the Lord, the God of Israel, as Cyrus the king of Persia hath commanded us.
Rebuffed at the Temple gate, the northern community withdrew to Mount Gerizim, the mount of blessing, where Moses had commanded the tribes to rear an altar of unhewn stones (Deuteronomy 27). There, in the days of Sanballat the governor of Samaria, they raised a sanctuary of their own, and ministered before it according to a Torah of five books — the Pentateuch — without the Prophets, without the Writings, and without Jerusalem.
Centuries later, when a Galilean Rabbi sat weary by Jacob's well, a Samaritan woman drew water and asked him: Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship. He answered her: Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. The schism that began with the rebuilding of the Temple in the days of Cyrus had not yet healed five hundred years later, and the wound, in some measure, has never closed.
To this day a remnant of the sons of Joseph — perhaps eight hundred souls — keep the Sabbath, slaughter the Pesach lamb on the slopes of Gerizim, and read from a Torah scroll in their own hand and in their own letters, claiming to be the true keepers of the covenant of Sinai while their southern brethren went after the prophets and the kings.
Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.John 4:20
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The sanctuary on Mount Gerizim, long known only from literary sources — Josephus, the New Testament, and the Samaritan chronicles — was finally located and excavated by Yitzhak Magen on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority between 1982 and 2008. His twenty-six-season campaign uncovered an immense walled precinct on the summit of Tel er-Ras and Tel el-Khirbeh, with a sacred enclosure of some 96 by 98 metres dating to the mid-fifth century BCE — exactly the period of Nehemiah and the Sanballat papyri.
The first phase of the precinct, with its monumental ashlar gates and its altar of unhewn fieldstones, predates anything Josephus described. Josephus (Antiquities XI.302–347) places the temple's founding in the days of Alexander the Great, c. 332 BCE, but Magen's stratigraphy and his corpus of more than 380 inscribed dedications — in Aramaic, Hebrew, and proto-Samaritan script — push the foundation back roughly a century and a half. The settlement around the sanctuary grew into a city of perhaps ten thousand inhabitants by the second century BCE.
John Hyrcanus, son of Simon Maccabee, destroyed the precinct in 111 or 110 BCE — a date fixed by the latest coins beneath the destruction layer (Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II) and by Josephus (Antiquities XIII.255–256). The Hasmonean act was a calculated assertion of Jerusalem's monopoly on legitimate worship; for the Samaritans it was the second great wound, after the rebuff under Zerubbabel.
The Wadi Daliyeh papyri, recovered from a cave north of Jericho in 1962 and published by Frank Moore Cross, sealed the case for a Samaritan governing dynasty: legal documents dated by the regnal years of Persian kings name a sequence of governors of Samaria — Sanballat I, Delaiah, Shelemiah, and Sanballat III — confirming the biblical Sanballat as a historical person and a member of a dynasty that lasted at least four generations.
Mount Gerizim is the only Persian-period sacred precinct in the southern Levant excavated on this scale; its mid-fifth-century date overturns Josephus and reframes the entire Samaritan question.Yitzhak Magen, Mount Gerizim Excavations II (2008), paraphrased