A Samaritan Plan of Religious History

A SAMARITAN PLAN OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY Ruairidh MacMhanainn Bóid Second Edition THE AUTHOR HAS NO CONNECTION WITH THE STATE OF ISRAEL Back of title-page with publication information Back of title-page with publication information Back of title-page with publication information First edition Melbourne, on the anniversary of the Jacobite Uprising, 2023 Second edition with cumulative additions and expansions Brisbane, Armistice Day 2024 ii Cha dèanar buanachd gun chall Do luchd mo chòbhrach is mo chaomhaidh eadar mharbh agus bheò trid fad bliadhnaichean na beatha seo Chrìochnachadh an sgrìobhadh air ceann-bliadhna Ar-a-Mach nan Seumasach fo cheannas Theàrlich Shthiùbhairt. Chuidich mo bhean nach maireann Flòraidh Anna Patraìse BhailEòghainn Bhóid flùr nam ban le tachairt na h-obrach i Back of dedication page Back of dedication page Back of dedication page Back of dedication page ii CONTENTS FOREWORD CONVENTIONS AND METHOD I. INTRODUCTION 1. 2. 3. II. THE PLACE OF ASÂṬÎR XI AND XII 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. III. Possible Origin from a Hebrew Original ……………………….... 148 Condition of the Aramaic Text …………………………………... 149 The Form of Aramaic in this Text ……………………………….. 156 The Present Edition of the Text and its Translation ……………... 166 PRESENTATION OF THE TEXT OF ASÂṬÎR XI AND XII 1. 2. V. Circumstances of the Times with Extensive New Documentation ... 12 Main Distinctive Doctrines ………………………………………... 80 Authorship and the Right Form of the Sacred Place ……………..... 93 Relationship to the New Testament Relevant to Dating …………. 140 Relationship to Jewish Exegesis Relevant to Dating …………….. 147 THE TRANSMISSION OF THE TEXT OF ASÂṬÎR XI AND XII 1. 2. 3. 4. IV. Preamble ………………………………………….………………..... 1 Description of the Text Studied as the Framework …..…………...... 3 The Purpose and Form of this Study ……………………………....... 6 Transcript of the Aramaic Text …………………………………... 171 Translation ……………………………………………………......172 ANNOTATIONS TO THE TEXT AND TRANSLATION Annotations to Chapter XI …………………………………........ 176 Annotations to Chapter XII …………………………………....... 196 . VI. THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOSITHEAN DOCTRINE …………...... 221 VII. APPENDIX. CITATION AND USE OF ABU ’L-FATEḤ ……....... 243 VIII. SELECT CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. 2. 3. 4. Samaritan Texts …………………………………………….…..... 253 Samaritan Aramaic and Hebrew …………………………….….... 256 Samaritan Theology and History …………………........................ 258 Primary Documents other than Samaritan ………………….…..... 263 EXCURSUS ON THE TITLES XPICTOC AND XPHCTOC AND XPEICTOC i 266 Back of Contents page Back of Contents page Back of Contents page Back of contents page ii FOREWORD This book is the first ever thorough study of the Samaritan expression of the religion of Israel in the first and second centuries A.D., with some reference to the third century. Some later events foreshadowed by the events of the times are brought in. Such a work had always been thought impossible, for lack of documentation. I found documentation. The book by Kippenberg was a good start but only has limited scattered data. My work on this field, the first ever done with extensive documentation, started in 1972. The first publication was my chapter Use, Authority, and Exegesis of Mikra in the Samaritan Tradition in 1988. This book is meant to be complete for all changes in doctrine or disagreements in doctrine relevant to understanding the text read correctly for the first time, chapters XI and XII of the Asâṭîr. It is not meant to cover other aspects of doctrine systematically. It is only meant to cover doctrine, and not not other aspects of religion, such as the composition of the earliest extant hymns, or the rules for exegesis of the Torah. Some questions like these are treated briefly in passing to the extent needed. Some questions like these are treated in my other publications, and it is hoped that more such will follow. Warning is needed straight off to forestall one mistake already made by some readers, sometimes wilfully. This book is a study of Samaritan religion. It is not a study of Christianity, not even as a secondary theme. If some Christian writings are used, it is only for historical data on Samaritans, just like all the Samaritan and Jewish writings used, or archaeological findings. If some aspects of Christian doctrine or the policy of the Christian Church are traced, it is only to show how Samaritans were affected. Very much of what was worked out about the Christian Church and Christianity in the course of sorting out the real subject turned out to be important, but none of this was followed up any further than needed for the purpose of the book, so some arguments stop abruptly. No arguments about Samaritan religion in this book depend on anything said about Christianity. I am not interested in any form of discussion of what is said in this book about Christianity. Some comments on my book so far show there is no shortage of people eager to write about the Samaritans thinking no real knowledge of Judaism is needed. The common belief that knowing about the place of what is now the Samaritan Pentateuch in the development of the Pentateuch makes anyone expert on the Samaritan form of the religion of Israel can be dismissed. So can the belief that knowing about the archaeology of Samaria is enough. So can the belief that knowing about history is enough. So can the belief that having read late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Hebrew adaptations of older historical books or new Hebrew concoctions without knowing the history behind them gives such expert knowledge. See the entry in the Bibliography on the Comprehensive History. The authors asserting all these beliefs are too vocal to miss and the reader will be able to name them straight off. The equally pernicious twin of this set of beliefs, the belief that knowing about Judaism without studying Samaritan writings gives licence to invent, has always been rife. The difficult structure of this book was dictated by the need to recover evidence. It is structured as an interpretation of a very short ancient text in Samaritan Aramaic, along with an entirely original description of the circumstances of the times. This text is the last two chapters, chapters XI and XII, of a booklet commonly called I by the Arabic title the Asâṭîr for convenience, the original ancient Aramaic title having been lost. All previous studies assume the text to be incoherent, that it puts some events in chapter XI in the wrong order and with no sense of proportion, that it makes impossible statements in both chapters, and that much of chapter XII had never been intended to make sense. Clearly the text had to be looked at again. The structure of this monograph might easily be misleading for a reader not immersed in the history of the place and time. The content of this book is far broader than might be supposed from the structure, which was dictated by what survives. This is also why Part VI had to be separated from Part II. The text had to be put in the context of the time it was written, but as well as that, there had to be a sketch of events leading up to the circumstances of that time, and later developments unforeseen by the authors but foreshadowed in the circumstances of the time of writing. In the book, I argue that the time of writing is the early second century A.D., though leaving the possibility open that chapter XI or the whole booklet from chapters I to XI might be older and might have been republished with a new final chapter XII on the events of the time. Moses Gaster thought the whole booklet to be ancient, but set it impossibly early, partly because he did not understand the text, partly because he misunderstood some historical references. He consistently misunderstood the Aramaic of chapters I to X, and had no understanding at all of chapters XI and XII. Proof of the extent of the faultiness of Gaster’s linguistic understanding can be found in BenḤayyim’s study in 1943. This led to more misreading. He did not recognise the deliberately artificial use of the Greek word Hellēnes, still with its Greek plural ending, in verse 17. Neither did Ben-Ḥayyim, Tal, or Bonnard. On the other hand, a lot of Gaster’s examples of parallels with Josephus or Targum Yonatan will stand up. (But note that some of his proofs of antiquity of the booklet only prove it to have been written by Samaritans, not Jews. A good example is how the booklet denies that Teraḥ was an idol-worshipper. This tenet is fundamentally important. See Macdonald’s book The Theology of the Samaritans on the light passed on from Adam). Ben-Ḥayyim went astray the other way, by making the whole booklet very late, well into the Arabic period. He did not try to answer Gaster’s arguments. Neither did Bonnard. Ben-Ḥayyim saw that Gaster had often misunderstood the Aramaic, and took this to mean all Gaster’s examples of proof of early dating could be disregarded just because some of them could be dismissed. Bonnard does not consider this question. He takes Ben-Ḥayyim’s dating as a datum not needing support. This is a breach of academic standards and a reflection on the quality of Strasbourg University. He was not able to establish a late date for the book as a whole from what he acknowledged to be native Aramaic vocabulary, after detailed examination going beyond the work by Ben-Ḥayyim in some respects. He disposed of the argument that some words must be late because other words are used in the earliest liturgy and the Mîmar Mårqe by showing that these two bodies of work are not uniform in vocabulary, meaning the extent of variation in vocabulary in ancient Samaritan Aramaic must have been much more than what is now known about. In this book I add the indisputable argument that the words not found in either the Mîmar Mårqe or the old liturgy have cognates in Syropalestinian or Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. That means these words did not pop up in Samaritan Aramaic as new inventions, but must have been there all along. Bonnard did not find many words not in the old writings anyway. Most of the examples of supposed borrowing from Arabic proposed by BenḤayyim have been refuted by Bonnard and other authors referred to by him, or in this book. I have thoroughly disposed of the main supposed example of Arabic borrowing II constantly quoted as decisive in Part I on pp. 7 – 8. The only instances of Arabic left are some glosses of place-names. In short, there is no evidence from vocabulary for late dating of the book as a whole or chapters XI and XII. There is certainly no evidence from vocabulary for late dating in chapters XI and XII. The technical word ‫ מערב‬and its Syropalestinian cognate and its meaning well known to New Testament scholars are left out of Tal’s dictionary. The deliberately artificial word Hellēnes ‫ אליניס‬with a Greek plural is treated as unexplained. The repeated mistakes in Arabic in explanations of the word ‫ עמינדס‬have been common knowledge for a very long while, but facts about a well known language were not verified, and Tal added some more mistakes of his own without the most basic knowledge. Here is more evidence pointing to an early date, not seen by Bonnard. In chapter VIII there is a list of names of Pharaohs. ‫ פרעה‬is treated as a name. The next three are called ‫ גוטיס‬and ‫ אטיסס‬and ‫( גוסיס‬Ben-Ḥayyim p. 17 last line). The first and third of these three are inner-Aramaic deliberate deformations of Aigyptos, and the second probably is as well. This looks like a deliberate triplication to make up enough numbers. The sixth is called ‫ אטינס‬. The name looks like Aten with a Greek ending, but is more likely to be another deliberate deformation. The seventh is called ‫ רימס‬. This looks like an Aramaisation of the Coptic or Greek name of Hermes. The fifth is called ‫ רבטט‬which I think is an Aramaic title with the name Tat from the Hermetic writings in apposition. This structure is archaic. It is normal in Imperial Aramaic. The later structure is as in the name and title ‫ בבא רבה‬. In ch. V the ruler of Egypt (not given the title Pharaoh) is called ‫ גיטט‬an inner-Aramaic corruption of ‫ גיפט‬from Coptic. In chapter IX the Pharaoh is called ‫ גוטס‬, the same innerAramaic corruption of Aigyptos as one of the forms in ch. VIII (Ben-Ḥayyim p. 19 line 3). The loss of the first syllable in all these variants could only be by transmission through Coptic of one variety. Some forms of Coptic have an initial syllable < ai > in this word, others haven’t. After this in ch. IX in the same line is the name of a Pharaoh called ‫ עטירס‬. I think it to be an articial change of ‫ אטינס‬. In the same chapter the Egyptians are called ‫( קפטאי‬Ben-Ḥayyim p. 18 line 5). When would it have been natural to call Egyptians centuries before Christianity by this Egyptian or Coptic name? Even if it is denied that the word is Coptic and it is claimed to be Greek, which is unworkable linguistically, it would still be evidence of a date before the Arabic period. The first consonant is not what would be expected in a borrowing into Aramaic from the Greek form Aigyptioi. On the other hand, the second consonant is not what would be expected in a borrowing from the Arabic Qibṭ or Qubṭ. (The forms Qifṭ and Qufṭ sometimes cited in etymologies are imaginary, but they would make no difference anyway because of the meaning). The fact that in Arabic the word means Egyptian Christians is unanswerable. Tal leaves this word out of the dictionary. It is not even listed as unexplained. Bonnard did not use any argument from syntax for dating, for the sound reason that the development of syntax in this dialect is not known. (I am aware of Stadel’s book. No progression is established. The few cursory words on the Asâṭîr use a circular argument, that any linguistic features in the booklet must be late because the booklet is known to be late. Tal’s article In Search of Late Samaritan Aramaic does the same as Stadel). There is one startling bit of syntax that has not been picked up by anyone, including Stadel. It is the phrase ‫“ צעורין וצלמין פרוק‬the saviour of the forms and images” in the formula in XI:22, mentioned below. Unbelievably, the noun in the genitive case comes before the noun in the nominative case. This construction never occurs in Aramaic, and it transgresses the deep syntax of the Semitic languages. The words read as a literal translation from Greek. That does not have to mean it actually was III translated from Greek. Still less can it be thought this was possible Aramaic syntax at the time. It reads as a deliberate artificial imitation of Greek to make the formula stand out. Notice that it occurs in what looks like a fixed formula of doctrine, and is put right at the end. This would only have been done when Greek was well known. Compare the artificial use of the Greek word Hellēnes with its Greek plural suffix at XI:17 expected to be recognised by the reader. Compare the unique usage of morphology imitating Greek morphology and the imitation of Greek usage in ‫ערלתו‬ at XII:18. The inventor of the word must have been able to speak Greek. He expected his readers or hearers to understand. This does not mean they all had to know Greek, but it does mean Greek was being widely used and people could handle usages that were not natural Aramaic. In this case the word was probably made up by the author himself, but he still expected to be understood. Tal leaves this word out of the dictionary. Stadel leaves it out too. Now to the content. What set Ben-Ḥayyim off on the wrong path is the belief by the authors of Arabic commentaries on the booklet that lines of thought of their own time could be seen, and that Islamic rule had been predicted. What was not realised is that the Samaritan commentators had no tradition at all of how to read the book. He ought to have seen this from his own observation that the commentators often could not read the Aramaic, and at times their interpretations depend on making artificial changes. My proof of early dating does not have to be weighed against any evidence to the contrary from the content. This is not to deny that there are a few interpolations, which were recognised by BenḤayyim, but they are mostly very short and mostly modernisations of place names. The picture is like Targum Yonatan on the Torah. Gaster and Ben-Ḥayyim both insist that it is certain there is no Samaritan tradition of understanding this book. I have seen this for myself in the commentary just mentioned. For immediate direct proof, see the Hebrew commentary in Gaster’s edition. Bonnard departs from scholarly method by selectively using the guesses in these uninformed commentaries as evidence from real tradition, whereas guesses on language and content that are sure signs of incompetence in Aramaic and complete absence of any traditional understanding of the content (beyond having read the Torah) are not mentioned. The obvious reason for this is that neither he or his supervisor could read Arabic and did not ask for information, so there are only straight copies of Ben-Ḥayyim’s scattered notes. No knowledge of the whole content of any commentary is shown. The reader is not told that the guesses descend to the level of artificially dividing words and finding symbolic numbers in words. Enough picking and choosing will come up with a few statements of the obvious and a few true but irrelevant comments. From this, it has been asserted that the use of Moslem theories of history by some commentators is proof that the authors of the book knew these theories. Ben-Ḥayyim did this first, in the face of evidence he could see for himself, and the assertion has been canonised because no-one with a real knowledge of Arabic has looked. Bonnard and his supervisors accepted the assertion without examination. The world is full of people with real knowledge that could be asked. The date of Entry into Canaan in the Asâṭîr was written down long before Moslem rule. See my article Restoring the Traditional Linkage. The antiquity of chapters I to X of the Asâṭîr is proven by Daniel Olson in his book on II Enoch. He has proven these chapters to be a reaction to the kind of outlook seen in II Enoch, and II Enoch to be partly a reaction to the outlook of the authors of IV these chapters. That does not have to mean either author read the other’s book. I can give my own independent observations, along with some observations of his clearly separately marked. His originality is readily acknowledged. II Enoch says over and over that there must always be some sacrifices at some times. It is argued by Olson that the conclusion from this is that one of the main purposes of the book was to insist that while misguided people have stopped sacrifices on the Mountain, there must be sacrifices on the Shechem Meadow. I have proven the circumstances of the end of sacrifices by the Sebuaeans and the Dositheans. Part of the evidence of the end of sacrifices before the time of Dositheos by the movement later called after him is at the start of the second notice of the Dositheans by A.F. and was common knowledge. I observe that II Enoch implicitly contradicts both the Sebuaeans and the Dositheans, on purpose. I observe that it contradicts the acceptance of the end of sacrifices implicit in ch. XI of the Asâṭîr, and explains its apparently purposeless silence on the question, that it was so as not to stir up profitless controversy. It has been pointed out by Olson that it is the insistence on the importance and permanent necessity of sacrifices in II Enoch that is the main reason for making Enoch as unobtrusive as the Torah allows in the Asâṭîr. He remarks the same reaction to the status of Melchizedek can be seen. II Enoch puts great importance on Melchizedek and conceives him as being a High Priest over generations. I would argue that this line of thinking was used to reinforce the concept that Mt. Gerizim was holy before the giving of the Torah, so a solution for the Dosithean concern about the occultation of the Tabernacle on the Mountain can be seen and is not perturbing. At the same time, if sacrifices on the Shechem Meadow before the giving of the Torah were divinely accepted without getting burnt up by fire from heaven, a reassuring convincing solution to the current concern of both parties can be seen. The holiness of the Mountain is not affected even if sacrifices have to be on the Meadow in the present era. Olson points out the vagueness of the wording of the Asâṭîr in the account of Abraham and Melchizedek as to who honoured who (though scripture itself is ambiguous). I draw attention to this comment at VII:19 (Ben-Ḥayyim p. 17 lines 11 and 12): “Then Melchizedek called him (God Most High) by a new epithet recognising him (God Most High) that saved him (Abraham)”. The explanation and translation are mine. The first epithet, quoted in Genesis XIV:19, was Maker of Heaven and Earth. The second epithet, the Shield of Abraham, is given in the form of a relative clause in the next verse of Genesis. Soon after, in Genesis XV:1, God says to Abraham “I am a shield to you”. These words are quoted in the Asâṭîr straight after, in verse 22 (Ben-Ḥayyim same page, lines 14 and 15). Melchizedek is now the High Priest of God Most High Maker of Heaven and Earth the Shield of Abraham. Abraham is now higher than Melchizedek. Tal in his dictionary and Bonnard in his thesis did not understand the word ‫ עקובה‬in verse 19 of the Asâṭîr and therefore its significance in the exposition. Olson observes that there is no mention in the Asâṭîr of Melchizedek officiating in the sanctuary of Mt. Gerizim and welcoming Abraham inside, as told by Pseudo-Eupolemos, whereas in II Enoch there is foreshadowing of the place of Melchizedek. In II Enoch the ascent of Enoch into the heavens and what he saw in each of them is described in detail. It says Enoch was translated instead of dying. It has been pointed out to me that the Asâṭîr says nothing about any ascent or revelations. Olson points out that it explicitly says he died, which is needless in the context, and against its usual practice, and that this looks like a reaction expressing disagreement. He points out that the words in Asâṭîr XII:22 “light with no darkness” are echoed prominently in II Enoch. Resistance to the concept of Melchizedek in II Enoch can be seen in unnatural silence in commenting on the words of the Torah. There are two massive collections of Samaritan V commentary on the Torah compiled in the seventeenth century from numerous older writings and traditions, obviously with some editorial choice. They are well known. One is the Dalîl as-Sâ’il ‘ala ’l-Masâ’il, on Genesis and Exodus, by Musallam bin Murjân ad-Dinfi and Ibrahîm bin Yacqûb his nephew. The other is the Kâshif alGhayâhib on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, by Ghazâl bin Abi ’s-Surûr al-Maṭari al-Ghazzi. I observe that in the second of these nothing whatsoever is said about Melchizedek. Gaster observed that the first of these is very terse and greatly minimises his place. The implications are in Olson’s book. One main concern of II Enoch is the insistence on sacrifices. This is common knowledge. I would phrase this by saying it is made clear that before the time of the giving of the Torah sacrifices had not been shown to be accepted by being shone on by light from heaven or by having parts burnt up by fire from heaven, because if the sacrifice was done the right way by a worthy person it would be acceptable. I add that one justification for ending sacrifices is thus negated. I add that their sacred building is probably the Vexatious Abomination mentioned in Asâṭîr XII:11, which is probably the same as the Shechem Sacred Enclosure mentioned in verse 14. The word ‘âkar “vexatiousness” for the building might reflect the epithet for their movement, the qaṭṭîṭẩ’i. See on category (c) in the third notice of the Dositheans in Part VI. Neither word describes the movement, so neither could have been the real name for either. The next step was to reconstruct Samaritan religious and political and social history of the times. As this was done, the evidence for the dating of the text added up. Now, it will be obvious that making such a reconstruction was a major piece of research. The history of Samaritan religion in the first and second centuries A.D. was unknown except for the tiniest of scraps, and even these could not be given meaning or context. It was generally thought that no texts had survived. Archaeology told almost nothing. I then set out to do what had been thought impossible. Historians know that often evidence has to be recognised for what it is. There was an obvious starting-place in the History of the Events of the Ancestors by Abu ’l-Fateḥ (hereinafter A.F.). Although written in 1355 A.D., it reproduces information from ancient books and documents in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek. In answer to the quibble that A.F. did not have many such documents to hand and mostly relied on previous shorter historical works in Arabic and Hebrew, it is enough to say that the compilers of the earlier works had access to even older works in Hebrew and Aramaic, which themselves used older documents. This is not guessing. It is known for certain that there was an official program of recasting all important ancient books written in Aramaic into Arabic in the late tenth century and early eleventh century A.D. There was not only straight translation, but selection and the formation of anthologies. The process of transformation of one ancient booklet from Hebrew to Aramaic to Arabic has been traced in my article The Transmission of the Samaritan Joshua-Judges. Examination showed straightaway that the book by A.F. had hardly been used by historians. There was a wealth of information, though mostly in the form of isolated data that had to be integrated into a picture. There were difficulties with the chronology of the book that were due partly to the author’s combination of earlier shorter works, but partly also due to very early damage of records in bad times before A.F. wrote. Eduardus Vilmar in the introduction to his edition in 1865 went part way to solving these. I developed his arguments. There were many more textual difficulties that had to be solved. More textual evidence is now available. I collated all the manuscripts. Once the information from A.F. had been reduced to order, other pieces of information could be fitted in. Some of these had not previously been VI recognised for what they were. I draw the reader’s attention to my article A Samaritan Broadside from the Mid Second Century A.D., in which a document originally in Aramaic authorised by the Samaritan government is recovered. Then scattered data from shorter Samaritan works, Rabbinic and Christian sources, a Roman historian, alQirqisâni, Josephus, and even coins, could be integrated. It became clear that relations between the Samaritans and Rome had been very good in the first and second centuries A.D. It then became clear that relations between the Christian Church and the Samaritans had been very good up till about 50 A.D., but very bad after that. It turned out that a lot of detail of Samaritan history, specially religious history, could be reconstructed from records of systematic opposition to Samaritan religion by the Christian Church, or borrowing from Samaritans in the earliest formation of Christianity, but remember this book is not a work on Christianity. A glaring anomaly showed up straightaway. The book of Acts, in chapter VIII, speaking of events supposedly in about 39 A.D. (though the words were written later), portrays Simon the Samaritan as a shifty wonder-worker successfully working on his own. Then Justin of Neapolis, in chs. 26 and 52 of his First Apology, in about 150 A.D., starts off the same way in both chapters but then says that when Simon came to Rome the Senate had a statue put up in his honour, which means he made a State visit. He says nearly all Samaritans in Samaria are followers of Simon, 120 years after Simon’s time. He lets slip that it is the same in the diaspora by mentioning Menander in Antioch. Simon’s importance has been clumsily hushed up. Justin says at the end of the Second Apology in the form that we have that the whole purpose of the booklet is to get the Senate to use the army to wipe out the Simonian movement. They must have been important. Justin represents Simon with some traits of Gnosticism, though not the full-blown form. In the Second Apology in the form now in our hands he tells his readers the Senate will think this to be so bad they will start a war to force all Samaritans to become Christian if he tells them. He tells his readers the Senate will go against the emperor’s policy because the influence of Simon’s teachings is inconvenient for the Christian Church. It is unlikely that such beliefs would have been expressed in the documents sent to the Senate, because they would not have had any effect, whereas the document we have does express his purpose and the purpose of his associates. It is unskilfully composed and looks like a composite. He was executed in 165 A.D., most likely for working along with some senators against the emperor’s policy. The Church made him a saint, with a hollow story known to be impossible, since Christians were never persecuted by Marcus Aurelius or his co-emperor. It can be seen that the first depiction of Simon as a Gnostic, which was by Justin, is a learned fabrication. To anticipate a bit, it is known that in Simon’s book there was a concept of a divine Great Power and a divine Great Thought. These are not God. Behind them is the Boundless Power, often symbolised as fire that is not destructive but creative. Even this is not God, but the start of the work of God. It is comparable to Wisdom in Proverbs chapter VIII. Still anticipating, it is known that Simon preached the need for perfection of each person bit by bit, to become as the Boundless Power intended, leading to the perfection of mankind and the world. Justin deliberately misrepresented all this. He knew Simon personified the Great Power (not the Boundless Power), and his wife, symbolically called Shining or Moon, represented the Great Thought. Justin changed her name from Selēnē, Moon, to Helēnē. Notice this only works in Greek. Justin tells the emperor and Senate about Helen and says she is said to be the First Thought and thinks they ought to be displeased. In the First Apology and the Second Apology he does not explain the significance of the false VII name, but it is known from slightly later authors that he said Simon declared her to be Helen of Troy. It is known from these authors that Christians, apparently starting with Justin, deliberately confused the divine Thought in Simon’s system with the Thought in Gnosticism sensu stricto, captured and degraded by powerful supernatural beings of inferior status. In the misrepresentation of Simon’s system, she is said to have been cast into bodily form, both animal and human, over and over since creation, till rescued by Simon. The deception is evident. The divine Thought can’t take on bodily form in the Gnostic system. Even if it were supposed there was some unknown variant that said this could happen, it remains true that Simon did not have any conception of the divine Thought being degraded. The change of name to Helen was the necessary prelude to misrepresenting Simon’s system. I argue that the misrepresentation of Simon as a Gnostic was calculated to make it seem the religion of the Samaritans was not an ancient ethnic religion entitled to protection, like the Egyptian religion. I also argue it was calculated to separate Samaritans from Jews in popular thinking and ultimately in official policy towards the religion. Here is the solution to the old historical puzzle of the confusion in the documentation on the rights of the Samaritan form of the religion of Israel as opposed to the Jewish form of the religion of Israel. Now to get back to what Simon really taught. Bearing in mind that Justin says nearly all Samaritans are followers of his, and other evidence pointing the same way, Simon (whoever he was), could not have been the leader of one single Samaritan party or faction: on the contrary, Simon is repeatedly said to be the author of a book that was widely or universally used by all Samaritans. We only know about the Greek version but there must have been an edition in Hebrew or perhaps Aramaic. The Greek title is the Apóphasis Megálē, which means the Great Utterance of the Truth, or more naturally in English How What Matters Really Is. I argue that it was read by a lot of thoughtful people that were not Samaritans. I give evidence of it being quoted in the New Testament. Not much survives, but there is enough to see the essence of the teaching, which is the need for the slow arduous perfection of individuals till mankind is perfected, which will somehow be connected with perfection of the whole of creation. It is very clear from what survives that Simon could not have been a Gnostic, since he not only read the Torah, but valued it and said his teachings were an articulation of the teachings of the Torah. In short, Simon was not a Gnostic, but the Christian Church framed him. What at first sight looks like a unique concept, the symbolism of the Boundless Power as Fire that is not destructive but creative, is not part of the Church’s new construction. In all the accounts, it stands separate from the picture of Gnosticism, and is clearly part of what can be seen to be authentic. Hippolytus misunderstands. Haar in South Australia, following Lemke in Queensland, has tried to turn the concept of the universal Fire into borrowing from Iranian religion. This shows ignorance of the religion of Israel. The legitimation of the symbol is in the Torah itself, in both the depiction of the Burning Bush, and the later statement that Moses received the Torah out of the Fire. This is not a destructive fire. Nec tamen consumebatur, as the scriptural quotation on a very familiar emblem showing the Burning Bush says. It is in the bush in the same way as it is inside all Creation. Compare this piece of imagery from Mårqe, with both concepts at once. “It [the writing on the two tablets] was written by the finger of consuming fire, according to the mind of the Divinity. With fasting and prayers was it received by Moses from out of the flames of fire, from the outstretched arm by which the universe is supported” (Hymn XIV, lines 37 – 42). See also the quote from Mårqe on p. 80 and see p. 60. Notice that although Samaritan thought agrees with Jewish thought in seeing the pre-existent Torah as the model of Creation, the wielder is not represented VIII by Mårqe as God, but a power of God. The concept of the Boundless Power is consistent with the Rabbinic statement that the prophecy of Moses differed from any other prophecy in being given directly ‫ מפי הגבורה‬. See my chapter Mikra p. 600, where Samaritan equivalents to the Rabbinic concept with the Aramaic equivalent of the very same term are cited. The misrepresentation of Simon was systematised before 150 A.D., since although not set out in detail in Justin’s First Apology, the necessary parts are there, the change of name of Simon’s wife to Helen, on which the whole edifice stands, and the concept of her degradation, which depends on the fiction identifying her with Helen of Troy. It is not known who this Simon the supposed author was. A Samaritan dignitary by this name visited Rome in the time of Claudius (41 – 54 A.D.) and was greatly honoured, but there is no necessary connection. To Christian authors, Simon is a personification of Samaritan religion. If Samaritans attributed the book to someone called Simon, which is not certain, the author might have wanted to stay anonymous. The tribe of Simeon disappeared very early, and is not named in the Blessing of Moses in Deuteronomy XXXIII. Its territory was an enclave inside Judah. Jewish exegesis finds the name hidden inside the blessing of Judah. New Testament scholars have never twigged why the old Priest that recognised the baby Jesus, from the tribe of Judah, and then said his own earthly service was finished, had to be called Simeon and had to be close to dying. Another example of how shallow Christian theologians’ knowledge of Judaism is. Justin’s fictitious description of Simon’s teaching might contain a little bit of truth. A grain of recognisable truth will make a big complicated fib go over better. It might have been claimed that the information in the Apóphasis Megálē would be liberating if applied. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free”. Some of the Christian accounts say that Simon said Helen was “the lost sheep of the house of Israel”. It is remarkable how the transmitters of this datum miss its incompatibility with the picture of Simon the shifty wonderworker, but that is no more remarkable than how modern scholars miss its incompatibility with the supposed Gnostic Simon, using the term in the strict sense. It would not be hard to integrate a concept of knowledge that is liberating if accompanied by work with the traditional interpretation of the words “whom God knew” as meaning that Moses knew God because God knew him, or as someone pretending to be Paul said, “We will know as we are known”. It would not be hard to put a concept of knowledge that is saving into philosophical terms (or Hermetic terms) by saying that the confusion of the solely natural is ordered by knowledge of the work of God. I did not go into this in the book. First, I did not think it was the right time. Second, nothing in my arguments depends on it. Third, I did not want to give a ‫ פתחון פה‬to anyone wanting to misrepresent the rest of the arguments by causing confusion. I hope to go into this in depth at the right time. With the words “In the course of time the saviour of the forms and images will settle holiness on the Hill” at the very end of chapter XI, the Asâṭîr overtly uses the distinctive terminology of the Apóphasis Megálē and overtly assumes knowledge of how the book uses the Torah in explaining its most fundamental principle, the need for long work by each person to become a better reflection of the Boundless Power, aspect by aspect and overall, with help from the Great Power and the Boundless Power, with eventual perfection of mankind and the world. See pp. 81 middle – 90 top. Here is indisputable evidence of antiquity. Without knowledge of Simon’s teaching, the formula would be meaningless and useless. IX There is indirect but abundant evidence that the book attributed to Simon was used by all or nearly all Samaritans. How it handled the question of the Mosaic Tabernacle is not known. It might not have brought the question up. There would not have been any need to go into the question of whether the occultation of the Mosaic Tabernacle mattered, so there would not have been any occasion to side with either the Dositheans or the Sebuaeans. An exposition of its purpose couched in a timeless present would have worked. There is indisputable evidence that Simon’s book was used seriously by people that were not Samaritans. Some of them were Christians, some not. The great attention to vilifying Simon and his book by the Christian Church is only explicable if the book was widely read, and not only by Samaritans. Chapter XI of the Asâṭîr is very much concerned with the sanctuary building. Unlike the Dositheans, and unlike all writings after the union of the Sebuaeans and the Dositheans over the course of the tenth century and early eleventh century A.D., it is not concerned with the consequences of the occultation of the Mosaic Tabernacle. Having a sanctuary building is enough. It is uncertain whether the reappearance of the Mosaic Tabernacle is expected. It is uncertain whether sacrifices are thought to be necessary in the present era. Most of the uniqueness of the theology of this document is connected with the place of a sanctuary building in the present era and the sacredness of the Mountaintop in itself. An important point of disagreement between the two parties, the Sebuaeans and Dositheans, is the precise relationship between the holiness of the Mountaintop and the holiness of any sanctuary on it. There can be no doubt that the last two chapters of the Asâṭîr are Sebuaean. For a survey of the uniqueness of the theology of chapters XI and XII, see Part II, section 2 and section 3. In this book, it is argued that the mention of the rebuilding of Lûza in ch. XI refers to a sanctuary on the Mountaintop. The context demands it, as the Annotations show. The purpose of chapters I to X has never been properly defined, but it is not hard to see. These chapters are not meant to be a summary of the narratives of the Torah as a prelude to chapters XI and XII. It is a set of pieces of information filling in what the Torah does not say. For example, it answers the obvious question of where Cain and Abel offered their sacrifices. It is no surprise that it is on the Balâṭah meadow, since it would be assumed that when Adam and Eve left the Garden the first part of the present world they set foot on would have been the present sacred top of Mt. Gerizim, the closest place to the Garden. As another example, the booklet tries to explain why one Pharaoh was favourable to Joseph and encouraged him to bring his whole extended family into Egypt, and a later Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites. The answer is that the different Pharaohs were ethnically different. The author could have been inspired by the observation that Egypt had once been ruled by Persians, and was presently ruled by Greeks, so it could have had other foreign dynasties at different times. Looked at that way, chapters XI and XII, or certainly chapter XI, give necessary information illuminating what the Torah says. Chapter XI is explicitly said to be an explanation of what is written in the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy XXXII about the long-term future. Moses understood what was meant, but it needs to be rephrased for other people. This purpose of chapters I to X will have to be borne in mind when trying to work out whether chapter XI was added on or was part of the original booklet. The rebuilding of Lûza, the last major event in chapter XI said to have happened so far, originally referred to the rebuilding under Macedonian rule. That does not mean the words were written then. They could have been written at the start of Roman rule, which finally got the Hasmoneans out of the way; or they could X have been written after the favourable changes in the time of Claudius, the details of which are not known. They could then have taken on new meaning when the sanctuary was improved by Hadrian. That would have been an appropriate time to write chapter XII. These questions of composition can now be fruitfully tackled, now that chapters XI and XII have been deciphered and make sense. No conclusive answer was found, but the indications are that chapter XII was written after chapter XI. It was said that chapter XI of the Asâṭîr, although concerned with the rebuilding of the sanctuary, is not concerned with the reappearance of the Mosaic Tabernacle. Chapter XII does not need to mention the rebuilding of the sanctuary, because it has already happened. It is established in this book from abundant evidence that this shows that chapters XI and XII could not have been written by Dositheans. It follows that they must have been written by Sebuaeans. It is shown in this book that there was only ever a two-way division between parties. This can be shown from multiple lines of evidence. It is shown that what is described by Epiphanios reduces to a two-way division. Abu ’l-Fateḥ mentions a two-way division in the time of Hyrcanus without naming the parties. His notices on the Dositheans make it clear that there was still only a two-way division, the Dositheans and everyone else, and he only knows of a two-way division in the time of Bẩbå Råbbå, the Sebuaeans and everyone else. The historians writing in Arabic only know of two parties, the Dositheans and everyone else. It is true that there were factional divisions amongst the Dositheans after Dositheos’s death, but they did not last. The details of disagreement and reconciliation amongst the Dositheans are set out according to abundant evidence in Part VI. This part had to be separated from the rest of this book so as not to confuse the explanation of the theology of chapters XI and XII of the Asâṭîr. A question needing more investigation is just when the Sebuaeans and the Dositheans stopped having sacrifices. There are indications that it was just before the turn of the first century A.D. The view that there can be no sacrifices is attributed to Dositheos himself at the start of the second notice of the Dositheans by A.F., and the context shows the view was already standard. Abu ’l-Fateḥ knows the Sebuaean argument, that sacrifices must be forbidden during the Fẩnûtå because it can be seen that whole burnt offerings are not burnt up by fire from heaven. He sets the decision during the Persian period, but this must be an anachronism. See below, pp. 114 – 116. It seems that each party found its own argument for ending sacrifices without disobeying the Torah. The common assumption that the Samaritan sanctuary was never rebuilt after its destruction by Hyrcanus in 111 B.C. is untenable. What was to stop it being rebuilt if it had been destroyed? It was a modest building. It did not need to be like the overblown monument supposed to have been put up by Solomon. The Torah does not require anything like this. Montgomery says the sanctuary on the higher peak shown on the coins of Neapolis reproduced by him facing p. 89, distinct from the temple on the lower peak shown prominently in the foreground, was a Pagan sanctuary. He knows the temple in the foreground on the lower peak is a Pagan temple. Somehow or other he has duplicated the Pagan temple without noticing what he says. Crown reproduces an exceptionally detailed coin from the reign of Antoninus Pius as the frontispiece to the collective volume by various authors entitled The Samaritans (J. C. B. Mohr 1988), which clearly shows a building on the higher peak. No-one has asked why, if the sanctuary was not standing in 36 A.D., Josephus can say it was hoped that one day the occulted paraphernalia would reappear (not just vessels as commonly mistranslated), with nary a mention of the need for a building. See XI below p 95. Hammer’s discovery of the mention of it in Luke’s gospel has been ignored. The useful arguments on matters of detail in his book have been ignored because the main premise of the book is untenable and so are some of the arguments. In this case his argument is sound, and backed up by information not available to him. See below p. 67. The sanctuary was renovated or improved in some way by Hadrian, perhaps by putting up useful outbuildings. See below p. 13. If it was not rebuilt, how could it have been destroyed by the emperor Zēnōn in 484 A.D.? Mor has treated this event in the last chapter of his book of 2003. The witness of A.F. is unequivocal. While he does not actually say the sanctuary was still standing, doubtless because the datum to that effect in his sources surprised him, he carefully reports what was tried by the emperor and then what was done in a way that shows the sanctuary must have been standing. See below pp. 109 – 112. There is a record at second hand that Marinos mentioned a hierón, which from the context must be a building with a status in its own right, not just a synagogue on the sacred Mountain. See below p. 13. Epiphanios knows of such a building. The term used is naós, which can mean a synagogue in the right context, but he speaks of a building with special status in its own right, and this time we have the wording at first hand. See below p. 107. The theoretical relationship between sacrifices and the service within the sanctuary building is not known, but it was still used after the ending of sacrifices. What is needed now is new examination of what was in the book attributed to Simon. Both Frickel and Salles-Dabadie have made a start, but they were led astray by not knowing that the Gnosticism attributed to Simon is an artificial elaborate construction. Beyschlag’s concerns were more comprehensive, and he made some progress, though he too was misled by the attribution of Gnosticism to Simon. The connection he made with Christianity, although wrongly (though brilliantly) argued for the reason just stated, needs to be reconsidered in the light of the distinction established in this book between what is authentic and what belongs to the elaborate deceptive fiction. This is because it has been shown in the present book that traces of Simon’s thought can be seen in the New Testament, and also because amongst the foreign readers of Simon’s book there might have been some Christians. It has been established that the book attributed to Simon did not depart from the religion of Israel. The possibilities within the religion of Israel are better documented in surviving Jewish writings than surviving Samaritan writings. The kind of examination needed can only be done by someone with extensive knowledge of the variety of documented lines of thought within Judaism and Samaritan religion as well as a real feeling for what the religion of Israel is in itself. It must be said that none of the authors of work on Simon or his book so far have been informed enough in these ways. A thorough rereading of the book by Mårqe, as well as the earliest liturgy, is needed, to see to what extent the outlook of the Asâṭîr can be discerned. The same kind of rereading is needed to discern traces of the outlook of the book attributed to Simon. This will have to be done with sensitivity, because not only resemblances of any kind, but also the absence of the later version of the vision of the future where it would have been appropriate, will have to be noted. It is remarked in this book that the earliest liturgy and the authentic parts of the book by Mårqe are strangely silent on metaphysics and systematic theology, as if they have been pruned. Hints remain here and there, but only hints. It is remarked in the section on the distinctive theology of the Asâṭîr chapters XI and XII in this book that expectation of Doomsday is first documented in a datable source in the first half of the eleventh century. It is in some XII of the late interpolations in the book attributed to Mårqe. The entirely unrelated concept of the Tẩ’eb in its full form first appears in the second half of the fourteenth century. (But note that the original concept is ancient. See note 16 on p. 14). Some of the short interpolations in the work of Mårqe might be a bit earlier, but not by much. The reason behind the far-reaching shift in the vision of the future will have to be investigated. It might well turn out to be connected with changes in the situation of Samaritans due to official policy. There is one important datum with implications that could usefully be followed up by others. The translation of the third clause of Genesis XLIX:10 in the Samaritikon is known to have been the same as the original wording of the LXX, “till what is stored up for him comes”. They interpreted the words not as referring to some notable favourable event connected with some special person from the line of David in the distant future, as the Jews and Christians obviously did, but the permanent end of the rule of the line of David over all Israel and then the permanent end of their rule over the part left, because of Solomon’s misdeeds. This verse thus negated the Christian theology of the significance of the supposed descent of Jesus from the Davidic dynasty. Since it was forbidden by the Torah itself to give anyone from the tribe of Judah any form of kingship, then in practical effect it was forbidden by the Torah in explicit words to give Jesus any equivalent of kingship, even at a unique level. See below, p. 47. The widely quoted rewording of the LXX “he that it is stored up for”, with the interpretation behind it, must have been meant to refute these objections, but could easily have been dismissed as meaning an undefined event with unknown significance. An inoffensive alternative would have been a form of Christianity giving Jesus unique status while not using his descent from David or perhaps not even knowing about it or perhaps rejecting any use of it, as in John’s gospel or the Epistle to the Hebrews. The full significance of the interpolated verse John IV:22 with the words “salvation is from the descendants of Judah” can now be seen. The importance of these questions in Christian doctrine and preaching would have given Samaritans encouragement to use the concept of the reappearance of Moses. This might be why there is a reference to the reappearance of Moses right at the end of chapter XII of the Asâṭîr, long after the perfection of the Mountain and mankind but prepared centuries before in a promise made through Moses, whereas in chapter XI the perfection of the Mountain and the world is the last stage and Moses is not mentioned. The rejection of any concern with descent from David by the Samaritan Ebionites is to be expected. The Christians descended from Samaritans that wrote the Epistle of the Apostles, even though they have moved further than the Samaritan Ebionites, are still not concerned with this, not even when having taken up the invitation to join the un-Israelite church. The official diatribe against Christianity and inviting the readers or hearers to return to Israel described in my article A Samaritan Broadside has no need to bring it up while systematically disproving any reason for giving Jesus any unique status, human or superhuman. There are numerous mentions in this book of the official Samaritan diatribe against Christianity and invitation to return to the religion of Israel identified and described and quoted in part in my article A Samaritan Broadside. It is assumed that any reader wanting to verify my use of that text in this book will read the article along with the whole diatribe to get a feeling for its purpose and method and be quite sure of what it does and does not say and what is in the secondary Jewish proem before casting doubt. The diatribe and invitation to return have a connection with the XIII circumstances of the Epistle of the Apostles, and parts of the Apóphasis Megálē still preserved come from a school of thought related to chapters XI and XII of the Asâṭîr, and all four texts have a historical connection with each other and Justin’s work and writing. The concerns shown in all these surviving writings have connections of various kinds not fully understood with the concerns of both II Enoch and the Epistle to the Hebrews, though it would not be safe to posit any direct or tight connection. Knowledge of the Apóphasis Megálē shows up in the New Testament, and it was read by people that were not Samaritans. Much more examination of all the texts mentioned is needed, now that the connections between the complexes of thought behind them have been detected, even though only in part or dimly. There are references to the Epistle to the Hebrews in a few places in this book. It is proven that the core of the book, with its concern with the Tabernacle and its picture of it as something in use after the sojourn in the wilderness, must be Samaritan Christian to make sense. The concern with the heavenly High Priest fits exactly into Samaritan thought. The book as it stands is clearly not from the hands of Christians that had been Samaritans, because of the concept of the heavenly Jerusalem and the importance given to a long quotation from Jeremiah. This is more than could be ascribed to superficial final editing. The concept of the heavenly Jerusalem contradicts the core of the book, on the heavenly High Priest and the concern with the Tabernacle. The one conceivable strong objection to the first form of the book being the work of Samaritan Christians can be answered. The opening of the Epistle to the Hebrews uses verses from the Jewish Psalms as central to its argument, but not the Jewish Latter Prophets. The Epistle of the Apostles, from another Christian sect of Samaritan origin, freely quotes from the Jewish Psalms in the first recension preserved in both Coptic and Ethiopic, but not the Jewish Latter Prophets or any other part of the Jewish scriptures. Even in the second edition with a prologue, in which the theology of the first edition has been flatly contradicted to agree with the de-Judaised and de-Samaritanised Church and Luke’s gospel, there is only one certain use of any other part of the Jewish scriptures, and that is the book of Job. It would be natural for Christians of Samaritan origin to reject the Jewish Latter Prophets, which are concerned with Jerusalem, along with the Jewish historical books, whereas there might be nothing objectionable in a version of the Jewish book of Psalms leaving out all references to Jerusalem and all titles ascribing some psalms to David. At least in the case of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the apparent quotations from the Jewish book of Psalms can be explained another way. The evidence for a northern origin of some psalms will be known to the reader. The evidence from Qumran for late fixing of the present collection and its fluidity for a long while will be known. I give here some compelling examples that have not been noticed. Psalm XXXVI:7. ‫ צדקתך כהררי אל‬. Psalm LXXXVII:1. ‫ יסודתו בהררי קדש‬. The mountains of God or the mountains of holiness have no natural meaning in Jewish religion. The mountain of God or the mountain of holiness is Mt. Gerizim. What looks like the term “the Mountains of Zion” in Psalm CXXXIII:3 is not disproof. The context shows that what is meant is parched ground. The next example needs detailed treatment, but this is not the place. Psalm CX:4. “Thou art a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek”. Jewish religion has nothing to naturally explain who is being addressed. This fits in with the concept of Melchizedek and the line of High Priests from him in II Enoch. It is obvious if I am right in interpreting evidence that on the ending of sacrifices some conservatives declared that the line of Aaron had disqualified itself and nullified the status of the sanctuary, and the solution was the reinstitution of the line of XIV Melchizedek. See p. 25. This is not to deny that Jews have tried hard to find some other meaning, and might not have even understood what was meant when first borrowing the psalm. This evidence has not been used in the arguments about the Epistle to the Hebrews or the Epistle of the Apostles, so as not to give a ‫ פתחון פה‬to anyone that wanted to deliberately misunderstand and say the arguments depend on my explanation of the verses just quoted. Now to developments. There was more than one Christian sect of Samaritan origin. The first recension of the Epistle of the Apostles expresses dismay that very many members have left, meaning they have returned to being part of Israel. There is a cryptic allusion to the same in the Epistle to the Hebrews at VI:4 -- 8. There is evidence of official organised work to reabsorb Christianised Samaritans at this time. The authors of the second recension of the Epistle of the Apostles written in haste not much later are willingly being absorbed by the rest of the Christian Church, explicitly labelled “Catholic”. After putting this booklet and specially chs. XI and XII in the context of the thought of their times, one remaining difficulty of detail has to be pointed out. Ch. I mentions an altar used by Cain and Abel between Lûza and the Mountain, which means on the Shechem Meadow. In ch. VI verses 8 and 9 it says Abram and others reentered Canaan and Abram stayed on the Plain of Vision, meaning the Shechem Meadow, and says he rebuilt the altar of Noah and Adam. Then it says Abram went up Mt. Gerizim, which is said to be to the east of Bethel. The first ten chapters clearly envision a sacred place on the Meadow, and identify it with Lûza or Bethel, where Jacob was sleeping at the time of his vision of the ladder between the top of the Mountain and the Garden or Heaven. This is incompatible with the later opinion that Lûza or Bethel is on the Mountaintop. The disagreement must be very old, because the verse Genesis XXVIII:17, where Jacob says he now realises that Lûza, where he was sleeping, is the House of God, and the top of the Mountain the Gate of Heaven, is carefully worded to suit either opinion. At first sight, this seems to show incompatibility between chs. I to X and ch. XII, which in verse 14 looks forward to the end of the Shechem sacred enclosure. Ch. XI at verse 20 says Lûza will be rebuilt, which from the time viewpoint of the authors means it has just been rebuilt. In the Annotations it is shown that the only interpretation that works is that Lûza is set on the Mountain, not the Meadow, in accordance with the known alternative tradition. This is plainly incompatible with ch. I, where it is made clear that Lûza is on the meadow. Two explanations are possible. The obvious one is that this chapter did not originally belong with the first ten chapters. An alternative is that a fully satisfactory Lûza has just been set up on the Mountaintop, signifying that the present era is more satisfactory than the time of Jacob. This sounds far-fetched when put baldly, but it explains the looking forward to the end of some unmentionably offensive Israelite sanctuary in ch. XII. This place was neither Sebuaean or Dosithean, but a protest by extreme conservatives against the ending of sacrifices by both parties. They set up sacrifices on the Meadow, which everyone agreed had always had its own sacredness since before Moses. Their place of sacrifice was probably the roofless stone structure described secondhand by Epiphanius at the start of the description of heresy no. 80. It can probably be identified with the Shechem Sacred Enclosure mentioned in ch. XII of the Asâṭîr. See note b to XII:14. This would have been just as abhorrent to the Dositheans as the Sebuaeans. For both of these parties, the sacred place could only be the Mountain. If sacrifices on the Mountain are forbidden in the present era, all that can be done is wait for the new Time of Favour, with no alternative sacred place and no violation of the Deuteronomic insistence on the one sacred place. The stone XV structure can be located precisely. It was destroyed before the time of Epiphanios, whose report is secondhand. Even if his report is regarded as firsthand, it is implicit in his words that it was not being used in his days. He knows it had been a place of prayer, but does not know who used to use it. Såkte’s pavilion, on the other hand, was used at least till the start of the ninth century. According to the addition to the work of A.F., the Dosithean pavilion stood on the Meadow till 809 A.D., but the Dositheans worshipped on the Mountain before and after. The extreme position of Såkte in rejecting all worship on the Mountain had little effect and did not last. See Part VI. It is not known what the pavilion was used for after his time, but it must have been important in some way if it stood for another eight hundred years. The date of destruction of the pavilion can be established from p. 220 of ms. C. It needs to be borne in mind that the destruction need not have been permanent, since it was a big elaborate tent, not a substantial building. It had been burnt down before in about 755 according to a note on p. 210 of ms. C. The precise location is given in column 28 of my article Social Anomie, with reference to my article The First Notice of the Dositheans with my explanation of A.F. 82:12 – 14 in column 371. It was in the form of a big ceremonial tent. See the explanation in note b to Asatir XII:14. The reason given in my article Social Anomie for regarding the form ‫ ﻣﻘﺎﻟـﮫ‬as a misreading of ‫ ﻣظﻠـﮫ‬, that it is due to a common misreading of hasty handwriting, needs some addition to show there can be no doubt. First, this is the word used in A.F. 161:7 – 8. Second, the emendation muqâwalah assumed by Levy-Rubin would make no sense here, since a debate is not the same as a place of debate. This little excursus was needed to establish beyond doubt that the important Dosithean ceremonial meeting place on the Meadow could not be the place of sacrifice on the Meadow hinted at in II Enoch, but that this second might well have been the unspeakable monstrosity called ‫ נוה שכם‬the Shechem Sacred Enclosure. It follows from every consideration of possibilities that ch. XI and ch. XII can’t be Dosithean, because although the occultation of the Tabernacle is mentioned, there is no expectation of its reappearance, and at the end of ch. XI it is made clear that the present situation is fully satisfactory. Perfection in the distant future is not said to be connected with the sanctuary. Even if the reappearance of the Tabernacle was expected, it could not have been an immediate concern. As was said in Part I section 3, the linguistic work here was only what was needed to decipher the meaning, with no intention of writing a study of the development of Samaritan Aramaic. All the same, a significant contribution of data showing antiquity of vocabulary has been given in the process, along with corrections of a lot of long-standing mistakes in understanding grammar and vocabulary. Al-Qirqisâni was read in the Arabic original. Rabbinic works and the targums were read in the original language in the standard critical editions. References to Josephus are always to both Niese’s full edition and the Loeb series. I used the Greek. Feldman’s translation is not always good. The translation of the Syriac recension by Joseph Gebhardt mentioned on p. 52 is sensitive to Syriac usage. I have used the Syriac original as well as this translation. Jones’s translation is not always accurate and sometimes copies old translations of the Latin against the Syriac. Gebhardt’s translation is the first, regardless of what Jones or the Brepols firm might say. William Whiston’s work in Primitive Christianity Reviv’d, vol. V of what was intended to be four, is still the best translation of the Latin recension. The translation of the Greek recension, the Homilies, by A. Siouville is very good: Les Homélies Clémentines, XVI première traduction française, Paris 1933. His translation entitled Hippolyte de Rome: Philosophumena ou Réfutation de toutes les hérésies is remarkably accurate. So is Cruice’s Latin translation. The translation of the Panarion by Frank Williams is not always safe to rely on: The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis. Book I (Sects 1 – 46). NHMS XXXV. Brill, Leiden, 1997. Klijn and Reinink are more accurate for the chapter of Epiphanios included in their collection. Translations of Greek workse were used now and then, but not systematically. Inadequacies in commonly used translations from Greek are pointed out if I have come across them by accident. I’ve never bothered to find out what translations of Hebrew works or the Jewish targums there might be. The translation of the work of Abu ’l-Fateḥ by Stenhouse should not be used. It is untrustworthy even where it seems to make sense. See Part VII. Dictionaries are not listed, except for Blau’s work, which was used in one place in Part VI, to explain the title ‫اﻟﻤﻘﯿﺲ‬. I disdain padded bibliographies. Notice the careful description of the unpublished Comprehensive History of 1875 in Arabic in the Bibliography. It is left out by Pummer in his survey of Samaritan historical works in the book of 2016. The derivation of the Hebrew book of Joshua from this book proven by Yahuda in 1908 is not mentioned. It was made in 1907 for sale to Gaster, but with no attempt at deception. The long-known method of composition of the long history in Hebrew called Chronicle II by Macdonald, which was to combine the Comprehensive History with the MT and some other well-known books, proven by Ben-Ḥayyim, is not mentioned. This too was made for sale, first to Gaster and then to anyone else that might be interested. There was no intent of deception. The author could not have dreamt how uncritical some academics might be. It was completed in mid 1908. All mss. are from that year or later. Macdonald misdated one ms. by three hundred years from a mistake in writing the date out in words in the colophon. The proof is given by Ben-Ḥayyim. The High Priest at the time is named. There was a High Priest by that name in the first years of the twentieth century. No earlier High Priest bore the same name. Macdonald with his usual absence of common sense just says there must have been some High Priest three hundred years before then with that name. He does not see anything odd in saying he was never listed. The supposed colophon to the history in Hebrew reproduced by Macdonald saying it is proof that the book was regarded as holy is not the colophon to the book. It is from inside the book and is about the Abisha scroll. Macdonald does not explain how the Hebrew history can quote words of A.F. here where he speaks about himself in the first person and says he saw the tashqîl of the Abisha scroll for himself. Crown and Fossum and Hjelm and Niessen never saw anything odd about this either. The explanation of the absence of early mss. given by Macdonald, that only members of the Dinfi family had it, is too far from the reality of the transmission of mss. by Samaritans to try to analyse. (Dinfi is wrongly made Danafi by Gaster and then Macdonald and everyone since without asking a member of the family how it is pronounced. Schorch has invented a form Danfi). All this is summarised in my article The Transmission of the Samaritan Joshua-Judges, which is not mentioned by Pummer. I know Pummer read my article because it was given to him at his own request and used by him at a conference in Leiden. (He leaves a lot of necessary books and articles out, depending on who wrote them. See the Bibliography). The reader is misled by Pummer, who describes the article on the method of composition of this book by Ben-Ḥayyim as a review without quoting the title, and misrepresenting what the article says to the extent of making it say the opposite of what it says. As well as this, he leaves out any mention of the Comprehensive XVII History, identified and described by Yahuda, then Ben-Ḥayyim, then me. The origin of Chronicle Adler as an abridged translation of the Comprehensive History made in 1900 for sale is not mentioned by him, and the impression is deliberately given that it was an original old composition. This misrepresentation of the Hebrew histories started before Pummer’s book appeared, in numerous pieces by A. D. Crown. The effect shows up in a lot of contentless articles by various authors. Ingrid Hjelm used the long concoction called Chronicle II by Macdonald as a major reference for a book of hers on the roots of Samaritan history. She believed Crown’s inventions. She never looked at the articles by Yahuda and Ben-Ḥayyim. Jarl Fossum was deceived by Crown’s suppression of data. He took advice from Crown when visiting Sydney University and was never told about the relevant articles about the Hebrew history by Yahuda and Ben-Ḥayyim. I was working at Sydney University at the time but never managed to talk to Fossum. There is now constant useless speculation about the imagined derivation of these three Hebrew books from older books in Hebrew. Noone asks why there are no old manuscripts. The speculation depends on not having read quite a few articles. Notice that Pummer contradicts what he wrote himself in another place. See in the Bibliography, the entry on the Comprehensive History, the entry on Ben-Ḥayyim’s correct identification of the twentieth century concoction called Chronicle II by Macdonald, and the entry on Yahuda, who identified the book that was extended to make this concoction. He does not give enough publication information for the reader to find the article and see what it really says. This way he avoids contradicting any of the uninformed inventions in the Companion to Samaritan Studies or anything written by Crown. To avoid contradicting his associates, he has to ignore what was written by Yahuda, and Ben-Ḥayyim, and me, and forget about what he wrote himself on the basis of evidence. A warning. The kind of combination of vapid invention without using reason and arrogant invention without competence just set out is rife in writing about the Samaritans. Arguments are based on these inventions and the fantastic conclusions treated as data. Whatever was written by someone holding a Chair must be right. There are too many examples shown up in this book to list here. An example of ignorant invention about an Aramaic title is given in footnote 38 on pp. 162 – 163. It is perturbing to see that Florentin, who does know Aramaic, repeats this furphy rather than contradict his associates. An unbelievably careless slip in reading Aramaic by Ben-Ḥayyim is copied unthinkingly by everyone, including Tal and Bonnard. Bonnard then misread the events described in ch. XI of the Asâṭîr at the most fundamental level. See the Annotations to XI:10. Violation of the standards of scientific investigation is treated as normal and acceptable. It is hard to get across to the reader how bad this gets. The uselessness of translations by Bowman and Stenhouse is shown at mind-numbing length in a lot of places in this book, specially Part VII. The absence of critical thought on the part of numerous authors is shown in too many places in this book to list here. Sometimes it gets to be so bad as to be funny, but the consequences are not funny. Bowman told me to my face that words in a translation by one of his students, Dorreya ‘Abd el-‘Al, saying that fish have to be covered in feathers to be kosher were what the Arabic said, and nothing is obviously wrong, because Samaritans write odd things. She got a doctorate from Leeds University. See Part VII. Stenhouse did not bother to find out where Bosra was, though it could be looked up in a dictionary of Biblical Hebrew or the index of placenames in an atlas of Palestine. Instead, he said it must be the same as Basrah in Iraq, and wrote that the territory of the tribe of Reuben must have been in Iraq. See below, XVIII p. 37 top. The spelling of the name Bosra in Arabic makes the identification impossible, but ordinary rational thought would have been enough. Crown saw nothing wrong. Have a look at Bowman’s explanation of the name ad-Dustân, below p. 101. He copies Adler and Séligsohn, without acknowledgment. Pummer treats Adler and Séligsohn’s comment as being worth considering. No-one asks how Samaritans in Palestine could have known Persian, or how they could have mixed it with Hebrew. In the Companion to Samaritan Studies, Tal says the title Kitâb al-Kâfi means the book of the all-sufficient one, meaning God. He can actually say an author could have said his book belongs to God. This is a step beyond infallible inspiration. There are books by Moslems with the same title. Did they want to say their book was as inspired as the Koran? Pummer repeats this in his book of 2016. Tal did not know enough Arabic to know why there is no definite prefix on the first word, and thought it must be in the construct state. This made him think the adjective to be a noun. First there is the willingness to make statements about a language you don’t know. Then there is the belief that a translation that would depend on the author being out of his mind is right. Then there is the usual attitude seen over and over that there is no need to ask anyone that does know the language. Pummer goes along with all this. Have a look at the catalogue of blunders set out on pp. 7 and 8. There is the usual belief that you can make up whatever you like about a language you don’t know. When writing this catalogue on pp. 7 and 8 I only set out to make a sober list, but the effect is funny by the time you get near the end. After you get over that, the effect is frightening. Stefan Scorch keeps on saying my advice to everyone without a knowledge of Arabic to ask for information before inventing something is personal attack. This kind of complaint says a lot about him and his close colleagues. It says a fair bit about my own work too, which is gratifying. ‫ יהללוך אחרים ולא פיך‬. It is not only Aramaic and Arabic that are not understood. Take Wedel’s explanation of the title Kitâb aṭ-Ṭubâkh (or Ṭabâkh). He takes the second word to be an adaptation of a Hebrew word. He copies Gaster in reading Ṭabbâkh, which means a cook in Arabic. He says slaughtering animals for food would be called ṭbḥ . He does not explain how a supposed Hebrew word was changed to sound Arabic. He does not explain how the supposed Hebrew word got to be changed to an Arabic word with no connection in meaning. Even though there is nothing in the book about rules for slaughtering, he says the word “slaughter” was used in the title because there are specifications of kosher animals ! ‫ ﺑﻌﯿﺪ‬. Too farfetched to bother refuting. He shows he does not know ṭbḥ is a rare word in Hebrew. He shows he does not know it is not the word used for slaughtering animals for food. That is šḥṭ . The person that does this is called a shoḥeṭ. The action is called ‫ שחיטה‬. Neither can ṭbḥ be used to mean killing animals as a sacrifice. The verb for that is zbḥ . Wedel’s explanation shows absence of feeling for Hebrew and ignorance of basic vocabulary. He shows he does not know how to look up single words in a dictionary skilfully by looking at usage. As well as this, he misrepresents my explanation of the meaning. In my book Principles of Samaritan Halachah I said the title is unusually short and looks like a short form of a longer flowery title. I suggested taking the short title to mean the Book of Insight or some such. In the context, that meant that the short title would have that meaning as part of a longer title. Wedel disregards what I wrote about the title being a short form of a long title and says Lane’s dictionary does not give the meaning “insight”. I never said it did. What’s more, Wedel misses the meanings “competence” and “good quality”. What’s more, he overlooks my words about the explanation coming from Heinz Pohl, who knew far more Arabic than me or Wedel, and had access to the work on the comprehensive dictionary of Classical Arabic being prepared in Germany. Lane’s XIX dictionary is not adequate The only sources are Arabic to Arabic dictionaries. Besides this, his translations of what they have to say are often too literal or give the wrong shade of meaning, as in this entry, where “fatness” ought to be something like either “substance” or “adequate quality” or “competence” in the different phrases quoted. Incompetence in publications on the Samaritans is not the end of it. There is constant suppression of data of all kinds. See my remarks on the Comprehensive History here and in the Bibliography. Crown’s doctoral thesis was never published. There was a good reason for that. The falsifications in the translations would have been seen. One example that would have torpedoed Crown’s fantasies about old histories in Hebrew. He reproduces and translates a Hebrew version of the Arabic Joshua book. He does not explain how it is that there are old Arabic mss. and the Hebrew ones are all from the start of the twentieth century. A preface to the Hebrew translation says it is not known who translated the book into Hebrew. Crown removes the inconvenient sentence. He does this by putting a very big dot in the middle of the Hebrew sentence, too big to be a punctuation mark, and treating it as a full stop in the translation. There is no instance of punctuation in the manuscript. Then he makes the two halves into two short sentences in pidgin Hebrew, and gives a translation as two sentences saying the book is known to be old. This got past the examiners, but they were Bowman and Macdonald. The reader is not told that Yahuda identified Crown’s other main text as a Hebrew version of the passage about Joshua in the history by A.F., or that Gaster acknowledged that Yahuda was right. Yahuda’s article is listed in the bibliography, but ignored. Neither is the reader told the text is the same book that was printed by Gaster and identified by Yahuda, but a different manuscript. This worked on the examiners too. Niessen improved on Crown’s device of turning different manuscripts into different books by managing to multiply a book by four. He used Crown’s other device of listing Yahuda’s article while ignoring it. See my article Transmission. He says nothing about the place in this Hebrew book published by him where it quotes A.F. speaking about himself in the first person and saying what happened was in the year of writing. It gets pathetic, down to kindergarten level. Works by scholars on the unkosher list, such as Macuch, Jamgotchian, and me, are left out of the supposedly complete survey of 2016 by Pummer. Read the preface on this website, not in the article, to my article La Purification de Jésus, on scheming by Crown and his lackeys for years to keep my address hidden. This will have to do. O tempora ! O mores ! Useful suggestions and data from specialist expertise were given by my colleagues Joseph Gebhardt and Daniel Olson. CONVENTIONS AND METHOD 1. The extensive use of bold print and italics in this book is mainly meant to guide the reader in seeing the connections between arguments from different kinds of evidence. Occasionally it is to emphasise a single datum that must be taken in if an argument is to be grasped and the strength of the conclusions to be seen. Sometimes it is to warn against fiction. It is hardly ever for straight emphasis. 2. Abbreviations All abbreviations will be self evident. It is made plain that A.F. is Abu ’l Fateḥ and B.R. is Bẩbå Råbbå. The rest are standard. XX 3. References to early Christian authors All references to early Christian authors are from Pummer’s collection unless otherwise stated or unless the book is listed separately in the Bibliography. 4. Transcription and pronunciation of Samaritan Aramaic and Hebrew The phonemic transcription differs in a couple of details from Ben-Ḥayyim’s system. A short open [e] vowel, I.P.A. [ɛ], in a final closed syllable is written < e > instead of Ben-Ḥayyim’s < ǝ >, which is deceptive. Ben-Ḥayyim’s symbols < a > and < å > were used. A doubly long double-peaked vowel is written < âa, ẩå, ûu >. Macuch writes < ẹ > instead of < ǝ >, and < æ > and < a > instead of < a > and < å >. In the Samaritan forms of both Hebrew and Aramaic there is no sîn. Compare Judges XII:6 for evidence of an early stage of the sound-shift. The same system can be used for Hebrew and Aramaic. The two have affected each other to such an extent that the sound-systems are the same. The sounds [h] and [ħ] (I.P.A.) conventionally transcribed < h > and < ḥ > don’t exist. There is no long [o:]. There is no sheva. (BenḤayyim’s symbol < ə > is not sheva). Transcriptions showing these sounds, though common, are ignorant. The sound [ʕ] (I.P.A.) exists but only initially and only before [a] or [å] long or short. The accent is on the second-last syllable, which has a long vowel if open, e.g. ‫ משה‬Mûshi, ‫ תורה‬Tûra, ‫ שמרים‬Shẩmêrem “Samaritans”, ‫ הרגריזים‬Årgẩrîzem. Double-peaked vowels are always accented, e.g. ‫פינחס בן‬ ‫ יצחק‬Fînẩås ban Yêṣẩåq or ‫ רחותה‬Rûutå “the Time of Favour”. Names like ‫עבדאל‬ c Âbed-el or ‫ נתנאל‬Nẩtån-el have primary stress on the first syllable and secondary stress on the last, with none on the middle. Initial < ‫ > ע‬can represent either [i] as in Iqbon ‫ עקבון‬or [ʕa] as in cAzzi ‫ עזי‬and there are historical rules as well as mostly reliable synchronic rules from the structure and the other vowels. The Syriac forms of the names of the Aramaic binyanim are used here along with the Hebrew term qal. 5. Text-witnesses and sigla For full information on all the mss. and other textual witnesses of the Asâṭîr the specialist reader is referred to Bonnard. Although he does not see the origin of most of the scribal notes and glosses in ch. XII or recognise the physical damage to the text, it is clear from his textual information that all the text-witnesses have the same defects, from which it can be concluded with certainty that all have a common ancestor. Ben-Ḥayyim’s ms. is ms. 7062 of the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem. It is given the siglum Y by Bonnard. Bonnard makes the cryptic remark that this ms. is not accessible, without explanation, and that he has used Ben-Ḥayyim’s printing. I have compared the whole book as printed by Ben-Ḥayyim with a typed transcript made by him. Gaster used two mss. nearly identical. Together they are called group A by Bonnard, and given the sigla M and H. The rest of the mss., mostly fragmentary, are collectively designated group B by Bonnard. The Arabic commentaries need not be listed here. For the evaluation of their direct quotations see Bonnard. He concludes that Y and group A and group B represent three textual families, that Y is by far the best, and that Y and group A together are nearly always correct. All this is unnecessary listing of mistakes and bad guesses, taking up pages without any use. My XXI own findings in regard to chs. XI and XII are that ms. Y is always correct in every instance of variation in wording and spelling in ch. XI, with the exception of XI:12, where all mss. might have a misplaced gloss. In ch. XII this ms. is always correct, aside from having the signs of physical damage to the ancestral exemplar seen in all the mss. and the scribal notes and glosses that are in all the mss. References to the collations by Bonnard are not needed for establishing the exact text, since all variants are secondary divergencies from ms. Y or its ancestor. It could be said the work on the text-witnesses by Bonnard is not entirely unnecessary, since it does have the usefulness of showing there is no textual information beyond what is in the manuscript used by Ben-Ḥayyim. Bonnard has collected details and filled pages without seeing the history of the text. In this book, I have followed what is printed by Ben-Ḥayyim. Olson does the same. What is printed by Bonnard is the same as what is printed by Ben-Ḥayyim except not always accurately copied, either in the body of the text or the notes to the translation. Contrary to popular belief, the latest printing of any text is not always the best. Bonnard has copied Ben-Ḥayyim’s translation, except that some new impossible guesses come up in ch. XII in places. He has found the Aramaic etymology of the word ‫חופה‬, though without finding any meaning that made sense and elaborating on one that obviously can’t make sense. Every single one of the defects in Ben-Ḥayyim’s translation of the whole booklet is carefully reproduced, such as ignoring the word ‫ מערב‬altogether. Ben-Ḥayyim could use the relatively late Arabic commentaries to a limited extent. Bonnard says he used these commentaries, but everything said by him about what is in these commentaries is copied from BenḤayyim, and whatever Ben-Ḥayyim leaves out stays left out. The single exception to straight copying in the thesis is the discovery that the vocabulary of the extant early Samaritan texts is not uniform. This would have made a useful article. What is written on the word ‫ עמינדס‬is a pile of guesses without knowledge by others with no examination whatsoever, with ignorance of Arabic demonstrated at length. Deep ignorance of Samaritan thought is shown wherever Ben-Ḥayyim has missed something. See my words on ignorance of the concept of the gate of the Kavod being on Mt. Gerizim, or the verse of the Torah saying so, on p. 158. Nothing could be more basic to Samaritan theology. See again my words on ignorance of the occultation of the Mosaic Tabernacle and the end of the Time of Favour, or the breaches of the Torah by Solomon, in note 40 on pp. 168 and 169. Nothing could be more basic to the Samaritan picture of religious history. Neither the supervisor, Joosten, nor the chief examiner, Schorch, picked up any of what is said in this paragraph. It would have been easy. The product was useful. Joosten and Schorch could claim expertise in Aramaic language and Samaritan religion at research level. I have collated Gaster’s edition (Bonnard M and H) and his Hebrew commentary (Bonnard F) and the collation by Ben-Ḥayyim of the Aramaic readings of the Arabic commentary used by him (my siglum S, Bonnard Š). Some disagreements between my collations and what Bonnard quotes turned up. As I had no access to the mss., I have simply recorded the disagreements. Any significant readings are recorded, but in fact there are not many such, and all are secondary. The second half of ms. Samaritan IX of the John Rylands Library in Manchester is not mentioned by Bonnard. The description in the catalogue is wrong. It is actually a commentary, but with no useful information. . XXII I. 1. INTRODUCTION Preamble This study is structured round an examination of two consecutive highly condensed eschatologies at the end of an ancient very short text in Samaritan Aramaic, commonly called the Asâṭîr for convenience, the original title being lost. 1 This gives the framework with extensive new information, but the book goes well beyond this information even further into uncharted territory. Extensive new documentation is integrated into the framework, with multiple inter-connections between the parts of the new documentation. The two chapters of the Asâṭîr are commonly numbered as ch. XI and ch. XII. The first is a scheme of universal history. It is eschatological in the sense that it ends with the hope of the ultimate restoration of the original perfection of creation, and that its scheme of history is structured as a fall, a rise, and ultimate perfection. It recalls the re-building of the sanctuary on the top of Mt. Gerizim but not the re-appearance of the Mosaic Tabernacle. This is to be followed in the distant future by the perfection of the top of the Mountain, which in Samaritan thought as documented in much later texts means the connection between Heaven and Earth seen by Jacob in his vision, or else the re-appearance of the gate to the Garden of Eden on the top of the Mountain. It is uncertain which meaning is intended here, or whether both might be intended. There is no mention of the expectation of the re-appearance of Moses or the appearance of someone like him. The second section of text is more concerned with the future. It starts with an expression of gratitude for a specific recent historical event, which leads into the presentation of the hope of successive degrees of future salvation under powerful secular leaders, with ultimate perfection of the Mountain and long after that (not before then) the re-appearance of Moses. There is no mention of the re-building of the sanctuary on the Mountain, apparently because the practice of There are three editions of the whole book. (a) Moses Gaster, The Asatir. The Samaritan Book of the “Secrets of Moses”, together with the Pitron or Samaritan Commentary and the Samaritan Story of the Death of Moses. The Royal Asiatic Society, London, 1927. The observations are useful. (b) Ze’ev Ben-Ḥayyim, (‫ ספר אסטיר )עם תרגום ופירוש‬. Tarbiz XIV:2, 1943, pp. 104 -- 125; XIV:3 -- 4, 1943, pp. 174 -- 190; XV:2, 1944, pp. 71 -- 87; 128. This article also has its own continuous numbering, though it was never separately published. I quote according to the continuous pagination. (c) Christophe Bonnard, Asfår Asâṭîr, le “Livre des Légendes”, une réécriture araméenne du Pentateuque samaritain. Présentation, édition critique, traduction et commentaire philologique, commentaire comparatif. Doctoral thesis, Strasbourg University, 2015. Accessible at this site. www.theses.fr/2015STRAK014 Gaster’s edition includes the Hebrew translation of an Arabic commentary with a few quotes in Aramaic. Ben-Ḥayyim consulted an Arabic commentary and listed its Aramaic readings. Bonnard copied the information given by Ben-Ḥayyim. All three editions give an annotated translation. Ben-Ḥayyim shows why Gaster’s translation is unsatisfactory, though it is my judgment that he exaggerates when finding fault with Gaster’s work. I disagree with Ben-Ḥayyim’s translation constantly, though my debt to his philological work is acknowledged. Bonnard copies Ben-Ḥayyim, with a few more guesses but no critical examination. Bonnard had access to more manuscripts. These turn out not to add anything useful at all anywhere. Information is set out in Part IV section 2. Ben-Ḥayyim’s ms. always has the best reading in every place throughout the book, in my observation. Bonnard comes to nearly the same conclusion. 1 1 the cultus is now undisturbed, but there is no mention of the re-appearance of the Mosaic Tabernacle either. It will be seen here as the exposition develops that the two chapters essentially agree. The concept of the re-appearance of Moses, although not known to the authors of ch. XI, can be made compatible with the doctrine set out there. It seems there was development over time. The authors of both chapters assume that the reader will know the doctrines briefly brought up, and there is no instruction. This is one of the reasons for supposing that both pieces could have been used liturgically or ceremonially. The two sections of text are the concluding parts of a very short unnamed booklet commonly known by the title ‫ ספר אסטיר‬asfår asaṭîr for convenience. The second word means narratives of notable events in Arabic. In this study the title will be transcribed as Asâṭîr, with the second vowel long, as this is the pronunciation in literary Arabic. In modern Syrian Arabic the vowel is short. The interpretation presented here differs radically from its predecessors, but can be justified rigorously linguistically, and can be integrated into abundant documentation. 2 With the completion of the interpretation of the two texts, the antiquity of their content becomes certain. The Aramaic seems to be old. Bonnard found numerous words otherwise unattested throughout the book, but points out that the vocabulary in Mårqe is not the same as in the old liturgy, so probably not all the old vocabulary is known. He found inconclusive evidence for the dating using the data of the choice of Aramaic words already known. His other examples from the two chapters treated here depend on misunderstanding, or even from trying to read the glosses in ch. XII as part of the text. Most of the syntactic evidence could be evidence of earlier dating than the rest of the extant texts just as easily as it could indicate later dating. Much of the argument is circular. Tal used the Asâṭîr as an important witness for late Samaritan Aramaic, so Bonnard found agreements with what had been described by Tal and claimed them as evidence of lateness. The supposed Arabic words and formations are all impossible. As evidence of antiquity of chapters XI and XII see the words ‫ אליניס‬in XI:17 and ‫ מערב‬in XII:20 and ‫ בדמסין‬in XII:10. The first is an artificial literary usage assuming widespread knowledge of Greek. Bonnard interprets as if the author were irrational. Ben-Ḥayyim and Bonnard (p. 382) do not know the second of these has a known precise meaning in Syropalestinian. Tal does not list the word in his dictionary. The third is a standard Greek official term not known to Bonnard or Tal. The guess that it means “publicly” is on the right track but not right because the underlying Greek word is not recognised. It is not δῆμος. Notice also how the word ‫ קפטאי‬in ch. IX is left out of the dictionary. See my Foreword p. IX. Nearly all the linguistic examples from ch. XI and ch. XII depend on misunderstanding of the meaning. See in more detail on the treatment of the language This is demonstrated in the rest of Part I and Part II, and the Annotations to the translation. It is to be noticed that there are interpolations in the text as we have it. Ben-Ḥayyim has proven that the excursus on the geography of the land of Canaan near the start of ch. XI, after v. 2a, is an interpolation. Whether or not his arguments are accepted, this paragraph need not be treated in this study, which is concerned with the scheme of history in the chapter. 2 2 by Bonnard Part I section 3 and Part III section 3 pp. 158 – 159. Some repetition was necessary for the clarity of the argument. Bonnard himself has disproven very many of the proposed Arabic borrowings and quoted other authors that have done the same. I have disproven the examples that have been most relied on. See pp. 7 and 8 of this book, but also the Annotations in each place. There is no linguistic evidence for a late date of chs. XI and XII left. There is strong evidence for an early date in the two Greek words mentioned and the ancient Aramaic legal term ‫ מערב‬not applicable legally later on, with its ancient exegetical use. I have not examined the language of chapters I to X in detail yet. There are clearly some Arabic words in some glossing of place names. On the other hand, notice the evidence of the use of Hellenistic historians given in the Foreword, and the Coptic borrowing ‫ קפטאי‬meaning Egyptians left out of the dictionary by Tal. The proof that A.F. puts Bẩbå Råbbå and therefore cẢmråm Dẩre and Mårqe in the third century is set out in Part III section 3, along with the evidence that the real date is earlier. If the text is understood as being rational, and if the meaning of the words is understood, all allusion to the thought of the tenth century vanishes. Examples of interpreting as if the author were irrational are the supposed mention of the Alans conquering Palestine in XI:17, linguistically impossible as well (Bonnard p. 370), or what is said about sea-water flooding mountainous land in trying to explain XII:10 (Bonnard p. 389). P P What is published here are the last sections of the original booklet, commonly referred to as ch. XI and ch. XII. Once deciphered, with the allusions to the Pentateuch understood, and the eschatological scheme seen clearly, they come across as the products of powerful and sophisticated minds. This comes across even through the condensed exposition. The authors of both ch. XI and ch. XII resolutely refuse to use the terms Jews or Samaritans. Even when they use code-names, their reference is to faithless and faithful Israelites. The authors look forward, not to the victory of their party, but the supremacy of the truth. What is said about the fate of rival parties always has a tone of clemency. These two texts are deeply religious in the best sense of the word. See the notes to XII:17 and XII:13 -- 14 for two striking illustrations. This study continues on from my works listed in the Bibliography as part of a long-term project to recover the Samaritan theology of early times. A lot has not been understood. To give an obvious example, what has always been thought to be a long list of factions in the third notice of the Dositheans by Abu ’l-Fateḥ has been shown to repetitive, and all developments have now been put in simple clear order in Part VI. 2. Description of the Text Studied as the Framework The Asâṭîr is a little booklet -- the Aramaic text could be printed without paragraph spacing on nine A4 pages, and a translation into a European language on fourteen. The two chapters treated here take up a page and a bit each in translation. This is not unusual in works from antiquity: some books of the Bible and some wellknown books of the Pseudepigrapha are no longer. The writing of the time can be 3 dense: every word matters. Often a single word or phrase can be meant to refer to a known set of concepts. All extant mss. of the booklet go back to a single exemplar. Fortunately, this exemplar was exceedingly accurate. 3 The proof of this statement is that the work of establishing a reliable text in ch. XII consists only of identifying and removing glosses and scribal notes, or restoring a couple of words partly washed out. In ch. XII some words or phrases have been washed out and are unrecoverable. In structure, the book re-tells the narrative themes of the Pentateuch, but both omits and adds material according to the purpose. The story of what happens after Moses and into the future is presented as implicit in the wording of the Torah and clear to Moses from his God-given understanding. The man-made troubles of the future are clearly seen by Moses, but so is the satisfactory ending planned by God. The book is structured round four covenants, of which the protagonists are Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses. 4 There is a lot of legendary material, but it has the serious purpose of clarifying the narrative of the Torah. Some determined polemic is shown at the end of the Foreword. The division into twelve chapters is from Gaster and BenḤayyim 5. Sentence-divisions are mostly not marked in the mss. The title Asâṭîr or Asaṭîr probably goes back no further than the fourteenth or fifteenth century, according to Ben-Ḥayyim. There is no obvious indication either at the start or the end of what the author intended as the title. 6 Ch. XI differs from the earlier parts of the booklet by being written from the point of view of what Moses knows about what for him is the future. Whether this section is eschatological is a question of definition. From the author's point of view everything in ch. XI has happened, with the sole exception of what is said in v. 22 about the settling of holiness on Mt. Gerizim in the indefinite future. As a single verse, with no sense of urgency behind it, its function is to show where the events in the author's immediate past fit into salvation history. This chapter differs from most eschatological texts by not being presented as a special revelation outside the canon of exoteric scripture, or as a text or a body of tradition handed down separately. Furthermore, it is not represented as intended for a special few. The chapter is presented as being no more than the narrative of the revelation by Moses of a piece of scripture, and then a correct interpretation of that text. The piece of scripture is Dt XXXII, the Song of Moses, although there are clear references to Lv XXVI and some other passages as well. This song is presented in Deuteronomy itself as a prediction of the future (XXXI:16 -- 22; 26 -- 30). If the context of the narration of the Song is read 3 Even where MHSF and other text-witnesses have corrupt or arbitrary readings, Y has a satisfactory text, witnessing to the accuracy of its ancestor. 4 Note the conclusion of ch. XII. 5 They are not quite the same in the two editions. I follow Ben-Ḥayyim. 6 Ben-Ḥayyim, pp. 4 -- 5 of the independent consecutive numbering = 107 -- 108. 4 carefully, it can be seen that the Song was not revealed to Moses on that occasion, but was already known to him: it was on this occasion that he revealed it to the Israelites. The Asâṭîr says that the occasion and nature of Moses's acquisition of knowledge of the future is mentioned in Nu XII:6 -- 8, and v. 8 is quoted in XI:7. The Asâṭîr does not say whether the content of Dt XXXII was acquired at Mt. Sinai, or later. The author is thus able to claim that what he presents is supported by Scripture. Furthermore, his reading of that piece of Scripture is supported by its conformity to what the readers can see has actually happened. The interpretation puts the extreme low point of Israelite history as being the time of Solomon. (Ezra is never mentioned). From then onwards there has been improvement, and the present is very satisfactory. All that remains to be fulfilled is the change of metaphysical state of the holy place, in a way not clearly explained but expected to be known to the reader. Ch. XII is partly a recognition of deliverance in the immediate past, and partly an expression of hope for a greater degree of divine manifestation in the future. The main foe is unnamed, but there is also a group called the troublemakers (v. 9), and another group connected with a holy place not on Mt. Gerizim, but in Samaritan territory (v. 14). The author's ultimate expectation is the restoration of full holiness to the mountain. What that means is only partly defined. It seems to include the permanent reappearance of the top of the Mountain. What this means is not defined but can be worked out. The main foe is given the code-name ‫ עמינדס‬in v. 1, v. 7, and v. 19. This word might be an Aramaic term for Ammon, by way of the Greek Ammanītis, its use here being symbolic. See the notes to v. 7. Note the analogy of the pure Greek word ‫ אליניס‬. This word is not a borrowing into Aramaic, but a foreign word marked on purpose as being a foreign word by using the Greek plural suffix. It must be acknowledged that the identification of ‫ עמינדס‬is not fully conclusive, but it remains true that the application of the term to Moslem rulers is not based on tradition, as will be shown. Ch. XII could be read as a reflection on the Blessings of Moses, Deuteronomy ch. XXXIII. On this reading, the figure expected embodies the qualities of all the tribes, and specially Joseph and Levi. Joseph is termed ‫ קדקד‬in this chapter of Deuteronomy, in v. 16, and the same term ‫ קדקד‬occurs at the start of each of the twenty-two verses describing the deliverer in this chapter of the Asâṭîr. The figure expected ultimately is Moses, a reasonable expectation from vv. 4 -- 5 of the Blessings. His incorporation of the best of all the tribes would be a reasonable reading of v. 5 of the Blessings, though this reading would still be compatible with a reading referring this promise to all of the tribes. The one like Moses is a king, as in v. 5. The title ‫ נזיר‬is taken from v. 16. The promises of vv. 26 -- 29 of the Blessings are assumed. There are explicit quotations of v. 19 and v. 21. A reference to the perfection of the top of the Mountain could be found in v. 15 of the Blessings. The epithets following the repeated introductory formula in each verse of ch. XII are all suitable as epithets of Moses, and a comparison with the earliest Jewish and Samaritan sources would show that most or all of them have in fact been applied 5 to Moses. For example, Moses was persistent and indefatigable in his repeated audiences with Pharaoh, deserving the epithet ‫( עציף‬XII:4), the cognates of which in Jewish Aramaic and Rabbinic Hebrew are precise and strong terms. The Israelites, at Moses’s command, did despoil the Egyptians of a lot of jewellery (XII:21). If anyone released the Israelites from constraint, it was Moses (XII:19). Leader (in the sense of guide) is obviously an appropriate epithet of Moses, perhaps more than for a later ruler (XII:18). The epithet in XII:1 is certainly a reminiscence of Moses, since Dt XXXIII:5 can be read as meaning that Moses was the first king of Israel. Compare XII:3 and 5. Nevertheless, the figure described is historical and not the re-appearance of Moses himself. See XII:7 and the notes. It is not even the prophet like Moses. On the other hand, many of these epithets would suit Joseph. He was Viceroy of Egypt (compare XII:3, 4, 18). Joseph released his brethren from a precarious situation they could not remedy on their own (compare XII:19). The Palestinian Targum to Dt XXXIII:16 makes much of these two traits of Joseph. Targum Onkelos translates ‫נזיר‬ in Dt XXXIII:16 as ‫( פרישא דאחוהי‬compare XII:15). When the Samaritan literature was re-edited in Arabic, and a theology acceptable to every faction was agreed on, this booklet would not have been translated, because its theology would not have suited what had become orthodoxy. There is no traditional understanding of the language or content. The ancestral exemplar of all the extant mss. was copied during the Arabic period, as is shown by the Arabic comment on the condition of the text in XII:9. The early part of the renaissance of the fourteenth century is the latest possible date. In the notes to XII:7 it is shown, following Juynboll, that a date before 1350 is certain, because of the use of the word ‫( עמינדס‬in Hebrew letters, as always) in expressing a date according to the Islamic era in the colophon to a Torah manuscript. Ben-Ḥayyim shows the book was known to A.F., writing in 1355, and Ghazâl ad-Duwayk, a bit before this time. 3. The Purpose and Form of this Study Ben-Ḥayyim was justified in bringing out a new translation. His work is unquestionably an advance on Gaster’s. He observed that there is hardly a sentence anywhere that is not misread by Gaster to some extent in his translation. 7 This is an exaggeration. His own translation was his first publication on Samaritan Aramaic, and although undoubtedly a big improvement, at times he just guessed. The stunning example of thinking an Aramaic noun in the definite state was in the indefinite state in XI:10 will do, specially since the carelessness destroys the meaning and structure of a big part of the chapter by removing clear reference to the end of the Time of Favour. In chapters I to X he was mostly successful, but not always. For example, he guessed that ‫ עקובה‬in X:19 meant “blessing”, an unattested usage, when in fact it means “epithet”, as usual. God Most High was given a new epithet, the Shield of Abraham. Other examples could be given. In chapters XI and XII he never saw a coherent and purposeful exposition, or any indications of the circumstances that brought about the 7 Ben-Ḥayyim, p. 1 of the independent consecutive numbering = 104. 6 writing of them. 8 His readings of very many of the sentences in ch. XI are without content or any relationship to the narrative, which means he must have misunderstood. The reading of ch. XII is nonsense. These statements will be justified at length. Bonnard just copies him in both chapters, except where attributing worse nonsense to the author. See below, section 3 pp. 10 – 11, with note 40 on pp. 168 -169. My interpretation of nearly every sentence must therefore differ from these interpretations. The estimate of the date and purpose is therefore different as well. The date that emerges in this study is very different to the one assumed by Ben-Ḥayyim. His main datum for the dating was the use of the term ‫ עמינדס‬in ch. XII. Some colophons of Pentateuch mss. use this term as a name of Moslems in general. Ben-Ḥayyim took this understanding of the term as being based on tradition and therefore correct. In fact, however, this usage in colophons is no more than a literary convention. The evidence for the setting of ch. XII in a period when the Samaritans ruled over their own land, even if under Roman suzerainty, is overwhelming. Regardless of the etymology, the term refers to a major Israelite faction, not foreign rulers. Ben-Ḥayyim’s arguments for a late dating based on supposed Arabisms in vocabulary are made nugatory, at least in regard to ch. XI and ch. XII, by the fact that the meanings of the terms in question can be shown to certainly be different to his proposals, or that an Aramaic etymology is natural. For example, ‫ חופה‬in XII:10 is not the Arabic ‫ ﺣﺎﻓﮫ‬because it would make no sense to say the enemies that are to be spared are to be transferred to the district of Shechem. There is an Aramaic etymology and meaning that fits the context much better. (On Tal’s explanation, followed by Bonnard, see the Annotations). Again, in XI:12, ‫קרמט‬ not ‫ קרטם‬is the right reading on the manuscript evidence. The word ‫ קרמט‬is Greek and evidence of antiquity. Even if the other form were original, it would still be an Aramaic word with a recognisable etymology. The Arabic word proposed as origin of the inferior reading is unworkable anyway, as I have shown, since it is either a phantom or too rare to be useful. Neither can the term ‫ עמינדס‬in XII:1, 7, 19, be explained as a combination of Hebrew and Arabic, with the second half Arabic. This word needs detailed examination here, because wide-ranging theories have been built on false statements about the meaning of the second half, the supposed Arabic word. Ben-Ḥayyim p. 53 = 84 is wrong in saying ‫ ﻧﺪس‬means to despise or has such a connotation and contradicts himself by saying ‫ ﻧﺎدس‬--- an active participle --- means ‫( מקולל‬cursed). Tal is wrong again in saying there is an Arabic adjective ‫ ﻧﺎدس‬meaning ‫( בזוי‬despicable or despised). The verb means to aggressively abuse or defame someone. It comes from the literal meaning of throwing someone to the ground. The active participle ‫ ﻧﺎدس‬if ever used would mean aggressively defaming. Tal takes this meaning of “despised” from Ben-Ḥayyim, who in turn claims to have taken it from Juynboll. In fact Juynboll never said this. He correctly gives what would be the 8 See Part III section 4 note 40 pp. 168 -- 169. 7 meaning of the word if it were Arabic. His only reason for even mentioning this, and then only as an aside, was that he had seen this name in colophons in dates according to the Islamic era. He emphasises that it would not make sense in Arabic. BenḤayyim’s meaning “despised” comes from his own contradiction of Juynboll, using words himself that are self-contradictory. Ben-Ḥayyim was inspired by a guess in two commentaries that ‫ נדס‬means the same as the unrelated Arabic ‫ ﻣﺪﻧﺲ‬mudannas “contaminated”, this Arabic word then being misunderstood by Ben-Ḥayyim as meaning ‫( שפל‬low-grade, inferior). Not so. The form ‫ ﻧﺎدس‬cited by Tal in the dictionary, misleadingly put in Arabic letters with alif inserted, if it were a real Arabic word, would be an active participle, but he defies grammar by treating it as a passive participle, following Ben-Ḥayyim. Bonnard p. 372 has his own original invention of the meaning as “vil” (= ‫)שפל‬, which he attributes to Ben-Ḥayyim, though BenḤayyim does not cite this meaning, but only intended to quote an explanation of an unrelated word mudannas, which he gets wrong anyway, though Bonnard did not notice this. The explanation of a double meaning for the deception of Moslems by Crown (as quoted by Bonnard) is based on an imaginary Arabic word nādas with a double meaning: both “wise” and “foolish”. The word does not exist and there is no other word from this root < nds > or the root < dns > with the meanings made up by Crown. Ultimately everyone ending up with Bonnard has repeated a falsehood about Arabic made up by Ben-Ḥayyim from not understanding what had been said by Juynboll. Bonnard then based his argument for dating in the Arabic period largely on the contradictory guesses about this one word by previous authors. Remember this word was his main linguistic datum. Bonnnard himself was able to dismiss nearly all other examples of supposed borrowing from Arabic by Ben-Ḥayyim or others, such as Florentin, by his knowledge of Aramaic. The explanation of the word by T. Kittenplon, alluded to by Bonnard from Late Samaritan Hebrew by Moshe Florentin (Brill, Leiden, 2005) p. 25 note 64, was accepted by Florentin without examination. It is too complicated and artificial with too many steps to be tenable, even for an artificial code-name. He says ‫ נדס‬in the supposed compound is meant to be mentally rearranged and understood as an Arabic word danis meaning befouled, but then more improbable processes too complicated to explain here are tacked on to explain the rearrangement. On top of all that is impossible in the varieties of this invention, how could the right explanation have got lost if the term is from the Arabic period? The loss of the meaning of a symbolic Aramaised Greek word must therefore be considered. See the Annotations to XII:7 on this possibility. Use of Greek at the time was far more widespread than used to be thought and such a device would have worked. See the work by Gleaves in the Bibliography. The artificial use of the Greek word ‫‘ אליניס‬Ελλήνες keeping its Greek plural suffix in XI:17 is unique. This is not a borrowing, but a codeword meant to be instantly decipherable. Note also ‫ בדמסין‬a Greek government term in XII:10. More examples on pp. 152 – 153. Dositheos is only known by his Greek name. My argument does not depend on an etymology of ‫ עמינדס‬from Greek. In fact, I only had to state some universally known usage of 8 Arabic and dismiss the inventions about Arabic. I acknowledge my etymology to be unproven, but if it is not right, then the meaning is unknowable. Either way, nothing in my arguments is affected in the slightest. Leading up to the first accurate understanding of the place of the text, there is consistent improvement in understanding of details in it. Many places were noticed where previous commentators had misunderstood a Samaritan Aramaic word that is attested elsewhere. 9 Words not previously documented, and in a few cases words only documented once or twice in other sources, have been explained to the extent needed in each case. 10 There are quite a few words and constructions the meaning of which was worked out for the first time by Ben-Ḥayyim. 11 This monograph, however, goes well beyond Ben-Ḥayyim in the understanding of detail, and this greatly improved the understanding of the overall intention. The work by Bonnard was only useful in part. The work on the textwitnesses confirmed my own earlier assessment of the reliability and superiority of ms. Y, the ms. used by Ben-Ḥayyim, on the basis of less evidence. His demonstration that the vocabulary was inconclusive in establishing dating was useful. His collected evidence on dating and his own observations are used along with evidence found in the course of writing this monograph in Part III section 3. His understanding of the meaning, on the other hand, has not gone any further than what was reached by BenḤayyim in the two chapters treated in this monograph. As with previous translations by Gaster and Ben-Ḥayyim, the translation of both chapters, but specially ch. XII, still reads as a set of vague unrelated or disordered sentences. See for example the contentless translation (p. 378) of XII:15 due to not knowing the use of the verb ‫בטל‬ in Samaritan Aramaic or Syropalestinian, and then giving it the meaning “destroy”; a meaning not in any form of Aramaic and only a vague word used as a filler. The usage in the Syropalestinian translation of the Epistle to the Hebrews is well known to NT scholars. See also the contentless translation (p. 382) of XII:20 mentioned below Part III section 3 p. 158, specially the translation of the theological expression ‫מערב‬ ‫ משלם תרח דאיקר‬as “il franchit la porte de l’honneur”. The translation of this verse depends partly on omitting the word ‫ משלם‬without letting on to the reader. There is no knowledge shown by Bonnard of the importance of Jacob’s vision in Genesis XXVIII. This is part of the most basic knowledge required of anyone working on anything touching on Samaritan religion, because it is connected with the metaphysical status of Mt. Gerizim. Knowing the status of Mt. Gerizim is as basic as knowing the Torah. At XI:10 (his p. 367), the word ‫ מקדשה‬is translated as meaning a 9 Examples: XII:4 ‫ ;עציף‬XII:5, 19 ‫ ;זור‬XII:15 ‫ ;פרוש‬XII:15 ‫בטל‬. 10 Examples: XI:12 ‫ ;קרמט‬XII:6 ‫ ;מלחמיה‬XII:10 ‫ ;חופה‬XII:20 ‫מערב‬. 11 For example, Ben-Ḥayyim’s explanation of ‫ אימנותה‬in XI:4; and so frequently. 9 sanctuary, not the sanctuary, following Tal p. 351 col. 2 top, who copies BenḤayyim. This is not Aramaic. Like Gaster and Ben-Ḥayyim, followed by Tal, and like the Arabic commentators before them, Bonnard treats the glosses and most of the scribal notes in ch. XII, even including the Arabic words, as part of the composition. Even the marker ‫ גג‬in vv. 12 and 14 is treated as part of the work, as a name equivalent to Gog (pp. 377 – 378), following Tal. This analysis of the word in the Torah would only be possible with the Masoretic analysis of the structure of the word ‫ מגוג‬as two morphemes, a prefix and then a proper noun. Tal does not address the contradiction of his analysis by the Samaritan pronunciation of this word as recorded by Ben-Ḥayyim in his transcription of the whole Torah or his dictionary of the Torah, or the contradiction from how the word is rendered in the Samaritan targums (plural), or the contradiction from the spelling. The defective spelling assumed by him is not in the Samaritan mss. of the Torah (or the Jewish ones either). Bonnard and Joosten and Schorch did not notice any fault with Tal’s explanation. Bonnard’s alternative, from Ben-Ḥayyim, is that this is a Hebrew word (not Aramaic) meaning a roof, so here it means someone exalted. This proposal need not be considered. It is an example of his consistent method. Scholarly method would have been to say nothing could be said. Any translation that consistently sounds disconnected and vague and irrational with no historical or logical order is bound to be mostly inaccurate, and any explanations that assume the author was irrational must be wrong. Ben-Ḥayyim missed a lot of allusions to the Torah. Bonnard has not got further. Missing references to the Torah can be seen by comparing the references marked in my translation by underlining, bold print, italic print, and quotation marks and explained in the Annotations. Examples are the treatment of XII:20 just mentioned, or the treatment of the term “desolation” ‫ אשמו‬in XI:16. There is more. From this survey it is evident why a new study at the most fundamental level was needed. 12 This work is the first accurate exposition of the author’s meaning, in its historical and doctrinal setting, regardless of whether explanations of any details turn out to need modification. The cumulative evidence for antiquity is strong. 13 It will be seen that chs. XI and XII of the Asâṭîr come from about the same time as both the Apóphasis Megálē and the official invitation for Samaritans led astray by Christianity to return to Israel. One of the main concerns of II Enoch is the need for sacrifices. This concern fits the time of ending sacrifices by both the Sebuaeans and 12 More could have been said, but it seemed better to cast the rest, which is still only a small sample, into footnote 40 on pp. 168 -- 169, where the whole question of the pervasive general attitude towards the composition of these two chapters and equally towards the competence of the authors of the two chapters is treated. Writing a chapter on the pervasive consequences of this attitude would have been outside the purpose of this monograph. The purpose has been achieved by the accumulated information of the detailed work, even though assessments by others have not been compared in most places. The Samaritan Greek translation of the Pentateuch is probably older, but very little of it survives. The list of the succession of the High Priests is presumably older, but this is not a text in the usual sense. One assumes that a lot of the historical material must be older, but we have it in later adaptations. The original of the Arabic Joshua Book was ancient, even though we have the book in an Arabic translation of an Aramaic epitome of the original Hebrew book; for the details and evidence, see my article The Transmission of the Samaritan Joshua-Judges. 13 10 the Dositheans, each using their own compelling justification. It is shown in this book from multiple lines of evidence that the Dositheans ended sacrifices not long before the start of the first century A.D., and the Sebuaeans soon after. It is shown in Part III of this book that the work attributed to Mårqe, ‘Amråm Dẩre, the Durrân, and Ninna must be from the time of chs. XI and XII of the Asâṭîr or not much later. Working out the relationships has been started in this book, but a lot more work is needed. Just as one obvious example, it is not known when agreement on a common hymnbook was reached. Or again, there is a need to see whether the work on the Torah attributed to Mårqe is deliberately vague in places, and if so, whether this was meant to make it acceptable to everyone. Bonnard has found indications of vocabulary differences between this work on the Torah and the hymns attributed to the same person, as well as indications of such differences between the oldest collections of hymns. It is remarkable how much more the hymn-writers coming much later are willing to say on theology and metaphysics than the earliest hymn-writers whose compositions are treated as canonical. The biggest puzzle is when the Apóphasis Megálē stopped being treated as authoritative, what it was that replaced it, whether we have the replacement in our hands in scattered form, with new formulation, and why a lot was not put in writing for general readers till centuries later. ! ‫ צ"ע‬. This is not a study of Samaritan secular history. All historical information in this book is for the sole purpose of helping clarify Samaritan religious doctrine and the circumstances of its development. Some wide-spread beliefs from careless reading have been refuted. Out of necessity, this book is structured round deciphering and then explaining a hitherto obscure ancient text. Information from other documents is brought in. Most of this had been overlooked. A lot of information given by Abu ’lFateḥ was read correctly for the first time. This information filled out the picture of development of doctrine. Just as this is not meant to be a piece of research into secular Samaritan history, it is not meant to be a piece of research on Samaritan Aramaic either. Numerous linguistic details in the Asâṭîr have been solved, but this was for the immediate purpose of understanding the document correctly so it could be used. The conclusions are far-reaching. The proliferation of Samaritan sects with hardly any information can be reduced to two factions divided on one question, which is whether there can be a sanctuary structure with its cultus after the occultation of the Mosaic Tabernacle and its apparatus and the end of the Time of Favour, the Rûutå ‫ רחותה‬. That is why this study goes forward in time beyond the dates assumed for the text studied. After long centuries, both factions were forced by historical events to give up on their expectations for the near or historical future. They found agreement in the tenth and eleventh centuries in following the words of Jacob as in the Torah declaring the holiness of the Mountaintop in itself, from before the giving of the Torah. Their expectations were formulated in the fourteenth century in the common acceptance of a refinement of the old Sebuaean concept of the coming of the Tẩ’eb within history combined with the Dosithean hope for the reappearance of the Mosaic Tabernacle, and the common hope of the coming of Moses in the end. 11 II. ASSESSMENT OF THE PLACE OF ASÂṬÎR XI AND XII 1. Circumstances of the Times with Extensive New Documentation (a). In ch. XI, the last event mentioned --- which is not to be mistaken for the time of writing --- is later than the Macedonian conquest. The term ‫אליניס‬ Ἑλλήνες “Greeks” in v. 17 is decisive. The setting must be after the re-building of the sanctuary on Mt. Gerizim, according to vv. 19 -- 20. The Comprehensive History, using a source not known to A.F., 14 definitely not Josephus, remembers Seleucid rule as the end of Jewish oppression of the Samaritans. Ch. XI and ch. XII belong to different times. The author of ch. XI lives in times when everything is right. The author of ch. XII looks towards getting rid of enemies soon. Both look to perfection in the unknowable future, not quite the same way. Whereas the most recent event mentioned in ch. XI is the rebuilding of Lûza, the most recent event in ch. XII is the later destruction of a false temple. It is hard to work out the date of ch. XI. Evidence for a date in the second c. A.D. will be put forward for ch. XII. Ch. XI might be earlier, but reread later on in new circumstances. P13FP13F P There was intense activity in the second century A.D. 15 A.F. at 115:17 – 116:2 (Stenhouse p. 159) records that all Jews were driven out of Samaria by Hadrian, within a radius of 24 parasangs of Neapolis (80 British Imperial miles). The real time could be the time of Vespasian, as will be seen. There had been Jews in Shechem itself. Very many Samaritans moved into Judaea and a significant number into the Galilee. Some towns that had been Jewish became Samaritan, apparently with their inhabitants. (Palestinian Talmud Yevamot 8:3, col. 9d top, and Kiddushin 4:1, col. 65c end, with the same words in two different contexts. See my article A Samaritan Broadside p. 35 note 13). In the time of R. Akiva and Rabban Gamli’el Samaria had regained its coastal territory (Tosefta Demai V:24). The Samaritans had a Patriarch in the mid second century. See my chapter Mikra, p. 616. As Bereshit Rabba 94:7 p. 1179 uses the Greek word Patriarchos and calls him Patriarch of the Shamrâ’ê, not Kûthâ’ê, this must have been a civil title bestowed by the government, so they had home rule under Roman suzerainty. They had a Senate in the first century. See p. 95. This probably continued. Massechet Kutim ch. II start allows Jews living where Jewish Priests are not allowed to officiate to give terumah to Samaritan Priests. Tosefta Demai III:3 allows the legitimacy of produce tithed to Samaritan Priests, but under conditions with an implausible explanation. Tosefta Demai V:24 allows it under conditions. All this fits the statement by A.F. that under Hadrian (perhaps meaning starting with Vespasian) the Samaritans officially ruled over any Jews in Samaritan territory. Before this, at 115:14 – 15 (Stenhouse p. 159), A.F. agrees with the Arabic Joshua book ch. 47 in saying Hadrian had a Pagan temple set up on the lower peak of Mt. Gerizim, which is not sacred. The location is confirmed by coins. At 116:2 (Stenhouse p. 159) A.F. says the Samaritans were charged with guarding the temple Confirmed in a hostile manner by Josephus, Antiquities XII: 257 -- 264 = XII:5:5. There was destruction of books under Commodus, according to A.F. 120:10 – 121:14 (Stenhouse pp. 165 – 167). All the histories and liturgical books from the Time of Favour were lost (121:10 – 14), but the number of exemplars must have been small, as all were accommodated in the High Priest’s house. A.F. ascribes a reign of 32 years to Commodus, apparently fusing him with Septimius Severus. This is not long enough for other liturgical books or histories with numerous exemplars to be lost. 14 15 12 building (kanîsah; see note 23 p. 105) and anchorites and priests. This means they had delegated military power. After this two true stories have been jumbled in the source used by A.F., partly because of ignorance of terminology. It says the Samaritans destroyed the temple (called kanîsah, which can mean either a temple or a church) and killed the priests (called qasâqisah, which resembles a Christian title) and anchorites (called ruhbân, which can also mean Christian monks) and this led to persecution. Then A.F. says they lied and successfully framed the Jews for it, and Hadrian was sorry for having persecuted them and then attacked the Jews. This is unworkable editorialising by A.F. to try to integrate unrelated accounts. There is an anachronistic reminiscence here of the destruction of a Christian church on Mt. Gerizim in the time of Christian Rome. The proof is that dead bodies were buried next to the temple or in it, which is a unique Christian aberration. If this was offensive, the building must have been on the sacred top of the higher peak. This is jumbled up with a secondhand Jewish true reminiscence of an attack by Jews on the Pagan temple on the lower peak and its Samaritan guard. The curse of the real Hadrian right at the end is standard Jewish usage and makes no sense in the context. If the two stories are disentangled, there is evidence that the Samaritans were favoured by the real Hadrian and Jews tried to sabotage the relationship. Such an attack by Jews would have been impossible straight after the first revolt. The evidence by A.F. is confirmed by the Arabic Joshua book, ch. 47, as will be shown. The sanctuary building was not destroyed by Hyrcanus in 111 B.C. See below, pp. 108-- 110. In the time of Pilate in 36 A.D. there was a hope of recovering the original apparatus, which means the sanctuary must have been standing. See p. 95. Dio Cassius at XV:12 records that Hadrian put up a temple on Mt. Gerizim dedicated to Zeus Hypsistos (Montgomery p. 91). Contrary to common assumptions, this was an Israelite temple. Zeus Hypsistos (Most High) is a standard Pagan designation of the God of Israel intended to be respectful while fitting into administrative terminology, as shown by its use later on in the late fifth c. A.D. by Marinos the philosopher, who was a Samaritan (Pummer 2002 p. 429). Hypsistos is a translation of ‫( עליון‬Most High), a Scriptural epithet of God at Gn XIV:18 and Dt XXXII:8. The anonymous Samaritan called Pseudo-Eupolemus, probably writing about 100 B.C., says Abram “was admitted as a guest into the temple (or sacred place) hierón of the city of Argarizin, which can be interpreted as the Mountain of the Most High (Hypsistos), and received gifts from Melchizedek, who was King and Priest of God” (Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica IX:17). See Gn XIV:18 on the terminology. Marinos connects this title of God with this event. Samaritans could comfortably have used the one word title Hypsistos by itself. The name Zeus might not have been objectionable to hear, since at this time it could simply mean God. The dedication of the Pagan temple was to Zeus Serapis. See below. Favour from Rome continued. A.F. says the Samaritans were as well off under Antoninus Pius as under Joshua. See A.F. 117:15 – 118:1 (Stenhouse p. 162). A.F. fuses Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (March 161 to March 180 A.D.) with Antoninus Pius (138 – March 161 A.D.), saying great troubles came after Antoninus. He says Antoninus studied the Torah in Hebrew and the Targum. It would be true to say he read the Torah in Greek. A.F. records that he was financially immensely generous towards the religion. The second century A.D. was the date of Bẩbå Råbbå ‫ בבא רבה‬, who was Patriarch, vassal ruler of Samaria with authority over Samaritans nearby in Palestine and Syria. See Part III section 3. Bẩbå ‫ בבא‬was his name, not a title. See note 38 on p. 162. Later leaders in unfavourable then favourable then unfavourable times are conflated with him. See pp. 20 – 21. He ruled late in a long favourable era lasting 670 years, dawning with the conquest of Palestine by Alexander in 333 B.C., marred by Hasmonaean harassment 13 from 171 B.C. but quiet after the thwarting of Hyrcanus in 111 B.C., flowering from the Roman conquest of Palestine in 63 B.C., interrupted badly from 180 to 217 A.D., but then restored, and ending disastrously when the Christian Church started to use imperial power in 337 A.D. See pp. 110 middle – 113. The Tûlẩdå and A.F. (details in Ben-Ḥayyim’s introductions) put Mårqe and his father in the time of Bẩbå Råbbå, which would mean Mårqe’s canonical book on the Torah and his hymns and the canonical hymns by his supposed son Ninna and supposed father cÅmråm Dẩre were universally distributed at that time. It is quite possible that the real B.R. has been fused with the Samaritan Patriarch in the second half of the first century. Kippenberg, in his article Gebetbuch, argues for an important part of the early Samaritan liturgy, the Durrân, having been written in the second century. 16 Now an important note to prevent misunderstanding of what has just been said and correct common misconception. After the Jewish revolts were finally brutally crushed, Rome did not persecute Jews, not even under Hadrian. The practice of the religion in a form not likely to foment revolt was encouraged. The organised work of the Tanna’im and the Palestinian Amora’im would not have been possible without some kind of official support. The work had to be made to be centred in the Galilee as a precaution, but was not limited to the Galilee. There is some evidence that Hadrian would have allowed sacrifices to start up again, but the terms were not acceptable, or religious leaders did not want sacrifices any more. The details are still unclear, so this is not the place to quote or use the evidence. What matters is that there is nothing in Rabbinic sources saying the Samaritans were used to help keep the Jews under In his published collection, Ben-Ḥayyim prints under the name of cẢmråm Dẩre hymns that are ascribed to this author and hymns ascribed to the Durrân collection, without any hint to the reader. His introduction p. 14 adds to the confusion. The two bodies of hymns are not only consistently identified in the mss., but also in the order of service. So far Kippenberg. Now my own comment. There is no Samaritan tradition of what the name Durrân means. The modern explanation that it is an Arabic word meaning “pearls” is unworkable. First, these hymns are from the Aramaic period. Second, there is no such Arabic word and never could be. Durrah meaning a pearl is a singulative from a collective durr meaning pearls, not “a pearl”. It is impossible to form a plural on the pattern durrân from a collective or a feminine singulative or a noun with a feminine suffix. See p. 100 with note 21. The possible plurals are the known durar and durrât. The word must be Aramaic even if the meaning is unknown. Kippenberg’s derivation in footnote 203 from an Aramaic word meaning pearls is impossible because there is no such word. The doubling of the second consonant makes a connection with the Aramaic title Dẩre impossible. The distinctive mode of composition shows a distinction between this collection and the hymns by cẢmråm Dẩre, as Kippenberg has shown. Ben-Ḥayyim does not tell the reader this, adding to the confusion. No. 3 (B.H. no. 9) and no. 16 (B.H. no. 16) mention the Tẩ’eb and no. 3 a coming Time of Favour. No. 16 speaks of the cleansing of the Mountaintop. This can only fit the circumstances of no. 3 in the time of Pagan Rome, which describes forced observance desecrating the sanctuary (see below p. 51). According to A.F., there were only three such periods. That was in the time of Commodus, from 180 to 192, Caracalla, from 211 to 217, and Decius, from 249 to 251. It is known from A.F. that the emperor Severus, next after Commodus, even while imposing terrible restrictions on religious observance, refused to let the Roman gods be dishonoured by sham recognition. A.F. describes repression of practice under Christian Rome after Constantine, but does not mention desecration of the sanctuary building. He says Zēnōn, who was the worst, found a final solution by replacing the sanctuary building by a church intended to take on the status of the sanctuary in 484 A.D. It follows that the term Tẩ’eb and the concept of the second Time of Favour are from the time of Pagan Rome, well over a thousand years before their common acceptance, doubtless with extensive reformulation, in the 14th century. Haran observed that the term Tẩ’eb must be older than the Arabic period because it is Aramaic not Hebrew. This is conclusive. There is new evidence from the first century A.D. in my article An Ancient Form of the Samaritan Concept of the Tâ’eb. 16 14 control. When the boundaries of Samaria were restored, they were restored to what they rightfully ought to have been. When Jews were forbidden to live in central Samaria, it can be supposed that this was to prevent internal trouble from being caused by some Jews. The rebuilding or renovation or expansion of the Samaritan sanctuary by Hadrian was consistent with the policy towards Jews. Samaritans remember Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus as great benefactors, but so do the Jewish records. This is not the place to go into all this. It is enough to say that the intensive systematic work of the Tanna’im was made feasible. I have been told it is anti-Semitic to know this. I thought the Mishnah was a well-known book. The story that Jews were driven out of Palestine was made up by Christian theologians to show how the Jews had been divinely punished demanding the execution of Jesus, that is, the Jesus invented by the Christian Church. The Jewish population outside Palestine centuries before the destruction of the temple is forgotten about. The story only appeared in the Renaissance, because there were too many Jews in Palestine before that. These days most Jews believe this bit of Christian theology, because it is vigorously promoted. This includes putting it in the Israel national anthem. No-one explains why most Jews did not move to Palestine while they were treated favourably within the Turkish empire, though they moved into other parts of the empire. It must be said that it is constantly forgotten on purpose that wanting to live in Palestine for religious reasons is meritorious no matter what. For the present purpose, it does not matter whether the three Samaritan authors just mentioned really were related or just worked at about the same time. It has not been remarked that passages in the undoubtedly original parts of Mårqe’s book lend themselves to formal recitation and other passages lend themselves to formal comments after the reading from the Torah and other passages read like sermons. It can be deduced that the new works were made canonical --- not just authorised --- as they have been ever since and put into use in the synagogue service everywhere straightaway from the fact that the old hymns said to have been used in the Time of Favour were only preserved in the care of the High Priest by the time of Commodus, and this is why it was possible to destroy them altogether. A plausible explanation for the drastic change might be that both factions, Dositheans and Sebuaeans, had come to regard using the psalms of the Time of Favour as against divine will, the same as it had been realised well before that sacrifices were unacceptable. Each side would have formulated this a different way. There is indirect evidence for such a decision in the report of the building of the sanctuary by Hadrian. It is proven further on that it was not destroyed by Hyrcanus, or if destroyed, rebuilt straightaway. It was a very modest building. Josephus only says the building put up two hundred years before by the supposed Menasseh was destroyed, niftily taking attention away from what happened next. What probably happened under Hadrian was cosmetic improvement of the sanctuary building along with adding new buildings for elaboration of its function as a place of learning and provision of better facilities for visitors and pilgrims. Regardless of how much was done, any work at all on the sanctuary at government expense would have been useless to Rome unless both Samaritan factions recognised they had been given a substantial benefit. The two factions had to come to a formal agreement on what to do about the sanctuary service. This meant agreement by the Sebuaeans to ending the use of the hymns from the Time of Favour so as not to offend the Dositheans. This then would have demanded not using them any more in the synagogue service, by a couple of lines of argument. The implication of this is that the decision by both sides and the work of composition, which would have taken time, 15 happened well before the rule of B.R., even if the completion of distribution of texts was done under his supervision. The organisation needed had been reached with the establishment of the Samaritan Senate, even before the rule of B.R in the second century. The lead up to the rebuilding of the sanctuary started in the time of Claudius (41 – 54 A.D.), when a statue of a dignitary representing the Samaritan Senate on a state visit was put up in Rome by order of the Senate. See p. 48 on Justin’s evidence, which is made certain by its hostility. Preparation by both sides seems to have started with the events of 36 A.D. See pp. 95. It will now be seen how A.F. did not know how to not contradict himself by putting Dositheos in the time of B.R. in one place. It is explained in the Bibliography that the historical appendixes to the Samaritan Arabic Joshua book are excerpts from a lost history. There is valuable information on the relations between the Samaritans and Hadrian in ch. 47 of this book, but it needs critical examination. There can be no doubt that the first part of the chapter is true reminiscence of favourable relations between the Samaritans and Rome. There is too much detail for it to be fiction, and there would be no reason to make up what is said. The compiler of the Arabic Joshua book puts Hadrian, by whom he means Vespasian, as will be seen, straight after Alexander. This mistake need not go back to the author of the history excerpted and probably does not. First, there is a mention of an attack on Christians in Egypt by Hadrian. This is not in A.F. It might be true. The mention is not connected closely with what follows. There is no telling whether Vespasian or Hadrian is really meant. Then it says Hadrian besieged Jerusalem. There is confusion here between the first and second Jewish revolts, and Hadrian and Vespasian. The well known account of Vespasian finding an idol in the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem temple is transferred to Hadrian. This is in A.F. as well (115:5 – 10; Stenhouse p. 158). No more or less reasonable than the identical malicious Jewish inventions about the Samaritans. Then A.F. says a lot of Jews were killed and the temple was destroyed (lines 10 – 11). This is not in the Arabic Joshua book but implicit from what follows. Before this it says two Samaritan brothers improbably named Ephraim and Manasseh showed the Romans how to block off the food supply to the city. This is in A.F. as well (114:12 – 115:4; Stenhouse pp. 157 -158). This fiction is confirmation of good relations between Samaritans and Rome in the time of Vespasian. The Arabic Joshua book explicitly says Shechem was not attacked after the taking of Jerusalem. This is confirmed by Josephus, who says he conquered the rest of Jewish territory, but passed through Samaritan territory without conflict (War IV:8:1 = IV:449 and the context). Both Samaritan sources say that after destroying the Jerusalem temple he took the massive bronze gates that had been part of Solomon’s temple and put them on the temple of Serapis he had built on the lower peak of Mt. Gerizim. (A.F. 115:15 – 17; Stenhouse p. 159). Then A.F. has the jumbled account described in the previous paragraph. Instead of this, the Arabic Joshua book has an account of how a Jewish delegation tried to damage relations between the Samaritans and Hadrian by telling him the Samaritans had ritually cleansed the ground he had trodden. It says the Samaritans explained that this was normal practice and not meant as a slight on him. Here again is confirmation that relations were good. If the Romans did not know about this practice, the time must have been the time of Vespasian, not Hadrian. Then comes an incompatible statement ultimately Jewish that Hadrian died of a nasty sickness with the standard Jewish curse on the real Hadrian “may God shatter his bones”. Both A.F. and the Arabic Joshua book must have unwittingly used a Samaritan source by an unthinking compiler, who tried to use Jewish material. This is clearly the end of a long account of favour by 16 Hadrian known to both authors, with some difference in the details. It is only after this that the Arabic Joshua book has a detailed account of persecution supposedly under Hadrian. A.F. correctly puts all this in the time of Commodus. He wrongly partially duplicates this with persecution under Hadrian but apparently for editorial purposes as described. It will now be partly understood why the compiler of the Arabic Joshua book puts Bẩbå Råbbå at an undefined time much later, and why A.F. does not know where to put him. See below, Part III section 3, at length. The historical work excerpted by the compiler of the Arabic Joshua book had real information on good relations between Samaritans and Rome at the time of the first Jewish revolt, even though he calls Vespasian by the wrong name. The fictitious bits are still true reminiscences of good relations. A.F. had this information, but he also had data on the favourable policy of the real Hadrian before and after the second Jewish revolt. It will be seen at the end of this section that Chronicle Adler, composed in 1900, changes a lot of this, out of new ideology. The establishment of the city of Neapolis by Vespasian in 72 A.D. looks like a substantial favour to keep them on side. The Israelite temple (probably meaning improvements with more outbuildings) put up by Hadrian definitively outweighs any argument or guess to the contrary. This is not to deny that it would have been useful to have a major Hellenistic city on the spot. The assumption that the population was mostly Pagan has no evidence whatsoever. The prominence of the Pagan temple on the coins is natural, if the coins were minted under licence from Rome. The depiction of the Samaritan sanctuary would have been impossible unless Samaritans were the great majority in the city. It is true that the building of a temple of Serapis by Hadrian (see below) must indicate that there was a substantial Pagan population, but note the remarks below on its symbolically inferior positioning and the location inconveniently far from the city. The Samaritans would not have wanted a Pagan temple defiling their city, and must have had the numbers to stop it. There is no other instance of a depiction of a temple not belonging to a member of the Roman or Greek pantheon or a god or goddess that could be identified with one of these on a Roman coin. The assumption that the population must have been mostly Pagan starts with the observation that the city had a Greek and Latin name, Flavia Neapolis, together with the assumption that the Samaritans must have had the same attitude to Rome as the Jews. All these fade away when looked at. First, a new major city would have had to have a Greek name because that was administrative practice. Continuity with Shechem is strongly emphasised by calling it Neapolis. If it had been meant to wipe out memory of Shechem and its centrally important place for the Samaritans it would have just been called Flavia. What’s more, when the name was shortened, it was to Neapolis, not Flavia, even in official papers and on coins. The Samaritan records in Hebrew and Aramaic call both the old city and the new one just over one British Imperial mile away Shechem, and the Samaritan records in Arabic call both Nablus, i.e. Neapolis. The thinking is that the same city that was standing in the time of composition of the Torah kept on standing forever afterwards, even if it moved up the road. Second, it has been seen that there is overwhelming evidence from multiple sources that the Samaritans were favoured by Rome after both Jewish revolts. Furthermore, the first Jewish revolt was a mix of different forms of ideological stupidity not supported by all Jews. This is made clear over and over by Josephus. Allowing for his own self-interest, there are enough hard data scattered through his work and both Talmuds to support what he says. A sorry story it is. The reader must be reminded of the words of King Agrippas near the end of the Yosippon saying go 17 ahead and destroy yourselves if that is built into your nature, but without me. Third, contrary to modern Jewish folk belief copied from purposeful Christian theological invention of history, Jews were not driven out of Palestine in great numbers after either revolt. How did the Palestinian Talmud or the midrashim composed in Palestine at the same time and even later get written and preserved? Bad persecution of Jews started under Christian Rome. The Pagan temple was put well outside the city, too far to conveniently walk, instead of the usual most prominent place within the city. It would have been seen as symbolic by the Samaritans that it was put next to their sanctuary but on the lower peak. Two sacred places are shown on numerous coins, e.g. in Montgomery’s two drawings of coins from the reigns of Antonius Pius and Volusian facing p. 89, meaning both had official status. The Israelite altar is prominently higher up. I have seen a picture of the tail side of an exceptionally well engraved coin from the reign of Antoninus Pius in private hands. The picture is reproduced in Olson’s book. The higher peak and the Samaritan altar are as prominent as they could be while keeping the Serapis temple in the foreground. The Samaritan altar is higher up than the Pagan temple, and the upper peak of the Mountain is drawn prominently. There is what might or might not be the specially sacred crag depicted next to the altar, out of perspective. From my friend Larry Rynearson I have photographs of legible samples of most of the coins of Neapolis. None show the Samaritan building, but the altar instead, with the really well made ones, including the one in private hands just mentioned, showing flames on the altar. Showing the altar, specially with fire, is an expression of hope for the end of the Fẩnûtå held by both parties. Showing the building would not have been expressive enough for either party, and might even have been uncomfortable for the Dositheans, because the only way to depict the reappearance of the Tabernacle is to show an altar in use. One coin showing a building on the higher peak but without showing the altar is known. It is reproduced as a photograph by A. D. Crown as the frontispiece of a volume written by numerous scholars including me. (The Samaritans, J. C. B. Mohr, Tübingen, 1989). Crown says the coin is from the reign of Antoninus Pius. If even one coin shows a building then the representations of an altar definitely can’t be interpreted to mean there was only an altar but no building. There are coins of Antoninus Pius showing both sacred places, Pagan and Samaritan, with both prominent. There is a coin of Marcus Aurelius (March 161 – March 180) showing both sacred places, but the Samaritan one is not prominent, though its location on the higher peak is certain. Coins of Macrinus (April 217 – June 218) and Elegabalus (218 – 222) show both sacred places, but the Samaritan altar is not prominent and is stylised, and it is not obviously set higher, though the road leading up to it is clear. There is a coin of Severus Alexander (222 – 235) showing the Samaritan altar fairly prominently and clearly set on the higher peak. Some coins of Philip (244 – 249) show both sacred places, with the Samaritan altar actually more obvious than the Pagan building from how the road leading up to it is drawn. Some clearly show the Samaritan altar as set higher up, though usually stylised, some are not clear in this respect. Some only show the Pagan temple. There is a coin of Oticilia Severa, wife of Philip and co-empress, showing the Samaritan altar carefully engraved with detail, and clearly set on the higher peak. The extant coins of Trebonianus (June 251 – August 253) and Volusian (November 251 – August 253) are not well preserved, except for the well preserved coin of Volusian drawn by Montgomery. From all this, on top of the evidence quoted before, it is certain that Hadrian’s recognition of the Samaritan sanctuary and therefore Samaritan Israelite religion was long-term policy past and future, and the frightful persecutions were a departure: Commodus (March 180 – December 192), 18 Septimius Severus (193 – 211), Caracalla (211 – 217), and to a limited extent mostly concerned with tax under Gordian (238 – 244. Evidence that the Senate or a faction within it was ready for this in the time of Justin, and the evidence of A.F. that the impetus for what was done not much later on came from the Senate, though with the cooperation of the emperors, is given below. Decius (September 249 – June 251) went his own way. The name of the Pagan temple is recorded in two different corrupt forms, once by A.F. at 115:15 and 17 and once by the Arabic Joshua book. A.F. gives < sfys > or < syfs >, with the first in more reliable mss. The Arabic Joshua book ch. 47 has < sqrs >. (There is only one ms. of it with this chapter). The ms. is in Hebrew letters, which is unusual for a book in Arabic. All other mss. of this book are in Arabic letters. There must have been a ms. in Arabic letters in the chain of transmission behind this ms. Clermont-Ganneau saw that the answer is < sfrs > Serapis (Montgomery p. 92). The alternation of < F > and < Q > is a common error in Arabic script. Alternation of medial consonants in words of the pattern CvCCvC is common in Aramaic, and [sefris] or [sefres] is more natural than [serfis] or [serfes]. The name Zeus Serapis occurs often on coins of Neapolis. This is conclusive. The proposal of Sospes by Adler and Séligsohn does not fit the graphic evidence and is in the wrong language. The attachment to the Arabic Joshua book uses the name of the god as the name of the temple. So does A.F. but with some confusion. The Samaritans might have treated the name this way so it could be freely used as a secular word. It was shown above that the highly favourable conditions of the second century before the year 180 led on from increasingly favourable conditions since the Roman conquest in 63 B.C. The proof of the dating of B.R. from the extant historical records is set out at length in Part III section 3 in the context of the dating of the earliest extant Samaritan Aramaic texts. In that place it is shown that the resistance leader fused with this person under the same name by A.F. must have been active just afterwards, in the period of persecution under Commodus, Septimius Severus, and Caracalla. A.F. then fuses both figures with the Samaritan leader under Philip, who was honoured by the Romans. The indications are that a series of emperors after the period of persecution tried to re-establish normality, and Philip and his wife the empress Oticilia are remembered as the most prominent. The policy of favouring the Samaritans at the time, in a return to standard long-term Roman policy, is definitively confirmed by the evidence set out above from coins of Neapolis. The coin of Oticilia is specially important, because the Samaritan altar is drawn as realistically as feasible on a coin and as prominently as feasible if the Pagan sanctuary is to be more prominent, and the higher peak of the Mountain is completely unmistakably and carefully shown as being higher. This fits in with the singling out of Philip by A.F. We have to distinguish five periods associated with the name B.R., the fifth being a composite. (a) First there is the era that came to be identified with B.R., that is, the long favourable period during which Dositheos appeared, according to the Tûlẩdå. (b) Second there is the time of rule of the innovator B.R., the all-powerful religious and secular leader. This person died in either 175 or 178 A.D., probably the last. Khaḍir might be quoting real tradition in saying he ruled for forty years. The calculations for the conversion of the date are in Part III section 3. The precise date is in the Tûlẩdå. This information independent of A.F. puts his rule squarely during the reign of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, and note what was said above about Antoninus Pius. A.F. is unable to give a precise date because he has fused four eras. The deeds of this person are set out by A.F. in a single long block of text in which there is not the slightest hint of any hostility by Rome. A.F. wrongly puts this after the accounts of 19 resistance, but it is to be noticed that the accounts of resistance are clearly dated by emperors, and the block of text describing the time of perfection has no dating whatever, not by mentioning any emperor and not by any clear relation to what is described before or after. (c) The third short era is the period of persecution under Commodus (180 – 192) then Septimius Severus (193 – 211) then Caracalla (211 – 217), when there was partly successful defence under a leader or perhaps different leaders whose name A.F. does not know, and whom his sources have guessed must be the famous all-powerful B.R. This short first era of troubles (c) and the second era of undisturbed peace (d) must be kept separate in any historical investigation, but confusion is common. The fourth era (d) was a time of peace with a return to normal policy by Rome, through the reigns of Macrinus (217 – 218), Elegabalus (218 – 222), Alexander Severus (222 – 235), Philip and Oticilia (244 – 249), Trebonianus and Volusian (251 – 253) (interrupted by Decius 249 -- 251 who had his own purposes, and perhaps less severely and more to do with tax under Gordian 238 -- 244). There is no telling how long this second and last favourable period lasted, but it seems to have been till the empire became Christian. A.F. says the person he calls B.R. died in Constantinople during the reign of Philip. This is a bad anachronism. It is conceivable that the Samaritan Patriarch went to Rome by invitation of Philip. It is conceivable that the last Samaritan leader of this last favourable period died in Constantinople in the time of Constantine. A.F. says he was a well-treated prisoner, so the era of favour was on the way out as soon as the empire became Christian. Bad persecution under Constantius II (337 – 361) after this is recorded. See Part III section 3, pp. 163 – 164. A historical appendix to the Arabic Joshua book impossibly puts the birth of B.R. in a fifth era (e), in the time of an unnamed emperor whose actions have been confused with Constantius II, who has himself been conflated with later Christian emperors. Our main concern here is with the second century A.D. Hardly anything is known about the relations of the person really called Bẩbå or the leaders before him with the two factions, the Sebuaeans and the Dositheans. The brief but detailed statement on this by A.F. from a single source is translated accurately and discussed in my chapter Mikra, on pp. 617 – 618 and in the context. [Stenhouse’s translation is too far out to analyse]. With the findings of the present study, specially that there were only two factions, more precision and insight can be added. First, the supreme secular authority of B.R. was accepted by both factions. Second, the Sebuaeans were not subject to B.R. directly on religious questions. Third, the two factions cooperated well politically. Fourth, there is no telling which faction B.R. belonged to. Now an important word of caution. There is no mention at all by A.F. of the affairs of the sanctuary in the time of B.R., even though he knew it was standing in 111 B.C. and 484 A.D. Not even the improvement of the sanctuary by Hadrian is known to him. Or again, there is no account of the rebuilding of the sanctuary in the time of Alexander in the right place by A.F., even though he knows it must have happened and knows Alexander endowed it, though he does not know to what extent. See p. 108. A.F. does not know about the official visit of someone called Simon to Rome in the time of Claudius recorded by Justin, or the massacre by Pontius Pilate in 36 A.D. recorded by Josephus. All this means many more records of important events over the years must have been lost, so that taking notice of the most meagre of hints in Samaritan and foreign records is always necessary. The single source describing the work of B.R. mentions a place for authoritative teaching and resolution of questions (A.F. 132:14 – 133:6). See my chapter Mikra p. 605. Khaḍir specifies that this was just at the foot of the Mountain. [What is called “Recension C of A.F.” in my chapter Mikra is the 20 Comprehensive History by Khaḍir]. This would have demanded cooperation between the parties, even if there was hostility. Compare the Pharisees and Sadducees. The only question is whether the Dositheans thought the sanctuary building standing at the time was in the right place. See the end of section 3, p. 139. This question can be answered with certainty with yes. In the narrative of the occultation of the apparatus of the sanctuary at the end of ch. 42 and then through ch. 43 of the Arabic Joshua book and the corresponding narrative in A.F. 39:3 – 42:1 (not quite in the same place in the overall narrative), the occultation of the apparatus of the Tabernacle is prominent, but not a word is said about what happened to the Tabernacle (the Mashkån) or the building housing it. It must have been assumed by the authors that the Tabernacle was occulted as well. This was certainly the belief of the Dositheans. It was believed that the unused stone building had stood till destroyed by Saul, but a new building was put up. The authors of most of the sources known to A.F., later called the Sebuaeans, assumed it had been rebuilt and was used, and say it was destroyed at the start of the exile, and then rebuilt on the return from the exile. See below at length in the next section. A.F. does not record any rebuilding of the sanctuary at this time, but it must have either been still standing or otherwise rebuilt soon after, because he records Alexander’s recognition of the building and his royal endowment, and it stood during the Seleucid and Hasmonaean period and lasted till 484 A.D. There is no room in this development for the first faction, later called the Sebuaeans, to decide the place of the building could justifiably be moved, because by definition it had to be on the exact place of the Tabernacle in the Time of Favour, otherwise it would be useless and meaningless. Neither is there any room for the second faction, later called the Dositheans, to make up a story that the original Tabernacle had been somewhere else nearby on the Mountaintop, because the broken stones left from the destruction of the original stone building by Saul’s men would still have been neatly stored on the place after the destruction. The building improved by Hadrian would have been on a known spot where a building had stood for centuries. There would not have been any reason for either side to make up a story, and it would not have been believable. Simplifying the argument, there was never a time when there was no stone building or no loose stones to mark the spot. It was only after the destruction of the stone sanctuary building in 484 A.D. that knowing the right location of the Tabernacle depended on tradition. Regardless of any uncertainty in any of the details of the argument, it is certain that in the time of B.R. both factions agreed on where the Tabernacle had stood, right in the middle of where the abomination of desolation was later put up by the Church under Zēnōn. (b). This is now the appropriate place to give the information available on the date and circumstances of the consecration of the sacred place on the top of the Mountain, and the circumstances of recognition of sacred places on the Meadow. The tradition was reinvented a few times by both Samaritans and Jews. There was a secondary version that twelve stones from the Jordan bed were set up on the Mountain on one occasion, and taken away. There were varieties of an original version that ten stones from somewhere else were used on one occasion. It seems to be assumed they were left there. One late variation on the original story known to A.F. is that the ten stones were set up again at the end of the Persian period. The relationship between the two or perhaps three traditions is complicated and each has its own rationale. 21 The clearest way to show the progression of versions of the two stories is to start with the late version known to A.F. himself and explain how it came about. At 82:2 – 3 (Stenhouse p. 109) A. F. says when the sacred place became accessible again after the return from the second exile just near the end of the Persian period the ten stones were put back in their places on top of the Mountain. He might envision stones lying scattered after deliberate destruction by Jews mentioned before this. The Torah was read. It was not read from the stones, but from the usual kind of scroll. Ten stones could be arranged as a rectangle with three stones at each end and four on each side. He does not envision a sanctuary building within a sacred courtyard, but only a courtyard, or perhaps only a marked off sacred place. This is a story of a reconsecration establishing a form of cultus without sacrifices. It fits in with a long piece of fictional rewriting of history that is mostly contentless waffle. In fact sacrifices continued for centuries. The story must have been made up when sacrifices were ended in the late first century B.C. or very early first century A.D. There was an older fictional story saying that although the sanctuary had been rebuilt straight after the Return, it had been learnt straight afterwards that sacrifices were not allowed in the Fǡnûtå. This was not good enough for one faction or faction within a faction because it implied that the sanctuary and the cultus inside it and outside it without sacrifices was still necessary, even without sacrifices. This would not have been good enough for any Dositheans with a really rigorous outlook. To try to make it believable, a second Exile and a second Return had to be dreamt up. One detail first. Olson thinks the Jewish king Izqiyya ‫ חזקיה‬mentioned is the king of Judah by this name, who ruled not long before the start of Babylonian rule over Judah. This is not far-fetched. What is said about this Izqiyya is not needed for the fiction of an exile at an unknown date. Neither do his efforts at settling the main disputes between Samaritans and Jews fit in with what is said about oppression under a Jewish king called ‫ שמעון‬, and in fact what is said about Izqiyya weakens the story of oppression at the hands of Jews. What this Izqiyya is said to have tried to do fits the efforts of the king of Judah by this name recorded in Chronicles to get the people of both north and south to observe the Passover in Jerusalem. It can be supposed that A.F. had this detailed information about a Jewish king called Izqiyya as a separate record without a date, and he put it where he thought it might fit. Surprising as it is, it can be seen that there was a time when Jews had a sacred place on the Shechem Meadow. They seem to have wanted access to the Mountain as well. This does not mean they put it at a level with Jerusalem, but only as a place hallowed by a theophany. There was a petition to the Jewish king by a party called the House of Menasseh, which was opposed by a party called the House or Family of Ithamar. (A.F. 81:10 -- 14; Stenhouse p. 108). The term “family” is meaningful. The House of Menasseh would be a natural indirect name for the Samaritans. The House of Ithamar would be a natural epithet for any Jewish High Priests by the Samaritans, who could point to the fact not denied by the Jews that Eli had been a priest of the line of Ithamar, not Phineas, and therefore even by the reckoning of the Jews unfit to be High Priest. The Amora’im tie themselves in knots trying to explain how such an astonishing breach of the Torah could have come about, and the more astonishing fact that it was accepted in the south, or the astonishing fact that the southerners had no High Priest and no sanctuary after Eli’s death. During all the career of Samuel, Saul, and David, or in the first years of the reign of Solomon there had not been a Jewish High Priest, and most of the time the Ark had sat in someone’s shed. (I use the term 22 Jews anachronistically for convenience to designate the people with a theology that later on could be called Jewish as opposed to Samaritan, and whose doings are recorded in the Jewish scriptures). If Jews had been willing to flout the Torah for centuries on end, why should anyone believe the High Priest Ṣâdôq that officiated in Solomon’s temple was of the right descent? It could be said the Jews could have stopped caring about legitimacy any time later on, so some of their High Priests at some time could have been descendants of Ithamar. Or to put it simply and devastatingly, the Jews had accepted Eli as High Priest knowingly, and their choice of Jerusalem was ultimately the result. What the House of Menasseh wanted was access to the Meadow. [What is printed by Vilmar here is badly wrong. The new king, called Izqiyya, was not the son of the one before. Vilmar follows a bad guess in ms. C (Stenhouse P), not recorded by Stenhouse. Unique readings in this ms. are not trustworthy]. All they got was control of Shechem, which was already given by the Torah and could not be denied, and which they already had by force of numbers. The king arbitrated and decreed that the Meadow and Mt. Gerizim belonged to all twelve tribes, since the Torah belonged to all twelve tribes. [Stenhouse misunderstands the Arabic and thinks the Governor appointed an arbitrator. He has misread “arbitration” as “arbitrator”, but the verb won’t allow this. Aside from this, an impartial arbitrator could not have been found]. In one way that was true, but what it meant was Jews had military possession of the Meadow and could keep Samaritans away, and the Samaritans could still keep Jews off the Mountain by force of numbers, which defeated two of the three parts of what had been intended, so no-one got anything, as A.F. prominently says. Gilgal near Shechem or Lûza or both must have been active religious sites for Jews, and Samaritans could not be allowed to have turns at using them. Now what is really surprising is that the king’s solution implies that the Jews as represented by their priests wanted access to the Mountain as well as controlling the Meadow. On thinking this through, the answer jumps out. They still read “Mt. Gerizim” in Deuteronomy XXVII:4. They still maintained that Jerusalem was the Deuteronomic one sacred place, but could not deny Mt. Gerizim had some special status and perhaps some kind of holiness. Even much later on, when they changed the name of the place, it could not be denied that Mt. Gerizim was the mountain towards which the blessings were directed. The proof of the change of the name is that there has never been a Jewish religious memorial on Mt. Eval and there is not even a traditional site. The silence is unexplainable otherwise. An unanswerable bit of proof that Jews were capable of deliberately falsifying the intention of the words of the Torah is the invention that Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Eval are mounds near the Jordan. Now what is left of the narrative can be used. See below pp. 116 – 117. There is a Rabbinic record of their dastardly Simon the Just having destroyed the Samaritan sanctuary in the time of Alexander, in the Babylonian Talmud at Yoma 69a and Megillat Ta‘anit, entry for the 25th of Tevet. Whichever of the two Simons is the one given the dubious title, he lived after the time of Alexander. The record is not to be dismissed as imagination, since the entry in the mishnah of Megillat Ta‘anit is a record of a real event on a known day in an unknown year. Two unrelated stories are joined together in the gemara of Megillat Ta‘anit and the Talmud. In the first story, about the High Priest meeting Alexander, he is wrongly called Simon instead of Yaddua. Josephus gets the name right but only knows the first story. A.F. has not heard of any attacks in the mid Hellenistic period. He is sure that in the late Persian the building was destroyed. He knows a story that the building was not standing just before Alexander’s arrival. The fiction bears the marks of removal of a fact from the 23 right setting. Supposing that a Jewish governor of Judaea could have got away with massive destruction in the north without being removed by the imperial administration is obvious fiction. Saying that the Samaritans were powerless is unconvincing. Saying that the Samaritans that fled went in every direction is unconvincing. Saying they went to countries far away with some being beyond the known world is unconvincing as well. Syria and Egypt and the Trans-Jordan would have been far enough. All this reads like hysterical Hellenistic over-composition. Saying the Jews were attacked from all directions by a lot of countries not named sounds the same. Supposing that the Jews could have been attacked by a lot of countries without the Persian administration taking notice of invasion of its territory is obvious fantastic invention. The difficulty that the Persian period was not long enough for a Return then a Second Exile then a Second Return remains. On the other hand, some thought went into making the story sound believable. Both Darius and Artaxerxes are named. The description of the career of this king Simon is padded out with borrowed legends, to give the illusion of substance and at the same time make it seem plausible that the Persian administration would have allowed such disruption to order and plausible that a governor of Judaea would have had the military power needed. Simon the Just rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, and the fictional story says the fictional Simon did this. This was a good choice of detail because it sounded like Nehemiah. Babylon is mentioned twice to make the story sound vaguely connected to the Persian period. The fictional king’s bloodthirstiness fits the High Priest Simon. This invention was a concretisation of fundamental theology into a story of a form of order of service without sacrifices, just like the story of the revelation to the saintly High Priest ‘Âbed-El described in section 3 that there can be no sacrifices during the Fẩnûtå. The instructions at the start of Deuteronomy XXVII and at the end of the Ten Utterances in Exodus and Deuteronomy could be read as setting the stones up and writing on them, and then using other stones to build an altar. This is the obvious way to read the instructions, but not the only way. The Mishnah at Sotah VII:6 says the stones with the writing on and the stones of the altar were the same. The stones were plastered and written on while they were part of an altar. The Tosefta in Sotah VIII contradicts this, and is more natural. It seems to be the original form of the account. The Mishnah and Tosefta agree that the stones with the writing on were taken away afterwards. You could say that at the reinauguration the same stones marking off a piece of ground were put back in the right places, or you could say new stones were put in the right places. If you were to assert the stones were new, you could not say words of the Torah were written on them, because that could only be done once. You could, however, say there had been reading from a scroll of the Torah. A.F. says the stones were set up in their places so that the Torah could be read: there is a necessary connection. Then you could say no altar was set up at the reconsecration and there were no sacrifices, in accordance with the revelation to the saintly ‘Âbed-El. The concept of the High Priest sometimes being given a prophecy is known in Judaism. If anyone objected that there had been sacrifices for centuries up till last month, you could say it had been innocent theological error. This line of thinking was probably Sebuaean, since the Dositheans would have used the criterion of the occultation of the Mosaic Tabernacle. The ending of sacrifices by the Dositheans because of the doctrine that they were not valid without the Mosaic Tabernacle is attested at the start of the second notice of the Dositheans by A.F. The obvious response would have been that the 24 Priests of the line of Aaron had abandoned part of their responsibility as ministers of the covenant under Moses. It could have reasonably been asserted that the Priests of the line of Aaron had made all the mitsvot of cleanness and uncleanness meaningless, because ultimately they are rules about fitness to enter the one sacred place of the Mosaic covenant. It could then have been said that the unique status of the Mountain under that covenant had been nullified by the rightful authorities over it, the Priests of the line of Aaron. The Mountain remained sacred in its own right but a sacred place on the Meadow was now legitimate, as it had been till the time of the Priests from Aaron. The question of whether the sanctuary was valid without the Mosaic Tabernacle could be said not to be meaningful any more. Any person insisting on the permanent need for sacrifices could argue that sacrifices could start up again at a sacred place on the Meadow. Whether Lûza is thought to be on the Meadow or on the Mountain, and whether the staircase seen by Jacob as recorded in Genesis XXVIII was on the Meadow or on top of the Mountain, would not have mattered. For the author of II Enoch, the whole Meadow was sacred. What can be said from all the evidence is this much. There will be some repetition of what is said in the Annotations, so there is no need for detail. There clearly was a sacred place on the Meadow or perhaps two, the names of which are translated here as the Shechem Sacred Enclosure and the Vexatious Abomination. This thing greatly offended the author of ch. XII of the Asâṭîr. Epiphanios knew of a substantial stone structure without a roof (start of description of heresy no. 80). The word he uses to describe it could mean it was round like a theatre, but could equally well mean it was like a municipal meeting place. It could not have been a meeting place since there was no roof. What was seen seems to have been a disused sacred enclosure. If there was no roof, then it was probably a place for offering sacrifices. It would have cost something, and must have belonged to a substantial faction. These two places were probably the same, but what follows does not depend on that assumption. What is certain is that there was a substantial faction that had started up formal worship on the Meadow. This faction might or might not have commissioned the writing of II Enoch, but they certainly would have approved of it. Given the certain evidence of a place on the Meadow that was unspeakably offensive, it is highly unlikely that II Enoch was written by an individual as his own personal expression of theory. If the book got translated into Greek, and kept on being easily available long enough to be taken over as edifying history by the Christian Church and then translated into Coptic and widely read in Egypt, there must have been a lot of manuscripts. This means it had to be the manifesto of a faction. If it was not commissioned by a faction, it was taken on by a faction. Direct commissioning is the simple obvious explanation. Olson steers clear of making this conclusion, but to my mind it looks inevitable. The offensive place was not Såkte’s pavilion. A place of teaching and synagogue worship on the Meadow with claims to unique quality might not have been congenial to everyone, but it would not have been offensive enough for its expected destruction to be predicted twice in ch. XII of the Asatir: only a place of sacrifice could be that offensive. A suggestion can now be made for identification of the category of Dositheans labelled (c) in Part VI of this book, who are said to have said all the mitsvot had been abolished. It had always been hard to see how such an assertion could be attributed to Israelites. Now it can be seen how something looking like this from the outside could have happened. From their own point of view they had not abandoned anything: most of the Mosaic mitsvot had been abolished by their rightful guardians, the Priests of the line of Aaron. 25 There is an old but not original tradition that the twelve stones taken from the bed of the Jordan had been used to reconsecrate the Mountain as the single sacred place commanded in the Torah, and this was miraculously done on the very day of entry into Canaan, interpreting an idiom at the start of Dt XXVII literally. It will be shown in the course of the argument that this is not the original belief, but a fantastic modification of the original later than the modification known to A.F. and on entirely different lines. This later story is the opinion of the Tosefta in Sotah ch. VIII. It is the opinion of the editors of the second recension of A.F., who specify the number twelve, from which it can be assumed that they took these to be the ones taken from the Jordan bed and the act was done on the very day of entry. This is not the opinion of A.F. himself. The Mishnah in Sotah VII:5 and Josephus try to negate the old tradition by saying the stones were set up on Mt. Eval, not Mt. Gerizim. The Mishnah agrees with the Tosefta that the stones were set up on the very day of crossing the Jordan. It agrees they were the twelve taken from the bed of the Jordan. When looked at closely, the narrative in the Tosefta and Mishnah leaves no room for moving the stones to a place for staying overnight and leaving them there, as in Joshua IV:8, neither does it leave room for moving them to what is now called a camp, which was not a place to stay overnight, and which was not far from Jericho and was called Gilgal, as in verse 19. The editors of the Mishnah try to fudge the difficulty by not actually naming Gilgal but it does not work. This story implies and demands omission of any part of the present MT that is about Joshua moving Gilgal away from the Jordan. The Arabic Joshua book puts Gâlel near the Jordan, which must be more original than what is in the MT. In its present form it leaves out everything about carrying out the commands in Deuteronomy XXVII, so A.F. does not mention any of it either. The omission can only be deliberate, to avoid having to decide between solutions to a difficulty. It does say the Tabernacle was set up at the end of the conquest, a year after entry into Canaan. Josephus denies the old tradition even further than the Mishnah by putting the event five years after entry, not connecting these stones with the stones taken from the bed of the Jordan, not saying how many stones there were, and saying the stones were left where they were (Antiquities V:34 = V:1:11. The first part of the present form of the MT is compatible with Josephus on the date and is definite about the place being Mt. Eval but the second part of the book, a later addition, implicitly contradicts this dating of the completion of conquest. The MT implies the stones were left where they were. Separation of the stones set up on Mt. Gerizim from the ones taken from the Jordan bed was accepted by some Samaritans. Whereas there is no telling why most Jews and then all Jews came to accept this separation, the thinking of the Samaritans that accepted it can easily be worked out. The new story accepted by A.F. agrees with the MT and Josephus in not identifying the stones with the twelve taken from the Jordan bed. It even goes further in separating the sets of stones by saying explicitly that ten were set up. The new version was accepted by some Samaritans because it was needed to justify the ending of sacrifices. It was a story that the sacred place on the Mountain was reconsecrated right at the end of the Persian period by setting up ten stones in their right places and reading from a scroll of the Torah, but with no sacrifices. The definite prefix is used: it says “the ten stones”, not “ten stones”. This might mean the ten stones that had been used at the original consecration. Now that the thought behind the story of the act of reconsecration has been considered, the significance of the number of stones that were taken from the Meadow and set up in their right place on the Mountain can be investigated. It will be shown 26 that there is a plausible explanation of a change from ten to twelve, and the change can be seen to be old. Since the writing on the stones was the Ten Utterances in Ex XX and Dt V, it might be thought ten stones would be needed. This might have been seen as unworkable, because there would have to be a separate stone for the heading “I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of Egypt etc.”. That would make eleven stones. The tenth commandment divides naturally into two parts. First there is the command to set up plastered stones with the words of the Ten Utterances on Mt. Gerizim. Then there is the command to set an altar up and have different kinds of sacrifices. This gives us twelve stones. This is not guessing. The tradition of twelve stones is documented in Tosefta Sotah VIII. The Erfurt ms. says all the tribes miraculously got to Mt. Gerizim the same day. Mt. Eval is not mentioned. Then comes the writing of the words of the Torah on plastered stones, and the setting up of the altar. Still no mention of Mt. Eval. The Vienna ms. and the first printed edition have a long irrelevant interpolation taken from the Mishnah designed to put a mention of Mt. Eval next to Mt. Gerizim into the narrative, and break the connection of the narrative with what was done on an unnamed mountain. This passage in the Mishnah is itself irrelevant in the Mishnah. The interpolator still did not dare change the text to say the stones and the altar were set up on Mt. Eval, and avoids the question, so that even the text with the interpolation still contradicts the Mishnah unless read carelessly with the words of the Mishnah in mind --- which was what the interpolator had hoped for. If the whole passage is read through, it can be seen that there has not been a long omission by scribal error in the Erfurt ms. by any of the usual mechanisms. Neusner’s English translation here is misleading. He translates from the Vienna ms., with no mention of important variants. Lieberman never claimed the Vienna ms. was enough by itself. Neusner has not told the reader that Lieberman prints the text of the Erfurt ms. of this chapter in its own column next to the column with the text of the Vienna ms. A reading favouring Mt. Gerizim in a Jewish text must obviously be original. The London ms. does not include this chapter. The reading of the Erfurt ms. can’t be said to be weakly attested if only two mss. along with the first printing in 1521 survive here, with no genizah fragments. The Erfurt ms. is centuries older. The tradition in the Tosefta and Mishnah (though not with all details in the Mishnah) is that they travelled sixty Roman miles and set up the stones and plastered them and wrote on them and set up an altar and offered different kinds of sacrifices and then took all the stones along with the Ark down into the valley between the two mountains and some of the Priests stood round the Ark and uttered the curses while facing Mt. Eval and uttered the blessings while facing Mt. Gerizim while the two sets of six tribes stood on each mountain and said amen after each curse and amen after each blessing and then they went back sixty miles to where they had started. The Mishnah avoids saying directly that they went all the way back so as to avoid locating Gilgal exactly. It is implicit that all twelve tribes said amen after each curse and each blessing. The origin of the legend that this was miraculously done the very same day as crossing the Jordan can be seen in the second verse of Deuteronomy XXVII, if read without understanding of idiom. Here is proof that the reading “Mt. Gerizim” in verse 4 of the same chapter was the original reading in the MT. It was not Samaritans that falsified the reading. The evidence of the Latin translation of the LXX has long been known. The Jewish fragment discovered by Charlesworth confirms the reading. It was not found in situ, but even if for the sake of argument we put the evidence of this fragment aside, the evidence of the Tosefta is conclusive. If Jews once had a tradition that the twelve stones taken from the Jordan and set up as the base of an altar on Mt. Gerizim had the Ten Utterances written on them, then it is certain the Samaritans must have. The 27 Tosefta explains the number twelve by saying one stone bore a coda with the words of Deuteronomy XX:18 onwards. This is obviously artificial, and still only makes eleven, even counting the heading “I am the Lord thy God” as if it were on the list. There are two explanations. One is that the command “Thou shalt not covet” was divided into two. It has two different verbs in the MT in Deuteronomy. The other is that the text of the Torah used in the original form of the tradition was old enough to have the original reading Mt. Gerizim in Deuteronomy XXVII:4, so it could have preserved some form of the tenth utterance preserved in the Samaritan text, which could be divided into two. The reflection of the original form of the verse in Deuteronomy has survived in the Tosefta because the verse is not actually quoted. This tenth utterance was certainly in some Jewish manuscripts at some time, as Hila Dayfani has proven. (4QpalaeoExodm and the Gerizim Composition. JBL 141:4, 2022, pp. 673 – 698). Here are two more proofs, showing how late the change in the official form must have been. There are signs that the present form of the MT in other places is very late. In the Masorah of the MT each one of the Ten Utterances in Exodus ends with a closed division, except the last, which ends with an open division. (But not in Deuteronomy). An open division at the end of the natural end of a major section means the whole major section of ten utterances is not finished. In this place the tradition behind the Masorah is older than the present wording. It will be seen that the Masorah shows that the first half of the first verse of Joshua IV is an addition. Other examples could be added, but this is not the place. Then again, according to the Syrohexapla, Origen marks what is commonly regarded as an expansion by the Samaritans at the end of the Ten Uttterances in Exodus with an asterisk, his marker of Greek text corresponding to the Hebrew that was not in what the older Greek text. How could it have been marked with an asterisk unless it was in the Septuagint column as it left Origen’s hands? The asterisk does not show up in the Göttingen Septuagint. The editors seem to have decreed that a word or phrase could not have been marked with an asterisk and marked as from the Samaritikon both at once in the Syrohexapla. Field records accurately here. The Göttingen edition is consistently unreliable in this respect. The note that the passage is in the Samaritan text can only be explained naturally as an original observation by the editors of the Syrohexapla, who could not explain the asterisk against a passage not in the MT. (I have these two pieces of evidence from the late Adrian Mikolašek). There are other indications of very late official acceptance of the present form of the MT as the only correct form in this chapter of the Tosefta. (This is not the same as the question of the date of editing of what ended up becoming official). This chapter of the Tosefta assumes the reading Mt. Gerizim in Deuteronomy XXVVII:4. It uses an older form of the book of Joshua than the MT, much shorter, with different content. The most obvious difference is that setting up the stones on the mountain and offering sacrifices and reciting the curses and blessings was done on the same day as crossing the Jordan. They took the altar apart and took the twelve stones back with them to Gilgal near the Jordan. The Tosefta says a second set of twelve stones was put in place where the Priests had been standing while the whole people were still in the riverbed, against the MT. The place is not named. The MT mentions the second set of twelve stones from the Jordan in IV:9, but does not say whether they were left on an island or left on the ground near the place. It is not even certain that they were taken away from the riverbed. Josephus has not heard of them. Neither have the Arabic Joshua book or A.F. 28 Now we come to a great anomaly in the Arabic Joshua book. There is no mention of writing words of the Torah on stones on Mt. Gerizim or setting an altar up on Mt. Gerizim, not on the day of crossing the Jordan and not when setting up the Tabernacle inside a stone building is mentioned in ch. 24. This allows for two stories, the oldest version that ten stones were set up this time at the end of the first year and the new fantastic invention known from Jewish sources that twelve stones taken from the Jordan bed were set up on the Mountain on the very day of entering Canaan. The invention that twelve stones taken from the Jordan bed were set up on the Mountain was known to Samaritans. It is implicit in the correction by the editors of the second recension of A.F. so as to say that twelve stones were set up, not ten as A.F. says. Such a tradition explains why the Arabic Joshua book says nothing about setting the stones up. The silence is jarring, but it lets the reader choose between the old story that ten stones were set up when conquest was complete at the end of the first year, and the later story that twelve stones from the Jordan bed were set up on the Mountain on the very day of crossing the Jordan. On the indications that the Arabic Joshua book in its original Hebrew form was meant to be acceptable to everyone, see the Bibliography. There are twelve stones on the Mountain at the moment, called Joshua’s Stones. This is incompatible with the Jewish version as in the Tosefta that the stones were taken back to Gilgal. The Mishnah does not explicitly say the stones were taken back to Gilgal, and could be understood either way. Josephus thinks the stones were left on the mountain (in his case Mt. Eval being meant). He does not say how many there were. There must have been a Samaritan form of the old story that the stones were left on the Mountain combined with the part of the new story that said there were twelve of them and they came from the Jordan bed and were set up on the very day of crossing. The place where they were left could naturally be called Gilgal. When Mårqe speaks of the Gilgals or the Stone Rings in the plural, he might be envisioning the same set of stones taken from the Jordan and then set up on the Mountain and then put back, or he might be thinking of the place of the twelve stones next to the Jordan and the place of the ten stones on the Mountain. The second is the most natural interpretation. It agrees with what A.F. thought. Whether A.F. is right or wrong in writing ten stones, the number still needs explanation, since with the present arrangement of the Ten Utterances, an eleventh stone would still be needed for the heading. The words at the end of the Ten Utterances that are not in the MT need not always have been counted as the tenth Utterance. They don’t fit the rest. All the rest are ‫ מצוות לדורות‬, that is, permanent commands, and these words are two ‫ מצוות לשעה‬, that is, commands for something to be done once. Besides this, the words refer back to all the previous commands. My suggestion there was that there might have been a time when Samaritans counted the Ten Utterances as the Jews do, counting the heading “I am the Lord thy God” as the first utterance out of ten, and not counting the words about Mt. Gerizim at the end. It says in the Arabic Joshua book in ch. 14 and ch. 15 that twelve stones are to be taken from where the Priests are standing. It says the leader of each tribe is to write his name on his stone, but A.F. p. 10 (Stenhouse p. 11) omits this. In ch. 15 it says there is to be another stone with the name of the king on. This is of course Joshua. A.F. does not mention a thirteenth stone. It says they are to be a memorial for future generations in all three chapters. The clear implication is that they are to be set up on the ground next to the Jordan where the names can be read. In ch. 16 the place where they are set up is named. The name is Gâlel ‫ גליל‬which in Masoretic pronunciation 29 would be Gâlîl. A.F. at 11:3 (Stenhouse p. 11) has ‫ גלילה‬Gâlîlå. The name of the place mentioned in Deuteronomy XXVII and at the end of the Ten Utterances in Exodus and Deuteronomy is ‫ הגלגל‬, so it could not have been imagined the stones had been put there later on. Josephus writes Galgala for the place near Jericho named Gilgal in the MT in verse 19. (Antiquities V:34 = V:1:11). We can now explain the word ‫ גלגליה‬in Mårqe in both recensions, p. 97 bottom and p. 99 top (Tal’s ed. p. 122). My colleague Daniel Olson stopped me from overlooking this word. BenḤayyim does not commit himself, but suggests two places called Gilgal might be meant. The suggestion is on the right track but unworkable as it stands, since the two places he counts are the same as each other: the Gilgal in Deuteronomy XI:30 must be the same as the one mentioned in the very same words at the end of the Ten Utterances in both Exodus and Deuteronomy. As the name means “circle of stones” in all four attested forms, the plural would mean “the circles of stones”. Mårqe might have meant the same twelve stones set up near the Jordan then on the Mountain and then put back near the Jordan, in agreement with the Tosefta except for the understanding that they were put next to the Jordan, not next to Jericho. Along with the stones set up in the Jordan this makes three sets. Otherwise he might be thinking of the tradition known to the editors of the second recension of A.F., that the twelve stones were set up near the Jordan and some time later set up on the Mountain. There is no way of telling for sure whether the editors of the second recension knew of the return of the stones to near the Jordan, though they probably did. Then we have to consider whether Mårqe knew the tradition of the pile of stones in the middle of the river. Besides all this, he knew of the Gilgal on the Meadow named in the Torah. Part of the process used by Jews and some Samaritans to depart from the meaning of the opening words of Deuteronomy XXVII and make a connection between the twelve stones taken from the Jordan and the unspecified number of stones set up on Mt. Gerizim (with a very late change to Mt. Eval in the very latest edition of the MT) can be traced. The meaning of the idiom “on the very day” is as soon as practicable. Whether the meaning was forgotten is uncertain. If we go by the example of R. Akiva’s kind of exegesis, one opinion at the time was that normal usage was not a criterion. The Arabic Joshua book says conquest took one full year, and during this first year, the people camped at Gâlel next to the Jordan (ch. 19 start). Josephus says the camp was at Galgala before the completion of the conquest at the end of five years. (Antiquities V:34 = V:1:11). He then describes the setting up of stones of an unspecified number taken from an unspecified place on Mt. Eval. Straight after this, he contradicts himself by saying when Joshua was old conquest was nowhere near complete, and the time of completion unforeseeable --- meaning not till Hasmonaean rule. He knows something like the original book and something on the way to the present MT. The present form of the MT at Joshua VIII:30 does not say how many years had passed. It has to dodge this question because all the turgid narrative and lists added onto the original book to make it a vehicle of Hasmonaean ideology of Fremdenreinheit in their own time contradicts the original fanciful story of conquest in one year or five years. Josephus just lets the two dates of conquest sit next to each other with flatly contradictory dating. The implication of Joshua VIII:30 is that the conquest was completed soon after the conquest of Ai. This agrees with the Arabic Joshua book, which says conquest took a year, ending four months after the conquest of Ai. Both Josephus and the present MT say the twelve stones were left near Jericho, trying to make the new fiction about the location of Eval and Gerizim spruiked by the early Tanna’im sound believable. This weakens the connection with 30 the crossing of the Jordan but also weakens the connection with completion of conquest. Josephus says the stones near Jericho were used as an altar, against the present MT but in agreement with the new fiction. The present MT at the end of ch. V says an angel told Joshua the new Gilgal near Jericho was sacred, to support the same new fiction. The present form of the MT contradicts any correct explanation of the name Gilgal as a circle of stones by giving an unbelievable explanation of the name in MT V:9. Josephus derives the name in an even more unreasonable way, but his explanation at least has the merit of being grammatically possible (Antiquities V:34 = V:1:11). The real meaning of Gilgal had to be made to get forgotten somehow. The Tosefta disagrees with Josephus and the Arabic Joshua book and says a second set of twelve stones were put in the river. The MT still says this even though it disagrees with the Tosefta in other ways. The only explanation is that the stones were set up on an island that appeared where the Priests had stood. This would actually be a better place than next to the river. The Tosefta says these stones were once measured. It says their volume was forty se’ot each. This is impossible. The stones would have been impossible to carry and carts would have been needed, and even then the carts would have been unmanageably heavy even on roads. I have only one explanation of how anyone could have come up with this. An old Canaanite site of a temple might have been found, and it might have been assumed the few stones left were the ones set up on the crossing of the Jordan. The present form of the MT does not say the stones were set up as a memorial within the river completely clearly, but seems to say the place where the priests had stood stayed dry afterwards. It does this by saying both sets of stones were picked up after the whole of the people had crossed, which means after the waters and mud had flooded back, which means a little island must have been left. The Tosefta says the two sets of stones were picked up while everyone was still standing on the riverbed. Then it says that when the waters flooded back there was water between the priests and the people. This might mean the Priests were on a newly-formed island, but it might mean the water was held back in that place as long as the Priests and the Ark were there. Either way, the stones must have been on an island when measured. The Arabic Joshua book ch. 15 agrees with the Tosefta that the Priests crossed after the people, but disagrees in saying the waters only flooded back after the priests had crossed. The present form of the MT contradicts itself on whether the Priests crossed ahead of the people or stood on the riverbed while they crossed. There is obvious uncertainty about how one place was not underwater afterwards. It was shown above that A.F. has an isolated record of an attempt at finding a settlement for the needs of access to sacred places by Jews and Samaritans, and that the Jews wanted some access to Mt. Gerizim and the Shechem meadow. On thinking this through, the reason for wanting to sort this out this jumps out. The Jews still read “Mt. Gerizim” in Deuteronomy XXVII:4. They still maintained that Jerusalem was the Deuteronomic one sacred place, but could not deny Mt. Gerizim had some special status and perhaps some kind of holiness. Even much later on, when they changed the name of the place, it could not be denied that Mt. Gerizim was the mountain towards which the blessings were directed. The proof of the change of the name is that there has never been a Jewish religious memorial on Mt. Eval and there is not even a traditional site. The silence is unexplainable otherwise. An unanswerable bit of proof that Jews were capable of deliberately falsifying the intention of the words of the Torah is the invention that Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Eval must be mounds near the Jordan. The attempt is recorded in the Sifre and the Midrash Tanna’im al Devarim published 31 by Hoffman on Deuteronomy XI:30. The well-known plain had to be turned into a collection of oak trees. Not a clever move. In a quotation of what was supposedly said to Samaritan scribes something much like this is said: “You have falsified the Torah by adding the words ‘opposite Shechem’, and you have achieved nothing, since we know perfectly well where Mt. Gerizim is”. This is an expression of great annoyance that a blunder once vigorously broadcast had turned into a standing joke. Both midrashim have to admit where the two mountains really are. The furphy is repeated in a more outrageously fantastic form considerably later on in the Palestinian Talmud at Sotah 29ab, where it says the Israelites built two cairns near Gilgal and called them Eval and Gerizim. This looks like the original invention, covered up in the Sifre and the Midrash Tanna’im edited by Hoffman because it really would have turned into a standing joke. The proof that the invention was vigorously promoted is that Eusebius put it in his Onomasticon, and he can be seen to always be careful in gathering information. See the entries for Gebal and Galgal. Jerome believed it at first when he translated the Onomasticon but later wrote a correction in no. 108 of his collected letters. The Babylonian Talmud at Sanhedrin 44b makes an astounding attempt at patching by saying God only commanded the Israelites to set the stones up next to the Jordan, but they got it into their heads to make the job harder by doing it sixty miles away. This is an indication of knowledge of information from the time of the early Tanna’im asserting that the fantastic invention about the place of the two mountains was the true meaning, but without casting it as an individual opinion, which is what the Sifre and Midrash Tanna’im edited by Hoffman do, and the Palestinian Talmud does in a worse way. The self-defeating solution by the Amora’im is to say the Israelites decided to disobey the Torah but that was all right really because they were just trying to make the job harder for themselves and by some unexplained line of argument that showed how virtuous they were. This would not have been made up unless unavoidable. The original disastrously dishonest invention would only have been tried out if the MT still read Mt. Gerizim in Deuteronomy XXVII:4, perhaps till the first revolt. At this very moment, there is an illegal Jewish Ultra-Orthodox settlement right next to the bottom of Mt. Gerizim next to Balâṭah which is Lûza, and the settlement is named something like the Mountain of Blessings. If the early Tanna’im had really believed in their hearts that the commands of Deuteronomy XXVII were carried out on Mt. Eval, there would be a mention of some kind of the importance of the place, no matter how vaguely worded. There would have been some kind of monument, or a place of pilgrimage, which would have been mentioned somewhere with approval or disapproval. I went into this in my book Principles of Samaritan Halachah. Then we would see another illegal Jewish Ultra-Orthodox settlement on Mt. Eval called something like the Mountain of the Torah. Some archaeologists claim to have found a cultic site on Mt. Eval. This could not have been Israelite, because even if the altar had been set up there and sacrifices offered, this was something only meant to be done once. Setting up a monument later on would not have made sense. Zertal and his followers ignore scientific method and try to make natural marks into letters that no-one else can see to push their ideology. Then there is the Meadow. As soon as the Jews lost their military grip on the Meadow when the Romans took over, any sacred place on it after the giving of the Torah had to be forgotten. It took a while. The Mishnah agrees with the Tosefta that what is meant by the words of the start of Deuteronomy XXVII is that the Priests stood on the Meadow with the Ark and uttered the curses and blessings while six tribes stood on each mountain. The editors of the Sifre and Midrash Tanna’im edited 32 by Hoffman say nought about Dt XXVII, except for an irrelevant comment on verse 5 in the comments on XI:30. The truth about the utterance of the curses and blessings on the Meadow is still in the Mishnah, but the timing of events is wrong and the wrong mountain is named. The real fiction has been kept in full in the Tosefta. The silence of the Sifre is one bit of evidence of a policy of silence about any sacred place on the Meadow. Proof of the policy is that early Christian authors are clueless about the whole procedure. In the early twentieth century it was still being tested whether people on one mountain could hear people on the other. Another proof of the policy of silence is that Eusebius still believes the story about the two mounds near the Jordan. Behind the legend there could still be an old recension of the book of Joshua saying all this was done at the end of the first year, modified into a legend that it was done on the very first day, after literal reading of Deuteronomy XXVII. This new form of the legend is attested in 4QJosha. Samaritan evidence of it is that there is only a hint of the date being at the end of the first year in the Arabic Joshua book. In the end some Jews did what had been inconceivable: go one little step beyond obscuring the meaning of the Torah in Deuteronomy XI:30 --- as they thought --- to changing the plain meaning in Deuteronomy XXVII:4. In ch. 8 of Sotah, the editors of the Tosefta found a way of saving the true wording in a way that could not be changed by not actually quoting the verse. The editors of the Tosefta often disagree with the Mishnah and the present MT, so they did not need to take orders from anyone. In the current state of knowledge, it seems they owed no allegiance to either the school of R. Yishma‘el or the school of R. Akiva, though loose association with one or the other is conceivable. They did not owe allegiance to the confederation that composed the Mishnah, but it can be seen that there was close contact. The Tosefta and Mishnah say the stones with the writing on were set up on the day of crossing the Jordan. This agrees with 4QJosha. It shows acceptance of a form of the book of Joshua resembling the Samaritan form with none of the mostly Hasmonaean second half and apparently without part of the first half, such as the moving of the stones to near Jericho in ch. IV and all of the extant ch. V except for the first verse. It is unlikely that the editors of the Mishnah realised the implications of the old story they had received. Josephus knew two different recensions and uses both, though his version of the short recension is not the same as the Samaritan one. On the antiquity of the Samaritan form, see my article The Transmission of the Samaritan Joshua-Judges. Josephus switches from one recension to the other after the account of setting the stones up, where he flatly contradicts what he has just said about the conquest having taken five years. The Tosefta disagrees with the Mishnah and Josephus in saying that the stones set up were the same as the ones taken from the Jordan. The Tosefta disagrees with the Mishnah and apparently Josephus in distinguishing between the stones with writing on and the stones used for the altar. The Tosefta seems to put the curses and blessings after the sacrifices, disagreeing with the Mishnah but agreeing with Josephus. The Tosefta uses a form of ch. IV of the book of Joshua disagreeing with the present MT in a few other ways. The most important are that the narrative demands the omission of the first half of the first verse (confirmed by the Masorah), and that the order of the mention of each of the two sets of stones in the first verses is reversed. It is anomalous that so few mss. of the Tosefta survive, and neither Talmud uses it directly. I think it to be the voice of a school in close contact with the compilers of the Mishnah, but distinct. No-one dared change the Tosefta substantially, since it was authoritative as a writing of the Tanna’im even 33 if hardly looked at, but a cunning interpolation was put in in some mss., looking like a harmless quotation of scripture or a gloss from the Mishnah. The useless quotation of Deuteronomy XI:30 in the Mishnah is not in keeping with its style and is concealment of invention in Deuteronomy XXVII:4. The falsification in some mss. of the Tosefta was to support the same invention. This kind of change seen in the Tosefta could not have been done till after the time of the Amora’im, when transmission of works of the Tanna’im was less systematic and rigorous. A separate study of the development of these stories is needed, so as to try to disentangle the development of the first chapters of the book of Joshua in the Samaritan versions and the various known Jewish versions (with some reconstruction of Jewish versions not extant). Some parts of this work were done on the previous pages. Some general observations on the process of writing and rewriting can be given here. It has to be borne in mind that the evidence is that different forms of the story were accepted by different people at the same time. Sometimes they were earlier and later, sometimes neither earlier or later but a bit different. The starting point is the undeniable fact that the first part of the book of Joshua is meant to confirm that the instructions in the Torah were carried out. The turgid second part is secondary. This is not the place to prove that, and for the present purpose, the investigation of the history of the stories behind the first part, it does not matter. It is assumed here that the first part of my article The Transmission of the Samaritan Joshua-Judges and the conclusions have been read. Among other things, the Torah requires two main things. One is to set up a sanctuary. Quite separately to the place in Exodus where this is commanded and the allusions elsewhere, there is a set of detailed instructions in Deuteronomy XXVII. A part of these instructions follows the Ten Utterances in Exodus and Deuteronomy in the Samaritan Pentateuch, and were in the Jewish version till very late. The start of this chapter of Deuteronomy says literally that they are to be carried out on the very day of crossing the Jordan. The wording is awkward. The explanation might be that at a very early stage neither mountain was named, and a place near the Jordan was meant. There is no need to speculate, however. This investigation only goes as far back as the traditions and inventions that depend on the mention of a mountain in the verse. As the wording stands, it can only be taken as an idiom meaning the obligation starts on that day and is to be fulfilled as soon as feasible, when it was certain that the stones with words of the Torah on would stand undisturbed, or as soon as appropriate. This means the versions that have the event at the end of the first year, when conquest was complete, must be original. A secondary development was that it was at the end of five years. The place was probably called Stone Ring. Either way, neither the stones with the writing on or the stones of the altar had to have any connection with any stones taken from the Jordan bed. Then some people got it into their heads that the idiom had to be meant literally. It is unlikely that they did not know Hebrew very well, and much more likely that they were uncomfortable with the thought that for a while the words of the Torah had not been written out in public and the curses and blessings summing up the spirit of the Torah had not been formally accepted in Canaan. Anyway, it was thought that the whole of the nation miraculously travelled sixty miles and did all the work that very day. After that, it seemed reasonable to suppose that the stones were connected with the crossing of the Jordan. This was easy because there was already a story that twelve stones had been taken from the Jordan bed. (This became twelve plus one in one version later on and twice twelve in another). The stones were set up at a place called Stone Ring. Then a second place called Stone Ring was set up on Mt. Gerizim, but the stones were 34 taken apart or taken down and taken down into the valley, even though they had no connection with the curses and blessings, which were recited round the Ark. Then the stones were taken back to Stone Ring next to the Jordan. Now there were no stones with words of the Torah on the Mountain. This disconcerted some people. A.F. believed an old form of the story, that there was no connection between the twelve stones taken from the Jordan bed and the stones set up on the Mountain, and makes sure the reader realises this by saying there were ten of them. He does not know why there are no stones in his day. I think the present sacred rock platform was the traditional location of the ten stones in the old story, but later on, when the connection with the stones taken from the Jordan became dogma, a set of twelve stones had to be set up somewhere else. These twelve stones are still there, and are said to be the stones taken from the Jordan bed. This would mean that the variant that the twelve stones from the Jordan riverbed were not taken back was accepted. This must have happened after A.F. finished his work. Then the number ten was changed to twelve by the editors of the second recension of A.F. After that, there was no story about the stone platform. This seems the only explanation of how the stone platform kept on being sacred without anyone knowing why. In the first or second century A.D., some people decided that the old version that there had always been ten permanent stones was right. If the stones had gone missing, the Mountaintop was defective because there was no public display of commitment to the Torah. Whether or not the sanctuary building still had the Mosaic Tabernacle inside was utterly irrelevant. Without these stones, there was no reminder of the altar first built a year after entry into Canaan, or the inaugural sacrifices. The present great altar had no legitimacy. This means that the insistence on the validity of sacrifices on the Meadow seen in II Enoch could have come from two separate but compatible arguments. One was that the commandments about sacrifices had been abandoned by the Priests of the line of Aaron. The other was that commitment to the Torah had been abandoned by not replacing the ten stones with words of the Torah on them. For both reasons, it was impossible to fulfill the requirements of the Torah. A temporary patch till right observance could be restored was to bring back sacrifices on the Meadow. If they had been valid and necessary before the giving of the Torah, they were valid and necessary again for a little while till righteous Priests of the line of Aaron arose and taught true doctrine. This argument is one of the main themes of II Enoch. It is not directly stated because this would have been anachronistic, but the argument would have been unmissable at the time of composition. See Olson’s work. A group thinking on these lines was known to the authors of ch. XII of the Asâṭîr. There might have been two with different arguments. It is not known when lines of thinking like this ended. The sacred structure or perhaps two sacred structures was still standing when ch. XII of the Asâṭîr was composed. The records in the hands of A.F. don’t mention them. There is no mention by early Christian or Jewish authors. The old record known to Epiphanios says the building is not in use. On the other hand, II Enoch got translated into Greek and survived long enough to be taken up by the Christian Church as edifying history. There could never have been many people willing to consider the Mountaintop as having secondary holiness, but their lines of thought are evidence that everyone, Sebuaeans and Dositheans, were very concerned with how serious it was that there could not be sacrifices in their time. Depicting flames on the Samaritan altar on very many coins, which would have taken work, must have cost something, and must have been a serious expression of hope. 35 The author of the report used by A.F. at 133:7 -- 11 (Stenhouse p. 183) says B.R. got seven stones from the Haykal that had been destroyed by Saul’s men, and another bigger one. The seven wise men sat on these while he sat before them. If read carefully, A.F. says they were set up on the Mountaintop, not in the building for answering questions from the public. It must have been thought the building destroyed had been the original Haykal built by Joshua to house the Tabernacle. As much as possible of the original building would have been used for the rebuilding, so these might have been damaged stones that could not be reused but had to be carefully kept. Since everyone accepted this arrangement, even the Dositheans must have had to acknowledge that even after the occultation of the Tabernacle, the stone building had kept a hint of the Time of Favour, and using the loose stones was a way of invoking guidance. Otherwise the seat of administrative decisions could more conveniently have been next to the building for public guidance on the lowest part of the Mountain. This building must have had offices and meeting rooms. This is still not conclusive proof. It is easy to see why the Sebuaeans would have wanted this arrangement. It is not so easy to see why the Dositheans would have gone along with it. It can reasonably be supposed that they were granted something in return, but there is no evidence of what it could have been (c). At this time a building called the House of Prayer was built opposite the Mountain to the same size and appearance as the shell of the House of Prayer from the Time of Favour in Buṣra (A.F. 132:5 – 9; Stenhouse p. 183). This new building is not to be identified with the sanctuary put up by the faction that composed II Enoch, or Såkte’s pavilion either. The appearance was copied exactly, down to giving it a dirt floor. The Arabic needs a slight correction in line 8 where an early scribe has missed the significance of the information that the shell was still standing, thinking the noun ‫ ﺑﻨﺎ‬meaning “a shell” to be the verb “he built”, so that the words ‫“ اﻟﺬي ﺑﻨﻲ‬which was built” are missing in all mss. Only mss. SB (Stenhous SC) of the first recension are close to the correct reading, but they still drop the words “which was built”. Vilmar saw something was wrong and printed ‫ ﻣﺒﻨﻰ‬instead of ‫ ﺑﻨﺎ‬. The correct words are these: ‫ اﻟﺬي ﺑﻨﺎ ﻓﻲ ﺑﺼﺮى اﻟﺬي ﺑﻨﻲ ﻓﻲ أﯾﺎم اﻟﺮﺿﻮان‬. Lines 7 and 8 say “with the House of Prayer that B.R. built to the size of the House of Prayer which is a shell in Buṣra which was built in the Time of Favour, along with its appearance”. [Mss. CD (Stenhouse PH) have ‫ اﻟﺬي ﺑﻨﺎه‬which could be read as “the shell of which is in Buṣra”. Although this seems to make sense, what is written is probably due to misunderstanding of the noun as a verb and probably not how the scribe meant the words to be read. The reading in all mss. of the second recension shows misunderstanding]. A.F. writes ‫ ﺑﺼﺮى‬which is a transcription of Buṣra or Boṣra, the Arabic equivalent of the Masoretic Hebrew Boṣrah in Jeremiah XLVIII:24, but with artificial respelling of the last vowel so as not to misread the name as the well known Baṣrah. This is the form in both Samaritan Arabic versions at Dt IV:43. (The Pentateuch and Samaritan Targum at Dt IV:43 have ‫ בוצר‬, both with ‫ בצר‬as an alternative reading. This alternative form is also the form in the MT in this place. The LXX has Bosor or Bosōr here and in Joshua and Chronicles. In the time of B.R. it was called Bostra in Greek). This was the secondary sanctuary put up by the two and a half tribes (actually two and a quarter) on the land near the River Jordan but on the east side in Moab in the territory of Reuben. [Stenhouse puts the two and a half Israelite tribes in Baṣrah in Iraq. That is undeniably further east than the River Jordan. 36 Bowman flatly contradicts what is said]. The Arabic Joshua book ch. 23 inexplicably says all sacrifices were to be performed throughout the lands across the Jordan, with no mention of the limitation to Mt. Gerizim. A.F. understandably leaves these startling words out. This statement needs serious investigation. At the moment it is inexplicable. The Jewish version in ch. XXII says an altar was built but firmly says there were no sacrifices. It gives the valuable datum in verse 29 that the altar was a reminder of the real altar in front of the Tabernacle. That was not meant to imply there was a copy of the building housing the Tabernacle. Regardless of what is meant by the Jewish version, this is what B.R. thought. The big difference is that he did not put up a new altar and envisioned the building as what was important. The new House of Prayer was built opposite Mt. Gerizim (line 6). The House of Prayer that was more than a synagogue across the Jordan had been authorised by Joshua as a reminder of the real sanctuary with the Tabernacle explicitly because the real sanctuary was inaccessible for practical use. It would have been reasonable for B.R. to think such a building meant as a reminder --- and perhaps in his view a reflection as well --- could be put up if ever the Tabernacle was inaccessible, whether the sanctuary building was in use or not. The two factions disagreed on the present status of the building on the Mountaintop, but agreed that this was the time of the Fẩnûtå. Here was a way of having a common ecumenical main building for worship. The justification for it indicates it was thought to have some dim glow of the Time of Favour inside. It was still standing up till the Crusades, though the exact date is not known. The quality of preserving some gleam or scent of the Time of Favour was later ascribed to the Abisha Scroll. See A.F. 35:9 – 36:13 (Stenhouse pp. 44 -- 45), who dates its first public display after being hidden for centuries in the year of composition of his book, 1355 A.D. Just as a suggestion, it might have been that the House of Prayer meant more to the Dositheans ---- which is definitely not to say it was not important to the Sebuaeans. Putting up the House of Prayer was a big undertaking. Experts with measuring gear had to go to Moab to the original building to measure it exactly, and other experts with them had to draw every remaining detail of design and decoration, all of which would have been worn and faint and decayed. Theological arguments for having it acceptable to both factions had to be devised. Later on the House of Prayer came to be called Bẩbå Råbbå’s Synagogue. It is not known when it was given this name, but it was being called this in the time of the emperor Zēnōn in 484 A.D. See below, p. 112. This might indicate a change in the theory about it. An unforeseen consequence of the success of the clever reasoning behind the plan to put it up as a reminder of the Time of Favour was that a lot of people preferred to go there at Passover, or travel there on other festivals, rather than to the Mountaintop. There is an expression of complaint of neglect using the technical terms ‫( ﺣﺞ‬going to the sacred place on any one of the pilgrim festivals) and ‫ﺳﻌﻲ‬ (travelling to the sacred place for any festival) by the author of the Kitâb al-Kâfi in 1020 A.D., when the two factions of the Sebuaeans and the Dositheans had reached accommodation, though not full agreement. The words are quoted, though not in full, in my chapter Mikra, note 121 on p. 628, where a reference to a printed quote of the whole passage in Arabic is given. His use of the gerund ‫ ﺳﻌﻲ‬to mean travelling to a synagogue indicates he means more than going into the ordinary local synagogue. His detailed specific complaint with the words at the end “or to some extent” is that it was thought that being in this building would be partway to being as good as being at the 37 sacred place. He singles out people living close to the Mountain, as if meaning that if the effort of a long trip was not a consideration, then some people held unjustifiable regard for the building. The strongest argument for the present proposal is that not being concerned with going up the Mountain when there is no difficulty because something else would be near enough would have been a great departure from immemorial Sebuaean practice and doctrine, but is not Dosithean thinking either. Then he gets to people that think the commandments to go to the sacred place have no force without the Tabernacle and past the Time of Favour. This is a known variety of Dositheanism starting with Såkte. His answer is that the Mountaintop is holy in itself. This is the known refutation by most Dositheans, but the records say that the refutation was accepted by nearly everyone, even while still regarding Såkte himself as undisputed ruler. Under these conditions the extreme position must have been forgotten after his death. This time there must have been a different argument, and there is no need to suppose the belief was a survival of Dosithean thinking. The answer can be seen in the words “at least to some extent”. Såkte would never have said this. No-one was denying that the Mountain had any sacredness, or that it would be desirable to go up it sometimes. What was being denied was only the obligation to go to the sacred place three times a year if feasible. This was the Jewish position while their temple stood, and no-one finds hidden meanings. Besides this, the Meadow had regained some of its sacredness. More work on this chapter is needed. The author is guarded in his wording. (d). It has been amply shown how the affairs of the Samaritans prospered under Pagan Rome. At the very start, the Christian Church tried to attract Samaritans. Very soon after, there was a cataclysm in Christian theology, and the de-Judaised form rejected the Ebionites as well as any form of Jewish Christianity and Samaritan Christianity that had departed from the Ebionies but was still attached to the Torah. Because of its newly-invented doctrines, it became hostile to Judaism but implacably hostile to Samaritan religion. It will be shown on pp. 48– 51 that in the middle of the second century A.D. it started to try to influence the government and use it as a weapon, to its own harm soon after and then later on at times. The Samaritan tract and diatribe against Christianity identified in my article A Samaritan Broadside was explicitly written to win back Christians that had once been Samaritans. The indications are that the tract was written right as part of a government policy of gathering in and re-education. This was feasible in the time of Bẩbå Råbbå and probably from the reign of Claudius. It offers a welcoming return to its readers, and assumes that the readers will already have seen the faults in Christianity and become dissatisfied. “Did he [Jesus] only come to make us not believe [in the power of God]”. See my article p. 36. Note the pronoun “us”. The readers addressed are the ones that themselves became Christian. The wording is unexpected. It indicates that a missionary formed a band of followers but was removed or thwarted somehow, perhaps by being banished, and the time period was so short that the removal of the leader and the process of becoming Christian could be spoken of as having been at the same time. This is said to have been “the other day” chthes kai prōēn (2:7). This phrase can mean within recent historical time, but in the context of events affecting a person or people speaking or being addressed means only a few years ago, definitely not long enough to be most of a lifespan. Even allowing for loose expression by the author to make his point that the change is still reversible and they will still be 38 accepted, it would not be a suitable expression for anything beyond twenty-five years or thirty at most. On the other hand, it would not be a suitable expression for anything less than five years. If the first flurry of Christian missionising in Samaria ended within the time of the Apostles, this gives an earliest date of 45 A.D. for the composition and a latest date of 75 A.D. [The dating in my article is to be corrected]. The authors remind their readers that when the Samaritan Christian community was first formed, the Samaritan community took some kind of highly effective drastic action against their leader, perhaps banishing him. Winning people back could only have come about when the Christian former Samaritans were ready. There might well have been unrecorded Christian missionising amongst Samaritans after the first brief flurry, but it makes no difference for the argument here. The de-Judaised and deSamaritanised Church with its new pagan doctrine soon lost all Samaritan Christians by rejecting them. Soon after 70 A.D. the prediction of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple ascribed to Jesus in Matthew, Mark, and Luke was reread as a prediction that the Christian Church would take over its status. For the present purpose it does not matter whether the prediction really was made or not. The status of the temple, history of Judah, the books of the Jewish prophets, and the Psalms, could all be made praeparatio evangelica more insistently after the temple was gone, but then the revised doctrine was made counter-productive by Samaritans as well as Samaritan Christians recognising Mt. Gerizim. Just as an example, they would have been able to show that the choice of Jerusalem is not authorised anywhere in the Jewish Former Prophets, making the reading “the place the Lord is going to choose” in the Jewish Hebrew form of Deuteronomy self-evident clumsy falsification. (It is now known that the LXX originally agreed with the Samaritan). The misuse of the term “smeared” “Christós” would have been glaring. Evidence had to be covered up. John IV:22 was inserted. The record of Philip’s success in converting Samaritans in Acts VIII:4 -- 8 was obscured by fictitious additions, in two stages, 9 – 13 and then 14 -- 24. Dt XXVII:4 LXX was matched to MT. See p. 133. It is not believable that it was not known at one time that Stephen was a Samaritan. He used the Samaritan Pentateuch four times out of five against both the LXX and MT where these two agree. The record that his house was in Samaria has been missed by NT scholars with narrow horizons. This is probably local Christian tradition. There is much more. See pp. 391 – 396 of the article The Origins and Development of Samaritan Christianity by Charles H. H. Scobie in NTS vol. 19, 1972 – 73, pp. 390 -- 414. The destructive deletion can only have been because erstwhile unity of Jewish Christians and Samaritan Christians had to be forgotten by the de-Judaised Church. This unity was once heralded by the prominent place of Stephen in the foundation stories at the start of the book, where he is also singled out of the seven in VI:3 – 6. It is in the Samaritan thought and expression of III:20 [19b – 20 translation] with the context. It is given as Jesus’s own policy in I:8. It is prominently announced in IX:31 as a summary and conclusion of what is now the first part of the book. If this announcement has any meaning, why is it that no there is no record of any official discussions or cooperation between Jewish Christians and Samaritan Christians? After 70 A.D., the annoying decree of the council of Jerusalem in XV:20 was denied so as to strengthen the claim of the de-Judaised Church to everything associated with the temple and the history of Israel. It was the question of whether to allow people to become Christian without becoming Jews that was the main business of the council. The decision to allow it was arrived at logically by only requiring them to keep the seven mitsvot of the Covenant with Noah, which are binding on all 39 mankind, and laid down explicitly and implicitly in the Torah. (Tosefta Avodah Zarah VIII:4). The solution was unacceptable to the de-Judaised Church because it assumed the validity of the Torah. The intention of the official formula in verses 20 and 29 and XXI:25 was transformed by adding “unchastity”, which took attention away from the intention of only saying what needed to be said. Three unrelated witnesses without it in verse 20 and four in verse 29 survive. Whether or no this argument is accepted, what follows does not depend on it. In what is called the Western Text but other witnesses as well, in verse 20 and verse 29 and in XXI: 25 the word “stifled” is missing. My suggestion is that this specification was put in so as to make people think of “blood” in the sense of the ingestion of blood and then assume a reference to kosher slaughter, so as to obscure the technical meaning of the word “blood” as a reference to verse 4 and the first half of verse 5 of Gn IX, the first half of the written part of the Covenant with Noah. In the end the decree was rejected by the Christian Church by purposefully forgetting the intention and finding a simple prohibition of the ingestion of blood. Then that was eventually ignored, and in the west eventually expressly declared abolished. Paul cannily sabotaged the whole decree by allowing the eating of meat from offerings to idols, saying it has no effect. He hides the original intention by not mentioning that pollution from idols does not have to mean idolworship. Jewish Christianity became heresy by definition. It all worked perfectly. Christian academics go off track by speculating about kosher slaughter, and then make guesses about social cohesion between Christian Jews and non-Jews. With all this hostility, the locals would have been in the right mood. The Samaritan tract mentioned powerfully restates the indisputable truth of life after death by the power of God, as opposed to the unnecessary doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus, which harmfully incites doubt in the power of God. It would have had to have been the work of all factions to be effective, whether they agreed on details or not. All Samaritan factions, like all Jewish ones, believed in life after death that was more than immortality of the soul. I am well aware that this statement contradicts current belief. For the moment, note the distinction between some form of bodily existence in some kind of body somewhere and the specifically Pharisaic specialisation of the term “resurrection” to mean resurrection of everyone all at once on earth. See Part VI on the concept of bodily existence in the Garden, but note that this is not the only possible version, and Simon’s metaphysics, which will be described further on, looks as if it would allow for repeated tries at gradual increased perfection. This argument on the harmfulness of Christian doctrine dependent on a supposed event carelessly left without any proof would have been powerful. Paul felt the danger. He says someone said five hundred people had seen the resurrected Jesus in bodily form. He skips over the contradiction with the unanimous tradition lying behind the gospels, that Jesus only appeared to a few people, with the obligation of the Apostles to announce what only they had seen. He does not care that he has wiped out part of the rationale of apostolic authority and made Thomas’s entirely correct and necessary demand pointless. Neither do the missionaries repeating the story. The sustained effort by the Samaritan government worked, but as well as that, in the late first century and during the second century the Church alienated Samaritan and Jewish Christians, including in the diaspora. Justin had no institutional backing in his own land. He had to go to Rome for his personal and political ambitions, which were the same thing. The search for Samaritan churches has got nowhere and never will, because what is miscalled Samaritan Christianity ended so early. The claims to have found Samaritan Christian churches have all been refuted. They depend on misreading inscriptions from ignorance of Hebrew usage before the twentieth century (sic), and a lot more. 40 (e). The chapter on the Ebionites by Epiphanios, ch. XXX, has to be used carefully, because he confuses two unrelated Samaritan groups that he thinks are Christian, one of them being the Ebionites, who were not Christian. (This is in the collection by Klijn and Reinink). There are a few remarks about a third that was neither Samaritan or Jewish and which he loosely connects with the Elchesaites and others in par. 1. For the present purpose, only the information that can be assigned without doubt to one or the other of the Samaritan denominations will be used. One of these can be identified with certainty with the Ebionites, using the information given by Epiphanios while taking account of the immediate context and its place in the structure of the chapter. The information given about the real Ebionites is brief but clear, and the explanation is made certain by what is known about the Ebionites from other sources, as will be shown further on on pp. 64 to 65 top. For the moment, what has to be done is to use the information from Epiphanios to identify the Ebionites as Samaritan. They were not Christians in the later sense invented by the unIsraelite Church with its Pagan concept called Christ, but such Christians identified them falsely because they followed the real Jesus. There really were Samaritan Christians in the later sense with a rewritten pagan Christ, and there were a lot of them till they suddenly disappeared (suddenly in historical terms). Their doctrine is explained much further on in this section, because the current of thought that Christianity misused has to be identified and described in detail first. The second, unnamed, sect known to Epiphanios does not need to be described, only distinguished from the Ebionites. The full answer to the relevance of Samaritan Christians in the later sense to a history of Samaritan religion will become clear over the course of this section, but the simple answer is that the reabsorption of the Samaritan Christians into Israel was itself an important part of Samaritan official policy and reflected their circumstances and activity. It worked beautifully because on one hand the Samaritan government had a practical organised policy, and on the other hand the de-Judaised and de-Samaritanised Church rejected them systematically. The Ebionites can be identified with certainty as Samaritan by their rejection of the Jewish scriptures and all that goes with them. This is in par. 18. Rejection of the Jewish scriptures is in par. 15 part 2, but pars. 15 and 16 confuse the two different groups. Disentangling what is said in these two paragraphs would have to be a separate study. The continued identity of the Ebionites as Israelites is shown with certainty by their observance of all the mitsvot, with the distinctive Samaritan trait of frequent immersion and avoidance of contamination. This is in par. 2, where they are named and Epiphanios is forced to admit their behaviour to be more Samaritan than Jewish. It is repeated with more or less emphasis in pars. 3 and 4 and 26. It is confirmed by their refusal to ascribe any supernatural or heavenly origin to Jesus before his conception and refusal to accept any supernatural conception This is in pars. 13 and 14. In par. 14 he says the Samaritan Ebionites used the Gospel of the Hebrews, which is known to have been unobjectionable to the de-Judaised and deSamaritanised Church. (Why wasn’t the earliest de-Judaised Church as much Aramaic-speaking as Greek-speaking? Why was it constantly assumed only Jews spoke Aramaic? How could Aramaic get confused with Hebrew? These questions still unanswered cast serious doubt on whether the new Christianity that could not tolerate the Torah or its practice was started up by Israelites). He says the doctrine of the miraculous conception of Jesus, and the genealogies of descent from David, are not in 41 their gospel and that they counterfeited [misunderstood by Williams] the genealogies by putting a different statement in instead, which was right at the start of the book. He does not explain what it was. This is useful information because if read in context, it confirms them to have been Samaritan Christians, not Jewish Christians. Samaritans would have seen using the undisputed but unimportant fact of descent from David as an argument to be worse than unconvincing, but shockingly impious. Christian theologians have never yet come up with a logical explanation of how descent from David can support the christological predicates. It is not actually used in their NT anyway. See the Excursus. The crude device of using the one word “anointed” in two incompatible meanings is still used in trying to missionise Jews, not realising it can only work on the most ignorant, or someone that has dropped the religion altogether. There is nothing about descent from David in John. Not all Christians accepted the miraculous conception in the first century, so it is not certain that all accepted it in the early second century. It is not in Mark or John. It nullifies the claim of descent from David. It is contradicted by Matthew I:16, which was later cunningly falsified. The reading in this verse saying Joseph begat Jesus in the Sinai Syriac and in slightly different syntax in three unrelated witnesses Θ f 13 Itala with Ambrosiaster must be original, otherwise giving Joseph’s genealogy would be useless. There are no genealogies in Mark or John, or the Diatessaron, and there were none in Marcion’s Luke. That does not have to mean a doctrine of supernatural conception just like what is now in Luke and Matthew came first, before the invention of the genealogies. It will be argued further on that the original concept was supernatural help or inspiration during growth in the womb, with a lot of variation in the form of the concept. Although the Ebionites did not have any concept of descent from David, they still must be distinguished from what is said in pars. 15 and 16 of the account by Epiphanios about an adoptionist sect with its own distinctive concept. What looks like adoptionism in par. 14 parts 5 – 6 is actually the Ebionite concept of divine recognition of effort by giving help, which will be explained further on after the theory of the Apóphasis Megálē has been explained. The description of the unrelated unnamed Samaritan Christian sect starts in pars. 15 and 16. At first sight, what is said there does not look like any form of Christians of Samaritan or Jewish origin. Samaritan origin is indicated by what is said about their rejection of the Jewish scriptures in par. 15 part 2, but the way it is worded might be an indication that the accusation of not accepting the Jewish scriptures might only be a guess by analogy with the Ebionites. They are real adoptionists. Their version of what descended on Jesus sounds like the Gospel of Philip. They say the Christ that descended on Jesus was created higher than the archangels and is ruler over everything created. This is not the later Christian concept: notice the word “created”. Note carefully that it is not said that God created this powerful being and then this powerful being independently created everything else, as in some forms of dualism. What is really surprising about this sect is that they said the gospel had replaced the Torah. In the context, this can be taken to mean parts of the Torah are abrogated by the gospel. The Samaritans discontinued sacrifices very early, so it was not a question of their attitude to current practice, and besides, they had separated themselves. The only apparent answer is that they maintained Jesus had definitively replaced sacrifices. There is some general resemblance to the Nazoraeans with their miraculous supernatural Jesus, but there seem to be some real differences. 42 here. What comes next in par. 17 is some form of gnostic Christianity not relevant Then par. 18 goes back to the Ebionites. What is said in parts 5 to 6 is unmistakably Ebionite, as will be shown when the Ebionite doctrine is compared to the teachings of Simon further on in this section and sharper statements of the concept and different forms of wording are quoted. In part 7 and the parts following it says the unnamed sect have rejected part of the Torah saying it has been abolished by the gospel. This is what Christianity has actually done. It is hard to say whether what Epiphanios writes here is taken from his source on the unnamed sect or is his misunderstanding of his sources on the Ebionites, but it is most likely a conflation of the two. Pars. 19 and 20 are explicitly marked as being off the subject. Then par. 21 is back to the Ebionites. It is said in par. 22 that Jesus did not eat roast lamb at Passover or did so unwillingly. The words quoted are “I did not want to eat this Passover with you”. Epiphanios thinks a verse of the New Testament is turned upside down on purpose by one of the two sects to agree with their doctrine of not eating meat. This is not believable. It would have been more effective to drop any mention of the connection with Passover. The question is whether Epiphanios quotes the words of his source, or interprets the words, or quotes but misunderstands. If he quotes his source directly, and his source quoted accurately or fairly accurately and was not trying to explain how the verse was to be understood, then the meaning of the verse must be that Jesus says he wants them to have this last meal together now, before Passover, because he does not expect to live to the next night. This is not the most likely explanation. Epiphanios constantly guesses from misunderstanding and absence of judgment. If his source said the Gospel of the Ebionites does not have the words “I’ve been wanting to have this Passover with you”, Epiphanios in his usual way could easily have thought this meant the words in the Gospel of the Ebionites were “I didn’t want to eat this Passover with you”. If this explanation is right, then the observation by Epiphanios’s souce would have been that the pericope starting with these words was not there. That means there was nothing about a Last Supper, the same as in John’s gospel. It is certain that Jesus did not say he was sorry to be with his disciples at Passover because they were eating mutton with their lettuce and crispbread, or he was worried he might have to eat mutton himself with it, as Epiphanios unthinkingly thinks the Ebionites thought (if he knew about the lettuce, which is unlikely). If Epiphanios thought someone could have written that, then he must have misread his source. See my article Restoring the Traditional Linkage, note 8 on pp. 18 and 19. The movement claiming the gospel to have superseded parts of the Torah is unexpected. They would have been taken in by the non-Israelite Church in the end. They would not have been far from agreeing with the doctrine of the Epistle of the Apostles, which will be treated later on. There is still the difficulty of how Epiphanios could have jumped from the description of one denomination to another in the middle of par. 18 without realising. There is a simple solution. It was remarked just now that paragraphs 15 and 16 are about the unnamed adoptionist sect. In par. 16 parts 3 and 4 he says that Jesus was conceived in the normal way, but Christ descended on him. This Christ is then defined as higher than the archangels and ruler of all creation, though he himself is created. Then in part 5 he says that this being announced, apparently through Jesus, that he 43 had come to abolish sacrifices. Then Epiphanios starts a long digression. He comes back to the real Ebionites with par. 18. He says Jesus was a normal person who was helped reach a higher status. In part 5 he speaks of “conjunction with a lifting up from above on him” (with terminology resembling Iamblichos). The details are quoted further on in this section, on p. 64 – 65 top, with information from various sources. Now this is obviously nothing like the concept of absorption in a cosmic being above the archangels who then dictates words. It still could have sounded near enough to Epiphanios. The concept of this otherworldly being descending on Jesus held by the anonymous adoptionist sect and then their prohibition of sacrifices attributed to it was the last thing mentioned by him before he went off on the long digression. If he thought his document about the real Ebionites was talking about adoption of Jesus by this otherworldly being, then he would naturally switch to copying detailed information about the prohibition of sacrifices, using the same document as before. (f). When Justin of Neapolis turned Christian in the time of Bẩbå Råbbå, he seized on the open malevolence of the de-Judaised Church against the religion of Israel in Samaritan practice. He is the first on record to have pushed for persecution by Rome, as early as 140 A.D. or a bit before, though he must have been part of organised effort. He started off nominally as an Israelite, but tries to hide it in his writing because the fact did not suit the effect intended. At the start of the First Apology (a) he lets ignorant foreign readers assume he must have started as a Pagan from the alternative Greek and Latin names of his father and grandfather as well as his own and the fact that he came from a city with a Hellenistic constitution. At the start of the Dialogue with Tryphōn (b) he sets ignorant pious Christian readers up nicely to bring in their own preconception that a seeker of truth in philosophy must be Pagan. He never says he is uncircumcised: he says (c) Christians in general are, even when he says “we”, if you read carefully. Who would look? (Dialogue chs. 19; 24; 94; and often). These three sleights of hand have worked beautifully to this very day on gullible pious scholars. Besides, he thoughtlessly gives himself away. He lets the truth slip (d) by using the word genos to describe his relation to the Samaritans right at the end of ch. 120 of the Dialogue, instead of calling the Samaritans his neighbours or fellow citizens. Commentators have puzzled over the use of the word in this place, and no answer has been found. He really forgets himself in ch. 14 of the First Apology where he says (e) before becoming Christian he and his brethren would refuse close social contact with members of other religious and ethnic identities. The mention of isolation from other ethnic identities is glaring. Philosohers were not like that. Iamblichos claimed to have learnt from an Egyptian priest. The members and leaders of the philosophical schools were equally well Greek or Syrian or Phoenician or non-Greek Anatolians and so on. Stoicism was founded by two Phoenicians. Pagan Hellenised Palestinians were not like that either. Modern Christian commentators skip over this. He blunders the same way (f) in his choice of the verb “rejected” and using the past tense in the first sentence of ch. 15 of the Second Apology, where he says he rejected the teaching of Simon of his own people. The word used there is not meant to mean to refuse to be persuaded. Parts of the First Apology show lingering Samaritan thought, such as ch. 10, where (g) “Word” at the end comes from the concept of Torah, or (h) with the words “Son and Apostle” in ch. 12, or (i) with “his Word was the Power of God” ending ch. 14, or preaching general resurrection in ch. 19 while (j) mentioning Jesus but forgetting the connection. In ch. 7 and at the start of ch. 8 of the 44 Dialogue he unthinkingly lets out (k) he accepted the prophets and become Christian both at once. Christian usage would have been “Moses and the Prophets”. If he had been a Pagan, he would have known of the importance of Moses and would have been more conscious of his greater importance than the Jewish and Christian Prophets, so he would not have included him under the general term “the Prophets”. Only a Samaritan would speak of accepting Christianity and the Prophets in the same breath. The Jewish prophets never call false prophets magicians: this is (l) a Christian slander against all Samaritan religious leaders (usually but not always done using the name Simon). The concept of a false prophet that was also a magician (m) would only have been familiar to Jews and Samaritans. One legendary version of the story of Balaam (not the only one) says he had been a magician and an augurer and diviner, and had been given true prophecy and felt compelled to utter it when commissioned to prophesy against Israel. This is an approach to an attack on Samaritan religion. Justin’s quotations of the Pentateuch (n) often disagree, whether substantially or in details, with the text of the LXX. The material was collected and sifted by Joost Smit Sibinga in his book The Old Testament Text of Justin Martyr: Part I, The Pentateuch [all published] (E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1963). This has to be weighed up against the very low number of divergences in the quotations of the Jewish Latter Prophets and specially the Psalms. The easiest explanation is that he memorised big parts of the Samaritikon, then read an up to date Christianised form of the LXX. Here is a new source of Samaritikon readings, but the evidence will need sifting. For a start, notice his quotation of the Samaritan reading in Ex III:6, in agreement with Stephen. ‫ צ"ע‬. Ch. 120 of the Apology as it stands has clear reference to the passages in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezra that Justin had quoted in chs. 71 to 73 and had said had been cut out by the Jews. That means the chapter as it stands is addressed to Jews. It can be shown that it looks like an adaptation of the address to Samaritans that ended his membership of the community. The opening words are very much like what would have been said to a Samaritan audience, that what he preaches does not depend on the Jewish scriptures, but can be proven from what they accept, the Torah. It has not been noticed by the editors of the Göttingen LXX that Justin quotes Gn XLIX:10 in two different forms in ch. 120 of the Dialogue, with τὰ ἀποκóμεινα ἀυτῷ twice and ᾧ ἀπόκειται twice. Although he does not quote the Hebrew, the dispute is over the meaning of the word ‫ שלה‬. (Less well attested but still adequately attested full spelling ‫ שילה‬. Details in von Gall. The Samaritan Targum has the defective spelling in the extant mss. The MT has the full spelling). Altogether there are three Greek translations of the Hebrew. Working out what LXX witnesses agree with the possible translations of the Hebrew is impossible using the Göttingen edition of the LXX, partly because it has not been noticed that Justin uses two translations in ch. 120 of the Dialogue, partly because the editors have jumbled the two forms ὃ ἀπόκειται “he that is stored up” and ᾧ ἀπόκειται “he for whom it is stored up” together. They have not understood the theological concept behind the words ὃ ἀπόκειται, and thought the omicron < o > to be a spelling mistake for omega < ω > due to late pronunciation. Neither Wevers, the editor of the Göttingen edition, or Smit Sibinga, have picked up the reference to the well-documented Samaritan and Jewish concept of the incorruptible body of Moses, hidden in an unfindable place by a space warp (to use modern concepts) till it is time for him to re-enter his body and manifest himself. The Greek verb corresponds to the adjective ‫ ספון‬in Dt XXXIII:21. The reference to Moses is taken from the word ‫“ מחקק‬law-giver” in the same verse. It is never safe to say one 45 reading that makes sense is derived from a similar-looking reading that says something else that makes sense. The similarity in appearance might just be by accident, as it certainly is in this case. Brooke and McLean did not make this blunder. The wording ὃ ἀπόκειται is too well attested to be a mistake. Smit Sibinga sets the evidence out in detail, using the information from Brooke and McLean. The Göttingen edition will be needed for what follows. There is a double translation in one ms. that proves the genuineness of the wording ὃ ἀπόκειται “he that is stored up”. It is τò ἀποκóμεινον ἀυτῷ ὃ ἀπόκειται “what is stored up for him that is stored up”. The genuineness of ὃ ἀπόκειται is confirmed by the mistaken addition of ἀυτῷ “for him”, which changes the meaning to “he for whom it is stored up”, in two text-witnesses (though one of them omits [ho] by mistake). This is in fact what is done by translators of Justin’s works. In par. 4 of ch. 120 Justin says his audience reads the third clause as “till what is stored up for him comes” τὰ ἀποκóμεινα ἀυτῷ and contrasts this with what he says is the wording of the LXX, “till he for whom it is stored up comes” ᾧ ἀπόκειται. Then he says that although he considers the translation in the LXX to be the right one, he does not want the exposition diverted by something that won’t be resolved, so he does not want to debate which is the correct translation. He then says he will use the fourth and last clause of the verse, which is clear and will support his contention. He explicitly contrasts the Greek wording of the third phrase of the verse accepted by his audience with the LXX, which he names. He does not say they have the wrong reading in the manuscripts of the LXX. He plainly says they don’t read the LXX. The only conclusion is (o) that his audience read the Samaritikon, as was said before. This might seem to be forcing the meaning of a simple rejection of a reading, but he must really mean they don’t use the LXX, first because the reading he rejects here τὰ ἀποκóμεινα ἀυτῷ is used by him in ch. 52 par. 2 of the Dialogue, though there is a marginal correction to ὃ ἀπόκειται, and second because the reading ὃ ἀπόκειται is used by him in other places, contrary to what he says in ch. 120 of the Dialogue is the reading of the LXX. Allowance must be made for alteration of hōi to ho by scribes, but the reading appears too many times to be explained this way. It occurs in the First Apology twice in ch. 32, in par 1 and par. 2. It occurs in ch. 54 in the text, with a variant hōi in the margin. It occurs in ch. 52 par. 2 in the margin. It occurs in the Dialogue in ch. 52 par 2 as the marginal reading. It is true that the reading with hōi occurs as well, in the First Apology ch. 32 par. 2, but this is the only place. The reading with ho must have been used by him, simply because the change from ho to hōi would be natural for a Christian, whereas the clause with the reading ho would have been opaque to a Christian. In this case the majority reading τὰ ἀποκóμεινα ἀυτῷ of the LXX in the extant mss. is the same as in the text used by his audience. In par. 3 and par. 4 Justin first quotes the clause with the Greek wording τὰ ἀποκóμεινα ἀυτῷ “what is stored up for him”, which he goes on to say is the wording accepted by his audience and disagreeing with the wording of the LXX. At first sight, there seems no reason for caring about the choice, since the readings rejected, τὰ ἀποκóμεινα ἀυτῷ, the one known to his audience, and ὃ ἀπόκειται, the one normally used by him himself, seem to mean much the same, though the second is ambiguous and could mean “what is stored up” or “he that is stored up”. The answer is that the two readings rejected could have suited the Samaritan interpretation of retribution on the tribe of Judah for the sins of Solomon, and the new one “he for whom it is stored up” might have been thought certain in meaning. Justin has departed from his own normal reading for the purpose of argument. The new reading is not a success, since it can still be taken to refer to Moses. This is in fact the original Samaritan interpretation of the verse, with introduction of the consequences of the sins of Solomon coming later. 46 The first version of the Samaritan Arabic Translation has “the one it rightfully belongs to” ‫ ﻣﺴﺘﺤﻘﮫ‬, that is, either Moses or the Prophet like Moses. (I think something resembling this was what was meant by the term Chrēstós in Christianity, before the thoroughly new doctrine of the Christós). The Targum leaves the word ‫שלה‬ untranslated. I think this means it is a name of Moses. The full spelling of the word as ‫ שילה‬has the numerical value of 345, the same as the name of Moses. The second version of the Arabic, by Abu ’l-Ḥasan aṣ-Ṣûri, author of the Kitâb aṭ-Ṭubâkh, has “till Solomon comes”, an explanatory translation of “till what is his comes”, meaning two descendants of Judah will be kings over all Israel till Rehoboam loses kingship over the North straight after Solomon’s death because he thinks he can keep up his father’s tyranny, and later on the line will lose kingship over the South, in agreement with the rereading of the Samaritikon. The Asâṭîr at XI:12 -- 14 says the Babylonian conquest was the consequence of the building of the Jerusalem temple, along with Solomon’s other recorded breaches of the Torah, but makes it clear that the whole of Judah was at fault. The apparently purposeless rewording in the LXX (p) was antiSamaritan. This new wording is used by numerous early Christian authors, which is what would have been expected. For the first time ever an agreement in wording between the Samaritikon and the LXX has been found, in the words “what is stored up for him”, but with the agreement in wording concealing two opposite interpretations, and with the text-witnesses of the LXX divided. The third interpretation, “he that is stored up” might well be a variant within the Samaritikon. In the LXX, the question of which translation is original is unanswerable at the moment, because the meaning originally intended by the words “what is stored up for him” for Jews is uncertain. The Samaritans in Justin’s time gave the translation in the Samaritikon a new meaning that could not have been the intention of the translators. The later intention corresponds precisely to the words of the Asâṭîr in XI:12 -- 14. The first version of the Arabic reflects a much older interpretation than the second version’s mention of the damage wrought by the whole tribe of Judah. If the Targum does not translate the critical word, then it is a name, but it means Moses, not Solomon. The full spelling of the name, with the numerical value of 345, the same as the name of Moses, is more likely to be original. Saying this chapter is a rewriting of an address to Samaritans is not fanciful. He says at the end (q) that he intends to say what has to be said even if then torn to pieces by his audience. He can’t be talking about the imaginary mild-mannered Jews in the Dialogue, who had put up with vituperation aimed not only at Jews in general, but personally at the three of them. This is (r) Justin’s own recollection of the furore before his excommunication. What else could have got him to drag in the reaction amongst the Samaritans to his dishonest attack on Simon’s theology in the First Apology, written when he could still count himself a member of the Samaritan genos? How can his three imaginary Jews be expected to know about the First Apology and the Second Apology? How is it relevant here? Justin told the Samaritans to do the opposite of divine decree of the loss of kingship by Judah forever by telling them to accept this Jesus as king by using the recognised fact of his descent from Judah and David as an argument. He must have known what he was saying and the effect it would have. It seems from his self-satisfied dramatic squawk that he set up a spectacular reaction and his dramatic excommunication on purpose. He would have known that if he had claimed Jesus was Moses or the prophet promised by Moses, while acknowledging his physical descent from Judah, his audience would have 47 disagreed but would not have been outraged. The Samaritan Ebionites and the authors of the Epistle of the Apostles accepted this solution. There were two possibilities for the return of Moses. The first is the reanimation of his body when his soul returns to it, and then his appearance from nowhere. The second is the appearance of a person born in the normal way, who might belong to any tribe. The two possibilities are set out in John VII:26 and 27. Jesus never abrogates any mitsvot, but he claims the authority to dismiss the application of them decided upon by the religious authorities. This is clearly behind verse 26. This answers the old puzzle of how he could be accused of breaking the Sabbath and could be so confident of his rebuttal. Moses was expected by many, even if not by everyone. Justin’s own knowledge (s) as a former nominal Samaritan made him see right to the depths of why the Samaritan form of Israelite religion was a menace to the root of the legitimacy of Christianity, of a different order to the Jewish form. This will be explained just below. Compare pp. 109 – 112 top on Zēnōn’s theological experiment of trying to snaffle the status of the Samaritan sanctuary and the Mountaintop. In ch. 26 of the First Apology Justin says most of the people of Samaria follow the teachings of Simon, again indirectly but clearly in ch. 15 of the Second Apology, and again dramatically at the end of ch. 120 of the Dialogue. These statements prove the Simonians are Israelites, not Pagans. They prove the book attributed to Simon was used by both parties, Sebuaeans and Dositheans. They prove Simon is not just a historical figure in the time of Claudius, but Justin’s code-name for Samaritan religion. He copies the book of Acts ch. VIII which uses the same double meaning. Justin seems to only have six half-hearted tries at maligning Simon in the surviving writings as they stand, but it can be seen from the ending of the Second Apology that he had been working long and hard since fleeing from Neapolis and knows for a dead certainty he will be taken notice of by the Senate. He maligns Simon to the Emperor Antoninus in ch. 26 of the First Apology (a) with accusations of undefined or incomprehensible wickedness, and (b) in ch. 56 makes undefined accusations to the Emperor and Senate. The only defined accusation of wrongdoing (c) is in ch. 26 and ch. 56 where he claims Simon deceived the Senate by claiming divinity when in Rome in the time of Claudius (41 – 54 A.D.), so that an official statue recognising that status was put up. It does seem a statue was set up honouring a Samaritan dignitary on a state visit during the formalising and elaborating of relations which were already good, which Justin was greatly irked by. In ch. 26 he obscures historical fact by misquoting an inscription on a different statue to the god Semo Sanco set up by the Senate. The usual objection that there must have been a different statue deifying Simon set up by the Senate because he would not have misquoted what could be read by anyone can be countered by the fact that he had not got to Rome yet and was obsessive and badly informed, as well as the self-evident fact that the Senate could not have legally attributed divinity to Simon on its own, and if it had been wangled somehow, there would be a record. In ch. 26 of the First Apology (d) he falsely attributes a misrepresentation of one part of a real form of gnostic teaching to Simon, coloured by his own misuse of the concept of Torah, without explaining why it ought to offend the Emperor. In ch. 26 (e) he blames someone else, Menander, off in Antioch, not Samaria, for asserting what can be seen to be part of the core doctrine of the Apóphasis Megálē, the doctrine that the aspects of identity the 48 perfection of which is not actualised dissolve within the creative Fire symbolising the Boundless Power (but are not annihilated forever) and the aspects of identity the perfection of which is actualised live on retaining their identity. This will be explained in detail further on. He misrepresents this by saying Menander said anyone believing in him would not die, making him sound irrational. He does not explain why this ought to offend the Emperor. The real doctrine of the Apóphasis Megálē would have sounded like Stoic piety and morals and ethics with an unusual form of Stoic metaphysics. He wants his readers to accept the claim about life after death for followers of Jesus. The teachers of the system of the book attributed to Simon had convincing argument for their doctrine, since it can be derived from careful reading of the Torah and the use of reason, whereas the Christian doctrine of life after death itself depends on other complicated new doctrines contradictory to the religion of Israel and philosophically undemonstrable or shaky. This was a clear danger. Menander is mentioned as a menace again in ch. 56. This time it is in the same breath as the mention of Simon. In ch. 26 he says Menander was a disciple of Simon. This just means Menander used Simon’s book. In ch. 26 he contradicted himself over whether Simon was an individual working alone or a major leader, but for his purposes in ch. 56 had to emphasise that he was a major leader, and then in the Second Apology he had to say this even more emphatically. In the same ch. 26 he avoids letting on that Menander was a community leader in Antioch, but lets it slip in ch. 56. Justin acknowledges Simon and Menander as Samaritans in ch. 56, where this fact was irrelevant to what he claims to be his purpose of warning Romans against evil spirits hostile to Christianity. He knows his readers will believe what happened to Christianity mattered to Romans. The version of the booklet in our hands looks to have been extensively touched up and expanded for Christian readers. Attack on the religion of Israel is only one of the themes of the First Apology, but it is (f) the whole purpose of the Second Apology. Justin says so himself at the end. It does not read naturally to have the purpose stated right at the end with no logical connection with what has gone before. The abrupt wording does not seem natural either. The booklet as we have it might be a condensed combination of two booklets. The ending of the book as we have it might be the end of a long petition. For the present purpose, the form does not matter, since Justin’s words are enough to prove there was once a petition to the Senate with some form of the words at the end of the booklet in our hands, and that these words were positioned prominently. To make the Second Apology seem reasonable in its present form, ch. 14, the secondlast, goes back to his unexplained assertion of supposed official acts against individual Christians in Rome at the start of the pamphlet, then in ch. 15, the last, Justin petitions the Senate to make his whole pamphlet, with expected additions not needing any setting out, government licence to end Simonian religious practice and force Christianity on them without any attempt at justification instead of their (g) “wicked and deceitful doctrine”. A lot of preparation with Pagan and Christian organisational support is indicated by Justin’s assumptions of detailed knowledge on the part of the Senators or a faction of them and expectation of being granted unstated details of an unexplained bald request for major military action and massive spending. This sixth accusation is even weaker in wording than the five in the First Apology. As in the First Apology, he does not say why the teaching of this undefined doctrine should matter to Rome, or how it could be harmful to Rome. The only explanation would be that he had been put up to it by a faction that knew the facts and was hostile 49 to any religion incompatible with the Roman one. We know from A.F. that this attitude later prevailed in the Senate, as will be seen. This faction might have needed various pieces of paper to wave round supposedly coming from an informed provincial. Unlike the First Apology, the Second Apology addresses the Senate without the Emperor. This was serious. The unexplained mention of Lollius, now conveniently dead, indicates this was early in 161 A.D., when Antoninus was in failing health and Marcus was a long way away. There is no attempt at all at a logical connection with unexplained acts against Christians in Rome by Lollius. More shenanigans like this would explain his execution under Marcus Aurelius in 165, who did not persecute Christians. Neither did his co-emperor. The impossible story that he was executed for being a Christian covers up the real crime, trying to thwart the emperor’s foreign policy by causing a war or economic collapse in a province, and diverting military resources at public expense. The verdict would have been treason or disturbing public safety. Why were only seven Christians executed, according to the story? The ending of the Second Apology, lunatic as it looks, uses a mood already there. Murderous attack on both the Israelites and Christians came nineteen years later, after the death of Marcus. Justin expected the Senate to favour his petition and add to it. In their own way, they really did. The Christian Church worked hard to set the way up to get itself persecuted under Commodus. The mentioning of followers of Simon means Justin’s depiction of Simon has changed without any attempt at an explanation from a wandering individual deceiving a lot of people about himself to being leader of most Samaritans. Ending what Justin calls Simonian religious practice would really be ending all Samaritan religious practice. The first step would be abolishing the Patriarchate. All religious education would end. Mt. Gerizim would be closed off. Samaritans in other countries would be persecuted. Even if it were supposed that Justin did not change the meaning of followers of Simon to make it mean all Samaritans, the action would certainly take the form described. The fact that Justin wants the Senate to take action without any apparent information would still stand. The misrepresentation of Menander’s teaching would still be evidence of malevolence. He takes the technique in the book of Acts of making Samaritan religion out to be nefarious but without explaining how, originally meant to alienate Samaritan Christians, and reuses it on the government so as to harm faithful Samaritans. The tactic was to make a false separation between the religion of the Jews and the religion of the Samaritans, so that the Samaritan form of the religion of Israel would not have the status of an accepted ancient national or ethnic religion. A long-standing puzzle is now solved. It can now be seen why circumcision by Samaritans was not forbidden before or after Commodus, from 180 to 192. It will be shown further on that A.F. says Severus oppressed followers of the religion, but did not ban anything. (The attempted prevention of circumcision of the son of a High Priest under Theodosius II recorded in the Arabic Joshua book ch. 49 was intended to break the line of succession, not part of a general ban). Origen writes absurdly in Against Kelsos II:13 that Samaritans get executed for being seen to already be circumcised, with Christian un-Christian gloating. He is out of date but perhaps that was convenient. This is a good example of Church historians turning theologically motivated invention into fact. Secular historians have believed the Church historians uncritically as usual and made unfounded guesses about the course of Roman policy. When Justin fled Neapolis for Rome, he found an existing collective wish. Christianity uses the two concepts of salvific history and supersession so as to prove the completely new and completely alien concepts “Christ” and “salvation”, with 50 unnatural reading of what it calls “the Old Testament”. It was existentially threatened by Samaritan practice of the religion of Israel without any need for the Jewish scriptures. Christians give the Jewish prophetic scriptures and psalms a status beyond what Jews themselves give them by making them equal to the Torah in theory, and more important than it in practice. Tryphōn had to be conjured up because by that time no informed Jew could have been found to debate with. This is because what is unacceptable is not exegesis, but fundamental replacement of the religion of Israel by incompatible concepts from a different religion in disguise, mostly using the specifically Jewish scriptures as if they had the status of the Torah. Justin necessarily can’t let the discussion conclude. Samaritan religion had to be misrepresented. Work started early, with the final edition of the book of Acts. Justin systematised the formulation. Hippolytus of Rome early in the third century and Theodōretos in the mid third century used a well informed popularisation with depth (oeuvre de haute vulgarisation) of the Apóphasis Megálē, apparently not done by a Samaritan but a sympathetic outsider, but sitting next to contradictory fiction elaborating on what Justin assumes his Christian readers have already heard. Irenaeus in the late second century seems to have seen an early version. See below. Two early bits of the Clementine book not dependent on Justin say Simon was leader of an unnamed movement after Dositheos, but one is fictionalised and one vague. See below. The thinking behind the openly announced manoeuvring by Justin to wipe out Samaritan religion, as well as the Church’s efforts over centuries to wipe out Samaritans themselves to the extent needed, can now be seen more sharply. The Christian Church’s un-Christian murderous plan soon started working. In the third hymn in the Durrân collection (as listed by Kippenberg according to tradition) it says faithful Israelites are readying what is termed “the uncleanness”. The verb ‫ מתקנין‬is a participle in the pacel (not afcel as Tal classifies it). Kippenberg impossibly uses the perfect tense and not quite the right verb. Ben-Ḥayyim uses a verb that is too vague (p. 47 line 26). Something fixed must be meant because of the definite suffix on “the uncleanness” ‫ טמאתה‬and because it says all holiness is taken away. The precise meaning of the verb indicates a structure but not a building. The “uncleanness” is said to be “on the top of the sanctuary maqdẩshå” ‫ על ריש מקדשה‬. Kippenberg and BenḤayyim both took this to mean on the Mountaintop, but this won’t do. It says “on the top of the sanctuary”. This would make the word maqdẩshå “the sanctuary” refer to the whole mountain, whereas the sacred place is specifically the top. Ch. I of the Asâṭîr assumes this distinction. Third, this must be a building, since it would not be natural to say ‫ על ריש‬if “the sanctuary” were either a special piece of ground or the whole Mountaintop. The only natural interpretation is that a statue is being set up on top of the front of the sanctuary building. Compare footnote 16 p. 14 on the sixteenth hymn. Here is the Aramaic name for what is called the Haykal in Arabic by A.F. This is being done under the compulsion of “the bad”. It says fear overspreads the world. This hymn (with the fifth) must be one of the last, in the time of Commodus from 180 A.D. onwards, right after the end of the period of well-being. Although there was persecution under Septimius Severus (193 -- 211), it was only under Commodus (180 – 192) and Caracalla (211 – 217; called Alexander), and Decius (249 – 251) that the rulers tried to force the Samaritans to worship their gods. A.F. 123:11 – 124:3 (Stenhouse pp. 170 – 171) says the determination to attack Israelite religion under Severus came from ‫ روﺳﺎ ﻣﻤﻠﻜﺘﮫ‬, that is, the Senate and perhaps high-ranking officials as well, and the emperor was persuaded by them. This is important. It has always been assumed the impetus came from the emperor. Justin’s manoeuvring worked, though 51 not in the long term. Later still, under Christian Rome, the plans could be realised by the Christian Church by using direct power. There is no record of an important leader or theologian called Simon by A.F. The Samaritan authors of the fantastic fiction about a magician used by A.F. at 157:15 – 159:14 (Stenhouse pp. 220 -- 222) have built on late Christian stories, and have only seen the name in Greek form. It can be assumed that the restoration of the Hebrew form of the name was done by A.F. himself. First recension ‫ ﺷﻤﻮن‬SD (Stenhouse SH) but S inconsistently, then amendment ‫ ﺷﻤﻌﻮن‬SBC (Stenhouse SCP) but S inconsistently and C with spelling ‫שמעון‬. Second recension ‫ ﺳﯿﻤﻮن‬AVL 3 Y (Stenhouse FVaGY) or ‫ סימון‬L 1 L 2 PNMJ Khaḍir (Stenhouse EBaMNRJ). [Stenhouse misrecords SCA, his sigla SPF]. The form in the second recension must be taken indirectly from Christian sources, because a change in the opposite direction would not have happened unless deliberately done by A.F. The ignorance of both A.F. and the later editors of his book about the real author of a fundamentally important Samaritan book is explicable. The content of the book could not have been lost, but it seems to have been recast in new symbolism scattered through later hymns. RR RR RR RR The same theme of invention of doctrines by evil spirits to work against Christianity brought up by Justin comes up again in the early part of the Clementine book. This is another indication of common tradition, to be added to knowledge of the importance of his marriage though misunderstanding what it meant, and knowing the name of his birthtown. Justin conflated Simon the philosopher with a Samaritan dignitary that was honoured in Rome in the time of Claudius. This way he connected an important real event with his personification of Samaritan religion in the name of Simon. Then all Christian authors copied. The Clementine book has copied the personification directly from Acts, with no influence from Justin, showing the great antiquity of the first part. It still uses the correct name Selēnē. There is an attempt at giving Simon a date by connecting him with Dositheos in the Clementine book. This book in its final complete composite form has the same purpose as Justin’s writing, deception about someone misleadingly called Simon, but the readers intended are different. The two have a common source about Simon. The connection is obscured in the Clementine book, not only by the narrative setting, but also by the historical material near the start from an earlier source, as well as the insistence on the doctrine of the True Prophet. Although no-one has twigged, this last doctrine is designed as a Christian argument against Dositheans. The Dositheans insisted that Dositheos was the Prophet like Moses. This book says Moses was the Prophet like the all-knowing Adam and then Jesus was the Prophet like Adam and Moses. The Clementine book has reached us in three recensions, one originally in Greek but only extant in abridged Latin translation, commonly called the Clementine Recognitions, one in Greek, commonly called the Clementine Homilies, and one in Syriac. (First English translation by Joseph Glen Gebhardt, The Syriac Recognitions and Homilies: The First Complete Translation of the Text. Grave Distractions Publications, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Copyright 2014. Accessible on the Academia website. I have used the original Syriac text as well). It is certain from linguistic evidence that the original language behind the two Greek recensions was a form of Aramaic, and historical considerations mean it would have been early Syriac. The extant Syriac shows influence of Hebrew. It will be seen that the Syriac text has 52 had some development in content, though not nearly as much as the other two recensions, which have been superficially adapted to later standard Christianity. It is certain that the extant Syriac was not translated from Greek, and neither was its ancestor. There are indications that the Syriac book is a conversion of an earlier work in western Aramaic older than the start of the use of the literary dialect called Syriac. (I owe some penetrating linguistic and textual observations to my colleague Joseph Gebhardt-Klein). As first depicted, Simon is the leader of an important movement, which is flagrantly incompatible with the rest of the book, where he is represented as an individual with a handful of impressionable followers. The Syriac and the Recognitions, in the old introductory material from before the interminable narrative about Peter and Simon and from before the core of this narrative, which is Simon’s utterances, say this movement was founded by John the Baptist. This person is not given the title “the Baptist” in the Homilies but described there, undoubtedly more correctly, as “a certain John, a Hemerobaptist”, using a term translating the Rabbinic Hebrew term for sects called ‫( טובלי שחר‬Syriac pp. 49 -- 51; Recognitions II:7 – 11; Homilies II:22 – 24). If this is an otherwise unknown John, the statement in the source could not have identified him with John the Baptist. Kippenberg missed this explanation by reading the datum out of context, and others have copied without looking. It is reasonable to identify this person with the leader of the Bâ’ûnẩ’i (definite plural gentilic noun), who had hegemony over all Dositheans after the death of Dositheos, though any connection with Simon would be wrong, as will be seen. They are said to have said all their prayers in water. This probably means they said prayers while still in the water each morning after immersion. (The Homilies go on to identify this person with John the Baptist, but this can be dismissed as a bad guess). The Recognitions say Simon was leader but Dositheos usurped his place during his absence, but was later defeated by Simon. The Syriac and the Homilies say Dositheos was leader but was defeated by Simon. At the end all three recensions say Dositheos died soon after being defeated. The author knows of both Dositheos and Simon as the name of the leader of a Samaritan movement, with Simon coming second. This might not mean any more than that the author had heard two names, and does not know what the relationship was, or whether there was any relationship. There might be confusion with Såkte, which would be impossible, but could have seemed plausible. In that case, the person called John might well be Nîn, Såkte’s grandfather. See note 20 on p. 98. The form Ninna as a diminutive of ‫ יוחנן‬or ‫ חנן‬is known. See p. 14. It is not usual to name a person’s grandfather, so there must have been a reason. The timing fits. Justin says Simon came to Rome in the time of Claudius. Såkte’s father Ṭibron used a name honouring Tiberius. Identification of Simon with Såkte has nothing behind it except the tendency to replace a name of an otherwise unknown person with the name of a known person. Simon’s teaching was used by both parties. It is here that the Gnostic doctrine of the fall of the female First Thought is attributed to Simon. Justin did the same. The real teaching might well have been development of the concept that that when Adam and Eve lost their appropriate status, all Creation was affected. It is here that his town of origin is named (with insignificant variants) and so are his mother and father. Justin knows the name of the town in yet a fourth form but not the names of Simon’s mother and father. In the Homilies at this place there is a disapproving statement that he recognises Mt. Gerizim and rejects Jerusalem. If that was important to the real Simon, it means he did not abandon the religion of Israel. In the later part, the narrative about Peter and Simon, Simon claims to find his doctrine of what is meant by God and Creator in the Torah, and this is no more than the doctrine known from Judaism that the transcendence of God beyond 53 Creation is only known through Creation. God can be named but can’t be named. See below pp. 219 middle – 220 middle. If in this later part, in the wording of the Recognitions, it says he puts himself above the Creator, this is only the concept known from Judaism and Neo-Platonism that God is before Creation, even though immanent in it, with the aspiration of working towards union with the unnameable God, with the added observation that this will be perfection of Creation. See the references to Jerome on p. 60 and Hippolytus on p. 58 -- 59 and p. 84 and Theodōretos on p. 59 – 60 top. If in the later part in the wording of all three extant recensions he is represented as saying his body is incorruptible, this can be explained as a misrepresentation of the concept of preservation of whatever aspects are perfected. Calling himself the Standing One means he is on the way to turning potentiality into actuality. A perfected aspect is not dissolved in the Fire or Boundless Power so as to start again, but stands. Both claims are given side by side in the Syriac and the Recognitions in terse wording implying no explanation is needed. This looks like a quote from an authentic document, though without understanding. Simon is connected with Dositheos again in the Syriac on p. 35 and in the Recognitions at I:54, in a long section not in the Homilies. In the earlier part of the extant composite, the historical information, the Syriac says he succeeded Dositheos as leader of his movement, but is vague about how. Here Dositheos and Simon are mistakenly assumed to have thought in a way similar to the Sadducees, but with no claim of any historical connection with the Sadducees. This is within a passage that comes from a tradition known to Justin, as remarked above. The tradition says evil spirits (according to Justin) or the Adversary (according to the Recognitions) or the Accuser (according to the Syriac) fomented schisms by planting false doctrines in existing movements. [Thomas Smith in the series The Ante-Nicene Fathers mistranslates the sentence about the Sadducees in the Recognitions in two ways, the unnecessary and contradictory possessive pronoun and the wrong adverbial phrase of time, as if Sadducees appeared at this time. William Whiston is correct. Jones does not understand the Syriac syntax and translates the Syriac by copying Smith’s misunderstanding of the Latin]. It says the Sadducees repeated a misconception by Dositheos and Simon, without actually saying they learnt this from Dositheos and Simon. This seems like an editorial note trying to combine two incompatible data. The editor had not heard of the Samaritans called Sadducees. Evidence of persistent confusion between the Jews called Sadducees and the Dositheans under their old name of Sadducees is set out on pp. 107 bottom -- 109 and 118 – 119 and p. 120. There are signs of combination of two bits of tradition in the Clementine book here. When the Sadducees are compared to Dositheos and Simon, it is not said both were Samaritans, though this was common knowledge, but then Samaritans in general are mentioned separately, and it is said they were misled by Dositheos. Here again is the familiar Christian mistake of thinking all Samaritans are followers of Dositheos. Simon is undeniably leader of a movement, not an unaffiliated individual, and his theology is Israelite, not Gnostic in the narrow sense. The extant book contradicts itself on Simon even more than Justin, because it is a composite. Bear in mind how Justin deceives by attributing the claim to Menander that those that believed in him would not die. Pious readers have believed someone could successfully make such a claim ever since. What Menander taught will be proven in Part VI as being immediate resurrection in the next world. Dishonesty as crude as this fits the deception about the symbolism of Simon’s wife. In the later part of the composite Clementine book, she is dragged in so that Simon can be deceptively 54 portrayed as a Gnostic, since everyone knew the doctrine of the degraded and maltreated Thought to be fundamental to the Gnostic system sensu stricto in all its variations. The trick has worked pretty well right up to this very day on unthinking Christian readers --- definitely including scholars --- even though in the Gnostic system it would be impossible by definition to say Thought had ever taken on human form or been besmirched by humans. It was well known that the Moon reflected the light of the Sun, but there is another explanation, and both might have originally been intended. In Palestinian Aramaic, that is, nearly always in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic including the Palestinian Targums, nearly always in Syropalestinian, and always in Samaritan Aramaic, the Moon is called ‫ )זיהרא( זהרא‬or ‫ זהרה‬with zayin (sometimes spelt with ‘ayin as the middle vowel letter in Samaritan Aramaic). What the word was in Qumran Aramaic is not known. This leaves room for a play on words. No matter how the extant long composite Clementine book was put together and edited, the name started off in Palestinian form. When the information was rewritten in the immediate forerunner of the literary dialect called Syriac, the editor had to make a choice. In Syriac the name of the Moon still has the original samech at the start. The editor had to decide whether the primary meaning was Moon or Moonlight or Shining. With some understanding, he would have chosen Shining, since the concept of the Torah as light is widely used. Without the requisite knowledge and insight, a Christian editor would have plumped for Moon. Something similar to the double symbolism --- though not the same --- can be seen in the words of the Book of Wisdom at VII:26: “She is the radiance that streams from everlasting light, the flawless mirror of the active power (hē energeia) of God, and the image of his goodness” (REB). In favour of both interpretations of how Moon or Shining was thought of, symbolic and personal, is the line of thought throughout ch. VIII of the same book, and specially verse 2, “I sought her out when I was young and longed to win her for my bride”, along with verse 6, “So I determined to take her home to live with me, knowing that she would be my counsellor in prosperity and my comfort in anxiety and grief”. As for the persistent Christian misrepresentation of her as having been maltreated in earthly form by humans, the obvious explanation is false belief that Simon taught a version of the concept of the fall of the First Thought from the pervasive canonical Gnostic Myth. The representation of her as having been born as Helen of Troy depends on a wrong choice of equivalent in converting her symbolic name from some form of Palestinian Aramaic to the dialect called Syriac soon afterwards, followed by a corruption within transmission in Greek from Selēnē to Helēnē. If she was never called Helen, she was never connected with Helen of Troy by anyone except Christians. Without such an identification, connection with the fall of the First Thought in the Gnostic Myth sensu stricto has nothing behind it except the assumption that all religious leaders that are not Christian must wickedly think the same, reinforced by the observation that Simon’s wife was just as important as him in the symbolism of the Simonian system. The long second part of the Clementine book’s representation of Simon is less cleverly thought out than Justin’s, though no less vulgar. It looks like an independent development of the picture in Acts. This is an indication of early date, before Justin’s concoction was canonised. Simon personifies Jewish and Samaritan religion, as well as the Ebionites and their Jewish equivalent. This is no great assumption. Simon represents Samaritan religion in general in Acts and Justin’s writings. It is thoroughly illogical to suppose that Peter and his associates represent what is misleadingly called Jewish Christianity. If they won’t have their meals together with non-members, that 55 does not mean they must be following Judaism to some extent. Contrary to the belief of NT scholars, Jews will have meals together with outsiders, provided all the food is kosher, and at a stretch, provided only that what is to be eaten by the Jews is kosher. Bringing in what Paul says about eating along with idolaters meaning non-Christians being permissible under conditions and then saying the figure of Peter represents Christians that did not accept what Paul said is reasonable, but that does not make the book Jewish Christian. On the contrary, there is no evidence at all of observance of the mitsvot, and explicit denial of the validity of some undefined parts of the Pentateuch. What is said about Clement in the book is fiction, but the reader is expected to think the character to be real and the same as the person called Clement that became bishop of Rome. (g). Now to Simon’s claim to be “the Power of God which is called Great”, as quoted accurately but misleadingly because without explanation in Acts VIII:9. The word is hē dynamis. Both this word and the word in the Book of Wisdom can convey the sense of the Aramaic ‫ חילה‬. It is distinguished as the Great Power because within Creation it is the Power manifesting in all Powers. The Boundless Power is above it. This is made clear in the direct quotation known to Hippolytus. See below p. 81. Compare the start of Proverbs ch. VIII, and the translation of the first verse of Genesis in the Palestinian Targum. The equivalent Rabbinic statements about the Torah are well known. None of the Jewish concepts are quite the same as the Samaritan one, so comparison must not be allowed to be misleading. The manipulators at the top would have seen that the great danger was that anyone could become a vehicle of the Great Power --- no matter how inadequately or incompletely -- as well as a servant, and as well as that, could be refined -- to use the common metaphor of the Jewish scriptures -- to become more and more like what had been intended. These principles are set forth in the quotation from the Apóphasis Megálē in the next section, where it is shown that the use of well chosen quotations from the Jewish scriptures and the NT (but without mentioning Jesus) in the summary is evidence that not only Samaritans read the book. The glossator need not have been a Christian, just a thoughtful person. If he had been a Christian, there are places even in the little bit preserved where a verse mentioning Jesus could have been used and a Christian of any kind would have done so. For Simon and his followers the marriage must have borne deep meaning as a representation of the relationship described as a dance between two partners, the Great Power and Great Thought. This is why early Christian authors cover the symbolic importance of the marriage up with crude vilification, and assert at tedious length they were not married. Making Simon out to be a Gnostic and then saying most Samaritans were Simonians would have had the effect of nullifying the traditional toleration it had shared with Judaism. This is known to have happened, though the explanation has not been known till now. Both forms of the religion of Israel had been represented for convenience at times as worship of Zeus from at least as early as the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, and the identification was made formal with the improval of the Samaritan sanctuary by Hadrian and its nominal dedication for administrative purposes to Zeus Hypsistos. Otherwise both forms of the religion of Israel were accepted as traditional and therefore legitimate, like Egyptian religion. The misrepresentation of Simon was systematic and elaborate with the same story right from the start. In his first account in the First Apology, Justin has a suggestion that Helen was rescued by Simon, but the metaphysical theory is not explained. The 56 explanation is that Simon’s wife wrongly named Helen had to be connected with Helen of Troy so that the story about the degradation of Thought could be attached to her, and also so that the canonical Gnostic myth could be modified to allow for the Thought to be forced into human form. To do that, Helen of Troy had to be transformed from a normal person into a divine being in disguise. The way was open because she was the sister of Castor and Pollux. To make her seem divine, the story about Stesichorus the poet is brought in. He was supposed to have been smitten with blindness by Castor and Pollux for having disparaged Helen of Troy, but supposed to have had his sight restored when he wrote new poems praising her. This part is in the story about Simon as a Gnostic from the start of its appearance, and the assertion about Simon’s representation of his wife as Helen of Troy depends on it. The stories about Simon’s supposed uses of passages from Homer were made up for the same purpose. One is the image of Helen standing atop a tower holding a torch aloft. Another is the wooden horse, or as the proverb says, beware of gifts bearing Greeks. Epiphanios at Panarion VIII:3 slips up by saying Simon used these images in his teaching against Pagan religion, and only after does he say he used them to assert his own inventions. He unthinkingly says Simon uses the term “Gentiles” in two incompatible meanings. What Epiphanios at VIII:2 and 3 says Simon says about Thought fits in with the concept of the Great Thought in the passage from the Apóphasis Megálē summarised just below. Epiphanios at VIII:3 contradicts himself by saying Simon identified Athena with Thought, because Helen of Troy can’t be Athena. Epiphanios, as well as Irenaeus and Hippolytus and Theodōretos well before him, dodge the question of the contradiction by first going into detail about Helen of Troy and her identification with Thought, and only mentioning two statues, one of Simon as Zeus and one of his wife as Athena, right at the end without explanation, except for some obscure words by Hippolytus saying Simon’s followers worship them. The difficulty with this explanation is that the gods and goddesses of the Roman and Greek Pantheon are incompatible with the Gnostic myth, even if it is reduced to the degradation of Thought. Philastrius in about 384 A.D. (On Heresies, ch. I), writing at about the same time as Epiphanios, drops the mention of the statues. Since anyone could see worshipping statues was unthinkable in Gnosticism, there must have been some strong necessity to make something this clumsy up. For the moment, a suggestion is that the Ark of the Covenant in the occulted Mosaic Tabernacle had had a pair of Keruvim with human faces over it, which were interpreted as representing the Creative Power and the Torah in readily accessible teaching. It would be useful to go through all recorded Jewish explanations. The elaborate construct by a learned author looks like the work of Justin and his school. The change of the name of Simon’s wife from Selēnē to Helēnē is inseparable from the rest. This suggestion gives the first ever explanation of the odd structure and outwardly incoherent argument of the Second Apology. It explains Justin’s confidence that the Senate would act on his words and go beyond them. It explains why he was executed in the reign of Marcus Aurelius when there was no persecution of Christians. It explains why only seven were executed, that is, if anyone else really was executed. The word Martyr was glued onto his name instead of Justin of Neapolis to boost the cover story. The Church had to start to look law-abiding. There is admittedly a difficulty here. The long later part of the composite Clementine book has what looks like the doctrine of the imprisonment of Thought in human form, though without all the later fanciful embellishments. If the tradition in 57 the Clementine book is older in at least one important respect, that is, the preservation of the name Moon without all the elaborations about Helen, this unadorned form must be examined to see how it looks if interpreted without preconceptions from the later elaborations. What look like parts of some unknown Gnostic system will have to be sifted to see if any are invention or misunderstanding. The next source after Justin is Irenaeus, who wrote in the last quarter of the second century A.D., soon after the unsurprising execution of Justin in 165 A.D. (Against Heresies I:23). Whereas Simon for the book of Acts and Justin was a codename for all Samaritan religion, for Irenaeus and all Christian authors afterwards Simon is a codename for heresy or Gnosticism. He carefully says Simon was not a Christian, even though the cause of all Christian heresies, but without explanation. Soon after comes some limited real direct quotation and limited quotation of a real summary of a real document by Hippolytus, writing between 200 and 235 A.D. in Rome. (Philosophoúmena, start of Book VI). He has it secondhand from the same Christian polemical compilation about Simon as was known to Theodōretos. Before bringing up the authentic book, he tells a witless story about someone in Libya that trained parrots. The argument is that because some people in Libya were tricked by parrots, Simon must have been making things up. With true doctrine you don’t need logic and it can be hoped the audience is on the same level. With a bit of luck they won’t wonder how anyone could have trained that many parrots either. He starts the real information by saying a few words about a book called the Apóphasis Megálē, the Great Utterance of the Truth [more accurately How What Matters Really Is] and quoting the opening. It can be seen to be the opening because it declares the content of the book, using technical terms that would all have had to be explained to the reader over the length of the book. Then comes a long summary of two parts of the book (with some correct glosses to the first part by an unknown hand), and then comes a long quotation amounting to about a page of print that looks like what would have started the argument of the book and would have come soon after the words of the opening. The glossator of the summaries can be seen to have had knowledge of Christianity from use of verses of the Jewish scriptures and verses of the NT not mentioning Jesus as useful brief expressions of concepts. He turns a necessary quotation of Dt XXXII:1 into a quotation of Isaiah I:2. This does not mean he was a Christian. His choice of quotations shows understanding. After this comes the usual fiction about Helen of Troy and more of the obligatory vituperation. There is no reason to believe the book to be by the historical Simon in the time of Claudius. All that is certain is that it was widely used by Samaritans. The quotations and summaries are too long to reproduce here but can easily be looked up. They need to be read right through. In the part preserved they only present bare theory, with only a little bit of direct application to the words of the Torah, but they do tell enough to show that the book is an exposition of normal Israelite religion in philosophical terms. The essential concept is that everyone and everything are in the form of the Boundless Power, symbolised at times as creative and dissolving Fire. Everyone and everything is potentially in its image, and the task is to turn potentiality into actuality. What is specially relevant to Christian misrepresentation of Simon is where it announces the Great Power and the Great Thought and tell how they work together. These two originate in God, who can’t be described or named but can be spoken about if words are needed as being unknowable silence or more immediately in the guise of the 58 quickener as Boundless Fire or Boundless Power. It is known from the earliest part of the Clementine book that Simon venerated Mt. Gerizim, so his religion was Israelite. There is no room for Gnosticism in the narrow technical sense or any kind of dualism or malign forces, because the Great Thought does not spring from the Great Power, as Christian authors with a knowledge of Gnosticism sensu stricto imagined. And still do. The Great Power and Great Thought are a pair dancing facing each other (antistoichountes). They spring together from a single unknowable united Power and Thought, which comes from unknowable silence or the Boundless Power. After them spring forth two more pairs till stability is reached and the immanence of God in Creation is completed. Where the earthly Moses and the earthly Torah are placed is not stated. Christian authors deliberately obscured the fact that there was an unknowable Power called the Boundless Power and symbolised as lifegiving Fire higher than the Great Power and Great Thought. This is what is meant by the term quoted in Acts VIII:9, saying Simon claimed to be the Power that is called Great. The Power that is called Great is an emanation of the unknowable Power and by definition not the greatest Power. The words “which is called” must be a set expression used as a reminder the title is misleading if the Boundless Power is not distinguished. The Church misrepresented the words as claiming divinity. There is a contradiction at Acts V:36, with a deliberately false attribution to Dositheos well before the symbolic Simon: “For before these days Theudas arose, saying he was something (sic) Great”. (Theudas is a diminutive. This is a cruder attempt at obfuscating). Any Samaritans of either faction, Sebuaean or Dosithean, could have used the book seen by Hippolytus. Justin’s presentation in the Second Apology might not have been as flimsy as it looks if he was cleverly lying with a half-truth when he said all Samaritans had to be wiped out because nearly all were followers of Simon, if nearly everyone accepted this book which the Church attributed to Simon. The readers labelled Simonians by outsiders could not have departed from the religion of Israel if Justin can say most Samaritans are Simonians. It is attested that Moon represented Thought and Simon represented the Power that is called Great. It is not known how the relationship was shown. The reports of the two statues of Simon and his wife as Zeus and Athena are obscure, perhaps on purpose, but it can be seen there was some kind of symbolism. ‫צ"ע‬. Theodōretos of Kyrrhos (now called Khûrus), writing between about 430 and about 460 in north-western Syria, starts his book Summary of Heretical Accounts with Simon as being responsible for all Christian false doctrine. He could have read his source in Syriac or Greek. He uses the Apóphasis Megálē, though without naming it. The real information quoted is meagre and could be printed on twelve lines. Nevertheless, it is valuable because it shows what he identifies as the two core doctrines and the most objectionable, both times with new information. (The obligatory vituperation and fiction about Helen then follow). Theodōretos says Simon claimed to be the Boundless Power. The Christian secondary collection he and Hippolytus used has confused the Great Power and the Boundless Power. Besides this, information about the Boundless Power and the exhortation to try to become more and more the image of it has not been understood by the source, perhaps on purpose. Jerome makes the same double mistake. See below. The part of the summary of the Apóphasis Megálē quoted by Hippolytus gives all the detailed information needed, and is perfectly clear, though compressed. Everyone and everything comes from the Boundless Power. What remains only potential is dissolved (not destroyed) on return. What has become actual becomes an image of the Boundless Power. See the quotations in the next section. 59 Irenaeus I:23 and Hippolytus par. 19 end and Theodōretos give the datum that Simon claimed to have appeared to the Jews as the Son and the Samaritans as the Father and the Pagans as the Holy Ghost. The formulation is Christian. Decoded, it says the Boundless Power manifests itself to all mankind in suitable different ways. What is meant by the two concepts is partly clarified in this fixed formula from a book of Simon’s quoted by Jerome. This could be the Apóphasis Megálē or a related work used in public teaching. “I am the Word of God; I am the glorious one; I the Paraclete, I the Almighty, I the everything of God”. “Ego sum Sermo Dei ego sum Speciosus ego Paracletus ego Omnipotens ego omnia Dei”. (Commentary on Matthew at XXIV:5). The term “omnia” Dei means every form of activity or manifestation of the Boundless Power. (For the same usage of “everything” in Hebrew, but applied to people, compare the ending of Ecclesiastes at XII:13). The Word of God is the preexistent and earthly Torah. For the explication of what is “speciosus” ‫( איקר‬Aramaic noun) see Asâṭîr XII:20. In the Jewish targums ‫ יקרא‬is the Kavod. God is the Paráklētos with all the implications of the word, the Comforter called to be with you in time of grief and trouble. “Omnipotens” translates ‫ שדי‬and fits being able to make potentiality that can become actuality. A Gnostic would not have used this term from the Torah itself with its traditional Samaritan and Jewish interpretation. The speaker is the Boundless Power, and the concept could be used by any human individual on the way to actualising their potential nature by trying to become an image of the Boundless Power. The formula was dangerous and had to be misrepresented as an irrational claim or an attempt at deluding a lot of people by a human person. Any Christian claim about the unique function or status of Jesus is wiped out, because anyone can start on the path of manifesting the immanence of the Boundless Power, which itself gives help, as will be seen in the next section. The book can give helpful knowledge and be a guide. What is left for Jesus to do? This obvious question, couched in the terminology and system of thought used these days, and with the right quotations from their Old Testament, still baffles missionaries at the front door. Any perceptive Christian reader would have seen a dangerous statement of self-evident truth making the doctrines of the Incarnation and Atonement and Trinity unnecessary. The doctrine using words attributed to Jesus that there could not be action by any paráklētos or ‫ מנחם‬before the departure of Jesus can then be seen to be unworkable falsehood because it denies what is written in Christianity’s Old Testament. The doctrine of the Trinity is thus controverted by facts that can’t be dodged by turning them into theological argument. On the word ‫ מנחם‬or paráklētos and the corresponding verb see a Hebrew or Greek or Syriac concordance to the Tenach. A vulcanised patch tried out a few times in the NT is to use paráklētos to mean defence lawyer, but this disconcertingly pits one Person of the Trinity against the other two, besides killing off any continuity with the Christian Old Testament. What is behind the Torah can make potential perfection turn into permanent actual perfection, or show the transcendent God as being immanent. A similar Jewish usage can be seen in the opening words of the Fragmentary Targum, ‫ בראשית בחוכמא ברא יי‬, with variants in Targum Neofiti and other Palestinian targum mss. This can be understood as it often is as meaning creation copied the preexistent Wisdom or pre-existent Torah, but also as meaning creation was by means of Wisdom or the Torah. To my knowledge, this second understanding is not found in Rabbinic writings, though it could be read into Proverbs VIII. The second understanding was recast by the authors of John’s gospel and the Epistle to the 60 Hebrews in the formula “All things were made through him”. (Evangelicals think the words “All things were made by him” mean “He made all things”. Once again, their theologians have no real command of Greek). An equivalent to the Jewish concept of the place of the pre-existent Wisdom is specially compatible with the use of the term paráklētos ‫ מנחם‬by Simon. Read the formula quoted by Jerome, which is quoted just above. Although the words of Proverbs VIII are a useful comparison, the system of thought is different. The words of the dictum quoted by Jerome are uttered by the Boundless Power rather than the pre-existent Wisdom. The pre-exiatent Word is not a hypostasis but an act or manifestation. The metaphysical difference between Simon’s system and the Jewish one is considerable, though there is no theological difference. Jerome has tried to mislead the reader by fudging, by first referring to the narrative of Acts VIII and inserting judgment telling the reader that when Simon said he was the Power that is called Great he was deluded or malevolent, and then confusing this Great Power with the Boundless Power so as to deceive the reader into thinking the speaker of the formula to be Simon again making claims about himself. Jerome must have known the truth because the Apóphasis Megálē was well known. Here we see why witnesses in court are required not to put quotations in indirect speech and to quote in full. This is a dictum that could be used in public religious instruction at all levels, or used in meditation. A recommendation for meditation and mindful action is suggested by the words from the summary of the Apóphasis Megálē quoted in the next section. There is an attempt at countering the attractiveness and reasonableness of concepts like these in Matthew XI:28 – 30, “my yoke is easy and my burden light”, where words of the Great Thought, speaking of herself as comforter, though without using the actual term, are taken out of context and attributed to Jesus. We might ask why the load has any weight at all. The answer is that the Great Thought and the Great Power demand purposeful work. The burden is light because of the synapheia, the lifting up from above. From all this, using a variety of approaches and evidence, the threat of the teaching attributed to a ghost called Simon becomes undeniable. The reason is now obvious why the misrepresentation to make him seem irrational and malevolent was so consistently copied, in its two contradictory versions, the one that made him out to be a self-seeking charlatan, and the one that recognised him as a major pernicious religious leader and the author of a fundamentally important pernicious book. The purpose and content of the book attributed to him are independent of the party affiliations of whoever the author might have been. Halachah need not have come up. Justin contradicted himself by saying pretty well all Samaritans were Simonians, even while making Simonians out to be a sect, but it still works. The book is written for discussion by educated readers, but could be simplified for public teaching. The conclusions are fundamental. The Clementine book, even in its extant form, shows an older tradition than any other Christian work by keeping the name Moon, because Helēnē can only be a deformation of Selēnē. The change could not have been a mistake because the original meaning was central to the system of thought. It was the first stage of construction of a learned complex coherent fiction. It follows that everything attributed to Simon about saying his wife had been Helen of Troy who had been Thought degraded by sinister powers and imprisoned in human form is invention from before Justin’s First Apology. The whole story about Simon the Gnostic must then be systematic invention designed to seem like 61 Gnosticism, though jarringly not fitting real Gnosticism. The only possible inventor of the elaborate complex is Justin, who tries to use it in the First Apology, but has not worked out how to do it effectively. He needed to go to Rome to get organisational support. One purpose of the invention was to give the emperor and the Senate something to use against Samaritan religion, but this was secondary. The purpose of the fully elaborated invention was to make it easier to turn thoughtful people away from the Apóphasis Megálē and related teaching. It was intended to be transmitted in every fixed detail. After Justin’s inevitable execution the organised official work behind him had to be hushed up, so he was saintified, with a hollow story now known to be impossible. More stories about Simon were made up. (h). From all this, a context for the Epistle of the Apostles shows up. The usual dating of this book is in the early to mid second century A.D. on the basis of supposed influence of Gnosticism, and its contradiction of the NT. Actually there is no Gnosticism, though it does disagree with the present NT. It disagrees on the conception of Jesus, and it implicitly rejects any connection of the term “Christ” with any concept of a Davidic king. The second would be expected of Christians of Samaritan origin. The book survives in two recensions, one in Coptic and one in Ethiopic, going back to a Greek original. There might have been an Aramaic original as well as the Greek original. The version extant in Ethiopic starts twice, and the version extant in Coptic starts in the same place as the second start in the Ethiopic. It says the eleven Apostles saw the need to write a counter to the teachings of Simon and someone called Kērinthos, whom it calls “false apostles”. There is a warning against Simon and Kērinthos further on at the old start. This is the only place where Simon is made out to be an anti-Christian apostle with later successors. In the context of a Christian writing, the term “apostle” without further definition must mean a Christian apostle. The title of apostle demands authority higher than holding an office in the Church. The only conclusion is that representatives of the teaching of Simon and Kērinthos claimed to teach what the original teaching had been before it was falsified and turned into Christianity. If they were so dangerously convincing they must have had proof. In my article A Samaritan Broadside I pointed out that the Epistle of the Apostles tries to give an answer to one of the devastating concluding observations in the Samaritan diatribe against Christianity with its official invitation to return to the religion of Israel, the observation that Christianity stands reason on its head by having a concept of a supreme Word and applying the same title with no change in meaning to a specific human person both at once. The Epistle of the Apostles in par. 17 goes to great lengths to answer an expression of wonderment by the Apostles themselves on this question (not using the term Word), though not in a way acceptable to Samaritans (or Jews either). It says both statements are true because Jesus is both standing in front of them and merged with God. It says earlier on in par. 14 that the Word put itself inside Mary’s womb, with the Holy Ghost out of the picture, and says just before this that the Word took on the appearance of the angel Gabriel to make the announcement. This is not Gnosticism, in spite of the account of the Word having come down stage by stage while taking on different forms, because there is not even a hint of the need to slip past malign powerful beings. In fact, the concept is unique. This contradicts the part that is only in the Ethiopic. The Ethiopic par. 3 says the Holy Ghost put the Word in the womb and looked after the child while in the womb. At the same place the Ethiopic says the Word became flesh, but without saying how, copying John’s gospel. The addition in the Ethiopic states part of the doctrine of the Trinity, whereas the original part has a different conception that needs 62 more investigation. The conclusion is that the explanation in par. 17 was made before the passage that is only in the Ethiopic was tacked onto the start of the book. The addition at the start is explicitly addressed to “the Catholics”. The sect that wrote the original book has been absorbed and their theology is being corrected bit by bit. This reading of the Epistle of the Apostles is confirmed by the vague but serious expression of concern in pars. 39 – 40 that very many former members have put themselves outside the expected future state and any present or future connection with their community or even with Jesus. It says at the end of par. 39 they did this by stopping keeping Jesus’s commandment, but without it being named. The Coptic speaks of one commandment, but the noun is plural in the Ethiopic. The singular is to be preferred, since the change to the plural is explicable as being due to the influence of John XIV:15 and other verses. There is no hint of any immoral behaviour, and this is confirmed beyond doubt by their symbolic names. At the start of par. 44, the ones that did not keep the commandment are identified with the five foolish young women described in par. 43, who did not get enough oil for their lamps and fell asleep before the coming of the bridegroom, in contrast to the five wise young women who made sure to have enough oil and whose lamps did not go out and who stayed awake. This is a reference to a parable in Matthew XXV. In the Epistle of the Apostles the five foolish young women represent the members that could not wait. The long reference to the parable can only be a hint to heed the exhortation coming right after the parable at Matthew XXV:13 “Stay awake, therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour”, which it would now be counter-productive to quote, as well as the same exhortations in XXIV:42 and 44. Commentators on the Epistle of the Apostles have not noticed the deliberate use of the ambiguity of the same Greek verb in all three places, meaning both “stay awake” and “be alert”. What is expected by the Epistle of the Apostles is some kind of reappearance of Jesus that is never explained properly, but can be seen not to be his physical reappearance on earth, but appearance in some ethereal way that causes the faithful to be transported bodily right out of this world. See Matthew XXIV:40 – 41. The Samaritan tract against Christianity and inviting return does not just mean Jesus is taking too long to come back to earth, but rather that even the form of expectation of his reappearance is harmful, because it can only reasonably be seen as denial of his own bodily resurrection on earth, which amounts to denial of the power of God. See my article A Samaritan Broadside p. 36. The term “commandment” can be read as a reference to other parts of the NT as well, since this term is not used in Matthew XXV:13. There is John XIII:34, explicitly termed a commandment to love all other Christians. Keeping the Christian religion till the end of the present order is explicitly called a commandment in I Timothy VI:14 and II Peter II:21 and III:2. The second passage in II Peter is about people not being able or willing to wait, and says the Apostles are the bearers of the commandment. Any of these allusions would fit the words here, but the last fits exactly. A reconsideration of the authorship and purpose of II Peter in the light of this might be useful. The Church still warns against Simon and Kērinthos at the start of the new opening, so their effect was not limited to the sect that wrote the tract. If the book survived, the evidence of Christianity being at least in part falsification of the theory of the Apóphasis Megálē and unnecessary must I have been effective for a long while. It was shown above pp. 38 – 39 that there are indirect but compelling indications that the tract against Christianity officially inviting return to Israel was published as part 63 of official reinvigoration of Israelite religion including bringing back the Samaritans that had been lured by the Church and then abandoned by it. The reference to the work of Simon and Kērinthos at both starts of the Epistle of the Apostles need not be meant narrowly, but as a cipher for Samaritan religion with government action for its restoration. Kērinthos is paired with Simon as an apostle, and might have been one of the leaders in the restoration. Kērinthos is described by Hippolytus in the Philosophoúmena Book VII ch. V but quite differently, probably by confusion, by Irenaeus in Against Heresies Book I ch. 26. He might have been thought to be a dualist by Irenaus from misunderstanding of the place of the Boundless Power as helper of created beings in their refinement and perfection. (i). Now an informed description of Ebionites becomes clear. Hippolytus, Book VII, ch. VI. “The Ebionites agree that the world is the work of the true God, though in everything about Christ they think the same as Kērinthos and Karpokrátēs. They live according to Jewish practice and make out they are made righteous by the Torah, saying it was by carrying out the Torah that Jesus became righteous. This is how Jesus himself got called Christ of God and Jesus since no-one out of the [plural noun missing] had completely fulfilled the Torah. [My words here. Moses is unique among all prophets. Joshua is unique from having been given some of Moses’s quality by Moses himself. Jesus became worthy of the title Jesus. The question of what his real name might have been comes up. Some indications are set out below, pp. 136 -137]. If anyone else had observed the mitsvot of the Torah, he would have become the Christ. That means if they do the same they too can become Christs, seeing that he too was the same as any human person”. They developed the theory of the book attributed to Simon. It can be seen why Simon and Kērinthos are mentioned together in the Epistle of the Apostles at both starts. The Ebionites said Jesus got his special status by his own efforts and divine help. That would mean acceptance of Simon’s system, modified as needed. There is nothing in the exact words of any other reports about his observance of the Torah, but the reporters were Christian. There is clear reflection of the term ‫ צדיק‬. Page references following are to the collection by Klijn and Reinink. First, Epiphanios, Panarion, XXX:18:5 – 6 (pp. 186 – 189). “Christ they call the Prophet of Truth, having become Christ the son of God [note the combination] through progress [προσοπή which in the right context means progress in benefit from practice of religious philosophy] and through a conjunction [συνάφεια] of a lifting up [αναγωγή] from above with him”. [The wording sounds like Iamblichos and Porphyry. Klijn and Reinink misunderstand. Williams copies them but adds to the error]. They say the prophets are prophets of understanding and not [direct] truth. (See the start of Numbers XII for the absolute difference between Moses and all other prophets). They want him to only be a prophet and a man and son of God and Christ, and a mere man, as we said before, who by a virtuous life got ready to be called son of God”. Marius Mercator, first half of the fifth century (pp. 244 – 245). “Because the whole wickedness of Photinus’s impiety was more due to Ebion, a Stoic philosopher. At the time of John the Apostle he lived in Asia. He dared to preach that Christ was an ordinary man born of Joseph and Mary and excelled the whole of mankind because of his meritorious life and that for this reason he had been adopted as the son of God”. (The observation of the resemblance of parts of Simon’s system to Stoicism shows that the original reporter had heard teaching from the book directly or indirectly and did not use Hippolytus’s report directly or indirectly). Theodōretos, about 447 A.D. (pp. 246 – 247). “But he said the lord Jesus Christ was born of Joseph and Mary, but as man excelled all others in virtue and purity”. Timothy of Constantinople, about 600 64 A.D. (pp. 256 – 257). “They suppose him to be a mere man like others, made righteous [note the term] by progress [prosopē] in way of life”. Honorius Augustodensus, twelfth century (pp. 272 – 273). “They believe that Christ is only a perfect and righteous man”. Nīkēphoros Kallístos, 1256 – 1335 (pp. 276 – 277). “They believed Christ was no more than a man, made righteous by progress [prosopē] in way of life”. This is Jesus as remembered by the Ebionites. It is highly doubtful that Jesus thought he had gone all the way to attainment. He said: “It will be said ‘Physician, heal thyself’ ”. The Christian Church would not have made these words up. It can be doubted that the Ebionites used the term christós, which in ancient times meant smeared all over with olive oil for cleansing. See the Excursus, at length. Both chrēstós and chreistós would have been suitable translations according to the intention (ad sensum). Christian reporters would naturally change both of these to christós. There can be no dispute that the epithet chrēstós was used by one movement, the Chrēstianói, which means “little chrēstói”. This does not have to mean it was the same movement as the Ebionites, and the behaviour of the two movements is not the same. For the present purpose, what matters is that use of the term was natural at the time. The term “son of God” in Matthew XVI:16 is used in a new way to fit Christianity, but the original meaning still preserved by the Ebionites can be seen in the definitions by Epiphanios and Marius Mercator just quoted.To the Ebionites, both terms, “chrēstós” (punning with chreistós) and “son of God”, must have meant a person granted conjunction synapheia with a lifting up from above. (Hippolytus has a combined epithet “christós [that is, chrēstós] of God”). It would have seemed realistic to say in John IV:7 that the Hebrew form ‫ משיח‬was used by the Samaritan woman. In this place the epithet is explained deliberately wrongly by the editors in Greek. If these words and the whole pericope are read in the context of the whole of John’s gospel in its present form they must imply the doctrine of the Church after its departure from Israel, with a message against the Ebionites. It is entirely plausible that the historical fact is that John the Baptist saw Jesus as trying to attain what he was trying to attain himself and was trying to help others attain. The gospels strongly imply that he did not stop his own work till he was imprisoned. This record must be true because it is awkward for Christian theology. There is no need for guessing that the Christian Church invented the connection between John and Jesus, though it is clear that John’s acknowledgment of Jesus’s higher status has been rewritten to suit Christian theology. The Samaritan Ebionites known to Epiphanios venerated Jesus the Jew and not John the Samaritan, which is confirmation that John recognised Jesus as having higher status somehow. There would have been no reason for affiliates of either the movement adhering to Jesus after his death or the one adhering to John after his death to change. The followers of John that did not change to calling themselves adherents of Jesus might have been turned off by the Christian Jesus, which appeared surprisingly early on. What is recorded of John the Baptist’s rejection of one category of people that came to him in Matthew III:7 – 10 takes on sharp meaning once it is realised that what was meant by the wrath to come is dissolution of faults by the fire of the Great Power or the Boundless Power. The glossator to the Apóphasis Megálē has seen this and quotes his words in just the right place as an illustration. Some people seem to 65 have expected John to do some mumbo-jumbo that would let them get out of the consequences of their way of life without the need for change. It says John attacked Pharisees and Sadducees that came to him. It can be doubted that he attacked Pharisees and Sadducees more than anyone unaffiliated. It is far more likely that the editors of the records in their Christian form did not understand what the attack had been about, and to them, Pharisees and Sadducees were bad by definition. Unnecessary chapters in books have been written trying to work out how John disagreed with both Pharisees and Sadducees while they disagreed with each other. (j). The importance given to the real Jesus, not the Christian Jesus, by the Ebionites, indicates but does not quite prove that he was their founder or became their leader. There is other evidence making the connection certain. We see new inner members addressed formally in the words “Blessed are the Poor”. Then it says “Blessed are the Meek” i.e. aspirants to be like Moses. See Numbers XII. Then it says “Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness”. Notice the evidence of the importance of this term righteousness set out on p. 64. It meant following the Torah and doing mitsvot better than pious people outside and being a ‫ צדיק‬. See Matthew V:20. In another place we see a record of part of the form of acceptance of a person wanting to become an inner member, reduced to a command without explanation. “Sell all that thou hast, and give to the Poor”. Jesus could not have gone against the Torah and told someone to be a ‫חסיד שוטה‬. It has always been observed that if the young man had given everything away he would have wilfully become a burden on society. NT scholars have never wondered how it is that Jesus never commanded everyone wanting to follow him to do this. The young man in the story is singled out for record. The fishermen kept their assets and kept their employees on. “With God all things are possible”. The list of requirements commonly called the Sermon on the Mount was addressed to just a few people in a place out of the way. Adrian Grant observes in a private communication that Jesus really could say to the new inner members that theirs is the Kingdom of the Heavens, because they would live in the Ebionite community, a bit of heaven on earth. This is of course not the main meaning, as can be seen from Matthew V:20. New outer members are addressed in the Sermon on the Plain. All members inner and outer would each work seriously on trying to reach the Kingdom of the Heavens with help from above. Part of the warrant for the concept from the Torah is the pericope with the words “It is not far from thee”. Another is the words “and they saw the God of Israel, and it was under his feet as it were a paved work of sapphire stone”, and the rest. There is more. When Jesus said to Pilate “My kingdom is not of this world” he meant that although there were premises at both Bethanies, and the inner and outer members could be listed, the body of members and the Order were not bound by the world. This truth is always seen by people that deserve to see it. “The true Church is invisible”, regardless of Rome. The Ebionite doctrine does not make Jesus unique in essence, only the forerunner. Andrew’s wording in John I:41 shows there was an expectation of such a person, recognisable on observation. Here is the first explanation of the pericope that does not depend on the anachronism of supposing that what Andrew meant to say about Jesus was that he was the Christ of Christianity. There is no need to suppose that this pericope is part of what is called John’s “high Christology”. On the contrary, it is accurate on how Jesus was later remembered by the Ebionites. Regardless of the steps in the composition of the gospels, the original form of the Greek version of the account must have used the term chrēstós. The term christós used by early Christian 66 authors is not in the NT unless you think it must be there. There is always an ambiguous abbreviation. Christós is not a real Greek word. It is an unnatural Christian invention that replaced chrēstós after chrēstós had been taken over and used to express a new concept. There is abundant evidence. See the Excursus. The question of Samaritan or Jewish identity was not clearly thought about by Christian authors. Epiphanios knew the Ebionites observed the Torah, but at first thought that meant they must be Jews. He had heard they resembled Samaritans in practice, but had not seen the implications. One precise description not defining the Ebionites as either Samaritans or Jews is quoted in incomplete form by Hippolytus. See above p. 64. Irenaeus says at I:26:2 that the Ebionites study the books of the prophets and accept Jerusalem. There must have been Jewish Ebionites as well as Samaritan ones. If there were Samaritan Ebionites and Jewish Ebionites, and both gave high status to Jesus, some connection must be assumed. This would explain why there were two places called Bethany, one associated with Jesus and one with his cousin John the Baptist. If there is no evidence of any town by this name, it would be because it is the name of two Ebionite gathering places perhaps with buildings. Now see Luke I:9 – 10 and 21 – 22. If Zechariah had to go inside a building, explicitly called the naós not hierón, to offer incense, out of sight, he must have been officiating at the Samaritan sanctuary. This was observed by Heinrich Hammer (pp. 39 – 40), using the details of the lay-out of the sanctuary in the Samaritan Pentateuch. Here is what he did not know. A.F. at 39:7 confirms the incense altar was inside the Tabernacle in the Time of Favour, when he describes the occultation of the apparatus, and the Arabic Joshua book ch. 42 assumes it was behind the curtain. The Arabic Joshua book ch. 24 end says the Tabernacle was housed in a temple in the Time of Favour that only priests ever went into. (Juynboll correctly translates kanîsah as “Templum”. See note 23 on p. 104). The modern building with its grounds would have had to be the same in lay-out. The Epistle to the Hebrews assumes something like this arrangement at IX:6 and 7, but with Jewish influence. If John the Baptist had a Samaritan father and Mary had Samaritan relatives by marriage, Galilean Jews and Samaritans must have been in close contact. Close contact is confirmed by Luke XVII:16. Hammer gives evidence that Jesus’s home at the time of his early ministry was inside Samaria in chapters VI and VII. Some parts of the argument are untenable, but there is enough to show strong plausibility. The whole argument is marred by his belief that Jesus was a Samaritan and needs very careful reading. His argument for the location of the real Nazareth is convincing, specially if it is borne in mind that there are indications that the place now identified with the Nazaret or Nazareth or Nazara of the NT was founded after the time of Jesus or perhaps just renamed. The questions can’t be summarised here. (It has been pointed out to me by Joseph Gebhardt-Klein that there is a place called Nazara in Samaria, at the north-west end of the Jezreel valley, 12½ miles south-east of Haifa. The Greek form in the NT has a zed sound. The place identified with the place mentioned in the NT has ‫ ص‬in Arabic, agreeing with the Hebrew adjective ‫ נוצרי‬. Confusion of zayin and tsade in a place-name is unlikely in Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek, but would be easy in Latin. Notice how Jerome needs to explain at the start of his Commentary on Isaiah that ‫ עמוס‬and ‫ אמוץ‬are different names, even though both are spelt Amos in Latin. He can’t use a transcription to help explain). It was shown at the start of this section that there were a lot of Jews in Samaria later on in the time of Hadrian. 67 There are indications that Jesus could plausibly have been accused of favouring insurrection at one stage of his career. This is not the place to go into the evidence systematically, since no arguments in this book depend on this proposal. Just as a sample, the story about overturning the money-changers’ tables and driving them out is impossible as it stands, but must reflect something that was wanted by some people. Or again, even if it were to be maintained that the story of a trial before Pilate is wholly or partly fiction, it is undeniable that it was thought it would be effective to spread a story that Pilate was easily coerced by a threat of a denouncement of him as having let a disruptor of social order work freely to gather support. My proposal is that Iēsous Barabban (sic) is a duplication, to muddy a record in inconveniently accurate popular memory. The proposal has been made before. My contribution is to point out that the explanation of the title Barabbas given by Jerome in his commentary on Matthew at XXVII:16 is right. The Greek Barabbas is obviously a transcription of Aramaic BeRabban ‫( ברבן‬or less likely Bar Rabban) meaning son of Rabban. Jerome says the title means “son of their teacher”. It has not been seen that Jerome must have taken the form Barabbas in the nominative case to be a back-formation from the form Barabban when in the accusative case. (The title is not used in the nominative case in Matthew or Luke). It has not been understood that when Jerome says the name means son of their teacher, he means that to people using it it meant son of our teacher, so that if the explanation is reported you can say the name means son of their teacher. All comments on Jerome’s explanation by NT scholars say it is unclear, though usually it is just ignored. There is endless futile speculation on a supposed title Bar Abba. This is disgraceful. The enclitic prefixed form of ‫ בר‬has not been recognised. The Aramaic possessive suffix in the Greek Barabbas and Barabban has not been recognised. The transcription Bar Rabban to render the Greek nominative and accusative in the Syropalestinian version is ignored. (I am reminded of the form in the Syropalestinian by Joseph Gebhardt-Klein). This datum has been available since 1899. It is decisive on its own. There is no excuse for ignoring it. The concept of direct and indirect speech is taught in the early years of school. A title “son of the father” is obviously nonsense. Attempts to make sense of it assume Christian theology or something close to it. If this were the explanation, Jerome would have known about it and would have mentioned it so as to dismiss it, according to his usual practice. Rabban is an attested title. It has been said that there are signs that well known facts have been changed to something sounding vaguely familiar, rather than making up a whole new story that might be doubted. If Jesus BeRabban is a splitting from Rabban Jesus, then Simon Kyrēnaios might be Simon Kyrios, that is, Jesus the leader of the Ebionites under his name rather than his title Jesus. None of the arguments in this book depend on this. (k). The place of Jesus in Christian theology has no connection with kingship except metaphorically, and descent from David is utterly irrelevant. Matthew XXII:41 – 45 plainly proves descent from David is not part of the concept of the Mashiach. It is amusing to see how the Ramban used the very argument of these verses in the disputation at Barcelona, and his Christian opponent with his coterie of learned advisers never twigged it was not some Jewish rigmarole but had been brought up by Jesus. The author of John’s gospel knows why David is irrelevant, as will be shown. In John I:41 the term Messias in the present Greek gospel used must mean the same as was meant by the same term Messias ‫ משיח‬by the Samaritan woman in IV:25 and 29. (The Greek gloss in both places in the book as it stands is not 68 an acurate translation and comes from after the invention of Christianity). Neither the gospels or Paul ever use the term Christós with any connotation of kingship. (Matthew I:16 is not an exception if read without preconceptions. If it is an exception, it is pretty vague). Christian theologians thought this up much later because the inherited term Christós demanded an explanation. Such a usage is now commonly thought to be in the NT. This is one of the favourite blunders by Christian missionaries to Jews, who rely on misusing the term ‫ משיח‬, though not the worst. (l). When the concept of a unique king was seen to be useless and politically fraught, Jesus was reimagined so as to make him not have a human father. It has long been observed that Jesus could not have been of the line of David if he never had a father. This concept of him not having a father is not Nazoraean. None of the early concepts of his miraculous growth in the womb had demanded this. The Samaritan Christian first recension of the Epistle of the Apostles says the Word put itself into Mary’s womb (par. 14 end). It would be easy to read this into John’s gospel. See John XI:27. The official diatribe and invitation to Samaritan Christians to return to Israel answers this by trenchantly stating the self-evident impossibility of the Word being constricted. The second recension of the Epistle of the Apostles par. 3 says the Holy Ghost put the Word into Mary’s womb. The Gospel used by the Nazoraeans says Jesus’s mother was the Holy Ghost. (Hennecke p. 164. This fragment is labelled wrong and so is the one on pp. 163 – 164. Not every book in Hebrew could correctly be called the Gospel of the Hebrews). Luke I:35 can be seen to have once said the Holy Ghost was the inspiration of the child in the womb, and Mary the physical mother. The gender is right in Hebrew and Aramaic. The Peshitta keeps the feminine gender of the Holy Ghost. It does not say it came onto Mary, only that it came, and the Diatessaron agrees. The Diatessaron says after this that the Power of the Most High came down onto Mary. This did not make a human father unnecessary. The wording in the Diatessaron must be original, since the precise term Power would not have been kept unless it was too well known. Changing the verb to hovering overhead made the term seem vague. The Holy Ghost was turned into a pagan divine father by using Latin and Greek gender. Making Mary a virgin was not necessary but it helped. Such a concept of supernatural fatherhood was unsustainable and it was replaced by a concept that became the doctrine of the Incarnation, which can be reasonably defended as long as the listeners are not Israelites. It is no less alien for all that, so that Samaritan and Jewish followers of the real Jesus were alienated further. The misuse of the verse from Isaiah has been disavowed, but only the other day, and only officially, not in sermons, and not by all denominations, and folk belief and Christmas cards have not changed. Epiphanios is certain that the Samaritan Ebionites used the Gospel of the Hebrews. Jerome quotes the Gospel of the Hebrews without saying who used it. What is called the Gospel of the Hebrews used by the Nazoraeans is a different book. It might not have been called the Gospel of the Hebrews by anyone except some Christian authors. It depicts a fantastic supernatural Jesus, not the Jesus of the Ebionites, but not the Jesus of Christianity either. The Nazoraean picture of Jesus could have been modified to form Christianity in the strict sense, starting with adoptionism and what could anachronistically but conveniently be called Arianism. (m). After Jesus’s death a foreign system pretending to be Israelite was slipped in by replacing the concept of his conjunction συνάφεια by something like 69 fusion. John X:30: “I and the Father are one”. At the same time the concept of a human teacher and guide for working on gradual freedom from fault and dissolution and eventual perfect freedom from fault with God’s help (though still passing through death) was replaced by making belief in Jesus necessary. With this change we see the exact start of Christianity. The mechanism of setting up Christianity was that utterances of the Great Power in the Apóphasis Megálē were attributed to Jesus and applied to him. The way had been laid beforehand. Utterances of the Great Power had been falsely attributed to Simon, and a twin set of false attributions would not have been a big step further. Application of the utterances looks to have been simple. Take the important utterance known to Jerome, quoted above on p. 60. Here is all you need for the Doctrine of the Incarnation, from which everything follows. All the details are easily got as well. Here is Jesus replacing the Torah, as Paul preaches, which means here is Jesus as the creative Word, as in John’s gospel. Here is Jesus as the visible manifestation of God, the Kavod, so he can say “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father”. John XI:25 – 27 “No man cometh unto the Father but by me”. The need for the invention of the concept of the Christ follows naturally. The concept is an application of the concept of the Torah or the Great Power as the sustainer of life. John XI:25 – 27: “He that believeth in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die”. As for the words “everything was made through him”, the same sentence from the Apóphasis Megálē is enough, and if focussed on making Jesus the creative Word it works even better. Being saved by Jesus can be derived from the same passage if you forget about the need for serious work on seeing the meaning. The concern with the world, meaning the whole of creation including mankind, in John’s gospel makes sense if the creative power was thought of as present in all of creation. (See below, p. 84). This might be one of the similarities to Stoicism picked up by Marius Mercator or his source (See above p. 64 and see what is said on the restoration of creation and the perfection of mankind on pp. 81 middle – 86 middle). The concept of the Resurrection follows from thinking of Jesus as embodiment of the Great Power, which is the source of life. There is evidence for this thinking. The Diatessaron says that when Jesus stepped into the waters of the Jordan to be immersed, the waters boiled. The Diatessaron says that when they tried to throw Jesus over a cliff at Caphernaum because they were displeased with his sermon, he flew away. He was not bound by the laws of physics, as we would put it, because he was the embodiment of the source of Creation and its laws. This is the same as walking on water, or stilling a storm, or summoning a school of fish. The flying away is unsuccessfully euhemerised in the canonical gospel by saying he slipped away through the crowd without them being able to catch onto him, which is not believable. If you think about it, it is just as much against the laws of nature as flying away, just less spectacular. The boiling of the waters is left out in the canonical gospel. There is no need to suppose that what is in the Diatessaron is embellishment by the popular collective Christian mind. It can be seen as the conception of Jesus after he had been transformed from human to godlike but before the need to make him completely human at the same time was formulated. It fits what is known of the Nazoraean Jesus. Healing miracles could be kept. Walking on water and stilling a storm have been redefined as evidence of the concept of the Incarnation. The new message was not put in the text in the accounts of these miracles in so many words, but the interpretation intended is undeniable. ‘‘What manner of man is this’’? There is an attested alternative to the resurrection, equally an expectable consequence of thinking of Jesus as godlike. This is the tradition that Jesus was not 70 killed, but people mistakenly thought he had been seen to get killed. The tradition is in some of the gnostic gospels and some records of Gnostics. It is also in the Koran, at IV:157. The form in the Koran is not an invention in Arabia. It is enough to say it has been shown there is material in the Koran from dissident Christian movements as well as the dominant Church. It is better to take the form of the story in the Koran, because the Gnostic sources contradict each other and show signs of euhemerising in different ways. Most of the authoritative commentators on the Koran euhemerise badly because they just guess. What is meant is that it was thought that Jesus had been seized and seen to be executed, but actually a solid projection, to use modern terms, was seized and then supposedly executed. It would not be surprising if there was no body in the tomb later on. Think a bit. If Jesus could be thought to be able to slip through a crowd without anyone being able to catch hold of him, or fly away to escape, he could be thought to be able to project a solid form to escape. Both stories, the story of a resurrection and the story that Jesus only seemed to get killed and was not really there, are developments of the story that there was no body in the tomb. Neither story is historically true, but the tradition that the tomb was empty probably is. The original ending of Mark is not what an invention would look like. The explanation for the disappearance of the body at the end of Matthew is believable but not certain. No matter what the details of how the story started, it seems best to accept that Jesus really was killed, though not by order of Pilate. The story in the gospels can be explained as acknowledgment that Pilate released BeRabban or Bar Rabban, that is, one half of Jesus the Rabban split into two characters, but the religious officials present with their hired crowd wanted him killed and actually made it happen in the end. The acknowledgment is confused so as to muddy recollections, as was said above. Pilate then had to be portrayed favourably so it would not seem that Rome was ever opposed to Jesus and so that the Christian Church would be seen as an asset for Rome. Fact embroidered would have been enough. Pilate might well have released Jesus because it suited him to have a counter to the influence of the Pharisees and Sadducees. The picture of Pilate openly showing his dislike of the Jewish religious authorities and taunting them would have been useful in giving the fiction verisimilitude, but that does not stop it from being a true record of his refusal to let himself be manipulated. There might really have been a sign held up somehow saying ‘‘Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews’’, or Pilate might really have used those words, but with the new meaning of the title having been made clear with undisguised pleasure by him. This was not the new meaning invented later on by the Christian Church, but the words turned out to be useful. The concept of the Virgin Birth looks like a deliberate misuse of the concept of the presence of the Great Power in everything. This is not just an assertion. The proof is that nothing is done with this concept of virgin birth in the NT. The concept conflicts with the need to hold onto a record of Jesus’s reality and had to be dropped. It was only given emphasis much later, when the doctrine of original sin was dreamt up. This doctrine had to be dreamt up to think of something for Jesus to have done. Paul’s theory is close to contentless, but Christian theologians don’t notice because they assume he must be talking about what was made up centuries later. The passage with the words “death came into the world through sin” is not about the need to be saved from original sin unless you already think it is. It is isolated anyway. If anyone ever does notice, the answer given is that the doctrine was thought through and formulated better long after Paul’s time. This is called “doing theology”. 71 The numerous Samaritan Ebionites and Jewish Ebionites and Jewish Nazoraeans show it was not Jesus that made the change. Unde? There are some strong indications of where Christianity came from in some anomalies that have never been honestly addressed. Martijn Linssen has given evidence that the Christian gospels in Greek were composed by people that spoke Latin. In my judgment this is too sweeping, but anyone that has read the canonical gospels will have seen numerous oddities here and there where the editors’ Latin to Greek dictionary did not give information. This is routinely skated over by giving Greek words impossible meanings to make a sentence mean what you undoubtedly correctly think the editors must have wanted it to mean. The morphology and syntax are often impossible as well. There really is a New Testament Greek not always the same as Greek of the period. Why else are special handbooks of New Testament Greek needed? Why not use handbooks of koinē Greek? It would have been thought it would be illuminating to look at usage in other writings of the period if the NT were in the same form of Greek. Bauer does his best in his dictionary, but ends up showing up what is not proper koinē Greek in the NT. The usual answer that the editors might have spoken Aramaic does not address the signs that they spoke Latin. There is the enormous anomaly that there was no Aramaic-speaking un-Israelite church for a long while. The gospels used by the Christian Church, as opposed to the older records known as the Jewish Christian gospels, were only published in Greek. They were first published in Aramaic as Tatian’s Diatessaron. Whether earlier gospels in Aramaic might have had an influence on the wording of the Diatessaron in places is not relevant, since they were not used by the un-Israelite Christian Church. The term “Jewish Christian” is wrong because the people referred to by this term were not Christian. Early Christian authors thought they could be called Christian because they followed the real Jesus, but this was not the pagan invention called Christ in Christianity. Early Christian authors don’t know the difference between Aramaic and Hebrew. That means Christianity could not have appeared in Syria, or if it did, the inventors could not have been Syrians. (This argument does not depend on an anachronism in terminology. I am well aware the words “Hebrew” and “Aramaic” were not commonly used at the time. Some unnecessary articles have been written belabouring this fact. Let’s just say early Christian authors don’t know the difference between the language of what they call the Old Testament and the international language of the lands from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. If at times they might mean Aramaic, the way they use it shows they still think it is the language of Jews and noone else. Just think how much ignorance of the Near East this shows. Greek-speaking Pagans in the same lands would have known better. Just think how culturally isolated they must have been. Greek-speaking Pagans in Palestine would not have been this isolated). There is ignorance of Judaism leading to unbelievable pseudo-Judaism, such as confusion between an extinct form of vitiligo called ‫ צרעת‬and some infectious peripheral nerve disease, with the belief that anyone with this condition was isolated. This can still be heard from the pulpit. There is the belief that adultresses could be stoned to death. There is the belief that babies had to be brought into the Jerusalem temple. Utterances attributed to Jesus are not understood out of ignorance of Judaism. See for example my article L’Antiquité des Racines du Karaïsme on Mark VII. (On this website). In verse 19, Jesus reminds the close disciples of what they already know, that anything eaten must necessarily stop being unclean because of chemical change by the time it gets to the small intestine. An old floating tradition has been taken over without being understood, as the two mistranslations of the most important word into Greek show, with a word meaning the small intestine being guessed to 72 mean a toilet. This does not mean the editors of this gospel in Greek thought Jesus rejected the categories of kosher and unkosher animals. That comes with Evangelicals. When Montefiore explained he was attacked for attributing Jewish thought and argument to Jesus. Attacks for this reason were an expression of disbelief in an important part of Christian theology, but as it often says in the Talmud, “Let thine ears hear what thy mouth saith”. He was attacked by Evangelicals for proving Jesus did not reject the categories of kosher and unkosher animals in this passage. He was attacked because he showed the editors of the gospels did not understand Jesus’s words. It would have been unnoticed if someone else had come up with it. NT scholars can say anything they think of, because they have a licence and can be relied on to keep supporting the set-up. If Jews find inconvenient evidence they have to be accused of working without a licence. Very many Evangelical translations add a lot of words to verse 19 to make it suit their theology without letting on to the reader. They have to ignore the neuter gender of the participle in Jesus’s words as well, so as to make it seem to be a statement by the editors about what Jesus did instead of his own words. This is commonly called pious fraud, though no piety shows up. The unidentifiable pagan religion is said to be a departure from the religion of Israel in John VI:35 to the end, with unique inexplicable honesty. The Samaritan Ebionites’ usage of the combination of “the Christ” and “the son of God” in a specific meaning seems old. They probably used the word chrēstós, not christós. The reading in Mark I:1 adding “son of God” after “Christ” is secondary but very early and shows knowledge. The old insertion of “son” before “God” in Luke IX:20 shows the same knowledge. Later on and for ever after the intention was thwarted on purpose. “I believe thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world” (John XI:27). In the context of John’s gospel, the last phrase can only mean the final editor actually identified Jesus with the Word. In Matthew XVI:13 – 20 the change-over is recorded. It is said that everyone sees Jesus as a prophet. Then Jesus is said to have asked Peter what he thinks. Peter says: “Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God”. Old words have been given a new meaning, and the new meaning is a new concept. The son of God has turned into God the Son, regardless of syntax. When the High Priest says the innocuous term “the Christ the son of God” is blasphemy, in Matthew XXVI:65, the story is deliberately anachronistic. The meaning of the title in Judaism would not have been blasphemy. The reader is expected to know the newly made up meaning and the doctrine behind it. In verses 17 and 18 in ch. XVI Jesus is said to have announced the importance of the exact phrase and says it is to be the foundation of the community he is to form. Translating ἐκκλησία as “Church” is not anachronistic. I observe as a historian that what Rome finds in verse 18 is wilful misreading. The death and resurrection of Jesus is announced in verse 21. The reader is meant to know the new doctrines associated. The Church asserted Paul’s authority, supposedly given by Jesus, over-riding the original set-up under James the Just. The newly sprung church claimed the authority of Peter while keeping Paul’s boast of having rejected Peter’s teaching to his face. Paul’s own equally impressive invention was how to deny the divine authority of the Torah while asserting its divine origin. He never stopped attacking the followers of the original Jesus. The new un-Israelite religion is mostly built on theorising about the incarnation of godstuff in Jesus and his resurrection. Glaring proof of pagan origin is the invention of a concept of a sacrificial lamb for atonement at Passover, which no Israelite could ever have come up with. This invention is second only to misuse of the term ‫ משיח‬. 73 The Sebuaeans and Dositheans each had their own reasonable arguments that sacrifices were forbidden in the Fẩnûtå, but the thought of the Fẩnûtå must still have been uncomfortable to sensitive minds. The Epistle to the Hebrews has a new version of the Fẩnûtå that might erroneously have been thought worth considering by Samaritans, and then Jews as well. It says sacrifices were needed year after year on the Day of Atonement because no earthly High Priest was perfect, but the need for all sacrifices ended with the perfect heavenly High Priest not descended from Aaron. This is an argument from the Torah itself, more formidable at first glance than misusing the term ‫משיח‬. The flaw is that the new pagan concept of Jesus as a sacrifice awkwardly inserted into the exposition of this theme in the Epistle to the Hebrews wipes out using the Israelite concept of the heavenly High Priest bringing the people closer to God. The answer given to any mention of this flaw depends on getting the reader to first believe in a new kind of Fẩnûtå so as to feel the need for an answer. This is a marketing technique, announcing an artificial need till it is accepted without examination at the same time as advertising a product to answer the need. This was only the first of two steps. The authors of the Epistle to the Hebrews have not heard of the massive bungle of the invention of a Passover sacrifice and claiming the lamb killed on the fourteenth and eaten on the fifteenth to be an atonement sacrifice. Nothing in these last ten paragraphs is a digression. The artificiality of Christianity and its origin outside the religion of Israel have been illustrated and shown and proven in different ways. The relevance of what has been said on this so far to this book, which is not about Christianity, is that this information is needed to see the actions and utterances of the real Jesus accurately. From this, the thought of the Samaritan Ebionites can be seen more accurately. It can be seen that the Ebionites were founded or reorganised by the real Jesus. There are indications that not all followers of the real Jesus were Ebionites., as well as indications that the Chrestians had a different purpose to the Ebionites. (The Nazoraeans had a fantastic supernatural Jesus. This is not the place to try to work out where they stand). The observation of the fact that both Hebrew and Aramaic were completely foreign to the earliest form of Christianity is obviously not to be taken as an argument against the use of Hebrew and Aramaic by the real Jesus and his followers. Nevertheless, it is not safe to assume that the real Jesus and his first followers could not have used Greek comfortably and naturally, or deny that there is some chance that it might have been Jesus’s native language and the native language of most of his followers. Use of the Greek term Chrēstós by a troublesome movement called Chrestiani in Latin is well documented, and this movement seems to have claimed to follow Jesus. The term Chrēstós seems to have been used by the Ebionites, who claimed to follow Jesus. (Note. This book is not the place to go into the question of whether there was a link at some time between Chrestiani and Ebionites, or whether the term Chrēstós was available and could be used in a way suiting unconnected movements. My own judgment is that the second explanation is the right one, and this is why Christianity could take the term Chrestiani over and give it a new meaning. There is documentation of replacement of this term Chrēstós by the newly invented artificial unnatural term Christós by the Christian Church at an unknown time, with change of Chrēstianoi to Christianoi in the last years of the second century, but this is another question. See the Excursus). 74 It remains to answer three reasonable objections. The first is that Christians will often say they have had direct experience of Christ. Direct religious experience is real. It happens to adherents of all religions and happens to people with no adherence to anything with a visible apparatus or buildings. Christians can have experience of what they call Christ because it is one way of seeing a faint indication of what could be called God or the real reality. Christianity need not be one of the best vehicles, but the experience comes from God and can’t be dismissed. Direct religious experience that is undeniably God-given and real proves nothing about what happened in one place at one time. The second objection is that an artificial religion would have no life. It would not spread and would not last. Although it has been said each time so far that Christianity is artificial and can’t be a natural development of the religion of Israel, it would be closer to the truth to say it is an artificial use of part of the religion of Israel and some insights of some kinds of non-Israelite religious outlook in countries neighbouring Palestine. This is not as simple as borrowing from official religions. There is enough life in what has gone into the new structure for adherents to use it to structure or describe direct religious experience, which does not need any formulated system. This leads to the third objection. A man-made conglomerate ought not to have any kind of life. The answer to that is that Christianity has taken over part of the theory of the Apóphasis Megálē, but with belief in Jesus replacing the demands of God and the need for constant serious aspiration. To this extent it is not entirely artificial. Besides this, it has life as a form of real non-Israelite religion. Another part of the answer is that it can be seen that the original system of Christianity as seen in most parts of Paul’s epistles is incomplete. What Jesus accomplished is vague unless theology invented over the next few centuries is read into what is in these epistles. Besides, the shorter epistles attributed to James and Peter and Jude as well as the Epistle to the Hebrews as well as some interpolations in Paul’s epistles are partly incompatible with Paul, and sometimes completely incompatible if read without preconceptions. Solutions to the incompatibility were found over the following centuries, but new inventions were needed for this to be done. A big part of Christian theology is trying to reconcile the real Jesus with Paul’s Jesus, and reconciling Paul’s Jesus with the rest of the Jesuses in the NT (including the interpolations in Paul’s epistles). Sometimes someone invents a whole new system or more exactly modifies an old system that was not Christian. Augustine never stopped being a world-rejecting Gnostic. Pure Calvinism is blasphemy and worship of Ialdabaoth combined. What has just been said is not to be taken as an attempt by me to rationalise Christianity to suit myself and hold onto something different while keeping the same label as before. It is not to be seen as a way of having an attachment to Jesus independent of Christian doctrine either. A lot of people do this, in all kinds of waffly ways with all kinds of vapidness. For example, there is a Theosophical Society Jesus who attacks the Torah and the religion of Israel, dreamt up with arrogantly wilful selfcongratulatory ignorance. There is a Jesus dreamt up by Jews ignorant of their religion and not knowing what makes them Jews, and thinking they need to work out what they are missing. Others like them think their books are “original” and give “fresh insight”. Klausner comes to mind. There is the Jesus dreamt up by Jews that think Christianity comes entirely from Judaism and want to show how important Jews are. Klausner and Vermes come to mind. Numbers of socialist Jesuses and the related sub-species humanistic ethical Jesuses are stable and neither is in danger of dying out. Communist Jesuses have declined drastically in numbers but are not threatened. A mutant rapacious plutocratic Jesus denying the concept of just wages can often be 75 seen, but its territory is limited to the USA where it is favoured by the environment. An albino wealth-creating Jesus is often described in haranguing in Unitedsatesian Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, but there are no trustworthy sightings and it seems to be a falsification. This is enough about the invention of Christianity. All this was only to show the difference between the thought of followers of Jesus and Christianity. From this the mechanism of rejection of followers of Jesus and the date of the rewriting needed can be worked out. Followers of Jesus had to be brought in because the best attested ones were Samaritans, though it is not known whether they were regarded as a misguided sect by other Samaritans. The chance that the Samaritan Ebionites were reabsorbed is good. Evidence for connection of the start of reabsorption with Bǡbå Råbbå’s rule is only indirect but this seems to have happened. The evidence for reabsorption of some Samaritans that had become Christians in the strict sense to some extent is good, but no clear indication of relative numbers survives. (n). Most of the Samaritan Christians in the strict sense, that is, those that had accepted some part of the new concept called Christ, as opposed to the Ebionites, were reabsorbed into Israel. Some of those that had gone too far into the new pagan religion ended up going all the way into the un-Israelite Christian Church. The authors of the first recension of the Epistle of the Apostles make it clear they have lost massive numbers, apparently most members. Some members have fully accepted the offer of the Samaritan government, described as propagation of Simon’s teaching. Some have become members of the school of Kērinthos. This seems to have enabled them to give Jesus some special position, along with full adherence to the Torah. These would have been reabsorbed into Israel in the end. The remnant left have joined the de-Judaised and de-Samaritanised Church by the time of composition of the second recension. This must have been written under pressure of time, perhaps in a couple of days. The new part is just tacked onto the front, so now the book has two separate starts saying the same thing, and the new part blatantly contradicts the old part in what it says about Jesus’s conception, with nary a trace of rewording of the old part. (Lines in the first recension not in the version preserved in Coptic are old minor editing within the first recension). The new part was what mattered, because it was a formal declaration of immediate acceptance of a formal offer of membership of the self-styled Catholic Church, showing a considerably later date. All its doctrines are accepted including the ones not heard yet. They did not know any suitable verses from the Jewish Latter Prophets, confirming they had been Samaritan Christians. This sect had departed greatly, but it is documented that very many were still reabsorbed into Israel. The Samaritan Ebionites had not departed from observance of the Torah at all, and would have been reabsorbed easily. (o). Back to the purpose of this book. It has been amply demonstrated, even if indirectly, that the Samaritan Ebionites followed a system developed from Simon’s. The fore-runner, Jesus, has shown that anyone can become like Moses, even if not equal to him by definition. The concept is used in I Corinthians XIII:12. The use of it is explained below at the end of section 4, p. 147. This looks like an interpolation here, since it is incompatible with Paul’s core doctrine. It sums up the theme of the Apóphasis Megálē. It says the same as the summary of the purpose of the Ebionites known to Hippolytus. See p. 64. Samaritan Christians of a couple of different kinds and Samaritans faithful to the religion of Israel but trying to emulate Jesus were 76 important and numerous, but they mostly disappeared very early, systematically reabsorbed into Israel. Hebrews VI:1 – 8 reflects this, though not as dramatically as the later Epistle of the Apostles. The campaign of reabsorption used the book attributed to Simon. It has been seen that there are numerous indications that Simon’s work was read and studied by all Samaritans and a great many foreigners, including serious-minded people acquainted with Christianity. Marius Mercator’s source gives direct evidence that the book was read by Christians in the late Apostolic period. The glossator was well acquainted with Christianity, but looked at it critically. Simon’s system is compatible with Jesus’s call to work on entering the Kingdom of Heaven, as well as John the Baptist’s analogy of the branch that beareth good fruit and the branch that beareth not good fruit. It seems that the oldest of the ingredients in the invention of Christianity was something akin to the system attributed to Simon, but this was later recast in a system incompatible with the religion of Israel and offensive to Pagan and Israelite rationalism. I think the Church tried to thwart the attraction by incorporating its own version of Stoicism as a minor ingredient, starting with Paul. In the end a clever compilation of Justin’s canonised fiction and real quotation and summary was put out, which has worked nicely ever since. (p). Ch. XII is a reinterpretation of the whole scheme of time of ch. XI, both past and future. The concluding verses of ch. XI thus become a prelude and link to ch. XII. The troubles over the centuries are insignificant in the long-term scheme. The future looks good. Ch. XII seems to be meant to be recited ceremonially, which could indicate that it was written for a particular special occasion, though not proof by itself. The division of nearly every verse into two parts, the first part being almost the same in each verse, invites antiphonal recitation. Verse 23 is a four-line doxology. Ch. XII is a piyyut on Dt XXXIII:5 and its context. A suitable occasion would be the dedication of a sanctuary structure. It is argued in the Annotations that XII:6 marks the present time for the author, and verses 7 –- 10 and 11 -- 14 refer to an expected take-over of Shechem, followed by control of the meadow. If the Shechem Sacred Enclosure of v. 13 belonged to the Dositheans, then the hope of vv. 13 -- 14 was unrealised. The two factions lived in cooperation in the time of B.R., perhaps only out of necessity. It is not possible to know which party B.R. belonged to. He was an impartial ruler. If the Sebuaeans did not accept the religious authorities directly appointed by him, that does not prove he was not a Sebuaean: it only says something about the Sebuaeans. The author of ch. XII has a precise chronological scheme in mind. The following is tentative. After the Roman take-over in 63 B.C., Judaea continued to rule over some Samaritan territory. Verses 3 -- 5 mark what has happened, not all of it recently. Verse 6 expresses the immediate intention. This is one of the reasons why v. 6 has the future tense “will stand”, and why it has “in his day” instead of “in his days”. Verses 7 -- 10 are an immediate policy (see the notes to v. 10). Verses 11 -- 14 set out the plan in the medium term. On this reading, vv. 11 -- 16 are an expression of the expectation of further political relief very soon, v. 17 is either expected or recent, and vv. 18 -- 22 are symbolically outside the author’s time-scale altogether, and for the indefinite future. Verses 19 -- 22 are an expectation of one of the versions of what is elsewhere called “the world to come”, the righting of earthly existence, soberly set out. This includes the expectation of the re-appearance of Moses in verse 20. The authors of ch. XI see the period of Jewish power in the Persian period as having ended 77 in its most severe form with Seleucid rule, and altogether in their own time, which is after the Roman conquest of Palestine. How long after is uncertain. With the compressed wording of the chapter and selective lay-out it could be long ago. A refinement of this argument can be proposed. The interpretation so far does not depend on what follows. A precise linkage with known events seems to show up, more definitely in some verses than others. XII:10 reads as a record of a known event. “The officers will vanish in his days by government order. Those allowed to live will be removed to Shechem’s outer lands”. The words are unexpectedly detailed and precise. They fit what was said by A.F., that Hadrian removed all Jews to a radius of twenty-four parasangs or eighty British Imperial miles round Shechem. He does not say they were removed from all of Samaria. This leaves room for Jews to live in Jaffa or Caesarea, which are just inside Samaria. At the same time it explains the information in the Palestinian Talmud, which says a list of towns formerly in Judaea and a couple in the Galilee became Samaritan. See pp. 12 bottom – 13 top. These towns are all in historical Samaria. There can be no doubt about the date. It says in the days of ‫ השמד‬with the definite prefix. This Hebrew term in this usage with the definite prefix (inexplicably missed by Jastrow) means the actions of Hadrian in establishing order and setting up arrangements that allowed social stability but would forestall disturbance by making most organisation impractical. There was certainly military force, but no oppression of Jewish religion. This meaning is to be distinguished from its common use in later Hebrew to mean any official policy of trying to stop all practice of the Jewish religion. It was remarked in my article A Samaritan Broadside that the very precise verb ‫ נשתקעו‬indicates the towns were officially Samaritan and the Jews in them became Samaritans. There is no need to press this last: for the present purpose of the exposition here it does not matter. The removal mentioned in the Asâṭîr is an official decree carried out in an orderly way, with ordinary people not being punished and still being allowed to live in Samaria, but only on the edges. A.F. implies that this was the policy, as was shown near the start of this section. The following is a suggestion. No argument depends on it. Verses 1 to 10 can be read as a panegyric of both Hadrian and the newly appointed Patriarch. The time reference would have to be to the present rather than the immediate future. Verse 3 would fit Hadrian better than an Israelite leader. “The speakers of wickedness in his days at the hand of foreigners will perish”. A suitable occasion for its recital would be the opening of the newly improved sanctuary building with its surrounds authorised by Hadrian and paid for by Rome. This would explain the epithet “strong in wealth”, which would sound odd without a known suitable context. It would explain the epithet “crowned”, which without a specific context would just be verbiage. It explains who are meant by the troublemakers. These were the Jews that tried to spoil relations between Hadrian and the Samaritans when Hadrian was trying to set up an orderly administration in cooperation with the Samaritans. It is acknowledged that some of this is not certain, but the argument of the paragraph before makes precise sense of what would otherwise be vague and ineffectual and unimpressive and very oddly worded. The rest cumulatively adds probability. The Sebuaeans are pleased with what has been done and can utter some statements of satisfaction about what has happened to about opponents. Hints of a continuation of the panegyric of Hadrian come up in the verses that follow, but with a primary meaning of an expectation of an Israelite leader in the far future. The words of verse 78 15 would fit both Hadrian and a future Israelite leader. “The Hebrews’ land he will set at rest”. Verse 19 makes more sense this way, specially the scattering, regardless of whether my suggestion about the etymology of ‫ עמינדס‬stands up. This proposed reading explains the choice of the title Qådqåd (which I have translated as “an exalted one”) repeated throughout the chapter. There is Scriptural precedent for using it to refer to a mighty Israelite religious leader, but it does not have to have that implication if the context is right. This nice ambiguity allows it to be used first to refer to past Israelite leaders in the first four verses, but at the same time to Hadrian, who enforced the separation of Samaria against Jewish claims. Then it is definitely Hadrian in verses 7 to 10 or perhaps 5 to 10, that is, up to the present. Then come unnamed future Israelite leaders presented as mighty but who have traits of Hadrian. Moses appears in the far future. Bẩbå, the first Patriarch to have authority over all inhabitants of Samaria, not only Samaritans, and authority over some big Samaritan communities outside Samaria but nearby, would have been given his full authority by Hadrian at this time. The calculations of the date of death of B.R. in 178 A.D. are in Part III section 3. The death of Izqiyya in 4100 A.M. and the death of B.R. in 4600 A.M. exactly 500 years later seem to have been two fixed points in tying Samaritan chronology to Seleucid. The first was correctly put not long after the death of Alexander in June 323 B.C. (q). Regardless of whether the reference to the rebuilding of the Samaritan sanctuary by Hadrian really is referred to in the words of the Asâṭîr, it did happen. It is just as certain that Hadrian organised for the temple of Zeus Serapis put up by him to be guarded and maintained by Samaritans. The Samaritan religion was greatly favoured including by being given financial support by Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. One or more likely both of these emperors were on good terms with R. Yehudah as well and interested in Jewish religion. Hadrian before them did not make reprisals in the form of oppression of the Jewish religion after the failure of the second revolt. Rome gave all that was needed for the work of the Tanna’im. Clearly there was some rift at high official level in Roman policy on such questions. Often Jews and Samaritans are brought up by historians as examples of bearers of alien religion intolerable to Rome, but in fact other religions were persecuted at some times unless they had adherents in Roman society. Let’s not forget the Romans had a formal plan that led them to wipe out the centre of continuity of knowledge of the religion of our own kin in the southern half of the island of Great Britain on the sacred place on the Isle of Môn (Anglesey) and end the office of Druids and destroy sacred places so as to break continuity. Success was only partial. It can be supposed that the emperors from Vespasian to Marcus were seen to be fostering pernicious foreign cultures. Rebuilding the Samaritan sanctuary and funding the teaching of Samaritan religion, or encouraging systematic preparation for the future by the Jewish Tanna’im, or reading the Torah with interest, was all too much. Besides, interest in Judaism by the philosophically-minded was widespread. This is known to have annoyed some people. It was remarked earlier on that a necessary part of the mechanism used by Justin’s organisation was to confuse the relationship between Samaritans and Jews. Jews had been misusing Judaism as a servant of nationality and worship of ethnic identity for centuries. Nothing is new. They had been misrepresenting Samaritans as part of the policy. An opportunity was cleverly seized on by Justin and the Church. 79 2. Main Distinctive Doctrines The theological expression is unique in the Asâṭîr at XI:21 and 22. The thought is unique in XI:19 and XII:21 and 22, and less obviously in XI:7, 16; XII:13, 17, 19. The following is a complete systematic exposition of all that is unique in these verses. There are basic disagreements with all other known Samaritan texts. In some respects there is close agreement with the Apóphasis Megálē ascribed to Simon. (a) It is apparent from Asâṭîr XI:19 etc. that the concept of a Day of Requital and Recompense for the authors was the coming of a satisfactory state within the course of ordinary uninterrupted history. The ending of ch. XII mentions Moses prominently, but his function is to bring about lasting perfection as mentioned in ch. XI. The same is implicit but certain in the insistence on gradual perfection in the Apóphasis Megálē. This core doctrine stopped being made public because it could be misused in favour of Christianity. It is not obvious in the earliest liturgy as we have it, but neither is any alternative. Truly the dog didn’t bark. But see the telling verse from Mårqe on the Fire quoted in the Foreword p. VIII. A hint of the coupling of preexistent and earthly Torah being the equivalent of the coupling of potentiality and actuality is kept in Mårqe’s Hymn XIV lines 25 – 30. “(25) These were the Ten Words, (26) by which Creation was completed [probably not ‘filled’], (27) written on stone tablets (28) and put in the Ark. (29) Mt. Sinai was shaking (30) from dread of them [mistaken variant ‘him’] as they were coming down”. Compare the cryptic words about the body of Moses in the Mîmar Mårqe mentioned under (c). Much later a metaphysical system reappeared reformulated with some new concepts. With the invention of the concept of Doomsday, Moses is no longer the ruler of a perfected world but the bringer of the end, so the Tẩ’eb had to be invented or his function had to be developed. Ben- Ḥayyim, in the introduction to his edition of the Mîmar Mårqe, briefly observes that the concept and term Tẩ’eb never appear in the ancient layers, and neither does any mention of resurrection and judgment. He observes that the concept of resurrection and Doomsday first appears in a datable text in the Ṭubâkh in the early eleventh century A.D., where it is presented at great length as if needing justification. He does not mention that Haran showed in 1952 that the full current concept of the Tẩ’eb first appears in a datable text in the second half of the fourteenth century A.D., in a special composition asserting it to be fundamental doctrine, but so elaborate that it looks as if the author thinks he has to convince the reader. (It was argued above in note 16 on pp. 14 -- 15 that the term must be ancient because in the Durrân, but not the elaborated concept). (b) The mention of the reappearance of Moses himself at the end of ch. XII of the Asâṭîr without any association with the end of the world or Doomsday, but connected with the reappearance of the top of the Mountain and the implicit righting of all Creation, has no later equivalent. This follows from what was said under (a). (c) The concept of the miraculously preserved body of Moses as the gage, the first instalment binding both parties to eventually finalise the transaction and agreement, called by its technical legal term the ‫ מערב‬in Asâṭîr XII:20, is not found anywhere else in any extant Samaritan text, except for an obscure hint of it, without development and without the technical term, in one place in Mårqe, p. 331 top. Compare the reticence in expression in the hymns under (a). The concept of the 80 miraculously preserved body of Moses is well documented in early Jewish sources up to the time of the Tanna’im, with clear hints of the implications, but the legal term is never used. Complete documentation is in section 4, p. 147. Allusions to the concept in a Christian form are numerous in the New Testament. See in detail Part II section 3, the second paragraph and the last four paragraphs. In Ephesians I:14 the actual legal term is used, in its Greek form ἀρραβών. The concept has been adapted, but a knowledge of the Samaritan and Jewish doctrine is needed to fully understand the condensed form of expression, so it seems knowledge by the reader could be assumed by the author. Such references are connected to a Christian equivalent of the perfection of the Mountain which is expressed as the Second Adam or the incorruptible spiritual body. The concepts are functionally equivalent because they are both an undoing of the harm attendant on the expulsion from the garden. It would have been because of the Christian take-over of the concept of the imperishable body of Moses that it disappears from Samaritan and Jewish writing. (d) The concept of the permanent reappearance of the top of the mountain in Asâṭîr XII:19 is unattested elsewhere. The words imply that the very top of the mountain joining onto Heaven or the Garden had disappeared from manifestation in this world. It would follow that when it says in the Torah the waters of the Flood covered the highest mountains, they could not have covered the Gate of Heaven. The Gate of Heaven is at the bottom of the ladder as well as the top. How high the Mountain is in feet above sealevel is irrelevant. This is not a circular argument, but an argument from the wording of the verse Genesis VII:19 “and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered”. The argument from the wording of the verse is acknowledged to be dangerously effective against the status of Jerusalem in Bereshit Rabba ch. 32 pp. 296 – 297 from the mid second century, so it is quoted mangled with a misleading response, pretending that it is asserted that the Mountain is higher above sealevel than any other mountain and pretending nothing else is asserted. The self-congratulation does not hide the weakness of the supposedly smart response, so a story supposedly showing how effective it is is added for the reader to admire. Here is what the smart comment in the story is meant to stop everyone from seeing. As Mt. Gerizim is the sprouted seed of all the created world, putting Mt. Gerizim right will be the first sign of putting the world right. The discomfort comes partly from the words ‘‘This is the House of God’’ in Gn XXVIII:17. Mt. Gerizim is mentioned in the Torah and Jerusalem is not. The standard Jewish answer is that the choice of the one permanent place under the Mosaic dispensation was announced later on. The words ‘‘the place the Lord has chosen’’ are changed to ‘‘the place the Lord chooses’’ in the present form of the MT of Deuteronomy. The LXX agrees with the Samaritan. (Most mss. show alteration to agree with the MT to support Christian theology, but enough unaltered mss. survive to show what the original reading was, as Schenker has shown). The argument made up later, that the choice of the permanent place was announced later on, is refuted by the words ‘‘This is the Gate of Heaven’’ in the same verse. The words plainly say the transformation of Creation is destined to start at Mt. Gerizim. That means Mt. Gerizim must be permanently sacred, so the standard Jewish exegesis does not work. That means there’s no permanency to Jerusalem. That means Jerusalem never was the most sacred place. The status of Mt. Gerizim is proven by a verse that is the same in the MT as in the Samaritan. 81 This entry in Bereshit Rabba comes from a late phase of a long attempt at proving that the Torah can be read as favouring Jerusalem as the permanent single sacred place, or if that could not be managed, proving that the Torah does not specify Mt. Gerizim. The entry in B.R. is later than the four changes, (a) removal of the words ‘‘opposite Shechem’’ in Deuteronomy XI:30, (b) removal of the coda mentioning Mt. Gerizim from after the Ten Utterances, (c) change of tense of the verb in the verse on the fixing of the one permanent place from past to future in twenty-two places in Deuteronomy, and (d) change of the name of the mountain in Deuteronomy XXVII:4. The changes are listed in what seems to be their order. The reader is reminded that there is evidence of the last three changes. The second change is probably later than the change of the counting of the Ten Utterances by the Samaritans so as to make the coda the tenth of the Utterances. In this late phase, the text of the book of Joshua is changed, but it is too late to change the text of the Torah. The editors of the Tosefta have still not agreed to the change of the name of the mountain. Outrageous invention is being tried instead, but not successfully. The invention of two mounds near the Jordan called Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Eval not only fell flat, but turned into a standing joke. The invention recorded in Bereshit Rabba would have looked safer, but was not much less clumsy. Focussing on misrepresentation of what was meant by saying Mt. Gerizim was the highest mountain and putting the argument in the mouth of a layman would have been meant to avoid obvious contradiction of Jacob’s words in Gn XXVIII:17, but no-one able to think would have taken any notice. The smart comment put in the mouth of the ass-driver is a denial by these Tanna’im of the words of their own Torah. It needs to be asked why they did not put forward an interpretation of the verse in Genesis saying that it did mean that Mt. Gerizim had been the Gate of Heaven on one occasion but now in the Mosaic dispensation it was permanently Jerusalem. If they were not game to try this, it can be supposed that they were not confident that it would be enough. This would indicate that the dispute was fiercer at this time than has been thought. Precarious answers like this and the one about the two mounds near the Jordan might not have been unnecessarily stupid, but actually safer than reasoned ones. Assertion of anything just to have something to repeat might have been the best course. The motivation would have had to be stronger than we can easily imagine. A guess might be that after in the time of Roman rule very many Jews in Samaria and north of it went back to recognising Mt. Gerizim, and that this tendency strengthened after 70 A.D. This is not the place to try to prove the guess. The datum from the Palestinian Talmud mentioned above on p. 12 needs more consideration. The alteration to the wording would have had to be done before 70 A.D., at least according to present knowledge. I am well aware that there will have to be a lot of work on this suggestion before it can be deemed likely. For the moment, it can be repeated that there is evidence for the last three changes to the Torah just listed. Here it is again for the reader’s convenience. The Masorah shows an omission after the Ten Utterances in Exodus, though there is no indication of any omission after the Ten Utterances in Deuteronomy. Schenker has proven that the LXX agreed with the Samaritan in reading “chose” and not “chooses” in all places in Deuteronomy. The original reading of the LXX in Deuteronomy XXVII:4 is known to be Mt. Gerizim from the Old Latin and the papyrus fragment published by Glaue and Rahlfs and the asterisk against the name of Mt. Gerizim in the Syrohexapla The original readin in the MT accepted by the editors of the Tosefta. This is not the place to go into the question of the genuineness of the fragment published by Charlesworth. I myself am satisfied 82 that it is genuine. If anyone disagrees, there is still the original reading of the LXX. There can be no doubt that the text of the books of the Former Prophets in the recension anachronistically but conveniently called the MT was still not completely fixed in the second century A.D., or in other words the MT text-form sensu stricto had not been set. In the cae of the book of Joshua, the variation was still substantial. See the introduction to my book Variation within the Masoretic Text (Damascus 1972. On this website). It needs to be considered whether this is an indication that little changes in the text of the Torah could still happen in the first century A.D. The evidence that it happened in a few places is collected by me in the same place. It is a mystery how changes no matter how little could have been justified. The well known story of comparison of three manuscripts kept in the Jerusalem temple has implications. There is no mention of editorial judgment, only a policy of choosing the reading of two out of the three manuscripts in each place. The need for this work is still surprising if you think about it: the master manuscripts must not have always agreed. It is hard to tell what date is meant, but it seems to be the last years when the temple was standing. As to the deliberate changes in the Torah, it can be seen that it took a few hundred years for all manuscripts to be made to agree, since the original reading at Dt XXVII:4 was accepted by the editors of the Tosefta a century later and then Origen later still, and the first editors of the Masorah knew of a coda to the Ten Utterances. This would indicate that the few deliberate changes were done later than the first comprehensive fixing of details done partly by comparison of manuscripts from the Jerusalem temple. This would fit the supposition that the deliberate changes were done when thought to be needed, and the observation that making the changes was not thought out. A mechanism can be suggested. Copying is not promulgating. Any number of manuscripts could be copied with any changes wanted. Then they could be used to stack the counting later on to fix the text for promulgation. Nothing was learnt: later inventions without changing the text became a menace instead of weapons. It says at XII:20 “The Lawgiver’s instalment is the binding deposit on the perfection of the Gate of Glory”. It says at XI:22 “In the course of time the saviour of the forms and images will settle holiness on the Hill”. Regardless of any possible disagreement with any part of my interpretation of these two verses, it is indisputable that it is thought that the holiness of the Mountaintop is not yet complete or not yet completely manifested. The words of XI:19 just referred to could say something close to this, but the two last verses say something astonishing. At a stretch, the words of XII:20 could be interpreted as only referring to the appearance or reappearance of the top of the Mountain connecting somehow to the Garden, but it is hard to see how the Mountain could be fully holy before this happens, unless it is implied that in the present era the perfection is only potential. Regardless of any objection that could be made to this reading of XII:20, the words of XI:22 are transparent. It would be hard to make them mean anything other than the interpretation of XII:20 just proposed. The distinction between potential and actual perfection is prominent in the Apóphasis Megálē, but the small part preserved only speaks explicitly about perfection of aspects of individuals. A concept of the eventual perfection of all Creation is implicit in what survives, but we don’t know what was said about the Mountaintop. It seems reasonable to suppose that the book made a connection between the Mountaintop and the perfection of creation, but it is not known how that was expressed, so we have to work with what is certain. In some way the authors of the Asâṭîr regard the Mountaintop either as not yet fully holy, or fully holy in potential but not yet in actuality. Such a doctrine would be unthinkable to the authors of all Samaritan 83 writings known to us. While the Dositheans maintained the Mountaintop could not be fully holy or in one extreme view not holy at all without a sanctuary with the Mosaic Tabernacle in it, the authors of the Asâṭîr are not concerned about this. Besides this, they see no impediment to the functioning of the sanctuary as it should, so there is no concept of any blemish in the holiness of the Mountaintop. Granted, they expected perfection of the Mountaintop, or perhaps the actuality of potential perfection, but that is not at all the same as expecting greater holiness. On top of this, if it is fully holy right now, how can holiness be added to it in the unforeseeable future after the reappearance of Moses? The only solution to the contradiction is that is thought that an aspect of God will be on the Mountaintop. In other words, the Mountaintop is fully holy right now, but a greater holiness, greater in kind, not just degree, will take its abode on it. This would naturally be connected with the reappearance of the occulted part of the Mountaintop, but it is not the same thing. The only solution at the moment is to suppose that what is assumed is that the Kavod, or ‫( איקר‬see XII:20), will settle and be visible. It could not be imagined that the vision would be equal to the perception by Moses, but it could be supposed that it would be equal to what was perceived by the Elders while in a normal physical state, still eating and drinking, after the giving of the Torah, when they saw the God of Israel over a sapphire pavement (Ex XXIV:10 -- 11). The clear meaning of the words of the Torah in this place is that although no-one can see God, in exceptional instances a vision of the God of Israel can happen. It will easily be seen how this concept would be incomprehensible to Christian authors. If Simon interpreted this passage as part of his teaching, Christian authors could easily misrepresent what was said or written to be the Gnostic doctrines that the Torah was not given by the real God, and that the real God is distinct from the God of Israel. Such teachings are attributed to Simon in book II of the Recognitions and the corresponding Syriac recension. Much of what is attributed to Peter in the debate could be Simon’s own teaching, and much of what is attributed to Simon could be clever twisting of his teaching to make him seem to have taught a variety of Gnosticism. A detailed study of this long text is needed, but this is not the place. For the moment, it is better to stick to what is plainly stated in the concise formula quoted on p. 60. “Ego sum Sermo Dei ego sum Speciosus (‫ )איקר‬ego Paracletus ego Omnipotens ego omnia Dei”. Words attributed by Simon to the Boundless Power say that the Boundless Power includes the Kavod and the Torah, but equally make it clear that the Boundless Power is not God. The explanation given at the start, that what is meant is that the Kavod will be manifest, is very similar to the thought underlying the translation of Gn XXVIII:17 in the Palestinian Targum, which should be read carefully. Just before this verse, Jacob says “Truly the Lord is in this place and I knew not”. In the same way, the Asâṭîr means to say that the Kavod is always present on the Mountaintop, but will only be perceptible when the Mountaintop is seen by everyone to be connected to the Garden or Heaven. Even one at the level of Jacob only knew the Kavod was on the mountain when he was granted a vision one time, but the one vision told him it was always there. The wording of the Asâṭîr can then be interpreted as meaning that when the occulted top of the mountaintop reappears and can be seen by everyone and stays that way, the holiness of the Mountaintop shown by the manifestation of the Kavod will be seen by everyone. In that sense, although the Mountaintop is fully holy in the present era, a greater holiness will be seen to have always been dwelling on it. The visible perfection of the Mountaintop will happen with the perfection of mankind and the world, as will be shown in the next paragraph. It is impossible to separate the perfection of the world from the perfection of the Mountaintop, and it is implicit but 84 clear in what survives of the Apóphasis Megálē that the perfection of the world depends on the perfection of mankind. Everyone will see the occulted part of the Mountaintop, which means everyone will be at a higher level than Jacob had been. The fragment of a summary of Ebionite doctrine that we have says that everyone has an obligation to live purposefully and fulfil the requirements of the Torah, and divine help will come and the level of Joshua can be reached. It is compatible with the expectation that at the end of days everyone will be at the level of Moses, and in fact the two expectations assume each other. The fragment of the Apóphasis Megálē that we have speaks of attainment of individuals now, but attainment by everyone in the end is implicit. Expectation of attainment by everyone combined with perfection of creation is expressed in the Asâṭîr. Most of this is expressed in an interpolation at I Corinthians XIII:12. This triple doctrine must have been widespread once. The Gnostics (in the narrow sense) misused it. The term “the saviour of the forms and images” in Asâṭîr XI:22 is part of this set of concepts. The “forms and images” are people, made in the form of God and by extension the creative power and potentially in the image of God and the creative power, as in Gn I:26 -- 27. Notice the double difference in wording between the two verses and how the author reads it as plain proof of the whole theological system. Making mankind in the form of God happened at the start. Making mankind in the image of God is still being worked on. (Irenaeus unskilfully uses Simon’s exegesis of the two verses at the start of Against Heresies V:1:6 without understanding). Verse 26 has “let us make” and “our form” and “our image”. Here is an intimation that the full process is looked after by successive forms of manifestation of the work of God. In the system attributed to someone called Simon, there is the Boundless Power, then the Great Power paired with the Great Thought. Of course, this could have been expressed according to different symbolism, such as the NeoPlatonist kind. Any metaphysical structure is only a necessary help for the human mind, both true even though inadequate and untrue because inadequate. Verse 27 says God made mankind in his image. That was the start, the emanation of the divine spark or sparks. The sparks are clothed in souls and bodies and then guided as the souls work towards being after the likeness of God. Both the plural pronoun referring to God and the singular are appropriate, without any hint of any multiplicity. This picture of metaphysical steps is far more theologically sound than the Rabbinic Jewish explanation that the plural pronoun refers to angels or a Heavenly Council. It has the great merit of looking at all the details of wording in both verses. Of course, there is a better explanation using the Kabbalistic metaphysical expression, but that is best not mentioned here so as not to give any room for unimaginative readers to say the comparison is anachronistic. The Kabbalistic expression is no less adequate and no less inadequate than Simon’s or the Neo-Platonist kind. The term “saviour” comes from Dt XXXIII:29, “Who is like thee, Israel, the people saved by God?”. God saves people by using the creative power to help them become more as they are meant to be. This is the deeper concept underlying the doxology and mantra known to Jerome but misused by him quoted above on p. 60. See the quotation of the summary of the Apóphasis Megáְ lְ ē by Hippolytus, Book VI, par. 14: “…. God, he says, fashioned man by taking dirt from the ground (Gn II:7). And he made him not single but double, according to the image and likeness (Gn I:26 – 27). And the image is spirit moving 85 over the waters (I:2), which, if its imaging is not perfected, perishes along with the world, since it remains in potentiality and does not turn into actuality”. It is a sign of deep ignorance of the religion of Israel that Christians have scrabbled to read this part of the book attributed to Simon as “gnostic”in the sense of “not Israelite”’. Nearly all examination of what survives of this book has been done by Christians. Beyschlag does his best but has taken too much notice of the misrepresentations, perhaps without realising. He never dreamt that the system attributed to someone called Simon was Israelite with no foreign admixture. G. R. S. Mead had no Christian bias, but was misled just as badly. He knew nothing much about Judaism and took on the ignorant vaticinations of the founders of the Theosophical Society about the crudity and primitiveness of it, without looking for himself. What has been said so far clarifies the end of par. 16, where the reviser of the summary has correctly inserted part of Isaiah II:4 and the words attributed to John the Baptist (not Jesus!) in Luke III:9. I follow Mead’s wording. “All ingenerables, therefore, he says are in us in potentiality but not in actuality, like the science of grammar or geometry. And if they meet with befitting utterance and instruction, and the ‘bitter’ is turned into the ‘sweet’ [an allusion to a well known deed by Moses] --- that is to say, ‘spears into reaping hooks and swords into ploughshares’ --- the Fire [the power behind Creation] will not have born to it husks and stocks, but perfect fruit, perfected in its imaging, as I said above, equal and similar to the ingenerable and Boundless Power. ‘For now’, says he, ‘the axe is nigh to the roots of the tree: every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is cut down and cast into the fire’ ”. The verse Gn I:2 is part of cosmogony, but the words from par. 14 just quoted show its deep implications as showing the perfection of Creation and perfection of individuals to go together. The concept of the perfection of Creation and mankind together underlies pars. 9 end to 14, and 16. If the connection is not the main theme here, remember only part of the book survives. What is said in the Asâṭîr and the Apóphasis Megálē was said not long after by the person called Mårqe. This time a different passage of the Torah is used. See p. IX of the Foreword. Theodōretos says Simon claimed to be the Boundless Power. This seems to be purposeful misunderstanding. Ch. VIII of the book of Acts says Simon claimed to be the Power which is called Great. This odd-sounding term is meant to draw attention to the need for precision, to distinguish between the Great Power and the Boundless Power above it. It can be assumed that Theodoret did not notice the distinction in his source. The book of Acts says Simon claimed to be the Great Power so as to make him seem out to inveigle the weak-minded. This is dishonest use of a fact. The Great Power seems to have often been quoted as speaking in the first person. For an example, see above p. 60. If people had heard these formulas without explanation, and had heard they had been uttered by Simon, they could be made to think Simon had been talking about himself. Jerome goes further than the book of Acts and uses the same trick when actually quoting such a formula. See p. 60. A plausible explanation is that the formula was too well known to be left ignored, so it had to be made to sound unbalanced. There is strong indirect evidence that formulas uttered by the Great Power in the first person were quoted and some were well known. The most obvious utterance like this attributed to Jesus is the passage in John’s Gospel where Jesus says people must eat his flesh, and the pericope about the Institution of the Eucharist in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Assuming that the real Jesus was in his right mind, the words make sense if they are a formula uttered by the Great Power. As the report stands, Jesus says the words about himself and in John’s gospel it says nearly 86 everyone thought he was badly deluded, for want of a stronger term. It is commonly thought that the report is evidence that John’s Gospel in its present form is very late, written after Jesus had been deified. Christian theologians will say it was written after the elect fully realised that Jesus embodied God. Not so. Either the real Jesus quoted the Great Power or a well known formula uttered by the Great Power was attributed to Jesus. This looks like pantheism or panentheism, but we have no way of knowing. It might be a development by the Ebionites and not part of the book, but we have no way of knowing that either. The proof that the story of the Institution of the Eucharist in Mathew, Mark, and Luke is later than the different story in John’s gospel is that a concept of a Passover sacrifice as some kind of atonement sacrifice had to be invented for the version in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The killing and eating of a lamb is or was one part of the observance just like eating lettuce with a high iron content with a bitter taste or eating unleavened crispbread. Eating all these is a memorial. That’s it. The seven days of unleavened bread are not the same as the Day of Passover, but the two go together and are inseparable and give each other meaning. The Day of Passover is the first day of Unleavened Bread. Making up a doctrine of an atonement sacrifice at Passover could not have been done by Jews. This by itself is enough to show that Christianity was invented by pagans. See my article Restoring the Traditional Linkage, footnote 8. One big part of one kind of Christian theology depends on this invention. Another example of falsely putting known formulas couched in the first person into Jesus’s mouth is the words ending “my yoke is easy and my burden light”. These words look like words of the Great Thought quoted by the real Jesus and then deliberately misinterpreted as being said by him about himself in un-Israelite Christianity. In Romans VIII:18 – 22 an interpolator adapts the Apóphasis Megálē. What is said here is only marginally relevant to the rest of the book. Saving people because of caring for the world in John III:16 can be explained on these lines. This verse John III:16 agrees with the words “lest we be condemned together with the world” in I Corinthians XI:32, resembling the wording in the Great True Utterance par. 14 just quoted, “which if its imaging is not perfected perishes along with the world”. The editor of the summary has seen this and put a quotation of the very words in I Corinthians XI:32 in straight afterwards. The pericope in I Corinthians fits neatly with the Apóphasis Megálē, though with the argument adapted to a form of Christianity. The Peshitta translators have seen the intention and translated “When judged …. we are educated” in verse 32 as “When we are judged …. we are winnowed”. In neither of the last places in the NT can kósmos mean all mankind, except as an elliptical expression assuming an outlook resembling the Apóphasis Megálē, since the kósmos is a metaphysical term for the whole universe including or not including mankind. Assuming a translation of Hebrew or Aramaic won’t work. Neither was there some special usage by Jews. Often in the NT “ho kósmos” is the collective outlook and behaviour of people in an unregenerate natural state, but still never all mankind in themselves. Even this is a really odd metaphor only explicable as infection from Gnosticism in the strict sense. John I:1 – 13 is a clever attempt at disinfection. In Acts II:47 in ms. D (Codex Bezae) the words “hólon tòn kósmon” have the exceptional meaning of the neighbouring non-Christian society, but this looks like a wooden back-translation from the Latin column, in which “hólon tòn laón” comes out as “totum mundum”: and yet it still does not mean all mankind. The imaginary exceptions to the whole of documented usage are all in John’s gospel. The Christian authors would not have used the term “the saviour of the world” in John IV:42 unless 87 it was generally known at the time to be an important term for Samaritans and could make the story sound realistic. It would sound vague to a later Christian, as the mistaken gloss “the anointed one” in most manuscripts shows. (On IV:25 and 29 see the next paragraph). Long-standing Christian interpretation of John IV:42 and III:16 depends on unscientifically ignoring all usage, with a circular argument. Most of the first chapter of John’s gospel was needed to explain the Christian concept of Christ, which was a completely new concept. For nigh on two thousand years Christian theologians have been trying in vain to find justification of it in the fact that the term “anointed” occurs in the Christian Old Testament. The fly in the literal ointment is that the meaning given to the word in Christianity is new and without continuity with earlier usage and not a natural metaphor either. The concept behind the term is unmistakably defined at the start of ch. XI of Isaiah, where the quality of a future king at the prophetic level of Joshua is defined. The attribution of the use of the term to Samaritans in John IV:25 and 29, whether fiction or no, is a crafty statement that the prevalent Christian explanation of its origin as a title of Davidic kings is wrong. See p. 133 on the Church’s contradiction of this verse and the pericope in verse 22. The ancestor of John’s gospel looks like the oldest after all. In chs. I (including verse 41), III, IV, and VIII the author shows he knows the new concept can be developed from the Apóphasis Megálē or something on the same lines. It would be against the intention of that book, and incompatible with the religion of Israel, but could seem to come from accepted premises. The Apóphasis Megálē and all related writings and teaching were a menace in showing the original system which was compatible with the religion of Israel, so that it could then be seen how the counterfeit had been strung together. It was easier to vilify the supposed author than the real book, which would have been counter-productive as well. When Irenaeus wrote, the Church had decided to forget what it was that it had been trying to stop people from noticing, so that the bald statement that Simon was the cause of all Christian heresies, even though not a Christian, stands unexplained. Hippolytus and Theodōretos use a collection that had authentic quotation sitting next to the Church’s traditional misrepresentation. Jerome quoted the definition of the great Power, though while pretending Simon said it about himself. See p. 60. The book could safely be quoted but misused by then. Then the meaning of the content was forgotten. The Great Utterance of the Truth was known directly to the editors of the book of Acts and indirectly to Irenaeus and Hippolytus and Theodōrētos and Jerome. Someone thought to be Paul in Romans VIII and I Corinthians XI uses a watereddown adaptation that stands out by its irrelevance in the place and negation of Paul’s theology. This book and others similar must have been widely known. It does not matter who Simon was, except that he was a Samaritan. It is very important that the accurate summaries of the Great True Utterance have been improved by an editor adding well chosen quotes from the Jewish scriptures and the NT, but with none of the quotes from the NT relevant to Jesus. This means some deeply thinking people exposed to Christianity understood the book and read it intensively and weighed it up while weighing Christianity up as well. This was dangerous. The first historically plausible explanation of why Simon is so persistently made out to be the author of all teachings leading to Christian heresy can now be seen. In later expressions it looks like no more than blaming him for the invention of Gnosticism in the strict sense, but it has been seen that the book attributed to him was not Gnostic in that sense. Besides, how else can the claim by Hegesippus in about 180 A.D. that all or 88 nearly all early Christian heresies were invented by Samaritans be explained? Then what about the persistent claim as early as Irenaeus that all Christian heresies originated with Simon? The way to the two claims is implicit in the use of Simon as a symbol of nefarious teachings in Acts VIII. Justin goes further in trying to misrepresent Samaritan religion as nefarious but can’t explicitly bring up a concrete threat to Christianity in an argument while writing to the Roman Senate. The explanation, then, is that the teachings of the Great True Utterance were well known and the book was widely read and so were books in the same line of thinking. The Church chose Gnosticism as a misrepresentation because it was well known, but there was a second reason: it is easy to misrepresent the basic concept of the need for potentiality to become actuality as rejection of the world in the narrow Gnostic sense. The trick was not thought through. In rejecting the concept of perfection of the world underlying all the Samaritan thinking it fought against, Christianity inevitably got indelibly stained by aspects of the main tenet of Gnosticism in the strict sense, overall rejection of the world. The old concepts were never entirely lost, but Gnostic rejection of the world is an unhackable hydra with ever-sprouting tentacles. Unlike Judaism, which it thinks it fulfils, Christianity handles sex harmfully, with the Romans being the worst. Or again, there is a battle right now to try to extend concern for the welfare of people to concern for the whole of creation. This is opposed by some Evangelicals. World-rejecting Gnosticism was not at the root of Christianity, but it was cunningly recklessly used to make a baneful new graft still sprouting with infernal vigour. Augustine had material to work with. In its denunciations, the Church meant movements that accepted the canonical Gnostic Myth or at least some kind of concept of the fall of Thought and her maltreatment by the efforts of malignant powerful beings. At the same time, they had to insist that in Simon’s system the fallen Thought could take human form, which is contrary to the world-rejecting Gnostic system. They chose Gnosticism first because Simon’s wife was prominent and was explicitly said to represent Thought, and second because Simon offered knowledge needed to tread the path on the way to perfection, and this could be misrepresented as the knowledge in the narrow sense spruiked by the Gnostics. The second reason was just as badly fitting as the first one, since Simon taught the way to perfection of the world, not escape from it, and taught that creation was from God and potentially perfect, with no room for malign forces. Modern attempts to make Simon a Gnostic depend on the twin ancient fallacies just described. Besides, such modern authors ignore the clear statement in the earliest part of the Clementine book that Simon venerated Mt. Gerizim and rejected Jerusalem. What would the question matter to a Gnostic? And the same modern authors ignore the unanswerable fact that he not only read the Torah, like some Gnostics, but unlike them valued it. And then the Saviour is the Boundless Power which is an effulgence throughout creation from God. What’s left? Because of the weakness of this misrepresentation, Irenaeus took a new tack that correctly made Simon and the misnamed Helen equal, but while claiming the Simonians worshipped statues of the two of them. The two misrepresentations are incompatible, but that did not stop him from having a go at both at once. To make Simon a Gnostic, modern authors have to dismiss the second claim about the two statues, but if this one is imagination, why isn’t the other one imagination? The usual answer is to water down the meaning of the word gnostic to anything with an insistence on the need for theoretical knowledge, as opposed to only reading sacred scriptures or reading them without insight. This would 89 cover every known system of religion and religious philosophy at the time. It would even cover any writing about Judaism in philosophical or metaphysical terms. It has been proven that the book the Apóphasis Megálē and the teachings attributed to someone called Simon do not depart from the religion of Israel. The Boundless Power or unknowable Fire is not God, but the start of God’s action. Compare Wisdom in Proverbs VIII:22, which is analogous in a different system. It is a duty to try to tread the long path to communion with the boundless power and true reflection of it and thereby help fulfil Creation. Presumably the mitsvot help. The necessary teaching has been given in the Torah with its tradition of exegesis and can be put in philosophical language as a help. The Apóphasis Megálē and the Asâṭîr have basic concepts in common not found elsewhere, and stand in the same theological lineage. They might or might not come from the same school. Their purpose and literary form and manner of expression are different. (e) Now a general observation on where the Asâṭîr sits in the thought of its times. Some parts of what is described will be more in line with the Asâṭîr than others, but its place in a widespread tendency of thought and set of related concepts expressed in different ways will become clear. Some recapitulation will be needed to make the picture complete. First, there is a short but highly meaningful passage in the Asâṭîr at the end of ch. XI and another at the end of ch. XII. In the present state of knowledge of currents of thought of the time, it is not certain whether they agree exactly or are slightly different in outlook. Second, there is the short passage from the Apóphasis Mégálē quoted just above. This should be read in its context. Third, there is the theory and purpose of the Samaritan Ebionites. There is the clear explanation copied by Hippolytus quoted above p. 64. Then there is an informative three-sentence summary by Epiphanios in ch. XXX pars. 5 and 6 quoted above p. 64. What is said by Epiphanios is confirmed by other sources, all of them quoted above. It is important to realise that the apparently unconnected statement about two kinds of prophecy in what is said by Epiphanios in par. 5 is part of the explanation of their doctrine. The reference is to the start of Numbers XII. The opposition between understanding and truth is explained by the common Rabbinic observation that what was revealed to all prophets except Moses was filtered through their own intelligence and personality. Even though the Samaritans don’t accept the Jewish prophets, they agree with the proposition. (The Asâṭîr considers it important that Joshua was a prophet at the lower level, as the Torah itself says. Sometimes it is proposed that the High Priest Phineas was a prophet at the lower level in the first years of settlement in Canaan. Sometimes it is proposed that Mårqe was a prophet when writing his book and composing his hymns. His writings are in practice treated that way, though obviously only at the lower level. Sometimes the whole ancient liturgy is treated that way, with Mårqe at the top, though it is never put into explicit words). The Ebionites thought Jesus had progressed till he was granted help from above. They insisted that Jesus had been the first to have done this, but the way was open to anyone. One aspect of their doctrine would suit the title Chrēstós. The meaning would have soon been lost with the deliberate confusion with the term ‫ משיח‬, thought clever at the time but counterproductive, as it still is. The Samaritan woman in John IV could reasonably have been said to have used the title ‫משיח‬, though not at all in the Jewish sense, even if the story is fiction. The occurrence of the title Chrēstós is directly and indirectly attested in mss. of the NT. It is confirmed by Roman writers and the Nag Hammadi writings. See the Excursus to the Bibliography. The facts are suppressed by editors out of ideology. 90 Fourth, there is the purpose of Dositheos’s work. He was the prophet like Moses, though not equal to Moses. The declaration by Lîbi that brought about his murder includes this sentence. “You send people out to banish the successor of the Prophet of God, the Second Prophet sent [or prepared] by God from Mt. Sinai”. [Omission by homoioteleuton in Vilmar’s text]. The Dositheans kept on hoping for the manifestation of the occulted Mosaic Tabernacle, but it is not known how this was connected with Dositheos. The expectation implies the full restoration of the divine presence in the sanctuary. This might not have been as high as the expectation in the Asâṭîr that the occulted top of Mt. Gerizim will appear, which must mean, as was said above, that all Creation will be perfected and everyone will be at a higher level than Jacob himself, though not equal to Moses. Fifth, there is the intention of John the Baptist. The glossator of the summary of the Apóphasis Megálē knew the whole book and must have understood the part preserved better than us. He knew more about John the Baptist and his school than us as well. His judgment in making the gloss with the words of John the Baptist must be treated as first-hand evidence in regard to the Apóphasis Megálē and first-hand or nearly first-hand evidence in regard to John’s followers. There were numerous members of John’s school that did not agree with the Christian claim that he had declared Jesus higher than himself. For the present argument, this does not matter either way. Sixth, some lines of thought in the Epistle to the Hebrews point back to an origin in Samaritan thought the same in outline as all the above, with the Ebionites the closest. Chapters III and IV are specially relevant. Sinfulness is negated by permanent willingness to obey God, which is brought about by permanent faith in Jesus, which itself leads to divine help being given. The result is eventual entry into a permanent Sabbath. This implies a perfected Creation, as on the first Sabbath. An argument aimed straight at Samaritans is that Joshua did not give the people entry into a Sabbath rest. Any Samaritan would know the Time of Favour was ended by God because of general moral decay, and the Mosaic Tabernacle was occulted with its apparatus. The Sabbath expected will be better than the Time of Favour. This is why John’s gospel uses the word “ho kósmos” and links the saving of Creation with the saving of mankind. The conclusion is that the Asâṭîr and the Apóphasis Megálē belong in a complex of lines of thought that was pervasive once. God wants everyone to be gradually perfected and if the effort is made there will be divine help. With the perfection of all mankind, Creation will be perfected, or with the perfection of Creation, all mankind will be perfected. There is nothing like this in the later concept of the function of the Tẩ’eb. The purpose of the appearance of Moses at the end of ch. XII of the Asâṭîr is totally contradictory to the later eschatology of Doomsday. (f) The Asâṭîr differs from the Dositheans and all late writings in not being at all interested in the reappearance of the occulted Mosaic Tabernacle or its apparatus. There can be a new sanctuary and apparatus and a proper cultus. The authors agree with the Dositheans that the state of fẩnu started at the same time as the setting up of the counterfeit sanctuary by Eli, but see the sectarianism that followed and the neglect of the sacred place by much of the Israelite population as the start of fẩnu in itself. Later on neglect of the sanctuary was imposed by force, starting with Solomon according to this text. These authors and their community accepted that the Tabernacle had vanished somehow but were not perturbed. This ought not to be surprising. Judaism is not perturbed by the fact that the Ark of the Covenant disappeared or was permanently hidden just before the destruction of the first temple. 91 Judaism is even less interested in what happened to the Tabernacle with its implements. The Jewish scriptures casually say they were put in a store-room in the first temple and never mention them again. Solomon built a new altar a different size. For the authors of the Asâṭîr and the members of their community, the meaning of the term fẩnu is any hindrance to the normal form of worship at the sacred place. In the next section pp. 105 – 106 top it is argued that this is the original usage of the term fẩnu and that the term was redefined by the inventors of the new doctrine and seized upon as the technical term to sum up their doctrine, usually used in the definite state Fẩnûtå. The Asâṭir could not have been written by Dositheans. The indications are that the authors were Sebuaeans. This question is developed in detail in the next section. The Torah does not envisage a temple like the one in Jerusalem. 17 Samaritan documentation records that before its occultation the Mosaic Tabernacle had been housed in a very modest structure, which was used by the Priests for unspecified purposes. The original structure in the Time of Favour was later called the Haykal or Kanîsah in Arabic. See note 23 p. 104. The later structure was still called the Haykal in later Arabic records. It was called Maqdẩshå in Aramaic so presumably amMaqdåsh in Hebrew. See p. 51. The Greek name is uncertain. See note 19 p. 95. It housed the golden lampstand and the golden Showbread table, which symbolise the divine presence. It is not known if there was a brazier for incense. There was a great altar in front. (This is not to be confused with the little altar inside in the Time of Favour, the incense altar inside the curtain). See A.F. 39:7 (= end of Arabic Joshua book ch. 41) speaking of the end of the Time of Favour: “The divine fire that never used to leave the sacrifices on the two altars disappeared”. Ms. A glosses correctly with “the stone altar and the bronze altar”. [Stenhouse p. 49 lines 1 – 2. Misunderstanding and putting the word “Monday” in the wrong sentence. See my article Transmission. Mistranslating “light” as “fire” in the sentence before]. All this would have been within a sacred enclosure. There is Samaritan documentation that there were sacrifices before the Exile. One inscription shows one faction at least still had sacrifices in the second century B.C. and A.F. confirms this in the story of the thwarting of Hyrcanus. It is known that both parties made a reasoned justification for ending sacrifices without disobeying the Torah. There is extensive Samaritan documentation of a structure accepted by everyone till the end of the Persian period. There is documentation of a structure in the time of Hadrian. There is Samaritan documentation of a structure up till 484 A.D., confirmed by outside records. The need for a structure in the present was recognised by the authors of the Asâṭîr ch. XI. Whether they accepted the need for sacrifices is not stated, but their silence is telling. Sacrifices are not needed any more. It has been shown that Luke’s gospel speaks of incense offerings inside the building at the time of the birth of John the Baptist. All pieces of doctrine mentioned in this section are connected with the two questions of The Jewish scriptures honestly acknowledge this in recording a divine revelation to the prophet Nathan to deliver to Solomon saying it should not be built. As for putting it in Jerusalem, the reading “the place God chooses” as later fixed in the MT instead of “the place God has chosen” as preserved in the LXX and Samaritan sets the insurmountable difficulty that there is no record in the Jewish scriptures of such a choice ever having been declared through a prophet after entry into Canaan. Why not? The verse I Kings VIII:16 and related passages depend on the editors implicitly giving David and Solomon prophetic status, which is never attributed to them in other contexts. The prophet Nathan does not let Solomon claim that level but asserts his own higher status as a real prophet. Nathan let the building through with vague wording in his personal capacity, against a divine revelation, deftly letting the choice of place go through in the package. And then the Samaritans get accused of sectarian invention. Solomon’s overblown monument to tribal identity gets wobblier the more you look. 17 92 the purpose of any sanctuary structure and how sacrifices ended. These will now be treated in detail in section 3. (g) The formula “twenty-six opposite twenty-six” in XII:23 is meant as part of the conclusion. Whether it was the conclusion before chs. XI and XII were added does not matter for the moment. The formula is explained in the Annotations. The thinking behind it would be compatible with the concept of the relationship between God and God acting as the Boundless Power and the Great Power. Compatibility is not enough for proof, however. More work is needed. 3. Authorship and the Right Form of the Sacred Place (a). The delight in the rebuilding of Lûzå seen here is incompatible with the later doctrine that there can be no fully adequate sanctuary structure, either with or without sacrifices, in the present era, the Fẩnûtå. This doctrine seems to have been an innovation within the old faction called Sadducees Ṣaddûqẩ’i, at a date unknown, but apparently after the death of Dositheos. (The Samaritan party has no connection with the Jewish party by this name). This faction was reformed by Dositheos and came to be named after him. On the death of Dositheos and the murder of his important follower Lîbi there was a short time of turmoil, with the oppressive hegemony of extremists. This ended when Såkte squashed the extremists and there was a reaction against his own extremism within his own movement by a group using the old title Sadducees. See pp. 120 middle – 123 and Part VI. This all happened rapidly. There might be a connection between the last stage, which was a sound solution to the difficulties caused by the occultation of the Tabernacle, and the expression of the hope for the reappearance of the occulted apparatus of the Tabernacle in late 35 A.D. See below. The timing would work. This late doctrine might have left its mark in the rewriting of history. It is apparent that the histories used by Abu ’l-Fateḥ conceal information, as they have left out most of the events of the period from the start of the reign of John Hyrcanus till the wars of the Jews against Rome. There are some amazing omissions. There is no mention of the release of Shechem and other parts of Palestine from Judaean rule at the hand of the Romans in 63 B.C. The first we hear about Roman rule is the installation of Herod, but even this is put in the time of Augustus (106:13; Stenhouse p. 146). The date intended is probably 30 B.C., when Herod was given control of new areas, including Samaria. We hear nothing about what happened in Samaria after that, except the bare statement that Herod oppressed the Samaritans and the Jews (106:15 – 16; Stenhouse p. 146. Less than two lines !). The fact is that Herod did not oppress the Samaritans. A Jewish source might have been used by the source used by A.F. Hadrian is confused with Herod the Great at 118:5 -- 7 (Stenhouse p. 162), where it is said that he protected the Samaritans by the influence of his Samaritan wife. The first and second revolts against Rome are fused, and part of what is said about Hadrian at 114:3 -- 116:2 (Stenhouse pp. 156 – 159) ought to have been said of Vespasian, specially 115:4 – 13 (Stenhouse p. 158). Confusion between Hadrian and Vespasian and their policies might only be due to accidental loss of detail in the records. If a lot of records were accounts of single noteworthy events, A.F. would have had to work out where to put them sometimes. The praise of Hadrian at 118:5 -- 7 (Stenhouse p. 93 162 bottom) is incompatible with the preceding but final curse at 117:14 (Stenhouse p. 162 top). The explanation for this is unthinking use of a Jewish source in the Samaritan books used by A.F., as has been seen. The narrative is filled out with undatable legends. A plausible explanation of the high number of such deficiencies might be that some records of the period were not preserved because they made it clear that there had been a sanctuary on the Mountain at least from the Return from the Exile. There must have been records of the recognition of the sanctuary by Alexander, but this is only recorded in relation to a later event. See p. 108. It is astounding that there is no mention by A.F. of the end of Hasmonaean trouble-making in late 63 or early 62 B.C. with the start of Roman rule. (The omission of what Josephus calls the destruction of the Samaritan temple, however, has the entirely different explanation that Josephus lied about Hyrcanus’s political devices as well as letting the reader think that destruction of the building was the end of having any building on the site. The true record is kept by A.F., though he has compressed the stages a bit. See pp. 108 – 109). A striking example of omission of something important by A.F. because it was not in his sources is the omission of the rebuilding of the Samaritan sanctuary by Hadrian. This information could not have been lost by accident, not when the information survives that Hadrian set up a temple of Serapis on the lower peak of the Mountain and the Samaritans were employed to guard it. Again, there is no mention of a state visit to Rome in the time of Claudius. There is no mention of the setting up of the Samaritan Senate. A.F. records honestly, even if he can’t reconcile contradictions between his sources. This is definitely not to deny that some omissions happened accidentally or some histories were lost. The Asâṭîr does not mention the reappearance of the Mosaic Tabernacle, instead mentioning the perfection or reappearance of the top of the Mountain and then much later on the reappearance of Moses. The authors must have looked to the account of Jacob’s vision, but they expected far more, the permanent reappearance of the entrance to the Garden of Eden or Heaven on top of the Mountain for everyone to see. It is likely that they interpreted the promise of a prophet like Moses in Dt XVIII:16 – 19 as being necessarily a promise of the return of Moses himself, since no-one else can be like Moses. This separates them from the Dositheans in a fundamental way. The authors of ch. XI regard the loss of the Tabernacle with the original apparatus as disastrous, because it marked the end of the Time of Favour, but still say a replacement will do nicely, if the cultus is satisfactory. The authors of ch. XII say nothing about the Mosaic Tabernacle, but nothing about any later sanctuary either, which can only mean that for them it was self-evident that as the mountain-top was holy in its own right, the Mosaic Tabernacle was irrelevant, and any later structure would be satisfactory. Judging by what A.F. says happened on the Return from the Exile, it is likely that they eventually set up an elaborate but small sanctuary within more extensive sacred walled or marked off open ground. For the authors of both chapters, the sanctuary is holy in a perfectly adequate way, while waiting for the restoration of the Gate of Heaven as seen by Jacob in his vision; in what we know of the Dositheans after the death of Dositheos, there can be no satisfactory sanctuary on the Mountain in the present era, not till the Mosaic Tabernacle re-appears. Whether they rejected the sanctuary building altogether is not certain. It is argued below pp. 126 bottom – 127 top that they did not go that far, but acknowledged that there can 94 still be a valid form of worship on the Mountain, because the Mountaintop is sacred in itself. There was some internal disagreement on this for a little while. See my article Restoring the Traditional Linkage between Samaritan and Foreign Dating, pp. 13 bottom to 15 top. The Samaritans that were getting ready to go up the mountain in late september in 35 A.D. did not necessarily expect the Mosaic accoutrements and paraphernalia (not vessels) to appear immediately, as Josephus misunderstands on purpose: but they certainly intended to show their hope for its reappearance at some time. 18 (Josephus, Antiquities, XVIII:85 – 87 = XVIII:4:1:2). It is possible that they were Dositheans and what they hoped for was the re-appearance at some future time of the cave with the implements and paraphernalia to be followed immediately by the manifestation of the Tabernacle in its proper place. It is equally possible that they were Sebuaeans and regarded the apparatus as what was important and saw no need for the reappearance of the Tabernacle. It seems more likely that both parties were working together. See pp. 120 middle – 123 top on the question of a possible theological and historical context. Neither the Arabic Joshua book nor A.F. say a word about what happened to the tent when the accoutrements and apparatus were occulted. The silence of the Arabic Joshua book on this might be on purpose, to make it acceptable to both factions. See the entry on this book in the Bibliography. This action in 35 A.D. was publicly heralded. Josephus tries to dodge this and modern scholars have not noticed. This unusual pilgrimage could have been done by order of the Samaritan Senate, along with an expression of what both factions could now agree on, after a new administrative development that demanded cooperation. They could not have been in revolt if the Senate (Boulē) was able to make a drastically effective complaint afterwards, as Josephus makes out. He put his foot in it by making this up. There could not have been any complaint, since Pilate was not summoned to Rome at this time or soon after. He got to Rome in March in 37 AD. The normal time for a fast government ship was one week. The statement that the people had been armed is not believable. The number of armed men hidden in the crowd must have been less than half. If the Samaritans had been armed, it would have been the hidden attackers that got massacred. Josephus can’t say what was wrong with a big group going up the Mountain. He never says it was unusual because he can’t go against common knowledge. What is said about the sacred apparatus being hidden by Moses is a straight lie. He tries to hide the significance of everything that happened. The story of the massacre is not believable, even if there are obscurities left. This kind of deceptive silence combined with straight fiction can be seen where he hides the weakness of Hyrcanus’s rule over Samaria. See pp. 109 – 110. 18 The words “the holy apparatus hidden there belonging to Moses” following the Greek wordorder, or in natural English “the holy apparatus of Moses hidden there”, express standard Samaritan belief agreed on by all factions. Josephus does not want the reader to understand what the words of this standard expression mean or the intention of the public action. The phrase must have been too well known to ignore, so the meaning had to be falsified. He wants the reader to think something impossible was claimed, because everyone knew Moses never crossed the Jordan. Modern scholars have fallen for it and written articles supposing some impossible unknown legend. Josephus wants the reader to think the organiser malicious and the community deluded. The sentence following, “He put them there after making them”, deceptively meant to look like unnecessary waffle, is a straight lie stuck in to drive the deception through with a sledgehammer. Feldman mistranslates as if the name of Moses were in the nominative case instead of the genitive so that he can put it in the wrong sentence. 95 Late Samaritan documents assert the doctrine that no fully satisfactory cultus is possible till the miraculous reappearance of the Mosaic Tabernacle along with its apparatus. There can still be valid religious services on the Mountaintop till then. The Asâṭîr, as well as nine passages from the Arabic period used in integrated argument for the first time, as well as a hymn in the Durrân collection, as well as the testimony of Marinos the philosopher, along with five foreign records, tell us otherwise. 19 Archaeology leads to no useful conclusions. There is evidence of a sacrificial service in the Persian period and into the second century B.C. No evidence of what could be called a temple in the usual sense has come up. A.F. says the sanctuary structure was thirty-five cubits square. This is the size of a modern good-sized singlestorey house. Most of the sacred ground was open. The only other solid structure within the grounds was the great altar. See p. 114. Archaeologists looking for an imposing Hellenistic Syrian temple building have forgotten that the only structure required is a place for the golden lampstand and golden table for the showbread, and some other accoutrements, or that the Jerusalem temple was mostly open to the sky. It would be hard to distinguish remains of the foundations of the sanctuary structure from remains of some other building, unless the exact location of the site were known for certain. The exact spot now identified as Lûzå is not inside the traditional sacred enclosure. The documents give enough information about the sanctuary, and only documents can give information on doctrine. A.F. at 171:13 -- 15 (Stenhouse p. 241) says the Roman church was built over the Haykal. See below pp. 110 middle – 113 top. Montgomery p. 113 was right in seeing this datum as decisive. Archaeologists have not found traces of the sanctuary under the church, but they have been looking for foundations of a big building, through not having read A.F There was a modest sanctuary building with a place for the lampstand and Showbread table and incense burner. This stood till 484 A.D. Sacrifices were ended by the Dositheans no later than the end of the first century B.C. It is uncertain how they regarded the building or its The records are listed on pp. 107 –108 top. The Arabic records are treated on pp. 107 – 117. The archaeological evidence for a structure of some kind has been collected by Pummer in the article of 2016. The most convincing pieces of evidence for a building are listed in the last paragraph. Not all these are conclusive. The term ἱερόν in the Delos inscriptions from the second c. B.C. could refer to an open holy place just as well as a structure and altar. What else could something like this have been called? It is significant that the word ναός is not used. If anything, this is evidence that there was no structure. The argument that there must have been something that could be called a temple because offerings were sent there and the word used is απαρχαί is actually inconclusive. This word does not necessarily mean sacrifices. Offerings could just as well have been sent to the sacred open place, which was in active use. Offerings are not necessarily to pay for sacrifices. They could have been for the maintenance of worship at the holy place, which is the equivalent of sacrifice, as well as the teaching and study of the Torah. The term ἱερόν used by Pseudo-Eupolemus could simply be an adjective meaning holy, describing Mt. Gerizim and implicitly referring to the sacred ground. If it is a noun, it still does not have to be a building. In the end, the only certain outside documentary evidence for a structure is the use of the term ναός in II Maccabees read in context, and the use of the same term by Josephus in a few places along with his comments. Unfortunately, this only takes us to the time of Hyrcanus in 111 B.C. I would comment that Josephus does not add that the sanctuary was never rebuilt, which would have been his style. His silence on what was on the mountain in his days when he speaks of Pilate’s massacre of Samaritans about to go up the Mountain is suspicious and the whole account looks deliberately confused. The phrase ‫ דבית דבחא‬in an inscription from Mt. Gerizim still only takes us to the second century B.C. The evidence from outside assembled and carefully assessed by Pummer shows there was probably a structure, which might have had an altar in front with sacrifices, up till the time of Hyrcanus. In the end, it is only the Samaritan documentation that can take us further in time and give certainty. That takes us right back to the purpose of this monograph. 19 96 cultus. The other faction, later called Sebuaeans, ended sacrifices not much later, but kept the cultus of the sanctuary. The acceptance of a sanctuary that is shown in the Asâṭîr would have been standard at one time. The sanctuary building on Mt. Gerizim was not obliterated by Hyrcanus in 111 B.C. When the old faction called Sadducees (no connection with the Jewish faction by the same name) and later commonly called Dositheans was reformed by Såkte after the death of Dositheos in the very early first century A.D. and came up with the concept that there could not be a sanctuary or sacrifices without the Mosaic Tabernacle, the sanctuary remained in use by their opponents, who were always the majority. Something important but not known happened in late 35 A.D., with the approval of the Samaritan Senate. See above, p. 95, and see pp. 120 middle – 123 top for a possible context. Ch. XI of the Asâṭîr shows the sanctuary was rebuilt at least once. It might be speaking about both a past event and the present. The sanctuary was rebuilt or perhaps improved with outbuildings by Hadrian. The sanctuary building was still standing in 484 A.D. and there were constant efforts to regain control of the site for years afterwards. This structure, ancient as it was, offended the Dositheans when they appeared. The Dositheans found a practical accommodation with the opposing party in the first c. A.D. See below pp. 120 middle – 123 top. This was successful. Mårqe in his book and all the extant early liturgy avoid the question, perhaps after editing. The only exception is the Durrân collection, which has one mention of the sanctuary and two mentions of the Tẩ’eb. The evidence for early dating of the collection and some form of the concept of the Tẩ’eb is set out above, note 16 on pp. 14 – 15. The supporters of the old doctrine, the Sebuaeans, and the innovators, the Dositheans, found accommodation in most of the halachah in the tenth and early eleventh century. The later general doctrine of expectation from the fourteenth century was concerned with a second time of Favour and the reappearance of the Tabernacle, presumably in a new sanctuary building but without emphasis on this. The question of sacrifices is neatly avoided. The old dispute over whether there could be a sanctuary building in the present era, the Fẩnûtå, could be forgotten. (b). A.F. does not know how to integrate the inherited ancient information on the Dositheans. The first notice, at 82:3 -- 83:15 (Stenhouse pp. 109 --- 111), is an account of the sect as it was before Dositheos himself. Setting the origin at the very end of the Persian period seems right. The founder or an early reformer is called ‫زرﻋﮫ‬ an Aramaic masculine word in the definite state meaning “the seed” which A.F. says is a title. I suggest this refers to his careful written argument that any other High Priests would be illegitimate, which implies that only Priests descended from him could be legitimate High Priests. [My article The First Notice and my chapter Mikra are to be corrected]. I suggest this person is Ṣâdoq the Great. See the start of Part VII. The second notice, at 151:11 – 157:9 (Stenhouse pp. 211 bottom – 219), is composite. First there is some biography of Dositheos, mostly made up, then some real technical data. This is followed by fictitious mentions of Philo, Simon Magus, and the followers of Jesus. The third notice, on developments after Dositheos, then follows, at 159:12 -164:11 (Stenhouse pp. 223 – 230). The second and third notices are set after Bẩbå Råbbå. It has often been suggested that there must have been two different movements arising at different times. This is to ignore the compelling evidence for dating in what is put between the second and third notices. The cause of the anomaly is actually the faulty integration of separate documents with their own chronology, as 97 will be seen, p. 100. The false dating of B.R. in the fourth century has caused confusion as well. The correct dating of B.R. is proven in Part III section 3. This kind of hypothesis of separation depends on separating the word adDustân in the first notice, which is clearly the name of the party, from the personal name written ‫ دوﺳﯿﺲ‬in all the extant mss. of A.F. Author after author without any real command of Arabic have asserted that A.F. says the name of the movement comes from their innovations in regard to the festivals and other matters. From this, they have then asserted that the meaning of the name is obscure (e.g. Isser p. 85). They have then claimed the sect not to necessarily be connected with Dositheos. On top of not understanding sentence structure that is not Indo-European, they have not known enough morphology to know ad-Dustân is a plural noun, and have not noticed the plural verbs or ignored them. This is what A.F. says. ‫وﻓﻲ ذﻟﻚ اﻟﻮﻗﺖ اﻧﻔﺼﻞ ﻣﻦ‬ ‫ﺟﻤﺎﻋﺔ اﻟﺴﺎﻣﺮه ﻓﺮﻗﮫ وﻋﻤﻠﻮا ﻟﮭﻢ ﻣﺬھﺒﺎ ﺑﻤﻔﺮدھﻢ وﺳﻤﯿﻮا اﻟﺪﺳﺘﺎن ﻻﺟﻞ اﺑﻄﺎﻟﮭﻢ أﻋﯿﺎد اﻟﺤﻖ‬ ‫ وﺟﻤﯿﻊ ﻣﺎ ﻧﻘﻠﻮه ﻋﻦ اﺑﺎﯾﮭﻢ واﺟﺪادھﻢ‬. “At that time a sect called the Dositheans ad- Dustân broke off from the Samaritan community and formed their own denomination because of their discontinuation of the correct Festivals and everything received from their fathers and ancestors”. It is the reason for breaking off that is explained by A.F. or more likely his source. I leave this to the judgment of anyone with a real command of Arabic, of whom the world is full. On how they worked out the dates of their Festivals see pp. 118 -- 120. The name is anachronistic but A.F. does not know the original name. See p. 109 and pp. 118 – 120. De Sacy, Juynboll (p. 112), Vilmar (pp. LIX; LXXX – LXXXIII), and all others with a real knowledge of Arabic have taken the name ad-Dustân as obviously plural. All later authors except Hitti, Scanlon, and Rubin-Levy, with nought knowledge of Arabic, have thought the word Dustân to be singular. Isser treats it as singular against the translation by Scanlon printed in his own book. He does not quote Vilmar’s explicit statement on p. LIX that the word means Dositheans so as to disagree. Moses Gaster, who had no Arabic but pontificated regardless, declared it to be the name of a person otherwise unknown. (The Samaritans. Oxford 1925. Page 66). No notice was taken of the clear statement that it was the name of a community, so he never read Vilmar’s summary. He disregarded the repeated plural verbs and plural pronoun suffixes and the definite prefix, but then, he probably could not recognise them. He does not quote Vilmar’s explicit statement on p. LIX that the word means Dositheans so as to disagree with it. He asserts that Dustân means Dositheos (e.g. p. 4). He does not try to explain how the name of the movement can be the same as the name of a single person. He misleadingly leaves the definite prefix out to make it seem like the name of a person. He violated the standards of scholarship by never thinking to consult anyone with a knowledge of Arabic, but then that’s the same as what everyone else does. Pummer, in the book of 2016, pp. 120 --123 top, has not seen that the term “the Dositheans” in Levy-Rubin’s English translation of the continuation of A.F. comes from the word ad-Dustân ‫ اﻟﺪﺳﺘﺎن‬in the Arabic printed in the very same book ! Like Adler and Séligsohn, Gaster, Bowman, Isser, and Crown, he ignores what Vilmar says on p. LIX about the clear meaning. The word ad-Dustân must mean the Dositheans in the third notice by A.F. at 162:14 (Stenhouse p. 227), where it says “The Dositheans (ad-Dustân, with plural verbs and the definite article) used to address him (Såkte) as their father [as ‘Our 98 Father’ A]” and then says at 162:16: -- 163:1 (Stenhouse p. 227) that this person, Såkte, discontinued the observance of the three pilgrim festivals while highly dubiously claiming to act “in accordance with the words of ‫ دوﺳﯿﺲ‬Dositheos”. See below note 22 pp. 104 -- 105 and note 30 pp. 120 -- 121 on the meaning. Gaster, Bowman, Stenhouse, Crown, and Pummer ignore this datum in their argument. Isser argues on p. 109 that what he calls “the Dustan sect” is an invention by A.F. so as to separate the information in his first notice from the information in the second and third notices associated with the name Dusis, without trying to explain how the term got to be used in the third notice to designate followers of Dusis. If he means the term does not mean followers of Dusis in the third notice, he does not say so. Now we can leave one set of inventions and look at its twin. This is part of a long description of a leader called Såkte which is part of a long list of movements all said to derive from Dositheos, implicitly at the start and explicitly at the end. 20 The name ad-Dustân occurs again in the continuation of the history by A.F. with plural verbs, in the part not printed by Vilmar, ms. C (Stenhouse’s siglum P) at 243:9, Jamgotchian 18:9; ms. C 243:12, Jamgotchian 18:11 (a new remark); ms. C 245:9. There is a mention of the Dosithean pavilion or tent at ms. C 220:5, Jamgotchian 4:3. All these passages are treated in my article Social Anomie. Both ad-Dustân and al‫ ﺳﻜﺘﮫ‬Såkte or Såktå is certainly the correct form. Jamgotchian was misled by Vilmar’s incomplete collations. The pronunciation Såktå is a possible noun form, but the vocalisation used here is to be preferred if it is a foreign name, on the analogy of Mårqe. I suggest the form Mårqe is a borrowing from the vocative case. (Compare the borrowing of the form Hamish in English from Sheumais [he:mɩʃ] the vocative case of the Gaelic name Seumas [ʃe:mǝs]). The name occurs three times here, at 161:4 (Stenhouse p. 225); 162:15 (Stenhouse p. 227); 163:5 (Stenhouse p. 228). (At the last place Stenhouse mistranslates and omits the name. See below p. 120 --- 122. His collations are partly wrong in all three places). All mss. of the second recension including the Hebrew translation as well as Khaḍir correctly have Såkte the first two times. All mss. of the second recension are corrupt in the third instance and have different forms of meaningless squiggles. See below p. 122. At this third place Khaḍir correctly has ‫ סכתה‬in Hebrew letters against all mss. of both recensions. Of the first recension, SP (Stenhouse SM) have kâf as the second letter the first time, and D (Stenhouse H) has it the second time, leaving only BC (Stenhouse’s CP). The third letter is certainly tâ’ not yâ’. The dotting is as tâ’ in AJL1L2L3VMNYH the first two times and in P the first time. Of the first recension, there are no dots on the letter in SC any time or in D the first and second time. Ms. C wrongly inserts an additional dotted yâ’ after the first letter in the second instance, showing the scribe or his Vorlage is guessing. It is dotted yâ’ in B all three times and P the second and third times and perhaps D the third time. The first letter is shîn only in D the second time and B the first time, and otherwise sîn in every ms. all three times. The form ‫ ﺷﻠﯿﮫ‬printed by Vilmar is a set of easy graphic errors in Arabic script. His father’s name is correctly given as ‫ طﺒﺮون‬Ṭibron in all mss. of the second recension including the Hebrew. Vilmar does not record the reading of A. By silence, Stenhouse attributes the wrong reading to his constant witnesses L2L3Y (his sigla BGY). No mss. of the first recension have the correct form. Mss. SDBP (Stenhouse’s sigla SHCM) have ‫ طﯿﺮون‬, an easy mistake, and ms. C (Stenhouse P) is indeterminate. The name Såkte has no Aramaic or Hebrew etymology. I take it to be an Aramaised pet-name for Alexander. Khaḍir quotes a written source saying he was given this cognomen (with the verb luqqib) when his pavilion was set up (A.F. 161:7, Stenhouse p. 225 mistranslating). On this pavilion see the notes to XII:14 on pp. 207 -- 208. The only imaginable connection would have to be that he took on or was given a Greek name when recognised as an official of the Roman administration. At this time the use of such a name would indicate membership of the aristocratic class and Roman sympathies. It is apparent from A.F. that when he set up his pavilion he was a powerful community leader. This pavilion lasted into the Islamic era. Its significance is not understood. See the notes to XII:14 and my article Social Anomie. His father’s name Ṭibron looks like an Aramaic name derived from Tiberius, and this too would put him in the aristocracy and indicate Roman sympathies. It would date him and his son. 20 99 Kûthân are plural gentilics like Yûnân “Greeks” or Suryân “Syrian Christians”. (Historically Yûnân is derived from the ancient Semitic name for Greece, not the singular Yûnâni). The form of the name ad-Dustân is one of the least used plurals, which would be why some authors that never felt any need to get information never knew about it, but it makes the plural of about fifty-three concrete nouns, nearly all very common. It never forms the plural of nouns with a feminine suffix or abstract nouns or collective nouns. Examples: dhu’bân “jackals”; ḥumlân “lambs”; khuljân “bays, boat canals”; buldân “countries”; fursân “horsemen”; shubbân “young men”; ṣubyân or ṣibyân “boys”; cubdân or cibdân “servants”; ghizlân “gazelles”; ḥîṭân “walls”; ghîṭân “low areas of ground”; jîrân “neighbours”; ṣîṣân “chicks”. The sign of plurality is the structure of the whole word. The first vowel must be [i] or [u] in a closed syllable or [î] or [û] in an open syllable, never [a] or [â]; there must not be any vowel between the second and third root-letters, so there must be two syllables; the ending [ân] is the third sign. 21 Singular uncountables resembling this pattern denote abstractions with active or conative connotation, like riḍwân “favour”; or else events and processes, like dhawabân “melting, dissolving”; or else both at once, like ghufrân “forgiveness” or nisyân “forgetting”. Ṭûfân “overwhelming flooding” and qurbân “the Christian Mass”, even though both borrowed from Syriac, fit this rule. All native singular words on this pattern are gerunds in form and origin. Exceptions such as ḥayawân “animal” and dukkân “bench, shop” can be explained as concretisations. Finally, the very few concrete nouns like shûfân “oats” or dilghân “clay” are all massnouns. Both ad-Dustân and al-Kûthân are therefore certainly plural. To prove this plural form was productive at the time, I can cite the word ṣîṣân just mentioned, which is post-classical but old; the word al-Kûthân “the Cutheans” which is found paired with ad-Dustân, “the Dositheans”, as the names of the two main Samaritan sects; and ash-shîrân “the psalms of the Tabernacle” twice at the end of a historical appendix to the Arabic Joshua book, ch. 47, and at A.F. 120:10 (Stenhouse p. 165) and 121:13 (Stenhouse p. 167). The form is still productive in modern Arabic. Ad-Dustân or ad-Dostân are paired with al-Kûthân as the two main Samaritan sects by some early Arabic authors: al-Baladhûri in the ninth century A.D. (Isser p. 69); the Karaite al-Qirqisâni, in Part I ch. 5 of his massive treatise Kitâb al-Anwâr wa’l-Marâqib written in 937 A.D. [with a wrong vowel-marker in the unique ms. as alKawshan and with no alif]; al-Mascûdi tenth century A.D. [The last is quoted at length by Antoine Silvestre de Sacy. Chrestomathie Arabe, ou extraits de divers écrivains arabes. Seconde édition. Tome Ier. Paris 1826. Page 342]. Later mentions by Arabic authors all derive from these, but sometimes with additional dubious information. AlMascûdi spells the first name as ‫ اﻟﺪوﺳﺘﺎن‬confirming that the first vowel is [u] or [o]. (The Arabic of al-Baladhûri was not accessible). The spelling in all three is with shîn as ‫ ﻛﻮﺷﺎن‬instead of thâ’ as ‫ ﻛﻮﺛﺎن‬in the second name, indicating a common source. This is an easy copying mistake, as both Silvestre de Sacy and Juynboll (p. 112) saw. (The best extant mss. of ash-Shahrastâni have ‫اﻟﻜﻮﺳﺎﻧﯿﺔ‬. The form given by Pummer p. 124 is corrupt. Abu ’l-Fidâ’ quoting ash-Shahrastâni has ‫)اﻟﻜﻮﺷﺎﻧﯿﺔ‬. Montgomery’s objection (p. 259) that Samaritans would not call themselves Cutheans has no force. The singulars of these nouns are not derivable from the plural. The singular of cubdân is cabd; the singular of dhu’bân is dhi’b; the singular of khuljân is khalîj; the singular of buldân is bilâd; the singular of fursân is fâris; the singular of ḥumlân is ḥamal; the singular of ghizlân is ghazâl; the singular of ḥîṭân is ḥâ’iṭ; the singular of jîrân is jâr; the singular of ṣîṣân is ṣûṣ. 21 100 This is what some others called them. The Aramaic name Kûthê “the Cutheans” is listed with Samaritans and Sebuaeans in the Halachot Gedolot. See below p. 103. Bowman ignores the explanation of ad-Dustân as meaning Dositheans by Vilmar. He knows the verbs are plural, which puts him ahead of Adler and Séligsohn, Montgomery, Gaster, Isser, Crown, and Pummer, but because he does not know this Arabic noun plural form he treats a suggestion by Adler and Séligsohn as a certainty and uses a corrupt form ‫ درﺳﺘﺎن‬in one ms. of al-Mascûdi against the other mss. of alMascûdi and against al-Qirqisâni and al-Baladhûri and against all mss. of A.F. without letting on. Like Adler and Séligsohn he finds an attested Hebrew word and gives it an unattested meaning showing no feeling for Hebrew. ‫ דרס‬means pressing down onto something, not necessarily with your feet. It does not mean going along. Pummer p. 120 treats Adler and Séligsohn’s invention seriously. Bowman’s own invention is to say the fictitious Hebrew word has a Persian plural ending. He does not see anything odd about this and does not explain how it could have happened. Fanciful assertions out of unnecessary ignorance and seriously bad judgment -- often comically bad judgment --- are normal in writing on the Samaritans. Everyone agrees to all quote each other’s assertions and inventions as fact. A text can say whatever you like regardless of grammar or usage and everyone will go along with it. See notes a and b on Asâṭîr XI:10 on p. 181 for a truly shocking example of disregard for Aramaic grammar by Ben-Ḥayyim repeated by Tal and Bonnard. See pp. XVVII middle to XX middle of the Foreword, and pp. 7 and 8, and footnote 38 on pp. 162 – 163, and the Bibliography entry on the Comprehensive History on pp. 254 – 255, and the entry on Tal’s grammar on p. 257, and the swarm of examples in Part VII. This long set of information making up the second and third notice is out of place. The reason can be seen in its synchronisation: it is synchronised with Iqbon ‫( עקבון‬a hypocoristic of ‫)יעקב‬, and a High Priest by this name did officiate after Bẩbå Råbbå. Given that the name Iqbon is woven into the narrative of the Dosithean schism here, it must be original; but this is not a person known from the High Priestly list as we have it. Abu ’l-Fateḥ has put in the whole long section where the High Priest’s name fitted. We have seen, then, that both sets of information, i.e. the first notice and the combined second and third notices, are in an impossible context, and that the first set has no synchronisation and the second an impossible synchronisation. Notice also that the fusion of the two Jewish revolts, and the fusion of Vespasian with Hadrian, mentioned previously, are dated in the time of a High Priest called Iqbon. (113:3, Stenhouse p. 155 middle). Let’s add that Abu ’l-Fateḥ omits the mention of six High Priests before the time of Jesus and John the Baptist. His chronology cuts out at 102:4 (Stenhouse p. 139) in the time of John Hyrcanus. Where he goes off track is where he should have mentioned a High Priest Iqbon ! (See 177:10, Stenhouse p. 248 line 9). This is not the same as either of the Iqbons mentioned so far. The chronology starts again at 107:6 (Stenhouse p. 147). These phenomena can be explained by supposing that A.F. found a lot of his data synchronised according to the reigns of High Priests that he could not identify, or else that he identified wrong. These would have been the High Priests of a different line. The list of High Priests in our hands must come from the Sebuaeans, since they had more political power in Palestine than the Dositheans in the last centuries before accommodation of the two parties. This is known from the continuation to A.F. See my article Social Anomie. 101 (c). The slightly garbled report by Abu ’l-Fateḥ on the term ‫חסידים‬ “Pious” is very relevant here. Abu ’l-Fateḥ 102:5 --- 13 (Stenhouse p. 139 middle – 140 middle) knows of three Jewish sects called Pharisees, Sadducees, and the Pious, all of which he names in Hebrew. (The second name is Arabised slightly). This is similar to the three-sect scheme used by Josephus (Antiquities XIII:171 -- 173 = XIII:5:9; Antiquities XVIII:11 -- 25 = XVIII:1:2 -- 6 [modified here to include the fourth philosophy, the Zealots]; War II:119 -- 166 = II:8:2 -- 14). It is doubtful whether Josephus’s scheme is adequate: “Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes” did not include all identifiable and cohesive movements, not even with the “fourth philosophy” tacked on. Abu ’l-Fateḥ uses the same artificial system: he has to find three identifiable groups because he has three names. For the first two names, this works, because the terms are unambiguously the names of the two main Jewish religious factions with political ambitions. The third group, the ‫ חסידים‬the Pious, are said to have come to agree with the Samaritans, and now live in the towns near Mt. Gerizim for the purpose of worship. The context is the splitting of the Jews into three sects, so A.F. wrongly thinks the Samaritans with this name Pious must have started off as Jews. This is not the place to sort out the relationships between the sources. It can, however, be said that the Essenes in Josephus’s scheme correspond to the Pious in the scheme of Samaritans known to A.F. Note that, regardless of the etymology of the term Essenes, the traditions used by Abu ’l-Fateḥ confirm the old guess that the Hebrew term must have been ‫ חסידים‬, which fact greatly narrows the choice of possibilities for the etymology of the Greek term. It also indicates that the Greek term might have been applicable as a self-designation by just about any pietistic movement accepting Priestly authority. The choice of the Hebrew word ‫ חסידים‬as a self-designation can be explained as deriving from the kind of interpretation of Dt XXXIII:8 – 9 to be seen in the Palestinian Targum, Fragmentary Targum, and Neofiti; in a rather different way in the Peshitta; and in the LXX and Symmachos. The Targums say Aaron was faithful at the times of failure by the whole nation in the wilderness. The Peshitta translates ‫ איש חסידך‬as ‫“ ܓܒܪܐ ܚܣܝܐ‬the man that makes atonement”. Here is the Aramaic word lying behind the Greek term, regardless of the precise shade of meaning. The Greek words Εσσάιοι and Εσσήνοι are therefore from the Aramaic ‫ חסי \ חסא‬with a Greek suffix, which itself could be modelled on an Aramaic suffix. There could be some influence on the Greek suffix from Aramaic, but the resulting Greek forms will be similar either way. The first root ‫ חסי‬is common in Syriac, where the verb means “to make atonement”, and the adverb means “piously”. It occurs in Samaritan Aramaic as a variant of ‫“ סחה‬to wash or bathe”. The second root is common in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Syropalestinian, Samaritan Aramaic, and Syriac (‫ ܣܚܗ‬Syropalestinian, ‫ ܣܚܐ‬Syriac). The meaning is to wash or bathe, in Syriac with an implication of purification, in the other dialects not quite so strongly. Given that the Hebrew name of the movement is ‫ חסידים‬the Aramaic name probably implies “those that are pious and pure enough to make atonement for the people”, with a specific reference to the personal qualities and set duties of the High Priest. Notice that the Fragmentary Targum, Palestinian Targum, and Targum Neofiti speak of the faithfulness of Aaron as compared to the nation, and Targum Onkelos speaks of the faithfulness of the whole tribe of Levi. See above. It can be seen why the movement was generally known by its Aramaic name, which is more precise than the Hebrew one, and makes the allusion to Dt XXXIII:8 much more obvious. It is the interpretative reading of this verse that explains how the Hebrew ‫ חסיד‬can correspond to the Aramaic ‫ חסי‬or its variants. The LXX and Symmachos are on the same track in translating ‫ לאיש חסידך‬as τῳ ανδρί τῳ ὁσίῳ, “to the sanctified 102 man”. Here is the source of the variant forms Οσσήνοι and so on, with an [o] vowel. It seems a genuine but vague tradition connecting the term Eσσαίοι / Eσσήνοι with Dt XXXIII:8 has led to a learned but false etymology, or if not technically false, at least secondary. We see that a movement that called itself “Essene” must have considered the personal qualities of the High Priest as more important than the sanctuary, if necessity forced the choice: see the Jewish Targums. There must therefore have been Samaritans called Essenes. This will be proven in what follows. How closely they resembled the Jewish movements called Essenes is another question. There is no Christian listing of Samaritan factions before Epiphanios with any knowledge beyond names, and all later listing depends on his work. Epiphanios (Panarion IX -- XIII) identifies four Samaritan factions, Essenes, Sebuaeans, Gorothenians, Dositheans. In paragraph XI he says the Sebuaeans put the new year at the new moon of Tishre (Williams mistranslates “at the new moon of Tishre” as “after the month of Tishre”, showing serious ignorance of Judaism. Pummer copies without any comment). He must have heard this from Jews, not Samaritans, because Samaritans would not use the Jewish names of the months. Jews would have been struck by the superficial resemblance to their own practice. He thinks Tishre corresponds to August, perhaps because he has confused the fast of the 9th of Av with the Day of Atonement, perhaps because he had not been told Tishre was the seventh month, perhaps because he had never heard of the Jewish New Year on the first of Tishre because not called “new year” in the Torah. He knows Passover is in the first month, probably from Exodus XII, so he wrongly deduces that the Sebuaeans put Passover in Tishre, which he thinks corresponds to August. Like most early Christian authors, he knows next to nothing about Judaism. But back to reality. The first of the seventh is a day of religious observance called Remembering Day ‫ יום הזכרון‬in the Torah and therefore the same by the Samaritans and its significance is that it is the start of the days of religious reflection leading up to the Day of Atonement on the tenth. Its other significance is that it is the start of sabbatical and Jubilee years. (The Jews have added other meanings, the start of the civil year with the illogical renaming of the day of religious observance as New Year, and reckoning from Creation). The first of the first is the date traditionally ascribed to Creation and the date of Entry into Canaan and the setting up of the Tabernacle a year after. The meaning of the name of the Sebuaeans indicates they might have observed sabbatical years and Jubilee years to some extent, with the Dositheans saying they were inapplicable after the end of the Time of Favour. Ch. 38 of the Arabic Joshua book (near the start) copied by A.F. 30:12 – 31:17 (Stenhouse pp. 38 – 39) could be read both ways. On deliberate ambiguity or silence in the Arabic Joshua book see the Bibliography and the refences there. The Sebuaeans must have maintained the holiness of the Mountaintop was enough to make the sanctuary holy, and in the same way the mountain was holy even without the Tabernacle, as Jacob himself had seen. The authors of the Asâṭîr must have thought this. After the much later accommodation sabbatical years and Jubilee years were certainly reckoned but whether they were put in practice in any way is unknown just yet. This information will be in the extant Arabic texts. Epiphanios does not know the meaning of the name Sebuaean. There is still constant ignorant guessing on the etymology because of the inadequacy of transcription in Greek letters, but it has long been certain, because the spelling in Aramaic and Arabic shows the root to be ‫שבע‬. See Halachot Gedolot vol. II p. 522 in the 1971 -- 1980 edition in the chapter Hilchot Shiḥrur Avadim. This book is in Babylonian Aramaic. For the evidence in Arabic (very slightly more complicated) see Abu ’l-Fateḥ 131:12 and 17 (Stenhouse 103 p. 182). The evidence from the book Halachot Gedolot was mentioned in an academic article in the first year of the twentieth century ! (Adolf Büchler, Les Dosithéens dans le midrasch. REJ vol. 42, 1901, pp. 220 – 231; vol. 43, 1902, pp. 50 – 71). Vilmar’s edition was published in 1865 ! There has been no excuse for guessing for a long while. The Sebuaeans ‫ שבועיי‬would have been so called because they attached importance to the first of the seventh month and the start of seven periods of seven years. A.F. mentions the differentiation of the Sebuaeans from the rest in the time of Baba Rabba, who could only have been the Gorothenians and Dositheans, who were probably the same, at 131:12 – 17 (Stenhouse p. 182). The opponents of the Dositheans whose records were used by A.F. just called themselves the Samaritans to distinguish themselves in the records used. The record by Phōtios of the dispute in Alexandria in 588 A.D. names the Dositheans but not their opponents. The Halachot Gedolot in about 830 A.D. names the Sebuaeans but lumps all other Samaritans together as Cutheans and Samaritans. It seems there were two main factions, Dositheans and Sebuaeans, who were just called Samaritans by outsiders unless the need to distinguish arose, which was hardly ever. Epiphanios knows nothing about the Dositheans except that resurrection is important somehow (ch. X and ch. XIII). He says there is no important distinction between Essenes and Gorothenians but does not know what it is anyway (ch. X). He says there are no Essenes in his time in ch. XX, probably out of misunderstanding. What he says in ch. X about distinctions can be dismissed as empty waffle against the explicit facts in ch. XII, where he says the Essenes agree with the Sebuaeans on the calendar and the Gorothenians and Dositheans disagree. The conclusion is that the Dositheans are to be paired with the Gorothenians against the Essenes and Sebuaeans. The Gorothenians are a kind of Dositheans. The only possible etymology of the name is that it comes from the name of a place. The designation Essenes does not necessarily mean any separation and it is likely that the Sebuaeans called themselves ‫ חסידים‬or Essēnoi amongst themselves and were nicknamed Sebuaeans by outsiders. A two-way division is implied by the documentation from Phōtios and the Halachot Gedolot, but the Arabic authors are explicit on this. See p. 100. It follows that the last two chapters of the Asâṭîr are the product of the ancestor of the sect called Sebuaeans and Essenes by Epiphanios. The Sebuaeans are the authors of the documents used by A.F. for information on the Dositheans. They are the authors of the continuation of A.F. who sharply distinguish themselves from the Dositheans and had the numbers to control Dosithean use of the Mountaintop as late as the eighth century A.D. (d). A.F. puts both events, the decision not to rebuild the Haykal and the appearance of the Dositheans, right at the end of the Persian period. This dating is more likely to be fiction from a later time. Either way, it is certain from the outside evidence and A.F. that something that could be called a temple stood for centuries longer than the coming of Alexander --- though the term temple has long been misleading --- even if it might have been rebuilt a few times. It has been shown that the theology of the Asâṭîr disagrees with the theology of the Dositheans. 22 Two main Some Dositheans had maintained that the requirement of the three pilgrim festivals could not be observed by definition (ṭulûc al-jabal ‫ طﻠﻮع اﻟﺠﺒﻞ‬in Samaritan usage in Arabic; ‫ העליה לרגל‬in Hebrew in Jewish usage and presumably Samaritan). This was the opinion of Såkte, but it never became general. See my article Social Anomie. See also below note 30 p. 121 and pp. 131 bottom – 135 top. Obviously if there was no sanctuary there could be no pilgrimage to the sanctuary. This is the universal Jewish 22 104 disagreements can be seen. Although ch. XI agrees with the Dositheans that the period of the Fẩnûtå started in the time of Eli (Samaritan ‫ אילי‬îli) 23 (XI:9 -- 10), it disagrees significantly by not being interested in the Tabernacle or even mentioning it after XI:10, maintaining that if a sanctuary is rebuilt on the sacred site, the era of the Fẩnûtå will be over (XI:20). Full divine approval will follow in the course of time (XI:22), with no intervention of any special eschatological figure. Again, ch. XII disagrees with the Dositheans in its expectation of a secular leader or a series of such P2FP2F P opinion. What they did for the Sabbath or Day of Atonement is not known, but it is known that it was not unusual for them to go up the mountain for religious services. (See my article Social Anomie). Their opponents disagreed, saying the requirement of the pilgrim festivals could still be carried out, presumably because the wording of the Torah specifies the sacred place, not the sanctuary. The question is whether the place is fully holy without the sanctuary. See further the notes to XII:14 and XI:20. Well before the time of the events mentioned in the article Social Anomie all Dositheans had come to accept the doctrine of the followers of Ṣâdoq that the holiness of the Mountain made all observance except sacrifice allowable. Some form of recognition of the sanctuary seems likely. See below, pp. 120 middle – 124 and note 30 p. 121 and pp. 132 bottom – 134. The evidence for an accommodation of all factions in or before the early eleventh century is that the Kitâb al-Kâfi, composed at this time, often mentions differences of halachah between unnamed groups that have recently been resolved, and occasionally mentions recent modifications approved of by the author. It was at this time that the halachic and theological writings from the past in Aramaic or Arabic or both were sifted, collected, and compiled into the two Arabic compendia the Kitâb al-Kâfi and the Kitâb aṭŢubâkh. On these two books and halachic differences between all the sources see my book Principles. On the unification in the tenth or early eleventh century see my article Transmission. Shehadeh reached the same conclusion of an official change to Arabic for important literary use by a different route. On the Dositheans see further my chapter Mikra, pp. 608; 625 -- 628; and my article The First Notice. 23 See A F. 39:16 -- 40:4 (Stenhouse pp. 49 – 50), and the Arabic Joshua book, ch. 42. A.F. uses the phrase thiyâb al-Quds for the High Priestly garments here, and calls the curtains of the Tabernacle sutûr Bayt al-Maqdis. This term is hardly ever used elsewhere in Samaritan texts because it is used as the usual name of the Jerusalem Temple. In the same place the Arabic Joshua book calls the High Priestly garments thiyâb al-Haykal and calls the curtain of the Tabernacle sitr al-Bayt al-Muqaddas. At the end of ch. 24 of the Arabic Joshua book there is mention of the Haykal ar-Rabb. This means the Tabernacle, not an enclosure. It says that only the Priests ever saw this. There was a structure enclosing this called a kanîsah. This probably does not mean a synagogue here, since A.F. uses the word kanîsah to mean the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem Temple at 115:6 – 7 (Stenhouse p. 158) and a Pagan temple (see above p. 13). At the corresponding place 26:17 – 27:2 (Stenhouse p. 33) A.F. calls the Tabernacle the ‫ משכן‬and the structure enclosing it the Haykal. He calls the enclosure the Haykal at 38:16 (Stenhouse p. 48). He attributes the term al-Mashkån for the Tabernacle to Såkte at 161:7 (Stenhouse p. 225). The counterfeit sanctuary put up by Eli is said to be a nâ’ûs (fane) exactly the same in form and appearance as the Haykal in the Arabic Joshua book ch. 43 and by A.F. at 38:16 (Stenhouse p. 48). (This word is from the Greek ναός, and means the same. The meaning of a tomb and then the derived meaning coffin assigned to it by Pummer p. 11 is specifically Egyptian and a specialisation of meaning. Only relying on Lane for Arabic words is unscientific. Juynboll p. 306 is correct). At A.F. 115:5 – 6 (Stenhouse p. 158) the haykal means the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem temple and at 116:2 (Stenhouse p. 159) it means a Roman temple. The only religious building in the Jerusalem temple is termed both haykal and nâ’ûs by A.F. at 50:4 (Stenhouse p. 63, not bringing out the double terminology). Jesus and his disciples are said to have been executed in Jerusalem (alMaqdis) and to have been buried in what is called an-nâ’ûs at 107:17, which in this case can’t be the Jerusalem temple and must be the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Stenhouse p. 148 line 3 leaves out the definite prefix without letting on and mistranslates. On terminology see also the notes to XI:20. Note that haykal in Arabic means outline or framework and is therefore a suitable term for both the Tabernacle made of curtains and the structure housing it. [It can mean temple in the right context, under the influence of Syriac. This might be what is intended by A.F. at 50:4 (Stenhouse p. 63)]. For the antiquity of the belief in the occultation of the Tabernacle and its apparatus, see pp. 90 bottom – 91, but note that in the passage cited there only the apparatus is mentioned and I have suggested some implications. The modest sanctuary building in later times is consistently called the Haykal by A.F. 105 leaders resembling Moses in some respects, and then in the far future Moses himself (XII:15 -- 22). It is not known whether the unnamed opponents of the Dositheans quoted by A.F. expected someone like Moses or Moses himself. The figure expected here is certain to come, because Moses's transformed body remains on earth (XII:20). This argument is taken from a line of exegesis also found in Jewish sources and mentioned in part by Mårqe p. 331 top. Dositheos was not the personage expected in ch. XII of the Asâṭîr. This text disagrees even more with the much later doctrine in late interpolations in the Mîmår Mårqe and other short writings, which have nothing to say about the continued presence of Moses’s occulted body on earth and expect someone coming back (‫ תהב‬Tẩ’eb) whose function is to restore the lost Tabernacle and inaugurate the new era, with a shadowy vision of Moses in the unforeseeable future. For the evidence that this doctrine in its full form comes much later than the time of Mårqe see Ben-Ḥayyim’s introduction to his edition. The doctrine can be seen to be artificial and therefore late by its combination of two expectations, both a prophet resembling Moses and Moses himself. (e). The question that has to be answered now is what precisely the authors of this text meant by the term fẩnu, and what precisely they hoped for after it had ended. They agreed with the view set out in the Arabic Joshua book and A.F. that it started in the time of Eli. They agree that the Tabernacle disappeared. (XI:10a). Their choice of term ‫ מקדש‬Maqdåsh “sanctuary” rather than ‫ משכן‬Mashkån “dwellingplace, tabernacle” needs some explanation. The natural meaning is not that there was no place of worship on the mountain after that, only that there was no sanctuary. In the context, that does not mean there was no structure, only that there was no Tabernacle inside. This understanding is confirmed by the second half of the verse, where it says the false sanctuary replaced the real one. If Eli made a counterfeit Ark, then it would have been put in a counterfeit Tabernacle, which would have been inside a building. They agreed that the first manifestation of fẩnu was sectarianism, but agreed with A.F. and disagreed with the Arabic Joshua book in setting the start of sectarianism just after the start of it, not just before. They seem to make the setting up of the false sanctuary the cause, but at the same time the sign that it had come. These authors use the term in a markedly different way to the core of the Arabic Joshua book or A.F., to mean the state brought about by the disuse of the sanctuary, which can be remedied by human hands. That would mean a sanctuary without a tabernacle is possible, as will be seen. In their view, the severity of the state of fẩnu was only partly felt at first, in sectarianism and disorder. Eli’s counterfeit ark was set up in the year 259 or 260 of Entry, just before the start of the Fẩnûtå on the first day of the year 261 of Entry, according to the Arabic Joshua book and A.F. It ended up in Solomon’s temple in the year 401 of Entry into Canaan, 140 years later, according to I Kings VI:1. (See the original form of the Greek in the Lucianic recension). In his times the severity of the fẩnu was felt in full. Solomon repressed the worship of Israelites at their holy places, even though willing to set up shrines to foreign gods for his own convenience. For both reasons, which are the two halves of the same reason, he caused Judah to lose the right to kingship. What follows is my own comment, but compatible with the text and implicit in it. The authorisation of Judah’s kingship is put after the introductory words “Moses bequeathed us the Torah”. As well as breaking one specific mitsvah by stopping Israelite worship, he dismissed the whole Torah, because he thereby flouted the words “I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage”. The other half-verse is “Thou shalt have no other gods before me (in my presence)”. It does not say “instead 106 of me”. The additional shrines were enough. The authors of Kings and Chronicles both acknowledge that Jeroboam had divine approval to become king because of Rehoboam’s announcement of his intention of keeping up his father’s policies, which can be seen not to have been limited to heavy taxation. Babylonian rule brought relief, presumably by ending the power of the southern kingdom. This lasted for a while into the Persian period. My own comment again. Here is the reason for the opposition to the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple from residents of both the north and the south recorded in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. No reason for their opposition is mentioned there. The reasonable apprehensions of the inhabitants were misrepresented by misleading or false wording as ill-will that was uncalled for. These fears came true in the late Persian period, and then again later under Hasmonaean rule. The author tells us emphatically the start of rule by Hellenes brought full relief. What these authors regard as the end of the Fẩnûtå is the restoration of the service of the sanctuary, without any threat. There remains the possibility that they still located Lûza on the Meadow, and that undisturbed religious services on the Meadow were enough for the moment. Either way, what is needed can be done right now, and the hope is for something much more, which can confidently be expected now that the start has come about. There is no expression of any expectation of the reappearance of the Mosaic Tabernacle with its paraphernalia or any need for it. It is therefore certain that it is older than the later common theology of eschatology. What these authors really hope for is the time some time after the end of the Fẩnûtå, when the top of the Mountain can be seen (XII:19). This must be the restoration of the union of Heaven and Earth seen by Jacob, or the reappearance of the entrance to the Garden of Eden, or most likely both. There will be a difference to what was seen by Jacob: the top of the Mountain itself will be visible, and the implication is it will be visible to everyone all the time. What is meant by this is unclear. The return of Moses is in the far future or the indefinite future. (f). The authors of the Asâṭîr must have accepted that there had been a sanctuary service, with or without sacrifices, after the occultation of the Tabernacle and after the return from the Exile. They were historically correct. The claim that there was no sanctuary building during the Fẩnûtå starts with Chronicle Adler in 1900, systematically falsifying the information in the Comprehensive History. There are three passages that might assume there was no sanctuary in use, only one of which is substantial. (a) Just after A.F. 51:9 Vilmar omits a list of High Priests in all mss. except A (Stenhouse F) which is also in the Tûlẩdå p. 79. The list is reproduced by Stenhouse p. 65. There is a mention of the Haykal built by Joshua to house the Tabernacle. The way it is mentioned indicates it was a historical relic, not in use. (b) There is mention of damage to the altar by Saul’s men but without any mention of a structure at 44:13 (Stenhouse p. 56). (c) At 132:9 – 10 (Stenhouse p. 183) A.F. says Bẩbå Råbbå used some of the stones from the Haykal which he says had been demolished by Saul’s men. This is not conclusive. They could have been damaged stones. On the other hand, there is evidence of a building from twelve other Samaritan records, as well as four records from foreigners and as well as the coins. They are (d) the original ending of the Arabic Joshua book, ch. 42, and the corresponding place in A.F., by their silence (see p. 123); (e) A.F. 58:10 – 16 (see below); (f) A.F. 72:7: -16, which is composite and has two forms of the combined wording (see pp. 114 -107 116 and p. 124); (g) a corresponding but incompatible excerpt from a lost history added to the Arabic Joshua book, ch. 45 (see p. 123); (h) a note incompatible with A.F. in the same way excerpted from a lost history in the Tûlẩdå, p. 85 (see p. 123); (i) A.F. 80:2 – 4 (see p. 22); (j) A.F. 93:16 – 94:16 (see p. 108); (k) A.F. 104:1 – 11 in 111 B.C. (see pp. 109 – 110); (l) A.F. 171:12 – 15 in 484 A.D. (see pp 110 middle – 113 top). There is (m) one of the hymns of the Durrân collection, from somewhere between 180 and 217 A.D. See p. 51. There is Marinos (n) in the late fifth century A.D., just before or just after the destruction by Zēnōn. See p. 13. (o) There is the Rabbinic evidence for the mid Hellenistic period. See p. 24. (p) There is Luke I:9, 10, 21. See p. 67. There is Dio Cassius (q) for the time of Hadrian. See p. 13. (r) There is Epiphanios, just before 394, intending to write about the present. This survives in Georgian translation. (Epiphanius De Gemmis, ed. Blake and de Vis, London 1934, p. 192. A quotation in Greek printed by Blake and de Vis preserves the original Greek term naós. The Georgian text is reproduced by Pummer p. 180 and p. 183 but without the evidence of the quotation in Greek). (s) There are the coins of Neapolis described on p. 18. Documentary evidence for sacrifices after the return from exile is confirmed by archaeology. See examples (e) (g) (h) (k). A.F. 58:10 – 16 (e) (Stenhouse pp. 75 – 76 top) records the existence of a sanctuary structure (termed Haykal) up till the time of the Exile under Nebuchadnezzar. [The Arabic word haykal does not mean the same as its cognates in Hebrew and Aramaic. See note 23 p. 104 and see below on A.F. 72:7 – 16 (f)]. He explicitly says right at the end that the structure had been rebuilt after having been demolished by Saul’s men. The prominent mention of the apparatus ‫ اﻻت اﻟﻘﺪس‬means it was in use in some way. These must be new ones, made after the end of the Time of Favour. This does not have to mean there were sacrifices, but does make it very likely. He says the apparatus was hidden by the High Priest, but the structure was left standing. This is in partial contradiction to what is said by A.F. at 72:7 – 16, that at the return from the Exile one specific Torah scroll and what remained of the Priestly garments were recovered at great cost, but the golden lampstand and golden table for the Showbread were built anew. This slightly contradicts a historical appendix to the Arabic Joshua book, ch. 45 (g), that says the requisite apparatus was made on the model of the original from before the Exile. It says there were sacrifices before the Exile. It then says there were sacrifices once again with a clear implication that there was no difficulty afterwards. An excerpt from a lost history in the Tûlẩdå p. 85 (h) says there were sacrifices after the return with no hint that anything went wrong. See also A.F. 104:11 (j). Against this, A.F. 72:7 – 16 has a composite account of the rebuilding of the sanctuary and the altar, but then an indirect divine revelation and direct angelic revelation that there were to be no more sacrifices. Details below. The pericope at A.F. 93:16 – 94:16 (j) (Stenhouse pp. 127 – 128) says King Philip of Egypt, who ruled under the Satrap Ptolemy Soter (323 – 283 B.C.), sought to lay his hands on the wealth of the House of God. This is the normal term for Mt. Gerizim and does not imply any building by itself. At 94:8 and 10 in a letter from the Samaritan leaders to the king they remind him of the endowment by Alexander by quoting directly from the document of grant, which had the words “this house” not “this holy place”. From a foreigner this wording is unambiguous. The grant was made 108 after Alexander had asked to be blessed by the house ‫ ﺗﺒﺮك ﺑﮫ‬and the blessing would have made the endowment irrevocable. [Stenhouse does not know the meaning of the verb in Stem V]. A.F. has a long passage about the dispute of Hyrcanus with the Pharisees at 102:14 – 104:1 (Stenhouse p. 140 – 142 top). After that at A.F. 104:1 – 11 (k) (Stenhouse p. 142 -- 143 top) there is another story about his relations with the Samaritans that ends by saying that because of his enmity towards the Pharisees he tried to make a pilgrimage to Mt. Gerizim. [Stenhouse misunderstands]. The Samaritans did not let him in spite of persistent tries. It then says he paid for sacrifices and made offerings instead. Straight after this, perhaps as explanation of the need for a new strategy, A.F. says he had previously attacked Sebastia and Nablus (using an anachronistic name). He had not taken Nablus, against Josephus, but had killed a lot of people from “the two factions”. Whether he took the city is a question of definition, since he could not have held it. In the context, this must mean the Samaritans called Sadducees, and one other faction. In this pericope, two stories about Hyrcanus and a faction called Sadducees have been put together. The Sadducees in the first story are Jews and the opponents of the Pharisees. This is the well-known story of how Hyrcanus came to oppose the Pharisees and support the Sadducees. In the second story they are the Samaritans known as Sadducees, who are known to have been the faction later known as Dositheans. See pp. 118 – 120. At 104:1 it says he gave the Sadducees and Samaritans licence to kill Pharisees. [Stenhouse translates from a corrupt form in one ms. that does not make sense]. This is where the two stories have been fused and the second starts. A.F. avoids the question of the connection between a group called Sadducees and Samaritans with careful wording and untypically roundabout composition. The two stories have a common ending at 104:11. Josephus says he destroyed the Samaritan temple in Antiquities XIII:255 – 256 = XIII:9:1. There is no mention of any attack on the sanctuary in the corresponding place at War I:63 = I:2:6, only capture of Shechem and the town of Mt. Gerizim. He avoids saying whether the sanctuary is still standing in his day or not. The Slavonic version does not even mention it. (The Slavonic version is not translated from the extant Greek book, but an earlier shorter Greek version which was the model used for the extant version). Magen has found ruins of a big town that was burnt down. A date of 111 B.C. would be within the time range. He does not know the size of the sanctuary building because he has not read A.F., and thinks it must have been an imposing Hellenistic Syrian temple. He does not know to look under the church because he has not read A.F. He does not know the sanctuary building stood till 484 A.D. because he has not read A.F. He describes a big building nearby as a garrison. Whose garrison? He thinks that if the town was not rebuilt, the sanctuary could not have been. This is projection of Jewish thought. If Josephus did not mention rebuilding in the War, it would not have been because he did not know about it. The answer would be that the Samaritans started the cultus up again soon after without a building, and rebuilt soon after that, and Josephus thought it best to dodge something that would have spoilt the tone. Then in the Antiquities he says the temple put up by Menasseh was destroyed two hundred years after being built, niftily dodging the question of whether there was continuation of the cultus or any new building at the time, or whether there was a cultus in his own time. This is obviously dodgy, but it has worked ever since because Jews wanted to believe it and historians fell for the trick in the wording. Hyrcanus could not have stopped anything. He could not tie his army up in an endless war. Look what happened 595 years later when the Samaritans were weaker and the foe mightier. He 109 could not afford the permanent loss of revenue either. This means the explanation of the coins from the reign of Hyrcanus’s successor found in the garrison building would be that it was used by the Samaritans. There is no record of Hyrcanus doing anything with the site later on. This is an argument from silence, but it is not weak, since a lot is recorded about the rest of his actions and policies. Bourgel has argued that Hyrcanus wanted to end worship on the Mountain and get the Samaritans to accept Jerusalem. (The Destruction of the Samaritan Temple by John Hyrcanus: A Reconsideration. JBL 135:3, 2016, pp. 505 – 523). Even though he has no direct evidence, his argument about the policy is persuasive. His observation, however, is that it only worked to the very limited extent that some Samaritans came to the Jerusalem temple. Other explanations could be found even for this. What A.F. writes is compatible with the findings of the excavation if only the outcome was remembered. Hyrcanus could easily have dropped unrealisable ideology and done the next best. This solution is unprovable, but it accounts neatly for what Josephus says and does not say, the detailed (if a bit confused) record by A.F., what is otherwise recorded about Hyrcanus, Bourgel’s argument from indirect evidence, the fact that there was no endless war afterwards, and the findings of the excavation. A.F. says he asserted his weak rule over Samaria by sending sacrifices and offerings as royal offerings, which were accepted. This could be done without seeming to recognise Mt. Gerizim as the Israelite holy place. He himself was not allowed up. Using force to go up would have undone the fragile set-up. Actually he would not have dared go up because he was a Priest, and it could easily have been claimed or thought that he recognised the holiness of Mt. Gerizim. In fact A.F. does draw this conclusion. He was wrong, but the conclusion was reasonable. Magen has not addressed the difficulties of the whole of the evidence. He does not even name A.F. here. He has not heard of the well known Comprehensive History of 1875. Here and elsewhere he refers to “unreliable Samaritan Chronicles”, by which he means Chronicle Adler of 1900, which to him has become multiple unidentified books. He does not know Chronicle Adler fudges a lot of what is in its source, the Comprehensive History. This is common knowledge. He has not read Mor’s book, which is the basic reference for this period. He falsifies the evidence of Procopius of Casarea. See the Bibliography. All this means he does not know the sanctuary stood till 484 A.D. He makes the astounding claim that knowledge of the sanctuary and town disappeared from Samaritan tradition. It is clear from A.F. 171:12 – 15 (m) (Stenhouse pp. 240 – 241) that the emperor Zēnōn and the Christian Church in 484 A.D. regarded ownership of the whole Mountaintop and ownership of the place of the Haykal building with its grounds as equivalent in importance for their purpose. A.F. says the emperor tried to force the Samaritans to become Christian and they showed they would rather die. Then he tried to buy the Mountain. This was new. The Christian Church had long wanted to wipe out Samaritan religion. Now, as well as this, it wanted to supersede Samaritan religion as it claimed to have superseded Jewish religion. The emperor therefore tried to make his control of the Mountaintop real, not just legal by the laws of man, and the Samaritans thwarted him by showing there was no mechanism. He then tried to acquire the virtue of the Haykal by building a replacement over the place. [The mss. of the first recension SDC have a phrase not in the second recension. (In this place the old part of ms. S is not extant). I have marked the phrase off with dashes. It can be seen not to be a misplaced interpolation if the condensed expression of the whole sentence is understood. It is an aside without a verb to show 110 subordination of importance, between two important nouns in apposition, the first bunyânan and shabah. A.F. has written the accusative case ending on bunyânan against his custom for clarity of syntax. There was a construction over the Haykal and another over the mikvah. The mikvah probably became the monastery bathhouse north of the church]. The church over the Haykal was meant as the analogue of the Haykal in the new dispensation. It was a martyrion marking a place. By saying the construction was over the Haykal and over what was right round it, A.F. means it was longer and wider than the Haykal. Only SDC of the first recension are completely correct. “He kept at it [trying to buy the Mountaintop] and then in the end ‫وﻟﻢ ﯾﺰل‬ ‫ﺣﺘﻰ‬ seized the Haykal ‫ اﺧﺬ اﻟﮭﯿﻜﻞ‬and everything round it [the enclosed grounds] ‫[ وﻛﻞ ﻣﺎ ﺣﻮﻟﮫ‬correct gloss ‘and everything round them of the ancient altars’ (wrongly plural not dual) A] and the [biggest A] pool and mikvah to the north ‫وﺑﺮﻛﺔ اﻟﻤﺎ وﻣﺠﻤﻊ‬ ‫[ اﻟﻤﺎ ﻣﻦ ﺷﺎﻣﯿﮫ‬adding ‘of the pool’ Khaḍir] and added over [wrongly adding binâ’ ‘the structure of’ Khaḍir] the Haykal and right round it ‫‘[ وازاد ﻋﻠﻰ اﻟﮭﯿﻜﻞ وﻛﻞ ﻣﻦ ﺣﻮﻟﮫ‬and added over the Haykal and added over everything round it (wrongly with wa-kull mâ instead of wa-kull min) A; wrongly om. ‘and right round it’ Khaḍir; wrongly wa-kull mâ for wa-kull min CAL 3 YJ] [wrongly adding ‘and built’ A] a construction ‫ﺑﻨﯿﺎﻧﺎ‬ [wrongly ‘a construction and a church’ A; wrongly min al-bunyân J; adding shattâ L 3 Y] --- and (inserting ‘built’ C) over the mikvah a construction ‫وﻋﻠﻰ ﻣﺠﻤﻊ اﻟﻤﺎ ﺑﻨﯿﺎﻧﺎ‬ [om. in all mss. of the second recension including B] --- the analogue (shabah) of the Haykal ‫[ ﺷﺒﮫ اﻟﮭﯿﻜﻞ‬wrongly prefixing ‫ وﻋﻠﻰ‬B; wrongly om. AL 3 Y Khaḍir] [wrongly adding ‘and built’ AL 2 MN; wrongly adding ‘and built in the Haykal’ C] a church ‫[ ﻛﻨﯿﺴﮫ‬wrongly om. L 3 Y Khaḍir; wrongly “the church and the Haykal’ J] and built in the church ‫‘[ وﺑﻨﺎ ﻓﻲ اﻟﻜﻨﯿﺴﮫ‬and built in it’ fem. L 1 L 2 VMNP; ‘and built there’ J; wrongly om. AL 3 Y Khaḍir] a great big dome (i.e. domed structure) ‫[ ﻗﺒﮫ ﻋﻈﯿﻤﮫ‬om. qubbah A; wrongly bunyânan instead of qubbah rest of the second recension except B resulting in ‫ ] ﺑﻨﯿﺎﻧﺎ ﻋﻈﯿﻤﮫ‬enormously high [excessively high A; very high and enormous L 2 MNL 3 Y], and whitewashed it and he [they AL 3 Y] permanently set up [ ‫ وﻛﺎن ﯾﻌﻠﻮ ; وﻛﺎن ﯾﻌﻠﻖ‬church and the Haykal’ J] and built in the church ‫وﺑﻨﺎ ﻓﻲ اﻟﻜﻨﯿﺴﮫ‬ L 1 L 2 VPMN; ‫ وﻛﺎﻧﻮا ﯾﻌﻠﻘﻮا‬AL3Y] a beacon on top of it [on top of the dome C] to shine at night, which they claimed ‫ ﯾﺪﻋﻮا‬yaddaCû [‘he claimed’ L 1 ] could be seen by those in [adding ‘the cities (wrongly plural, not dual)’ L 2 VPMNL 3 YH Khaḍir] Constantinople and Rome”. For clarity, here is the correct wording by itself according to mss. SD of the first recension (Stenhouse SH). “He kept at it [trying to buy the Mountaintop] and then in the end seized the Haykal and everything round it and the pool and mikvah to the north and added over the Haykal and right round it a construction --- and over the mikvah a construction --- the analogue [shabah] of the Haykal, a church, and built in the church a great big dome [i.e. domed structure] enormously high, and whitewashed it and permanently set a beacon up on top of it which they claimed could be seen by those in Constantinople and Rome”. This last statement about it being seen in Constantinople and Rome was figuratively true and meant seriously and expressed one aspect of the purpose. [Stenhouse misunderstands right through. He flatly contradicts A.F. on p. 241 line 6, where the first and second words and fifth to seventh words are from an addition by Vilmar against all mss. His note 1155 shows he does not know the words are not in the mss. ! Here is another proof that the translation was written before the thesis using Vilmar’s edition and never revised properly. His collations are incomplete. The wording P P RR RR RR 111 RR RR RR printed by Vilmar is wrong from ‫ ﻣﺎ‬to ‫ ﻓﻲ‬in line 14. Write this in instead. ‫ﻣﻦ ﺣﻮﻟﮫ‬ ‫ ﺑﻨﯿﺎﻧﺎ ﺷﺒﮫ‬. The Arabic must be explained to forestall uninformed assertion that the words ‫ ﺷﺒﮫ اﻟﮭﯿﻜﻞ‬should be understood as meaning “something looking like the Haykal”. The church building was not a likeness of the Haykal. The Haykal was square. The church was a complicated shape and a lot bigger. The wording in mss. CAL 3 YJ saying it covered the altars is correct in fact though not original in the text. It looks like real tradition. The church had an enormously high lighthouse on top. Besides, a replica of the Haykal would have been useless, because it had to look like a church. Finally, the context makes the meaning certain]. RR RR The doctrine of supersession was made visible in Jerusalem by desecration of the old site of the former Jewish temple and construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The doctrine was made visible on Mt. Gerizim by the church building with its enormously high light-tower, which no-one has tried to explain before. This worked better than what was done in Jerusalem because the precise sacred place was not moved at all. The dome on top of high walls with the grotesquely high beacon on top probably sat exactly over the Haykal. Procopius of Caesarea in about 555 A.D. has heard a Church pronouncement that John IV:20 -- 23 says Jesus predicted the ending of Samaritan worship on Mt. Gerizim and replacement by Christians. (Buildings 5. 7. 1 -- 17). “When she asked him about the mountain, he replied ‘In future it won’t be Samaritans that worship on this mountain, but on the very place true worshippers, meaning Christians, will worship’ ”. This was in the spirit of verse 22, which is an addition in the revision. See p. 133 and pp. 49 -- 51. To go to this enormous expense the Christian Church must have believed this manoeuvre gave them the God-given status of the Samaritan Israelites and made up for the missing part in their claim to the Torah, just as they believed they had taken over the God-given status of the Jewish Israelites with their scriptures as well as their possession of the Torah. The beacon was an announcement. This was a completely unprecedented experiment in theology with a technical term translated by A.F. as shabah ‫ ﺷﺒﮫ‬meaning analogue and metaphorical likeness (probably εἰκών used as in Christian usage in speaking of Jesus in relation to God). If the Church regarded control of the site of the Haykal as showing supersession or helping get it, important enough to set up this overdone martyrion with a triumphalist lighthouse, not at all normal on a church, they must have believed the Sebuaean doctrine that this very spot was still holier than the rest of the Mountaintop even without the Tabernacle and that the building with its paraphernalia and ceremonies was commanded by the Torah even without the Tabernacle. The precise Dosithean attitude is unknown, but they could not have doubted that the site was original. The considerations are right at the end of this section. A.F. says the church building was over the site of the Haykal but went out further on every side. The Analogue is in fact twice as wide and more than twice as long as the original sacred building. What was meant to be shown was that the Analogue took on the virtue not only of the Haykal and the original place of the Tabernacle, but beyond that the virtue of the two altars, which it covered. Looking impressive was a secondary reason. Procopius of Caesarea says the boundary wall round the church was only light, not enough for defence, and that when the church was fortified later on the defensive wall was built round the original light wall, which was kept. The symbolic building with its symbolically marked grounds would thus have replaced everything considered sacred or destined to return to being sacred by 112 both the Sebuaeans and the Dositheans, and the framers of the Christian theological experiment could have been dead certain of having replaced everything divinely made sacred. There is an astonishing statement by Procopius of Caesarea that there had never been any temple on the Mountaintop. He must have heard there had been something that could be called a temple up till seventy years before. It must have been common knowledge. Procopius of Gaza knows about a Samaritan temple (naós) and the steps leading up to it (Catena on the Octateuch 12. 11, on Deuteronomy XI:29). He writes a generation after the destruction, but his information is taken from Epiphanios, writing before 394 A.D. See p. 108 top. This mention of the steps is important. It means that later mentions of steps are not to be dismissed as due to confusion with the steps leading up to the temple of Zeus Serapis on the lower peak. In the time of Procopius of Caesarea the reason for building the church building would have still been being advertised. His denial sounds like his own interpretation of what he would have heard from Samaritans, that the church building had no standing and was a wraith, besides which nothing could affect the holiness of the Mountaintop. Malalas’s false record saying a synagogue was destroyed was probably due to having read an official record that the temple was destroyed and thinking a synagogue must be meant. He shows he misses the point by thinking the massive martyrion put up by Zenon was only a chapel (Chronographia 15. 382. 10 to 383. 4 = PG 97. 568; probably writing in 532 A.D.). Perhaps the dogma represented by the martyrion was hard to spread. It would not have sounded very impressive with loss of government control of the hinterland. Procopius of Gaza did not hear about it. At the same time as this the Christian Church as represented by the emperor tried to desecrate the Mountaintop. A.F. has two versions. The first is that a son of the emperor’s was buried there. The second is that the emperor was buried there. A.F. says he wanted to make sure all Samaritans would have to pray in the direction of his grave, which would have invalidated all prescribed prayers. On top of all this expense and effort, the logically necessary final solution was to eliminate the Israelites themselves. The emperor asked why there are no statues on Bẩbå Råbbå’s synagogue. This means the House of Prayer built as a reminder of the real sanctuary, accepted by both factions as having a trace of the scent of the Time of Favour. See pp. 36 – 38 middle. The answer given was that the God they worship is unseen and unqualifiable. The answer was already common knowledge. It is also Christian doctrine. The question was asked so that the answer could be officially hypocritically misused. First it showed they did not accept the doctrine of the Incarnation, because there were no statues of Jesus or Mary, and therefore did not believe in the Trinity. Then it could be inferred that they could be persecuted the same as Pagans. They could be forced to revolt leading to a massacre, or killed unless they pretended to become Christian. This had already in fact been official policy in Palestine under the direction of the Christian Church since 337 A.D. with minor variation in thoroughness. Jews and Manichaeans and Pagans and others suffered as well, but the Samaritans were singled out, in a policy derived from Christian theology. See pp. 49 – 51 and pp. 132 bottom – 133. Persecution was worse than ever under Zēnōn. See A.F. 170:14 – 172:10 (Stenhouse pp. 239 to 242). This seems to have been connected with the seizure of the Haykal. After 490 or 492 A.D. these policies led to a collapse of government in Samaria, though persecution never stopped in Samaria because there were raids. Chronicle Adler follows the Comprehensive 113 History in saying Zēnōn was the last emperor to rule over Samaria. (Adler and Séligsohn label this correct observation “fantaisie”. Here we see the tiresomely common assumption by Jews and Christians that anything you don’t understand in a Samaritan writing must be a mistake by uncritical Samaritans. Rabbanite Jews do this more than Christians because anything they don’t understand in Samaritan writings is threatening to the basic principle of Rabbinic Judaism, the claim of complete infallible knowledge inaccessible to anyone else. The standards of scientific inquiry or normal reading can be disregarded in such cases by religious permission and must be disregarded by religious demand). See A.F. 172:10 – 19 (Stenhouse p. 242). Outside Palestine oppression by means of legislation was made to be intolerable, forcing people to pretend to become Christian. There were massacres outside Palestine as well. It is doubtful whether the records are complete. The most systematic persecution was under Justinian. It was because so many Samaritans lost their identity throughout the empire over these horrific centuries that their numbers are often badly underestimated. There are historians that ignore the evidence of a significant Samaritan diaspora at this time and then assume there never was one in earlier centuries. Then they can be forgotten about. Four notices by A.F., namely (f) (i) (j) and then an entry on the Dositheans immediately after, show some of the development of doctrine. The first two confirm that there was a sanctuary building before the Exile, and that it was rebuilt on the Return. The first, in its present composite form, says there were sacrifices before the Exile, but these were discontinued when it was realised that they were not allowed in the Fẩnûtå. At the start of the present composite form of the notice is a statement that sacrifices were started up again. There is not even a try at explaining how it could be known that sacrifices were accepted by God before the Exile if it has just been discovered they are not allowed during the Fẩnûtå. The sanctuary has been rebuilt and it has been seen that this was favoured by God. There is no solution. The third notice, describing the re-institution of worship on the Mountaintop some time after later destruction of the sanctuary, has no mention of any rebuilding of the Sanctuary soon afterwards. The appearance of the Dositheans is recorded immediately after and some detailed information about them is given, but without any mention of their late shortterm doctrine that there can’t be a sanctuary during the Fẩnûtå. These three obscurities are treated together here because taken together they seem to show an ongoing current of thought and debate about what made a sanctuary building or sacrifices valid, which itself is wound up with the first appearance of the concepts of the Time of Favour and the Fẩnûtå. There are indications that what is related by A.F. are real reminiscences of the concerns of later times, but couched in terms of history, which has been retold in part. The new development in 36 A.D. in the time of Pilate might have made concerns like this acute, with the need for a new joint ambiguous formula. See p. 95. This activity might have led to the state visit of the historical Simon to Rome soon after some time during the reign of Claudius (41 – 54 A.D) recorded by Justin. A.F. makes it clear that there had been a modest sanctuary structure before the Exile in his favourable account of the re-building of the sanctuary after the return from the Exile. A.F. 72:7 – 16 (f) (Stenhouse pp. 94 bottom -- 95). There was a small structure thirty-five cubits square (just shy of 61¾ feet) with the holy vessels and implements and housing the golden lampstand and golden table for the Showbread. These are said to have been the originals used before the Exile, recovered from the 114 foreign rulers. The word used for the structure is Haykal. See note 23 pp 102 -- 103. (At the end of ch. 24 of the Arabic Joshua book it says the Tabernacle was housed in a temple kanîsah. On the meaning of this word see note 23 p. 104. A.F. does not mention this in the corresponding place, which would have been after 30:6. The Tabernacle inside was thirty cubits by ten). Outside in front was the great altar, ten cubits square (17½ feet square) and five cubits high. The first recension, mss. SDCBL 2 L 3 Y (Stenhouse SHPCBGY), mentions an inaugural hecatomb along with offerings of wine and olive oil. It is clear from the syntax and wording and stated explicitly in ms. C (Stenhouse P) that it was the High Priest cÂbed-el that did this. [Stenhouse has not recorded the reading of C. He mistranslates a singular verb qurrib or qarrab (except in L 3 Y) as plural]. It then says the land then became prosperous and drought did not come back. Then it says “Except that the High Priest cÂbed-el ‫ ) עבדאל ( ﻋﺒﺪال‬after seeing [SB correctly have ‘now’ after this] the sacrifice would not be accepted from them, the same as they had come to realise ‫ ﻛﻤﺎ ﻛﺎﻧﻮا ﯾﻌﺮﻓﻮا‬the [divine] restraint from sacrifice in the time of the Fẩnûtå, it is recorded that he dreamt he saw someone saying to him ‘Everything right [i.e. ‘well done’], worthy worker, in fẩnu (indefinite) there is no perfection’ ”. [Stenhouse in the thesis, vol. 2 apparatus to p. 79 line 6, wrongly records the important word “now” in SB (his SC) as a replacement of the word “saw” instead of an addition. The translation is impossible 24 ]. The mss. of the second recension, AL 1 VPMNJH (Stenhouse FEVaMRNJRh) along with Khaḍir, don’t mention sacrifices or other offerings right at the start of the mention of the setting up of the sanctuary. [Stenhouse’s collations are defective and don’t show this]. After saying the land became prosperous and the drought did not come back, they have “Except that [‘then’ instead of ‘except that’ Khaḍir] the High Priest cÂbed-el offered up a hundred cattle on the altar, and after not seeing the acceptance of the sacrifice as usual ‫ ﻛﺎﻟﻌﺎده‬he made his recitation that night and dreamt he saw etc.”. The meaning of both versions is that the structure with its paraphernalia and worship is enough during a time of fẩnu. The word fẩnu here does not refer to the absence of the Tabernacle. It means the time when sacrifices are not accepted any more. The angelic pronouncement means “because this is a time of fẩnu there are not to be any sacrifices”. There is no explanation of the change in the will of God. The concept of fẩnu is not the same as in the Asâṭîr but the line of development can be seen. This looks like the justification found by the Sebuaeans (and quite likely He translates “It would have become barren again had not cAbdāl when he saw the sacrifice, refused to accept it from them: for they knew that sacrifice was forbidden during the Fanūta”. The first clause is not an unrealised possibility with a positive verb but a flat negative statement in the past tense ‫ وﻟﻢ ﺗﻌﺪ ﺗﺠﺪب‬wa-lam tacud tujdib meaning “it did not become barren again”. Stenhouse thinks it was the High Priest that accepted sacrifices, not God. Ignorance of Judaism shows up constantly in his translation and notes. There is a second misunderstanding of grammar, namely the tense of the second negative verb, ‫ ﻻ ﯾﻘﺒﻞ ﻣﻨﮭﻢ‬lâ yuqbal minhum, “would not be accepted from them”, which has ‫ ﻻ‬lâ, not ‫ ﻟﻢ‬lam, and is therefore not a statement in the past tense. Reading the verb in this second place as being in the active voice leaves a normally transitive verb without a pronoun object suffix (which is slipped into the translation). The second recension unequivocally says sacrifices were normally accepted and this time was different, and the same is indicated by the word “now” in mss. SB of the first recension. Vilmar does not record the reading of ms. A here (Stenhouse’s F), and Stenhouse follows Vilmar by not remarking on the words of the second recension. He misquotes ‫ رت‬meaning head of cattle (which is in all mss. of both recensions except L1 which has ‫ ) راس‬as ‫( رات‬which is not a word) in the note without letting on that he has done this, because he does not know what it means. 24 115 accepted by the Dositheans) for giving up sacrifices. Both versions acknowledge that sacrifices had been accepted up till the Exile. Saying sacrifices were accepted means the whole burnt offerings ‫ עלות‬câlot and the parts of the peace offerings set aside for God and not eaten were burnt up by divine fire, and all sacrifices were lit up by light from heaven. There is an equivalent Jewish concept in regard to the first temple but not the second. See A.F. 39:7 and in more detail A.F. 27:2 – 4 (Stenhouse p. 33 middle) on the fire on the altars in the Time of Favour. The corresponding places at the start of ch. 42 of the Arabic Joshua book and the end of ch. 21 of the Arabic Joshua book (in the second place only approximately corresponding) don’t mention the divine fire. 25 Both versions of the pericope in A.F. claim an angelic explanation, quoted in Aramaic. It says ‫ ישר פעלה כשרה לית בפנותה שלמו‬. Moses is addressed the same way as ‫ פעלה כשרה‬in Asâṭîr XI:6. The implication is that the High Priest was given an authoritative prophecy. 26 P25FP25F P Later on at 82:2 – 3 (Stenhouse p. 109) A.F. mentions the reconsecration of the sacred site in the late Persian period. His fictional source says this was not long after the destruction of the sanctuary under the Persian king Darius (i) (A.F. 80:2 – 3; Stenhouse p. 106), and just after a Jewish king called ‫חזקיה‬, Izqiyya in Samaritan pronunciation A.F. 81:10 (Stenhouse p. 108). So spelt in SBAL 1 PMNJ i.e. mss. of both recensions (Stenhouse SCFEMRNJ). Spelt ‫ עזקיה‬in CDL 2 L 3 Y (Stenhouse PHBGY), with the same pronunciation. The spelling ‫ ערקיה‬attributed to C by Vilmar 25 Stenhouse’s translation in the second place, A.F. 27:2 – 4, shows that he does not realise that burnt offerings and peace offerings are two different things. The two nouns are consequently put in apposition in the translation by omitting the verb wa-dhabaḥ in between. The translation three lines further down, which has it that “sacrifices” instead of “burnt offerings” were burnt up by divine fire, shows confusion between the two categories, burnt offerings and peace offerings, though the overall meaning is not affected. Stenhouse does not know parts of peace offerings were burnt up. Stenhouse’s translation of the Aramaic address ‫ פעלה כשרה‬as “well done” is erroneous. Among other things, it misses the grammatical force of the title being in the definite state and therefore an addressing of someone, apparently reading the first word ‫ פעלה‬as cognate to an Arabic feminine noun meaning an important act. The meaning of the Aramaic noun and its masculine gender are certain. Stenhouse misses the evidence of the same usage in ch. XI verse 6 of the Asâṭîr. The word ‫ ישר‬comforts the High Priest by assuring him that God has not abandoned them, but favoured them with a sign. This is why it is mentioned that the High Priest made his recitation before going to sleep, which could have been assumed anyway. The recitation is Dt XXXII:4, which expresses confidence in God’s works. The opening verb ‫( ישר‬pronounced yẩshår in Hebrew, probably the same in Aramaic) draws attention to one part of this verse relevant to the situation. The High Priest is addressed as “worthy worker” in an allusion to the third word of this verse, meaning he tries to align his works with God’s will, and in fact they are. His action in making the offering was right as the last act under the old dispensation and needed for the divine sign of the new dispensation straight after, when the offering was not accepted. There seems to be a deliberate allusion here to the same words addressed to Moses in the Asâṭîr. This would be appropriate because he helped bring about a divine revelation. There is no contradiction within the first recension when it speaks with approval of the building and the offerings and then says the sacrifices were not accepted. The building was still needed, and so were the other kinds of offerings explicitly listed, the Showbread and wine and olive oil. Presumably incense too. The second recension still mentions the Showbread with approval. I wonder if this is a historicisation of a quite reasonable argument. If it is believed that before the Exile some kinds of sacrifice were burnt up by divine fire and all kinds were lit up by light from heaven, a belief well attested in Jewish sources as well, but it can plainly be seen that these days that does not happen, some explanation is needed. The Jewish solution was to ignore the difficulty, the same as with the disappearance of the Ark of the Covenant, which is mentioned in Jewish texts with interest but not as a matter of concern. 26 116 is a misreading. Khaḍir has the name ‫ חלקיה‬but can be seen not to be following A.F. in the narrative here. The form Isser accepts for the name of the king, copying Vilmar p. LIX, is not close enough to Hyrcanos or ‫ חורקן‬its known Hebrew equivalent. Vilmar might have been too sick to get rid of an unthinking first guess. See near the start of Part VII. Olson has found the solution. See p. 22. Vilmar sees that the second Jewish king Simon is the High Priest imaginatively called Simon the Just. [Stenhouse in the translation p. 108 follows Vilmar’s printed text against all the mss., and puts his own identification with Hyrcanus in a note without acknowledgment 27 ]. A.F. thinks this king was followed by another Jewish king called Shimcon. His source is a piece of fictional rewriting of history. See p. 24 on A.F. 79:18 (Stenhouse p. 106). Ms. C makes the second the son of the first at A.F. 81:10 (Stenhouse p. 108) as a bad guess, and Vilmar prints this without comment. [Stenhouse does not record this reading of C (his siglum P) in the thesis. In the notes to the apparatus, he says there is no ms. support for this word “his son”, while asserting that this Shimcon must be the son of John Hyrcanus, so it would be correct to have a reading “his son”, except that it is not attested. This is beyond analysis. Take this example as a clear warning about the whole work, even where it seems to make sense]. In this story, the stones commanded to be set up on the Mountain on one single defined occasion at the start of Dt XXVII and after the Ten Utterances in Ex XX and Dt V were put back in their place on the Mountain, and the Torah was read. A.F. says there were ten. He implies they stayed there. This is more startling than might be thought. See Part II, pp. 21 bottom – 37. P26FP26F P P P P P The second story is misleading as it stands. An account of rebuilding soon after must have been lost, since A.F. knows there was a sanctuary in the time of Alexander and in the time of Ptolemy I and in the time of Hyrcanus and after. In what is said straight after this about the party anachronistically called Dositheans by A.F. the question of the Tabernacle in relation to the sanctuary building and sacrifices, essentially important for the later Dositheans after taking on their new name of Dositheans, is not brought up (A.F. 82:3 – 83:15). It might not have been a concern at the time. What is said about the acts of Hyrcanus in 111 B.C. in trying to end the functioning of the sanctuary implies that both parties used the sanctuary. This is admittedly mainly an argument from silence. See p. 108. An enthusiast movement in Alexandria that was probably not Dosithean is mentioned by A.F. near the end of the list in his third notice of the Dositheans. See 27 In the thesis, vol. 2 variants to p. 88 line 12 of his text, he records this erroneous form in the lemma with the word “sic!” as being present in his collating base D (Stenhouse H) when it is not, even though he records the Stuttgart ms., which is mostly a copy of this ms., as having the form with zâ’. The photographs in the thesis are prints of negatives from prints from negatives. My photographs are originals with unbroken lines, so I can speak with certainty about the form of the name, though it is clear enough to be beyond any doubt in Stenhouse’s reproduction. Stenhouse falsely attributes the same non-existent reading to CL2L3Y (his PBGY). In the notes to the apparatus, end of vol. 3, p. 79, the dot is explained as being sukûn. These mss. don’t use sukûn, not ever. The mark is clearly a plain very big dot. The identity with the form ‫ חזקיה‬is not seen. Pummer, article of 2016, p. 12, accepts Stenhouse’s firm identification, without considering what could have been possible, without considering the information in Vilmar’s apparatus, and all the while not knowing ‫ עזקיה‬is a respelling of ‫ חזקיה‬to show the vowel sound, with the first consonant sound unchanged. This last is common knowledge. 117 Part VI. This was “the person from On”, Ûnẩ’å, that is, “the Heliopolitan” 28 and his followers, who must have been numerous and important. One statement is this: “Those that accepted his teaching and survived stayed in his movement and thought they were in the Time of Favour, though they were in Error” A.F. 164:2 – 3 (Stenhouse p. 229). 29 It also says they were told the Time of Favour would appear if they followed this unnamed leader. The two statements are not reconciled. What they meant by the Time of Favour is not explained. The statement that they got divorced and abandoned their possessions seems to mean the expectation of a sudden change in the state of the world. Not everyone was thinking about the Tabernacle, but very disparate movements were concerned about the return of the Time of Favour. There is a statement of something closer to the view of the Asâṭîr and the presumed view of the Sebuaeans, though definitely not the same, in regard to a group within Dositheanism with a name quoted by A.F. at 163:5 connecting them to the title Sadducees. There is strong evidence for such usage. Epiphanios, in his book Against Heresies says there are four Samaritan sects, Essenes, Sebuaeans, Gorothenians, and Dositheans. See above p. 103. Straight after this, at ch. XIV, he starts to describe the Jewish sects, the first being the Sadducees. In befuddlement, he says the Sadducees within Judaism derived from Dositheos. Before him Pseudo-Tertullian about 200 A.D. Heresies 11 said the same. Hippolytus Philosophoumena IX:29, after 223 A.D., says the Sadducees mostly live in Samaria and their only scripture is the Torah. The identification of the term Sadducees with Dositheans can be seen indirectly in information given by al-Qirqisâni in Part I chapter 6, on the Sadducees. This chapter comes straight after his chapter on the Samaritans, which might indicate an ultimate common origin with the source used by Epiphanios. Al-Qirqisâni’s data show the faction called Sadducees by him to be some variety of Dositheans. Not one of the numerous known traits of the Jewish faction called Sadducees are mentioned by him, and the two traits he does mention are not traits of theirs. It can be suggested that the Jewish party called Sadducees claimed to follow somehow in the line of Ṣādoq (using the Samaritan pronunciation). It will be shown below that the Dositheans traced themselves back to someone by this name. It would not be the the same line of descent. There might be a little bit of historical truth in the Jewish legend that the sanctuary on Mt. Gerizim was started up by someone of this name. This could be the name of a Samaritan reformer. The connection with the Jewish line with this name All the mss. are slightly corrupt but in slightly different ways. An Aramaic title has not been recognised because of being written in Arabic letters. The correct reading in Arabic letters is ‫ اوﻧﺎﯩﮫ‬or ‫ اوﻧﺎه‬. The original mistake was misreading a big nûn as lâm, due to ignorance of the subject. See my article Transmission, section 4. This scribal mistake is common. See note 34 p. 144 for an example. The name On is the native one. It is referred to as On and Bet Shemesh in Hebrew and Heliopolis in Greek. The modern name is ‘Ên Shams. It is in outer metropolitan Cairo downstream. 28 This is the wording in the first recension. The words “Those that accepted his teaching” ‫واﻟﺬي‬ ‫ ﻗﺒﻠﻮا ﻣﻨﮫ‬are only in ms. D (Stenhouse H) si vera lectio. This could have been omitted in all the other 29 mss. of both recensions by homoiarchon. Vilmar follows the consensus. Stenhouse writes nonsense, as “those of them who were killed”. He has changed “accepted” to “were killed” (with tâ’ instead of bâ’) and made ‫“ ﻣﻨﮫ‬from him” mean ‫“ ﻣﻨﮭﻢ‬from them”. The original reading of the next words seems to have been “and that survived (baqiyû) remained (baqiyû) in his movement and thought they were in the Time of Favour, though they were in Error”. The second occurrence of the word baqiyû “remained” has been dropped but can be seen to be needed from the word wa-ẓannû “and thought” with “and” prefixed (which Vilmar has mistakenly corrected and Stenhouse has ignored). 118 would then be a wrong guess. There are three positive data. One is that he always uses the present tense in describing them. The second is that he knows they have a calendar with every month having thirty days. A.F. quotes the original formula accurately when speaking about the Dositheans in his first notice at 82:14 – 15 (Stenhouse p. 110. He shows he does not understand the Arabic). A.F. quotes it like this: ‫وﻛﺎﻧﻮا‬ ‫( ﯾﻌﻤﻠﻮا اﻻﯾﺎم ﺑﺎﻟﻌﺪد ﻛﻞ ﺷﮭﺮ ﺛﻼﺛﯿﻦ ﯾﻮﻣﺎ ﻻ ﻏﯿﺮ‬verb Stem IV) “They would give numbers to the days as each month thirty days, not anything else”. [Stenhouse mistranslates]. Only mss. SB (Stenhouse SC) of the first recension are correct (B with a minor mistake). [My article The First Notice omits the explanation, which I did not know at the time]. Mss. DC (Stenhouse HP) of the first recension omit the third word by ignorance and the second recension has worse misleading rewording. The words here in the first notice as we have it leave out the information needed before this to understand this gnomic formula. As A.F. would never have abbreviated his source to the point of being meaningless unless you already knew, it seems a statement of the rule given by him in the second notice, but in the clearer form quoted by Qirqisâni with two examples, has been lost very early. Another bit of evidence is that the old name Sadducees was used in the time of Hyrcanus for what seems to be the faction later renamed the Dositheans after the time of Dositheos, somewhat to the puzzlement of A.F. as can be seen from his roundabout composition. See pp. 108 – 9. At A.F. 163:3 – 10 (Stenhouse p. 228) the Dosithean group named after their founder ‫יצדק‬ Yaṣdaq or ‫ צדוק‬Ṣẩdoq can be identified with the Dositheans called ‫צדוקאי‬ Ṣaddûqẩ’i (definite plural) at 160:15 (Stenhouse p. 224). See Part VI. The last bit of evidence is conclusive on its own. The third positive datum is a different wording of a datum given by A.F. in his second notice of the Dositheans at 157:3 – 4 (Stenhouse p. 219 line 6 entirely corrupt) where A.F. says the Dositheans would only observe a festival day on the Sabbath, even if that meant moving it from one day to another. The datum is only in ms. A. On the differences between recensions in these lines and the correct text just here, see my article Transmission part 4. Examples of the third datum given by al-Qirqisâni are that the Sabbath during the Passover week or during the eight days of Booths would not be counted as one of the seven days of Passover or eight days of Booths, so that in fact one real day would be added to the length of Passover and one real day to the length of the period of Booths. It could have been seen as incongruous to make a Sabbath a day of ‫ חול מועד‬, and the words of the Torah could be read as fixing the number of such days. The calculation seems to have been over-simplified by al-Qirqisâni or his source. There are three days of special observance of Festivals in the seventh month, the first, fifteenth, and twenty-first. If they did not fall on a sabbath, there were three unnumbered days in the seventh month and it must have had thirty-three real days. The Passover month, the first, has two special days, on the fifteenth and the twenty-first. If each of these was observed on the following unnumbered sabbath, the month would have had thirty-two real days. The week of Unleavened Bread would have become nine days long. The five unnumbered days added to the twelve months of thirty days each give a year of 365 days. This calendar would have been easier to use than the one used by the other party. The consequences would have been that not every month started on a new moon, and the first of the first and the first of the seventh could not have been exactly half a year apart. Neither of these consequences need have mattered. The first of the first, as the first day of the religious year, must have had to be on a new moon, but not necessarily the start of any other month. It could have been on any day of the week. If the first of the first were on the sixth day of the week, for example, then the fifteenth, 119 the day of Passover, would be on the sixth day of the week, but would be observed on the sabbath. There would be 180 plus two days or 182 days or twenty-six weeks from the first of the first till the first of the seventh, so the first, fifteenth, and twenty-first of the seventh would be on the sixth day of the week. The first of the seventh would be a day after the new moon most years, because a lunar month is about half a day short of thirty days. There would be 30 times 6 plus 4 or 184 real days from the first of the seventh till the first of the first of the next year, which is twenty-six weeks and two days. This would put the first of the first on the first day of the week, so Passover would be on the first day of the week, but observed on the following Sabbath, the twentieth of the month. This would be the start of the week of Unleavened Bread. The Sabbath following would have to be counted as observance of the seventh and last day of the week of Unleavened Bread the day before that Sabbath. If Pentecost was counted from the Sabbath of the Week of Unleavened Bread, it would always be on the first day of the week. The four previously known ways of calculating Pentecost are set out in my book Principles of Samaritan Halachah, pp. 322 – 323. In that place I said the Dositheans agreed with the Pharisees by counting from the day after the day of Passover. I was wrong. The apparent agreement in the simple statement by A.F. in the first notice of the Dositheans hides a sharp disagreement and a fifth way of caculating. The Pharisaic calculation depends on artificially taking the word shabbat to mean the Festival day. The Dositheans must have counted from the sabbath after the fifteenth, in agreement with the modern Samaritan practice. The difference between them and the Pharisees and Rabbanite Judaism, and just as much between them and the modern practice, is that they made this sabbath the day of special observance of Passover on the Mountain, not just the usual observance of any sabbath or the Great Day of the sabbath of the Week of Unleavened Bread on the Mountain. They must have had some kind of special synagogue services on the dates mentioned in the Torah, such as the fifteenth of the first for Passover. Having special services on the Mountain (and without sacrifices in the daytime) seems likely. The difference between them and other Samaritans might have been hard to describe. One misconception now has to be warned against. This is not the calendar with months of thirty days used by the Qumran sect. First, the unnumbered days are in different places. Second, this is not the way the Qumran sect calculated Pentecost. Now we have the solution to the puzzle nearly two thousand years old of how the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke set Passover on a Thursday night and John on a Friday night, so that there is no Last Supper in John. No other known calendar would allow making the night and following daytime of observance of Passover a day later than the full moon. Here is more evidence of Samaritan outlook in John. A.F. says at the start of the first notice of the Dositheans that the main cause of their separation was abandoning the right Festivals, which means they had a different calendar. Dositheans using a form of the ancient label of Ṣaddûqẩ’i are explicitly contrasted with Såkte and his followers at 163:5 (Stenhouse p. 228), where it seems to say they arose in opposition to a doctrine of Såkte’s that took the consequences of the Fẩnûtå to intolerable extremes. [The verb wa-ghayyarû “they disagreed” has been mistranslated by Stenhouse p. 228 as “they were jealous” as if in the first stem, against the information in his thesis. It can be seen from note 1065a that the translation here was written before the thesis. The notes to the apparatus in the thesis p. 170 on the text at page 175 line 3 disagree with the translation on the meaning of the verb]. A.F. writes “They disagreed with Såkte and his associates”. All mss. of the 120 second recension have a corrupt form of the name Såkte but Khaḍir and the Hebrew translation have it correctly. (Khaḍir has the wording “They changed what Såkte and his followers said”). The name Såkte is partly corrupt in all mss. of the first recension. Vilmar made the wrong choice of form by printing ‫ ﺷﻠﯿﮫ‬. In this place what is in the mss. does look more like what was chosen by Vilmar, though the evidence of the other instances of the name is compelling. For the exact forms see above note 20 p. 95. 30 [Stenhouse’s argument in the notes to the translation that the Arabic waP29FP29F P The words immediately following are a statement of their main principle, by which they differed from the main principle of Såkte and his followers. They asserted the holiness of the Mountain with or without the Tabernacle and beyond the degree of holiness of the Tabernacle. Såkte had gone to extremes in asserting that the Mountain had no holiness at all during the Fẩnûtå. At A.F. 161:12 -- 13 (Stenhouse p. 226 middle) it says “He (Såkte) started to make replacements in (‫ ﯾﺒﺪل ﻓﻲ‬yubaddil fî) the Festivals, and spread this error amongst the Samaritans”. The replacements would be modified religious services, not changes in the dates. Mss. CL1A (Stenhouse PEF), representing all text-types, correctly have fî after yubaddil. All other mss. read “He started replacing the Festivals”. This word fî and the word “he started” mean he started by making some replacements in some Festival services then declared the Mountain profane and then there were consequences to all the Festivals. The next sentence is difficult at first sight. “He declared Mt. Gerizim to have been replaced ( ‫ ﻣﺒﺪﻻ‬mubaddalan) like all the other festivals (‫ ﻣﺜﻞ ﺑﺎﻗﻲ اﻷﻋﯿﺎد‬mithla bâqi ’l-acyâd) and said anyone praying towards Mt. Gerizim might as well pray towards a grave [literally ‘is like someone praying towards a grave’]”. Khaḍir has ‘He declared the sacred Mountain to have been replaced like the festivals and said anyone praying on the sacred Mountain is like someone praying towards a grave’. Ms. C (Stenhouse P) stands alone in having the word ‫ ﺟﺒﺎل‬jibâl “mountains” as against ‫ اﻋﯿﺎد‬acyâd “Festivals”. At first sight, this seems correct, and Vilmar printed it without telling the reader it was a unique reading. It makes sense to say “like all other mountains” but it does not seem to make sense to say “like all the other festivals”. Stenhouse gets round the difficulty in the same way as usual, by ignoring the word bâqi altogether, translating “just like the Feasts”, causing loss of the argument intended. With the reading jibâl, it means Såkte declared Mt. Gerizim to have undergone the same kind of change as the Festivals. The Festivals had become impossible to carry out as required because of the disappearance of the Tabernacle. Here then is a rewording of the whole sentence, keeping the reading jibâl. Just as the Festivals had lost their holiness without the Tabernacle, so had the Mountain, and Mt. Gerizim is like any other mountain. This means, among other things, that praying towards Mt. Gerizim is meaningless. If the reading acyâd instead of jibâl is kept, which I think it should, the argument is the same, and more is said. Although elliptically expressed, it would have been understood by the members of the movement. The word bâqi remains part of the expression of the argument. The argument then is that the three Pilgrim Festivals on the Mountain can’t be observed because the Mountain has been changed by losing its holiness because there is no Tabernacle, just the same as the other Festivals can’t be satisfactory in the present era. Even though going up the Mountain was never required of everyone for the three Pilgrim Festivals year after year, there still has to be a special sacrificial and prayer service on the sacred site, and this is impossible to do properly in the Fẩnûtå. This will show up in the form of the service on the Mountain and the synagogue service. This movement went further in having no special services on the Mountain and making its own changes to the synagogue service. It seems that the word acyâd is original, and A.F. has copied the elliptical wording of his source. A simple presentation of the same argument leading to exactly the same conclusion is to read the sentence like this: “He declared Mt. Gerizim to have been replaced, and therefore the three Pilgrim Festivals, like all the other festivals”. Dositheans in general maintained that as there was no Tabernacle, most of the Festivals could not be observed properly, either on the Mountain or in synagogues, but there were still the three Pilgrim Festivals in some form because of the holiness of the Mountain. Såkte denied the holiness of the Mountain itself without the Tabernacle, and therefore the three Pilgrim Festivals necessarily had to be replaced by a special new service recognising this, as with all the other Festivals. On this reading the structure of the sentence becomes more logical. It can be seen why they would have had a different synagogue service and why if they did go up the Mountain for any category of Festival they would have had a different order of service there to other Dositheans. Stenhouse’s apparatus to the thesis text p. 173 line 15 says the name “Mt. Gerizim” is missing in ms. C (his P), but this is false. See further on Såkte as compared to all Dositheans note 22 pp. 103 -- 104 and the Annotations to XII:14 and XII:20. 30 121 aṣḥâbhu ‫ واﺻﺤﺎﺑﮫ‬meaning “and his followers” (or associates) means enchantments because there is a Hebrew word not cognate that means this is too illogical to analyse]. The second recension has the name in corrupt form as ‫ ﺳﯿﺴﻨﮫ‬SYSNH except for L 1 which has ‫ ﺳﯿﻨﺴﮫ‬SYNSH. [The reading of L 1 (Stenhouse E) is missing in Stenhouse’s collations]. This is similar to the variants of the name in the mss. of the first recension, but with lâm being misread as a big nûn. The form of the name must have been too uncertain to recognise. The form ‫ ﺳﯿﺴﻨﮫ‬is a wild guess starting with ms. A (Stenhouse F). [Khaḍir definitely has ‫ סכתה‬in Hebrew letters, but Stenhouse has not looked. In the translation Stenhouse accepts the inferior reading within the second recension, ignoring the first recension, which makes perfect sense. He translates it as “the scroll-handle”. The word “the” is not in the Arabic, so this must be the name of a person, not a thing. Stenhouse inserts the word “the” without letting on. As for the unbelievable manoeuvring of how he gets to this meaning, see below, note 34 pp. 144 – 145. Read it to believe it]. Here is the reading of the next sentence, on lines 5 – 6, as in the first recension according to SDBP (Stenhouse SHCM). “They said Mt. Gerizim was holy (‫ ﻣﻘﺪس‬muqaddas) as he said ‫[ ﻛﻤﺎ ﻗﺎل‬i.e. as God said, meaning as in Scripture] as if the House were on it ‫” واﻟﺒﯿﺖ ﻋﻠﯿﮫ‬. [Stenhouse mistranslates]. Mss. L 1 V of the second recension (Stenhouse EVa) agree. [Stenhouse’s collation of L 1 is wrong]. (It would be possible to read the word ‫ﻣﻘﺪس‬ not as the adjective muqaddas meaning holy, but as the noun Maqdis equivalent to the Hebrew ‫ מקדש‬Maqdåsh, but without a definite prefix). The reading of ms. A (Stenhouse F) of the second recension is the same but more explicit and would have been enough to give Stenhouse the intended meaning, except that he did not record it in the thesis. Instead of “as he said” it has “as God said”. Ms. J (Stenhouse the same siglum) of the second recension is equally explicit in reading “as he said in the book [i.e. the Torah] about it”. (The omission of ‫ واﻟﺒﯿﺖ‬in J (Stenhouse same siglum) is probably scribal error. The ms. is consistently unreliable). [Stenhouse did not collate this ms. here. Actually, he hardly ever uses it]. The reading of ms. C of the first recension (Stenhouse P) is shorter but means the same. “They said Mt. Gerizim was as if the house were on it ‫” ﻛﻤﺎ ﻛﺎن اﻟﺒﯿﺖ ﻋﻠﯿﮫ‬. Vilmar follows but changes slightly. “They said Mt. Gerizim was holy (muqaddas) as if the House were on it’. All mss. of the second recension except AL 1 VJ (Stenhouse FEVaJ) i.e. L 2 L 3 MNY along with Khaḍir (Stenhouse BaGRNY) are shorter but even more explicit. “They said Mt. Gerizim was a Sanctuary’. The term here is ‫ ﺑﯿﺖ ﻣﻘﺪس‬Bayt Maqdis the equivalent of the Hebrew ‫ בית מקדש‬Bit Maqdåsh. Compare the Annotations to XI:22, note d. This would have been hard to argue against, since it is clearly stated in Scripture in Jacob’s own words, from before the giving of the Torah. [Stenhouse has not recognised the common Arabic expression “he [i.e. God] said” borrowed from Islamic terminology (without any connotation of borrowing of Islamic thought) instead of saying “as written”. He inserts the name Dusis against all the mss. This goes beyond carelessness. In lines 6 -- 7 it says observance according to Scripture must be carried out right now, even if only to the extent allowed by circumstances. “What is written must be carried out on it and what is not possible is not to be carried out (V [Stenhouse Va] adds ‘on it’)”. Stenhouse misunderstands the syntax and the meaning of the fifth and last verb meaning “is not possible”]. This sentence is not in L 1 P (Stenhouse EM). Ms. L 1 is the second-oldest ms. of the second recension. Ms. P belongs to the second recension but has numerous correct readings. This omission might, however, only be due to homoioteleuton. Ms. C (Stenhouse P) wrongly omits RR RR RR 122 RR “on it”. Mss. SDCB (Stenhouse SHPC) wrongly have “possible” instead of “not possible”. So the second sentence is only preserved correctly in the mss. of the second recension (but not L 1 ) and Khaḍir, and the first sentence is fully preserved only in the first recension and mss. AL 1 V of the second. The dictum in its two parts seems to have been hard for the scribes to understand. They accepted the legitimacy of the three Pilgrim Festivals in their own time. See above, note 22 p. 103. This brought them back to original Dosithean doctrine. Denying the holiness of the Mountaintop in the present era would have been socially difficult. There might have been more to it. They seem to have tried to accommodate the sect agreeing with the Asâṭîr, which was identified above with the Sebuaeans, by modifying the doctrine of the reason for the need of the return of the Tabernacle while keeping the doctrine of the need for its return, by arguing that the holiness of the Mountain preceded the giving of the Torah. This would have enabled the two sects to work together and to a limited extent worship together. This is speculation. The undeniable fact is that there was significant shift in the reasoning of one of the two main Dosithean factions which brought them closer to the Sebuaeans or the authors of the Asâṭîr. It was argued above on p. 95 that the procession up the Mountain in 36 A.D. after widespread heralding and general acceptance of the doctrine of the expectation of the reappearance of the paraphernalia and implements (though not immediately) seems to have been organised and official. The reappearance of the Tabernacle is not mentioned. Dositheans and Sebuaeans would all have accepted the desirability of the reappearance of the Mosaic paraphernalia. In my article Transmission I argued that the core of the Arabic Joshua book was meant to be acceptable to both factions by its silence about whether the service of the sanctuary or sacrifices continued and ambiguity about what happened to the Tabernacle. (g). There is evidence of invention of doctrine. There is no record in the last chapter of the original Arabic Joshua book, ch. 42, or A.F., or anywhere else, of the new doctrine of the Dositheans forbidding sacrifices or even a sanctuary building or the expectation of the return of the Tabernacle being proclaimed by the High Priest c Azzi ‫ עזי‬at the start of the Fẩnûtå on Monday the first day of the first month of the year 261 of entry into Canaan. A.F. describes the rebuilding of the sanctuary at the start of Persian rule (f) in detail with approval, leaving the fact that it was not rebuilt near the end of Persian rule unexplained. At 93:16 – 94:16 (Stenhouse 127 -- 128) (j) he says there was a building in early Hellenistic times. At 171:12 – 15 (Stenhouse 241) (l) A.F. says there was still a building till 484 A.D. Throughout his book he avoids the question of whether there were sacrifices before the Exile. The last chapter of the original Arabic Joshua book, ch. 42, (d) is glaringly silent on this. A.F. lets information out at 104:9 – 10 (Stenhouse 142) (k). There are three versions of how the apparatus was restored. One of the excerpts from a lost history (g) attached at the end of the mss. of the Arabic Joshua book, ch. 45, says the silver and gold implements and apparatus, which had perished in the Exile, were remade on the model of the originals in the former Sanctuary, called explicitly the Haykal here in Arabic. A.F. in his first account (e) says the implements were hidden, but implies they were recovered later. A.F. in his second account (f) says the Priestly garments were recovered from the foreign rulers at great cost, but the apparatus was remade. The first account by A.F. (e) and this excerpt from a lost history (g) say nothing about whether 123 the sanctuary structure was still standing on the return from the exile. The second account by A.F. (d) says it had to be rebuilt. The first account by A.F. (e) says nothing about sacrifices, probably to avoid the question. The second account by A.F. (f) says there were sacrifices before the exile but not after the return. The attachment to the Arabic Joshua book (g) says there were sacrifices before and after the return from the Exile. An excerpt from a lost history (h), perhaps the same lost history, at the same place in the Tûlẩdå (p. 85) says the High Priest cÂbed-el built an altar on the return from the Exile and offered up a hundred cattle, with no mention of anything going wrong. A.F. 104:1 – 11 (Stenhouse 142) (k) says there were still sacrifices in the time of Hyrcanus. The composite account at A.F. at 72:7 – 16 (Stenhouse 94 -95) (f) reconciles a doctrine that there can be no sacrifices in the present era with historical fact, or what might still have been actual practice up till the time, neatly and quite logically, if the explanation above in note 26 pp. 115 – 116 is right. It is satisfying because it still legitimises a sanctuary and its cultus inside in accordance with the Torah. This same line of logic might have led to the earlier unbelievable Dosithean invention with denial of history. The slight reordering in the second recension of A.F. at 72:7 – 16 (f) might go back to a correction in his source trying to correct the signs of patching of two accounts, but might go back to A.F. himself. On reworking by A.F. himself in difficult places see Part VII pp. 243 – 244 and p. 252. The favourable mention of the Showbread and lampstand is kept in the revision, along with the favourable mention of the modest structure and the great altar. It seems that for centuries on end till 484 A.D. there was a modest structure with the golden table for the Showbread and the golden lampstand and perhaps an incense burner, but now with no sacrifices. The second part of this composite account at 72:7 – 16 (f) with the angelic revelation looks like a later backdating of the Sebuaean decision to give up sacrifices while still keeping their sanctuary building and thereby even adding to its own importance in itself, but keeping the original argument that sacrifices were not to be offered any more because it could be seen they were not accepted any more. The justification was the honest conclusion of serious thought. (h). Here is a summary of what has been shown in this work about the two meanings of the term fẩnu, with their relationship to the allowing of sacrifices and a sanctuary building, but incorporating some of what was already known for clarity and to show how the new data fit together. (Some of the information is in my article The First Notice and my chapter Mikra, but much more is known now). The doctrine of the expectation of the reappearance of the Tabernacle with the original vessels was an innovation, though derived from existing doctrine. The origin of the concept of ‫פנו‬ fẩnu is put in the Persian period by A.F. It is not defined, but means a time when the Samaritans are subject to foreign rule that gets in the way of practice of religion. This is certain, because it is said there can be no sacrifices in a time of fẩnu, and it is acknowledged there were sacrifices before the Exile. A division into two factions is attested for as early as 111 B.C. by A.F. See above p. 108. In another place A.F. puts the breaking away of the faction later known as Dositheans at the end of the Persian period. This might be deliberate backdating by the Dositheans themselves. Centuries later the term was redefined to suit a new doctrine. In the definite state ‫ פנותה‬Fẩnûtå it was seized on as the technical doctrinal term for the present era, the time of waiting for the reappearance of the Tabernacle. Those that asserted the new doctrine were called Dositheans. This faction had originally been called the Sadducees Ṣåddûqẩ’i. 124 (No connection with the Jewish faction by the same name). See above pp. 107 bottom -- 109, where it is shown that A.F. does not understand how a Samaritan faction could be called the Ṣåddûqẩ’i. (Early Christian authors were confused as well. Much of what they say about the Sadducees is a description of the Samaritan faction by this name). A.F., in his first notice of the Dositheans, thinks he describes them as they were before the appearance of Dositheos. It can be seen that he does not know what they were called before accepting the authority of Dositheos. He has to call them the Dositheans, but then he does not know what to call the son of the High Priest of the opposing faction that joined them and became their leader, because if he called him Dositheos the composition would be jarring, so he can only use his nickname, and the wording shows he knows it was only his nickname. Part at least of what he says about them before their new leader is totally anachronistic. He says their book of doctrine said God could be worshipped in the land of Zawîlah till he could be worshipped on Mt. Gerizim. See my article The First Notice for the explanation of the choice of name. They meant on land near the foot of the Mountain, that is, on the Balâṭah meadow, known as Marj al-Bahâ’. This is specifically Såkte’s doctrine. This usefully gives an approximate date. (I did not see the anachronism when writing the article, because at the time I had not worked out the developments within the Dosithean faction). Såkte denied the Mountain had any holiness at all in the present era, the Fẩnûṭå, which he also called the Time of Error, for reasons unknown. It is amply documented that most of his own followers could not reject all worship on the Mountaintop. It is evident from the third notice of the Dositheans by A.F. that the denial of any holiness at all to the Mountaintop was an innovation, not existing Dosithean doctrine. Nothing like this is attributed to Dositheos himself in the first or second notices of the Dositheans. Nothing like this is attributed to the extremists that took over the Dosithean faction after the murder of Lîbi. The splitting of the Samaritans into two parties, one of which came to be called the Dositheans centuries later, might have happened at the end of the Persian period, where A. F. sets it, though this is unlikely. It is known, however, that it was before the time of Hyrcanus, as has been seen. Nevertheless, what A.F. knows about them does not date from before Dositheos, as he thinks. This means the concept of the Fẩnûtå in its later form was invented after the death of Dositheos, not by the extremist dictatorial pietists that held power for a little while after the murder of Lîbi, but by Såkte when he took power. When his followers rejected the full extreme form of the doctrine that denied all holiness to the Mountaintop, they kept the concept, but in a more manageable form. It is certain that they kept the concept in some form because it survived till the formation of a common theology of future expectation in the fourteenth century and became central to it. A.F. does give the important datum that Dositheos not only claimed but wrote at length that he was the only legitimate High Priest. This seems to mean this was the first time the two factions had not recognised the same High Priest. Although this seems surprising, the analogy of the Jews shows that two factions could accept a single High Priest out of the need for such a person if there is to be a single holy place recognised by everyone. The analogy of the Jews indicates that this High Priest could still be firmly affiliated with one faction and at different times a member of one faction or the other could hold the position. It can be assumed that each Samaritan faction would have had its own Chief Priest. To avoid confusion, this person would be termed ‫ רבץ‬rêbåṣ, a term which later took the form Rabbîs in Arabic. (There is some ambiguity in this term. A single faction could call its chief Priest in a single place with a big Samaritan population by this term). The Sadducees accepted the authority of Dositheos, acknowledging him as the Second Prophet 125 predicted by Moses. From then on the faction was commonly known as the Dositheans, but there are multiple indications that they still used their old name amongst themselves. Dating Dositheos is hard, but indirect evidence puts his death in the very first years of the first century A.D. After his death, and after the death of a leader called Lîbi ‫ לוי‬, an extremist pietistic movement held power for a little while. Their unbearable domination was ended by Såkte. The concept of the Fẩnûtå as the present era after the occultation of the Tabernacle in its most fully developed and extreme form is his. There was then a reaction against the most intolerable form of the consequences of the new concept by most of his own followers, though they still accepted his authority and agreed with him in all other respects. Detail follows. The other old faction were called Sebuaeans by everyone. The Essenes or ‫ חסידים‬could have been a pietistic movement within the Sebuaeans but might equally well just be the Sebuaeans under their own name for themselves. In the tenth and early eleventh century the two parties largely but not fully reached agreement on halachah. There is extensive evidence of remaing disagreement on details in my book Principles of Samaritan Halachah, but such disagreement did not disturb anyone. See note 22 pp. 103 -- 104. Full theological agreement came in the fourteenth century. See below. The assumption that the Samaritan sanctuary was never rebuilt after the time of Hyrcanus is an obvious fallacy. Why not? See pp. 109 – 110. The extensive Samaritan documentation has been in print since 1865. Not reading it is plain laziness. There is documentation of its destruction in 484 A.D. Hadrian rebuilt the sanctuary. See p. 14. It seems from the Durrân there was still a sanctuary in the late second century. See p. 51. The sanctuary appears on coins from Antoninus Pius to Volusian. The Haykal was still important in the late fifth century. A.D. See pp. 109 middle – 112 top. The Sebuaeans and Dositheans did not go away either. The Sebuaeans existed in the time of Bẩbå Råbbå according to A.F. 131:12 – 14 (Stenhouse p. 182). This was in the second century. See Part III section 3. Sebuaeans existed in the time of Epiphanios in the fourth c. A.D. See pp. 102 – 103 middle. The book Halachot Gedolot, which mentions them, is from about 830. See p. 102. Hostility towards the Dositheans shows up in the continuation of A.F. as late as the mid to late ninth century A.D. In those records, the opponents of the Dositheans are in a position of power over the Dositheans on what happens on the Mountaintop. Sebuaean ideology is implicit in the appendix to the Arabic Joshua book and the excerpt from a lost history in the Tûlẩdå, and the last chapter of the original Arabic Joshua book is ambiguous on purpose. The Dositheans would still have had to agree that the Sebuaean sanctuary building was over the site of the original building, and since the original building had not been occulted along with the Tabernacle, it could have been thought legitimate to have it as an expression of hope. Whether they considered the cultus of the sanctuary without sacrifices to be legitimate is considered further on. The pericope A.F. 72:7 – 16 (Stenhouse pp. 94 -- 95) relating a realisation and revelation that sacrifices are not allowed in a time of fẩnu must be back-dated, since A.F. records sacrifices in the time of Hyrcanus. The justification is either Sebuaean or common to both Sebuaeans and Dositheans. The second possibility is more likely. See pp. 113 – 115. See note 26 p. 115 -- 116. There are some indications of when the story was needed. Josephus is silent on why Pilate massacred Samaritans about to go up the Mountain to express their expectation of the reappearance of the Mosaic paraphernalia in 36 A.D. and refuses to say what was bad about it and lies about the origin or meaning of the paraphernalia. It was argued above on pp. 95 – 96 top that both factions might have come together this time to express an expectation they could 126 both agree on. That would indicate the Sebuaeans had abandoned sacrifices, perhaps as early as the Dositheans, and shifted their attention entirely towards the sanctuary building. Their attention this time would have been on the reappearance of the paraphernalia, not the Tabernacle, which is not mentioned. Modern scholars have consistently overlooked the distinction. The new Dosithean doctrine, from just before the time of Dositheos himself according to the start of the Second Notice by A.F., was that sacrifices are not allowed in the present era, the Fẩnûtå, while the Mosaic Tabernacle is occulted. This gave relief by ending the sacrificial system while not disobeying Scripture. The time of meaningful sacrifice in the story of mankind was fading away. Såkte defeated himself by forgetting about the holiness of the Mountaintop in itself, but all Dositheans were willing to welcome an argument for the end of sacrifices. There is no record of any disagreement on this. The Sebuaeans found a better argument to end sacrifices while keeping the sanctuary building and all the rest of its cultus. After amalgamation much later, the Dosithean argument was kept. The two arguments for the ending of sacrifices would have been formulated by the learned, but it would not have been disconcerting to people in general when it happened. Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop three times a year was still encouraged. The act would still have been as satisfying as ever because marked by a special order of service with specific hymns. The congregation would have been given the Priestly Blessing as worded in Numbers VI. The same can be said for the observance of the Day of Atonement on the Mountaintop. The cultus of the sanctuary building continued. The essentials of this are summed up in the account of the rebuilding of the sanctuary on the Return from the Exile by A.F., the very account that was used by the Sebuaeans as a historicisation of their argument for the ending of sacrifices. See pp. 113 – 115. The account can only be interpreted to mean that the existence of the building was favoured, and so were the Showbread and libations of wine and olive oil. It can be assumed there was an incense altar and the permanent light. If the congregation did not see all this or hear the special hymns recited inside the building, they were vividly aware that the sanctuary was fulfilling its purpose. They did see the libations, so the altars kept all their original significance. There still would have been buildings for study and teaching. There would still have been the satisfaction of gathering with numerous other people on special occasions. People living too far away to get to the Mountain still had a central holy place to attach themselves to. Synagogue services everywhere would have been satisfying because echoing the services in the sanctuary at the same time. People living far away or in other countries could still send community and personal offerings. Before then some of this money would have paid for special sacrifices, but it could also be used for the upkeep of the sanctuary building and the functions of the temple, study and teaching and maintenance of books and charity and the maintenance of the functions of Priests scattered throughout Palestine and in other countries. Scholars could be trained and sent to communities throughout Palestine and in other countries. When sacrifices ended, money donated could still be used in all these other ways and would be regarded as a gift to the sanctuary. The sanctuary still kept its important function of being a symbol of identity of individuals and communities in relation to the outside world. For this purpose, the one sacred sanctuary building in the one sacred place might well have been more important for Samaritans outside Samaria than in it. The 127 evidence from Delos and Thessalonica demonstrates this. The analogy of Judaism leads to the same conclusion. The Samaritans accomplished this without letting zealots undo it. The proof that sacrifices were not allowed in a time of fẩnu since it could be plainly seen they were not accepted by being wholly or partly burnt up by fire from heaven must have been convincing. At the same time, this proof could have become weak when examined, because it was known that sacrifices had been accepted before the Exile. The only explanation would have been that the time of Fẩnu started with the Exile. This would mean the occultation of the Tabernacle and its apparatus was irrelevant. There would still not be any explanation of why the time of Fẩnu had not ended on the Return and the rebuilding of the sanctuary. It was suggested above that an answer might have been that the Israelites were still under foreign rule, which meant they could not have a king of their own from amongst their brethren. An Israelite king would have some religious function. One of them would be to read aloud from the Torah on Sukkot. Agrippas did this. Another function would be to make the observance of sabbatical and Jubilee years possible. Necessary above all would be to make sure the administration was in accordance with all the provisions of the Torah. Having an Israelite king is a mitsvah in itself. It is known that these considerations could be powerful. The last in particular motivated some factions of the Jews in the revolts against Rome. It must be asked why the ending of sacrifices by the Sebuaeans happened when it did. It certainly did not happen at the end of the Persian period. It was certainly later than the time of Hyrcanus. Either something made the argument acute, or the collective subconscious wish to end sacrifices became acute. Given that the Dositheans ended sacrifices at nearly the same time, the second reason seems plausible. It is hard to prove this. One argument would be the analogy of the Jews. If they had really wanted to have sacrifices after the two revolts, they could have. Enormous numbers of sacrifices are not required by the Torah if it is not possible to have them. The Roman administration destroyed the temple because it was a nationalistic focus, but they could have allowed limited sacrifices in an unimpressive temple to keep the populace content. There is some evidence that this offer was open before the empire came under the rule of the Christian Church, but was not taken up. Not doing this could only have been because the meaning was gone. Maimonides is right when he says time was up by then and the ending was Providential, harsh as it was. In the Jewish synagogue service Jerusalem is often mentioned, and in some places a wish for the return of the temple comes up, but there are very few clear suggestions of starting up the sacrificial system again. There is no clear statement that it won’t start up again either. In practice, the sacrificial system has been forgotten about. There are some Ultra-Orthodox Jews getting ready for when the sacrificial system is brought back, but they are a tiny minority and looked at askance. The book of Leviticus is read, but only according to the concept that there is a deeper meaning not obviously apparent which can benefit anyone that studies the book. The same outlook can be seen in the Samaritan concept of the Tẩ’eb. When describing what is expected, the sacrifices don’t come up. He is expected to make the Mosaic Tabernacle reappear, in much the same way as the Dositheans hoped, but he is regarded mainly as the inaugurator of a time of full observance of the Torah. He is hardly ever named, but whenever a writer commits himself to naming the Person Coming Back, it is usually said he will be like Joshua, or will be Joshua himself. Nevertheless, the opinion that the Person Coming Back is Enoch is attested, with express denial that it is Joshua. See Merx p. 75 and the context. My judgment is that 128 the view of the importance of Enoch reflected in II Enoch was held continuously from ancient times but there was another view held by a significant minority within the Dositheans. I think this is why a title is used instead of a specific name, so that everyone could assent to the use of the term Tẩ’eb and the concept of a new Time of Favour, called the Second Kingdom. The implications of the equivalence of Enoch and Moses are profound. Olson goes into this in detail, but more work is needed. (i). The wish for a king is not to be underestimated. Agrippas worked hard and was genuinely concerned for the religion of Israel, but he was greatly appreciated just for fulfilling a role. Both Talmuds, followed by the Yosippon, only know of one long-lived and long-reigning Agrippas. Agrippas II is only mentioned by Josephus, whose account is not convincing. Jews never give their children the same name as their parents. Besides this, Josephus has nothing much to say about Agrippas II. The only substantial content is rewording of information about Agrippas I. The rest is just verbiage. Some of it does not even sound like a serious try at making things up. Amongst the reasons given for saying Agrippas II was useless or reigned badly is that he built an observation deck so as to see into the temple grounds. Josephus doesn’t explain what was wrong with that or how it made him an ineffectual king, but the new Schürer, for example, repeats this unthinkingly. There is much more. An explanation that would work perfectly is that the date of accession of the fictional Agrippas II was when the first Samaritan Patriarch was appointed. The Samaritans had been satisfied with Herod. He made himself visible in Samaria and lived there a lot of the time and showed benevolence, which is part of being a king. In fact, he treated his subjects in the kingdom of Samaria better than in the kingdom of Judaea. He was in thrall to the Roman emperor, but still active. In the light of all this, it seems plausible that the time of absence of an Israelite king standing between the people and the direct rule of a heavy-handed foreign governor would have been when the concept of the time of fẩnu as understood by the Sebuaeans could have become important. (j). After all this, feasible times for the ending of sacrifices by the Dositheans and the Sebuaeans can be worked out. It is partly a question of eliminating when it would have been unlikely. The late Hasmonaean period is not workable, because a temple with sacrifices was needed to protect the religion. Under Herod there was stability and contentment, not perfect, but good enough. The same under Agrippas. Dating Dositheos is hard. The usual dating depends on Christian synchronising of Simon with Peter and Dositheos with Simon, but the Dositheos pictured only has a few followers, and is not the leader of an ancient innumerable movement. The fantastic fictions between the second and third notices by A.F. don’t help because they depend on reworking of Christian sources. It seems the death of Dositheos and murder of Lîbi were in the very first years of the first c. A.D., but the proof is indirect and more work is needed. It is certain that Såkte took power very soon after. He invented his own extreme version of the Dosithean doctrine of the Fẩnûtå. See Part VI. A plausible time for the Sebuaeans to have argued that a new time of fẩnu had come and end sacrifices because of this (on top of the collective subconscious wish) would have been between the death of Herod in 4 B.C., but specially under Pontius Pilate. This means both factions would have been ready to stop having sacrifices at about the same time if they had not already done so. The Dositheans could have acted first because they had a leader, Såkte, who used his authority drastically. Most of his followers were not convinced by his rejection of the 129 status of the Mountaintop in the Fẩnûtå. One part of his doctrine, the ending of sacrifices, was already accepted by all Dositheans. The second notice of the Dositheans by A.F. starts with a story that assumes sacrifices had ended before before the time of Dositheos himself. The usual view of the doctrine of the Dositheans after the murder of Lîbi has been coloured by the attention given to Såkte. His authority as leader of one of the two Dosithean factions was complete and his authority as decider of halachah unquestionable, except on the question of the status of the Mountaintop, on which most of the people that accepted his authority disagreed. These two facts are proven at length in Part VI. See also above, pp. 120 middle – 123. There has long been a serious misconception that his views on the status of the Mountaintop were accepted by all Dositheans in his time and after. Såkte was intolerably extreme in his rejection of any special services on the Mountaintop and specially the three pilgrim festivals (A.F. 162:16 – 163:2; Stenhouse pp. 227 – 228 top). His rejection of pilgrimage to the Mountaintop follows logically from his assertion that the Mountain was not holy, which A.F. records well before this with no connection. A.F. does not quote any argument for this, but it must have been a consequence of his version of the concept of the Fẩnûtå. This is the only assertion of his for which A.F. quotes a justification. Såkte can’t say Dositheos uttered this explicitly, but his justification is trenchant. ‫“ واﺑﻄﻞ طﻠﻮع اﻟﺠﺒﻞ اﻟﺸﺮﯾﻒ وﻗﺎل ان ﻟﻢ ﯾﻄﺮح ﻣﺎ ﯾﻌﻢ اﺗﺒﺎﻋﺎ ﻟﻜﻼم دوﺳﯿﺲ‬He abolished the pilgrimage up the Mountain, saying he had not abandoned what could be inferred as a corollary [or as an instance of a general statement] according to the [gnomic] sayings [or axioms] of Dositheos”. He said he had not abandoned what would have been the right doctrine and practice before, even if that was not the actual practice before, so what might look like innovation was actually keeping to tradition. That meant it was actually those that did not accept his decree to change doctrine about the Mountain that were the innovators. This is one of the very few places where ms. C of the first recension (Stenhouse P) has the correct reading against S (Stenhouse same siglum) or D (Stenhouse H) of the first recension, having preserved ‫ اﺗﺒﺎﻋﺎ‬. (Though more likely a perceptive correction). By an easy misreading, this becomes ‫ ﻟﺴﺎﻋﺎ‬in SD (Stenhouse SH) and all mss. of the second recension, except for L 3 Y (Stenhouse GY) which omit it, and A (Stenhouse F) which has ‫ ﺑﺎﻟﺴﻤﺎﻋﺎ‬. The way the word is written in S shows uncertainty. [This part of B (Stenhouse C) belongs to the second recension]. The verb just before has caused difficulty too. Ms. S has ‫( ﯩﻌﻢ‬Stem I passive) correctly but without dots. [Stenhouse’s recorded collation is wrong]. It is copied correctly in L 1 (Stenhouse E), the oldest ms. of the second recension, as ‫ ﯾﻌﻢ‬. Attestation in the most reliable witness of both recensions makes the form certain. So does the meaning as a technical term of rhetoric and philosophy. The technical use was not recognised later on. DC have ‫ ﯾﻌﻤﺮ‬, an easy mistake in reading. B has ‫ ﯩﻐﻢ‬without dots on the first letter. Ms. A omits and guesses badly and rewords. [Stenhouse’s collation of both is wrong]. J guesses badly in a different way and rewords. [Stenhouse does not record this]. The rest L 2 VNMPL 3 Y (Stenhouse BaVaNRMGY) have ‫ ﯾﻘﻢ‬. Khaḍir does not recognise the corrupted verb but understood what was claimed and perceptively writes this: ‫ وادﻋﻰ ان ﻟﻢ ﯾﻄﺮح اﻟﮭﻮى ﻟﻢ )= ﻟﻤﺎ( ﯾﻘﺒﻞ ﻟﺴﻤﺎع ﻛﻼم دوﺳﯿﺲ‬. [Amazingly, Stenhouse does not know the negative verb is in the past tense. After that, the meaning of the whole sentence is lost. Take this example as a general warning on how sentences are often completely misunderstood by him]. It is not surprising if most of 130 Såkte’s own followers, even though needing his strength of leadership, could not swallow the argument, whatever the axiom used might have been or whatever the argument from it might have been: it would have been seen as a reductio ad absurdum, with the unanswerable weakness that if Dositheos had meant something so important he would have come straight out with it and acted on it. The doctrine would have been forgotten about altogether soon after Såkte’s death. (k). At this point indications of a hitherto unseen and undreamt of strong possibility have to be weighed up. In spite of his single impossible new doctrine about discontinuing the pilgrimages to the Mountaintop, Såkte had great power, because he had authority over all Dositheans that had rejected the oppressive extremism that had followed the murder of Lîbi. He got the upper hand and publicly showed this by getting control of access to the relics of Dositheos and Lîbi. The learned from amongst the Dositheans had to find an argument to show his new doctrine to be unsustainable, even while accepting the full form of the concept of the Fẩnûtå, which was probably his. They came up with a proof that was compelling because it did not depend on argument, but came from a plain statement in the Torah. The holiness of the Mountaintop does not depend on the presence of the Tabernacle, because it is undeniable that the Mountaintop is holy in its own right, as the Torah itself says, quoting Jacob. “This is the House of God and this is the Gate of Heaven” (Gn XXVIII:17). It could be seen beyond doubt that Såkte had let his premises lead him into a fallacy with intolerable practical consequences, logical as the argument might seem. They devised a concise formula of both theory and practice. This formula was known to A.F., but it puzzled later generations of scribes. The recovery of the wording of the formula is explained on pp. 121 – 122. Here it is. “They said Mt. Gerizim was holy, as it says in Scripture, just as much as if the House were on it. What is written must be carried out on it and what is not possible is not to be carried out”. To work out what is meant precisely, we have to first work out what is thought not possible. The answer can only be whatever depends on the presence of a valid sanctuary with the Mosaic Tabernacle inside. That means sacrifices. It is known that in the time of Dositheos, even before he joined the Ṣåddûqẩ’i and became leader, so well before they came to be called Dositheans, this party had stopped having sacrifices. See Part VI. It follows that the specification “what is written” means some observances other than sacrifices. At the time the salient question would have been the validity of the three pilgrimages to the holy place each year, which Såkte had denied as part of his main plank. The formula declares the validity of this observance and necessarily the validity of worship on the Mountaintop at any time. The question that comes up now is whether the Dositheans accepted that although sacrifices depended on the presence of the Tabernacle, there could still be a service of the sanctuary. An obvious example would be the laying out of the Showbread. Other examples would be special prayers, or filling the house with the smoke of incense, or keeping the seven-branched lampstand alight. Public worship in front is assumed by the Torah. The story of the realisation that sacrifices are not allowed in a time of fẩnu set at the end of the Persian period still makes it clear that the sanctuary continued, with the golden table for the Showbread and the seven-branched lampstand, so a service of the sanctuary even without sacrifices could be meaningful to the Sebuaeans. It might follow that it could be meaningful to Dositheans as well. The critical question is whether the Dositheans maintained that not only the sacrifices, but also the service inside the sanctuary, depended on the presence of the Tabernacle. The passage A.F. 152:2 – 9 about the discussion between Dositheos and Yêdo ‫יחדו‬ 131 shows the Dositheans (still called Sadducees then) did not have a sacrificial service then. The original part of the Arabic Joshua book near the end at ch. 42 is silent on this. I have argued in different places that this ending is deliberately silent on a couple of salient questions. It is silent on whether sacrifices continued, so as to be acceptable to both Sebuaeans and Dositheans, who had quite different arguments for ending sacrifices and probably therefore disagreed on when it happened. That means what is eliminated by the words “what is not possible” means the sacrifices, not the service within the building by the Priests, and not the public religious service outside with reading of the Torah and the congregation’s hymn-singing. Let’s look from the other direction. It has been shown that the words “what is written” would have to include the three pilgrimages. The question is whether they include the service of the sanctuary, or perhaps we should say, came to include that later on. This is not long after the persecution of Dositheos, which is not well understood because the second notice of the Dosithean faction is obscure, and A.F. only has a legendary version of what happened. It is not long after the murder of Lîbi. Though his place in the history of the Dosithean faction is not properly understood by the source used by A.F., he was important and after his murder was regarded as a martyr. That does not have to mean relations were murderously hostile before Dositheos or after Såkte. Dositheos became important to the old faction called Sadducees Ṣåddûqẩ’i. (No connection with the Jews by this name). This faction was at least as old as the time of Hyrcanus, since A.F. says there were two factions of Samaritans at that time. See p. 108. The analogy of Judaism indicates that they both could have used the sanctuary at that time. The ending of the first notice of the Dositheans says a refusal of the Sadducees to recognise the validity of a High Priest from the other faction started with Dositheos. See my article The First Notice. The implication is that before then the High Priest could be from either faction, which is how it was with the Jewish Sadducees and the Pharisees. This necessarily means common access to the sanctuary. I therefore suggest that the Dositheans that kept on recognising the holiness of the Mountaintop kept on recognising the validity of the service of the sanctuary. The indications are that after the death of Såkte himself, that meant all Dositheans. Both factions could have cooperated on the use of the sanctuary, like the two main Jewish factions. (Under Bẩbå Råbbå they were forced to cooperate to the extent of accepting an ultimate authority, even though they could legitimately disagree and each had their own Rêbåṣ. See my chapter Mikra, p. 618. B.R. had secular authority even on religious administration. See Mikra pp. 617 -- 618. See also A.F. 129:8 – 15. It is not known if B.R. was a Priest. If he was High Priest of one faction or the other, he did not favour either over the other). We come back to the words “what is written” in the formula. However limited in practice their interpretation might have been in the time of the reaction against Såkte’s intolerable extreme fallacious doctrine, when the right time came and the Sebuaeans had ended sacrifices and both factions could bring themselves to cooperate, the words could be taken to include what is written in the Torah about the apparatus of the sanctuary and the service inside, with collective worship in the yard in front. A strong piece of evidence, which to my mind is conclusive, is how certain the Christian Church in the time of Zēnōn was that taking over the virtue of the sanctuary building --- not just the old site of the Tabernacle --- meant taking over the virtue of the whole Mountaintop. That indicates the Dositheans did not scoff at the sanctuary building. This would mean that when Hadrian rebuilt the sanctuary, it was for the benefit of both factions. Would he have done this otherwise? They still would have sometimes had separate 132 Festival services because they had different calendars, but this would not matter. Both parties would come to have a deeper feeling of the need of rule by Rome. (l). Stability was ended by the Christian Church. From 337 A.D. onwards, the Church used its hold over the state for oppression of all other religions that was designed to be beyond survival. This meant Samaritans above all. See pp. 112 – 113 top. At times the practice of the religion was forbidden. At times oppression was designed to force revolt so that Samaritans could be massacred. At times they were forced to pretend to become Christian under pain of death. Justin’s plan of keeping on using the history of the Jews and the Jewish scriptures as validation of Christianity but making doubly sure by wiping out Samaritan practice of the religion of Israel had become workable. This wish emerged in the collective subconscious well before his time. The wish is expressed by the editors of John’s Gospel in IV:22 by declaring Judaism and the status of the Jerusalem temple (after its destruction) necessary for Christianity and the utterance of the first lie, which is fundamental, that Samaritan practice of the religion of Israel is invalid. This verse goes against the whole pericope as well as the verse before and the verse after. The last words are meaningless unless uttered by the Church and vapid unless tendentious in a historical setting. There are two changes in the LXX that are so close to complete in the text-witnesses they must be due to official Christian editing. They are the readings Mt. Eval in Dt XXVII:4, and “the place the Lord chooses” instead of “chose” in 21 places in Deuteronomy, both of which reject Mt. Gerizim and support John IV:22. In Acts VIII:5 -- 25 the reason given for the arrival of Peter and John is nonsense. The real reason was to assert opposition between Peter and Simon, and to make sure Simon was seen as an isolated individual, so as to obscure what had just been written about substantial numbers of Samaritans having become Christian. The second lie was to depict him as an ineffective individual rather than an earlier author of a work of philosophy and systematic theology accepted by both Samaritan parties, and at the same time make him a personification of Samaritan religion so as to belittle it. Justin was inspired by this device and took it further. The wish for annihilation of Samaritan religion lurked because logically existentially demanded. In what follows, all quotes are in Pummer’s collection and can be looked up immediately. Well before the murderous final solution, Origen smugly but illogically supports the execution of Samaritans for being seen to be already circumcised (Against Kelsos II:13. The information is mangled and outdated, but is constantly misused in history-writing). The inconvenience of the Samaritans but with their logically incompatible inferiority or unimportance comes up often as the third lie, e.g. Origen, Commentary on John, 13. 12. 81, 83; Homilies on Ezekiel 9. 1. For a long while the wish was acted out by trying not to admit Samaritans existed, but at the same time yet more weak malicious lies were tried out. The fourth lie, the clumsiest, was to say the Samaritan factions were Christian heresies. This starts in Acts VIII. Then Hegesippus before 180 A.D. says this about every Samaritan faction including the Simonians (Eusebius, Church History 4. 22. 5). Eusebius quotes this seriously as late as 313 A.D. The fifth lie was to misrepresent Samaritan leaders as what are now called Gnostic leaders under the name of Simon (Acts VIII; Justin; Origen, Against Kelsos VI:11. On Justin see pp. 48 – 51). The sixth lie, a variant on the second, was to say all Samaritan religion was invented by Dositheos (Tertullian, Heresies 11; Jerome, Dialogue against the Luciferians 2. On Jerome, see also p. 218). The seventh lie was that Samaritan religion came from within Judaism (Hegesippus, quoted seriously by Eusebius, 4. 22. 7; Tertullian as above; Jerome as above). Jerome contradicts himself three times over on each of the 133 last two by saying the Samaritans opposed Ezra (Commentary on Daniel 9. 24; Commentary on Haggai, Prologue; Epistles 121: 5. 4 -- 7). The eighth was to deny the existence of uncountable Dositheans long after the founder (Origen, Against Kelsos, VI:11). A ninth lie, a variant on the first, was denying the Samaritans could receive the Torah (Origen, Commentary on Romans II:14). A tenth lie was to deny that Samaritan religion was religion (Origen, Against Kelsos II:13). An eleventh lie was that Samaritans are all bad (Jerome, Epistles). The Church started work on the logically necessary murderous final solution once it got control over the government. The control was indirect and only partial but with real effect. Moslem rule brought sanity. Under Moslem rule the revolutionary doctrine that the unique martyrion, “the analogue”, both expressed supersession and helped enable it was suddenly dangerously counter-productive and had to be dropped real quick. The church building was abandoned and the reason behind it permanently forgotten on purpose. The monastery was shut down soon after because it was best not to have to explain why it was there. The current pathetic story given out is that the church was built on the mountaintop because from there you can see the church a long way down below and the place far away at Sychar where Jesus talked to the Fotini. It works. Gullible clergy believe it themselves. The eastern Church then came up with a new dishonest cunning bit of fiction. The Samaritan woman in John IV, now named Fotini, was declared equal to the Apostles, a unique status. This was nearly as original as the theory of the Analogue. The story is still being spread that all Samaritans had become Christian in her time or soon after, against known history and the Church Fathers. Suddenly there were no more Samaritans and never had been since the time of Jesus. This cover-up of centuries of atrocities is still vigorously touted and believed by the uninformed, including academics and clergy. Centuries of economic and legal repression in the diaspora making it impossible to survive as a Samaritan are cut out of the standard history of the place and time. Christian theology has been taken as history. 31 The Christian Church’s alternative piece of unChristian malevolence combined with lunacy, copied in modern pseudo-scholarship, is to say Samaritans fighting to stop desecration or practise their religion or just survive had no reason to do so. They are called fanatics (p. 113) or obstinately unruly (p. 121) by Montgomery, who was a Presbyterian minister. He calls the Samaritans enemies of the Church on p. 102 in the context of persecution of Samaritans and their religion by the Church. Read it to believe what is said really got said. They should have thankfully taken the opportunity to abandon their religion and thankfully have taken the opportunity to die without causing trouble. The hope of future reappearance of the apparatus of the Tabernacle expressed in 36 A.D. is called fanaticism on p. 85 and p. 113. If hope for a perfected future were fanaticism, the whole scheme of Christian Heilsgeschichte definitely including the Doctrine of the Atonement and the doctrine of the second coming of Jesus could be called fanaticism. Actually it might well be, if it is to be known by its fruits. Montgomery is not at all alone in covering up Christian un-Christian persecution over centuries by saying 31 The western Church went better. It found a way to forget about the question, for the first time in the Church’s history, by rewriting the history of Israel to obscure the identity of the Samaritan Israelites. (The Anglican Church has it both ways, as usual). It could then concentrate on its obsession with the Jews. This is another theological subterfuge still used in historical pseudo-scholarship. 134 Samaritans are irrational, or just denying what was done. This is the technique of the Big Lie. (m). The misrepresentation of Samaritan religion comes from the same place as the misrepresentation of the religious organisation once led by James the brother of Jesus in the Clementine book. This organisation can be identified with the Jewish Ebionites. When Jesus said formally to his close followers in private (not to the crowds as Evangelicals think) ‘‘Blessed are the poor’’ he meant ‘‘Blessed are you Ebionites’’. (This is obvious, but I did not see it till Adrian Grant made an observation on something related). I add that when he said ‘‘Blessed are the meek’’ he meant ‘‘Blessed are all you on the path to being like Joshua who had part of the spirit of Moses who is designated by the code-word ‘‘meek’’. (See Numbers XII and see below p. 148 and pp. 154 bottom to 155 top and see above p. 64). The land to be inherited is the promised land of Deuteronomy, represented on the material plane by Canaan. This will be a second Time of Favour. ‘‘If Hoshea bin Nun had given them rest there would be no need to speak of another day’’. The words ‘‘they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness’’ are loaded with meaning too. See p. 64. For both purposes of misrepresentation, the caricatured figure of Simon is used. There are three stories. He is different in Acts VIII, then the learned detailed construct dreamt up by Justin canonical in Christianity up till this very day and copied in pseudoresearch up till this very day, then the Clementine book. It is hard to see how the Christian Church can insist on the truth of both of the first two stories at once and regard the third as edifying and largely true, but faith overcometh all, including source criticism. All three versions of the caricature are caricatures of the real Jesus. It is meant to be used against the religious movement founded by the real ungodlike Jesus and led by his brother James and then annoyingly not going away. It is meant to be used against Samaritan religion by saying Samaritan religion was made up. It is meant to be used against the Apóphasis Megálē by identifying the legendary author called Simon with the founder of the movement led by Jesus’s brother and at the same time identifying the legendary author with Jesus’s brother. Using a caricature of the real Jesus against the work of the real Jesus while spruiking the Christian Jesus was inspired from somewhere. Using the caricature of Jesus to discourage people from reading the Apóphasis Megálē was part of demonising the Torah, now the Law of Death. This time the inspiration did not go far enough. Records of the real Jesus inconveniently survived. ‘‘Not one yod or tittle will pass away’’ had to be interpreted ‘‘spiritually not carnally’’. The really annoying verse Mark VII:19 could be rewritten by substituting ‘‘toilet’’ for ‘‘small intestine’’. (For the explanation of what the real Jesus meant here see my article L’Antiquité des Racines du Karaïsme, on this website). That was still enough for translators to use in the time of King James but these days a sledgehammer is judged better and words are added in most translations and the morphology of the participle ignored. This works because theological students are told there is a unique kind of Greek in the NT. I think the lecturers have come to believe it. There really is a special NT Greek brought about by inadequate knowledge of Greek, but that is not noticed. Like any effective caricature, the caricature of the real Jesus looks a lot like the real thing. The real Jesus could bring someone out of a trance. (‘‘She is but sleeping’’. ‘‘Thy brother will rise again’’). The real Jesus could fly, according to later Nazoraean imagination surviving in the Diatessaron. This had to be dropped in the Christian gospel of Luke because Jesus had become too fantastic in enthusiastic embellishment and had to be reimagined as fully human, as he actually had been. The real Jesus when re-imagined by enthusiasts could walk on water as 135 well. This story could be kept when Jesus went back to being fully human by being reinterpreted as proof of his godlikeness and specifically the function of being the vehicle of creation (not the Creator except for Evangelicals), or God the Son in later terms. The real Jesus had a wife called Mary Magdalene. She was rewritten in the Christian gospels in their final form but the record is too well attested to be fiction. It has long been a puzzle how she could have this epithet when there is no town in Palestine known for having a tower. Suntower in the Golan seems too far. We need to look for a symbolic tower. There is Aseneth’s tower. The Clementine book says that Moonshine could look out of all four windows of a tower facing all four directions at once. I refer the reader to the commentaries on Joseph and Aseneth. None of the arguments in this book depend on this paragraph. Hippolytus’s source says the Ebionites said that Jesus acquired the titles of Jesus (which is Joshua) and Christós. It might have added what was thought to be an obvious necessary gloss. A Christian reporter would not have heard of anyone acquiring a title or status called Jesus, but he would have heard of Christians that said that Jesus acquired the status of Christ on his baptism. Saying Jesus became Jesus would not have made sense to a Christian, but saying Jesus became Jesus and Christ would. If the words are read carefully, however, there is no need to make this proposal. Christian reporters would inevitably turn Chrēstós into Christós. Remember Christós does not mean anointed in real Greek. See the Excursus, at great length. In the story in the Clementine book and the Acts of Peter, the second contradictory story in the book of Acts in ch. VIII, and the third contradictory story given out by Justin, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Theodōretos, Simon is the personification of the followers of the real Israelite ungodlike Jesus and a caricature of the real Jesus. The authors must have thought the symbolism would be understood, so the followers of the real Jesus must have commonly been using the name Simon when the book was written. This means Jesus’s real name was Simon. Before the Clementine book was written, the Christian Church had turned the title Jesus into a name. Paul forgets himself and speaks of the name Jesus, the name over every other name. This is his own misuse of the meaning of the title, but he still slips and says the name was given, not inherent. Forgetting that Jesus was a title had to be done before the real Jesus could be split into the Christian Jesus as opposed to the Ebionite Jesus and as opposed to Simon the Samaritan. The Christian Church had invented the Christian un-Israelite pagan godlike Jesus and was attacking the real Jesus and his followers. There are signs of haste. Verses in the Psalms that have the word christós instead of ēleimménos in the extant mss. are not used in the book of Acts or Paul’s writings, or if used, without emphasis on the term, which means the new word christós was not in the mss. yet. No-one has noticed this. The three versions of Simon are inconsistent and partly incompatible. Justin’s elaborate story was modified by Irenaeus and then that story was modified back. The Christian godlike un-Israelite Jesus had been invented and the new religion was being promulgated. Denying the historical continuity of the Ebionites with the real Jesus was urgent. This leads to the question of whether the Apóphasis Megálē was really thought to have been written by someone called Simon, or whether the Christian Church fused the unknown author with one of its Simons. The Simon known to Hippolytus and Theodōretos is the one made up by Justin. Hippolytus and Theodōretos know about the book, but Justin does not mention it. This does not have to mean the Christian 136 Church made the author’s name up a few years after Justin’s time. Books nearly always had the name of an author --- though not always the right author. It has b een shown that the Apóphasis Megálē was well known, and not all readers were Samaritans. Trying to falsify the name of the author would not have worked. At the moment, the name of the book’s author looks like a useful coincidence. The book was known to the Christian Church before Hippolytus’s time. It has been shown that it shows up in interpolations in Paul’s epistles that are incompatible with his system and has echoes in John’s gospel. It seems to have become safe to mention it to rubbish it. I suggest that Justin did not mention it because too many people that were not Samaritans were reading it and understood it, and too many people would have known that the book had authority for most Samaritans, and it would have been too easy for members of the Roman Senate to get hold of the Greek version to work out whether it was really pernicious from the viewpoint of Rome. Justin had an immediate purpose. In Hippolytus’s time the book would still have been well known, but there was no immediate political purpose. Besides, he was only writing for Christians, who would not have cared about any inconsistency between the supposedly world-rejecting Gnostic canonised Simon and the book based solidly on the Torah and affirming the worth of the created world. This book is not about Christianity. What matters is that after this tedious sifting of fiction, it can be said with certainty that there was a Simon the Samaritan (perhaps only as a pen-name) but not in the form depicted in the self-contradictory inventions of the Christian Church. That means that the elaborate scholarly construct of Gnostic Samaritan religion (using Gnostic in the narrow sense) has no documentation. The most extreme example is Haar’s book. Guesses are piled on guesses without documentation. Essentially, it is assumed that a theory is validated by being internally consistent even without evidence. Guesses like this are made about developments among Samaritans because the authors think the rules don’t apply when investigating the Samaritan form of the religion of Israel. It is shown in Part VI of this book that there was no Gnostic Dosithean faction, and that what has been thought to be rejection of the Torah was in fact an adjustment by people taking the Torah and the religion of Israel seriously. Gnosticism in the narrow sense comes from outside Israel. The antipathy to the religion of Israel sometimes shown in world-rejecting Gnostic writings is therefore not an internal development within the religion of Israel, but reaction by outsiders to the threat of an incompatible religious and metaphysical outlook. The antipathy to the religion of Israel in Paul’s epistles comes from outside. There is still a place for investigation of Samaritan metaphysical concepts and kinds of outlook, but it can only be done using Samaritan documentation. Now that it is certain that the Apóphasis Megálē is Samaritan, what survives of it needs to be looked at again. It is older than the literature of the second century A.D., that is, the old parts of the book attributed to Mårqe and the oldest part of the extant liturgy. (n). Circumstances forced reconciliation and extensive accommodation between the two factions, with union coming later on. The twin books the Kitâb aṭṬubâkh and Kitâb al-Kâfi from the early eleventh century A.D., which sift old material and speak with authority, are evidence of completion of the first stage. The Sebuaean insistence on the full holiness of the Mountaintop in itself was fully accepted, but the Dositheans had come to largely agree with this long before. The Sebuaean concept that in the end Moses himself would appear was kept. The Sebuaean concept of the reappearance of the occulted top of the Mountain became the 137 concept of the reappearance of the Gate to Eden, which is not quite the same. Everyone could now agree on a common place of worship on the Mountaintop and they could compile a common set of hymnbooks with everyone’s favourites. One trace of this is the two named corpora of hymns Ildustân and Durrân distinguished from the rest. They could start working on common halachah while recognising variation in details for the moment. The Kâfi often mentions disagreements still standing or recently resolved but never names factions, at most only mentioning unnamed villages, and often slipping in a friendly phrase. Numerous disagreements in detail remained. The start of the religious year in the first month is in the Torah and had never been disputed. The Dosithean system of some unnumbered special Sabbaths was not kept. Sabbatical and Jubilee years, which must start on the first of the seventh month from the Torah, were recognised as valid in the Fẩnûtå, even if full observance in practice was impossible, in agreement with the Sebuaeans. On purpose, neither the Ṭubâkh or the Kâfi mention future expectation. Afterwards a theologically sound common formulation of expectation finally uniting the two factions was found by common acceptance of a new form of the very ancient concept of the Tẩ’eb in the fourteenth century. See note 16 on p. 14. The Sebuaeans already accepted that the cultus could not be perfect in the present era because sacrifices were not accepted, even if they did not know why, and knew as well that the Haykal could never be rebuilt for practical reasons, and could see the remedy could only come from God. This brought them close to the Dositheans, who had always seen the need for the manifestation of the Tabernacle. The newly expanded form of the concept of the Tẩ’eb and the second Time of Favour was a formulation of what was seen by both factions. The term Tẩ’eb “the person coming back” was meant to be colourless. It could be taken to mean the occulted Dositheos when he manifests himself to complete his work, including revealing the Tabernacle. Or it could mean Moses himself, completing the work of Dositheos. See the Annotations to XII:14 and 20. Or it could mean Enoch, as the equivalent of Moses, completing the work of Dositheos. Or else it could be taken by the Sebuaeans to mean Joshua as king in the new Time of Favour and the second prophet. Both of these last two opinions are attested in Merx’s collection but the documentation is not ancient. The expectation of Joshua is the oldest form attested. See my article An Ancient Form of the Samaritan Concept of the Tâ’eb, but the other forms of expectation could be just as old. The vagueness of the term was needed to have it accepted by both parties. The meaning of someone returning got forgotten on purpose later on. The late Samaritan guess at a causative sense, on the analogy of the cognate Hebrew verb in Dt XXX:7, won’t work, since the meaning there depends on the noun following. This phrase is therefore not a model for general causative use of the qal of the Hebrew verb, and as well as this, Hebrew is not Aramaic. Most modern scholars have accepted the false explanation. The late explanation shows persistence of the expectation of the reappearance of the Tabernacle, central to Dosithean thought but significant to some extent for the Sebuaeans. It also shows persistence of the concept of the restoration of the conditions of the Time of Favour in the Second Kingdom. Although A.F. in 1355 records abundant evidence of a sanctuary and sacrifices, he found a few contradictions. His data were honestly recorded by Khaḍir in 1875. Chronicle Adler in 1900 fudges the records of rebuilding and destruction according to a newly invented doctrine saying there was never a sanctuary building. Most modern authors, from unnecessary ignorance of both Abu ’l-Fateḥ and the Comprehensive History, have let themselves be taken in. If Magen has not found the 138 foundations of the Haykal under the church, it is because he does not know what shape and size it was and does not even know for sure to look under the church; neither does he know it was different in lay-out to the Jerusalem temple, because he believes Josephus’s deceptive wording and has not looked at A.F. Josephus says a sanctuary building was put up by Sanballat on Mt. Gerizim like the Jerusalem temple. He knew his words would be read as saying the Samaritan sanctuary building that was set up was like the Jerusalem temple. They still are read that way. He lies when he has to, but prefers to say something that will sound familiar and not be doubted but will be taken the wrong way. See pp. 109 – 110 for an important example that worked as planned. If Magen has not found the great altar it is because he has never heard of it, let alone where it was and how big it was. The place of the Haykal will be a square 35 cubits across marked in the flooring inside the round empty part in the middle. The place of the great altar will be under a marked square ten cubits across under the extension of the church where mass was performed. The church advertised not just the obliteration of the original but the acquisition of its virtue, and the groundplan would have been meant to show this by covering both the place of the sanctuary building and the great altar. The beacon which symbolically could be seen in Constantinople and Rome was meant to announce the replacement. No-one has noticed anything odd about having a beacon on top of a church, but then, the usual witless explanation of why the church was built is accepted without thought. (o). There remains a historical question that must be set out here lest it be overlooked. It has been seen that the intention was for the abomination of desolation to be the equivalent of the sanctuary in virtue. A.F. says the Church in the guise of the emperor had first tried to buy the whole Mountaintop, but had been thwarted, not by force, but unanswerable proof that the acquisition would never be valid by the laws of God. This meant the Church needed ownership beyond what could be given by the laws of man. A new theological term that translates into Arabic as shabah [ ʃæbæh ] meaning image and analogue was invented, or at least, if the term already existed as an epithet of the metaphysical Christ in relation to God, it was extended to a building on a unique site. The Church collectively must have been dead certain of the special sacredness of the exact spot. The only solution is that the Dositheans must have recognised that the Haykal stood on the site of the Tabernacle, while asserting that it had incomplete sacredness as a structure because of the occultation of the Tabernacle. They expected the reappearance of the Tabernacle and would have expected it to be inside this very building. They could not have denied the evidence of the remains of the two altars from the Time of Favour. There must have been continuity of knowledge of where the Tabernacle had been. The Tabernacle did not stand by itself. At the end of ch. 24 of the Arabic Joshua book it says the Tabernacle was housed in a temple building. (Note that the word kanîsah means not just a synagogue or church, but any temple building. It is used by A.F. for the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem temple, and a Pagan temple. Modern dictionaries are incomplete in this respect. See note 23 on p. 104. A.F. does not mention this at the corresponding place, which would have been after 30:6). This is important. It means the Dositheans could not have denied the stone building still stood after the occultation of the Tabernacle, marking the rightful spot. Their theory as rewritten by Såkte might have led them to imagine it had been in ruins and unused up till the Exile, but they could not have denied continuity of knowledge or continuity of evidence. They could not have denied that the building put up on the Return from the Exile was on the right spot. They could not have invented a story that at some time a new building had been put up nearby. 139 Actually it is not known if they still went as far as declaring the Haykal illegitimate after the end of the influence of Såkte, or returned to their attitude in the time of Dositheos. It is known that Såkte’s theory that there could not be pilgrimages up the Mountain after the disappearance of the Tabernacle was rejected by most of his own followers. It would logically follow that the service of the Tabernacle, such as having a Showbread table, or making libations, could be regarded as legitimate. This would still be possible even while knowing that the apparatus being used was only a copy of what had been occulted. The ambiguity of the ending of the original Arabic Joshua book would make this allowable. The considerations are set out in detail above, pp. 130 bottom – 132. Regardless of whether these arguments are accepted in whole or in part, the Dositheans must have given the site of the Haykal and the sites of the two old altars and the whole of the original sacred grounds some special status because they had been divinely chosen and because of the expectation of the reappearance of the Tabernacle, however hard it might be for us to define the status. Even when the ruins of the church had been abandoned, worship on the real sacred site of the sanctuary building with its courtyard would still have been impossible, because clearing up the polytheistic Christian statues and digging up the dead bodies would have been impossible. There would have been petitions to the Moslem government, which was very much concerned to keep order. A dead scorpion can still sting. This might explain the special sacredness attributed to the rock platform, though with the meaning now lost. It might have once been the traditional site of the plastered stones with words of the Torah written on that are commanded to be set up on entry into Canaan in Deuteronomy XXVII. That would have made it the most sacred accessible place. At the moment there is a set of twelve stones called Joshua’s Stones on the Mountaintop in another place. A.F. thinks there were ten stones. The different incompatible stories about the ten or twelve stones must have both been accepted by different Samaritan movements at least till the time of A.F. The documentation has been set out at length in this section, pp. 22 bottom – 36 top. It is not known when the location of the sanctuary building was forgotten. 4. Relationship to the New Testament Relevant to Dating Comparison with the N.T. must be limited to what is needed to prove an early date. What can be seen in the Asâṭîr are concepts shared by Samaritans and Jews, though with differences in formulation and emphasis. Some of these concepts are not attested in Samaritan or Jewish writings later on, very likely because they were being misused to mislead the unlearned and weary the learned. The complex of ideas assumed in Asâṭîr XII:20 is pervasive in the New Testament. Usually it contradicts specifically Christian doctrines, but sometimes it is irrelevant. In regard to Ephesians I:13 -- 14 and John VII:27, see the Annotations to the translation at XII:20. The striking analogy of the binding payment that obliges both parties to complete the transaction is the same metaphor as in Asâṭîr XII:20. The belief alluded to in John VII:27, that the Anointed One will come from an unknown and unknowable place, alludes to the same complex. Some form of the basic dogma of the resurrection of Moses is assumed in Acts III:18 -- 26, specially verse 22. Note the order of the words in the quotation of Dt XVIII:15 and 18 here in Acts, which are 140 taken to mean that God will raise up, i.e. resurrect, a prophet just as he is going to resurrect Moses. Jesus resembles Moses by being resurrected. In the context, where the argument is a parallel to the argument in the previous chapter of Acts, the concept of the incorruptibility of Moses's body is implicit. We now see how incorruptibility can imply resurrection in Acts II:24 -- 32. The reference in Jude 9 to the dispute between the Archangel Michael and Satan over Moses's body alludes to the occasion of the transporting of the living but inanimate body to its place of concealment and waiting, four Roman miles away from the place of his death. The concept of the resurrection of the incorruptible body of Moses is re-used by Paul in his use of the term ἀπαρχή in I Corinthians XV:20 and 23 and Romans VIII:23, which goes back to the word ‫ ראשית‬in Dt XXXIII:20 and 23, as interpreted in the Asâṭîr. The identification of the adoption as sons with the redemption of human bodies is assumed by Paul to be intelligible to his readers in Romans VIII:23, which means he knows of the identification of the transformation of all bodies with the re-appearance of Moses, though expecting his readers to come to see this as the work of Christ. I Corinthians XV:23 – 24 is a Christian recasting of the concept of the incorruptible body of Moses, still with its life-force, ready to reappear one day. Part of the argument for the transformation of all creation here in Romans VIII depends on the concept of the transformation of all human bodies. The concept of the transformation of all creation can be arrived at by the analogy of Moses, as in Asâṭîr XII:19 -- 22, but it can also be arrived at by the argument from the perfection of the mountain, as again in Asâṭîr XII:19 -- 22, but also in Asâṭîr XI:22. In part, what Paul says about Christ being the Second Adam, who reverses the consequences of the Fall, in I Corinthians XV, is functionally equivalent to the Samaritan concept of the re-appearance of the top of the Mountain, which is the gate to the Garden and the Gate of Heaven. The concept of the visible presence of God in Jesus is a transposition of the expectation of the permanent vision of the occulted top of the Mountain. The concepts of the resurrection of Moses, the appearance of Moses, the perfection of all human bodies, the perfection of the Mountain, and the perfection of all creation, are inseparable in the Asâṭîr. Some forgotten Jewish complex equivalent in function and similar in content is recast as a whole as part of the material for inventing the new complicated conceptual construct of Christ. The concept has stopped being Israelite and at the same time has been fitted in with a set of pagan constructs. The author of the tract studied in my article A Samaritan Broadside emphasises that all Samaritans will agree that bodily resurrection on earth is self-evidently within the power of God. This does not have to mean that he actually expects a general resurrection on earth. He has only said that God can resurrect anyone on earth, which he expects the reader or hearer to agree is self-evidently true. This is part of an objection to Christianity. He finds the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus and its consequences harmful by inviting disbelief in the power of God because Jesus is no longer on earth as proof, and worse, might not be expected to come back in bodily form. See p. 38 bottom. What is said in the tract is compatible with either an expectation of some kind of general resurrection on earth or some kind of general resurrection at another level of existence. The tract does not go into detail, probably because what is needed is a statement that all Samaritans agree resurrection is selfevidently possible if God wants to bring it about, without confusing the reader with information about factions. See pp. 38 -- 40. Some form of a concept of general resurrection is a natural development of the expectation of the re-appearance of Moses such as mentioned in Asâṭîr XII:22 along with the expectation of some form of 141 perfection of human bodies in relation to the perfection of the Mountain as prominent in XI:22. The Dosithean doctrine of the end of the Fẩnûtå in its two different forms, whether soon or in the far future, is related to this, but not the same. It can be seen that most or all factions of both Samaritan parties had a concept of resurrection either on earth or on a different level of existence. Reports of their denial of resurrection can be explained as denial of the specifically Pharisaic version. See Part VI for details of important internal disagreement between Dositheans at times, and evidence that some Dositheans agreed with the Sebuaeans. None of the kinds of resurrection assumed by either of the two parties were the same as the Pharisaic one. Early Christian reporters were confused because of this. Any bald statement that any Samaritans or any party or faction of any party thereof did not believe in resurrection is unsafe. One of the Dosithean doctrines of resurrection will now be brought in because it shows the importance of the concept of resurrection at the time and is known fairly well. It would not be safe to assume that it became standard Dosithean doctrine later on. It is from the second notice by AF. It should be read in context because there were developments. For orientation see Part VI of this book. “My faith is in thee, Lord, and Dositheos thy servant [thy prophet L 3 Y; om. J] and his sons and daughters [daughters and sons L 3 Y]” A.F. 155:1 – 2. This is in Aramaic or Hebrew with the last two words “and his sons and daughters” in Arabic. In L 3 Y (Stenhouse GY) the first word is written in Arabic, so that the whole sentence can be read as Arabic. A (Stenhouse F) and Khaḍir have the last two words in Hebrew, with A adding an Arabic translation of the whole. Vilmar did not understand these two Hebrew words, perhaps because of the phonetic spelling of the possessive suffixes in A. (They are spelt < ‫> ו‬, not < ‫יו‬ >. This would still be an accurate representation of the Samaritan pronunciation of the plural possessive suffix, which is [o]. The pronunciation of the singular possessive suffix, spelt < ‫> ו‬, is [u]). He did not realise the corresponding two Arabic words were a translation ! He did not notice the Arabic translation of the whole formula in A ! He emends the two words seriously badly with one word ‫ ובנבותה‬in Hebrew letters which is meaningless in Hebrew, though it would have a suitable meaning in Arabic. It is unworkable because the formula is in Hebrew. This is a really bad slip. See the remarks near the start of Part VII on the indications that Vilmar could not revise his work and his judgment was not good at the end of the work on the book. 32 Jamgotchian did not understand the phonetic spelling in A either, but translates correctly. P31FP31F P Next example, still from the second notice. “They said: ‘The dead would rise soon as the children of Dositheos ‫ أوﻻد دوﺳﯿﺲ‬awlâd Dûsis the prophet of God ‫ﻧﺒﻲ ﷲ‬ nabi Allâh’ ” A.F. 156:14 – 15. [Stenhouse does not understand the syntax and writes nonsense]. A.F. clarifies at 157:7 – 8 that they believed resurrection was immediately on burial, but this seems to be from another source. Here only L 2 VMNL 3 Y RR RR RR RR Stenhouse in the translation p. 216 does not understand, for the same reasons as Vilmar, and leaves the last words untranslated, with a note quoting Vilmar’s impossible conjecture. In the apparatus to the thesis vol. 3 apparatus to page 167 line 14 the reading of A (his F) is not given in spite of the claim that this ms. is one of his constant witnesses. In the notes to the apparatus vol. 3 p. 152 he does not mention the Arabic translation in A and says the two Hebrew words ‫ ובניו ובנותיו‬in this ms. are an addition. He shows that he correctly understands the last two words and quotes Khaḍir, who has the last two words in Hebrew, with formal spelling. What is written in the translation with its note could not have been written after the composition of the thesis and this correct explanation in the thesis. 32 142 (Stenhouse BVaGRNY) are completely correct. (H the Hebrew translation was not accessible). SDCBL 1 PJ (Stenhouse SHPCEMJ) omit “of God” (‫ )ﷲ‬because of the shape of the letters < ‫> ل ا ن‬, which can resemble each other in some positions, in the following word ‫“ ﻻﻧﮫ‬because”. [Stenhouse in his thesis apparatus to p. 169 line 8 omits any mention of the correct reading in numerous mss. including his constant witnesses L 2 VN (Stenhouse BVaN)]. Mss. SBL 1 P now ungrammatically have ‫ﻧﺒﻲ‬ now indefinite, as a title; J secondarily has the definite ‫ اﻟﻨﺒﻲ‬. P has the secondary error of omitting ‫ ﻻﻧﮫ‬. CD and Khaḍir go right off track before this. Khaḍir could not make out the word ‫ اوﻻد‬awlâd “children”, and leaves a space, but in mss. written out by his son Nâji bin Khaḍir it is written as ‫ اوﻻ‬awwalan “first”. CD have ‫ واﻻ‬wa-illâ “but”. The omission of dâl at the end is due to the following dâl at the start of the next word and ignorance of the subject. Khaḍir then inserts the conjunction anna ‫ ان‬before “Dûsis” for grammatical reasons. Ms. C attaches the prefix fa to Dûsis for grammatical reasons. D then has a wrong adjustment of this with the negative fa-mâ ‫ ﻓﻤﺎ‬instead of fa, making wa-illâ fa-mâ Dûsis nabi ‫ واﻻ ﻓﻤﺎ دوﺳﯿﺲ ﻧﺒﻲ‬as if meaning “But Dositheos was not a prophet”. The misreading in Khaḍir’s text is closer to the original than in CD. Vilmar prints from D, from a corruption of a wrong adjustment to a misreading ! The correct reading awlâd ‫ أوﻻد‬in B is not mentioned ! [Stenhouse in his thesis, vol. 3 apparatus to his text p. 169 line 8 records the correct reading awlâd but does not clearly give the information that all mss. in both recensions read this way except DC. The omission of fa-mâ in all other mss. is not mentioned in the apparatus, but is implicit in the notes to the apparatus. The significance of the reading fa-Dûsis in ms. C is not seen, even though this is the error that led to the error fa-mâ Dûsis in D, his collating base. Stenhouse in his translation p. 218 tries to translate what is printed by Vilmar. The words in the thesis in his notes to the apparatus, vol. 3 p. 156, show that he thinks the unique reading of D (his H) to be correct. He mistranslates the words of the consensus of the mss., not understanding the syntax]. Ms. A (Stenhouse’s siglum F) has “They said the dead would soon rise, by miraculous divine favour (karâmatan) to Lîbi ‫ לוי‬and his community, as the children of Dositheos the prophet of God”. Vilmar does not mention this. [Stenhouse in the thesis omits this reading of A]. This wording might be by the scribe, but it is correct interpretation. Note carefully that this is not Christian doctrine using another name, neither is it something on the way to Christianity. This needs to be said because Christian scholars will turn anything into what they call a Messianic concept if they can. (The need to keep doing this is one of the signs of the artificiality of Christianity. The acceptance of the practice is a stronger sign). Lîbi was the great Dosithean martyr. (A.F. 155:11 – 157:8; Stenhouse p. 218). After his martyrdom a distinct community put a cairn up on the site and kept relics of him and Dositheos. (156:9 – 14, Stenhouse p. 218). 33 The relic of Lîbi was a palm leaf that had been rubbed into his blood. On the Aramaic name of the cairn ‫ מתוב לוי‬Mêtob Lîbi or ‫ תותב לוי‬Tûtåb Lîbi meaning “Lîbi’s cairn” see my article The First Notice, which makes a small but conclusive correction to my article Transmission. The details are in the article, but essentially, the row of Arabic letters ‫ﻣﻮﺳﻮﺑﮫ‬ (wrongly ‫ ﻣﻮﺳﻮﯾﮫ‬in a few mss.) can easily be explained as ‫מתובתותב‬, two attested synonyms in Samaritan Aramaic, mistakenly read as one word before being transcribed into Arabic letters as ‫ ﻣﺘﻮﺑﺘﻮﺗﺐ‬and later on with most of the dots lost, leading to a form ‫ ﻣﯩﻮﯩﯩﻮﯩﺐ‬after which the second letter tâ’ was easily lost with the undotted fourth and fifth letters bâ’ and tâ’ being read as sîn and the wrong 33 143 [Stenhouse wrongly translates “dipped”, but the Arabic is unambiguous. Besides, the blood must have been half dry by then]. 34 This was wrapped in Torah scrolls that had dot being put on the second-last letter, the undotted tâ’, forming an erroneous bâ’ (yâ’ in some mss.) and with an independent bâ’ at the end with a high left side and a downward flourish being read as initial bâ’ followed by final hâ’. This last part can’t be printed and would have to be drawn. It can happen easily. This corruption is probably as ancient as the corruption of the Aramaic word sansan described in the next note, with the same mechanism, and under the same circumstances. It is quite possible that A.F. himself did not realise these words were Aramaic transcribed into Arabic letters, because all this happened long before his time. All he knew of the Dositheans was what he read. Thesis page 169 line 3 and line 6. I have corrected and completed the collations myself. The correct reading can be proven and so can the meaning. All mss. of the second recension AL1VMNJ as well as L2L3YP of the first recension (Stenhouse FEVaRNJBGYMR) read ‫ ﺳﯿﺴﻨﮫ‬SYSNH. (The Hebrew translator guesses, but wrongly. See below). In this part of the book L2L3Y belong to the second recension. Ms. P is often corrected according to the second recension, specially with names and difficult words. This leaves SDCB (Stenhouse SHPC) and St. Petersburg Fragment H representing the first recension. All show attempts at reading either the same word or ‫ ﺳﻨﺴﻨﮫ‬SNSNH with incomplete dotting causing some loss of letters and confusion with undotted pricks causing loss of the second sîn leaving remnants in following undotted or wrongly dotted letters. (But see B). S has ‫ ﺳﻨﯿﮫ‬SNYH both times. Stenhouse has doubts about the reading of this ms. the first time, but that is because he does not recognise the convention of writing a nûn big or high with or without a dot for certainty. B has ‫ﺳﻨﯿﺴﮫ‬ SNYSH the first time and ‫ ﺳﻨﯿﮫ‬SNYH the second time. C has ‫ ﺳﯿﻨﯿﮫ‬SYNYH the first time (with the second letter being present, even though wrongly dotted and ‫ ﺳﻨﺒﺒﮫ‬SNBBH the second time, probably a guess at reading ‫ ﺳﻨﯩﯩﮫ‬SNXXH. D has ‫ ﺳﻨﯩﯩﮫ‬SNXXH the first time and ‫ ﺳﻨﻨﯩﮫ‬SNNXH the second time. (X represents a prick without dots). Stenhouse misreads D, the first time as ‫ ﺳﯩﮫ‬SXH and the second time as ‫ﺳﯩﯩﮫ‬ SXXH, again not recognising the convention of a high nûn without a dot. The copyist of the Stuttgart ms. has misread this as lâm and written ‫ ﺳﻠﻨﮫ‬SLNH the first time and ‫ ﺳﻠﻨﯩﮫ‬SLNXH the second time. Ms. A adds after the word the first time the explanation ‫ وھﻲ ﺟﺮﯾﺪة اﻟﻨﺨﻞ‬meaning “which is a palm branch”. Now to reconstruct. The form ‫ ﺳﯿﺴﻨﮫ‬SYSNH in all mss. of the second recension is wrong as it stands, but something like this stands behind the forms in the first recension. See specially B the first time and C the first time. The argument here is not affected by the exactness of the process of reconstruction of development within the first recension. These are two miscopyings of ‫ ﺳﻨﺴﻨﮫ‬SNSNH, itself possibly but not at all certainly a miscopying of ‫ ﺳﻨﺴﻦ‬SNSN, meaning a palm-leaf in Hebrew and Aramaic. A feminine alternative ‫ סנסנה‬does exist in Hebrew, but does not seem to be attested in Aramaic. The evidence from the Aramaic name of the cairn is that A.F. was copying from a book in Aramaic, not Hebrew. An important religious symbol could have had a Hebrew name even in popular use. The first to see a connection with the Hebrew ‫סנסן‬, as well as Akkadian sissinu, but without mentioning the Aramaic cognate, was Theodor Gaster, who apparently thought the forms in the mss. to represent an unattested Arabic word. (Quoted by Leon Nemoy, in Isser’s book p. 80, conveying a personal observation to him by Gaster. Stenhouse ignores this). This word ‫ סנסן‬meaning a palm-leaf (with its occasional feminine variant in Hebrew) is common in Hebrew and Aramaic. If transcribed into Arabic letters instead of being translated, and then mistaken for some unknown Arabic word by much later scribes, the miscopying would have been easy, as has been shown. There is an example of the same process in the previous note. If the word was masculine, it could have been mistaken as feminine if a final nûn with a high left side with a downward flourish at the top had been misread a medial nûn followed by final hâ’. Compare the previous note on the misreading of an independent bâ’. The possibility of an original feminine remains, and my own judgment is that it is more likely. The spelling of the last letter in the second place, where it is in the construct state, as < ‫ > ة‬and not < ‫> ت‬, is easily explicable by the fact that whoever transcribed the Hebrew letters into Arabic letters, probably A.F. himself, recognised that the Hebrew or Aramaic word was in the construct state. Anyone reading the word in Hebrew letters and not misled into thinking it had to be Arabic could not possibly misunderstand the meaning: it is a common word. Stenhouse translates the single word as “a scrollhandle made of palm-fronds”. It seems from Stenhouse’s note to the translation and note to the apparatus that this imaginative production of a scroll-handle made out of a palm stalk comes from inspiration from the Hebrew translation, which translates as “stick” or “rod”, combined with a gloss in 34 144 become unfit for public reading by having been corrected (or re-inked) in too many places, termed in the first recension asfâr mukhṭi’ah ‫“ اﺳﻔﺎر ﻣﺨﻄﯿﮫ‬Torah scrolls with mistakes”. [Stenhouse does not understand the halachah here, and translates as “erroneous writings”. This is the same misunderstanding as in all mss. of the second recension after B, which have asfâr Dûsis ‫“ اﺳﻔﺎر دوﺳﯿﺲ‬books by Dositheos”. The editors of the second recension were not always right]. What is said about Dositheos is not compatible with Christianity or on the way to it either. On the way he died see the Annotations to XII:20. One version, in the dubious story in the second notice of the Dositheans by A.F., is that he was killed; the better attested version is that he died willingly and vanished. It would be natural to say that Dositheos resembled Enoch in being translated. See Olson’s book on pairing of Enoch with Moses by the faction that left the Dositheans. It was thought by some Dositheans at one time that because of his death belief in him would enable immediate resurrection in the next world. The doctrine is not clearly explained. It would not be safe to assume that this belief persisted in the long term. See the notes to Asâṭîr XI:7 and XII:16. It is Moses's knowledge, the consequence of him being known by God, that an interpolator in Paul’s epistle assumes in I Corinthians XIII:12, where he follows the Palestinian Targum's interpretation of Dt XXXIV:10, along with the Fragmentary Targum, Neofiti, and the Samaritan Targum, and along with Targum Onkelos in a different approach; as does the Asâṭîr, XII:16. The source of the concept is in the last verses of Deuteronomy. Moses knew everything because God knew him. The analogies with Moses go much further. When the interpolator speaks of seeing in a mirror, he alludes to the Hebrew word ‫ במראה‬in Nu XII:6; and when he speaks of seeing indistinctly or seeing a blurred picture, he alludes to the word ‫ בחידות‬in verse 8. When he speaks about seeing face to face, he is interpreting Nu XII:8 according to Dt XXXIV:10 as interpreted by all the Jewish targums and as interpreted by the Asâṭîr in XII:16. The fragment of a summary of Ebionite doctrine that we have says that everyone has an obligation to live purposefully and fulfil the requirements of the Torah, and divine help will come and the level of Joshua can be reached. This teaching can stand on its own. It is compatible with the expectation that at the end of days everyone will be at the level of Moses. The Apóphasis Megálē has both parts of the doctrine. This doctrine in one or other of its two forms or both must have been more widespread once if the interpolator in Paul’s epistle had heard about it. It must have been widespread if the Gnostics (in the strict sense) misused it. ms. A [his F] that it is a palm stalk, combined with his own guess that when the text says this thing was put in books or writings, that means a scroll was made out of the books or writings with this thing as the handle. A palm branch can’t naturally be called a stick and would not be suitable for a scrollhandle. The words say this thing was put in the writings, which would naturally mean wrapped in them. Stenhouse doesn’t address the question of how it is that if the explanation added in ms. A and the Hebrew translation represent genuine tradition, they don’t agree. The last question now is why the Aramaic or Hebrew sansan ‫ סנסן‬or the Hebrew sansinnah ‫ סנסנה‬was transliterated into Arabic letters instead of being translated into Arabic in the source known to A.F. The answer is probably that Sansan Lîbi ‫ סנסן לוי‬or more likely Sansinnat Lîbi ‫ סנסנת לוי‬was a significant theological term for the Dositheans, unlikely to be translated and not needing translation. Compare the example of the transcription of the Aramaic name Mêtob Lîbi or Tûtåb Lîbi. 145 It has often been said by Christian theologians that when Jesus was in the wilderness he repeated the experience of all Israel in the wilderness, but successfully (Matthew IV:1 -- 11; Luke IV:1 – 13). So far no proof-text from Christianity’s Old Testament has been found. The answer can be found in ch. XII of the Asâṭîr, which gives the future Moses the traits of all the tribes in Dt XXXIII. It does this by giving this personage the traits of Joseph, in its use of the word ‫ קדקד‬constantly, and ‫נזיר‬ in v. 3; the traits of Gad, in v. 20; the traits of Zebulun, in 18. It says in v. 5 that Moses was a king. It follows that the same will apply to the future Moses. Besides, the whole chapter, including the prolegomenon, is said to be a blessing, so the prolegomenon must have a future reference as well as a past reference. This person will be king by combining the virtues of all the tribes, so that the words in verse 5, ‫ בהתאספו העם יחדו שבטי ישראל‬, are intended to be interpreted to mean “on his gathering up into himself of the eponymous ancestors of all the tribes of Israel combined”. (MT differs on the form of the first word. A few Samaritan mss. agree with MT). One ms. of the first recension of the Samaritan Arabic Version agrees with this analysis of the morphology. This set of concepts about Moses is not in extant Jewish writings, but the gospel writers seem to have known about it, since hints that Jesus represented all Israel occur in quite a few places. Here is more evidence of the antiquity of the Asâṭîr. This is one more part of the disguise taken over from the religion of Israel by the authors of the pagan construct called Christianity, but the Christian concept called Christ stays foreign and pagan for all that. This judgment applies to all the the rest of the trappings taken over that are listed here. The enigmatic verses Matthew XXVII:52 – 53 make sense if the awakening of the faithful in bodily form on the death of Jesus was the sign of the fully successful end of the work of both Moses and Jesus. Moses died, rather than being translated, because the Israelites failed in the wilderness. Moses and Aaron struck the rock at Meriva because the Israelites were not ready for a direct view of the power of Providence. They were then not ready to enter the land (Nu XX; Dt XXXIII:8; XXXII:50 -- 51). Moses had to stay behind so as to guarantee (or force) their eventual perfection (Dt XVIII:15 -- 17; Asâṭîr XII:20; Psalm XCV:11; Hebrews IV:8). The NT means to say Jesus did not fail, either in the wilderness or later, and so successfully finished the work of salvation as the embodiment of Israel. This is an allusion to Dt XXXIII:21 as interpreted in Asâṭîr XII:20. Just as Moses’s work is completed on his future reappearance, Jesus’s resurrection only took on meaning after he had appeared to his followers. His body waits: it is called the Church. One aspect of the meaning of the Kingdom of Heaven in Matthew V:10 becomes more precise by comparison with Asâṭîr XI:22 and XII:19. Jude 9 assumes the ideas or some of the ideas behind Asâṭîr XII:20. It is known that this verse of Jude borrows from the lost part of the Assumption of Moses. The enigmatic word “assumption” (assumptio, ἀναλήψις) where “ascension” would have been expected can be explained --- though I don’t think the fact has been noticed --- by the concept of the taking up of Moses's soul into heaven, while his incorruptible body waits on earth. In the Assumption of Moses his second mission is said to be awaited. Not enough of the booklet survives to tell exactly how close the concept is. 146 5. Relationship to Jewish Exegesis Relevant to Dating There are two lines of interpretation that are fundamentally significant for the authors of this text and which are specially well attested in early Jewish sources but not later on. This is additional unanswerable evidence of the early date of the concepts of the Asâṭîr. In XII:20, in a striking and theologically loaded exegesis of Dt XXXIII:21, by which the miraculously preserved body of Moses or perhaps better the miraculous preservation of his body is the first but binding instalment of the process of perfection, the Asâṭîr agrees with the Palestinian Targum, Fragmentary Targum, Neofiti, Peshitta, and one old line of interpretation that is in the Sifre, but not developed in full. There is no telling. Targum Onkelos and the Vulgate mention part of this interpretation, with similar wording to the other targums, but stop short before getting to what is essential. Philo has a vague partial idea (Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, vol. VI text corresponding to note 951). Part of it at least is assumed in John VII:27. The LXX makes no mention. A compatible reading of Dt XXXIII:5 is in the Fragmentary Targum, Neofiti, LXX, and Peshitta. See the Sifre on Dt XXXIV:7 on the incorruptible body of Moses still with its life-force and able to act again when the time comes. There is a partial mention in the Midrash Tanna’im al Devarim recovered by Hoffman. See just above on the Assumption of Moses. Of course, the Assumption of Moses might be a Samaritan composition. This looks like the concept that was modified into the Christian concept of the incorruptible spiritual body implicit throughout I Corinthians XV:35 – 50. The concept does not come up in Jewish writings after the time of the Tanna’im, doubtless because it could be used to promote Christianity if not honestly set out. See below, note a to Asâṭîr XII:20, for a systematic explanation. In its use of the term desolation in XI:16 the Asâṭîr stands in a line of tradition found in Daniel and then followed by I Maccabees and II Maccabees and echoed in the Gospel of Matthew, but the rationale in using the term in the Asâṭîr is closer to the intention of the Torah than in Daniel, where the use of the term has no explanation except the historical context, which itself is not explained and has to be known to the reader. This does not mean this chapter of the Asâṭîr is older than Daniel or I Maccabees or II Maccabees. 147 III. 1. THE TRANSMISSION OF THE TEXT OF ASÂṬIR XI AND XII Possible Origin from a Hebrew Original The Aramaic text might be a translation from Hebrew, since retranslation into Hebrew hints at alphabetical acrostics. Here are the suggestions. .8 ‫ זה שהגלה‬.7 ‫ וקול‬.6 ‫ הואיל‬.5 ‫ דעת‬.4 ‫ גם כן‬.3 ‫ בשנת‬.2 ‫ אמר‬.1 ‫יא‬ ‫ נחשי בלעם‬.14 ‫ מגדל‬.13 ‫ לבנת‬.12 ‫ כת‬.11 ‫ יסוף \ יחדל‬.10 ‫ טעם‬.9 ‫חוה‬ ‫ רצון‬.20 ‫ קרא אחר‬.19 ‫ צביון‬.18 ‫ פרקון‬.17 ‫ עדת‬.16 ‫ סמוך לזה‬.15 ‫ תוך חליפת ימים‬.22 ‫ שגיאה \ שגיאת‬.21 ‫ידחה פניה‬ .4 ‫ גויים נכריים יאבידו דוברי רשעה‬.3 ‫ במדה אצלו‬.2 ‫ אז‬.1 ‫יב‬ .8 ‫ זדים \ זה‬.7 ‫ ובית‬.6 ‫ הוא ייסיר את עול הברזל‬.5 ‫דחית דין‬ ‫ ] כעס‬.11 ‫ יאבדו שליטים‬.10 [ ‫ ] טרודים ומוכים‬.9 ‫חדות העם יחזק‬ ] .15 ‫ נוה שכם‬.14 ‫ מרד הקהל יחדל בימיו‬.13 ‫ לצים \ לצנות‬.12 [ ‫מתעב‬ ‫ ] ענו [ בחכמה יחיד בימיו יהיה‬.17 ‫סביבת [ ארץ העברים יניח‬ ‫ שולט מיעקב יאביד שריד‬.21 ‫ ראשית‬.20 [ ‫ ] קינים‬.19 [ ‫ ] צדים‬.18 ‫ תורה יכתב‬.22 ‫מעיר‬ Some of these depend on reconstruction of lacunae and are put in square brackets here. Some are precarious and not convincing proof. On the other hand, as a list of secure retroversions, I propose XI:1, 2, 5, 6, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21; XII: 3, 8, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22. Some of the remainder are highly probable, e.g. XI:7. In some cases the reconstructed Hebrew word is more precise than the Aramaic, namely XI:9, 11, 17, 19, 20; XII:13, 14. In twelve cases the Hebrew reconstructed is confirmed by a Scriptural quote or allusion namely XI:1, 2, 5, 14; XII:9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21. At XII:14, the word ‫ נאוס‬remains a possibility. Compare on this Abu ’l-Fateḥ 38:16; 50:4; 107:17. See the notes to XII:14. There is the analogy that the original language of the Arabic Joshua book was Hebrew which was translated into Aramaic. See the Bibliography. No arguments in this study depend on this proposal. The Hebrew that emerges is similar to Rabbinic rather than Biblical Hebrew, but there are no signs of any words that are not in the very earliest Rabbinic Hebrew (that is, if the hypothesis is sound, and recognising that this is building on a hypothesis and unprovable). From the alphabetical acrostics, typically Rabbinic are XI:4 ‫ דעת‬in the sense of “mind-set”; 8 ‫ חוה‬piCel in the sense of “set out systematically”; 9 ‫ טעם‬in the sense of “fundamental cause”; 11 ‫ ;כת‬17 ‫ ;פרקון‬19 ‫ קרא‬meaning “a passage of Scripture”; 22 ‫ ;תוך‬XII:4 ‫ דחיה‬in a technical sense; 14 ‫ נוה‬in the sense of “the whole sacred area” or “the outer wall of the whole sacred area”. [But the correct restoration could be ‫נאוס‬. See above]. Note also the word ‫ חצוף‬in the meaning of “indefatigable”, which is the epithet in XII:4. Once again, it must be emphasised that no part of this study depends on these reconstructions. 148 2. Condition of the Aramaic Text All the mss. go back to a single exemplar, as can be seen from the state of ch. XII. Leaving aside variants of spelling, Ben-Ḥayyim's ms. is superior to the other witnesses in every instance of disagreement, as will be shown. Most of the divergencies of the other witnesses are due to deliberate emendation to try to make sense of the text. Some of these emendations reach absurdity, even to the extent of the breaking up of single words to form sigla for numbers. There are, however, a couple of secondary readings that might be due to the adjustment of the wording to modernise the vocabulary, and these are presumably from an earlier period, when the text was still understood to some extent. Thus in XI:12 the secondary reading ‫קרטם‬ in MHSF is reasonable, even if not original. In the same verse, the secondary reading ‫ בחלוף‬for ‫ בעלום‬added in Gaster’s mss. at the end is reasonable as well. In Gaster’s mss. the phrase is ‫( בעולם רשות דבית יהודה בחלוף‬Bonnard records the first word as ‫ בעלום‬which probably was in fact the intended form). Ms. Y always has the original text, except that it starts v. 13 with the gloss or misplaced word ‫רשות‬ as do all the other mss. On every criterion, Y must be the primary text. Bonnard chose Y as his base text using detailed argument, which need not be repeated here. The state of ch. XII will be described first, before ch. XI, for reasons that will become clear. In ch. XII, the text has suffered physical damage in the ancestor of all extant witnesses. The scribe of the ancestral ms. has faithfully copied out what was readable, and left blank spaces for the rest. In XII:9, after ‫ נזיר‬he has written ‫זאל‬ that is ‫ זאלה( زال‬MH not recorded by Bonnard) in Hebrew letters. This is Arabic for “It's obliterated”. Note that this word shows for certain that text was not lost by tearing, but by water damage or bad fading due to a long passage of time. He has then copied out the sequence of letters ‫ בתנומי‬which of course are not complete words. After that, he has copied out ‫ יומיו‬which is ‫ ביומיו‬with the first letter missing. Previous commentators have not understood the Arabic note or its significance. In fact, it seems to have never been recognised as being an Arabic word. A scribe at some later stage has inserted rubrics in Aramaic signifying that v. 12 (in my numbering) is to be moved to after v. 14. I have not followed this instruction, because it is highly likely that it was entered into the text in the process of filling in the blank spaces with floating glosses and their lemmata, as described below. The quotation of v. 13 in the first rubric as ‫ בדוש ולעיו‬shows serious misunderstanding. Besides, the present v. 14 is a better ending for the group of four verses, and the sequence as it stands reads better. Also, the pattern of the water 149 damage seen from the present order of the verses is more likely. It is to be noted that the letters ‫ גג‬after ‫ קעם קדקד‬in vv. 12 and 14 are the equivalent of an asterisk or brackets, and are meant to correspond to the same symbol in the rubric directing the shifting of the verse. They have therefore been ignored in the translation and in all references to these two verses. Gaster's ms. A (Bonnard M) has this symbol in v. 11 instead of v. 12, but this is a secondary adjustment. Tal misunderstands completely, and is followed by Bonnard. A bizarre attempt at replacing the lost bits of text -- whether high-handed or unthinking is hard to say -- has led to the insertion of various unconnected words into the blank spaces of ch. XII verses 11, 12, 14. These words, in Aramaic and Aramaised Hebrew, have been artificially lined up to suggest sentences or phrases. All these words are easily identified as glosses to words in two other places in this chapter, taken from their correct position in the margin and relocated, in one case with the corresponding lemma as well. In v. 11 after ‫ קעם קדקד‬there comes the following pseudo-sentence that has baffled previous commentators: ‫יאבד ביומיו עמה‬ ‫( יזער בחטיה קיאמה ילקטון‬Variants: ‫ יעבד‬S not listed by Bonnard; ‫עמה‬ wrongly omitted in S not listed by Bonnard; ‫ יעזר‬MHSF and others listed by Bonnard; ‫ ילקון‬wrongly MHSF and others not specified By Bonnard). The word ‫ יזער‬is from the root ‫זור‬. On this root see XII:5 and the notes there. This word ‫ יזער‬renders the approximate meaning of ‫ יוסף‬in v. 17, and the form has probably been correctly identified as the ethpecel of ‫סוף‬. The word ‫ בחטיה‬is a mistaken gloss on in v. 17, with ‫ עקב‬misunderstood as a preposition. The lemma is inserted in v. 12. The word ‫ קיאמה‬is probably another mistaken gloss on ‫ יוסף‬in v. 17, interpreted as if the afcel of ‫יסף‬, the feminine form of the adjective being due to a misunderstanding of ‫ זרותה‬as the subject of ‫יוסף‬. The word ‫ ילקטון‬is another mistaken gloss on ‫ יוסף‬in v. 17, as the ethpecel of ‫ אסף‬with the plural being a guess to remedy what looked like the absence of a subject, with ‫ עקב‬not understood. The preceding words are the original text of the verse, which will be explained below. In v. 12, after ‫ קעם קדקד‬the words inserted are ‫עקב בישיה ביומיו שמאש‬ (Variants: ‫ בימיו‬F; ‫ שמאם‬wrongly MHSF and unspecified others). The original words then follow: ‫( מן ארעה חיולה חיול ימטי‬Variant ‫ ארעה‬F and unspecified mss.). The words ‫ עקב בישיה‬are taken from v. 17, and are the lemma belonging to the mistaken gloss ‫ בחטיה‬in v. 11. Here in v. 12, the words ‫ עקב בישיה‬have probably been inserted due to a misunderstanding of ‫עקב‬, as if meaning “end”. The word ‫ שמאש‬in its origin is probably an inept explanation of ‫ משמש‬in v. 20, since the marker ‫ אהן‬has been inserted in v. 20 before this word. Why it was inserted in v. 12 is hard to say, unless it was meant to be read with the words that follow, as if the 150 meaning were “a servant of God from the land of the Hebrews”. In v. 14, after the words ‫ קעם קדקד‬, the words added are ‫ באפילה קסמים‬. The original words of part of v. 14 then follow. ‫ יהי איכלה דשכם יקד באדה‬. (See below on the first word, which is incomplete; variant ‫ אכילה‬wrongly in S not recorded by Bonnard). The word ‫ באפילה‬glosses ‫ בעכר‬in v. 7. The word ‫ קסמים‬meaning “cabinet-makers and joiners” wrongly glosses ‫ מלחמיה‬in v. 6, misunderstood as meaning “carpenters”, probably due to the influence of a mistaken interpretation of ‫ יבנה‬in the same verse, as if from ‫ בני‬instead of ‫פני‬. This word ‫ קסמים‬was probably inserted in v. 14 in the belief that it meant “diviners” and by extension “idolaters”. It is worth remarking that the ineptitude of most of these glosses, though not all of them admittedly, is a sign that the language must have seemed archaic to the glossators. This is important evidence for an early date. Having worked out the extent of the glosses in ch. XII, we can now restore v. 11. This verse would have invited the start of the clumsy attempts at restoration, with its apparently unfavourable meaning, and the word ‫ בעכר‬at the start looking like a reminiscence of the same word in v. 7. As the verse stands, the apparent meaning is “In confusion the people will perish in his days”. This is impossible from the context. The solution is to take ‫ יאבד‬as a transitive verb, in the paCel, and ‫ עמה‬as the subject. (Although it is not common to see the object before the verb in Aramaic, it is done a few times in this text for effect, much as in English. It appears oftener than would be expected, in X:10 and 22 and XII:12 and 15 as well as here. This indicates that if the Aramaic was translated from Hebrew, the translator of both chapters was the same. In XI:7 the authors quote a sentence in Hebrew with the same construction). The paCel of this verb means to demolish or destroy a structure: the meaning of “to cause to perish” is rare, and is carried by the afCel. This leaves ‫ בעכר‬as the object. The Aramaic word ‫ עכר‬is the natural equivalent of the Hebrew ‫ כעס‬and is attested in this meaning, though not recorded by Tal in this meaning. The obvious Scriptural reminiscence is to Dt XXXII:16, ‫ יקניאהו בזרים ובתבועות יכעיסהו‬read in its context. As this causative meaning is echoed in v. 21 of this chapter of Dt with ‫ אכעיסם‬the allusion here can be seen to extend to vv. 19 -- 21. The allusions to this chapter of Deuteronomy continue in the following verses of ch. XII. The words of Dt XXXII:16 suggest a restoration ‫ תיעוב )מתעב( עכר‬tiyyob (amtâ’eb) Cakkår. This would mean “the vexatious abomination”, literally “the abomination of vexation”. For the meaning of ‫ עכר‬compare Mårqe p. 67 = I:32, lines 459 – 460 in the old recension ‫“ וקעמו קמיון באפין מלין עכר‬They confronted them with faces full of displeasure”. Not recorded by Tal. For the use of cakkår in an allusion to Dt XXXII:16 -- 20 and its context and the Hebrew ‫ הכעיס‬see Ben-Ḥayyim p. 61 line 151 40, in a piece by CÅmråm Dẩre, the first extant named hymn writer. Not recorded by Tal. This restoration is strongly supported from the context. If this suggestion is right, then the first letter of ‫ בעכר‬in the manuscript is actually the last letter of the word before, the rest of which is obliterated. I have tried to show this in the transcription by writing ‫ ]] תיעו [[ ב‬with square brackets round the first four letters but not the last. It is certain that a couple of words have been obliterated, since the epithet before this is missing. The phrase ‫ קעם קדקד‬could be a restoration. Having shown the pattern of the damage, we can now see what has happened to v. 9. The letters ‫ בתנומי‬were all that the scribe could work out from the traces left, and he has said explicitly that the rest is obliterated, with the Arabic word ‫זאל‬ before this group of letters. The sequence as it stands has no solution. If the < ‫ > ב‬is re-interpreted as < ‫( > ד‬the two are very similar if partly washed out) and the < ‫> תנ‬ as the remains of the plural suffix < ‫( > ינ‬a washed-out < ‫ > י‬will look like < ‫)> ת‬, then a restoration of ‫ טרידין‬is possible, and such a restoration is confirmed by the following verse. The plural suffix and the meaning fit the word ‫ עכירין‬at the end of the verse. On the analogy of ‫ טרידין‬and the following verse, the letters ‫ ומי‬are naturally read as ‫ ומיעין‬or ‫ ומיחין‬plural passive qal participle of ‫מעא = מחא‬. (The singular ‫ מיעי‬occurs in the Samaritan Targum at Ex XVII:14 mss. JEC). If the Aramaic ‫ טרידין ומיעין‬is read according to the following verse, with its reminiscence of Nu XXIV:19, then the Hebrew original (if there was one) can be restored as ‫ טרודים ומוכים‬with the second word being an explanation of ‫וירד‬ (as if from ‫)רדה‬. and the first word being an explanation of ‫והאביד שריד מעיר‬ which are the following words. With this neat fit in every direction, the restoration of the Aramaic can be regarded as highly probable. It is clear from the distribution of the damaged patches that each verse in ch. XII must have started on a new line. The extent of the physical damage to the ancestral exemplar can now be worked out. To start with, it is obvious that the first words of v. 9, the start of v. 11, the first half of v. 12, and the first words of v. 14 were affected. In all three verses, the initial words ‫ קעם קדקד‬are best explained as a reconstruction by the person that copied from the ancestral exemplar. In v. 9, ‫ נזיר‬is an epithet that has occurred earlier, in v. 3 and v. 5, and is probably a guess on the part of the same copyist. If the scribe correctly read the last two letters as ‫ יר‬then the obvious restoration is ‫אדיר‬. The letter < ‫ > ד‬can look like the middle and right side of a < ‫ > ז‬that had been smudged. The same might apply to ‫ עזיז בעותר‬in v. 10, which occurs earlier in v. 6. In v. 13, there is no title or epithet after ‫ קעם קדקד‬which could itself be a restoration. The verse is too short, and the word ‫ ביומיו‬would have 152 been expected. In v. 14, there is no title or epithet after ‫ קעם קדקד‬which could itself be a restoration; but the rest of the verse is of normal length. The word that follows ‫קדקד‬, the word ‫יהי‬, does not fit the context, and is to be regarded as a scribe’s guess. In the notes to this verse, I have argued for a correction of ‫ יהי‬to ‫אמיץ‬, a fairly minor graphic correction in Samaritan script. When this is done, a pattern emerges. The epithets in XII:3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 are all on the model of qaṭṭel ‫ קטיל‬in Aramaic. This consistency confirms the restoration. The damage has therefore affected the start of v. 13 and the start of v. 14. This uneven distribution of the damage within each verse would more likely be due to water than a tear: besides, a tear would have affected the text of ch. XI as well, if the damage had been at the outer edge of the leaf, which it probably was. Let’s consider a reconstruction of a textual layout where each verse started on a new line. Water wiped out the first words of v. 9 (except for a few traces), perhaps the start of v. 10, a bit of v. 11, the first half of v. 12, the first words of v. 13, and the first words of v. 14. The water damage would have been continuous. It will be seen later that it extended into v. 18. If the exposed side was the right, then it follows that the writing was on the right-hand page, which would have been the back of the second-last leaf of text. This would explain why the title does not survive at the end of the text. It would have been on the next leaf, which would have been more exposed to the water, specially if the binding was missing. This assessment will be refined. There is a kind of pattern to the insertions of the extraneous words in the blank spaces. The additions in v. 11 are all glosses belonging to v. 17. The additions in v. 12 are from v. 17, then v. 7. The first insertion in v. 14 is from v. 7, and the second from v. 6. The source of all the extraneous words is two cohesive sets of glosses, one set originally next to vv. 6 and 7, and the other set originally next to v. 17. This cohesiveness is preserved even with their insertion into their new positions. At this point a simple and plausible explanation, supported by analogy, as to how these blocks of words could have entered the body of the ancestral ms., readily suggests itself. The fact that the break-up has been minimal can be explained by supposing that in the ancestral exemplar the text had blank spaces to mark unreadable words in the exemplar that preceded it. In the present case, one might suppose that the ancestral exemplar was copied from a unique ms. At the same time or later on, glosses would have been put in the margins or between the lines, sometimes accompanied by their lemmata. If these words were near blank spaces, they could be mistaken for displaced pieces of the text. For the sake of presentation of the mechanism, let us suppose three ancestral mss. one after another. The first might have had a few illegible spots in ch. XII. The second ms. had the notation “It’s obliterated” in Arabic in v. 9 and blank 153 spaces to mark illegible phrases. This master ms. was later glossed in an effort to elucidate the text. When this ms. was copied, the glosses and lemmata were mistakenly put into the blank spaces nearest to them, or where they seemed to yield a suitable meaning. All extant mss. were copied from this third exemplar, through intermediary copies. The phenomenon of blank spaces being unrecognised by later scribes and closed up is common. A wavy line is often put in to stop this. In v. 19, the Arabic word ‫( פיגמה‬fa-yujimmuhu ‫ )ﻓﯿﺠﻤﮫ‬correctly glosses the previous word ‫פרע‬. Perhaps this word is to be read as made up of ‫ פ‬for ‫פרע‬ followed by the gloss ‫יגמה‬. The Arabic word is to be understood as “releasing from constraint”. This one Arabic gloss ‫ יגמה‬can probably be ascribed to whoever wrote ‫ זאל‬in v. 9. In that case, it is older than the inept Aramaic and Aramaised Hebrew glosses in ch. XII. The form ‫ פיגמיה‬in MHF and mss. unspecified by Bonnard is to be rejected as an inept adjustment by someone that did not recognise the Arabic. In XII:15, the allusion to Dt XII:10 requires a word from the root ‫ סבב‬in the original Hebrew. Note that the Samaritan Pentateuch only has the singular of this word, never the plural, so the singular form would have been used here for preference. The verse is a bit short as it stands, but the insertion of ‫ סביבת‬in the Hebrew would make it the right length. In Aramaic, it would be ‫ סארת‬from the root ‫ סחר‬/ ‫סאר‬. In XII:16, the epithet is missing. The preceding words ‫ קעם קדקד‬might have been a restoration by the scribe. Note that there is no difficulty in reading the words that remain. Previous commentators have been misled by the spelling of ‫ענון‬ “humility”. (Or perhaps “strength”. See p. 155 on ‫)ענו‬. It has been read as the adjective ‫ ענון‬of Jewish Aramaic and Syropalestinian: this has then led to unfounded conjectures on what to do with the prefix ‫ ב‬or how to alter the form of the noun. In fact, this form ‫ענון‬, though not attested elsewhere, can easily be interpreted if the suffix is read not as ån but as on, i.e. if the word is read as the noun inbon. This noun is not attested elsewhere, but its formation would be regular. Note also that the adjective from the root ‫ ענו‬is already known, and it is ‫עני‬. See the Samaritan Targum to Nu XII:3 ms. V. The entry in Tal’s dictionary shows misunderstanding of the word and its morphology and the syntax of the sentence. There is clearly something wrong with v. 18 as it stands in ms. Y. To restore the normal structure of introductory phrase with epithet and then complete sentence, MHSF have added the verb ‫ יינק‬at the end, this word being supplied from Dt XXXIII:19 (singular in the Samaritan text). This reading is superficially attractive, 154 but does not give any clear meaning. On examination, it can be seen that the reading in Y, though disturbed, is better than the reading of MHSF, which is secondary. The word ‫ ערלתו‬is part of the paraphrase of Dt XXXIII:19, and must therefore be in the same sentence as ‫בשפע ימה‬. With ‫ יינק‬added, the paraphrase departs from the structure of the scriptural verse. Besides, the obvious sense of the scriptural allusion demands that the riches must pass to the ‫קדקד‬, as tribute from the foreign nations. Anyway, the title ‫ נגוד‬is appropriate for a guide of an Israelite tribe or a guide of all Israel, but not appropriate for a guide of foreign nations, so ‫ ערלתו‬can’t be part of the epithet: but this means there is no room for the verb ‫יינק‬. I conclude that the water damage affected one word near the start of v. 18. The damaged spot would have been exactly underneath the damaged spot in v. 15. The missing word is ‫ צהדין‬in Aramaic, corresponding to ‫ צדים‬in Hebrew. Compare the Palestinian Targum of Dt XXXIII: 19 on this restoration, where the paraphrase is close to this. This discovery in regard to v. 18 leads to the question of whether v. 17 might have been affected near the start, and whether the epithet ‫ בר‬should be ‫( גבר‬to be read as gibbår). There is a well-attested line of interpretation that makes the word ‫ איש‬in Nu XII:3 a technical term from the root ‫ אשש‬or ‫ אוש‬rather similar to the Christian term athlētēs, which is then specified by the term ‫ ענו‬so that the verse means that Moses was heroic in the degree of his humility. This is the interpretation of the Sifre and Sifre Zuṭa, and is behind the translation of ‫ ענו‬as “powerful” in some traditions of the Samaritan Targum. (See p. 154 on the noun). Once again, ‫ קעם קדקד‬could be a restoration. The letter < ‫ > ג‬in Samaritan script, if partly obliterated or smudged, could be mistaken for a blemish line on the parchment or papyrus. After some thought, it was decided that the reading ‫ בר‬fitted the intention of the verse. Verse 19 has the appearance of completeness. See above. In the notes to v. 20, it is shown that the epithet in the Hebrew text would have been ‫מחוקק‬, but that the translator has modified the structure of the verse. It is apparent, then, that there is no textual derangement after v. 18. It can be concluded that the water affected a continuous or nearly continuous stretch of text from v. 9 to v. 18, modifying the assessment given earlier. The text obliterated was the first words of v. 9 (except for a few letters and traces), perhaps the start of v. 10, the start of v. 11 (except for a few letters), the first half of v. 12, the first words of v. 13, the first words of v. 14 (except for a few letters and traces), a little bit part-way into v. 15, the first words of v. 16, the first words of v. 17, and a little bit part way into v. 18. Water damage is the only explanation for the distribution of the damage, or the 155 preservation of isolated letters in v. 9. Neither would the copyist have used the Arabic term ‫ זאל‬in v. 9 if he had meant to say some paper or parchment had been torn off. The three minor emendations needed in ch. XI are merely the removal of a gloss with a slight re-adjustment in the first place, the re-positioning of a word written above the line at some stage in the second place, and the removal of a gloss or scribal note in the third place. The first two of these adjustments can be supported by compelling argument, and there is a good argument for the third. In ch. XI v. 13 ‫בר‬ before ‫ מולד‬could have been inserted as a gloss, the purpose being to show that the word is to be read as muwwẩled “offspring”, and not the commoner word mûlåd “birth”. At a later stage, the word ‫ בד‬before this would have been deleted by a later scribe, who thought that the letters ‫ בר‬written between the lines to be a correction to ‫בד‬. This produced the reading ‫( בר מולד‬without ‫ )בד‬in the extant mss. I have deleted ‫ בר‬and restored ‫בד‬. Ben-Ḥayyim made the same emendation using a simpler argument. It is acknowledged that this restoration is not certain, but the meaning of the verse won’t be materially changed. In v. 12, the word ‫ רשות‬before ‫דבית יהודה‬ can be seen to either be a gloss or out of place. If meant to be an Aramaic word and part of the sentence, it is grammatically impossible. It is in the construct state, which is impossible before ‫דבית‬. If the word is to be read with the following word, it would have to be in the definite state or just possibly the absolute state. Either way, the plural verb is inexplicable. I take it, then, that the word was an addition between the lines, which has been entered into the body of the text. The meaning would be “authorisation”. The intention would be to explain that Judah’s authorisation to hold the kingship is in the scriptural verse quoted. The place of the gloss would be before the Scriptural verse quoted. In this place the construct state would be needed. It could even be that the word is not a gloss, but a restoration of a missing word noted between the lines, which has later been inserted into the line in the wrong place. If the gloss had been inserted before ‫ שמע‬but above the line, it could easily have been thought to belong on the line above, as part of the text. This would put it before ‫ דבית‬as it now is. Bonnard has a different solution, taking the word to mean “wickedness”, but this would have the same double grammatical difficulty as just explained. Aside from this, there are signs that the word does belong at the start of the verse. In this chapter, the only marker of any division within a verse in ms. Y is just before this word ‫רשות‬ which is not where any major division would have been expected. (The only other division anywhere is after v. 6, where it is quite appropriate as a major division). I think it highly likely that a symbol before this word, showing that it is an interlinear or marginal gloss, has been misread and has turned into this verse divider. After long thought, it was decided to restore the word to the presumed right place rather than 156 delete it as a gloss. The meaning of the verse is not affected either way. Gaster has no conception of why the quotation in Hebrew is written here, and Bonnard uses the layout of his text to avoid trying to explain why it is there in his translation. In v. 16, the word ‫ קהל‬before ‫ ואשמו‬was either an interlinear note to explain that ‫ אשמו‬is the designation of a category of people, or more likely, an interlinear note to change ‫ ואשמו‬to ‫ וקהל אשמו‬for the same reason. The suggestion that ‫ אשמו‬refers to a category of people was rejected for compelling reasons explained in the notes. Finally, there are two places, one in ch. XI and one in ch. XII, where the editor must delete very late secondary content. First, Ben-Ḥayyim has shown conclusively that the survey of the promised land, as seen by Moses, that comes after XI:2a can be seen to be an interpolation by syntax, style, and content. Second, the verse-numbering in ch. XII is certainly secondary, and shows serious misunderstanding of the chapter. It depends on the absurdity of numbering the two scribal notes directing the repositioning of v. 12 as if they were themselves separate verses, and depends as well on the blunder of reading the word “twenty-six” in v. 23 as if it were a verse-number. No verse is numbered 25. In Gaster’s mss., this misreading has caused the transposition of the two halves of v. 23, so that v. 23, which the scribe considers to be no. 26, can start with the number 26, lifted from the words of the verse. 3. The Form of Aramaic in this Text In a few cases previous commentators have been misled by some predictable normal phonetic spelling. Some examples: XI:13 ‫ גפנה‬Gåbbẩnå or Gibbêna instead of ‫ ;גבנה‬XI:17 ‫ רבע‬rêbå instead of ‫ ;רוח‬XI:22 ‫ בעלבן‬bilbån instead of ‫ בחלפן‬or ‫ ;בעלפן‬XII:4 ‫ ראבי‬râbi instead of ‫ ;רוח‬XII:6 ‫ ביומיה‬instead of ‫ ;ביומה‬XII:6 ‫ יבנה‬yibbâni instead of ‫ יפנה‬or ‫ ;יפני‬XII:14 ‫ באדה‬instead of ‫( בחדה‬the phonetics need further consideration to make this one certain); XII:16 ‫ באד‬instead of ‫( בחד‬but notice the spelling ‫ באחד‬in S not recorded by Bonnard). It is normal for the sound [b] to be re-spelt as < ‫ > ב‬instead of < ‫> ו‬. It is common for doubled [bb] to spelt with < ‫ > פ‬or < ‫ > ב‬regardless of etymology. It is normal for < ‫ > ח‬and < ‫> ע‬ to change places and to some extent there seem to be rules for it, as a device to show vowels. The spelling in Macdonald’s edition of Mårqe does not follow the reality of the mss. Macuch has a useful section on spelling but it is misleading by being incomplete. There is a need for a systematic study of the range of variation in spelling and the rules for phonetic respelling. 157 On the dating of the language see also above Part I section 3. Bonnard has a well-balanced but very short sketch of the evidence for the dating of the language of the Asâṭîr as a whole. The evidence from vocabulary supports antiquity, though Bonnard does not draw the consequences of his own survey. It turns out in instance after instance that there is a difference between the original parts of Mårqe and the equally old parts of the liturgy. Besides this, often words attested in Samaritan Aramaic only in the Asâṭîr, or only in this book and what are considered to be late forms of the Targum, have cognates in other forms of Palestinian Aramaic. These words did not appear from nowhere, and can only be explained as old alternatives, like the alternatives that Bonnard has pointed out in the old texts. Ben-Ḥayyim and Bonnard found a surprising number of unattested words throughout the book. On top of this, as evidence of antiquity, I have found some unexpected borrowings from Greek not noticed or understood by previous commentators including Bonnard and not recognised in Tal’s dictionary. Instances are ‫ קרמט‬in XI:12 or ‫( אליניס‬with a Greek plural ending) in XI:17. See the list following. Admittedly, the second of these might well be an artificial literary device, but that only shows its antiquity more convincingly. The term ‫ בדמסין‬in XII:10 is a legal and government term not likely to survive into later centuries as conditions changed. The etymology is explained correctly by Tal, though the meaning is missed. Bonnard transcribes it wrongly as ‫ בדמוסין‬p. 377 and then mistranscribes it in yet a second worse wrong way as b-dmys in the commentary p. 376. He lacks knowledge of the exact underlying Greek word and its precise meaning. See further in the Annotations. I would add to the words derived from Greek the enigmatic ‫ עמינדס‬in three places in ch. XII. See above Part I section 3 pp. 7 -- 8. The Aramaic legal term ‫ מערב‬in XII:20 must be ancient in the meaning it has here, that is, a deposit and first instalment that binds the payer to complete the transaction by making more instalments and binds the receiver to accept them so as to complete the transaction. Bonnard p. 382 does not know this word has a known meaning in Syropalestinian and makes an uninformed guess that means leaving the next word ‫ משלם‬out of the translation and interpretation without letting on to the reader. It depends as well on not recognising a title of Mt. Gerizim based on Scripture. He translates ‫ איקר‬as “honneur”. The uniqueness of Mt. Gerizim is a fundamental theological concept and common knowledge. The reference to Jacob’s vision ought to have been unmistakable. It is common knowledge that in the Jewish targums on that very passage ‫ יקרא‬is the Kavod. The use of this phrase ‫תרע דאיקר‬ otherwise unattested is a sign of antiquity. The words ‫ חלק מחקק‬or ‫ חלקת מחקק‬at the start of the verse are not recognised as coming from the Torah and this is one of the reasons the verse is not understood, though not the only one. The translation of the sentence is without content. Tal does not list the word ‫מערב‬. Why not? Later usage of cognate words does not reflect precisely this legal concept. This is a step beyond the meaning of ‫ ܪܗܒܘܢ‬in Syriac, which is a gage, but does not legally oblige the payer to finish the transaction by making more payments. See the illuminating examples given by Brockelmann. The term in the Asâṭîr and the equivalent in the NT in identical meaning down to the details, mutatis mutandis, is a deliberate use of a 158 term of commercial law. It is a step beyond the meaning of ‫ ערבון‬in Hebrew and Jewish Palestinian and Babylonian Aramaic, which is a gage and a non-refundable deposit, but does not put any legal obligation on the person paid, who can cut the transaction short with a financial penalty, and does not put any legal obligation on the payer, who can withdraw but by losing his deposit. If my arguments for the meaning of the place-name ‫ גפנה‬are correct, then this is a sure sign of antiquity. The supposed Arabisms are not convincing, often being due to misunderstanding of what is meant and then arguing backwards, as has been shown in this study in the course of the argument. Instances are ‫ קרטם‬or ‫ עמינדס‬or ‫ חופה‬in the list following. In XI:12 the original reading is ‫ קרמט‬not ‫ קרטם‬and this is a Greek word. The second word has a more complicated explanation. See the Annotations. In the last case Bonnard has shown that the word is native Aramaic, though not understanding the meaning. Many of the supposed examples of Arabised syntax are weak or can be seen to be possible Aramaic before any Arabic influence. As knowledge has progressed, many of these have been discarded. See Moshe Florentin, Late Samaritan Hebrew (Brill, Leiden, 2005), p. 25 note 65 for an example, but Bonnard cites others. The word ‫ ערלתו‬at XII:18 is certain. Aramaic does not use abstract nouns for categories of collective nouns, and neither does Arabic, but Greek does it so normally and easily that another language in close contact could copy. The word looks like a loan-translation. Note that the morphology is unique. Even that has been borrowed. When was Greek used so naturally in Palestine? Bonnard has not presented a case for late dating. His data actually support an early date for the whole booklet, once the ignorant guesses at borrowing from Arabic copied mechanically from others just as ignorant are got rid of. He finds Aramaic etymologies for some of these himself, and quotes others. An important word on the correct dating of the earliest extant Samaritan Aramaic texts. Ben-Ḥayyim, followed by Tal, puts the earliest named hymn-writer c Amråm Dẩre, the father of Mårqe, in the first half of the fourth century. He uses the two separately attested data that both lived in the time of Bẩbå Råbbå, whose length of life he dates as 308 to 362 (p. 13). He does not say where he gets the date of death from, but the date of birth must come from Chronicle Adler. He points out that c Ảmråm is said to have been a high official under Bẩbå Råbbå so must have been a mature adult. He insists on a dating of B.R. in the fourth century under rule from Constantinople, arguing fallaciously from the mention of Christian symbols when B.R. paraded through Constantinople, forgetting that this is set in the reign of Philip, who reigned from 244 till 249 in Rome. (Ed. of Mårqe introduction p. 14. No knowledge of detailed proof of a third century date from A.F. by Vilmar and Adalbert Merx and Montgomery, and thinks the concept to be original to Stenhouse). The mistake in mentioning Constantinople is not to be explained away as a mistake in the name of the emperor, since emperors ruling from Rome in the third century have just been mentioned and Decius comes afterwards. The only other mention of Constantinople is the story before this of Bẩbå’s nephew Lîbi ‫ לוי‬becoming Patriarch of Constantinople and then taking part in a war against the Byzantines 159 which is obviously stupid fiction, as was seen by A.F. himself. Dating in the fourth century is untenable from all the data in A.F. See A.F. 122:4 onwards. Stenhouse’s historical notes to his translation p. 168 line 7 onwards are copied from Montgomery who improved on Merx and Vilmar. Stenhouse copied this in two articles in 1995, which he had presented as if new discoveries at conferences of the Société d’Etudes samaritaines. See Pummer’s book of 2016. Mor and then Bonnard and his associates and then Schorch in a recent article know nothing of all this work. The question is always ignored or dismissed without argument by Tal. A.F. gives synchronisations with Septimius Severus 193 – 211 just before Bẩbå Råbbå; Alexander i.e. probably Caracalla 211 – 217 rather than Severus Alexander 222 – 235 (Montgomery p. 96) and Gordian 238 – 244 at the time; Philip 244 – 249 near the end of his rule and with no mention of persecution; and Decius 249 – 251 afterwards. On the other hand, the Tûlẩdå p. 92 gives the date of 4600 A.M. which can be shown to be 175 A.D. (or just possibly 178) for B.R. 35 The author of the 35 A.F. says Muhammad “rose” and a bit later on “came” 5,047 years from Creation. If he means the year of the Hijrah starting in July 622 A.D., then 1 A.D. started a few months before 4426 Anno Mundi. See A.F. 172:15 – 18 (Stenhouse p. 243). Re-calculated from the end of the Time of Favour in a list at A.F. 176:12 – 13 (Stenhouse p. 247 misunderstands and mistranslates), where the term used is the “appearance” of Muhammad. Part 2 of the Introduction to the Tûlẩdå written in 1346 A.D. pp. 58 – 59 makes 1 AD start a few months before 4433 A.M., a discrepancy of seven years. Current reckoning makes 1 A.D. 4434 A.M., a discrepancy of eight years. This first appears in publications from 1950 onwards. It is an adjustment of an earlier reckoning with a discrepancy of nine years, which first appears in ms. L1 in 1859 at A.F. 176:12 – 13 as an editor’s alternative. Ms. A in 1857 has a big lacuna. It then appears alone in all later mss. of the second recension except for J which has a new erroneous calculation due to erroneous addition of years of High Priests, following the Tûlẩdå which has a big lacuna. There is abundant documentation of confusion before the writing of ms. L1. The discrepancy of nine years can be explained as due to an unnatural reading of A.F. 172:15 – 18 to mean Izqiyya died in 323 B.C. when Alexander started his campaigns, and the discrepancy of eight years by an unnatural reading to put his death in 322 B.C. when Alexander conquered Palestine. The date in the Introduction to the Tûlẩdå and the modern dating are impossible because they would contradict A.F. by too many years on the approximate date of the death of Alexander, and would flatly contradict him on the date of the Hijrah, which he must have known for certain. The disagreement with the dating of the Hijrah by A.F. is covered up in current publications by giving a date according to years of Entry into Canaan, an entirely novel device. The place where A.F. meant to tell the reader the conversion of the date of composition of his book by years of the Hijrah to the year A.M. at 178:9 – 12 is corrupt in all mss. of the first recension and therefore deliberately left out by the editors of the second recension. [A.F. wrote in 756 A.H. = 1355 A.D. which is 5780 A.M. The dates 898 A.H. and 5945 A.M. first appear in D written in 1595 then the late part of S then B (Stenhouse HSC). What probably happened was that a scribe took the author’s words “which is the date of writing this book” to be the words of the scribe of his exemplar and changed the date to the date of his copying from that. Ms. C (Stenhouse P) written in 930 A.H. or 1523 has a secondary correction to 756 A.H. and 5803 A.M. If 1355 A.D. = 5780 A.M., then this would be 1378 A.D., 23 years after the date of composition]. There is an apparent difficulty. At 92:9 – 10 A.F. says Alexander’s death was before the death of the High Priest Izqiyya. At 84:2 – 5 he says this High Priest died 4,100 years from creation. If 5047 is the year of the Hijrah which was in July 622 A.D. then 1 A.D. is 4426 A.M. This would put the death of Izqiyya in 4100 A.M in 326 B.C. when Alexander was aged 30. But Alexander died in June 323 B.C. at the age of 33. A.F. must be following a source using a different reckoning at 92:9 -- 10. A.F. gets round the difficulty by careful ambiguity in the first place 84:2 – 5 as to whether Alexander’s campaigns were well advanced during the time of Izqiyya or whether Alexander had died before the death of Izqiyya. It can be assumed that A.F. knew the figure 4,100 years from creation for the death of Izqiyya came from was incompatible with what he says at 92:9 – 10 about Izqiyya hearing about the death of Alexander and worrying about 160 Comprehensive History, Khaḍir, followed by Chronicle Adler, says the appearance of B.R. was in 4600 A.M., copying but misunderstanding the Tûlẩdå, which does not use the word “appearance”. He then wrongly and inexplicably converts 4600 A.M. to 665 years since Alexander and 308 A.D. The figures are copied by Chronicle Adler. 36 Khaḍir ambiguously writes “since the appearance of Alexander”. Chronicle Adler writes “since the accession of Alexander”, without correcting the real mistake. 37 The Tûlẩdå puts the date of 4600 A.M. for B.R. at the end of the whole long notice, after the details of his twelve-part administrative division of Samaritan population in and near Palestine. It is the date of his death or the sudden end of his rule. Note that absolute dates of High Priests are given by the year of death in the Chain of High Priests. The Tûlẩdå then says Dositheos appeared in the days of B.R. If this was not the time of the individual B.R., it was within the favourable era that ended with him. It will be shown in a separate article that Dositheos died in the early first century A.D. See Part IX. Khaḍir followed by Chronicle Adler has the independent datum that B.R. ruled for 40 years. If true, this puts the start of his rule in 135 or 138 A.D. This date 4600 A.M. or 175 or 178 A.D. is near the end of a long period of at least 150 years ending in 180 A.D. when a Senate and Patriarchs ruled with an increasingly free hand under Roman suzerainty, but this period had its beginnings earlier still, in 63 B.C. or 217 years before. See pp. 12 bottom – 19 top on major changes at that time. A selfcontained block of text in A.F. sets out the thorough reorganisation by B.R., which could only have been done if he had been Patriarch, an attested position, under Roman suzerainty. It is impossible to dismiss this as fiction. It is too sober and sounds too the future. With his usual honesty to his data (as mentioned on pp. 107 – 108) he has kept the record. It is probably legendary and due to knowledge of the importance of Alexander to the Samaritans, as well as a false secondary association of the exact dates of death of Izqiyya and Alexander. Therefore 622 A.D. is 5047 A.M. and 1 A.D. is 4426 A.M. and therefore 4600 A.M., the date of B.R., is 175 A.D. if the entry in the Tulẩdå follows the same system as A.F. Otherwise it is 178. Note that this date for B.R. in the Tûlẩdå stands isolated from the lists of High Priests, so is not dependent on adding up the years of officiating. All other calculations are due to erroneous addition of terms of High Priests, and can be ignored, against Powels’s speculations. It was just before the persecutions under Commodus. The year 308 A.D. is 663 years from the birth of Alexander and 643 years from his accession to the throne. The very first mss. wrongly give years from Alexander as 665, but this is inexplicably changed for the worse to 655 years in mss. soon after. In the same mss. the date is changed to 380 A.D. The second change could be a misreading of bad very cursive or very hasty handwriting and might not be deliberate. Chronicle Adler copies the figure of 655 years since Alexander and 308 A.D. 36 37 In the cumulative counting devised by the author of Chronicle Adler, the death of the High Priest Izqiyya is put in 3944 A.M., making a mistake of 156 years. Chronicle Adler goes one step further than the book it is translated from by giving a progressive cumulative dating of High Priests, but there is no tradition behind this. This can be seen by how it disagrees with the Chain of High Priests and how the times between events don’t work. The Chain of High Priests makes 4600 A.M. the year of accession of B.R.’s father, but this is from cumulative addition and not an absolute date. It does not seem to be significant. The conversion of the date 4600 A.M. to 308 A.D. in both the Comprehensive History and Chronicle Adler is unworkable because incompatible with the known dates A.M. and A.D. of Alexander and the Hijrah. What has happened is that the authors of both books, the Comprehensive History in 1875 and Chronicle Adler in 1889, have not known enough history to understand the synchronisation of B.R. with Roman emperors by A.F., but on the other hand have not been able to handle the figure 4600 A.M. in the Tûlẩdå in relation to the dates of either Alexander or Muhammad because the necessary printed history books were not to hand. See footnote 35. 161 practical. For example, the reader is explicitly told the system in the Time of Favour was not imposed, only a system that worked. The account is incompatible with either the fourth or third century. Conditions were right in the second century. See above pp. 12 middle – 20 top. The Samaritans did not take part in either of the Jewish revolts. Why would they? Roman rule protected them from Jewish rule, which would have been worse than under the Hasmonaeans with the malevolent μισανθρωπία ‫שנאת חנם‬ of every one of the Jewish parties except perhaps the Sadducees. A true record of relatively undisturbed religious practice and religious education under Roman rule starting in 63 B.C. and ending near the end of the second century could have been preserved. We have this associated with the name of the last Patriarch, but there was probably still a Senate as well. Then came real wickedness under three emperors in a row. The division of extensive territory into twelve parts under twelve pairs of a local governor and a Priest mentioned by both A.F. and the Tûlẩdå is not fanciful, neither is it incompatible with the previous account by A.F. of a division of a more modest territory under seven wise men. It is Samaria at its full extent, where the local governors had full power, but together with places outside Samaria, such as Gaza and Tyre, where the governors managed a substantial Samaritan minority. Everything before reads like a sober record of a long-lasting workable administrative and educational system with a list of names of district administrators at the very start or the end. At the moment, there is no way of telling whether the self-contained block of text preserved describes the original set-up or an extensive improvement towards the end. A.F. says B.R. limited some of the power of the Priests and took away some of their functions which they had been exercising out of custom but not by right, specifically mentioning circumcision. He was the overall secular ruler, but quite possibly an important Priest of one faction. His religious authority over the Sebuaeans was real but limited. There is more on all this in my chapter Mikra and above p. 14 but see the whole of Part II section 1 above. If the name and title belong to the very end of the system, it might be relevant that there was a High Priest called Bẩbå in the Tûlẩdå but called Ṭûbiyya by A.F. at 118:8 (Stenhouse p. 162), at about the right time. 38 The Tûlẩdå is self-contradictory on whether B.R. was ever High Priest. It P37FP37F P Bẩbå Råbbå ‫ בבא רבה‬is not a title, as commonly asserted. It does not mean “the big gate”. The first word ‫ בבא‬is a name. It is spelt with final alef not hē showing it is a diminutive of a name. The second word is a title in the form of an adjective in the definite state spelt ‫ רבה‬with hē meaning “the Great”. There is no word bâb or bǡb in Samaritan Aramaic or any form of western Aramaic meaning gate. (The feminine form occurs once in Targum Neofiti in the meaning of the pupil of the eye). This word is eastern. It is normal in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and Mandaean, but not Syriac. (In Syriac the feminine form means the pupil of the eye). Florentin in his edition of the Tûlẩdå p. 88 makes this false assertion about this word. I single Florentin out because he does know Aramaic, but it does not suit him to contradict doctrine. The mistake seems to have started off as an uninformed but pretentious guess by someone unfamiliar with the differences between eastern and Palestinian Aramaic in the Companion to Samaritan Studies (Mohr, Tübingen, 1993). Pummer (book of 2016 p. 132) copies from this entry without acknowledgment. Tal avoids commenting by leaving the name out of his dictionary. Three persons in the Tûlẩdå bear this name. Were they all gates to something? Why aren’t their names mentioned as well as their supposed titles? The same name occurs in the Talmud as a diminutive or hypocoristic of ‫אברהם‬. Pummer goes on about Mesopotamian supernatural or superhuman figures that were mystic doorkeepers or had this as their title. This is fantasy. Even if it were true, a doorkeeper is 38 162 does not assign any years of High Priesthood to B.R., but then says his brother became High Priest after him, not after their father. A.F. calls him High Priest at 37:13 (Stenhouse p. 190) but what goes before is clearly fiction and what follows jumbles a vassal king and a successful resistance leader. A.F. alternates to the point of self-contradiction between speaking of B.R. as a powerful prestigious ruler honoured by the emperor and a leader of resistance against Roman oppression. The resistance alternates between completely successful and only partly. A.F. tells the story that B.R. was kept in Constantinople (before the time of Constantinople) till his death. What this means is A.F. does not know when he lived. This might explain why A.F. calls the first Bẩbå by an alternative name. It is hard to find enough years for B.R.’s military activity. There was persecution before Caracalla but military resistance to persecution started some time after the start of his reign. The question of successfully resisting paying tax comes up out of context at A.F. 137:15 -16 (Stenhouse p. 190). Nothing is said about Gordian’s behaviour towards the Samaritans. The honouring of the person called B.R. by A.F. by Philip and Oticilia seems to reflect a real policy of repair, and it is conceivable that the Samaritan leader was invited to Rome. In short, A.F. has fused three historical eras, not successfully. To clear up confusion. An excerpt from a lost history attached to the Arabic Joshua book as ch. 49 falsely identifies the child of the High Priest circumcised by the goodwill of a high official with Bẩbå Råbbå. Juynboll accepted this and Montgomery follows. In the related passage in A.F. Vilmar, followed by Montgomery, identifies the name of the emperor, called Ṭâ’os or Ṭê’os ‫ طﮭﻮس‬in Aramaic by A.F. at 150:1 (Stenhouse p. 109) in all the complete mss., as Constantius II (337 – 361), but St. Petersburg fragments GH undoubtedly correctly have ‫ طﯿﮭﻮس‬Ṭî’os. Fragment G has some unique correct readings. See pp. 244 and 250. Montgomery identifies the Roman official ‫ גרמון ﺟﺮﻣﻮن‬named by A.F. with Bishop Germanus of Neapolis in the fourth century because ch. 49 of the Arabic Joshua book calls this official a Christian priest qissîs. A.F. does not mention this title. In the Aramaic part of the not a door. Even if it were true, the religion of the Mesopotamians is not the religion of Israel. There is not a skerrick of a mention in the legends about B.R. or the real historical information about him either that has anything to do with doorways. Pummer in his book of 2016 says the title Baba meaning gate or gatekeeper has been given to various Jewish and Moslem holy men. The scholars by the name of Baba in the Talmud were not famed for any special saintliness and had no connection with gates. He gives no evidence, but this is one of the many ignorant inventions of A. D. Crown made without evidence but believed by everyone in the clique --- or better, pretended to be believed. As for the statement that it can be an Islamic title, meaning either gate or gatekeeper, Arabic is not Aramaic and the word bâba in Arabic does not mean gate: it means father. Arabic titles are not always religious. It is mildly honorific, but there is no connection with holiness or saintliness, as Pummer claims, not even respectability. Has he read Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves? These fantasies about the name of B.R. are refuted at length here, boring as it is, because they are in keeping with the common pernicious practice whereby one author makes data up about Arabic and sometimes Aramaic without knowledge and without asking someone, and it is then copied without verifying by others, since if it was asserted by one of the omniscient few it must be true, or if not true, not to be questioned in print. 163 memorial phrase in both books he is called ‫ אסורה‬. I think this is the Greek hierós, pronounced [jeros] (stress on the second syllable) at this time, a title of a senior priest. A.F. says the emperor tried to stop all practice of the religion of Israel. This fits Constantius II. A.F. speaks of a ban on performance of the religion in general, but speaks of circumcision only in connection with the child of the High Priest. The Arabic Joshua book says the ban was specifically on circumcision and that it was imposed on the whole population. A.F. makes no connection of this child with B.R. and sets the event later than his time and names the child’s father as the High Priest Iqbon. (Which one?). This child is unnamed. It is only the Arabic Joshua book that makes the impossible connection with B.R., giving his father a different name, Nẩtånel, the name of the father of B.R., and leaving out the name of the emperor. 39 A permanent guard was put over the High Priest’s house. There was a careful watch on the house on the eighth day of the child’s birth. The emperor seems to have been trying to wipe out the High Priesthood by ending the eligibility of the whole line of Phineas. Restriction on the High Priest by Constantius II has been conflated with a free-floating tradition of trying to end the High Priesthood by a much later emperor in circumstances when it might have seemed feasible together with a ban on circumcision in general at various other times. The explanation of the permanent importance of what was done by the real cleric Garmon and the date have inexplicably been lost, even though mentioned in the hymn for circumcision by Mårqe still in use. Investigation is needed. Khaḍir follows A.F. but Chronicle Adler guesses from incomplete knowledge and changes Constantius to Decius. P38FP38F P From all this it follows that if A.F. is right, the earliest Samaritan hymns in our hands aside from the Durrân, that is, the works of cẢmråm Dẩre, are from the early third century and Mårqe wrote his book in the mid third century; but it is certain both of these are nearly a century earlier from other evidence. The proposed dating of the chapters XI and XII of the Asâṭîr in the first half of the second century, with ch. XI perhaps slightly earlier, is confirmed. Although Khaḍir does not make the mistake of identifying the unnamed child with B.R., and does give the correct name of his father, he has somehow given B.R. a date of 308 A.D. and a date of 665 years, changed to 655 years, since Alexander, as was shown in note 36 pp. 160 -- 161. This date can only come from identifying B.R. with the child of the High Priest and the emperor Constantius with Constantius I who died in 396 A.D. Khaḍir knows these events happened after the time of B.R., but has unthinkingly copied the calculations of someone that copied the statement in the Arabic Joshua book that the child was B.R. but combined that with the identification of the emperor by A.F. as Constantius. Chronicle Adler copies. There was no cross-checking. There is real tradition throughout the Comprehensive History (see the Bibliography for the only exception) but it is copied selectively with some bad changes in Chronicle Adler. The common practice of using modern Samaritan histories without reading what is known about them leads to endless mistakes. Pummer in his book of 2016 misrepresents Ben-Ḥayyim’s words where he agrees with Yahuda on the origin of the long modern history in Hebrew as being a translation of the Comprehensive History with massive additions from the MT, and then does not give a proper reference, instead referring to a place where Florentin refers to Ben-Ḥayyim’s findings on a different question. See Pummer’s p. 248 note 120 in its context. See my Bibliography p. 257 and p. 261. 39 164 There is a very surprising number of previously unattested words, or words unattested in a certain meaning or form, in this short text in chs. XI and XII, on average just over one in every two verses. Here is a provisional list. XI:7 ‫ דריה‬here meaning “the unending future”. Compare the Rabbinic Hebrew term ‫“ הלכה לדורות‬halachah for the unending future” as opposed to ‫ הלכה לשעה‬. See also Ben-Ḥayyim, p. 161 line 35. At this place Ben-Ḥayyim explains the word ‫ דריה‬from the context as meaning the world, but this is forced and does not fit the usages of this word in other forms of Aramaic, or Hebrew. Not recorded by Tal in any meaning except “generations”. Compare Syropalestinian ‫ ܠܕܪ ܘܕܪܝܢ‬. XI:11 ‫“ פלגה‬theological disunity, internal sectarian division”. Compare Syriac and Syropalestinian ‫ ܦܠܘܓܘ‬, Syriac ‫ ܦܠܓܘ‬, JPA ‫פליגו‬. XI:12 ‫“ קרמט‬an extensive open paved area; an acropolis”. Borrowed from Greek. Wrongly identified by Tal. XI:12 ‫“ קרטם‬a cleared flattened area”. A secondary reading.XI:13 ‫“ גפנה‬a terraced and ridged-sided hillock; an acropolis”. Used as a proper noun. Could be masculine definite as used here. Probably Hebrew in origin. XI:13 ‫ אקדשו‬in the general sense of the Hebrew ‫ זנות‬though stronger. XI:16 ‫ שהמה‬as a technical term. Borrowed from Hebrew. XI:17 ‫ אליניס‬Ἑλλήνες. See Part I section 3 p. 8 and see above pp. 157 – 158. Felt and meant to be felt as being a foreign word, because the Greek plural is used. Quite possibly an artificial word or a nonce word. There was enough knowledge of Greek at the time for such a literary or stylistic device to work. See Gleaves. XII:1, 7, 19 ‫ עמינדס‬a proper noun, possibly a symbolic word, possibly borrowed from Greek and quite possibly a nonce word. As said in Part I section 3 pp. 8 -- 9, there is no suitable noun or adjective in Arabic from the root < ‫> ﻧﺪس‬. XII:4 ‫“ פלטן‬way of getting out of a situation, exemption”. The second meaning is to be preferred. This seems to be a technical legal or government term. XII:6 ‫“ מלחם‬hostile, threatening, menacing person”. But the eshtafcal is used P P in a related meaning in the Samaritan Targum Gn XXVII:42, ms. C, though not recorded by Tal in the dictionary. Compare Syriac. XII:10 ‫ = בדמסין‬Greek δημοσίᾳ (dative case), “by government order, under government control”. XII:10 ‫“ מיה‬those spared, those left alive”. Strictly speaking, this is not an unattested word, but an unattested but regular form. It would be expected to be unstable over time because of its similarity (not identity) in pronunciation to a word meaning “the water” and also because of the double weakness of the root. XII:10 ‫“ חופה‬the open country belonging to a city-state; the outlands”. 165 XII:13 ‫“ בדוש‬resistance to divine will”, equivalent to Hebrew ‫ מרד‬and probably a technical theological term. Compare Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. XII:14 ‫“ איכל‬the outside wall or outer structure of a sanctuary, or the whole sanctuary area”. Not quite the same as the Rabbinic Hebrew or Rabbinic Aramaic cognates. The Arabic cognate is different in meaning to all these. XII:14 ‫“ בחדה‬straightaway”. Compare Syriac ‫ ܒܚܕܐ‬and Syropalestinian and Syriac ‫ ܡܢ ܚܕܐ‬. XII:15 ‫ ענון‬inbon “humility”. Forms from this root are well attested. The formation is regular. XII:16 ‫ באחד( באד‬S not listed by Bonnard) “unique”. Compare Syropalestinian ‫“ ܡܢ ܚܕܐ‬once and for all”. Note also the adjective ‫ ܚܕܢܝ‬in Syriac. Compare also the Syriac theological term ‫ ܐܝܚܝܕ‬or ‫ ܝܚܝ‬. XII:17 ‫“ עקב‬traces”. Compare Syropalestinian and Syriac. XII:18 ‫“ ערלתו‬foreign nations” (in a favourable sense, despite the interpretations of previous commentators). Note the structure of this word, unattested elsewhere in Samaritan Aramaic. The use of an abstract noun for a concrete collective is impossible in a Semitic language and could only have come from imitation of Greek when use of Greek was pervasive. XII:19 ‫“ פרע‬to release from constraint” (but related usages are attested). XII:20 ‫מערב‬. A technical term of commercial law, “the initial instalment or P P deposit obliging both parties to complete the transaction”. See above pp. 157 – 158 and see in detail in the Annotations. The meaning is the same as for Syropalestinian ‫ ܡܥܪܒ‬and the Greek loan-word ἀρραβών. Neither Gaster nor Ben-Ḥayyim nor Bonnard know what to with this word. Tal deceptively leaves it out. All three are selective in which phenomena to pick on when trying to date the language. Perhaps the ethpecel of ‫( סוף‬XI:10; XII:13,17) should be added to this list. Tal records this verb in the qal, but does not recognise it in these three places, following Ben-Ḥayyim in mistaking the root for ‫יסף‬. Bonnard follows. Misunderstanding the verb depends on thinking a noun in the definite state in XI:10 to be indefinite. See the Annotations. 4. The Present Edition of the Text and its Translation The transcription of the text as restored in both chapters follows BenḤayyim’s ms. All variants of text are recorded in the Annotations, and so are all spelling variants of any possible significance. The text has been corrected according to the arguments set out in Part III section 2. In what follows details of every single departure from the base ms. are listed and justified. 166 In ch. XI the corrections are minor, and even if not accepted won’t affect the overall meaning or the arguments in this monograph. The interpolation on the topography of Canaan after XI:2a is deleted. One word is moved to the right place in XI:12. There is a very minor and obvious correction to XI:13, the result of the deletion of a gloss. A gloss is deleted in XI:16. In ch. XII there are no emendations, but numerous interpolations of glosses and scribal notes are removed. The word ‫ שמאש‬in XII:9, which in its origin is a gloss to ‫ משמש‬in v. 20, is deleted, and the marker ‫ אהן‬in v. 20 showing where it is meant to be put is deleted. The Arabic comment in XII:9 is deleted. The six letters that follow are restored as two whole words on the basis of the context and a Scriptural allusion explained in the Annotations. Four letters are restored as two whole words in v. 11 on the basis of the context and a scriptural allusion. The word ‫ ביומיו‬in v. 9 is written in full, i.e. with < ‫ > ב‬at the start. The text is cleared of glosses and scribal notes in XII:11, 12, 14. The Arabic gloss in XII:19 is deleted. There is a minor and obvious addition of one word ‫ ביומיו‬in XII:13. A word is inserted in XII:15, and again in XII:18, where a reminiscence of a scriptural verse makes the restoration certain in both places. A smudged epithet is restored in XII:9, and again in v. 14. Note the warning at the end of section 10. A word is restored in v. 12 according to the context and the acrostic. The erroneous and very late verse-division and verse-numbering in ch. XII is omitted. Note that the only places where the editor has modified what the original copier tried to make out from smudged or washed-out letters are ‫ אדיר‬and ‫ טרידין‬in v. 9, and ‫ אמיץ‬in v. 14, and even then only on compelling evidence, and using the traces seen by the first copier. It is admitted that these last three restorations are probable but not certain. If they are not convincing, then it will have to be accepted that three small bits of text have been lost. If these last three restorations or even the more solidly based restorations in v. 9, v. 11, v. 13, v. 15, and v. 18 are not accepted, the understanding of the chapter overall won’t be affected and the understanding of these verses won’t be affected enough to matter. The deletions of glosses and scribal notes must be distinguished from these restorations and have been proven conclusively. Some words at the start of some verses are lost permanently. Even if every one of the suggestions for restoration of text in a few places in ch. XI or reconstruction of text in ch. XII are rejected, and even if the reading of the Aramaic is regarded as unproven here and there, what is presented is the systematic exposition intended by the author with evidence that it is meant to be systematic. Some words are permanently lost in ch. XII and there are linguistic uncertainties in both chapters, but even then, the author’s intended meaning can be read clearly. The identification of what remains of the text of ch. XII by deleting scribal glosses and scribal notes has been proven. The author of ch. XII did not write unrelated scattered purposeless murky oracles. He had a scheme in mind. Ch. XI is not a record of events chosen for no obvious reason and without a sense of proportion and partly out of order. It can be seen to be tightly knit, starting with the Fẩnûtå but as understood by these authors, tracing its worsening and then complete relief, but again as understood by these authors, with an expression of greater hope for the ultimate future but again according to their distinctive theology. The two chapters fit together and agree on the same coherent reasonable scheme, though with different emphasis. The questions of whether they were written at the same time or whether they agree in all details in their 167 doctrine and expectations might not be answerable. Some details of what is meant are still unclear. The most important example is the question of what exactly is meant by the Shechem Sacred Enclosure and the Vexatious Abomination and whether they were the same thing. Then there is the question of whether they are connected to the outlook shown in II Enoch. The next question is what is meant to be understood about perfection of creation by saying the top of the Mountain will be permanently visible. Then there is the identification of the trouble-makers. 40 P39FP39F P It would have been wearing on the reader and the one writing these words, as well as impractical, to point out every instance of the consequences of these false assumptions of triviality, unreasonableness, purposeless obscurity, and disorder in the narrative. It would have been worse to write a chapter. It will be enough to give some representative examples here. Ben-Ḥayyim reads XI:13 as meaning the Samaritans were persecuted by Jesus, without facing the question of how the author could have said this. Tal in the entry ‫ אקדשו‬gets round the difficulty by saying the author means to refer to persecutions by Christians. This certainly happened, but it is not what the author says. The author’s explicit mention of Solomon’s support of other religions at State level is too much for BenḤayyim to take in, even though in his own scriptures. So is the calculated criminality of his parents’ marriage, rightly called ‫ אקדשו‬by the author, with the consequence that his birth and therefore his claim to royal descent was tainted. His father murdered his mother’s husband and his mother married her husband’s murderer ! Gaster correctly saw a reference to Solomon but illogically blaming Bathsheba for something not recorded and which would be irrelevant anyway, because unable to take in the fact of David’s deeds recorded in his own scriptures. The reason for calling Solomon “cursed” by breaking the commandments with its recall of Dt XXVII was just too much for Gaster and BenḤayyim to want to understand. Bonnard accepts the identification with Jesus and clearly accepts Tal’s identification of the oppressors with Christian rulers. To support this, he writes at length about what is said in some Samaritan works about a scheme of history with the Byzantines as world rulers followed by the Moslems. He uses these works as if giving traditional knowledge of the intention of the Asâṭîr. By definition this means the Asâṭîr must have been written during Moslem rule. This is the fallacy of assuming what is to be proven. See below. Bonnard has not faced the fact that the Arabic commentators are unable to handle the wording of these two chapters, which means they have no tradition of understanding the wording, only a limited knowledge of the Aramaic language. Now that it has been shown that a lot of ch. XII is scribal glosses and notes, and the Arabic commentators never twigged, this conclusion is cast-iron. If there is no tradition of understanding the wording, any tradition of knowing the intention of the author is too unlikely to consider. The reader is reminded of the places where these Arabic commentaries descend to absurdity by breaking words up to find numbers. Only when you have ploughed through these commentaries can you see how much the authors just guess, often without any sense of judgment. The very few reasonable comments cited by Ben-Ḥayyim and copied by Bonnard can then be seen to only be selected guesses. They are still often unreasonable. Bonnard adds to the unreasonable guessing. He thought that XI:17 spoke of the conquest of Palestine by the Alans. There is no comment on the ending of the word ‫ אליניס‬or the change of vowel, or how it can be plural, or the insuperable geographical and historical difficulties. His justification seems to be that because later geographers in the Islamic world knew of the Alans, a Samaritan author could have thought to mention them and imagine them conquering Palestine. One difficulty among others is that Bonnard has not been able to determine whether this text is early or late by linguistic arguments, and yet this supposition demands a date just before the replacement of Samaritan Aramaic by Arabic --- or perhaps even later than that if looked at closely. Gaster and Ben-Ḥayyim left the verse without comment, following proper scholarly method. Ben-Ḥayyim misread XII:10 as meaning waters would reach as far as the lands of Shechem, which was all that could be done with the knowledge of the time, but followed proper scholarly method by not elaborating on what the words seemed to say. Bonnard explains the words by referring to tsunamis that hit the coast of Palestine in recorded history, and seems to mean the author imagines tsunamis reaching the highlands of Shechem in the future. Silence, following Ben-Ḥayyim, would have been more scholarly and more reasonable. Bonnard reads ch. XI as saying the Jewish temple was built by Ezra, but without any mention of the building of the first temple by Solomon, which had to come first and was more important. Bonnard does not explain why, if this is Ezra, his rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple is mentioned without any mention of what is much more important to the Samaritans, the change of the alphabet of the Torah (recorded in both Talmuds) and 40 168 The reader has enough information to convert the corrected text to the exact form of the text of Ben-Ḥayyim’s ms. in every instance. The arguments relating to these adjustments are in Part III section 2, not the annotations to the text and translation, because they need to be seen in the context of the examination of the transmission of the text. (But see the notes to XII:14 for more detail). The versedivision throughout ch. XI follows Ben-Ḥayyim. There is no numbering in the mss. The verse division in ch. XII largely follows the manuscripts, but with significant departures where the scribe has taken collections of glosses and scribal notes to be verses on their own. This will give a text preserving the full meaning intended in all details. All of the textual variants in MHSF and the rest of the text-witnesses collated by Bonnard are secondary and inferior. All potentially interesting variants of spelling or text are mentioned in the Annotations to the Translation. The reader has all that is needed to understand the reasoning behind the translation, including all secondary readings and all errors likely to cause confusion. A few unimportant variants of spelling and a few very obvious errors are not listed. This would not be relevant to the present purpose, and would add obscurity. This work has been done by Bonnard, whose work can be consulted. It would be hard to picture the wording of ch. XII as it stands in the manuscripts by comparing the restored text with the list of removals of glosses and scribal annotations just given. The wording of ch. XII is set out here as it is in Ben-Ḥayyim’s ms. For the present purpose, the minor differences in the mss. make no difference. The verses have been numbered as in my restoration and not as in the manuscript and not as numbered by Ben-Ḥayyim, for reasons explained above. Each new verse has been set as a new paragraph here for convenience, and also to make it easier to see how the damage happened to the original exemplar, where the pattern of damage shows each verse must have started on a new line. Words that are glosses are in ordinary type in round brackets. Scribal annotations are in italics in square brackets. The original words are in bold. Rows of dots show where a word could have been lost through physical damage, even though there are no blank spaces now. These are the words of the manuscript, no words added or deleted or changed, but with my editorial markers. All that has been done is set some words and phrases in different type and brackets, and insert dots as a signal of a possible lost word. The reader is reminded that the first two words in verses 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16, the constant introductory phrase, are probably correct restorations by a copyist of words washed away. The erroneous punctuation printed here is in the manuscript. the Samaritan tradition that he altered the text of the Torah. He therefore finds no mention of Eli (Samaritan ‫ אילי‬Ili) and his counterfeit sanctuary at Shiloh, an event no Samaritan writing a scheme of history with a purpose could ever have left out. Solomon is therefore not mentioned. Bonnard, like Gaster and Ben-Ḥayyim, thus has to assume the author has no sense of historical or logical order, but avoids coming out with it and saying so. If they could avoid the question, then so could he and his supervisors. The author would not have written rubbish, but it is unspokenly asserted at length that he did, when scholars lose all critical sense and print what can only be rubbish at length without comment. What is even worse is when they print rubbish at length and then give uunbelievable explanations, such as Bonnard’s explanation of a verse in ch. XII of the Asâṭîr that the author envisages tsunamis with floods of seawater as high as Shechem. Much more could be added to illustrate all this but enough has been said. The reader will find innumerable more examples. 169 ‫‪Transcription of Chapter XII Showing Glosses and Scribal Notes and Damage‬‬ ‫‪ .1‬קדקד יקום באד תקיפה יכלי עמינדס ביומיו ייתי ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .2‬קדקד יקום בחיל מעמי מנה בה ולא כלי ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .3‬קעם קדקד נזיר אמורי בישתה ביומיו ביד נכר יאבדון ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .4‬קעם קדקד עציף בקשט יהי פלטנה קהלה ביומיו ראבי ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .5‬קעם נזיר ניר ברזלה ביומיו יזער ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .6‬קדקד יקום עזיז בעותר בית מלחמיה ביומיו יבנה ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .7‬קעם קדקד דער בלוזה ישרי עמינדס בעכר ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .8‬קעם קדקד עזיז במדע מקשט קהלה יהי חדי ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .9‬קעם קדקד נזיר ‪ ] ............. ............‬זאל [ בתנומי יומיו עכירין ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .10‬קעם קדקד עזיז בעותר שליטים יאבדו ביומיו בדמסין מיה‬ ‫יגיזון לחופת שכם ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .11‬קעם קדקד ‪ ........... ...........‬בעכר יאבד ביומיו עמה ) יזער ( ) בחטיה (‬ ‫) קיאמה ( ) ילקטון ( ‪ ] :‬קעם קדקד בדוש בתר אהן [‬ ‫‪..............‬‬ ‫] גג עקב בישיה ביומיו [ ) שמאש ( מן ארעה‬ ‫‪ .12‬קעם קדקד ‪............‬‬ ‫חיולה חיול ימטי ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .13‬קעם קדקד ‪ ............. ...............‬בדוש קהלה יוסף ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .14‬קעם קדקד ‪ ) ............ ............‬באפילה ( ) קסמים ( יהי איכלה דשכם‬ ‫יקד באדה ‪ ] :‬קעם קדקד גג בתר אהן [ ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .15‬קעם קדקד פרוש ‪ ............‬ארע עבראותה יבטל ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .16‬קעם קדקד ‪ ............‬באד בענון בחכמה ביומיו יהי ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .17‬קעם קדקד בר פשע מקדש זרותה ביומיו יוסף עקב בישיה‬ ‫יתוקד באש וגפרי ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .18‬קעם קדקד נגוד ‪ .............‬ערלתו ביומיו בשפע ימה ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .19‬קעם קדקד פרע ) פיגמה ( קהלה עמינדס יזער בכל אתר בדור‬ ‫בארע גבעלה וישראל עשה חיל וריש גבעתה בחזוה וממן כן ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .20‬קעם קדקד חלק מחקק מערב משלם תרח דאיקר קהלה יהי חדי‬ ‫] אהן [ משמש למרן בשלם ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .21‬קעם קדקד בזז גוי ירדי מיעקב והאביד שריד מעיר ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ .22‬וקדקד יקום בקשט יכתב ארהותה ואטר פליאתה באדה אור‬ ‫ולא יהי חשך מרן יזרז בכן ‪ :‬טוב דיעמי‬ ‫‪ .23‬וברוך אלהינו לעולם וברוך שמו לעולם ‪ :‬כו קבל כו ישתבח‬ ‫חכום כסיאתה וגליאתה יתרומם ‪:‬‬ ‫‪.24‬‬ ‫אדם נח אברהם משה‬ ‫עליהם השלום לעולם‬ ‫‪170‬‬ ‫‪PRESENTATION OF THE TEXT OF ASÂṬÎR XI AND XII‬‬ ‫‪Transcription of the Aramaic Text‬‬ ‫‪IV.‬‬ ‫‪1.‬‬ ‫פרק יא‬ ‫‪ 1‬ואמר אל למשה קח לך את יהושע בן נון גברה דרוח בה‬ ‫והקימה לקדם אלעזר כהן וקמי כל כנשתה ‪ 2 :‬בשנת המ ‪ :‬בירחה‬ ‫אי ‪ 3 :‬וכן עבד משה בחדו וזהו רבה הך דאלו הוא א‪ :‬מבניו ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ 4‬לית טבה שבק אימונתה לעלם ‪ 5 :‬ואתרשי משה מביארה ארהותה‬ ‫קדישתה והוא משרי מבאר ארהותה בג‪ :‬ומחסל בד‪ :‬ומעל לה לגו‬ ‫משכנה בה ‪ 6 :‬ונפק קל חייה מן ענן כבודה פעלה כשירה אהנו‬ ‫יומה עקבאה ‪ 7 :‬מחכום דריה מה דגלה משה נביה רבה ממה‬ ‫דארשתה מרה וכן אמר ותמונת יהוה יביט ‪ 8 :‬ואמר מה עתיד‬ ‫אתי לג‪ :‬אלפין ור‪ :‬וד‪ :‬שנין כי תולידו בנים ובני בנים ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ 9‬ריש פנותה תרע מגויאתה קעם גבר לואה ושמה עזרז בר פאני‬ ‫וריש אקנהותה באדה ‪ 10 :‬ומקדשה יוסף ביומיו מקדש זרו קדש‬ ‫עבראותה יחלף ‪ 11 :‬פלגה רמי לגו קהלה סדר פנו ורשו ‪ 12 :‬קרמט‬ ‫בנימים בעמון יבני דבית יהודה בעלום גזיראתה יבטלו‬ ‫] רשות [ שמע יהוה קול יהודה ‪ 13 :‬מגדל גפנה יבני בעמק קהל‬ ‫יהי בעי קשטה יתלחצון ] בד [ ] ‪ [ ........‬מולדאקדשו מורר ‪ 14 :‬יה‬ ‫קסמי בלעם בימיו תשמיש אלהי נכראי תתקומם ‪ 15 :‬מציבעד‬ ‫יומים מקדש זרותה יתפגר ביד גוי עז פנים ‪ 16 :‬ודבית שהמה‬ ‫ודבית פאניה בדור בארע ] ‪ [ ............‬ואשמו דאר תחתיון ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ 17‬באסכמו רבע קהל יהי מגבי לאקנהותה יתעבד ארח בחוריה‬ ‫אליניס יסחנון ‪ 18 :‬שדך יהי בעלמה בחור חיל ואיקר וחיים‬ ‫בטב ‪ 19 :‬ובתר כן חלוף כתב יתעבד מלין חדתן מלגו עתק יפקון‬ ‫ויעלנך יהוה אלהך לארעה דירתו אבהתך ותירתנה ‪ 20 :‬לוזה‬ ‫תבנה יובל בחדו פנו תניאני תקום ‪ 21 :‬טעו בעמי נקיא תתעמי ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ 22‬בעלבן יומיה קדש גבעתה ידיר צעורין וצלמין פרוק ‪:‬‬ ‫פרק יב‬ ‫‪ 1‬קדקד יקום באד תקיפה יכלי עמינדס ביומיו ייתי ‪ 2 :‬קדקד‬ ‫יקום בחיל מעמי מנה בה ולא כלי ‪ 3 :‬קעם קדקד נזיר אמורי‬ ‫בישתה ביומיו ביד נכר יאבדון ‪ 4 :‬קעם קדקד עציף בקשט יהי‬ ‫פלטננה קהלה ביומיו ראבי ‪ 5 :‬קעם קדקד נזיר ניר ברזלה‬ ‫‪171‬‬ ‫מלחמיה‬ ‫‪ 6‬קדקד יקום עזיז בעותר בית‬ ‫ביומיו יזער ‪:‬‬ ‫ביומיו יבנה ‪ 7 :‬קעם קדקד דער בלו זה ישרי עמינדס בעכר ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ 8‬קעם קדקד עזיז במדע מקשט קהלה יהי חדי ‪ 9 :‬קעם קדקד‬ ‫נזיר ]] טרידין ומיעין [[ ביומיו עכירין ‪ 10 :‬קעם קדקד עזיז‬ ‫בעותר שליטים יאבדו ביומיו בדמסין מיה יגיזון לחופת‬ ‫שכם ‪ 11 :‬קעם קדקד ‪ ]] ............‬תיעו [[ ב עכר יאבד ביומיו עמה ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ 12‬קעם קדקד ‪ ]] ........... ...........‬לצנין [[ מן ארעה חיולה חיול ימטי ‪:‬‬ ‫‪ ..........‬בדוש קהלה יוסף ‪ 14 :‬קעם קדקד‬ ‫‪ 13‬קעם קדקד ‪...........‬‬ ‫]] אמיץ [[ איכלה דשכם יקד באדה ‪ 15 :‬קעם קדקד פרוש ]] סארת [[‬ ‫ארע עבראותה יבטל ‪ 16 :‬קעם קדקד ‪ ............‬באד בענון בחכמה‬ ‫ביומיו יהי ‪ 17 :‬קעם קדקד בר פשע מקדש זרותה ביומיו יוסף‬ ‫עקב בישיה יתוקד באש וגפרי ‪ 18 :‬קעם קדקד נגוד ]] צהדין [[‬ ‫ערלתו ביומיו בשפע ימה ‪ 19 :‬קעם קדקד פרע קהלה עמינדס‬ ‫יזער בכל אתר בדור בארע גבעלה וישראל עשה חיל וריש גבעתה‬ ‫בחזוה וממן כן ‪ 20 :‬קעם קדקד חלק מחקק מערב משלם תרח‬ ‫דאיקר קהלה יהי חדי משמש למרן בשלם ‪ 21 :‬קעם קדקד בזז גוי‬ ‫ירדי מיעקב והאביד שריד מעיר ‪ 22 :‬וקדקד יקום בקשט‬ ‫יכתב ארהותה ואטר פליאתהה באדה אור ולא יהי חשך מרן‬ ‫יזרז בכן טוב דיעמי ‪ 23 :‬וברוך אלהינו לעולם וברוך שמו‬ ‫לעולם כו קבל כו ישתבח חכום כסיאתה וגליאתה יתרומם ‪:‬‬ ‫‪24‬‬ ‫אדם נח אברהם משה‬ ‫עליהם השלום לעולם‬ ‫‪The Translation‬‬ ‫‪2.‬‬ ‫‪Editorial Markers and Editorial Method in the Translation‬‬ ‫‪The translation is intended to summarise the exegetical and textual arguments‬‬ ‫‪in the Annotations and the textual arguments in Part III section 2. Markers have been‬‬ ‫‪carefully and extensively used to show some of this information.‬‬ ‫‪The understanding of these two pieces of text requires recognising the‬‬ ‫‪numerous and constant Scriptural references, not all of them direct quotations. In the‬‬ ‫‪translation, the following markers are used to show Scriptural quotations and‬‬ ‫‪allusions.‬‬ ‫‪Bold print with underlining marks direct quotes in Hebrew. There are five‬‬ ‫‪instances of this, at XI:1, 7, 8, 12 and XII:21.‬‬ ‫‪172‬‬ Bold print without underlining marks direct Scriptural quotes in Aramaic. Print in italics marks systematic paraphrase. Quotation marks with ordinary print show that a particular word or phrase is a technical term derived from Scriptural usage and with intended Scriptural allusions. Markers have been used to show the state of the text. Single square brackets have been used in the transcription and angle brackets in the translation of ch. XI where a word has been re-inserted in the right place in v.12, where a correct gloss has been removed and a word restored in v. 13, and where a mistaken gloss has been removed in v. 16. Double square brackets mark words put forward as highly probable restorations of lost words in ch. XII, always for compelling reasons having to do with the repeated form of composition of the verses, or intentional Scriptural allusion, or the possibilities of reading a word copied from a smudged original. Words in double square brackets appear in the transcription and translation of XII:9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18. There has not been any guessing at obliterated words without evidence and argument. In every case, the interpretation of the rest of the verse will stand even if the suggested restoration is not accepted. The text has not been emended in the usual meaning of the term, because the textual difficulties are not due to inaccurate copying, but rather due to physical damage and the insertion of glosses and a couple of scribal notes. Dots mark lost and unrestorable words or phrases. Dots appear in the transcription and translation of XII:11, 12, 13, 16. The overall justification for everything mentioned in this paragraph is in Part III section 2 and explained in detail in Part III section 4. Round brackets are used in one place in the translation, at XI:12, to mark off a couple of English words not intended to correspond to any words in the Aramaic, but needed for clarity. Throughout the translation of ch. XII the distinction between future and participle in the original has been kept by using the English future and present, so as not to impose my interpretation of the sequence of events on the reader. It must be borne in mind that although the general intention of XI:20 is unmistakable, the exact meaning beyond the first two words, “Lûza will be rebuilt”, is uncertain because of uncertainty in the details of the wording. See the notes. Chapter XI in Translation 1. And God said to Moses: “Get Joshua the son of Nun, the man in whom is spirit; and have him stand before Elâazår the Priest and the whole Congregation” a 2. in the fortieth year, in the eleventh month. a 3. This Moses did, a very happily and gladly, as if he were one of his own sons. 4. A good man never departs from his own character. 5. Moses started to write out the holy Torah. a He started writing out the Torah on the third, finished b on the fourth, and put it inside the Tabernacle c on the fifth. d 6. The voice of the Living One a came out of the cloud of the Glory: b “Everything right [i.e. ‘well done’], worthy worker. c This is the last day”. d him, b 7. What Moses the great Prophet a revealed, from what the Lord vouchsafed is knowledge of the future. c Thus it says “and he beholds the image of the 173 Lord”. d 8. He set out what was going to happen a over three thousand, two hundred and four years b --- “when you have children and grandchildren”. c 9. The origin of the “Withdrawal”, a the gate to the “Requiting” b is that a Levite c called cAzråz the son of Fẩni arises, the start d of “the divine jealousy” e in his hand. 10. So the “Sanctuary” a will come to an end b in his days. A sanctuary c of “alien religion” d will replace e the “Holiness” f of the Hebrews. g 11. Sectarianism a is started up within the Congregation, b a system c of “apostasy” d and wickedness. e 12. The Acropolis a of Benjamin b will be built amongst their people. c Those of the house of Judah, by flouting the commandments, d will nullify < the authorisation > (in the verse) “Hear, O Lord, the voice of Judah”. e 13. The Bulwark of Gåbbẩnå a will be built in the gully. The Congregation b will be after the truth; they will be repressed c < by > the “accursed” d < ...... > offspring of an illicit union. e 14. There will be “Balaam's divinations” a in his days: the worship of alien gods b will become prevalent. c 15. In a little while a the sanctuary of “alien religion” b will be destroyed c by a nation fierce of face; d 16. and those of the house of “desolation” and those of the house of “apostasy” a are scattered over the earth, b < ……… > with “desolateness” spread over where they had been. c 17. At the culmination [comes] the Congregation's a relief, b there will be “Requiting” c for the “provoking of divine jealousy”; d the land will pass to others; Hellenes c will take possession. 18. There will be contentment in the world, the ultimate in wellbeing, honour, and prosperity. a 19. Then a another scriptural passage will come into operation: new words will come up out of the text: b “and the Lord your God will bring you up to the land acquired by your fathers, and you will acquire it”. c 20. Lûzå a will be rebuilt: “Withdrawal” will be turned into happiness: b it will stand again .c 21. My a people's straying b will be seen as innocent.c 22. In the course of time a the Saviour b of the forms and images c will settle holiness on the Hill. d Chapter XII in Translation 1. An exalted one will stand, a with a mighty hand. He will bring about the end of b Ammanītis. In his days he will come. c 2. An exalted one will stand, manifested a with power. b It is allotted c to him without limit. d 3. A crowned a exalted one stands. The speakers of wickedness in his days at the hand of foreigners will perish. b 4. An exalted one stands, insistent a with truth. There will be the exemption. b The Congregation in his days feels relief. c 174 5. A crowned exalted one stands. The iron yoke in his days will drop away. a 6. An exalted one will stand, a strong in wealth. The house of menacers b in his day c will be cleared out. d 7. An exalted one stands, dwelling in Lûzå. a He will set Ammanītis b down in confusion. c 8. An exalted one stands, strong with a rightly-directed will. a The Congregation will be happy. b 9. A crowned exalted one stands. The troublemakers [are driven out and smitten] in his days. a 10. An exalted one stands, strong in wealth. The officers will vanish in his days by government order. Those allowed to live will be removed to Shechem's outer lands. a 11. A ............ exalted one stands. The people will demolish the Vexatious [Abomination] in his days. a 12. A ............ exalted one stands. ............ [scoffers] from the land. The Powerful One a will provide a powerful one. b 13. A ............ exalted one stands. [In his days] the Congregation's rebelliousness a will end. b 14. A [champion] a exalted one stands. The Shechem Sacred Enclosure b will catch fire straightaway. c 15. A miraculous a exalted one stands. [The circuit of] the Hebrews' land he will set at rest. b 16. A ............ exalted one stands. Unique in humility a with wisdom b in his days will he be. 17. An unsullied exalted one stands. The offence of the sanctuary of "alien religion" a in his days will end. b The traces of the wicked will be burnt up in fire and brimstone. c 18. A guiding a exalted one stands. Foreign nations [fish] in his days for the abundance of the sea. b 19. An exalted one stands, setting the Congregation loose. a Ammanîtis will drop away b everywhere, scattered into Gêbâla, c and Israel gets more power. d The top of the Hill can be seen, and stays that way. e 20. An exalted one stands. The Lawgiver's Instalment is the binding deposit on the perfection of the Gate of Glory. a The Congregation will be happy, serving our Lord in peace. 21. An exalted one stands, a despoiler of a nation. a One from Jacob will exact punishment, and will make the rest vanish from the city . b 22. And an exalted one will stand. a Truthfully will he write out the Torah, b with the Staff of Miracles c in his hand. Light with no darkness. Our Lord will be quick to bring this about. Fortunate whoever sees it. d Coda to the Whole Book (23). And blessed is our God forever, and blessed is his holy Name forever, a twenty-six corresponding to twenty-six. Praised be he that knows the hidden and the revealed, b exalted is he. (24). Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses: a on them peace forever. 175 V. ANNOTATIONS TO THE TEXT AND TRANSLATION Annotations to Chapter XI 1 a Nu XXVII: 18 -- 19. The words “and lay your hand on him” in v.18 are assumed, as is the statement of the meaning of the commissioning and authorisation in vv. 20 -- 21. 2 a In the fortieth year from leaving Egypt. The date is taken from Dt I:5. The long interpolation on the geography of Canaan follows here. 3 a Nu XXVII:22 -- 23. See also Dt XXXI:7; XXXIV:9. 5 a Dt I:5. See also XXXI:9. The standard Samaritan understanding of this verb is that it means to write out. b Dt XXXI:24. c Dt XXXI:25 -- 26. d The words “your days (plural) have come close to die” in Dt XXXI:14 have been interpreted as meaning the day after tomorrow. The plural, along with the assumption that at least one must be a whole day, make this the soonest possible: but the verb have come close (past tense) implies that it is to be the shortest period that will satisfy any other conditions. If the minimum and maximum are the same, then it is to be the day after tomorrow, or what is elsewhere called "the third day". 6 a See Nu XIV:28; Dt V:23. The word is grammatically singular here in the Asâṭîr and grammatically singular in Numbers, whereas it is grammatically plural and attached to a noun in Deuteronomy. It is in Nu XIV:23 -- 35 that the Israelites are doomed to forty years’ waiting (not wandering !) before entering the land. b This is an allusion to Dt XXXII:48. c There is an allusion to Dt XXXII:4, which would have been unmistakable because this verse is commonly recited as a summary of faith. See above Part II section 3 note 26 p. 115 on A.F. 72:15 -- 16. The meaning here in the Asâṭîr is that Moses has completed his long mission in accordance with God’s will. d Dt XXXII:48 -- 50. The words ‫“ בעצם היום הזה‬on this (not that) very day” imply that not only the announcement, but the event itself, were on that day. The Asâṭîr disagrees with Jewish tradition (e.g. the Palestinian Targum to Dt XXXIV:5), which puts Moses's death on the seventh of Adar. Or are we to understand the meaning intended to be that Moses died at sunset on a Friday? 176 7 a Both Samaritans and Jews agree that Moses's prophecy was different in quality to all other prophecy. See Nu XII:8 in its context. See also Dt XXXIV:10. b He was granted unique knowledge. The allusion is still to Nu XII:8. c Both Samaritans and Jews agree that the Song of Moses tells the future history of salvation, if you know how to read it (Dt XXXII:1 -- 43). The purpose of the Song is explicitly stated in XXXI:14 - 30, and vv. 14 -- 18 explicitly say it is a prediction, not a warning. What the author of the Asâṭîr claims to give is a true interpretation of the Song of Moses. He does not conceal the fact that he is writing from a later date with the benefit of hindsight and written historical records (see below, on verses 9 -- 16, where the Jewish historical books might have been used). The author does not rely entirely on the structure of the Song of Moses, but also on other passages from the Pentateuch that set out the principles by which the future (which to him is the past) can develop. One of these is Lv XXVI:3 -- 46, which is quoted by the Samaritans by a name taken from v. 3, ‫ אם בחקתי‬am baqqûti. The others are Dt XXIX:9 - XXX:10, together with the preamble to the Song of Moses, Dt XXXI:14 -- 30, and together with Dt IV:25 -- 40. Certain key words are taken from these passages and from the Song of Moses, throughout the rest of this chapter. d Nu XII:8. The image (or picture) of God is interpreted as the working of God in the world. See the notes to XII:20. See also the Palestinian Targum, Fragmentary Targum, Neofiti, and Samaritan Targum mss. JD to Dt XXXIV:10, which say that God taught Moses directly, interpreting ‫ ידעו‬as “he taught him”. This is not an artificial interpretation by the Targums. What is meant is that because God knew Moses, Moses knew God, and therefore understood God's plans. Compare I Corinthians XIII:12 and Asâṭîr XII:16. The verse in Numbers has been interpreted as referring back to Ex XXXIV:6, where the repetition of the Tetragrammaton shows that the adjectives refer to the manifestation of God as providence. See XII:23 and the Annotations to it. It was on Mt. Sinai that the germ of the whole Pentateuch was given in the form of the two tablets. The positioning of this concept of the germ of the Torah (in Ex XXXIV:27 and verses 1 -- 5 of the same chapter) alongside the self-revelation of God (verse 6) has been interpreted here as implying that the content of the Song of Moses had been given beforehand on Mt. Sinai, and the verse from Numbers has been used as confirmation of that fact. The theory of revelation implicit in the Asâṭîr can be used to explain why Jubilees starts and finishes with Moses on Mt. Sinai. 8 a He told this in the Song of Moses. There is no claim of knowledge of esoteric books here -- only a claim to be able to read the Pentateuch correctly in the light of history. The words in italics refer to Dt XXXI:16 -- 22; 26 -- 30. 177 b As Ben-Ḥayyim points out, the Asâṭîr is working on a scheme of six thousand years followed by a period of grace. Taking 3,204 away from 6,000 makes 2,796. That means Moses must have died at the end of the year 2796 and the entry into Canaan was on the first day of the year 2797. All other Samaritan sources make the year 2795 A.M. the date of the entry of the Israelites into Canaan. Ben-Ḥayyim proposes emending the text. This is not the solution. The letters < ‫ > ו‬and < ‫ > ד‬do not resemble each other at all, and would not be confused. Besides, the Asâṭîr stands on its own in too many respects to impose any correction. The fixing of 2795 as the year of the entry into Canaan is attested for the first time by Abu ’l-Fateḥ, who says 2,794 years passed from Creation till the entry into Canaan, so that the entry into Canaan was on the first day of the year 2795 of Creation (6:6 – 8 and the context. Stenhouse p. 5). A.F. wrote in 1355 A.D. The Tûlẩdå p. 75 and the Chain of High Priests ed. Pummer p. 157 middle agree with AF. Granting the antiquity of the calculations used by Abu ’l-Fateḥ, there is room for two sets of calculations, since one could find two solutions to the reconciliation of Gn V:32 and VII:6 and XI:10, and then from this the starting date of the forty years of waiting, and the difference between the two solutions will be two years. Accordingly, there are separate traditions for the last year of the Time of Favour. A.F. copied by the Comprehensive History copied by Chronicle Adler allows 260 years for the Time of Favour and puts the end of the Time of Favour at the end of the year 3054 A.M. The Tûlẩdå p. 76 makes it the end of the year 3055 A.M. but says this was during the last year of cAzzi. This might P P be confusion between the date of the end of the Time of Favour during the last year of c Azzi and the date of the end of the High Priesthood of cAzzi, who lived one year or P P P P part of a year into the Fẩnûtå according to A.F. and for some unstated time according to the Arabic Joshua book. The Chain of High Priests puts the end of the High Priesthood of cAzzi at the end of 3053 while still allowing 260 years for the Time of Favour. If it still agrees that cAzzi lived one year or part of a year into the Fẩnûtå, then P P P P the Time of Favour ended at the end of the year 3052 and Moses must have died at the end of 2792, in agreement with the Asâṭîr. Two traditions have been confused in the Chain of High Priests. The reckoning in the Asâṭîr is earlier than the start of the Islamic Era. See my article Restoring the Traditional Linkage. c Dt IV:25. There are two possible interpretations of this quotation. It could just mean in the distant future, or it could be an allusion to the verses that follow. The second interpretation is better. This effectively means that the author must make a connection between the setting up of idols in the Jerusalem temple and the exile of Judah. This is no more than what is said in vv. 25 -- 27 of Dt IV. It is also the view of the Jewish tradition (II Kings XXI:1 -- 16 = II Chronicles XXXIII:1 -- 9; II Kings XXIV:3 -- 4; XXIII:26 -- 27; XXIV:3 -- 4; and specially II Chronicles 178 XXXVI:15 - 16). The author's primary reference, however, is still to the prologue to the Song of Moses (Dt XXXI:14 -- 30) and the Song itself. Unlike all the other passages listed above in note c to verse 7, which are warnings, the preamble to the Song of Moses is a straight prediction: Israel will certainly go astray, and will certainly suffer the consequences. Although the author blames the southern kingdom, XI:13 is probably an implicit recognition of the faults of the northerners. In this compressed account, the active initial apostasy of Eli and setting in concrete by Solomon is given the attention, and the fall of Jerusalem must be more prominent than the Assyrian conquest of the north. It is clear from XI:11 -- 14 that the faithful northerners suffered from the time of Solomon, up till Seleucid rule. Anyway, the author does not think in terms of north and south: he thinks in terms of the Congregation of Israel, both good and bad. An identification of the fates of both north and south is made in II Kings XXIII:27, and this is a frequent theme in Jeremiah and Ezekiel. This author thinks the same way. 9 a ‫ פנותה‬Fẩnûtå, definite noun from the root ‫פני‬. The indefinite form ‫ פנו‬Fẩnu occurs in vv. 11 and 20. The word means the turning away of the face. Here the primary meaning is the turning away of the face of God, as in v. 20. This is its usual meaning in Samaritan usage as known from all other sources. This author uses it to mean the turning away of the people from God in v. 7, and this is an implicit meaning here. The first meaning of the term is derived from the use of forms from the Hebrew root ‫ פנה‬in Dt XXXI:17 -- 18 and XXXII:20. The second meaning is derived from Dt XXXI:18, 20. The two meanings are treated as reciprocal in Deuteronomy. See further v. 20, note b. b ‫ מגויאתה‬magbiyyẩtå, a plural definite noun from the root \ ‫גבי‬ ‫ גבה‬and combining the meanings of the Hebrew nouns ‫ נקם‬nêqåm “requital” and ‫ שלם‬shallem “recompense” in Dt XXXIII:35. The crucial phrase in the Samaritan text reads to the Day of Requital and Recompense. In later writings, as published by Heidenheim and Merx and Cowley for example, the Day of Requital and Recompense is Doomsday, the apocalyptically expected Last Day, the day of resurrection. For this author, requital has just happened (see v. 17). The day is within the course of history and is not final. There is no mention of such a concept of a last day in XII:19 -- 22 either. See also note a to v. 15 and note b to v. 20. c In Samaritan usage, the term “Levite” can mean a Priest. The Arabic Book of Joshua chs. 41 – 42 and Abu ’l-Fateḥ 38:3 -- 40:3 (Stenhouse pp. 47 -- 50) say that Eli was a Priest of the line of Ithamar, who tried to usurp the place of the rightful High Priest cAzzi (Masoretic cUzzi, I Chronicles V:32 etc.; Ezra VII:4), who 179 was a legitimate High Priest, being descended from Phineas. He then set up a counterfeit Ark at Shiloh. These acts had a connection (not as simple as cause and effect) with the onset of the Fẩnûtå, a metaphysical condition marked by the withdrawal of the divine presence from the true sanctuary. cAzzi put the holy apparatus in a cave that opened up on Mt. Gerizim. The next day there was no sign of where the cave had been, and the marks he had put in the rock to mark the place had vanished. See Part II section 3, frequently, on the doctrinal importance. The name cAzråz ‫ עזרז‬must be a code-name for Eli, as Gaster recognised. Note that the Samaritan spelling for this name is ‫( אילי‬pronounced ’îli) not ‫עלי‬. The name has been formed by substitution of letters according to an unknown code. It might also owe something to the adjective ‫ עז‬, the name ‫ עזרא‬, and the adjective ‫זר‬. The name Fẩni ‫ פאני‬is a variant of the name Yêfunni (‫ יפני‬a phonetic spelling of ‫ )יפנה‬quoted by A.F. at 38:3 and 4. [Stenhouse p. 47. Stenhouse’s vocalisation shows that he does not recognise a well attested Hebrew name]. The name has been modified to show his connection with the Fẩnûtå. The alternative explanation considered side by side with Gaster’s by Ben-Ḥayyim, following the Arabic commentaries, and accepted by Bonnard, is incompatible with the narrative in the Arabic Joshua book ch. 43 followed by A.F. here and the form of the name in both books, as well as the surname of his father, which does not fit Ezra. This can’t be made conceivable by suggesting it is an alternative tradition, because this would make the order of events impossible according to this very text and wrong according to history. The Jerusalem temple was built by Solomon, and rebuilt in inferior form under Ezra. In a narrative compressed like this it makes no sense to attribute the building of the temple to Ezra while leaving out the instigator, Solomon. In verse 12 it says Judah lost the right to kingship because of what followed the building of this temple, and this is precisely what did happen right after the time of Solomon. The books of Kings and Chronicles (the second grudgingly) acknowledge that Rehoboam lost the right to rulership of the north and Jeroboam followed the will of God politically, even if not religiously. What was or was not done by Ezra is irrelevant here in this text. The subject is the location of the new counterfeit building and the idolatry and oppression that inevitably followed. Ezra is claimed to have altered the script of the Torah by both Jews and Samaritans. The Samaritans add that he falsified the wording. This sentence has not the slightest mention of the text of the Torah. d The start was the making of the counterfeit Ark. This is why it can be said to have been in his hand: it was a thing, not an event and not a state. The disappearance of the Tabernacle and its vessels was the consequence of the divine jealousy, which itself was the consequence of the start, the making of the false sanctuary. At the same time it marks the sectarianism that was one of the first 180 manifestations. The Arabic Book of Joshua disagrees. It is careful to make it clear that the ending of the Time of Favour was caused by the progressive degeneration of the behaviour of the people, and that what was done by Eli was what could have been expected at the time. A.F. modifies the account in the Arabic Book of Joshua by inserting the mention of the building of Eli’s sanctuary with its counterfeit ark into the account of the signs of the approach of the end of the Time of Favour, implying that this act of Eli’s was one of the causes or the main cause. e ‫’ אקנאותה‬aqnâ’ûtå, a definite verbal noun from the afcel of ‫קנא‬. The allusion is to the use of the corresponding Hebrew root ‫ קנא‬in Dt XXXII:16 -21, with a minor allusion to Dt XXIX:19. 10 a ‫ ומקדשה‬is a definite noun, and so must mean “the sanctuary”, and can therefore only refer to the original sanctuary. Ben-Ḥayyim followed by Tal p. 351 column 2 top followed by Bonnard p. 367 took it as grammatically indefinite meaning “a sanctuary”, taking it to refer to a new separate sanctuary. This is just not Aramaic. It is certain that Tal and Bonnard know Aramaic, so copying a bit of really bad absent-mindedness by Ben-Ḥayyim is inexplicable. This helped them misunderstand the rest of the sentence with misunderstanding of the verb, and disastrously missing the record of the occultation of the Tabernacle. The Tabernacle (‫ )משכן‬is called a ‫ מקדש‬in Ex XXV:8. b ‫ יוסף‬yuwwẩsef, ethpecel of the root ‫סוף‬. The same form occurs in XII:13, 17. This is the regular form of the ethpe‘el of hollow verbs. The pattern is documented in the definitive work of Macuch, p. 192 bottom and 193 top. I can add that the corresponding imperative of the ethpe‘el of a hollow verb is printed by Cowley p. 378, four lines from the bottom, as the form ‫ ווקם‬uwwẩqem. (Not noticed by Macuch). Notice yuwwẩnef and yuwwẩqem just after this in Cowley’s edition, to be added to the examples. Tal in his dictionary has misunderstood the word as if from the root YSF, even though its meaning is clear from the context here and in the other places and the qal of this verb is recorded in his dictionary. This can only be done by violation of noun morphology at the most basic level by not recognising a definite suffix, as explained just above. c ‫ מקדש‬is an indefinite noun. It refers back to ‫( מקדשכם‬singular in the T15 Samaritan) in Lv XXVI:31, which in mss. VNB of the Samaritan Targum is translated as “what you have sanctified”. d ‫ זרו‬zẩru, a feminine indefinite noun from the root ‫זור‬. The term is derived from the use of the corresponding Hebrew root in Dt XXXII:16. This means that Dt XXXII:16 - 19 must be interpreted as referring to the Shiloh sanctuary and the Jerusalem temple, and v. 20 must mean they are the cause of the Fẩnu. 181 e ‫ יחלף‬must be either afcel or pacel, because the ethpacal would not P P P P P P assimilate the [t] in a form from a root with a weak first letter, and the ettafcal never assimilates the [t]. f ‫ קדש‬in Ex XL:9 is a noun designating the Tabernacle (‫)משכן‬. The P P term “the holiness of the Hebrews” is probably a stylistic device to avoid the term “the holiness of Israel”, which is a designation of God. g See v. 13, note b. 11 a ‫פלגה‬. This is described at length in the Arabic Joshua book. b c d e It is still one Congregation, but now it is divided. ‫סדר‬. An alternative translation would be “organisation”. ‫פנו‬. See v. 16. ‫ רשו‬rêshu, a phonetic spelling for ‫ רשעו‬or ‫רשוע‬. The word occurs P P in the Samaritan Targum to Dt IX:27, but with etymological spelling. 12 a The word ‫ קרמט‬is borrowed from the Greek κέραμις genitive κεραμίδος meaning a paving tile, or paving, whether in tiles or flagstones. The derivation from the genitive can be seen in the Syropalestinian ‫ ܩܪܡܝܕܣ‬or ‫ܩܝܪܡܝܕܣ‬ which in the plural means a tiled roof, or roof-tiling. A related word, in the form ‫קרמיד‬, is common in Syriac and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. It means a tile or a brick. It is possible that the form in Syriac and JPA is from the Greek κεραμίδιον, since it never has the meaning of paving, but always means a single tile or brick, or tiles or bricks when in the plural. (I have carefully verified that the word can mean either a tile or a brick, which must have been confusing. German and Arabic (with qirmîd) do the same, so we can see that it can happen, improbable as it might seem). I take it that the word ‫ קרמט‬refers to the courtyards paved in marble within the Jerusalem temple, and the paved area of the Temple Mount round the temple. It is probably a name for the whole of this area along with the temple, so it effectively means “acropolis”. The form ‫ קרטם‬in MHSFA2 could be an alteration so as to replace an archaic word by a more familiar one. If a real word and not a guess, it would be from the root ‫קרטם‬, meaning to snip the tip off something, to nip, to clip, referring to the artificial appearance of the mount as a hill without a peak, i.e. its stumpy appearance. If you stand where you can see the join of the western and southern walls of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the epithet is strikingly appropriate. It might have been even more appropriate before the artificial cuboid was extended by Herod, because the eastern side would have been distinct from the city walls. The etymology from Arabic assumed by Ben-Ḥayyim followed by Tal is made implausible by the related words in other forms of Aramaic. The Arabic word assumed as the origin has 182 no documentary attestation and is only in the modern dictionary the Muḥîṭ al-Muḥîṭ. This dictionary, like a few others in common use, records some nonce words otherwise unknown taken from single authors, as well as words that disappeared after the pre-Islamic period. If a real word, it would have been much too rare to be useful. Compare the name Gåbbẩnå or Gibbêna in v. 13. b Jerusalem is in Benjamin. (Some of the modern extension is in Judah). c Amongst the people of Benjamin, who accept it. Judah’s part is to take the initiative and impose it. d The commandments are mentioned in the plural because if the sacred place is lost, the commandments relating to the sacrifices, the festivals, and the priesthood lose their meaning, and the commandments relating to the land are degraded because the land loses some of its holiness. Gaster prints the reading of his two mss. as ‫ בעולם רשות דבית יהודה בחלוף‬. Bonnard prints the first word as ‫בעלום‬, probably correctly. e Dt XXXIII:7. Judah will lose his right to kingship, and it will pass to Joseph. Compare Dt XXIX:17, which speaks of the possible secret apostasy of a whole tribe. Bonnard, like Gaster, does not understand how to integrate the direct quotation into the sentence, but covers the difficulty up as if he understands. 13 a The name ‫ גפנה‬is explicitly identified with the hill later to become the Jerusalem temple mount in the Asâṭîr, ch. III, lines 8 -- 9 in Ben-Ḥayyim’s edition. The name is interpreted as meaning ‫ בית מכתש‬which I take to mean a squared off hill (not a plague or medical affliction, as both Ben-Ḥayyim and then automatically Tal suppose). The same identification is made in Mårqe, p. 297 = IV:102, line 1021. The same identification is made by Abu ’l-Fateḥ at 43:14 (Stenhouse p. 54). The words ‫ בית מכתש גפנה‬in A.F. are in Hebrew letters in most mss. It is apparent from the corrupt form ‫ ﯾﻔﻨﮫ‬in Arabic letters in ms. B (Stenhouse C) not recorded by Vilmar and the same corrupt form in ms. S (not known to Vilmar), along with the corrupt form ‫ כפנה‬in mss. DL 2 L 3 Y (Stenhouse HBGY), that the RR RR RR RR scribes were unfamiliar with the name. All these belong to the first recension in this place. Mss. CP of the first recension and A of the second recension (Stenhouse PMF) of Abu ’l-Fateḥ have the correct form in Arabic letters and the rest of the mss. of the second recension with Khaḍir the same in Hebrew letters. These mss. belong to two different textual families, so their consensus has weight. Vilmar wrongly printed the reading of ms. D, not knowing of the occurrence of the name in the Asâṭîr in three different chapters and Mårqe. [Note: The name occurs again in Asâṭîr ch. VIII, line 12, in an interpolation (see note 2 on p. 2). In this instance, the context requires a location in Mesopotamia. The real location has been forgotten]. The gully is therefore 183 the one to the west of the temple mount, from which the retaining walls rise directly. I take ‫ גפנה‬to be a phonetic spelling for Gåbbẩnå or Gibbêna, presumably the old name for this hill. Doubled [ff] usually becomes [bb] in Samaritan Aramaic, perhaps historically by way of a theoretical [*pp], and is very often spelt < ‫> פ‬. I therefore take the < ‫ > פ‬here to be an unetymological spelling for [bb]. The spelling is normal. See Macuch p. 72. In my observation, there is a tendency to spell [bb] as < ‫ > פ‬to show it is doubled. I take the word to be derived from an adjective describing the rough or terraced form of the sides of the hill. This name would then be meant to contrast the appearance of this hill to the original appearance of the other hill, called ‫עפל‬, in reference to the sweeping curve of its rise. The cumulative evidence is very strong. (a) In Psalm LXVIII:16 -- 17, the term ‫ גבננים‬occurs, first as an epithet of the Temple Mount, then as what seems to be an epithet of other hills. (I hesitate to say other mountains, because the Temple Mount is no more than a mound on three of its sides, and a low hill on the fourth. The name “the Temple Mount” is a great exaggeration). (b) The Peshitta translators regarded ‫ גבננים‬as a proper noun in both verses, and transcribed it as ‫ ܓܒܢܝܡ‬in both places. (c) Aquila translates ‫ גבננים‬as “having a ridge or overhang at the top”, i.e. as having a vertical unimpeded drop from the edge. This means he saw a connection with the Aramaic and Hebrew ‫ גבין‬meaning “an eye-brow”. The metaphor is preserved in his translation. Although not attested in Jewish Aramaic in its metaphorical meaning, ‫ ܓܒܝܢ‬is so attested in the Peshitta, and the Syropalestinian Version of Luke IV:29, in a context where the meaning of a vertical drop from a hill-top must be intended, both by the context and by the known physical features of the place named there. It occurs in Rabbinic Hebrew in a related meaning, but this could be an independent development. As for the plural form ‫גבננים‬ as the title of a single hill, there is a parallel in one ms. of the Syropalestinian Version, which has ‫ ܓܒܢܝܗ‬instead of ‫ ܓܒܝܢܗ‬. (d) The Greek translators are on the same track in translating ‫ גבננים‬as “set like cheese”. This is not a false etymology but rather an attempt to describe the craggy appearance of the sides of the temple mount. This meaning would explain the plural form. Consider the expression “blocks of milk” in I Samuel XVII:18. Consider also the semantics of the Latin term lac formaticum. The Greek translators have tried to express a standard metaphor, by which ‫ גבננים‬can be used as a noun, not an adjective, in apposition to a singular or plural noun. This word could have been understood by them as a technical term for a fortification sited above vertical walls rather than behind. Compare the semantics of the technical term ‫חרוץ‬ in the Old Testament. It is this correct line of understanding that has degenerated into the folk etymology heard by Josephus. (e) Josephus (War V:140 = V:4:1) is our only source for the information that the gully in Jerusalem was called ἡ Φάραγξ τῶν Τυροποιῶν “the Cheesemakers’ Valley”. Jerusalem is the last place to find 184 cheesemakers. On the other hand, a translation of ‫ גבנה‬/ ‫ גפנה‬as “the cheesemaker” would be an easy mistake. This assumes that the gully was called after the hill. (f) I have translated ‫עמק‬as “gully”. It could also be rendered “ravine”. It does not mean “valley”, which would be a translation of ‫מישר‬. Now, fortifications or towers are not normally built in gullies, though they might be built up the side, as e.g. the ravine in Luxembourg. Jerusalem is an exception. The retaining wall of the acropolis does rise from the edge of the ravine’s floor. Even before Herod’s earthworks, the steep sides rising from the ravine floor would have been nearly continuous with a retaining wall part way up the side. The association of the acropolis and the gully can also be seen in Josephus’s association of the name of one with the other, if my interpretation is right. (g) This line of explanation accounts for the use of ‫ גבננים‬as an epithet of both a single hill and multiple hills in Psalm LXVIII:16 -- 17. Anyway, regardless of the etymology, if the Asâṭîr knows the name Gibbêna as the name of the Jerusalem acropolis, then it is older than Josephus. b At this stage the “Hebrews” or Israelites are not yet differentiated into Samaritans and Jews, though many, mainly from the south, have attached themselves to the schismatic movement centred in Jerusalem. That Jerusalem never became the national religious centre is shown by the fact that Rehoboam went to Shechem to be made king by all Israel (I Kings XII:I = II Chronicles X:I). Even if the word “Israel” meant specifically the northerners even before the division of the kingdom (compare II Samuel XI:I and I Kings XII:17 = II Chronicles X:17), it still remains true that the king had to be crowned at Shechem (perhaps after being crowned in Jerusalem) to satisfy the northerners. Rehoboam would not have done this unless compelled. The use of the term “Hebrews” rather than “Israel” by the Asâṭîr might be a way of avoiding the ambiguity of the term “Israel”. See XI:10 and XII:15. This use of the term “Hebrews” might account for the widespread use of the term “Hebrews” as a self-designation in other Samaritan writings. c This statement gives a definition of the otherwise undefined repression mentioned in I Kings XII:4, 10, 11, 14 = II Chronicles X:4, 10, 11, 14. We see from these verses in ch. XI that Solomon imposed the recognition of the innovation of the unscriptural building in Jerusalem on the whole country, with the repression of any cultus elsewhere. Certainly taxation is implicitly part of the discussion here, but if Rehoboam’s response is to have any rationale, some kind of repression is under discussion as well. Notice that it is implied that granting the request is only a matter of clemency, not something that will cost the king anything in revenue: and it is explicitly said that he will still get what he wants from the northerners if he grants their petition (I Kings XII:7 = II Chronicles X:7). It is obvious that the repression was severe and violent under Solomon because Rehoboam arrogantly delights in saying 185 so, using the reminder as a threat. It is remarkable that Jeroboam’s seizing of the kingship of the north is given divine approval in Kings (I Kings XI:26 -- 39; XII:22 -24), and even the author of Chronicles is unable to avoid acknowledging the divine approval, though in as cursory a manner as possible (II Chronicles IX:29). d ‫מורר‬, ethpecel participle (muwwẩrer) or less likely ethpacal participle (muwwårrår) of the root ‫ארר‬. This is a translation of the Hebrew word ‫ ארור‬ẩror in Dt XXVII:15-26. Solomon is accused of committing the offences listed there, and in that context these offences represent abandonment of the covenant. According to Bonnard, all mss. except YA1 have ‫ בראה‬instead. This seems to be an inept gloss. e Everyone knows Solomon was the offspring of David and Bathsheba, conceived when David had it off with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and who then had Bathsheba’s husband murdered, and then married her (II Samuel XII). She was as guilty as him. The Aramaic ‫ אקדשו‬used here is much stronger than ‫זני‬ or ‫זנו‬. The author has used the strongest term he could come up with, and rightly. Ben-Ḥayyim and Bonnard think the reference to be to Jesus. This is impossible from the order of events before and after. For one thing, it would put Jesus straight after Eli. Even if Ben-Ḥayyim’s alternative explanation were accepted, that it is Ezra and not Eli that is meant in v. 9, it would not fit the sequence of events. Verse 16 loses any meaning. This verse can only refer to perfidious Israelites. Tal’s explanation in the entry ‫ אקדשו‬contradicts the words and the order of events. The natural reference is to the exile of the southern kingdom. In the context the meaning is that Judah was exiled because of the behaviour of the supporters of dissension, and it could be pointed out that it was the royalty and nobility and leaders that were exiled. What would the Samaritans care about Jesus? Jesus is an obsession of modern unobservant Jews. How could Jesus have imposed repression on anyone anywhere? If anyone was ever the product of a criminal sexual union, it was Solomon. The Talmud lists various fatuous reasons to try to make Uriah deserve to be killed, forgetting on purpose that none of these were capital crimes or even crimes, and forgetting on purpose as well that if he had really been guilty of something, he would have had to have been tried and openly executed, not secretly assassinated. The Amora’im thought it better to pretend David to be guilty of perverting the course of justice and sneakiness rather than murder. This author has higher morality. See further footnote 40, part III section 4 pp. 168 -- 169. 14 a ‫קסמי בלעם‬. Balaam used to practice ‫“ נחש‬omen-watching”, but stopped when he prophesied about Israel (Nu XXIV:1). The Palestinian Targum and Fragmentary Targum and Neofiti understand this word to mean “divination” in this verse (‫)קוסמיא \ קסמיא \ קסמיה‬, The translation in the Targums in this place is deliberate, since elsewhere, in Nu XXIII:23, the Palestinian Targum and Neofiti 186 translate ‫ נחש‬as “omen-watchers” (‫ )נטורי נחשין‬and the Fragmentary Targum translates it as “augurers” (‫)עבדי נחשא‬. Presumably the intention of the Targums in Nu XXIV:1 is to say that Balaam used to practice not only omen-watching, but augury as well, and perhaps other kinds of divination. The Asâṭîr understands Solomon’s “knowledge of plants, animals, birds, and water creatures” (I Kings V:13) as omen-watching and augury. This is actually a natural reading of the verse, which does not say he knew about them as if he had knowledge of botany, zoology, and ethology, but that he spoke about them. The same interpretation is invited by the words ‫לא היה דבר‬ ‫ נעלם‬in I Kings X:3 = II Chronicles IX:2, combined with ‫ אשר לא הגיד לה‬. The second phrase invites requests for revelations, not demonstrations of encyclopaedic technical knowledge. b This statement might seem surprising, but it is confirmed in I Kings XI: 1 -- 13 (not in Chronicles, which is not surprising); 29 -- 39 (not in Chronicles). c ‫תתקומם‬. The Shiloh sanctuary and its ark was counterfeit, but idolatry started with the erection of the Jerusalem temple. This is a bit more than what is said in I Kings. One wonders if what is said in I Kings has been toned down. There is an allusion to Dt XXXII:16 -- 18. See the notes to XII:11. 15 a ‫( מציבעד יומים‬Variants ‫ וציבעד‬MH; ‫ כציבעד‬F and unspecified others; ‫ כזיבעד‬S not recorded by Bonnard). “In a little while” is an allusion to Dt XXXII:35 Close is the day of their disaster, and future events hasten to them ‫ קרוב יום אידם וחש עתידת למו‬. This is the verse that mentions the Day of Requital and Recompense (see v. 9, note b), which much later Samaritan writings understand as coming well after the time of the Tẩ’eb, quite distinct from improvement to conditions in history in the present world. The Asâṭîr once again differs from all later writings. It is true that the Jewish First Temple did not stand as long as was expected, but it was still a respectable three and a bit centuries. The author is thinking in terms of cause and effect rather than duration, and God’s time rather than mankind’s. b See v. 10, note d. c An allusion to both Dt XXXII:35 and Lv XXVI:31. d Dt XXVIII:50. 16 a The two terms desolation ‫ שהמה‬shåmmå and apostasy ‫ פאניה‬fånyå are allusions respectively to Lv XXVI:3 - 43 and Dt XXXI:16 - 30. Both words are definite and masculine. The first term refers to wilful neglect of the commandments, or the replacement of the rightful commandments by manmade precepts and invented 187 practices. The second term refers to active apostasy. For the distinction, see Targum Onkelos and the Palestinian Targum to Dt XXIX:18. For the meaning of shåmmå, compare also II Chronicles XXXVI:21, which interprets Lv XXVI:43. Forms from the root ‫ שמם‬are found in Lv XXVI:31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 43. Specifically, v. 31 speaks of your sanctuary, meaning it is yours and not God’s. See above, note c to v.10, on Lv XXVI:31. See above, note a to v. 9, on the interpretation of the root ‫פנה‬. The “house of desolation” and the “house of apostasy” are probably the same people. The use of the term desolation in Daniel (VIII:13, 27; IX:27; XI:31; XII:11), followed by I Maccabees I:54, as a technical term, and then echoed in the gospel of Matthew, is in the same exegetical tradition as its use in the Asâṭîr. The usage in the Asâṭîr must be older, and therefore closer to the original meaning, since it is directly derived from the usage of the Pentateuch. The exegesis is based on Lv XXVI:34, 35, 43, where the word ‫ אשמה‬has two meanings at once, the wilful neglect of the Torah indicated by the neglect of the seventh year, and the consequent exile. Perhaps we should stop trying to understand the meaning of the term desolation in Daniel in the light of I Maccabees I:54 and II Maccabees VI:2, and interpret the term as the profanation of the temple by the abandonment of rightful practice, whatever the author of Daniel might have understood by that. Again, the usage in the Asâṭîr is older than the usage in I Maccabees, and older than in Daniel, for the same reason. b The primary reference is to Dt XXVIII:64, which is to be read in the context of the whole of the chapter and specially v. 69 of the chapter. Mss. MH correctly write ‫ בארעה‬here. There would probably not have been any difference in pronunciation. c The word translated desolation earlier in the verse was ‫שהמה‬. Here it is ‫ אשמו‬an Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew ‫ שממה‬in Lv XXVI:33. The meaning of this Hebrew term is specifically depopulation. For this reason the word ‫ קהל‬before this must be a mistaken clarification and has been deleted. Although only a small part of the population of Judah was sent to Babylonia, it was the leaders that were lost. From this time till the end of the Persian period, Judah was not a political power. The return of some of the leaders during the early Persian period changed the political situation only marginally. The verb ‫ דאר‬is hard to interpret. If it has its usual meaning of “dwelling”, then the reference is to the alien settlers mentioned in Lv XXVI:32, now settled in Judah. This would be a nice reversal of the polemic in II Kings XVII: 20 41. On the other hand, if ‫ אשמו‬is taken in its obvious meaning, then it refers to the condition of depopulation that let the land make up the sabbatical years that were never observed. The difficulty with this interpretation is that ‫ דאר‬then has to mean “prevailing, overspreading”. Metaphorical usage of this verb in Aramaic is not well 188 attested. As far as I know, it is limited to the afCel of this verb in Palestinian Jewish Aramaic. After considerable thought, I have chosen the second line of interpretation for the translation. Whoever inserted the gloss ‫ קהל‬before ‫ ואשמו‬must have understood ‫ אשמו‬as a category of people and ‫ דאר‬as having its usual meaning. So far we have seen at least four meanings of nouns from the Hebrew root ‫ שמם‬and its Aramaic equivalent. They are the neglect of the covenant; the existence of the sanctuary in Jerusalem (and perhaps Jeroboam’s two shrines as well); the destruction of the Jerusalem sanctuary (and perhaps Jeroboam’s two shrines as well); the partial depopulation of the land; and the settlement of hostile foreigners. All four meanings are present in this author’s reading of Lv XXVI, and all except the condemnation of Jerusalem are to be found in the plain meaning of this chapter of Leviticus. The word desolation must have been a major theological term before being taken up by the author of Daniel and modified in meaning. 17 a The author resolutely refuses to categorise people as Jews and Samaritans, only right or deluded. Compare v. 11 and v. 13. b ‫ ;רבע‬spelt ‫ רוח‬in F not recorded by Bonnard. For the form and meaning, see Ben-Ḥayyim, vol. III, part 2, p. 109, lines 68 -- 69. c See v. 9 for the allusion. d See v. 9 for the allusion. e ‫ אליניס‬is Ἑλλήνες “Greeks” with its Greek plural ending. There can be no doubt that the word is meant as a Greek plural, because the verb is plural. The word must have still been felt as foreign, to keep the Greek plural. It can be seen from the transcription that Samaritan Aramaic had lost the phoneme [ h ] by this time. The reference can only be to the Macedonian conquest and then Seleucid rule, seen from a later time. This is not the usual Aramaic word for Greeks and could well be a deliberately transparent code-name. The use of the Greek plural form is probably deliberately artificial. The explanation by Bonnard p. 370 that it means Alans shows serious lack of judgment. How does he make it plural if Aramaic? What about the vowels? See further note 40 pp. 168 -- 169. See Part I section 3 on knowledge of Greek at the time, which would have made this deliberately transparent code-name workable. 18 a The faithful Israelites attached to Mt. Gerizim suffered throughout the Persian period and then under the Hasmonaeans and then much longer. The source used here by Khaḍir in his Comprehensive History sees it this way, and tells of the late Persian period, under a certain Jewish puppet-ruler appointed by the Persians called Simon, as the worst. A.F. (79:18 – 81:9) agrees, but following a different 189 source. Archaeological evidence seems to show the temple on Mt. Gerizim was in ruins before the Macedonian conquest, and was rebuilt very soon after. The word ‫ חיל‬îl has been translated as “wellbeing”. It is not a technical term here. Contrast XII:2, 14, 19. 19 a ‫ובתר כן‬. What is meant is that this follows on from the state of wellbeing, but after some time. Probably to the start of the Seleucid period is meant. b I have not seen this way of putting it anywhere else, but the observation itself, expressed more prosaically, occurs here and there in the Rabbinic literature. c Dt XXX:5. What is important here is the second half of the quotation. The faithful living in Samaria regained control of Samaria after a long period of Jewish tyranny. All of vv. 6 -- 9 of Dt XXX is assumed here. The implication of v. 8 would be that the holy place is rebuilt and operative. Compare Asâṭîr XI:10, 20. For this author, Dt XXX:8 is not a command, but a promise. 20 a Lûzå is mentioned in Gn XXVIII:19 and XXXV:6. It is the holiest place known to Jacob, the house of God and the gate of heaven (Gn XXVIII:17). The traditional location is on the higher peak of Mt. Gerizim. This identification is ancient, but more work is needed to trace when it is first attested. It is the traditional place of the Passover sacrifice. The “rebuilding of Lûzå” is the rebuilding of the Samaritan temple on Mt. Gerizim. A repeat of the rebuilding of the sanctuary after the Return from the Exile is envisaged. See Part II section 3 at length on this. The concept of the rebuilding of Lûzå is not found elsewhere in extant Samaritan theological writing. Neither Gaster nor Ben-Ḥayyim nor Bonnard have addressed this question, though its importance was recognised by Kippenberg. What is expected in all other writings is the restoration of the Tabernacle with its original vessels on the site of Lûzå. Both the Dositheans and their opponents awaited this, the only difference between them being that the Dositheans said the place was not holy without the Tabernacle, and their opponents said it was. The Dositheans agreed with their opponents that prayer and Scriptural reading could be carried out on the Mountain at the present time, but disagreed in maintaining that the pilgrim festivals could not be observed satisfactorily at the present time. For some of the evidence on this distinction made by the Dositheans, see my article Social Anomie. See also Part II section 2 note 22 p. 102 and note 30 p. 121. Both agreed that only divine intervention could restore the Mosaic Tabernacle and its vessels, so their absence was a metaphysical state. (There would only have been a difference of terminology, since the Dositheans seem not to have located Lûzå on the Mountain, but on the flat ground at the foot, which they called 190 “the Meadow of the Glory”. See my article The First Notice of the Dositheans. The Asâṭîr agrees with this being the location of Lûza in ch. I. This means the authors of ch. I were not the authors of ch. XI. They were not the authors of ch. XII either. See the long second note to XII:14. The Dositheans would have used a different term for the sacred place on the top of the mountain, presumably Bethel). This author says the site can be fully operative as the holy place at the present time. The inference might be that the full sacrificial system is envisaged. An argument for this would have been that the full cultus had been carried out over the centuries before whenever the times were favourable. He speaks of the rebuilding of Lûzå because for him the place is holy in itself. A sanctuary presumably called the ‫ מקדש‬Maqdåsh can be built, and the holy site will then be operative. It is likely that both a boundary wall and a building covering part of the site are intended. The Jewish temple was a stone enclosure with a sacred building at one end. Whether the building within the sanctuary grounds is to have an equivalent of the Tabernacle in some form inside is unclear. There might well have been a theoretical reason for it. Such an arrangement seems to be assumed in Hebrews IX:2 – 8. Compare Ecclesiasticus L:5 (specially the Hebrew). In the Jerusalem temple there was a separation of the building containing the ark (in the first temple) from the court of the priests. A.F. avoids this question in his account of the rebuilding. See p. 113. The historical appendix to the Arabic Joshua book mentioned on p. 124 does the same. Both only mention the Haykal. (The appendix calls the whole Samaritan sacred ground both the Quds and the Maqdis. It calls the Jerusalem temple [not the city of Jerusalem] the Quds as well. The usual Samaritan name for the Jerusalem temple in Arabic is Bayt al-Maqdis, but compare footnote 23 on pp. 102 -- 103). In the future the full holiness of the site will become manifest. This is said more explicitly in XII:19 and 20. The question then is how the authors can consider the Fẩnu, the Withdrawal, to be ended when Lûzå is rebuilt. These authors have no concept of the Fẩnûtå as a metaphysical state starting with the occultation of the Mosaic Tabernacle. There was a state of Fẩnu as long as the Shiloh sanctuary was in place and later as long as Solomon imposed the recognition of his temple and forbade the rightful cultus on the Mountain, then in the late Persian period, and again later under the Hasmonaeans. See the second note to XII:14, on the Dosithean location of Lûzå on the Shechem meadow. b The sentence here ‫ יובל בחדו פנו תניאני תקום‬is very difficult. The implicit subject of the verb ‫ תקום‬must be Lûza, since the verb is feminine. This might seem to mean that the word ‫ תניאני‬before that would be an adverb meaning “a second time”, except that the adverb would then have to be ‫תניאנית‬. Ben-Ḥayyim was only able to make sense of the sentence by amending the last two words to ‫ תניאנית יקום‬This still won’t work as it stands, because the 191 subject then has to be ‫יובל‬, and by that interpretation the word ‫ בחדו‬makes no sense. His solution was to amend ‫ בחדו‬to ‫ בחור‬or ‫בחורי‬, which would mean “after”, so that the subject of the verb would be ‫יובל‬. He recognises that this word would be unexpected. He does not add that it is unattested in this language. This is not a decisive difficulty, since the extant corpus of text in this language is not extensive. There are similar forms in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. The difficulty is that the analogy of JPA indicates that the form would have to be plural, i.e. ‫בחורי‬. This would be a substantial emendation. Taking ‫ יובל‬as meaning a Jubilee in the metaphorical sense is not difficult. There remains the substantial difficulty that it is not natural to say a Jubilee will stand or stand again. Somehow or other the words have to say Lûzå will stand again. Everything considered, I think it inevitable to read ‫ תניאנית תקום‬meaning “it (Lûzå) will rise again”. The emendation is minor and natural. This leaves the three words ‫ יובל בבחדו פנו‬unexplained. Either ‫ יובל‬is a verb, or Ben-Ḥayyim’s emendation has to be accepted, or the three words have to be left as unexplainable. I definitely propose reading ‫ יובל‬as yuwwẩbel, an unattested alternative form of the imperfect ethpecel of the root ‫יבל‬, which commonly functions as the passive of the afcel of this verb. I then propose explaining it as meaning “will be brought” or “will be moved”, shades of meaning well attested in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. If this is not the answer, a verb is still demanded. Otherwise, the reader can choose to accept Ben-Ḥayyim’s emendation ‫ בחורי‬because although not compelling it must be close to the author’s intention. It is to be understood that the translation of the three words ‫ יובל בחדו פנו‬resulting from either decision is only a plausible suggestion that will definitely be close to the author’s intention, but might not be exactly right. The emendation ‫ תניאנית תקום‬has been assumed in the translation because of its simplicity and naturalness, but was not printed in the Aramaic text because of the uncertainty of detail in the words just before. The first two words ‫“ לוזה יבנה‬Lûzå will be rebuilt” are clear and the rest of the sentence has to be interpreted in a way that fits. The overall intention of the rest of the sentence is clear and the translation of this part coming after ‫ לוזה יבנה‬is correct overall. c All of this verse is an interpretation of the quotation of Dt XXX:5 in the previous verse. See v. 19, note c. Part of the argument probably involves the words “and God will make you better off and more numerous than your fathers” at the end Dt XXX:5. Then the following verse of Deuteronomy is a consequence of that. Then, as said above in note c to v. 19, Dt XXX:8 is a promise. It is still true, of course, that the author is describing what has actually happened, and in that respect this piece of exegesis resembles the actualising of Nu XXIV:19 in XII:10. Whether that actualising in XII:10 is anticipating or a real observation does not matter for this purpose. 192 21 a God speaks here, being the author of the Song of Moses and the revealer of the workings of Providence to Moses. b The Israelites have been led astray. Those that have been led astray must include the Jews, but a lot of Samaritans as well. The author is concerned with the whole nation. c I have read ‫“ נקיא‬innocent” as an adjective. What is meant is that it will be judged by God as having been well-intentioned foolishness. “Seen” means in the sight of God. There is a clear allusion here to Dt XXXII:28 -- 29. 22 a ‫ בחלפן = בעלבן‬bilbån. On the change of [f] to [b] see Macuch p. 72. The form ilbån is a noun from the qal of the root ‫ עלף‬/ ‫חלף‬. The qal of this verb has no connotation of substitution. b ‫ פרוק‬fẩroq. c The Saviour of the forms and images is God. The forms and images, ‫צעורין וצלמין‬, are human identities, modelled on the divine and angelic. The second word is the plural Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew ‫“ צלם‬image”, in Gn I:26 -- 27. The first word is another Aramaic translation of the same word, şiyyûren, plural of şiyyor, from the root ‫צור‬. The formal equivalent in Jewish Aramaic is ‫ ציור‬but the semantic equivalent is ‫צורה‬. The word ‫ צעורין‬is also reminiscent of the verb ‫ ויצר‬in Gn II:7. In the Samaritan text this verb is spelt with one < ‫ > י‬and interpreted as being from the root ‫צור‬. The forms are thus made up of body and lifeforce (Gn II:7) along with a divine and angelic element (Gn I:26 -- 27). The same usage of terms can be seen in the Arabic Joshua book, ch. 16, lines 5 – 6, and the traditional Samaritan interpretation of the first word of Dt XXXII:4. The implication is that the world will be made right when God makes Mt. Gerizim as it should be, when the divine presence settles on it. (See also below, XII:19 -- 20). Then in some way people will assume their rightful forms. What this means is hard to say. There is an anti-Gnostic hint here. Because people are images of the divine and angelic, their salvation is inevitable, because God will inevitably save them, and that means all of them. Furthermore, the body and life-force are bound up with the angelic or divine element. See pp. 81 – 82 . It is possible to see how this concept of inevitable salvation could take on Gnostic form. It could be conjectured that there is an echo of the verb ‫ וירד‬in Gn I:26 in the use of the same verb in the quotation of Nu XXIV:19 below, in XII:21. In that case, the argument is very anti-Gnostic. d The name ‫ גבעתה‬Gêbẩåtå literally means “the hill”, but as a proper noun it is the name of the ground where the Sanctuary stood, i.e. the higher of the two crags of the mountain. See also XII:19, where the term is used the same way. See A.F. 193 39:17, where it says ‫وﻧﻈﺮ ]ﻋﺰي[ وھﻮذا ﻓﻲ ذﻟﻚ اﻟﻤﻜﺎن ﻣﻐﺎره وھﻲ ﺟﺒﻌﺘﮫ ﻣﻔﺘﻮﺣﮫ ﻟﻢ ﯾﺮھﺎ‬ ‫ ﻗﺒﻞ ذﻟﻚ اﻟﻨﮭﺎر‬meaning “He [cAzzi] looked and there in that place, which is Gêbẩåtå [the Hill], was a cave open he had never seen before that day”. In this place Vilmar has printed ‫ ﺟﺒﻌﺜﮫ‬but the mss. have < ‫ > ت‬not < ‫ > ث‬and the word is Aramaic, not Arabic. Stenhouse (p. 49) copies the printed text, not the mss., as he often does. As he does consistently, he fails to recognise a word important in Samaritan theology, the Aramaic word meaning “the Hill” which is the name given to the higher of the two peaks of Mt. Gerizim, and does not recognise it as Aramaic. He does not understand the syntax. He does not understand the pronoun wa-hiya meaning “which is” referring back to dhâlika ’l-makân (perhaps not knowing that Arabic allows an intervening word) and introducing a non-defining relative clause separating the noun maghârah from its adjective maftûḥah. Instead, it is ignored, as the quote of three syntactically unconnected Arabic words in his note 170 and the anacolouthon in his translation show. He therefore does not understand that it was the cave that had never been seen before, not the event, not recognising that the object pronoun suffix in lam yarahâ is not free-floating but has a referent, the word maghârah, which is why the pronoun object suffix is feminine, and which is why it says lam, not wa-lam or wa-ammâ lam; and at the same time not recognising that the adjective maftûḥah belongs to maghârah, not ‫ ﺟﺒﻌﺘﮫ‬. In the end he does not know what it was that was open and neither does the reader. Verses 20 and 22 are an interpretation of Ex XXV:8. In the Samaritan text, this reads “Make me a Sanctuary, and I will dwell amongst you” (‫ בתוככם‬for ‫בתוכם‬, so ‫ ועשו‬is a straight imperative). The word translated as “sanctuary” is ‫ מקדש‬Maqdåsh not ‫ משכן‬Mashkån though the context is the making of the Tabernacle. The verb translated “and I will dwell” is ‫ ושכנתי‬from the same root as ‫“ משכן‬Tabernacle”. The relationship between the two halves of the verse is not that the two happen together (as it is in most of the Versions), nor that the second is a clause of purpose (as it is in both forms of the Samaritan Arabic translation). The second clause is a clause of result and sequence, “Make me a holy place, and as a result, eventually, at some time, I will dwell amongst you because my Tabernacle will be amongst you”. One Old Latin witness understands the second clause as sequence and result. How does the author know that this is the true intention of Ex XXV:8? The answer lies in his use of the name Lûzå instead of the word ‫מקדש‬. The word ‫מקדש‬ Maqdåsh would naturally be taken to mean the ‫ משכן‬Mashkån in the context of Ex XXV. It is necessary for his purpose for it to mean something other than ‫משכן‬. The word ‫ מקדש‬is literally a holy building. Such a simple reading is impossible here, because the contrary assertion, that it is a descriptive name for the ‫משכן‬, would be more plausible, and there would be no resolution. Therefore, ‫ מקדש‬means a building 194 not intrinsically holy, but holy because it is on sacred ground and is needed for the cultus belonging to the sacred ground. So he asserts that ‫ מקדש‬here means Lûzå. The word ‫ מקדש‬is unexpected in the context. A reasonable interpretation would be that the commandment of the holy place is a separate item, meaning that even if there is no ‫משכן‬, you still have to have a holy place. Lûzå is the only possible such place, since that is where the ‫ משכן‬is to be if there is a ‫ משכן‬and it is the holiest place in its own right. It is therefore obligatory to have a cultus at Lûzå according to all requirements laid down, whether there is a ‫ משכן‬or not in those days. If, then, there is a commandment to have a cultus at Lûza, but the presence of God has not become manifest when the commandment has been faithfully carried out, then the relationship between the two halves of Ex XXV:8, the command and the promise, is not causal, but sequential, in the course of time. God’s promise can be trusted, but what if the dwelling of God that is promised is only a recognition of the holiness of the place? The answer given is that the relationship between the human and the divine, according to Gn I:26 -- 27 and II:2, is such that there is a lot more to hope for than having a cultus in operation. Some manifestation must come, and must remain visibly present. Compare below, XII:19. This manifestation must be metaphysical as well as physical; God will be seen as fẩroq, Saviour. To sum up, verses 20 and 22 are to be read together as a paraphrase of Ex XXV:8 saying “Build Lûzå: as a result I will eventually dwell amongst you in a way that is more satisfactory than the way I would otherwise dwell amongst you”. In this interpretation, the word ‫ משכן‬means the ‫מקדש‬ but only when the Divine Presence is there. This piece of exegetical argument is the product of a powerful and sophisticated mind. It is probably also the product of exegetical tradition. This is one of the kinds of exegesis that I inferred must have existed in my chapter Mikra, pp. 610 -- 611. A simpler example can be seen in XI:7. [For two instances of another kind of exegesis inferred in the same study, see XII:19 and 20]. I suspect that there is still another part to this argument I have not traced, showing more explicitly how the term Saviour as an epithet of God is necessary and compelling. Perhaps what is meant is that “amongst you” ‫ בתוככם‬in Ex XXV:8 is unexpected. “On the place” would have been expected. As God already dwells amongst them as a people, what is the promise? Probably that God will dwell within each one not as now, but in a way that manifests the relationship between God and the human identity. The holiness that descends on the hill would then be the intended state of the world. Some argument from Gn XXVIII:17 is probably hinted at as well. If Lûzå is treated as the house of God, i.e. the place for the house of God, then it will eventually be seen as the gate of Heaven. See XII:14 and 20 and the notes. It is hard to tell whether the authors set Lûza on the Mountain or on the Meadow. 195 Annotations to Chapter XII 1 a The constant use of the verb ‫“ קום‬to stand” is meant to suggest that the human agent of divine deliverance resembles Moses, who stood (Dt XXXIV:10) and will stand (Dt XVIII:15,18. Note the allusion to Dt XXXIV:12 in the words “with a mighty hand”.). As these declarations in ch. XII move further into the future, the exalted one resembles Moses more and more, till in the end, in the unforeseeable future, it is Moses himself. In Dt XXXIII:5, the Fragmentary Targum and Neofiti translate ‫ ויהי‬as a future, ‫“ ויקום‬and will stand”. The LXX and Peshitta translate “and will be”. Although the extant Samaritan tradition takes ‫ויהי‬ in its plain meaning, as a statement that Moses was king over Israel, it is almost certain that the author of the Asâṭîr finds a prediction of the coming of the promised prophet like Moses in this verse. One assumes that reading ‫ ויהי‬as a future was possible because the plain meaning of the word as a past tense occurs in a context referring to the future. The verb would have been taken in its plain meaning grammatically, but the translations of it as a future are meant to add that what Moses did once, i.e. rule over all Israel, the promised prophet like him will do again. Besides, if these words are a blessing, they must have a future reference. This reading of Dt XXXIII:5 could well be the origin of the expansion of v. 21 of the same chapter in the Jewish Targums. See below, note a to v. 20. Throughout ch. XII, the word translated “an exalted one” is the Hebrew and Aramaic ‫קדקד‬, which literally means “the fontanel of the head”, and which is used metaphorically, for reasons not yet understood, several times in the Pentateuch to mean a leader. The usage here is derived from the blessing of Joseph by Jacob (Gn XLIX:26) and the blessing of Joseph by Moses (Dt XXXIII:16). In three places in this chapter of the Asâṭîr (v. 3 and v. 5 and v. 9) the word ‫ קדקד‬is followed by the word ‫נזיר‬, a Hebrew adjective associated with the word ‫ קדקד‬in both versions of the blessing of Joseph and meaning “crowned” in the context. [Though the third instance is to be rejected: see Part III section 2]. This does not mean the person expected is to be from the tribe of Joseph. The traits of Moses become more and more evident through the chapter. Also, the person expected is given traits of Issachar in v. 18. Also, the ‫ נזר‬is the High Priest’s diadem. b ‫ יגלי( יכלי‬S). It might be better to translate “He will restrain Ammanîtis”. Ammanîtis is progressively reduced in power throughout this chapter, but it is not said that it will vanish completely. On the other hand, the re-appearance of Moses must involve the disappearance of Ammanītis. I take it that v. 1 refers to immediate relief and v. 2 to ultimate salvation. On the term Ammanītis, which is not attested but is a reconstruction and unprovable, see 7b. 196 c See Part II section 1. The faithful have suffered for too long. The leader appears when the year comes. “His days” are the time for the leader to arrive and do his work, and this is the meaning in each verse that follows where this expression is used. 2 a ‫ מעמי‬must be the passive participle of the afcel. Note the technical term ‫ חיל‬here. b The word ‫ חיל‬îl “power”, is probably used here in a technical sense. Notice its use in v. 19. Compare also ‫“ חיול‬powerful”, in v. 12. c ‫ מנה‬mêni, passive qal participle from the root ‫מנה‬. d ‫ ולא גלי( ולא כלי‬S). There is a play on the sound and perhaps on the meaning of ‫ יכלי‬in v. 1. 3 a ‫נזיר‬. See note a to v. 1. b Not a sign of great power, so an actual event. On the identification of the “speakers of wickedness”, see note b on v. 7. The reference seems to be to the Roman seizure of power in Palestine in 63 -- 62 B.C. and their very neat containment of Judaea, which required some skirmishes and shows of force to make the situation clear to the Hasmonean rulers and their followers. If so, the author is looking well back into the past. 4 a ‫ עציף‬êṣef, adjective from ‫ חסף‬/ ‫עסף‬. Compare Gn XIX:3, 9; XXXIII:11 Samaritan Targum, where ‫ עצף‬translates ‫פצר‬. b ‫ פלטענה( פלטנה‬MH) falṭẩnå, masculine definite. One might perhaps think of the petition by the Samaritans to Antiochos Epiphanes not to be counted as Jews, but this was the avoidance of a threat rather than a way out of an existing situation. The only event that matches the tone of this passage, with its implication of sudden dramatic relief from longstanding active oppression, is the act of the Romans near the end of 63 B.C. whereby they removed all non-Jewish cities from Hasmonean rule, by annexing them. Josephus has struggled to express this, but has not found a suitable Greek verb, and has had to say the cities were “freed” by the Romans, and then explain that after being freed, they were not actually free, since they became cantons in the Roman province of Syria (Josephus, Antiquities, XIV:74 -- 76 = XIV:4:4; War I:155 -- 156 = I:7:7). I suspect that there is a technical term lying behind the Aramaic, but this question needs the attention of an expert on Roman administration. Although Josephus does not list Shechem among the cities freed, his list is obviously incomplete. It might be a copy of a preliminary listing. Also, there was an attack on Mt. Gerizim by the Jews in a revolt about seven years afterwards 197 (Antiquities, XIV:100 -- 101 = XIV:6:2 -- 3), and this was an attack only and specifically on Mt. Gerizim. This indicates that the Jews had wanted to keep Shechem and its lands as part of Judaea, even if they had to give up foreign cities such as Samaria. Of all the cities lost to Judaea, only Shechem was not inhabited by nonIsraelites. I think it highly likely that the exemption or way out or getting out was the granting of non-Jewish status to Shechem, the only Israelite city lost to Judaea. In that case, “insistent with truth” in v. 4 is a precise term, and refers to the leader of the delegation that insisted to the Romans that not all Israelites were Jews. They got an exemption from Jewish rule, because they got an exemption from Jewish status. This clarifies the term “speakers of wickedness”. They are the Judaean representatives, arguing maliciously and on false grounds that the Samaritans ought to be under their jurisdiction. Again, the author is looking back on the basis of historical records. c ‫ ראבי‬rẩbi is the active qal participle of ‫ רוח‬/ ‫רבע‬. P 5 a ‫ יזער‬yêzor, spelt ‫ יעזר‬in MHSF Taf, future qal of ‫זור‬. This root occurs frequently in Samaritan Aramaic, e.g. the Samaritan Targum to Gn XIX:2 (*M 2 ), Nu XVI:26 (m), and Dt XXX:8 (JE). Note the spelling ‫ תעזר‬têzor in this last instance. It is well attested in Jewish Aramaic and Syropalestinian. The shade of meaning required here is attested in Syropalestinian, and is not too far from the usage in the Samaritan Targum in the second example. See also v. 19. 6 a Ms. Y stands against MH and SF (not recorded by Bonnard) and L in reading an exalted one will stand instead of an exalted one stands. I have preferred the reading of ms. Y here because v. 5 seems to mark the end of what, from the author’s viewpoint, has happened so far but well in the past. The same changeover to the future occurs in v. 22, which is the ultimate that the author hopes for. The use of the future in the first two verses of the chapter seems to be meant to mark off a pair of general statements applicable to the whole chapter. With v. 6 these two statements have come true in a fairly mundane sense. With v. 22 the same two statements are expected to come true in a very different way. I consider v. 15 to mark the appearance of one like Moses to some extent, and v. 19 to mark the expected appearance of one equivalent to Moses. If this reading of the whole piece is right, then the author’s main divisions are between what has happened so far, first well in the past and then more recently, and what is expected for the immediate future, and then the ultimate future outside his historical time-scheme. See Part II section 1. b ‫בית מלחמיה‬. Note the meanings of ‫ ܠܚܡ‬in Syriac. Note also the word ‫ משתלחם‬in the Samaritan Targum, Gn XXVII:42, ms. C. Not recorded by Tal in the dictionary. The word ‫ מלחמיה‬is a plural definite ethpacal participle. A P 198 P derivation from the Hebrew ‫ מלחמה‬as Ben-Ḥayyim unthinkingly assumes is impossible, since this word is not attested in Aramaic, and if it were borrowed, it would keep its feminine gender. The form ‫ מלחמה‬in MHF is corrupt. d ‫ יבנה‬yibbanni, ethpacal of ‫פני‬. The spelling could be due to misunderstanding on the part of the scribe, who thought he was normalising a phonetic spelling as ‫ יפנה‬of a form from ‫בני‬, since both ‫ יפנה‬and ‫ יבנה‬would be pronounced the same. On the other hand, the spelling could be an archaic device to mark the assimilated ethpacal, and distinguish it from the qal. See Macuch p. 72 and P P the context. What is meant is that the leaders of the opponents have fled. They are called menacers or threateners because they had long ago made it an offence (perhaps a capital offence) to worship on the mountain. 7 a On the significance of Lûzå, see XI:20-22 and the notes. b The absence of the word ‫ ביומיו‬indicates that the verb in the original Hebrew was transitive (with ‫ קדקד‬as the referent of the subject of the verb). The subject could be restored as ‫ זה‬if the original was in Hebrew or otherwise the object could be restored as ‫זדים‬, and put before the verb. The second solution is better. If it is right, then the word ‫ זדים‬is to be taken in its technical meaning in Rabbinic Hebrew of “heretics”. Note, however, that ‫ עמינדס‬might perhaps render ‫ קינים‬in v. 19, though the meaning is the same. Ammanītis is to be identified with the speakers of wickedness of v. 3. It is mentioned again in v. 19. See v. 21 and the notes there. I use the Greek word Aμμανίτις \ Aμμανείτις where the text has the Aramaic ‫עמינדס‬, probably to be pronounced ammîndes or ammînẩdes. This word is not an artificial combination of the Hebrew or Aramaic ‫ עם‬with an Arabic ‫ ﻧﺪس‬as previously conjectured without knowledge of Arabic or even looking in a dictionary. There is no Arabic word ‫ ﻧﺪس‬or similar that yields a suitable meaning. See above Part I section 3 pp. 7 -- 8. The use of ‫ עמינדס‬in Pentateuch colophons, as a name of the Moslem world when expressing dates according to the Moslem Era, is an artificial literary convention, derived by elaborating on a bad guess in some Arabic commentary. The earliest attestation of this usage known to me is in a colophon of the year 1350 A.D. (Juynboll, p. 19 of his introduction). The date can’t be much earlier, if the recovery and copying of the one surviving ms. of the Asâṭîr is to be dated to the revival of the 14th century. Aμμανίτις (also spelt Aμμανείτις with the same pronunciation) is the Greek name for Ammon. This Greek word will become ammîndes or ammînẩdes by regular adaptation to Samaritan Aramaic. The short [a] is unstable in an open syllable before the accent, but amnîdes would be unstable as well, because the sequence mn does not occur before a stressed vowel. The only pronounceable version would be ammîntes or ammînååtes. The change from [t] to [d] 199 would then be regular. The use of an adapted Greek name instead of a native name in Aramaic is known to have occurred in other cases. Syropalestinian has ‫ ܡܘܗܒܝܬܐ‬for Moab, from Greek Mωαβίτις. This is nearly exactly the same usage as here (if the suggestion is right). Palestinian Jewish Aramaic has ‫ אמאוס‬instead of the native ‫חמא‬. Nevertheless, the use of the foreign form here needs explanation. One reason could have been that the artificiality of the use of the foreign name was a signal to the reader that the name was being used as a code-name, not as a name for the real nation of Ammon. Perhaps, too, the form ‫ עמון‬in Aramaic would have been inconvenient, as it could be taken to mean “their people”. Now, Ammanītis is contrasted with Israel in v. 19, and probably with Jacob in v. 21. Also, Ammanītis is used with a singular verb both here and in v. 19. It is thus a collective noun. The events are later than the relief brought about by the Roman conquest in 63 -- 62 B.C. and the end of the Hasmonaeans. For a possible context, see above, Part II section 1 pp. 12 bottom – 20 top. Regardless of who had the right sacred place, the act of stopping Israelites from practising their religion was a violation of the whole Torah. Violation of the whole Torah carries the penalty of losing the status of being an Israelite, by divine decree, not by the decree of any earthly court, according to Nu XV:30 - 31. Deliberate desecration of the Israelite sanctuary carries the same penalty according to Lv VII:20, 21; XIX:8; XXII:3; Nu XIX:13, 20. Furthermore, the result will be the destruction of the sanctuary that has become the headquarters of the faction working against the carrying out of the Torah, and this destruction, even if at the hands of mankind, will be by divine decree. See Lv XXVI:31 in its context (and note that the Samaritan has “your sanctuary”, not “your sanctuaries”). The destruction of the false sanctuary mentioned below, in v. 17, is caused by those that misuse their sanctuary as a base for working against the practice of their religion by other Israelites. Those that cut themselves off from Israel can justly be called “Ammonites and Moabites” as a symbolical name, so that Dt XXIII:4 can be read as “those that can’t be part of Israel are called Ammonites and Moabites”. This use of the verse is not new to the Asâṭîr. There is a precedent in the Jewish use of it for propaganda purposes in Nehemiah XIII:1, which does not really speak of “Ammonites and Moabites”, but rather of Nehemiah’s foes, the foes of the self-appointed self-obsessed self-righteous exclusivist Jewish party, as the immediately following verses about the use of public facilities make clear. The author of this chapter of the Asâṭîr has used an existing Jewish polemic and cleverly turned it round, just as the earlier author did in XI:16. The author does not mention Jews by name because his policy is to speak only of those attracted to the truth and those attracted to falsehood. Compare XI:11, 13. Ammanītis does not mean Jews in general: it means the set-up that imposed the iron yoke for so long (v. 5), which was consistently hostile to the religion of Israel for so 200 long (v. 6), and which behaved as if it were a foreign nation in relation to Israel (v. 15). The Hasmonaean state fits the picture of Ammanītis, but for this author that was well in the past, and he is re-applying it to Jewish oppressors later on. Dating is hard. The unexpected singular verbs confirm it to be a set-up rather than individuals of a certain tendency. There seems to be a reminiscence of an attack on the sanctuary on Mt. Gerizim in the first century or early second century that we don’t know about, perhaps in the time of Hadrian. See the remarks above on p. 13 in their whole context. Anyway, there is theological and historical truth in detecting the misappropriation of religion as the servant of corporate identity. It was in fact this same misuse in a more general way that did lead to the destruction of Jerusalem. Compare the sombre conclusion of the Sifre Zuta on Numbers on this theme. The Asâṭîr is theologically correct in v. 17. The statement is a sober expectation. c ‫בעכר‬. Demoralisation or shock or confusion. Compare Mårqe p. 295 = IV:97, lines 1001 -- 1002, ‫ומדעיון עכירין‬. Some related forms are recorded by Tal, but not this one in this meaning. 8 a ‫במדע מקשט‬. Note that in Samaritan Aramaic, ‫ = מדע‬Rabbinic Hebrew ‫ דעת‬in all of its meanings, and goes a bit further. b Not a vague statement, but an assessment. The omission of the word ‫ ביומיו‬indicates that in the Hebrew original the verb was intended as transitive, with ‫ חדות העם‬as the object. The verb would have followed. In this position it would not have been exposed to damage, so its omission is not due to accident. If the anomalous ‫ עזיז‬in the overloaded epithet is due to the translator, then the verb left out would have been the Hebrew ‫( יחזק‬picel) or something similar, left untranslated to avoid a clanging of words in the Aramaic. P 9 a P ‫ עכירין‬is the plural active qal participle of ‫עכר‬. The form occurs (in a literal sense) in Syropalestinian. The context shows that the troublemakers are associated with Ammanītis. On the other hand, the use of this root in a metaphorical sense in Aramaic and Hebrew normally suggests disruptive activity from inside the community, or actions that spoil the harmony of the community. It seems from v. 10 that the word ‫ עכירין‬refers to an internal political movement, whose members belong to it by choice, not ethnic affiliation. These people have the right to live in Samaritan territory, though they can be re-settled outside Samaria proper. The natural conclusion is that the “troublemakers” are Samaritans that have been on the other side. There remains the possibility, however, that they are those that rejected the religion of Israel altogether. The congregation is said to be happy in v. 8 because its internal disruption has been alleviated. In v. 7 what is meant is that Ammanītis has 201 lost its influence in Samaria, and has no more power to cause harm. For the restoration of ‫ טרידין ומיעין‬and the meaning of these words, see the next verse, the Annotations to v. 11, and Part III section 2, p. 151. 10 a The verb ‫ יגיזון‬has the variants ‫ יגוזון‬in MH not recorded by Bonnard and ‫ יגוזו‬in SF not recorded by Bonnard. This is an explanatory paraphrase of Nu XXIV:19. The word translated “by government order” is ‫בדמסין‬. This is a borrowing from the Greek δημόσιος meaning “publicly owned”, or “available for public use”, and as an adverbial dative feminine δημοσίᾳ “by government order”, or “at government expense”, or “under government supervision”. It is the adverbial sense that is used here, marked in Aramaic by the prefix, though the word is derived from the Greek neuter plural. The related nouns in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic are all from the Greek neuter plural, either with the Aramaic plural ending or ending with the Greek neuter plural ending re-interpreted. The leaders are executed by the state after due legal process. Bonnard assigns the meaning “in public”. This was a suggestion broached by Ben-Ḥayyim without conviction. Tal copies Ben-Ḥayyim uncritically and Bonnard copies both uncritically. This won’t work. First, Syriac usage is against this. The term is unique to the Clementine book, a hapax legomenon at the place corresponding to Recognitions I:7 (Gebhardt’s translation p. 10). Brockelmann took it to mean “publice”, but the Syriac has two adverbs a few words apart, first galyâ’îth meaning “publicly” and then this word, which if it is to add any meaning at all must mean “in the officially designated public place”, i.e. the Forum Romanum. The Latin interprets incompletely, saying “in the most public place in the city”. This is the first time the Latin phrase has been understood. Second, although Tal has found the right underlying Greek adjective, presumably from Jastrow, there is no sign of the use of a comprehensive Greek dictionary to find the essential meaning in Greek lying behind all derived usages of the plural noun, which Jastrow reasonably never thinks necessary to mention. Third, it is decisive that none of the nouns in JPA derived from this Greek adjective depart from the meaning in Greek. Not even the word meaning “public games” cited by Bonnard is an exception. They are called by this word undoubtedly taken straight from their government name in Greek because paid for by the government and run by it. Fourth, Bonnard misquotes the word in two different ways, as ‫ בדמוסין‬p. 377 in the Aramaic text and b-damys p. 376 in the comment. Both misquotations lead him to a connection with JPA ‫ דימוס‬singular, but this means “the people” as paired with “the Senate” or loosely the general population, and is irrelevant. Fifth, no form of Aramaic keeps a Greek or Latin singular ending when making a new masculine plural noun without a singular. If Bonnard does not know something like this, then the accuracy and depth and originality of the whole 202 work is in doubt. Sixth, Bonnard has not understood the lay-out in Jastrow’s dictionary, which would have contradicted his assumption of the underlying Greek word. He gives a reference to Sokoloff, but Sokoloff does not quote anything that would have contradicted Jastrow. The underlying Greek word was not δῆμος. Next word. The word ‫ מיה‬mâayyå or mẩåyyå is the plural emphatic pacel passive participle of ‫חיה‬. It means “those allowed to live”. Ben-Ḥayyim followed by Tal in the entry ‫ חופה‬followed by Bonnard find the meaning “water” here without any expression of surprise. Bonnard suggests that a tsunami covering the highlands of Shechem might be imagined. Ben-Ḥayyim and Bonnard both accept that the author could write nonsense, without question, though Ben-Ḥayyim follows scholarly method by not trying to explain. The word ‫ יגיזון‬is the ethpacal of ‫גוז‬. The feminine form ‫( חופה‬not in quite the same meaning as here) is attested elsewhere in Samaritan Aramaic, e.g. Samaritan Targum to Gn XLIX:13 ms. V, which is not recorded by Tal in the dictionary. In the dictionary, the meaning assigned to this word in the Asâṭîr is “coast”, which is absurd. Bonnard follows uncritically as usual, trying to make it less absurd by translating “rives”. The bonnie banks of what river or the edge of what forest? Compare Jewish Aramaic ‫ חופא‬wheel-rim; ‫ חיפא‬border of weaving; Rabbinic Hebrew ‫ חף‬border of weaving; Rabbinic Hebrew ‫ חפופים‬boundary markers. I am not sure whether ‫ לחופת שכם‬means to the land surrounding Shechem or to the outermost areas under the control of Shechem. The words ‫מיה יגיזון‬ ‫ לחופת שכם‬are an explanatory translation of ‫ והאביד שריד מעיר‬in Nu XXIV:19 “he will cause the remainder to vanish from the city”. The statement of the execution of the leaders is probably an explanatory translation of ‫( וירד‬from ‫)רדה‬, the first word of the verse, which has been taken in the later sense of “to punish”. There might be a double interpretation of ‫ וירד‬here, as “he will take control and exact punishment”. The subject of the verb is ‫מיעקב‬, “one from Jacob”, interpreted as identical with the “exalted one” spoken of throughout this chapter. There is probably a second meaning, as “from out of Jacob”, i.e. the leaders will be eliminated from Jacob, which they did not really belong to anyway. This reading would make a parallel and contrast between “out of Jacob” and “out of the city”. In this case, there could be a third interpretation of ‫וירד‬, as “will drive out”. The whole of Nu XXIV:19 is quoted in Hebrew in v. 21. Part of Nu XXIV:18 is quoted in Hebrew in v. 19. The precision and sobriety of this statement indicate a statement of government policy. The leaders of the oppressors are to be executed, but legally and by due process. Any common people that had been caught up are to be kept away from the seats of power, but not punished, because their actions were not entirely free. There is admirable reasonableness here fitting the general tone of the book. 203 11 a On the restoration of the word ‫ עכר‬translated as Abomination, see Part III section 2, pp. 151 – 152 top. The allusion is to Dt XXXII:16, 19, and the context of these verses. Note the two omissions by Tal. Although the natural assumption would be that v. 11 refers to a syncretistic religion, and although the allusion to Dt XXXII here seems to confirm such an interpretation, this is not the author’s intention. In Asâṭîr XI:21, the allusion to Dt XXXII:28, 29 is in a context where the only error it can refer to is venerating the wrong sanctuary. Asâṭîr XII:13, with its use of the term ‫בדוש‬, an allusion to Nu XIV:9, has no suggestion of anything more than harmful wilfulness, neglect of God’s will, and disregard of Moses. This is serious, but not syncretism. The reason for the suggestion of the restoration of the Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew word ‫( לצים‬a word of various shades of meaning, with no English equivalent, but conventionally rendered “scoffers”) in v. 12 is that I see a reading of Dt XXXII:5, 16 - 21 as in Mårqe IV:33, 37 - 39, 99, where the illegitimate cult in the wrong place is identified with worship of trolls and goblins (‫ שדים‬v. 17), or foreign gods. Compare Asâṭîr XI:14, 16. There is a much more explicit assertion in Abu ’lFateḥ 115:5 – 10 (Stenhouse p. 158). According to this there was an idol within the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem temple. The word ‫ ﻛﻨﯿﺴﮫ‬kanîsah here does not mean synagogue. See note 23 p. 105. (No more or less reasonable than the corresponding fictitious malicious calumny of the Jews against the Samaritans, which came first, and without evidence). The second reason (or better, the other half of the reason) for the choice of this term is that it is the natural term for the time and the subject. For example, the corresponding Hebrew word ‫ לצים‬is prominent in the Eighteen Benedictions of the Rabbinic Jewish liturgy. (Before considering this analogy, the reader needs to bear in mind that the wording is slightly different in the Sefardic and Ashkenazi forms, and also in ancient documents from the Cairo Geniza and elsewhere. This is not the place to go into these details). No arguments in this study have been built on this proposal. The noun phrase ‫ תיעוב )מתעב( עכר‬in v. 11 is singular (if the restoration is right), and by implication a structure. The statement that it is to be destroyed by the people implies that it is an invalid but entirely Israelite structure, which the Israelites themselves will come to reject. As usual in this piece, there is no suggestion of religious coercion: only those that wrongly recognised the validity of the structure have the right to demolish it. The use of force mentioned in vv. 6 -- 10 was for military ends, and the enemy was an occupying military force. The best solution seems to be to take the “Abominable Vexation” or “Vexatious Abomination” as being a major building used by the promoters of the forcible recognition of Jerusalem throughout the lands belonging to Shechem, even though the temple was no more. If it was this offensive, it might have been a place of sacrifice. 204 12 a The Powerful One, ‫ חיולה‬cayyûlå, is a standard title for God in the P P Samaritan liturgy. Compare v. 2 and v. 19. b On the interpretation of this verse, see the notes to the previous verse. 13 a ‫ בדוש‬biddosh, verbal noun from the pacel of ‫בטש‬. For an instance of the spelling < ‫ > ט‬representing an etymological doubled [dd] sound in the pacel, in a similar phonetic environment, see Dt XXXII:15 Samaritan Targum ms. J, where ‫ ויבטר‬represents ‫ויבדר‬. Wrongly recorded by Tal in the dictionary as ms. C. [For the meaning of ‫בדר‬, note the use of the pacel or afcel as “pressing olives” in Micah VI:15 Targum. Note that this verb in the pacel and afcel consistently renders Hebrew ‫ נאץ‬picel in the Samaritan Targum. ‫ בדר‬/ ‫ בטר‬is therefore a suitable translation of Hebrew ‫ בעט‬in Dt XXXII:15]. It seems that in some forms of Samaritan Aramaic, a doubled [ṭṭ] sound near voiced consonants became [dd], so that the spelling < ‫> ט‬ could represent the sound [dd] and etymological [ṭṭ]. I take it therefore that ‫ ויבטר‬is a false etymological spelling for ‫ויבדר‬, and represents wyêbadder. Note also that the pacel and afcel of ‫ בדר‬are always spelt with < ‫ > ט‬not < ‫ > ד‬in the Samaritan Targum in all other places. This unetymological spelling in the opposite direction conclusively proves the sound-shift proposed here. Here ‫ בטוש = בדוש‬biddosh. This biddosh means rejection of God’s will, and action in defiance of that will: compare the usage of the verb ‫ בטש‬rendering the Hebrew verb ‫ מרד‬in the Palestinian Targum to Nu XIV:9. The Hebrew word underlying biddosh must therefore be ‫מרד‬, which is a technical theological term. It is likely that the Aramaic biddosh is a technical term. b ‫יוסף‬. Compare XI:10 and XII:17. The burning of the Shechem shrine in v. 14 follows the voluntary abandonment of it in v. 13. Compare v. 17. 14 a This is one of the only three places where the text is unsatisfactory (if scribal notes and glosses are left out of consideration), the other places being part of the epithet in v. 9 and part of one other word in the same verse. The manuscripts have ‫ יקד‬......... ‫ יהי‬i.e. they have ‫ יהי‬where I have proposed ‫ אמיץ‬near the start of the verse. A continuous tense is simply impossible in the context. Also, the adjective ‫יקיד‬ is normal instead of the participle in all forms of Western Aramaic, including Samaritan. The participle exists, but means “getting burnt up”. It is attested in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, but not Samaritan. (Though it must always be borne in mind that the corpus of text in Samaritan Aramaic is not all that much, so absence of attestation of any words except very common ones is not proof). This means what the scribe of the ancestral first transcript of the damaged ms. saw as ‫ יהי‬must be the last few letters of the epithet. Now, a slightly washed-out < ‫ > צ‬will look like < ‫ > י‬in Samaritan script. The letter < ‫ > ה‬when damaged can look like an indeterminate row of slanty strokes, so that a scribe seeing indeterminate marks could see a letter < ‫> ה‬. The only possibility for the last letter is < ‫ > צ‬and the only word with a suitable 205 meaning that fits is ‫אמיץ‬. The verb ‫ אמץ‬is not used in late Samaritan Aramaic, and is rare in the early period. A scribe trying to make sense of the letters preserved would not naturally think of ‫ אמיץ‬specially if traces of only the last two letters < ‫> יצ‬ were preserved. (It has been established that the water damage was on the right-hand side). For an instance of the use of the verb, see Dt XV:7 Samaritan Targum as quoted by Mårqe, p. 283 line 2. Not noted by Tal. I have not seen an instance of the adjective ‫ אמיץ‬but its existence follows from the existence of the verb, since it is a regular formation. b ‫איכלה דשכם‬. (Erroneously written ‫ אכילה‬in S). This structure was seen by the author of a report used by Epiphanios, who recorded it in his Panarion at LXXX:1 in about 375 A.D. It is apparent that the term ‫ איכל‬in the Asâṭîr is to be understood as the whole sacred area and the enclosing structure of that whole area, i.e. the word is equivalent to the Hebrew ‫ נוה‬as interpreted in the Rabbinic literature. It seems to be more similar in meaning to its Arabic cognate, on which see footnote 23 p. 105, than its cognates in Syriac and Jewish Aramaic and Hebrew. It was not a houselike structure. Epiphanios says the place of prayer, as he calls it, resembles a theatre and is roofless. This structure and the pavilion mentioned in the next paragraph are not the same and were not used by the same faction. The pavilion or tent might not have been next to the structure on the same sacred place. Scriptural authorisation for either this structure would have been found, partly but only partly, from Gn II:11. See my article The First Notice. The place is said to be two milestones outside the city, on “the flat ground” i.e. the plain east by south of Shechem. The source used by Epiphanios can be dated to some extent. Epiphanios simply identifies Shechem with Neapolis. In the context of the measurements of Sabbath distances, to ignore the clear mile and a quarter (British Imperial) or a bit over two km. between the outer walls of the two is to show ignorance of the locality, which means the identification of Shechem with Neapolis is from the hand of Epiphanios, not his source. This means the source did not need to specify whether Old Shechem or New Shechem was meant, which means it is from before the foundation of Neapolis in 72 A.D. or early in 73 A.D. Those that put their sacred place on the flat ground outside Shechem must have been able to cite some scriptural warrant. I suggest that they found it in Gn XXVIII:19, read as meaning that the site was near the city mentioned there. The holy place is therefore in the territory of Shechem, just outside Shẩlem. There is actually a place called Shẩlem the Great by the Samaritans, and called Sâlim in Arabic, the right distance east by south of Old Shechem. As the flat ground mentioned by Epiphanios can only have been east and east by south of Old Shechem, because that is the way the road goes, the structure must have been pretty close to the modern Sâlim. From Gn XXXIII:18 it can be seen that the site faced Shechem. The meaning of Gn XXXIII:19, if read without preconceptions, is that the sacred place was on the open flat ground east and east by south of Old Shechem. This is the only flat ground in the vicinity, other than the valley, and the valley is too narrow to be called ‫ שדה‬open country. This means Jacob’s holy place would have been thought to have been about halfway between Shẩlem and Shechem. The structure seen by 206 Epiphanios’s informant was in open country, not near a village or town. The fit is perfect between the location recorded by Epiphanios and the only possible location of Jacob’s holy place if it is not to be on the Mountain. Both Shechem and Shẩlem must lie on the Marj al-Bahâ’ and so must Lûza, the place where Jacob camped in the view of those that did not locate it on the Mountain. (There is no way of telling whether the opinion that it was on the Mountain is ancient. The ambiguity of Jacob’s words in verse 17 of Genesis XXVIII might be deliberate, which would make the disagreement ancient). The Shechem Sacred Enclosure is not be confused with an important structure not on the Mountain attributed to the Dosithean reformer ‫ סכתה‬Såkte by A.F. at 161:7 – 8 (Stenhouse p. 225). There is no indication at all that this was meant to be any kind of sanctuary. How it was regarded is not known. The potential holiness of the mountain was not denied by Såkte, who promised that the Tabernacle (‫משכן‬ Mashkån) would re-appear, and promised that from his marquee or pavilion (maẓallah) they would go up to Mt. Gerizim. On this term see the information on the next page. Ms. D (Stenhouse H) reads “He said from this pavilion he would go up to Mt. Gerizim”. Ms. C (Stenhouse P) and Khaḍir read “He said ‘From this pavilion we will go up to Mt. Gerizim [the sacred mountain, Mt. Gerizim Khaḍir]’ ”. (Stenhouse is wrong in saying the name Mt. Gerizim is not in ms. C. It did not show up in his photograph. For the explanation, see above, footnote 30 on p. 121). All the other mss. read “He said ‘Whoever has this pavilion will go up to Mt. Gerizim’ ”. Ms. A omits the whole sentence and has an expansion of the previous sentence instead. [Stenhouse’s collation of this ms. in this sentence and the sentence before is wrong]. My first judgment was that this was a mistake caused by copying the word lahu from the line above, producing man lahu instead of min, and the reading could be disregarded. On the other hand, the reading with lahu is in both recensions or both main textual groups, so any mistake would have had to have been early. Then again, the reading without lahu is in both CD and the text used by Khaḍir, again from both main textual groups. There might be something here we don’t know about. A.F. says neither he nor his followers ever went up the mountain, so the mountain was not an actual holy place, only a potential one A.F. 162:16 -- 163:1 and 163:3 (Stenhouse p. 227 bottom not quite accurately, and 228 top). This might be an exaggeration meaning they did not count this as a fulfilment of the commands of the Torah. For the evidence that the Dositheans did actually go up (but while not considering doing so to be full fulfilment of the requirements of the pilgrim festivals) see my article Social Anomie columns 35 – 36, and see Part II, footnote 22 pp. 103 -- 104, and Part VII. Perhaps those that built the Shechem shrine, and Såkte, said that their Lûzå, which was on the meadow, on flat ground, was permanently sacred because it had been recognised as such by Jacob, and was therefore independent of the Sinai covenant: whereas the mountain was sacred only when functioning as the sacred place of the Mosaic covenant, which would only be when the Tabernacle (‫ )משכן‬was present. This would explain the Arabic term Marj al-Bahâ’ “the Meadow of the Glory” (Arabic Book of Joshua ch. 39; A.F. 81:13; and frequently). See the Samaritan Targum to Gn XXVIII:16 – 17 ms. *M 1 for the origin of the name. The tent set up by RR RR 207 Såkte would correspond to the place where Jacob slept and had his vision, that is, Lûzå. Chapter I of the Asatir sets Lûzå on the flat ground, not on the Mountaintop, in contradiction to ch. XI. See the first note to XI:20. Certainly A.F. quotes Såkte as distinguishing between his tent, called in Arabic a maẓallah, and the Tabernacle, which is given its Hebrew or Aramaic name of ‫( משכן‬161:7 – 8 Stenhouse p. 225). The continuation of the history by A.F. calls the tent alternatively both miẓallah on p. 220 of ms. C and qubbah on p. 211. All commentators have misunderstood the Arabic miẓallah as meaning a booth or hut, but in the context this makes no sense. Comparing the range of meaning of the two Arabic terms at the time shows that it was a pavilion (in the old meaning, that of a big elaborate ceremonial tent). See my article Social Anomie. It is fairly easy to reconstruct the Aramaic technical terminology rendered into Arabic in this passage. The Mosaic Tabernacle was called ‫משכן‬. The Aramaic words corresponding to maẓallah are ‫ חפי‬and ‫אגן‬, both of these words actually being applied to Jacob's tent in different forms of the Samaritan Targum, Gn XXXIII:19. (The majority of witnesses have ‫ משכן‬however). This does not indicate any Dosithean influence in the Targum, only that careful translators wanted to avoid the use of the Aramaic ‫ משכן‬to render the Hebrew ‫ אהל‬when it clearly could not refer to the Mosaic Tabernacle. Abu ’l-Fateḥ, a highly competent scholar with good critical sense, has managed to preserve the distinction between the two Aramaic technical terms even in Arabic translation. Probably Såkte’s Hebrew name for his tent was ‫ אהל‬as in Gn XXXIII:19, and his Hebrew name for the Mosaic tent was ‫משכן‬, the Scriptural term. It is not clear what name he would have given to his tent to distinguish it from the ‫ אהל מועד‬the Mosaic Tabernacle. In venerating their sanctuary, consecrated by a theophany to Jacob himself, these ancestors of the Dositheans sensu stricto, as well as those that had their sanctuary on the mountain, were in the line of an ancient and well-attested tradition. In expecting the manifestation of the union of heaven and earth, on that location, they were in the line of a very reasonable exegesis of the Pentateuch. See Hoshea XII:5 -7 in the MT (with its own internal variants), in the Greek (including the later adaptations), in Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion, in the Peshitta, and in the Targum. This is apparently a fragment of the liturgy of the sanctuary of the northern kingdom, not a composition by the prophet. See below, Asâṭîr XII:23 notes, on the Targum to this passage in Hoshea. There is no room here to go into the question in detail. Here are a couple of observations to help clarify the data. (a) The Greek translation of the Minor Prophets has quoted the verse as worded in the liturgy of Bethel. (b) The Hebrew of verse 5b can be read as both present and future. At Bethel he will find him and there will he speak with us. Accordingly, if these verses are read with the understanding that what is said of the ancestor Jacob can be said of the nation Jacob, then the development set out by the Targum in vv. 6 -- 7 will become self-evident. (c) The source of all this is Gn XXXV:3 and XXXII:31, along with other verses relating to Jacob’s experience, including Gn XXVIII:20 as read by the Palestinian Targum, and XXXV:15. It could be argued that the Bethel visited by Hoshea was on the Shechem meadow, ‫ אלון מורא‬ẩlon mûra, Marj al-Bahâ’. There can be no doubt 208 that Jacob was near Shechem, because Scripture says so. The words imply the worshippers had ready access to the place where Jacob was, but their shrine where this piece of liturgy was recited was not itself at the place. The Dosithean expectation for the eschatological future was the manifestation of the Mosaic Tabernacle on the mountain. The mountain was still a place of prayer. Their divergence in practice is set out in footnote 22 pp. 104 -- 105. There were some with the extreme view that the mountain had no sanctity at all except when the Tabernacle was present. See above note 30 pp. 120 -- 121 on A.F. 161:13 and the main innovation by Såkte. Note also the sentence “He (Såkte) said there was no holiness in the age of error” A.F. 162:5 – 6 (Stenhouse p. 226). Even then, they still might have had religious services on the Mountain, in expectation of the restoration of its rightful status. The phrasing of doctrine as “In the Fẩnûtå there is no perfection”, A.F. 72:16, quoted above Part II section 3, pp. 114 and 115, has this meaning. The authors of the Asâṭîr chapter XI maintain that God will eventually settle holiness on the hill (XI:22), or in other words, the top of the mountain will appear (XII:19) and the mountain will be perfected (XII:20). They must therefore maintain that the mountain is sacred even without the Mosaic Tabernacle. They do not mention the reappearance of the Mosaic Tabernacle. It is still not certain whether they set Lûza on the Mountain or the Meadow. They differ from the Dositheans in expecting the perfection of the top of the mountain, by which they probably meant the actualisation of the connection between heaven and earth seen by Jacob. This might have meant the repairing of the damage to the whole of creation at the time of the expulsion from the Garden. Up to this point, for the sake of clarity, the explanation of the readings Shẩlom as a proper noun, ‫ שלם‬as an adverb, and Shẩlom ‫ שלום‬as an adverb in Gn XXXIII:18 have been postponed. Some explanation is needed here if a place called Shẩlem by the later Samaritans can be mentioned in a verse where the known Samaritan exegesis finds no proper name. Now, the natural reading of both ‫ שלם‬in the MT and ‫ שלום‬in the Samaritan is as a place-name. Not quite as certain, but the best explanation available, is that the meaning is that Jacob arrived at Shâlêm / Shẩlom, which is in the territory of Shechem. The LXX, followed by the Peshitta and Vulgate, finds a proper noun here. On the other hand, Targum Onkelos writes ‫ שלים‬which is probably intended as an adverb. The Palestinian Targum has a double translation, but the intention is the same as in Onkelos. To my knowledge, this is the consensus of the Rabbinic tradition. The known Samaritan tradition is the same, but the reading ‫שלום‬ in mss. CB of the Samaritan Targum indicates a reading of the Hebrew ‫ שלום‬as a place-name. The Aramaic ‫ שלם‬in mss. JAME, however, certainly represents the later known Samaritan tradition. The distribution of the data shows that an older, and correct, interpretation of ‫ שלם‬/ ‫ שלום‬as a place-name has been replaced by an artificial exegesis. It is understandable how the Rabbinic tradition could have rejected the correct interpretation, since it is too clearly evidence of the former sanctity of Mt. Gerizim or a site near there. The correct reading is still compatible with having the Mosaic sacred place in Jerusalem, but is an awkward reminder of historical reality all the same. What is much harder to explain is why the Samaritans should have rejected 209 the correct interpretation. In the light of the previous discussion of the data on the location of a sanctuary not on the mountain, one answer suggests itself. It has been mentioned that a reading of Gn XXVIII:19 and XXXIII:18 that puts Jacob’s holy place on the flat ground, not on the mountain, is more natural than one that puts it on the mountain. If, however, ‫ שלום‬is not a place-name, the holy place can be located much more plausibly on the mountain. This is not to say that the correct and original reading of ‫ שלום‬as a place-name is incompatible with locating the holy place on the mountain: it is only to say that it becomes at least as plausible to locate the holy place as being near the place called ‫שלום‬. This means the artificial Rabbinic exegesis to avoid recognising the sanctity of a site on or near Mt. Gerizim was borrowed by the Samaritans to avoid any possible reference to the Dosithean holy place between ‫שלום‬ and Shechem, and thus negate the Dosithean exegesis. There remains the question of how the author of the Asâṭîr manages to set the sanctuary on the mountain, if at the time of writing ‫ שלום‬was still read as a place-name. The solution is to take ‫ שלום‬and Shechem as approximate indicators and to take Lûzå as the name of a sanctuary just outside a settlement of the same name. A similar solution lies behind the Peshitta’s replacement of city by place in Gn XXVIII:19. It is also what lies behind the transcription of ‫ אולם‬in the LXX and in Aquila’s first edition (probably) and ho Hebraios, that is to say that Oulamlouz, porch (of the sanctuary) of Louz, was the name of the city, but the city was so called because it was near the sanctuary, and perhaps only existed because of the sanctuary. This same solution is found in mss. AM of the Samaritan Targum. In this case ‫ אולם‬really might be part of the place-name by historical tradition. Ms. E writes ‫ואולם‬, but M writes ‫ואלום‬, and A writes ‫ואלפן‬. The spelling with < ‫ > ו‬or < ‫ > פ‬represents the sound [b]. The interchange of [m] and [n] in this position is common in Samaritan Aramaic. Anyway, it is not the Aramaic ‫ארום‬, which usually renders the Hebrew adverb ‫אולם‬. The agreement of the Samaritan Targum with the Septuagint and the other witnesses puts the antiquity of this exegetical solution beyond doubt. The phonetic changes in Samaritan Aramaic show that ‫ ואולמלוז‬must have been a real place-name. There is evidence of two other real places called ‫( אולם‬see Jastrow). There remains the question of why ‫ שלום‬is the reading in the Samaritan, and ‫ שלם‬in the MT. I hope to treat this question in a more suitable place. As for why the place near Shechem is now called Shẩlem and not Shẩlom, perhaps it was a deliberate deformation by the opponents of the Dositheans to take away from the effectiveness of a major piece of exegesis used by them. Or perhaps the Dositheans called the town Shẩlem, not Shẩlom, because their text of the Pentateuch differed at this point, and agreed with what later became the MT. The fact that the Dosithean text differed is well attested: see my Use, Authority, and Exegesis, pp. 625 -- 629. The second explanation is preferable, since the town would be more likely to keep the name used by its inhabitants, and the name Shẩlem would have been more convenient for the Dosithean interpretation of these verses. There is no difficulty at all in supposing that the Dosithean form of a place-name could have become universal and its implications forgotten. There is a much more obvious piece of Dosithean 210 terminology in the name of the grassy plain east by south of Shechem, on which stood the sacred place that rivalled the mountain. The Arabic name Marj al-Bahâ’, “the Meadow of the Glory” is clearly a translation of an Aramaic name that referred to Jacob's vision and the sacred site on the flat ground. The Arabic bahâ’ translates the Aramaic ‫איקר‬, an allusion to Gn XXVIII:16 (see the Palestinian Targum, Neofiti, Onkelos) and to v. 17 (see the Palestinian Targum). It is remarkable that the same word ‫ יקרה‬occurs in the Samaritan Targum of v. 16 in *M 1 and that the word nûr occurs in one ms. of the first recension of the Samaritan Arabic translation. The word marj is of course obviously appropriate, but it echoes the word ‫ שדה‬in Gn XXXIII:19, and the mss. of the Samaritan Arabic Version avoid using it. We can now remove the objection that the Shechem Sacred Enclosure would be expected to be in Shechem: it was called this because no other name was available. It would have been called the Sacred Enclosure in Jacob’s Field or the Field of Glory by those that recognised it -- but this author sets Jacob’s vision on the mountain. For the term Marj al-Bahâ’ “the Meadow of Glory” see above in this note. Eusebios, in his Onomastikon, sets Lûzå on the flat ground at the foot of the mountain, within the third milestone, i.e. a bit past the second milestone. (The American translation in English should not be used). It seems the Dositheans did the same. See my article The First Notice of the Dositheans. This author could not call it the Bethel Sacred Enclosure either, though those that recognised it might have called it that. It is uncertain whether the place Salim / Saleim of John III:23 is the place eight Roman miles south of Scythopolis (Eusebios, Onomastikon) or the place east by south of Shechem referred to in this discussion. c The word ‫ באדה‬must be understood as “straightaway”, and not “by his hand”, because this author sees the destruction of any false shrine as being permissible, or a sign of theological progress, only if the destruction comes at the hand of those that used to venerate it but have then seen its falsity. See the previous verse. Compare vv. 11 and 17. The “exalted one” only exerts force against oppressors. See vv. 9 -- 10. All that can be expected from political and military might or the piety and goodwill of the people has happened. What is described in the rest of the chapter is explicitly miraculous. The powerful one of v. 14 is a military leader. The personage described in the rest of the chapter is like Moses or is Moses. Up to v. 14, the mountain has been holy, but has looked like any other mountain. In v. 19 the missing top of the mountain appears. In v. 20 the perfection of the Gate of Glory is expected. What is looked forward to is the sure and certain (v. 20) fulfilment of God’s promise. There is no urgency, just an expectation for the long-term future. Compare the phrase “in the course of time” in XI:19. Compare also what is said in Part II section 1 about the time-scheme. The settling of holiness on the Hill in XI:22 is the equivalent of the reappearance of the top of the Hill and the perfection of the Gate of Glory in XII:19 -20. There is still one military victory to be won (v. 19). If a distinction is to be made within vv. 15 -- 22, then the personage of vv. 15 -- 20 is like Moses, and the personage of vv. 21 -- 22 is Moses. 211 15 a ‫ פרוש‬fẩrosh, passive participle qal of the root ‫פרש‬. Compare the use of ‫ פריש‬in Jewish Aramaic to translate the Hebrew ‫נפלא‬. The use of forms from the root ‫ פלא‬in Samaritan Hebrew normally suggests the acts of Moses. ‫]סארת[ ארע‬ ‫ עבראותה יבטל‬. The restoration of the first word is explained in Part III section 2 p. 153. The restoration is tentative and no arguments are based on it. The semantic range of the root ‫ בטל‬in Samaritan Aramaic and Syropalestinian differs from Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. In Samaritan Aramaic it is the common equivalent of the root ‫ שבת‬even in a favourable sense. Notice the use of the verb ‫ בטל‬to render the Hebrew verb ‫ שבת‬in connection with the Sabbath in the Samaritan Targum in Gn II:3; Ex XVI:30 ms. A; Ex XXX:15, 17. The ethpa‘al is used the same way in Syropalestinian at Hebrews IV:9, where it is not understood by Sokoloff. Notice also Ex XVI:23 ms. A of the Samaritan Targum, where ‫ שבתון בטול קדש‬renders ‫ ;שבתון שבת קדש‬Ex XXXI:15 ms. A, where ‫ בטול בטולין‬renders ‫ ;שבת שבתון‬Ex XVI:26 ms. A, where ‫ בטול‬renders the noun ‫שבת‬. In reference to the seventh year of rest, notice Lv XXV:2 in m, where the verb is used and ‫ ותבטל ארעא שבה‬renders ‫ושבתה הארץ‬ ‫ שבת‬. Tal records the noun but not the verb. More importantly, the Aramaic verb ‫בטל‬ in the qal renders ‫ נוח‬in the qal in Ex XXIII:12 mss. JV of the Samaritan Targum. Not recorded by Tal in the dictionary. In this verse of the Asâṭîr, the allusion is to the use of the Hebrew ‫ נוח‬in the hifcil in Dt III:20; XII:10; XXV:19, where it is used to mean God’s giving of final and definitive relief from any threat from the nations round about. The specific allusion is to Dt XII:10. The following verse in Dt refers to the operation of the sanctuary. The exalted one will definitively end all threats from foreigners, and the congregation will be able to live undisturbed in their land, with the sanctuary operative, as promised in Deuteronomy. From v. 17, we see that the Jews occupying parts of Samaria will no longer be a separate religious group. P P 16 a ‫ באחד( בענון‬S not recorded by Bonnard) ‫באד‬. This is meant to recall Nu XII:3 and 6 -- 8, where Moses is said to be unique in these two ways. b ‫בחכמה‬. Moses is said to have been instructed directly by God in the Samaritan Targum, Palestinian Targum, Frag. Targum, and Neofiti to Dt XXXIV:10. This made him unique. Compare Part II section 4 pp. 145 – 146 top, and XI:7 and the notes. An alternative, but less likely, explanation would be that the Hebrew behind this read ‫ ענו בדעת יחיד‬. The first word is the key word in Nu XII:3. The second word is used by the Sifre to this verse to explain that the word ‫ ענו‬does not mean poor or weak here, but humble, ‫ענו בדעת‬. The same device is used by the Palestinian Targum, which has ‫ענותן בדעתה‬. The word ‫ איש‬is probably taken to mean “heroic”, as if from the root ‫ אשש‬or ‫ אוש‬and Moses is heroic in his humility, that is, his accurate perception of the relationship between him and God. Perhaps compare the term ἀθλήτης as used by Paul. This is why the Samaritan Targum can render ‫ ענו‬as meaning mighty. This figure is like Moses, but is not Moses himself. He is unique in his generation, not for all time. Contrast vv. 19 – 22 and specially v. 22. 212 17 a This seems to be the Jerusalem temple, not the sanctuary on the Shechem meadow. Compare XI:10 and 15, and the notes to XII:7. b ‫יוסף‬. Compare XI:10 and XII:13. c After the false cultus has been abandoned, the structures will be burnt. This seems to look to the future. This would put the date of composition very early, enough to be a real difficulty. On the other hand, the author could be looking back. It is historically true that the Jews made no attempt to reintroduce a prayer service on the temple site, but in fact it would have been impossible. At the moment I would rather leave the question of the dating of this verse as unanswerable. The actual source of these words is Dt XXIX:22 and XXXII:22. After the ending of the second revolt very many Samaritans moved into Judaea. See Part II section 1 pp. 12 -- 13. 18 a ‫ נגוד‬nẩgod, active participle qal of ‫נגד‬. For attestation, see Gn XLIX:10 Samaritan Targum. b Foreign nations translates ‫ ערלתה( ערלתו‬P), an explanatory translation of the Hebrew ‫ עמים‬in Dt XXXIII:19, taken in its plain contextual meaning. The Palestinian Targum agrees. Abundance of the sea is the Aramaic ‫שפע‬ ‫ ימה‬which renders the Hebrew ‫ שפע ימים‬in the same verse. The interpretation of the whole verse is as in the Palestinian Targum, except of course that the holy place is Mt. Gerizim. The restoration of the obliterated word is explained in Part III section 2 p. 154. The leader causes wealthy coastal nations engaged in all kinds of fishing, presumably including crustaceans and shellfish, to recognise Mt. Gerizim, and this leader will be immensely wealthy from the treasures of the sea. There is still obscurity here, in spite of the Scriptural allusion. Why choose this verse? Why do coastal nations specially matter? 19 a MHSF wrongly omit the word ‫פרע‬. The omission is not recorded by Bonnard. b ‫ יזער‬yêzor, spelt ‫ יעזר‬in MSF Taf. Compare note a to v. 5. c ‫גבעלה‬. More likely pronounced Gẩbêla rather than Gẩbẩla judging by the spelling. The usual translation of ‫ שעיר‬in the Samaritan Targum and (as ‫ )גבלה‬in the Palestinian Targum and Targum Neofiti. It is the Idumaea of the Hellenistic period, south of Judaea and west of the Dead Sea. This is one of the reasons for proposing ‫ קינים‬in the restoration of the Hebrew acrostic in this verse in Part III section 1, that is, if the restoration of the acrostic is accepted. After 63 B.C. it reached to within fifteen or twenty miles of Jerusalem (British Imperial miles, not Roman). What is said here would have no reasonable meaning if applied to foreign rulers, or if applied to a Samaritan faction. It is this statement that makes it certain that ‫עמינדס‬, whatever the word might be etymologically, means the militant misusers of the religion of Israel and the Jerusalem temple. The Jerusalem cultus seems to have been discontinued (see v. 17) but the menace of those that try to manipulate the religion for their own ends remains. If not removed, they will have 213 another go. They are to be removed, not just from Samaria, but even from Judaea. Judaea by now is not foreign territory. The source of this statement is Nu XXIV:18 interpreted as in the Peshitta and Targum Onkelos. The references to Nu XXIV:18 -19 in this section indicate an eschatological hope, not an immediate political wish. d Nu XXIV:18. On the word power ‫ חיל‬see v. 12 and v. 2. e Compare the following verse, and XI:22 and the notes. The Hebrew form is suspicious. L, with S according to Bonnard but not Ben-Ḥayyim, read ‫ בחזותה‬but the definite state is not right here. I propose ‫ בחזו‬. 20 a The first two words ‫ חלק מחקק‬are from Dt XXXIII:21. MH agree, S agrees but its reading is not recorded by Bonnard, F not recorded by Bonnard has the Hebrew form ‫ חלקת‬. The allusion is to the exegetical tradition still to be seen in the Palestinian Targum, Fragmentary Targum and Targum Neofiti. Moses’s body is said to be preserved in a jewel-bedecked cave in the territory of Gad, and one day he will rule and guide Israel again. This implies that Moses’s body shows not the slightest effect of death. Such an opinion is attributed to Rabbi Elicezer ben Yacaqov, a transmitter of old traditions, in the Sifre to this verse. This line of interpretation in the Targums is alluded to in the Peshitta, and Onkelos and the Vulgate mention that this is the location, but leave out the rest. Mårqe shows knowledge of this tradition (e.g. p. 330 top) but does not say much about it. There remains the question of what happened to Moses’s soul, but logic says he must be ministering in heaven. Such an opinion is stated in the Sifre to Dt XXXIV:6. See further Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. VI, pp. 161 -- 168, and specifically the text corresponding to notes 951 and 953. See also the Sifre to Dt XXXIII:21. The reasoning behind calling the presence of Moses’s body the first but binding instalment is probably like this. If Enoch was translated, then surely Moses should have been. If his body remained, it must have been for a special purpose. Moses intervened on behalf of Israel, offered to share their fate, shared God’s anger at Israel even though he himself did not deserve it, and thus saved Israel from the divine wrath (Ex XXXII:32; Nu XIV:11 -- 20; Dt I:37). If Moses was not raised bodily to heaven, then it must have been so that he could save Israel again. The presence of the body is a gage and the start of the process of him coming back to earth. Thus the word ‫ ראשית‬in Dt XXXIII:21 is interpreted as the first to be resurrected. See Part II section 4 p. 140 bottom and the context. As for how it is known that his body is not affected by death, that is answered by the Sifre to Dt XXXIV:7, which points out that the statement that Moses’s body lost none of its perfection comes after the mention of his death. There is a partial statement in the Midrash Tanna’im al Devarim. This is not to be taken to mean the Midrash Tanna’im al Devarim was reticent. We only have the Midrash Tanna’im al Devarim as quoted in the Midrash ha-Gadol. That means that passages that say the same as the Sifre, even if in different wording, won’t show up. This rule applies to every piece of information on this theme in the Sifre. It is remarkable, then, that the Midrash Tanna’im al Devarim has so much to add. It could be added that if Moses was buried by God or angels, as the wording of the Torah implies here, it was more than any ordinary burial. 214 This line of thought explains John VII:27, When the Messias comes, no-one will know where he is from. It would be possible to interpret Dt XXXIV:6 as meaning that although Moses was buried in a valley, his present burial place is somewhere else, and that this place is unfindable. It is then possible to reconcile this verse with Dt XXXIII:21, interpreted to mean that the present burial place is in the territory of Gad (Palestinian Targum, Fragmentary Targum, Targum Neofiti, Onkelos, Peshitta, Vulgate, Sifre). The body was transported to this place four Roman miles away by God (Sifre and Midrash Tanna’im al Devarim). The place is permanently hidden by an optical illusion as well as what we might call these days a warp in space (Midrash Tanna’im to Dt XXXIV:6; Sifre). It is possible that the word ‫ ספון‬in Dt XXXIII:21 was interpreted by both Jews and Samaritans in a technical meaning, corresponding to the Rabbinic ‫ צפון‬which is a technical term in eschatological discussions. The word would then mean both “reserved for the world to come” and “outside current mundane experience, supernaturally inaccessible”. In the world to come, Moses will return to guide Israel (Palestinian Targum, Fragmentary Targum, Targum Neofiti to Dt XXXIII:21) and rule as the eschatological king (Fragmentary Targum, Targum Neofiti, Peshitta, LXX to Dt XXXIII:5, but not fully explicit in the LXX). This expectation never disappeared, even though the Talmud only speaks of it obliquely. It is the expectation of one well-known ultra-orthodox sect striving for tyranny over Judaism and all Jews. The expectation is that their dead former leader, who was both Mashiach and Moses, will return and manifest himself. This is thought by them to be a great secret. The word ‫ מערב‬in the Asâṭîr is a technical term of commercial law, used as a vivid metaphor. The same word, in the same striking metaphorical usage, occurs in the Syropalestinian Version of Ephesians I:14. It renders the Greek arrabōn, which is a borrowing from some form of Canaanite, far more likely Phoenician rather than Hebrew, since it means something quite different to the Hebrew ‫ ערבון‬meaning a pledge. See further Part III section 3 pp. 158 -- 159. The Greek word has a precise legal meaning. It is a technical term meaning a first payment that puts the payer under an obligation to pay the rest of what is due so as to complete the transaction, but which also gives the payer the right to compel the other party to complete the transaction. The ‫ חלק מחקק‬is the first instalment given by God and by Moses, the presence of Moses’s body, unaffected by death, ready to receive the soul. The presence of Moses’s body is not a pledge, which is something left behind and expected back, but a deposit, which is something given. The significance of the contest between the archangel Michael and Satan for possession of Moses’s body mentioned in Jude 9 will now be seen. The body is presumably the incorruptible spiritual body, as in I Corinthians XV:35 -- 50. Moses assumed this after his death (Sifre to Dt XXXIV:7). It should by its nature have ascended to heaven, but was given as the first instalment of his re-appearance. The act of giving was the removal of the body to its new place after its transformation. The second instalment is to be the descent of the soul into the body. When that happens, he will do what is needed, and following that God will restore the mountain to its original state. The Hebrew word ‫ ראשית‬in Dt XXXIII:21 seems to have been understood as meaning the first to be 215 resurrected, as in I Corinthians XV:20, the one whose resurrection makes resurrection available to everyone, and starts the restoration of the whole world to its rightful state. Anyway, I take the Aramaic ‫ מערב‬to be an explanatory translation of ‫ חלקת מחקק‬in Dt XXXIII:21. The form ‫ חלק‬rather than ‫ חלקת‬in Y is probably to be explained as due to the translation of the word into Aramaic. This means that ‫ מחקק‬is probably intended to be pronounced as an Aramaic participle pacel. The reading of F would then be a secondary adaption to Hebrew. The use of a masculine noun in Aramaic might have been unavoidable, but it might be that the author wants to show that the Hebrew adjective ‫ ספון‬belongs to the Hebrew noun ‫ חלקת‬in sense even if not in grammar. This is the Peshitta’s interpretation. It could be connected to an eschatological reading of Dt XXXII:34. For the concept of the perfection of the Gate of Glory, compare also XI:22 and XII:14. The name Gate of Glory is derived from the epithet of Lûzå in Gn XXVIII:17 as the Gate of Heaven, and the vision of the ladder (or flight of stairs). The Palestinian Targum has “the Gate of Heaven is set underneath the Throne of Glory”. This targum and Targum Onkelos use the word ‫ יקרא‬in this passage. Presumably, then, the perfection of the Gate of Glory will mean its connection with Heaven will become visible, when the invisible top of the mountain re-appears, and the expulsion from the Garden is remedied. We can now understand Origen’s report of the Dosithean belief that Dositheos did not die, but is still alive somewhere (Commentary on John, XIII:27). Somewhere is probably a technical term not recognised by Origen, referring to Dt XXXIV:6. Another report is given by Abu ’l-Fateḥ at 154:4 – 5 (Stenhouse p. 215), who quotes an anti-Dosithean parody, according to which Dositheos stayed in a cave on Mt. Gerizim, but died there, and the reason his body vanished was that it was eaten by dingoes. This report can be supplemented by an anti-Dosithean tirade quoted by Epiphanios (Panarion XIII) which admits the Dosithean claim that Dositheos went into a cave on purpose and died on purpose, but says he only did this as an act of utter foolishness, and what’s more, the body did not vanish, and what’s more, it did decay. From this evidence, we can reconstruct the Dosithean doctrine that Dositheos purposely died in a cave when his mission was over. His death was by his own timing, just as Moses was able to die when commanded (Dt XXXII:50). The body was never found. What is meant is probably that it was occulted, as with Moses. This is more likely than that he was translated, from Origen’s wording and analogy with Moses. Thus Dositheos is the promised prophet like Moses, “the second prophet sent by God from Mt. Sinai” A.F. 156:2 (Stenhouse p. 217). See Dt XVIII:16 – 19. Although all the information available to A.F. comes from the opponents of the Dositheans, there is a record of an official statement by later Dositheans in Alexandria in 588 A.D. asserting that Dositheos was the promised prophet like Moses and quoting Deuteronomy XVIII (Phōtios, Bibliotheca XV). This might explain why he claimed the authority to modify the text of the Torah here and there. The Dosithean declaration just mentioned seems to have included an assertion of the validity to the slight changes to the wording of the Torah made by Dositheos. See the notes to v. 22, below. Dositheos claimed that he would make the Mosaic Tabernacle appear. See 216 above, on XII:14. All that is needed is to believe in him (A.F. 155:1 – 2 along with 156:14 -- 15, both quoted above Part II section 4 p. 142 -- 143 according to the real reading of the mss.). Jerome says the Samaritan woman mentioned in John IV was a follower of Dositheos. (Epistles 108:13. 3). She could not have been if she was expecting someone. Jerome thinks all Samaritans are followers of Dositheos. This was a common Christian belief. See above, p. 133. Add the Clementine book, Syriac p. 35 and Recognitions I:54. She expects the one to come to know everything, which is a trait of Moses. This includes knowledge about her. On Moses’s universal knowledge, see Part II section 4 pp. 145 -- 146 top and the Annotations to XII:16 and XI:7. She challenges Jesus to give an adequate statement to support the Jewish recognition of Jerusalem, which is never even mentioned in the Torah, as opposed to Mt. Gerizim, on which the Torah says an altar was set up by Abraham, then Isaac, then Jacob. Before asking, she acknowledges Jesus as a prophet. The Samaritans recognise the possibility of the appearance of an ordinary prophet, that is a prophet not of the stature of Moses, and not the same as the promised prophet like Moses. The reasoning is that there were obviously prophets before Moses; Miriam and Aaron were prophets during his lifetime (Nu XII); Moses declared the prophesying of Eldad and Medad to be genuine and expressed hope that more Israelites would be prophets; Moses gave Joshua the spirit of prophecy. At times Mårqe has been accorded this status. At this point this is all she is said to mean. Some NT scholars take the words “our fathers worshipped on this mountain” to mean earlier generations of Samaritans used to worship there regularly. Clearly they read a German or English or Dutch translation. The verb is in the aorist tense. The Germanic languages have no obligatory distinction between single and habitual acts in the past. Aside from this, a basic knowledge of Judaism would tell you that “our fathers” means Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, her ancestors and Jesus’s. This pericope presents the Samaritan woman as still expecting a miraculous figure like Moses. It would come from the very short period when the Christian Church thought it could convert the Samaritans, and the first pericope of Acts VIII with its fictitious portrait of Simon. Verse 22 would come from the time straight after when it had been seen that the Samaritan practice of the religion of Israel was an existential threat to Christianity, and the clumsy imaginary additions in Acts VIII. See above pp. 39 bottom – 40 and p. 135. We can now see why Jesus is represented as being accused of being a Samaritan and not denying it, even though obviously a Jew (John VIII:48 – 49). In this chapter the authors of the gospel are trying to use Dosithean doctrine during the same very brief period mentioned above, but this specific device did not fit naturally into later Christian doctrine. These short groupings of sentences, from verse 31 to the end of the chapter, hang together if the underlying misuse of Dosithean doctrine is seen. This does not mean everything here is Dosithean. Jesus tells his accusers indirectly in v. 49 they were right in having smelt Samaritan doctrine, and then trumpets it in v. 51 and v. 56 and v. 58. In v. 51 he says “Verily, verily, I say unto you, if a man keep my saying, he shall not taste death”. These words are misuse of part of Dosithean doctrine. See Part II section 4 pp. 142 – 143 on A.F. 156:14 – 15. In v. 56 Jesus identifies himself as the expected prophet like Moses, since his claim to being older than Abraham in v. 58 assumes Samaritan 217 doctrine about Moses. The Mîmar Mårqe and liturgical pieces from then onwards make Moses’s mission older than everything, logically developing the words of Nu XII:7, “In my whole house he is trusted”, that is, he has delegated authority over everything created, seen and unseen, within time and at the start of time, as bringer of the Torah, material and metaphysical. See XI:6 and the notes. [Although very late, the Mawlid an-Nâshi’ and Mûlåd Mûshi sum up much earlier terse and scattered expressions of the concepts and show the limit. (Selig J. Miller, The Samaritan Molad Mosheh. Samaritan and Arabic Texts Edited and Translated with Introduction and Notes. Philosophical Library, New York, 1949. Theodor Gaster gives a lot of corrections to the translation in his article in The Joshua Bloch Memorial Volume, so be careful). This concept of Moses has been seriously misinterpreted by Wayne A. Meeks, under the influence of Christianity, in his article Moses as God and King printed in Religions in Antiquity --- Essays in Memory of E. R. Goodenough. E. J. Brill, Leiden 1968. Pages 354 – 371. His book The Prophet-King: Moses Traditions in the Johannine Theology, SNT XIV, E. J. Brill, 1968, is a bit more sober but still misrepresents the religion of Israel. He goes beyond what was cautiously set out by John Macdonald in his book The Theology of the Samaritans. Others have gone astray the same way]. Jesus’s identifying of himself with Moses in v. 58 is one of the doctrines that take Christianity critically past any form of Israelite religion, though nowhere near the most serious. Dositheos was the Second Prophet, sent by God from Mt. Sinai, as quoted above, and neither equal to Moses nor a reappearance. If the person expected has the Staff of Miracles in his hand it must be Moses himself. If I am right in saying this, that would not make this chapter Dosithean, since the coming of Moses is long after the coming of a new time of favour. Note, however, that this is not the later concept of the coming of Moses on Doomsday. Here is another bit of evidence for the antiqity of this text. b This is a parallel to v. 10, and v. 14. Each of these three verses marks the end of a stage. 21 a The words a despoiler of a nation paraphrase Nu XXIV:18 pretty well. The nation is therefore Edom or Secir. According to v. 19 of the Asâṭîr just before this, part of the territory of ‫ עמינדס‬is Gẩbẩlå, which is a rendition of Secir understood as Idumaea. The nation that is despoilt must be ‫עמינדס‬. The reason they are to be exiled to an area outside Judaea is that Nu XXIV:19 has been interpreted as meaning they will be driven out of the land and people of Jacob. See the notes on XII:7. Presumably Edom is land, not the name of a nation. The Hasmonaean state had as its home territory both Judah and Idumaea, so there could be a deliberately anachronistic but transparent use here, since Edom was still included in Judah. The author has managed to avoid using the name of the honoured patriarch Judah to refer to the organised enemies of Jacob / Israel. See v. 19 and the Annotations. b Nu XXIV:19, in Hebrew. I have translated this verse the way it is understood in v. 10, though in v. 10 the context is different. Thus ‫ וירד‬is exacts punishment, ‫ והאביד‬is gets rid of, not causes to perish, and ‫ שריד‬is the rest, not 218 the refugees. The city must from the context be Jerusalem, not Shechem as in v. 10. The spelling ‫ וירדי‬is to make sure the root is understood as being ‫רדה‬. 22 a On the change of tense, see v. 20, note a, end. For a discussion of the theological issues, see the notes to v. 20. b This is more than the slight improvements made by Dositheos. The implication is that Moses himself will re-appear. See the Annotations to v. 20. What became orthodoxy after the consolidation of all sects, apparently in the early 11th century, was a doctrine of the coming of the prophet like Moses and the inauguration of the second Time of Favour, and then in the distant future the re-appearance of Moses on the Day of Requital and Recompense. (On this consolidation see note 22 p. 104). This looks like a fusion of doctrines with an accommodation of the Dosithean outlook without the person of Dositheos. This text, however, speaks of the reappearance of Moses himself without the prophet like Moses beforehand. The authors of this text were concerned with the holiness of the Mountain in the present, and had no expectation of the restoration of the Mosaic Tabernacle, thus disagreeing with both the Dositheans and their opponents, and disagreeing as well with the later orthodoxy, as was shown in Part II section 3. c The Staff of Miracles is Moses’s staff. d MHSF Taf add ‫וימטי‬, probably wrongly, after ‫דיעמי‬. Ms. Y has a verse-divider before ‫טוב‬, but this is a mistake. Notice that there is no mention of the Day of Requital (better than Day of Vengeance) in XII:19 – 22. Compare the notes to XI:9. 23 a A Hebrew liturgical phrase, partly derived from Ex III:15, which has been interpreted as “This word ‫ יהוה‬is my name, and this name is eternal; and this word ‫ יהוה‬is how the unimaginable God can be referred to by mankind throughout time”. We actually have a theological fragment from Bethel in the northern kingdom in Hoshea XII:4 -- 7 or 5 -- 7, where, in v. 7, the formula ‫יהוה אלהי הצבאות‬ ‫ יהוה זכרו‬is used to mean that because the unknowable God is constant, then the human relationship with the divine can be constant; or because the unknowable God is known through the workings of providence, God is always accessible, in all centuries and to all generations. See the Annotations to v. 14 on the identification of the place. The Samaritan Targum to this verse brings in an explicit reference to Ex III:15, according to a correct understanding of the meaning of the theological formula. The Targum has the correct interpretation throughout the whole passage. See the notes to Asâṭîr XII:14. There is also the influence of Ex XV:18 where the Samaritan text has ‫ עולם ועד‬instead of ‫ לעלם ועד‬which has been understood as “eternally and eternally”, i.e. the Name is eternal as God is eternal. The repetition of the Tetragrammaton in Ex XXXIV:6 is probably the main element in the derivation of this formula. On its significance, see note d to XI:7. The line of interpretation is clearly given by the Aramaic words that follow, twenty-six corresponding to twentysix. Now, twenty-six is obviously the numerical value of the Tetragrammaton. If the Tetragrammaton corresponds to itself in Ex XXXIV:6, then the name corresponds somehow to the nature of God: it is both a name and a sign. Some Dositheans rejected some liturgical formulas that might be related to this, but the intention is unclear (A.F. 219 82:10 – 11, Stenhouse p. 110 and A.F. 162:16, Stenhouse p. 227; and A.F. 163:8 – 9, Stenhouse p. 228). See my article The First Notice. There is a secondary reference here to the fact that Moses is the twenty-sixth from Adam (counting Adam) implying that he was fitted to receive the revelation of the Name of God, i.e. the Torah. Compare what was said about the structure of the Book of Jubilees in the note to XI:7. I am reminded by Daniel Olson that the concept of a chain of twenty-six bearers of primordial light comes up in the liturgy. Abrahams’s ancestors must be on the list. The Samaritans utterly reject the Jewish claim that they were idol-worshippers. b A reference to Dt XXIX:28. The words are in Aramaic. Note that this verse of Deuteronomy comes after the long reminder that the covenant belongs to all generations, that possession of the land is conditional on its observance, and that false worship will surely result in disaster and exile. 24 a This encomium in Hebrew of the four that each received a new covenant is a reminder of the content of the whole Pentateuch, and an appropriate ending for this book in its present form. There is no way of telling for sure whether this encomium was once at the end of a shorter book ending with ch. X or not. It was shown above in the notes to XI:20 and XII:14 that chapters XI and XII disagree with chapter I on the location of Lûzå. Chapters XI and XII put it on the Mountaintop, in agreement with all later tradition. Chapter I puts it on the flat ground at the foot of the mountain. This was the Dosithean identification. Furthermore, chapter I puts the altar set up by Cain and Abel on the meadow, not on the Mountaintop. It distinguishes between this place on the meadow where the altar was put and the place on the meadow identified as Lûzå, where Jacob slept and had his vision. Lûza is located at the foot of the Mountain in the Onomastikon. Eusebius knows of a building on the Meadow, but this is not the same as the site of Lûza. The extension of the history by A.F. says the Dosithean pavilion lasted till 809 A.D. See my article Social Anomie.This datum is highly surprising. It is valuable in confirming the indications in the Ṭubâkh and the Kâfi that accommodation of the two parties was regarded as recent in the early tenth century AD, and there was still disagreement on details of halachah and wide disagreement on eschatology. This building was probably at the traditional site of Lûza. All that can be said is that the purpose of both Såkte’s pavilion and the roofless stone enclosure was to have something provisional till the return of the Mountaintop to its rightful state. Sakte’s pavilion was definitely not a place of sacrifice. The stone enclosure probably was. In spite of all this uncertainty, it seems the Dosithean tradition of the site of Lûza on the meadow and not on the Mountain must have lasted at least as long as the start of the Arabic period. There is disagreement between ch. I on one hand and chapters XI and XII on the other hand, since it says in ch. I this altar was not at Lûza, but with the implication that Lûza is on the Meadow. The whole Meadow had some special quality. This can be seen in the modern name of the Balâṭah meadow, Marj al-Bahâ’ the Meadow of the Kavod. This piece of land includes Old Shechem. There is some indication that a different composition starts with what is said about Moses, since it is here that the concern with the dates of the month of sets of events starts. It has been shown at length that chapters XI and XII are Sebuaean. Chapters I to X might have been common to both parties originally, or might have been Dosithean. 220 VI. THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOSITHEAN DOCTRINE It would have overloaded Part II and Part V of this book to explain developments within Dositheanism thoroughly and systematically, but single data relevant to their relationship to the Sebuaeans often had to be brought in. These single data can be fully understood if the developments within Dositheanism are set out systematically. What follows is complete for history and doctrine, except for some technical details, but not halachah. Abu ’l-Fateḥ has three notices of the Dositheans. The first at 82:3 – 83:15 has been treated thoroughly in my article The First Notice of the Dositheans, which should be regarded as the first part of the following study. [My explanation of the epithet ‫ זרעה‬was wrong. The obvious explanation for him being called “the seed” is that if he was the only legitimate High Priest, only his descendants could be High Priests. He might have been descended from one of the Priests called Ṣâdoq. Another message might have been that he discovered hidden religious truth by his unique learning and insight and made it accessible to everyone. Change “glass” to “copper or glass” in the translation of 83:6. The Arabic there is right]. The first notice is short. Most of it is about halachah. Not all the pieces of halachah, such as the bit about leprosy of houses, could ever have been needed in reality, and it seems that what A.F. reproduces is a set of chapter headings of a long book, some of it using purely hypothetical situations to convey a rule or principle. The same can be heard from the pulpit. Maimonides often does the same at the end of a chapter, with the introductory words ‫ נמצאת למד‬. Isser, Bowman, and Stenhouse think leprosy of houses really happened and the question of what to do was immediate in those days. The same can be heard from the pulpit. A.F. puts the origin of the party at the end of Persian rule. The reformer mentioned at the end is not meant to be Dositheos brought in anachronistically. A.F. says the main cause of the split was use of a different calendar. He then says that in this calendar all months had thirty days. I have partly recovered this calendar in Part II pp. 118 – 120. It was shown in Part II pp. 118 – 123 that the original name was the Ṣaddûqẩ’i (regular definite plural gentilic), meaning Sadducees, but not to be confused with the Jewish party by this name. The name of the party probably comes from the name of the founder, Ṣâdoq or Yaṣdoq. Both of these are diminutives of ‫ צדקיה‬and could refer to the same person. There were always diminutives, but using them officially fits the Persian period. Compare use of the Jewish diminutives of the name ‫ ידעיה‬as Yaddua‘ and ‘Iddo, or ‘Ezra for ‫ עזריה‬and Yona for Yonatan. (The last is still used). The connection of the two names with the name of the party is shown further on in this Part. A.F. does not know this original name. Some early Christian authors make a confused connection between the Jewish party called Sadducees and the Samaritans. This happened because this Samaritan party was called Dositheans by outsiders, but still called by the old name by the members amongst themselves, sometimes at least. The fictitious accounts between the second and third notices show that Dositheos died or was killed in the very early first century A.D. Christian texts, including the oldest component of the Clementine book, 221 make him an older contemporary of Simon. This is a little bit too late, and comes from false connection with Simon. The name Simon is probably a pen-name anyway. See the Foreword, pp. VIII bottom – IX top. The identification of these two with each other in my article The First Notice was wrong. This is a convenient place to mention that what is said by A.F. at 82:12 – 14 is put in context in Olson’s book. The observation in my article that the service of the sanctuary must be meant, not a synagogue service, has been shown to be right. This does not mean that the service on the Meadow was regarded as adequate but not the best under the Mosaic halachah, but rather that it was fully adequate in its own right because the Mosaic halachah had been temporarily discontinued by the wicked Priests of the line of Aaron. I would like to point out a consequence of these words in the first notice. The notice is about Dositheans. That means that the party that set up a sanctuary on the Meadow must have broken away from the Dositheans, not the Sebuaeans. This means this entry in the first notice of the Dositheans is not about Dositheans in general, but the faction that broke away from the Dosithean party, the faction that wrote the Second Book of Enoch. The rest of the third notice both before and after this entry is about Dositheans in general. The collector of scattered statements now making up the third notice of the Dositheans did not have much on this faction, but they appear as a useful caricature in his entry (c). In contrast to the first notice, A.F. gives abundant historical information in his long second notice at 151:11 – 157:8 and then in detail in his long third notice at 159:12 – 164:11, which presupposes the last part of the second notice. The first notice and the ending of the second notice are not compatible with a long scurrilous bit of fiction about Dositheos right at the start of the second notice. The fiction still has some real data mixed in. It does give the important datum that Dositheos recognised that sacrifices were not possible in his time, but was not the first to hold this opinion.Whether it was accepted by both parties, the Sebuaeans and the party later called the Dositheans, or only by the second party, is not clear, because the narrative has been fictionalised, but my own judgment is that it was accepted by both parties. This makes the date of the historical Dositheos important. The same story makes it clear that Dositheos wrote books. An important book of his is mentioned at the end of the first notice, and books in the plural are mentioned in the second part of the second notice. The fictional story preserves the datum that Dositheos’s followers had faith in his unique personal quality, and quotes a formula of belief in two slightly different forms. This formula is treated in Part II, section 4, according to the wording at A.F. 155:1 – 2. The rest of the story needs separate treatment. (In previous publications I made a mistake in reading the name of the Priest written as ‫ יחדו‬. My recognition of it as a diminutive of ‫ ידעיה‬was sound, but the pronunciation must be yẩådo. Compare the Masoretic form Iddo. The second part of the second notice is sober historical record. The information needed for the present purpose will be set out in full below, so consultation of a translation is not needed. 222 See my book Principles and for some details my article The First Notice on the deficiencies in every part of Isser’s book on the Dositheans including deficiencies in understanding both Samaritan religion and Judaism. The treatment of all three notices by A.F. goes nowhere, first because the text was not understood and second because Isser did not know the Jewish halachah. Besides this, Isser mostly relied on the desultory notices by early Christian authors, which say almost nothing, and where they do have a snippet of information, it shows misunderstanding. I have shown this in a few places in Part II of this book and at length in my book Principles. Isser has not found any of the connections between any of the nine entries in the third notice, and misses all the places where one faction responds to another, or where there is disagreement within a faction. He sees a list without structure. Before Isser’s work there is no work on the third notice. Stefan Schorch’s claim that there were studies of the Dositheans in the nineteenth century shows ignorance. Now to what is useful. The first notice is accurately translated and explained in my article. If a translation of the second or third notice is needed, Scanlon’s in Isser’s book or Jamgotchian’s will do, if corrected in a couple of places in agreement with the few corrections to Vilmar’s Arabic text mentioned below on entry (f). There are very few mistakes by Scanlon. The one causing the most damage by disrupting the structure of the exposition is treated at length below in footnote 47. Scanlon might have missed the meaning because the usage of the verb ‫ ﻋﺎد‬is post-Classical, though correct in literary language. It is normal in modern Syrian and Egyptian Arabic. Another inexplicable misunderstanding of syntax at 160:15 but causing less damage, where Stem VIII is read instead of the passive of Stem I, is described at the end of note 44. It is hard to reconcile the few slips like these with Scanlon’s demonstrated command of Arabic, and it must be wondered if there was no time for revision and how much he was paid. Besides this, Scanlon and Jamgotchian had to work with the text as printed by Vilmar, which departs from the manuscript evidence in a couple of places. The only three serious examples in the third notice are set out below, in footnotes 42, 44, and 46. (I have checked the apparatus in Stenhouse’s thesis against the mss. myself). A full translation is not printed. First, the summaries and comments would still have been needed; second, Scanlon’s English translation will do quite well to follow this study and so will Jamgotchian’s Russian one; third, this study is not a commentary and could be used without any translation or the Arabic text to hand. It is the first systematic presentation of the information in the third notice about disagreement and reconciliation of factions. It could be read profitably without any translation or even the Arabic to hand. I have donated exemplars of three of Jamgotchian’s books, including his translation, to the NINO library. I have given the ISBN in the Bibliography. It can be bought secondhand from Russia. It is in the public domain on a Russian web site. Stenhouse’s translation is best disregarded. See Part VII of this book. So is Bowman’s. Bowman had surprisingly limited knowledge of Arabic syntax. He invents meanings of words by misusing dictionaries. Refuting his translations phrase by phrase would be profitless. See my book Principles of Samaritan Halachah note 13 p. 9 on his agreement with his student’s reading of an Arabic sentence as saying that fish must be covered in feathers to be kosher, and insisting on it when I asked him how anyone could have written that and a lot more like it and got a doctorate from Melbourne University. What was not said in my note was that the Hebrew sentence from the Torah glossed by the Arabic sentence was sitting next to the Arabic in this text ! He got a Chair in Semitic Studies at Melbourne University, which was changed at his urging to Middlle Eastern Studies, on the strength of claiming to know Arabic and Hebrew as well as Syriac. The Arabic has 223 not been printed here because it would have made this work unpublishable and it is easily to hand, either as reproduced by Isser or in the reprints of Vilmar’s book. (Isser’s reprint does not always exactly follow the line-divisions, and not quite all the apparatus is printed, but it will still do quite well here). It is normal literary Arabic of the period and anyone with a command of Arabic can see what it says so long as there are notes in the few places where Scanlon and Jamgotchian have been misled by what is printed by Vilmar, or where Scanlon has misunderstood, or where a technical term appears. The world is full of people with a command of Arabic that could be asked for help if my word is doubted in the slightest. The text as printed by Vilmar is mostly good, but there are a few faults. These will be pointed out in the right places. I have gone into the quality of Vilmar’s text at length at the start of Part VII. A shorter form of this Part in the form of a long article was sent to the journal Bibliotheca Orientalis, published by the Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, in early 2020. The assessor, Ronald Kon M.A., asserted that the mss. did not read what I said they read. I’ve got complete photographs of all the textwitnesses. He hasn’t got any. Kon also said information from Blau’s dictionary used by me was not in the book. Last year I pointed this out to the secretary of BiOr. I carefully and clearly said I was concerned that if the editorial board had shown that they believed Kon’s claim that I had falsified data, my academic reputation would be threatened. Word spreads. I said as well that I was concerned that any articles I sent in future might get knocked back because the editorial board thought data might be falsified. No reply. I got a reply four months later, early this year, 2024, from the directress of the NINO, Willemijn Waal. She said “the events …. did not happen”. I don’t know what she meant by the word “events”. I sent a reply back on the 15th of January inviting her to claim that Kon had the copies of manuscripts needed to say that Kon was able to know the readings, or that she did. I knew there would be no reply, and there wasn’t. Going by emails sent out by Kon and Stefan Schorch as circulars to a dozen and a half people but not me a fortnight afterwards, there was a flurry. I’m pretty sure the circulars were never seen by the directress. The editorial board of BiOr and the directress of the NINO have breached academic standards. Besides claiming either access to manuscripts or mystic powers making this unnecessary, Kon asserted that the information taken from Blau’s dictionary was not there. He complained as well that I had not given the page number. Looking at what he wrote, I see that the reason he complained there was no page number was that he did not know the book was a dictionary. He was unable to read the title, which is in Hebrew. He obviously did not have the book to hand when saying the information I quoted was not in it. It would have been thought there would have been someone on the editorial board that could have been asked what the title said, but obviously no-one was asked. The conclusion is that no-one on the board can read Hebrew. The editorial board showed they did not have the slightest knowledge needed to see what the article was about by sending it to Kon, who knows nought about the religion of Israel or the ancient Levant centuries before Islam. To be fair, he does not claim such knowledge. It was the editorial board that sent the article to him. The conclusion is that no-one on the editorial board could work out what the article was about, because none of them knew anything about the ancient Levant under Roman rule or the religion of Israel. This raises the question of whether BiOr is still a journal of research on the whole of the ancient Near East, and whether the NINO is still an institute of research on the Near East, or only Egypt and Anatolia. The directress of the NINO has emphatically made it clear she still does not see anything wrong with sending the article to someone with 224 no knowledge of the field. I have kept the documentation of everything said so far. A few days after getting the strangely-worded message from the directress of the NINO, I sent my article Restoring the Traditional Linkage of Samaritan and Foreign Dating to the secretary of BiOr. Sure enough, it was knocked back. No reason was given. This is not normal behaviour. It means no fault could be found. The message came from someone below the level of the secretary. Leiden was a world centre for the study of the Near East for four and a quarter centuries, but not four and a half. Serious work is still being done, but only on a couple of parts of the Near East. It will definitively be down to Anatolia and Egypt soon, as retired people stop working. I have misgivings. If the directress and editorial board will let readings of manuscripts be falsified, and then dig their heels in rather than allow correction, it will be impossible to ever trust what is published about Anatolian or Egyptian writings, or Mesopotamian writings either for the few years while work is still being done on them. I sent a message to the directress of the NINO telling her of the record set out here, making sure she could look it up and read it. I got a reply saying “this matter is closed”. I record this response of hers so that it will be known I have been honest, but also that it will be undisputed that she found no inaccuracy in this record written here. I have kept this bit of documentation along with all the rest. Now to what matters. The end of the second notice and the third notice of the Dositheans by Abu ’l-Fateḥ describe rapid radical changes and divisions and reconciliations in the first half of the first century A.D., starting with the death of Dositheos. While it is true that A.F. seems to have used an existing collection that had some scraps of information from uninformed sources, most of the material reached him in ordered form with authentic and penetrating detail. A.F. has done his best to make the lay-out of the information clear to the reader. Once all the descriptions are properly understood, and the duplications are recognised, a surprisingly simple pattern of variation and logical development within the Dosithean movement can be seen clearly. There were two main unrelated developments, each with secondary development, and then eventually unity. The third notice extends from 159:12 to 164:11. 41 There are indications that A.F. used an existing collection. At the end it says “All these factions came from Dositheos’s books. Because of them came severe trouble and great sins and dissension and animosity over things of no profit. God repays everyone for what they do”. These words seem to come from the compiler, not A.F. himself. A.F. has a mild tone of disapproval at the start and end of the first notice, but it reads like words from his source. Even if they are his own words, they are mild. There is a long scurrilous story about Dositheos himself at the start of the second notice, but A.F. does not comment in his own words. In the second notice he repeats the anti-Dosithean claim that the reason Dositheos’s body was never found in the cave where he died was that it was carried off by wild dogs, but he was probably only trying to quote the argument as he found it and the rest of the wording is still neutral in tone. He repeats the claim that the first followers of Dositheos fell under a spell when immersing themselves, but again, the wording is as neutral as the subject Jamgotchian consistently gives cross-references to Vilmar’s page numbering. Scanlon’s translation is on pp. 80 – 82 of Isser’s book. Scanlon conveniently divides the passage into nine paragraphs, which correspond to the division into nine entries in this study. This makes finding the right place in his translation while reading this study is easy. (But remember the study can be followed without referring to any translation). Stenhouse’s page numbering is pp. 223 – 230 middle. Stenhouse often departs from Scanlon’s correct understanding of clear Arabic by making basic mistakes. 47 225 allows. The short descriptions in the third notice are unmistakably hostile, but they still read as copying by A.F. without his own comment. The longer descriptions in the third notice are sober collections of data with real detail showing understanding. This can be seen in the important questions of theory within the long (or relatively long) descriptions. It can also be seen in the order of the longer descriptions in relation to each other, and the explicit helpful brief notes on the relationship of the doctrine of each group to the doctrine of some other group, and sometimes their historical relationship. We have in front of us a surprisingly long and detailed collection of data, with a surprising amount of illuminating explanation. Thre are also some mentions of names without real content, just the usual statement that all adherents were killed. The collector of all these pieces of data took whatever he could find in any histories he could lay his hands on. He did not realise there was duplication, with some brief mentions in some records corresponding to longer detailed and accurate explanations in other sources, and with some duplication of the accurate explanations. His words “all these factions” right at the end show he thought there were numerous factions. All modern scholars have accepted this expression as a statement of fact, without doing some obvious editorial criticism. They could not do any of this anyway, because the clear Arabic prose was not understood. Both Scanlon and Jamgotchian understood the Arabic, except that Scanlon was thrown off course in one place by a serious bit of ignorance of usage. Both were misled by a couple of mistakes in Vilmar’s text. Neither were writing a critical analysis, only translating. Isser’s treatment is too disorganised to refute. Rather than go through the tedious and profitless job of refuting it bit by bit, it will be more useful to set the picture out and show that it is self-evident overall and in detail and all the details are confirmed by coherence and mutual consistency. The third notice is the direct continuation of the ending of the second notice, which describes the Dositheans after the death of Dositheos and then the murder of Lîbi ‫ ﻟﻮي‬very soon afterwards. Lîbi’s place is not entirely clear. The second notice ends at 157:8. In between this and the start of the third notice are miscellaneous events establishing the date. There is a long story about Simon Magus inspired by Christian legends related to the Clementine book. Then a little bit about Simon’s contests with the disciples of Jesus, which he is said to have won, contrary to what is in the Christian books. Because the misrepresentation of Simon is so blatant in the Clementine book and related texts, A.F. never saw any connection with any historical Samaritan leader. There is an erroneous mention of Philo of Alexandria, in which Philo quotes the words of Rabban Gamli’el in chapter V of the book of Acts about Christianity. Then it is said that Simon was buried opposite St. Stephen’s house. (It has to be asked how most of the New Testament scholars that have tried to prove Stephen to have been a Samaritan from indirect indications have failed to quote this solid historical datum). Then it says that with the death of the last of the fifteen disciples of Jesus Christianity lost all relationship to Judaism. Then comes the third notice of the Dositheans, with no introduction about circumstances or date. None is needed because what was said before was an interruption to a single report. All this gives an approximate dating for the untimely death of Dositheos at the age of 28 and then the martyrdom of his first apostle Lîbi very soon afterwards in the very early first century A.D. Some of the early Christian mentions of Dositheos put the start of his activity at about the same time as the start of the work of the Christian Apostles but this is too late, and is due to the need to find a relationship between the only two Samaritan leaders whose names were known to Christian authors. The events 226 recorded at the end of the second notice are the immediate reaction to the martyrdom of Lîbi, and then the third notice records the divisions and then accommodations over a short period till stability was reached. The notice still does not explicitly mention the eventual accommodation of the two factions, but there is a hint, as will be seen. Here is a list of the components of the third notice, with all the information on the inter-relationship of the doctrine of the divisions or factions, as well as their order of appearance. The information on halachah is not treated. This will have to be done detail by detail, by different hands as time goes on. There will be no loss of detail in reconstructing the inter-relationship of the doctrines of the factions or any aspect of who has the authority to determine halachah will be treated. The main technical term defining this position of authority will be explained for the first time. Entries (a) and (b). A.F. 159:12 –14 and 160:4, with a long insertion from 159:14 to 160:4. It has not been realised that this is not a pair of entries, but one entry with an addition and then a coda referring to the whole. First there is a terse entry at 159:13 without any doctrinal information noting the existence of a group called ‫ﺑﻌﻮﻧﺎي‬ and the location of their first headquarters. Si vera lectio, these letters would represent Bâ’ûnẩ’i. The form is a regular Aramaic masculine plural definite gentilic. It can only come from the name of a person called Bâ’on, which would be a regular diminutive or hypocoristic form. This entry can be seen to follow on naturally from the description of the enthusiasts or extremists at the end of the second notice by the one piece of information about their doctrine, that they followed the opinion of Dositheos and his disciples. Then at 159:14 a new datum “The seven men that had killed Dositheos all perished”. The intention seems to be that the seven of them were killed by the Bâ’ûnẩ’i, but the wording indicates that the compiler did not see this, because anyone that killed Dositheos would be in his good books. The editors of the second recension thought the same way and made a bad guess by writing “The seven men that became disciples of Dositheos all perished”. The statement that Dositheos was killed loosely fits the first part of the second notice, but does not fit what comes next in the second notice and is known to early Christian authors, that he died willingly in a cave (see the Annotations to XII:20); neither does it fit the picture of Dositheos as the reformer of an ancient faction at the end of the first notice by A.F. A separate study is needed. ‫צ"ע‬. A long insertion at 159:15 – 160:2 follows. This is a mention of an unnamed group but with a named leader that abolished the Festivals. This can only be a record of Såkte and his followers. See categories (e) and (f). The leader was called Ansami or Atasami. The correct reading is not known, but was probably not either of these. The form looks like a miscopying of an Aramaised form of a Greek name with the Aramaic suffix -ay (as in Ṭalmay). [Stenhouse misreads ms. S]. (The statement in Chronicle Adler that this sect was called Âbiyya is to be ignored. See below on category (e). This author makes a lot up, and this datum is not given by Khaḍir, his direct source. The datum is not from tradition but a reasonable guess that won’t work). It is said there were only seven of them. This seems like a misunderstanding of the datum that there was a council of seven. Origen, in a complete void of critical thinking (not unusual with him when it suited him), thought there were only thirty Dositheans or less in his own time by the same mistake (Against Kelsos VI:11). Then it says how a spokesman for unnamed others tried to get him to drop this doctrine. There is another record of the direct reaction of the Bâ’ûnẩ’i to Såkte in entry (f) at 161:9 – 10. See below. The editors of the second recension have had difficulties with the introductory wording in the first recension, which seems at first sight to start with 227 the words “someone called Ansami said to them” without saying what was said, and seems on hasty reading not to be related to the lines before, so they wrote “someone called Ansami rose after them”. In fact what Ansami said to them is stated but not in the form of a quotation. What he said was Såkte’s distinctive doctrine, that there can be no valid pilgrim festivals in the present era. The reading “from amongst them”, as in the first recension must be right. At the end at 160:2 – 4 it says the building collapsed on them and they were all killed. After this at lines 3 and 4 it says “None of the Bâ’ûnẩ’i survived except for one man”. The two notes are incompatible if about the same sect. The first note must belong where it stands, but be about the end of the followers of Ansami. This is the right place for it, after they had been told by someone unnamed how wrong their doctrine was, on the authority of traditional knowledge as well as an authoritative announcement in a true dream. It says all perished. The second is about the end of the Bâ’ûnẩ’i, who are named, and is in the right place right at the end. It says one survived. Khaḍir does not see that there are two records of the end of two factions here and so does not know what to do with what looks like a contradiction, so he changes the wording to a double statement that everyone died implying they were all members of the Bâ’ûnẩ’i. Entry (c). A.F. 160:4 to line 10. A group called the Qîlânẩ’i ‫( ﻗﯿﻠﻨﺎي‬or similar) or Qâṭṭîṭẩ’i ‫ ﻗﻄﯿﻄﺎي‬. A.F. says he found the name ‫ ﻗﻄﯿﻄﺎي‬written in Hebrew letters, making it less likely to get corrupted. This is an Aramaic gentilic in the plural in the definite state, but qaṭṭeṭ is not a proper noun or proper adjective and would have to mean vexatious. The fiction is that they all perished by an affliction of wild active looniness brought on by their loony doctrine. This only means the compiler had no information about how long they lasted. They are said to have maintained that the validity of all the mitsvot had ended. This might show misunderstanding of Såkte, but it suits the break-away faction that wrote II Enoch much better. Olson does not make any connection of this entry with the faction that wrote II Enoch. Here is something that Olson has not fully brought out. If the service of the sanctuary on Mt. Gerizim had been ended by Priests of the line of Aaron, this was entirely different to interruption by a foreign power. It had been lawfully ended. Of course, the act was unlawful and wicked, but the effect was lawful. Since all the mitsvot are part of what was set out after the giving of the Torah, if the mitsvot of the sanctuary have been validly though wickedly ended, then all the mitsvot have been validly though wickedly ended. It was entirely appropriate and pious to demonstrate this by going through a graveyard on a Sabbath. The Sabbath was still in effect because it came before the Mosaic dispensation, but not restrictions on overshadowing dead bodies, not even on a Sabbath. The message is laid on with a trowel in II Enoch. This does not mean they were satisfied with the new situation: quite the opposite. They had a duty to make everyone understand the new situation so that the hope for a restoration would be understood. At the same time they had a duty to make everyone realise why their new sanctuary under the return to the old dispensation was valid and necessary till the Mosaic dispensation started up again. Entry (d). A.F. 160:10 -- 16. A group not named at the start of the entry appeared. They are termed “another category” jins âkhar who arose out of the community jumlah of the Bâ’ûnẩ’i. The two data that they arose out of the Bâ’ûnẩ’i but rejected the doctrine of the Bâ’ûnẩ’i on resurrection will be reconciled in what follows. At the end of this entry (d) the new group opposing the Bâ’ûnẩ’i are said to have been called the Ṣaddûqẩ’i. Samaritans called Sadducees are mentioned by some 228 early Christian authors or confused by them with the Jews called Sadducees. Elsewhere at 102:14 – 104:1 A.F. has difficulty distinguishing between the Samaritans called the Ṣaddûqẩ’i and the Jews by this name. See Part II pp. 118 – 120 and p. 120. In this case, the ancient name is revived as a symbol of continuity and to avoid confusion. The notice is important in giving the fundamental datum that the Ṣaddûqâ’i denied the great importance of the death of Dositheos and the murder of Lîbi in bringing about general resurrection, a belief they correctly attributed to the Bâ’ûnẩ’i. A.F. says they maintained that resurrection of everyone would happen when the world had finished its ordained course. The syntax has been misunderstood by Stenhouse, with some words misunderstood as well. Scanlon gets the point. The entry starts like this. “Another category arose from the aforementioned community of the Bâ’ûnẩ’i [the extremists just described at the end of the second notice]. They [the new category] said: ‘The Bâ’ûnẩ’i have made the announcement 42 Everyone will arise because Dositheos died disgustingly (or revoltingly) and Lîbi ‫ ﻟﻮي‬was stoned. If Dositheos died, well then, all the righteous that have ever lived died’ ”. These words assume the reader will know that for a while some Dositheans asserted a new doctrine that there would be general resurrection soon by a miracle granted to Dositheos, or in another version Dositheos and Lîbi. Khaḍir slightly misunderstood the refutation. “The followers of that category said ‘… Everyone was not resurrected after their death as a result of Dositheos dying disgustingly or as a result of Lîbi dying by stoning’. They said ‘Even if Dositheos did die like that, well, all the righteous that ever lived have died’ ”. The dispute was not about individual resurrection but the time of general resurrection. The doctrine is quoted in its complete form, perhaps lampooned, in the second entry on the Dositheans, at 156:14 – 157:1. For clarity, the full version is quoted below, in the description of entry (f) in the list. Såkte rejected the new doctrine. (161:9 – 13). It says this doctrine was seen as illogical because the death of Dositheos had no more consequence than the death of any righteous person. This doctrine would have been seen soon after as giving fuel to Christianity both by connecting resurrection with the character of one single individual and by being likely to be reinterpreted to mean there can be borrowed righteousness. Part of the new doctrine was that Dositheos was translated, the proof being that his body was not found. The rebuttal was that the body had been eaten by dingoes. Both Dosithean sides had the concept of a double resurrection, first resurrection of each righteous person to the Garden straight after death and then a general resurrection on earth at the end of the present world, either soon or in the far future. For the Bâ’ûnẩ’i there is an explicit statement in the second notice at A.F. at 157:5 – 8, right after the statement about general resurrection not mentioning Dositheos. “It is recorded that they believed that as soon as the dead person is buried he rises from the grave and goes to the Vilmar followed one unreliable manuscript of the first recension, ms. C (Stenhouse P), in printing the wrong verb ‫ اﺧﻄﺆا‬and leaving a couple of words out by homoioteleuton. He has a tendency to follow this ms. when its reading is not the best, perhaps because it was the oldest dated ms. known to him, perhaps by accident because it was the collating base. Ms. B is not quoted in Vilmar’s apparatus here. (There are a few more instances of incomplete collation of ms. B. He did not have access to ms. S, the best witness of the first recension). The same omission by homoioteleuton is in ms. D (Stenhouse H) of the first recension but the verb is right. The correct wording is this, as in mss. SB (Stenhouse SC) of the first recension. ...... ‫ وﻗﺎم ﺟﻨﺲ اﺧﺮ ﻣﻦ ھﺎوﻻي ﺟﻤﻠﺔ ﺑﻌﻮﻧﺎي وﻗﺎﻟﻮا ان ﺑﻌﻮﻧﺎي اﺧﻄﺮ ﺑﻘﻮﻟﮭﻢ‬. The second recension has the verb ‫ اﺣﻀﺮ‬with no omission by homoioteleuton. The change of verb does not affect the overall meaning. 42 229 Garden”. For the rest of the Dositheans, the absence of any denial of this in what is attributed to Såkte and the Ṣaddûqẩ’i is enough. Notice the confusing use of the same terminology in talking about individual life after death in the Garden and general resurrection on earth. The verb here is from the same root as the word for resurrection meaning general final resurrection used in saying the Snake will manage creatures till the day of resurrection ‫ ﯾﻮم اﻟﻘﯿﺎﻣﮫ‬. Such a pair of concepts of resurrection is well attested in Judaism. There seems to be a concept of double resurrection in the importance given to the present work of Moses in Heaven in ch. XII of the Asâṭîr while his body waits for its reanimation, to be followed by earthly perfection. This chapter is Sebuaean, not Dosithean, so the comparison needs to be used carefully. More work is needed before a final answer can be given. Full explanation of the words of the opponents of the new doctrine of the form of general resurrection was postponed out of the need to consider the first part, the refutation. The entry in the mss. and repeated by Khaḍir then says what the opponents of the new doctrine asserted to be the truth. “They maintained that the world would run its full natural course bringing all creatures to the day of resurrection”. This is a translation ad sensum. The literal translation is “They said the Snake ‫ اﻟﺜﻌﺒﺎن‬would handle the creatures till the day of resurrection”. The word here means a constrictor snake, and is the name of the star Thuban and constellation Draco. This star is within this constellation. The meaning might be that the world will last till the star Thuban goes back to being over the North Pole. This might have been thought to be 24,000 years. Anyway, the significance is transparent even if the symbolism is not. Contrary to guesses against the context, there is no connection with Naassenes or Ophites, since this faction is not said to have departed from the religion of Israel. The concept agrees with the late Samaritan doctrine from the eleventh century A.D. onwards and some known forms of Jewish doctrine, in that it says the end of Creation and the time of general resurrection are foreordained; but the way of expressing and the length of time are otherwise unknown. Now the extent of the authority of Såkte needs to stated precisely. It can be seen indirectly that Såkte was undisputed leader of all Dositheans except the Bâ’ûnẩ’i, but it is certain that only a minority agreed with him on the status of the Mountaintop. The members that did not agree on this one fundamental doctrine chose to use the ancient name the Sadducees Ṣåddûqẩ’i from before the time of Dositheos. This does not necessarily mean it was only Såkte and his close followers that rejected the new concept of resurrection indirectly through Dositheos and maintained the original doctrine from before Dositheos that all the righteous are resurrected, and in fact the information in footnote 43 gives evidence against such an assumption, as does the choice of term the Ṣaddûqẩ’i in this entry without naming Såkte. It looks as if Såkte attracted everyone that had never come to accept the connection of Dositheos with resurrection and the unappealing rites that went with it, even if they could not accept his extreme rejection of the holiness of the Mountain in the present era and ended up telling him so and making him let them go along with their own contrary practice as a condition of keeping them on as members. 43 It can P42FP42F P There are conflicting statements from early Christian authors as to whether the Dositheans accept the concept of resurrection, and also on whether Samaritans in general accept it. The data are complicated and setting them out and analysing them would go outside the purpose of this work. The fact that there is disagreement is common knowledge. For the present purpose, the very fact of the contradictions can be used without setting out the details, so as to reinforce the conclusions from evidence from centuries later. The Karaite Abû Yûsuf Yacqûb al-Qirqisâni, writing in the early tenth century A.D., in Part I ch. 5 of his massive survey Kitâb al-Anwâr wa ’l-Marâqib, says there are two 43 230 be conjectured that a united front with acceptance of a single authoritarian leader was needed to counter the numbers of the Bâ’ûnẩ’i, the rigid pietistic enthusiasts, if only for safety. A.F. says at the end of this entry at 160:13 that the members of this faction, the Ṣaddûqẩ’i, were attacked and massacred, though without saying who by. 44 He Samaritan parties, al-Kûthân meaning “the Cuthaeans”, the dismissive name commonly given to Samaritans in general by Rabbinic authors, and ad-Dustân, the Dositheans. (I read the Arabic in Nemoy’s edition, not the translation. Wrongly al-Kawshan in the single extant manuscript. The mistake probably goes back to the source, since al-Balâdhuri in the late ninth century A.D. writes al-Kûshân as well when making the same two-way division. Writing shîn for thâ’ is an easy scribal error. He has no information except the two names. A likely date for the common source of the two authors would be the time of al-Balâdhuri. The Arabic of al-Balâdhuri was not accessible). In this case we can take the party designated by the neutral term of Cuthaeans to be the Sebuaeans, since it is known that there were only two major parties, though with internal disagreements. (The division between the Dositheans and everyone else is established. For the present purpose only the fact of a division into two parties is needed). Al-Qirqisâni says one of these two does not believe in resurrection but is unable to say which one. The uncertainty on the part of an author always careful to get facts right seems hard to explain at first sight. Besides this, the statement must be wrong in itself, because the clear implication of what is said at length by A.F. was that the Dositheans did not invent the concept of resurrection, but only their own new version of it that came up after the untimely death of Dositheos and the martyrdom of Lîbi. The strange uncertainty of al-Qirqisâni combined with a bad mistake on a question related to one of the purposes of his book has not been adequately remarked on. Here is the first suggestion for an answer to have been put forward. The source used by al-Qirqisâni or al-Qirqisâni himself had heard of a Dosithean doctrine of resurrection and a Dosithean doctrine denying resurrection, and could only conclude that the information he had to hand was not transmitted exactly, but that it was certain that there was disagreement amongst Samaritans over resurrection. He never dreamt that this disagreement was within one party, the Dositheans, but at the same time one faction within the Dosithean party agreed with the other party, the Sebuaeans or Cuthaeans, against the other faction of their own party; and never dreamt either that the disagreement was not over whether there was resurrection in any form at all, but whether there would be resurrection of each person into the Garden one by one immediately after death associated somehow with the person of Dositheos, or general bodily resurrection on earth at the end of time. The term “resurrection” was used not only for bodily resurrection on earth, but for going to the Garden as well, so the terminology would have confused Christian reporters. Qirqisâni’s uncertainty and the incomprehension of Christian authors means the division over the concept of resurrection started by Såkte or perhaps started by others before him within the Dosithean party lasted a long while, even allowing for use of information by al-Qirqisâni that was centuries out of date. At the end of 160:13 Vilmar prints ‫ واﺗﻜﻮا ﻧﺎس ورﺟﻮھﻢ‬. Where Stenhouse finds the meaning “they drugged the people” in the words ‫ واﺗﻜﻮا ﻧﺎس‬is beyond imagination. Notice that he has no note on this word. He says the Ṣaddûqẩ’i massacred other people. This is impossible, because the noun is indefinite, but he constantly goes against the wording to force a meaning. Aside from the impossible meaning assigned to the verb, the definite prefix is slipped into the translation without letting on so that the subject can be the object. Scanlon is wrong in saying in the same place that people leant towards them and trusted them. He has copied Vilmar, who prints the first verb as in the mss. without comment and misreads the second verb. Even so, the sentence printed can’t mean that because it doesn’t mean anything. Jamgotchian correctly says the whole sentence is meaningless. The only solution is that a letter in the first verb was smudged right at the start of copying or early on. This happened. See the start of Part VIII of this book. Khaḍir and the Hebrew translation try to correct the meaningless first verb ‫ واﺗﻜﻮا‬and probably get it right. Stenhouse misquotes Khaḍir in the notes to the apparatus of his thesis in relation to the top of his p. 173 of the text. Khaḍir wrote “Then people came to them and raided them ‫ وﻓﺘﻜﻮا ﻓﯿﮭﻢ‬and killed uncountable men and women and slaughtered them as well as a lot of people”. (This author’s composition is not careful sometimes). The Hebrew translation says the same without the expansion at the end. Stenhouse is right in saying the evidence of the mss. is that the second verb, the last word in line 13, must be ‫ وذﺑﺤﻮھﻢ‬though he turns the meaning round and thinks the Ṣaddûqẩ’i massacred other people. Notice that Khaḍir and the Hebrew translator were careful to prevent this mistake, which would be against the syntax anyway, as has been seen, but Stenhouse has not registered. [His reading of ms. C (his D) is inaccurate]. Vilmar has misread the second verb. He has 44 231 does not say whether this happened more than once. The attackers can only have been the Bâ’ûnẩ’i or a faction within them. A.F. says they kept their essential doctrine secret. Word must have got out. As A.F. says they were only in one village, they must have tried to keep their doctrine secret right at the start. Here is more reason for supposing that people were willing to accept Såkte as their leader even if they disagreed with him on a fundamental question so as to live in peace or even so as to stay safe. See on entry (f). Attacks could not have kept up once the Ṣaddûqẩ’i grew in numbers and then had hegemony and showed it by having hold on the relics of Dositheos and Lîbi. It is shown in Part II that Ṣåddûqẩ’i was the original name of the whole Dosithean party. The implication is that the Bẩ’ûnẩ’i innovated against original doctrine. They vanished in the end. Entry (e). A.F. 160:16 to 161:4. Âbiyya and Dôsa. The first name is Hebrew. The natural Aramaic diminutive or hypocoristic would be Bâ’on. This is very likely the eponymous founder of the Bâ’ûnẩ’i. The second looks like a diminutive of Dositheos. There were only ever a hundred and twenty of the members, in the belief of the writer of the note. They are said to have abandoned all the mitsvot. No Dositheans would ever have done this. If this is not a standard statement to be put in when no details are known, it can still only mean they both differed from the Sebuaeans in details of halachah. They were all killed by snakes except for two. This mention is only fiction to explain two vaguely remembered names and the fact that there were once two Dosithean factions and both of them together had a Sanhedrin of a hundred and twenty members. If both factions are mentioned without contrast and they seem to have had a common council, this note would come after the two Dosithean factions had learnt to cooperate. Even though undatable, it is valuable confirmation that some kind of arrangement happened. Entry (f). A.F. 161:4 to 163:3. A precise historical record with the name of a real founder of a faction, Såkte the son of Ṭibron. (Såkte is without any doubt the inexplicably misread a clearly written dâl at the start as râ’ in mss. DA (Stenhouse HF). He has misread a bâ’ followed by ḥâ and read it as jîm, perhaps by not recognising a scribal convention while working in haste. See Part VIII on the indications that Vilmar was never able to do a final revision. The verb ‫ ﯾﺴﻠﻜﻮا‬meaning “went along the road” printed by Vilmar in line 14 in agreement with the second recension is impossible. Scanlon tries to find meaning by translating “they circulated”, but the verb can’t have this meaning, and even if it did, circulating is not inhabiting. Jamgotchian’s try is equally unworkable. In one old line of transmission some dots have dropped off, and this can be seen in ms. S of the first recension, where the fourth letter is missing. The word ‫ ﯾﺴﻜﺘﻮا‬meaning “kept silent” in ms. D of the first recension fits the words just before. The scribe has taken special care to make sure the dots of the letter tâ’ are read correctly, but has put a single big dot on top to mark nûn. (Stenhouse’s photograph is not good but the intention can be seen, though it might be possible to see one of the dots as a blemish. My photographs are better). The difficulty would then be that a verb would be missing before the words “in a town called Mâlûf”, so this is not the whole solution. Ms. C of the first recension reads ‫ ﯾﺴﻜﻨﻮا‬meaning “dwelt”. The difficulty is that this ms. is not very accurate. It would, however, be possible to suppose a pair of similar-looking words have been copied as a single word. That would give .... ‫ وﻛﺎﻧﻮا ﯾﺴﻜﻨﻮا‬.‫ وﯾﺴﻜﺘﻮا‬.... meaning “They did not disclose their inner doctrine to anyone and kept silent. They dwelt in a village called Malûf”. Anyway, the meaning would be the same with either solution, either following ms. C or combining the two readings. Scanlon is wrong in translating line 15 as saying they pretended to be the Ṣaddûqẩ’i. It actually says this was what they were called. He has taken the verb ‫ ﯾﺪﻋﻮا‬to be Stem VIII instead of the passive of Stem I, but the syntax won’t support this. There would need to be a conjunction annahum (probably pronounced annum at this time) after the verb. This basic mistake is not typical of his work. Stenhouse and Jamgotchian are correct here. 232 right form. See Part II note 20 pp. 95 -- 96. The form Shalya printed by Vilmar is an understandable mistake). There is information on halachah which needs separate treatment. This was not what separated them from Samaritans that were not Dositheans. What separated them was the doctrine they attributed to Dositheos himself, I think wrongly as explained above, that the Mountaintop could not be holy at all without the Mosaic Tabernacle. What separated them from the Bâ’ûnẩ’i was mainly the rejection of the belief that there would be general resurrection soon instead of in the far future by a miracle granted through Dositheos, with rejection of two related practices. There is an explicit statement of the belief rejected in the second notice of the Dositheans, at 156:14 – 15. “They said the dead would rise soon, as the children of Dositheos the Prophet of God”. There is a related notice, still not fully understood, again in the second notice, at 155:1 – 2. “My faith is in thee, Lord, and Dositheos thy servant, and his sons and daughters”. 45 Some explanation is quoted in the second notice at 156:14 – 157:1. “They said the dead would rise soon as children of Dositheos the Prophet of God, because he died at the age of twenty-eight and was eaten by dogs after his death and Lîbi ‫ ﻟﻮي‬his first witness was stoned in Joseph’s field”. The statement that his body was eaten up by dogs was probably tacked on by a hostile reporter. It is known from Christian sources that the Dositheans maintained Dositheos had gone into a cave for the purpose of dying willingly like Moses and his body was never found because he was translated, but it is known from the same sources that the opponents of the Dositheans lampooned the story. The details are in the Annotations to Asẩṭîr XII:20. For this reason Såkte abolished the excessive veneration of the relics of Dositheos and Lîbi. The relics of Dositheos were books in his own handwriting. The relic of Lîbi was a palm-leaf that had been rubbed into his blood. This is called by its Hebrew name Sansinnat Lîbi here. The proof of the form of the word is in Part II, note 34 pp. 141 -- 144. The Bâ’ûnẩ’i objected to his abolition of the requirement of saying prayers while standing in water. This needs some explanation. It says in the second notice of the Dositheans that after the deaths of Dositheos and Lîbi new customs were introduced. At 157:1 – 2 it says one was praying while standing in water. 46 The explanation is that there was a risk they might become unclean again by unwittingly walking over ground with human bones underneath while going to the place of prayer. This meant certain prayers must have been recited while standing naked in the water in a mikvah or pool or stream. This could never have been a requirement for all prayers. It would have made any synagogue service impossible. Some special prayer must have been recited after immersion each morning while still standing in the water. It would be natural to say P45FP45F P 45 The two passages are treated at length in Part II, pp. 142 – 143. In regard to the second sentence, see the informative note by Jamgotchian. In regard to the first sentence, it is enough to say here that Vilmar followed an obvious scribal error. The words that follow in line 2 have nothing to do with water. Vilmar followed a manuscript that had al-mâ meaning “the water” instead of lammâ meaning “when”. He misread the word taḥayyulhum meaning “their devices” and could not work out what it ought to be. The rest of the confusion followed. For the clear straightforward explanation with full manuscript evidence see my article The Transmission of the Samaritan Joshua-Judges, section 4. Stenhouse’s supposedly complete collations of this passage in a table in the notes to the apparatus in the thesis are incomplete as well as being wrong in a few places, including where it makes a big difference. This is a good example of how Stenhouse’s collations need to be verified against the manuscripts before being used to reach conclusions. Numerous authors have made bizarre guesses about Samaritan veneration of sacred water without doing any work to find out what was really written by A.F. by reading this article. 46 233 “all their prayers” to mean constant obligatory prayers, even if there were other prayers as well. Såkte denied connection between general resurrection and Dositheos and ended the excessive preparation before being allowed to see the relics of Dositheos and Lîbi and the practice of praying while standing in water. The end of the second notice shows the extremists had hegemony straight after the death of Lîbi and had custody of their relics as a sign of it. A.F. implies that Såkte wrested possession of these at 161:10 – 11 when he says the Bâ’ûn’ẩ’i protested when Såkte said no-one need fast before seeing them. The whole three defining doctrines of Såkte’s come up in the words of the reaction by the Bâ’ûnẩ’i. A.F. 161:9 – 10. “Then [or ‘thereupon’] the Bâ’ûnẩ’i said ‘How disgraceful is what they say, The dead will rise and no-one need fast before looking at Lîbi’s palm-leaf and Dositheos’s handwriting and no-one need pray in water’ ”. 47 These new decrees of Såkte’s were an effective announcement of disagreement and a sign of self-definition. Their general acceptance would have consolidated his authority. This would have offset the rejection of his doctrine that Mt. Gerizim was not holy at all in the Fẩnûtå. Såkte limited the mitsvot of cleanness and uncleanness to what did not matter for being present at the service of the sanctuary. As he plainly said, there is no holiness in the Time of Error. There can be cleanness, but not holiness. There can be uncleanness, but it does not matter. There was still uncleanness from human dead bodies, but as soon as the person affected went from being Av Ṭum’ah to Rishon leṬum’ah with immersion on the third day, he could touch anyone else because they would only be made Sheni le-Ṭum’ah. They went to elaborate lengths at funerals and burials so as not to be made Av Ṭum’ah by a Av Avot ha-Ṭum’ah, but this is compatible with not caring about being made Rishon le-Ṭum’ah. He allowed direct touching of menstruating women. A woman could still be Niddah and Av Ṭum’ah, but anyone and anything touched by her would only be Rishon le-Ṭum’ah. As R. Akiva said, ‫ תמזוג את כוסו‬. He forbade sex followed by immersion on the Sabbath. This might have been because the man is only made Rishon le-Ṭum’ah and the woman only Sheni le-Ṭum’ah and immersing would make a false statement. The words seem to mean he allowed sex on the Sabbath. More consideration is needed. Såkte claimed an unthought of kind of authority which put him in the line of authority from Dositheos himself. Dositheos claimed the authority to make small Scanlon and Stenhouse both think that in line 9 ‫ وﻋﺎد ﺑﻌﻮﻧﺎي‬means “and the Bâ’ûnẩ’i repeated” and refers back to the words of the previous sentence instead of what follows. This is the common phenomenon of a verb in a Semitic language corresponding to an adverb in Indo-European languages. This verb can only mean “to return” and can’t mean “to repeat” regardless of Hebrew idiom. Here it means “they reacted”. Jamgotchian, who really did know Arabic properly, gets it right. The Bâ’ûnẩ’i objected to all three decrees by Såkte, which belonged together. The word “soon” or “immediately” qarîban printed by Vilmar after “the dead will rise” is not in the manuscripts and was not written by A.F. In fact, it was by not putting this part of a fixed expression in that A.F. signalled what was meant. It is an addition in ms. A (Stenhouse F) written in 1860, which tends to make explanatory adjustments. Vilmar copied this through misunderstanding, and did not note the disagreement of his other mss. in the apparatus, because he does not note variants that seem inconsequential to him. Stenhouse does not record this disagreement of ms. A with his collating base, ms. D (Stenhouse H). It is remarked in Part VIII that his collation of ms. A is haphazard. Khaḍir and the Hebrew translator only partly understand the argument, but do still understand what the essence of the intention of the objection was, unlike the scribe and editor of ms. A. It is certain that the word qarîban was not in the text they used. In the case of ms. A, the result is nonsense, because the Bẩ’ûnẩ’i would never have denied that the dead would rise soon. 47 234 changes in the Torah. The purpose seems to have been to provide necessary information which was not in the text but could not be worked out by any argument either. The only known example is given by A.F. in the second notice of the Dositheans, at 155:15 – 17. At Exodus XII:22, where the word ‫ אזוב‬izzob is written, Dositheos decreed that it was to be read aloud as ‫ צעתר‬ṣẩåttår. The details and explanation are in my chapter Mikra. The Hebrew word substituted by Dositheos must have been meant to mean the same. It might have been meant to end uncertainty. It might or might not be relevant that some early Karaite authors, such as Nissim ben Noaḥ, deny the certainty of the Jewish tradition of the identification, and so does Ibn Ezra in his commentary on Exodus. It is not known to what extent Dositheos did this. There is one sentence in the second notice, at 155:8 – 9, where it says he changed a lot, comparable to Ezra, but more. This can’t mean changes in the very written text. It can only mean that he made the equivalent of the Masoretic Qerē readings which were recorded in the same way as Jewish practice either in lists or in annotations to texts of the Torah but not in scrolls meant for public reading aloud. After this time the changes in the Torah made by Dositheos are never mentioned again in Samaritan records. The only hint is a statement in the continuation to A.F. that the Dositheans were not allowed to start their service on the Mountaintop till their opponents had finished the recitation of the Torah. See my article Social Anomie. The only Christian mention is in the well-known record by Phōtios in his Bibliotheca at V:60 – 64 of the petition of the Dositheans in Alexandria in 588 A.D. to be officially recognised as a different religious community to other Samaritans. Phōtios says in his opening words that Dositheos had made innumerable harmful changes in the “Mosaic Octateuch”. What happened to these changes? Are we to suppose that in the accommodation of the tenth and early eleventh centuries the variation in the text of the Torah was officially resolved? Some of these readings might turn up in some traditions of the targum. They might be hiding in readings attributed to the Samaritikon or with no attribution. Now, Såkte never claimed authority at this level claimed by Dositheos, but he did have a unique official title that translates into Arabic as al-Muqîs, and used this as if it were his name. See A.F. 162:7. Usage of the verb in Stem I is common, but usage in Stem IV is only attested in Jewish writings. In Jewish writings it is used as the equivalent of the Hebrew verb ‫ הקיש‬which has the corresponding abstract noun ‫ היקש‬. The corresponding abstract noun in Arabic is the common word qiyâs. Blau gives examples. 48 The common usage of Stem I of this verb is to derive something by analogy or formal logic, or just to correlate something with something. It can also mean to measure. The Hebrew word lying behind the Arabic would be ‫ מקיש‬. An example was given in Part II section 3 pp. 130– 131 top of his claim to derive the supposed fact that Mt. Gerizim has no holiness in the Fẩnûtå from general statements by Dositheos. This would have been a claim to unique authority. His claim to have derived the corollary that the Mountain had no holiness in the Time of Error from axioms of Dositheos was not believed by most of those that accepted his authority. Stenhouse reads the noun as qîs or miqyas (with a final short vowel), nouns that don’t exist. He often makes words up, using the dogma that Samaritans write in their own special dialect. With this dogma who needs to ask for information about Arabic? See p. 253 top. He says these imaginary nouns mean the same as the noun miqyâs, which has an alif to mark a long vowel. I bring this up to stop the reader from thinking Stenhouse had access to hitherto unknown text-forms. I have actually been asked this very question by astonished colleagues after they had compared Stenhouse’s translation with the Arabic. Scanlon understands the morphology and vocalises correctly, but leaves the word untranslated. Jamgotchian does not understand the morphology, because he was not familiar with the Jewish usage. 48 235 Another innovation still not properly understood was brought in by Såkte. He set up a pavilion or elaborate tent miẓallah and taught in it. He said that from there they would go up to the Mountaintop, meaning on the return of the Time of Favour. Entry (g). A.F. 163:3 – 10. The compiler says there was a division within this movement of Såkte’s but not a splitting-off. Five brothers called the sons of Yaṣdaq and someone else called Ṣẩdoq the Great are explicitly said to have disagreed with Såkte. The movement is not named. It can plausibly be supposed that they were the same as the faction called Sadducees. The name Såkte was unclear to the scribes of most of the manuscripts, but not all. The essential information is not recorded by Stenhouse in the thesis because his collations are incomplete. Proof of the correct reading is in Part II, note 20 p. 96. The important difference was that they found a way of reconciling the Dosithean doctrine that the Mountaintop could not be fully holy without the Mosaic Tabernacle with an argument for still observing the Festivals on the Mountaintop. The argument was that the Mountaintop is said in Scripture to have its own holiness whether or not the Tabernacle is there. This is an unassailable argument. Scripture records the words of Jacob in Genesis XXVIII:17 saying it is the House of God. The words are “as he said”. This is a Moslem formula. It means “as God said” meaning “as written in scripture”. There can be no doubt about the meaning because some of the manuscripts expand the phrase in different ways. Stenhouse does not recognise the formula and as usual does not know what passage of Scripture could be meant, so he translates on p. 228 middle with “as Dusis [i.e. Dositheos] said” inserting this name against all the manuscripts. This is an outstanding illustration of the warning not to rely on this translation even where the content seems unremarkable. Vilmar wrongly leaves out the words “as he said”. It is known from the completion of A.F. that in the early centuries of Islam but probably much earlier than that Dositheans really did worship on the Mountaintop. See my article Social Anomie. Nevertheless, there was no split, since they still recognised Såkte as whatever Aramaic or Hebrew word is translated as al-Muqîs. It looks as if this sub-faction were reclaiming the old original name of Sadducees, which for all we know might have gone back to someone called Ṣẩdoq the Great, but the author of the source thought the name to be an innovation. This arrangement as rather simplistically described looks either unstable or unworkable. The only explanation that seems plausible is that the followers of Såkte found this reconciliation of basic Dosithean doctrine with practical need and put it into practice. In support of this explanation is the fact that everything else said about this group in this place right down to the last detail is true of Såkte himself. The conclusion is that this is information about Såkte and his followers found by the compiler in a different source that used the old title Sadducee or mentioned the supposed eponymous founder. That means there never was a faction differing from Såkte while recognising his authority, only disagreement within the faction, and the compiler made this clumsy explanation up because he thought the specific doctrine mentioned to be incompatible with what he knew about Såkte’s doctrine about the loss of full holiness of the Mountaintop and the importance of his pavilion. Notice that the movement led by Såkte described above in section (f) is not named, except for the misleading general name Ṣåddûqẩ’i for one branch. Entry (h). A.F. 163:10 – 164:2. A person living in Alexandria but originating in On (the Egyptian name and the original Hebrew name) or Heliopolis, modern name ‘Ên Shams and within metropolitan Cairo a few miles downstream. He is known to A.F. only by the Aramaic epithet Ûnẩ’å ‫ اوﻧﺎﯩﮫ‬or ‫“ اوﻧﺎه‬the person from On”. (Note 236 that A.F. does not use hamzah. It might be more accurate to say the scribes don’t use hamzah. This has caused confusion here). This person taught that those that followed him would see the return of the Time of Favour. His followers prepared for the immediate end of normal social and economic conditions. This person could have been listed because the compiler of the information used by A.F. put anyone objectionable down as a Dosithean, though it remains possible but unlikely that he was a Dosithean leader with his own extremist bent and this overshadowed the record of a doctrine about the manifestation of the Mosaic Tabernacle. See Part II p. 117. Entry (i). A.F. 164:3 – 9. Some kind of extreme encratite sect called the Fasqûṭẩ’i not compatible with the Dositheans or any known Samaritan tendency or any possible form of the religion of Israel. The compiler of the list assumes anything he has vaguely heard of that is not normal must be Dosithean. It might have been an odd form of Christianity or might be one of the variety of religious movements of the time wrongly called Gnostic because not enough is known about them. The presence of four consonants indicates there is some Greek word behind the Aramaic name. This ends the list. Now the Dosithean sub-divisions can be separated out and the simple differences can be explained. First, though, some elimination has to be done. Category (i) can be eliminated straight off. It was probably not even Israelite. Category (h) was undoubtedly real and undoubtedly authentically Israelite, but was not Dosithean. It might have been distantly influenced by the Dositheans. Category (e) are real names, but the compiler knows nothing about them. One name is Dositheos himself and one might be the Bâ’ûnẩ’i. It might be evidence that the two factions managed to get on together and then unite. This leaves five categories that are Israelite and Dosithean, and which are not just mentions without real data and which are not longer or shorter duplicates. These are (1) faction (f) in the list, Såkte, who opposed the Bẩûnẩ’i on their specific form of the doctrine of resurrection, and denied the holiness or full holiness of the mountaintop, along with his unnamed movement; (2) faction (c) in the list, who broke away from the Dositheans and would have broken contact with the Sebuaeans in the process; (3) faction (g) in the list, a faction who are said by the compiler to have disagreed with Såkte on the status of the Mountaintop but not actually broken away from his movement, and who might have been called the Sadducees; (4) the Bâ’ûnẩ’i, before these factions appeared, mentioned without any information in entry (a) except for their implicit identification with the enthusiasts described at length at the end of the second notice of the Dositheans, then in entry (d), with a clear allusion to their doctrine, then in entry (f) in the list, with a mention of their doctrine of resurrection by a miracle granted through Dositheos, their excessive veneration of the relics of Dositheos and Lîbi, and their rule of praying standing in water, not understood so far; (5) the original Dositheans after the murder of Lîbi 49 as described by A.F. in the second notice, with the same doctrine on resurrection as the Bẩ’ûnẩ’i later on. This five-part division can be simplified. Not all these factions existed at the same time. There was development. As well as this, the name Sadducees might have still been used privately within the movement, or the faction later called Sadducees might have asserted their right to use the ancient name. There still might be a real historical reason for the preservation of the separate record These are to be distinguished from Dositheos’s followers during his lifetime, or after his death but before the murder of Lîbi. 49 237 naming the later Sadducees separately from Såkte. This question is discussed at length in Part II, pp. 120 middle – 123. How the Bâ’ûnẩ’i regarded the Mountaintop can be seen from what A.F. says and does not say in the second notice of the Dositheans. There is detail about their halachah and practices, but not a word on how they regarded the Mountaintop. In one place at 156:1 A.F. cryptically says Lîbi accused the other Samaritans of having replaced the Festivals. This must mean they observe the Festivals on the wrong days. Lîbi is accusing them of not using the Dosithean calendar. There is some compression and anachronism in the account. There is no suggestion that the Festivals are invalid, which means there is no suggestion that the Mountaintop is not holy. It will now be seen the doctrine that the Mountaintop is not holy at all was an innovation by Såkte, definitely not the teaching of Dositheos himself or his followers after his death. This is why pronouncements of his related to this come up so many times in the long notice on him. It was entirely new, and it had drastic consequences. It will also be seen why, after the detailed description of Dosithean practice after the death of Dositheos and the murder of Lîbi at the end of the second notice, the third notice starts off with names of movements that rejected the Festivals and must have denied the full holiness of the Mountaintop. They are reminiscences of this startling new doctrine. It will also be seen why Såkte is described at great length, whereas the Bẩûnẩ’i are only mentioned in this entry where it says how they disagreed with Såkte on resurrection and related questions. The Bâ’ûnẩ’i probably kept on recognising the partial holiness of the Mountaintop even without the Tabernacle. The extreme original doctrine of Såkte in regard to the Mountaintop was unacceptable to most of his own faction as well as the Bâ’ûnẩ’i. The official precise and terse formulation of the modified doctrine and official directive by the dissident group is quoted indirectly by A.F. at 163:5 – 7: “They said Mt. Gerizim was holy as he said [i.e. as written in the Torah] as if the House were on it. What is written must be carried out on it and what is not possible is not to be carried out”. The words “as he said” are wrongly left out by Vilmar. The full evidence is set out in Part II, pp. 121 -- 122. It can be said with certainty from this that in most respects Såkte’s governing council decided to return to the form of acceptance of the holiness of the Mountaintop in itself, independent of the giving of the Torah at Sinai and the requirement of the Tabernacle. Dositheos himself must have agreed, otherwise such a shocking difference would have been mentioned by A.F. right at the start of the first notice. This theory had enabled them to worship on the Mountaintop. They had always been divided from the Sebuaeans, and this kept up after Såkte’s party had reformed, and confusingly labelled itself with the old title of Sadducees. Såkte still taught in his special pavilion, which was still important for unknown reasons till destroyed in the eighth century A.D. There is a statement by A.F., right at the end of what he says about Såkte, that he never went up the Mountain in his life. This might mean he stuck to his original extreme position, but might equally well mean he used to go up the Mountain but did not consider this to be proper fulfilment of the mitsvah to go to the sacred place three times a year, which was impossible after the occultation of the Mosaic Tabernacle. It is known that like all Dositheans he hoped for the reappearance of the Tabernacle, but he must have gone further in some way, because right at the start of the entry on him A.F. records his announcement that his followers would see the reappearance of the Tabernacle, and says setting up the pavilion and teaching in it were somehow related to this. Såkte and his followers denied the doctrine of the Bâ’ûnẩ’i invented after the murder of Lîbi that general resurrection would come soon through a miracle granted 238 to Dositheos, but explicitly said there would be a general resurrection when Creation had run its course. In this they might have gone back to the original Dosithean doctrine. This was probably how a lot of early Christian writers came to the absurd belief that Dositheans or all Samaritans rejected resurrection. They were probably helped along by the way they unwittingly confuse the Samaritans called Sadducees with the Jews called Sadducees because of not knowing there are Samaritans called Sadducees. As well as this, they might easily have misunderstood the Jews called Sadducees by thinking that because they rejected resurrection in its sectarian Pharisaic use, they must have rejected the concept of resurrection in any form. This last question needs serious investigation, but this is not the place. It is not certain whether either Såkte or the faction of his followers that did not accept his doctrine of the extreme consequences of the Fẩnutå --- called the Time of Error by him (A.F. 162:6) --- accepted a doctrine of individual resurrection to the Garden straightaway for the righteous. It is certain from the second notice at 157:7 – 8 that the Bâ’ûnẩ’i had this concept, and any disagreement would have been too important to leave out. After all this, we come to the following coherent picture of change within Dositheanism. Later information strongly indicates the Dositheans were originally called the Ṣaddûqẩ’i. (No connection with the Jewish party of the same name. The name is self-descriptive and therefore not exclusive, like the political self-description Green or Labour. Very many early Christian authors confused the two, as would be expected). A.F. in his first notice puts the rise of this party right at the end of Persian rule or just after. This is undoubtedly right, though his source has confused the date of Dositheos with the date of origin of the party. A.F. mentions “the two factions” in the time of Hyrcanus. In the late first century B.C., they rejected the validity of sacrifices and perhaps even a sanctuary structure during the Fẩnûtå, that is, the present era, after the occultation of the Mosaic Tabernacle. Immediately after there was the work of Dositheos himself, who declared himself the Prophet like Moses. He did not make any innovations that are recorded, except for declaring his authority to make changes in single words in the Torah. It is an astounding fact that we don’t know what Dositheos thought his mission to be, or whether the later Dositheans thought he had fulfilled his mission. After his death his followers found a new formulation of part of his mission, bringing about general resurrection after his death. He died in a cave and his body was never found, and his followers said he had been translated. The most prominent active preacher of his full status, Lîbi, was murdered and then declared a martyr. Såkte made five fundamental changes, but most did not last. First, he turned the old doctrine from before the time of Dositheos that the Mountaintop could not be satisfactorily holy during the Fẩnûtå into his own new doctrine that the Mountaintop was not holy at all and therefore that the three Pilgrim Festivals could not be observed, while declaring that the concepts of uncleanness and cleanness remained valid by not being dependent on the status of the Mountaintop. At the same time he limited the mitsvot of cleanness and uncleanness to what did not matter for being present at the sanctuary. Second, he set up a pavilion as a place of teaching and preparation while waiting for the reappearance of the Mosaic Tabernacle. Såkte’s doctrine about the Mountaintop was rejected by many members using the ancient title the Ṣaddûqẩ’i, though while still recognising his authority. Before or at this time the old title of the Sadducees Ṣåddûqẩ’i was revived as a convenient term to distinguish his faction from his opponents, now known as the Bâ’ûnẩ’i. The third change was to reject the new doctrine of general resurrection soon as children of Dositheos through a miracle granted to Dositheos and Lîbi, still strongly asserted by the Bâ’ûnâ’i, but in 239 this they were only returning to old doctrine from before Dositheos which might well have been the opinion of Dositheos himself. The fourth change was to invent the concept of the decider of Dositheos’s unstated opinions from his stated decrees by unquestionably correct process, the term for which was translated into Arabic much later on as al-Muqîs. By doing this he gave himself authority equal in practice to Dositheos himself, without having to call himself the prophet like Moses. The fourth innovation was that he said he was the father of all his followers, and insisted on being referred to and addressed as such. This detail has not been mentioned up till now because the precise significance is not known. He might have needed the title because of having denied the old doctrine of resurrection connected with Dositheos. A.F. says Såkte only claimed to follow Dositheos, but what is meant is not an assertion of equal authority. The title seems to have only expressed ultimate absolute personal authority in his own time. Såkte’s doctrine that the Mountain had no holiness in the Time of Error was forgotten after his death. His doctrine that the mitsvot of cleanness and uncleanness had mostly but not entirely been suspended would have been forgotten as soon as the first doctrine was forgotten. Then there was unity again, as in the time of Dositheos. The faction that wrote II Enoch could have separated themselves before or after the time of Såkte. They tried to address the same difficultis as he did, but their solution was more drastic. It has been shown at length that soon after the trauma and shock of the martyrdom of Lîbi there were only two formal Dosithean factions, one of them tolerating internal disagreement, and a break-away faction. A new doctrine of general resurrection soon instead of in the far distant future by a miracle granted to Dositheos or Dositheos and Lîbi appeared after the death of Dositheos and murder of Lîbi. The inventors of this doctrine, called the Bâ’ûnẩ’i, had hegemony at first. Såkte and his close followers, along with many others under his authority using the old name of the Ṣaddûqẩ’i, rejected all the innovations and took power. There are indirect indications in entry (e) that the two Dosithean factions reached accommodation, conceivably by the end of the first century. The dispute over the form of resurrection was not settled till later on, as was shown in note 49. Såkte’s denial of the full holiness of the Mountain in the Time of Error, however, was unacceptable even to most of his own followers and is unlikely to have been kept up by anyone at all after his death. Now a fallacy in the form of a false dichotomy needs to be disposed of. Kippenberg, in his book of 1971, pp. 316 – 321, maintains that the expectation of the return of Moses is meant to refute the claim of the Dositheans about the status of Dositheos. The assertion has been copied by others as if fact. He maintains that the dispute between the Dositheans and their opponents on this question was couched in terms of two different interpretations of the promise of the appearance of a prophet like himself by Moses in ch. XVIII of Deuteronomy. His thesis is that the opponents of the Dositheans invented the concept of the reappearance of Moses himself so as to prove the status of Dositheos as the prophet like Moses asserted by the Dositheans to be untenable. His thesis is that it was maintained that the promise of the appearance of a prophet like Moses could only mean the reappearance of Moses himself, since noone could be equal to Moses. He uses the clear statement of the unique quality of Moses as compared to other prophets at the start of ch. XII of Numbers, and correctly observes that Mårqe often alludes to it. There are a couple of false arguments intertwined. The repetitious wording in Deuteronomy in two slightly different forms can naturally be read as a clear statement that any prophet can be like Moses by being 240 a prophet though not on the level of Moses, but that a prophet equal to Moses is to be expected as well. Jews have usually read it this way. Mårqe adds that logically the prophet equal to Moses must be Moses. Jews have often done the same. It is not known exactly what the Dositheans thought about the status of Dositheos, and what his mission had been. It is known that he reworded the Torah in places to bring out the meaning, presumably by inventing the equivalent of the Qerē readings in the Masoretic system, but without changing the letters on the page. It is still not known by what authority in relation to the authority of Moses it was done. They called him the Successor of the Prophet of God, meaning the prophet like Moses, which must have meant he was greater than any prophet, except perhaps Joshua, but it can be seen that they did not put him at the level of Moses himself since they thought his opponents had caused his early death, even though he chose the time of dying and his body disappeared afterwards. This must have meant more work was to be done. The Dositheans were obsessed with the need for the Mosaic Tabernacle. It would follow that only Moses himself could perfect the work of Dositheos and bring it back into the material world. Mårqe does not contradict either party, but speaks to both of them. Kippenberg pp. 321 – 323 says Joshua was claimed by some to be the prophet promised by Moses in Deuteronomy XVIII, so as to contradict the Dositheans. In fact both parties agreed that the promise could partly refer to Joshua. A true but cunningly deceptive statement by the opponents of the Dositheans was made with the connivance of the Dositheans themselves. Phōtios at 5:60 – 64 (Pummer p. 425) says that in 588 A.D. the Dositheans of Alexandria, presumably on behalf of all Dositheans in Egypt, petitioned the government for official recognition as a separate community from other Samaritans. Their argument was that their doctrine was different to the other Samaritans’ doctrine, in that they maintained that the second prophet promised in Deuteronomy XVIII was Dositheos. No-one has ever noticed that their unnamed religious opponents, undoubtably the Sebuaeans, successfully supported the Dositheans’ petition to be officially distinguished from other Samaritans, by saying truthfully but purposefully misleadingly it was their doctrine that Joshua had been the prophet promised by Moses. They made the Dositheans’ petition more convincing and more intelligible by making a true but deceptive assertion about their own doctrine. It would have been legally necessary to give the court a statement of two incompatible doctrines, because the court was being asked about definitions to be used in administration. The Dositheans had to be the petitioners because they could not have denied Joshua was a unique kind of prophet (though not equal to Moses) if asked as a direct question, so that fact had to be hushed up, which meant their assertion of the status of Dositheos had to be the question before the court. Samaritans of any party at any time over the centuries have agreed Joshua was a prophet. The Torah actually says Moses conferred his own gift of prophecy on him, but clearly implying at a lower level than himself, in Numbers XXVII:18 -- 21. There seems to be a scholarly fiction that Samaritans say Moses is the only prophet. Kippenberg maintains that the party that was not Dosithean put Joshua at the same level as Moses. They could not have done that because it would have contradicted the passage in Numbers just mentioned. When one party said Joshua was the one promised, they knew the judge wouldn’t dream they expected him to come back. When the other party said Dositheus was the one promised, they knew the judge would never dream they expected Moses himself to come back later on. (This belief is not to be confused with the ecumenical solution arrived at in the middle of the fourteenth century, whereby the coming of Moses is postponed to the end of time and Joshua is called by the vague term the Tẩ’eb). 241 Notice how they must have been on good terms with each other by then. The Dositheans told half the truth and the other party a quarter. Between them they told even less. It says the judge was a bishop. It says he had an advisory panel of clerics. There has been a lot of puzzlement over the reason why two Samaritan parties would want a legal decision on which had the right doctrine, or how they could not have known the answer would be that they were both wrong. Modern historians have been as simple-minded as the judge at the time of the hearing. In fact it is obvious that they knew what the verdict would be and wanted it, because then they would be defined officially just the way they wanted. They let the government and the court interpret the question as being about two different ways of being wrong in doctrine, both needing to be refuted by a Christian theologian for the Court records, so that they would each be defined by their own special way of being wrong in doctrine. Both Samaritan sides knew the judge would think be thinking in terms of Christian doctrine about Jesus. The two sides had worked together to assure the judge they really did contradict each other and given him words that he could use in his verdict and the government could use in its decree. It worked like clockwork. They got a verdict and decree that both sides were officially wrong in two precisely defined different ways. Before then, they had been officially wrong the same way as the Jews. Now they were each officially wrong in two different ways to the Jews. This would have ended all claims over them to the government by the Jewish authorities. It would let them label themselves officially in approaching the government, separately or working together according to what was needed each time. I think this planned cunning cooperation for mutual benefit shows the start of reconciliation between the two parties. This was in Egypt. According to the Continuation of A.F., the two parties were still squabbling in Samaria for another two and a half centuries. The evidence for the date of the social reconciliation between the Dositheans and Sebuaeans is set out in Part II. In Palestine it was after the mid eighth century A.D. It was mostly completed before the start of the eleventh century. It might have been a necessity for survival. Doctrine had to be reformulated, but this seems to have taken a long while. Unity on details of halachah was reached even slower, over centuries, and in a couple of details never. This is made abundantly obvious in my book Principles of Samaritan Halachah. I leave this study of Dosithean doctrine with a fundamentally important question that needs to be tackled. When did the title Dositheans stop being used? When did the title Sebuaeans stop being used? What was there in the new common formulation of doctrine that let the Dositheans stop thinking about Dositheos while staying faithful to their religion? Why does the full concept of the Tå’eb appear so late? (It was shown in note 16 on p. 14 of Part II that the term is ancient, but it is certain from Haran’s careful separation of the documentation that the final concept appeared all at once in the second half of the fourteenth century. Haran did not take account of the use of the term in the Durrân, but his argument is not affected). What happened at the very start and on the way? I think the answer will be in the Kitâb aṭ-Ṭubâkh, but couched carefully and obliquely in terms of principles. 242 VII. APPENDIX. CITATION AND USE OF ABU ’L-FATEḤ The transcription Abu ’l-Fateḥ, which represents the actual pronunciation, has been used instead of the technical transcription Abu ’l-Fatḥ for the convenience of non-specialists. The history by this author is untitled in the mss. It is a work of the first importance for Samaritan history overall. Use of an accurate text is indispensable. I work from the mss. Set out here is enough information for the reader to have confidence in all quotations or summaries in this monograph. This information will be needed in using very many other publications quoting A.F. and will be needed by scholars in future, so the amount of detail given here is justified. It is to be hoped that one day a thorough investigation of the history of the text of this book after it left the author’s hands will be made. This will have to be accompanied by an investigation of passages that indicate that the author revised his work where he had difficulty understanding his sources. In a couple of places he mentions such difficulty, speaking in the first person. At the moment there is no way of telling for sure whether this was done from time to time or in one go. There are some places where it can be seen that the author made two revisions. A very brief start on this work has been made in section 4 of my article Transmission as well as the article by Hans Daiber cited in the bibliography to the article. There are two or perhaps three endings to the book. It is not always the second recension that shows revision. New examples of differences between recensions are listed at the end of this section. Complicating any thorough study will be the need to separate out places where a systematic effort by editors to restore corruptions, mostly in the forms of names and some realia and corrections to quotations, shows up in the witnesses of the second recension, including the text known to Khaḍir. It is impossible at the moment to work out when this could have happened, because in some important places the witnesses to this recension are divided. For examples out of many instances of both correct restoration and disagreement within the recension, see above, pp. 120 middle – 123, on the restoration of the text at 156:5 – 7, in three matters. First a name has been restored in the ms. used by Khaḍir, though not in any of the known mss. Then a negative in the words of the fundamental dictum of Ṣẩdoq has been correctly restored in all witnesses of the second recension. Then adjustments are made to the wording of the dictum to bring out the argument, which are not the same in all the witnesses. They might be alternative wording of the original dictum, or correct adjustments to bring out the argument. Further complicating the question of correct restoration of readings are deliberate changes by the editors, some right, some wrong. As an example of the first, the editors of the second recension gave up on trying to restore the Aramaic word for the cairn marking Lîbi’s martyrdom mentioned above note 33 p. 144 after ms. B and replaced it with the equivalent Arabic word rajam from the 243 context. As an example of the second, notice the misunderstanding of what was meant by scrolls with mistakes mentioned above pp. 144 – 145, or the meaning of a formula on p. 122. On top of the question of the author’s own revisions where he had difficulty with his sources, there is the question of very early corruption to the text. The omission of a negative in all mss. of the first recension in the place just mentioned goes back to a time relatively soon after composition of the book, apparently within a century. The bad omission by homoiarchon in all mss. of both recensions described below p. 252 can be corrected from two of the St. Petersburg fragments, but of these, only one has the fully correct form. This mistake must be even older than the omission of the negative just mentioned. On the other hand, at least one ancient exemplar, or a relatively recent copy of such, must have been used to make the second recension. The correct form of the name Såkte was proven by me using multiple witnesses of the first recension that were not fully satisfactory, but the editors of the second recension must have known it from a ms. where it is written correctly in full. At least one ancient exemplar without the omission by homoiarchon, or a copy of such, must have been to hand for the copying of the St. Petersburg fragment just mentioned. Clearly there were very early corruptions but there were chains of transmission unaffected. There is more detail on this in my article mentioned. Some corruptions might go back to the sources used by A.F. See specially what is said about 82:14 – 15 on p. 118. The wording is exact, in contrast to alQirqisâni, so his source was good, but a couple of lines have been lost very early, perhaps by A.F. himself in making his master ms. It is hard to tell whether the corruption of the name of the cairn marking the murder of Lîbi is due to early miscopying of A.F. or miscopying in his source. The same with the word meaning palm-leaf described above note 34 pp. 144 -- 145. The person at the end of the book called ‫ ﺻﺮﻣﺼﮫ‬in all the mss. must have been called ‫ ירמיה‬, though no-one has twigged that the name must have been written in Hebrew letters by A.F. or his source. See note 28 p. 117 on the title ‫ اوﻧﺎه‬corrupt in all the mss. There is a pressing need for collation of all the St. Petersburg fragments, specially GHI. Abu ’l-Fateḥ is cited by pages and lines of Vilmar’s edition. Abulfathi Annales Samaritani quos ad Fidem Codicum Manu Scriptorum Edidit et Prolegomenis Instruxit Eduardus Vilmar. Arabic titlepage. ‫ ﻛﺘﺎب اﻟﺘﺎرﯾﺦ ﻣﻤﺎ ﺗﻘﺪم ﻣﻦ اﻻﺑﺎ‬. Gotha 1865. Vilmar’s ms. sigla are used. For the rest of the sigla, see my articles Transmission and The First Notice. Stenhouse departs from the usage of Vilmar’s sigla ABCDF, used in all technical writing ever since, without giving any reason, which causes unnecessary confusion. It would have added to the confusion if I had not used Vilmar’s sigla. Because of this, my sigla for most other mss. had to differ from Stenhouse’s (except for SNYJ). For the convenience of the reader Stenhouse’s siglum is always added whenever a ms. is specified. Lists of the mss. of the two recensions with both sets of sigla can be looked up above, Part II section 2, p. 115. This is not the place to describe 244 the mss. The reader is referred to Stenhouse’s thesis, vol. 1 ch. 2. The Stuttgart ms. known to Stenhouse, which is closely related to D (his H), was inaccessible, but this turned out not to matter, as explained below note 53 p. 247. All translations or summaries of A.F. in this study are my own. In every instance Vilmar’s printed text has been compared to all the mss. including the Comprehensive History. All differences affecting the meaning are cited. Inferences can always safely be drawn e silentio. It was found that Vilmar’s edition was adequate in most places, but not everywhere. Vilmar did not have access to all the text-forms known now, but he did have representatives of the two main recensions, (B)CDF (F incomplete) (Stenhouse CPHA) as opposed to (B)A (Stenhouse CF). Ms. P (Stenhouse M) belongs in the first group but has been revised correctly against the second group. P and Khaḍir sometimes have unique or nearly unique superior readings. BL 2 L 3 Y (Stenhouse CBGY) belong to the first recension in the first half and the second recension in the second half. Ms. A and Khaḍir sometimes correctly differ from both recensions, so that in some places three recensions can be seen. Stenhouse, thesis vol. 1 ch. 3 pp. 24 – 25 asserts that these differences in A are the work of the scribe. He is probably right about some additional explanatory sentences or phrases. Nevertheless, many readings can be seen to be genuine. See the examples in my article Transmission section 4. See also the end of this section. It can be seen from the St. Petersburg fragments and the studies in section 4 of my article Transmission that some of the correct readings of both recensions are equally old. In many places the correct reading is only in mss. of the second recension. See for example the next paragraph on 157:2. An unexpected finding was that Vilmar often leaves out alternative or superior readings in A, as at 72:11 – 16 (see p. 115 note 24); 76:14 (see p. 115 note 24); 155:1 – 2 (see p. 142); 156:14 – 15 (see pp. 142 -- 143); 157:2 (see the next paragraph); 161:4 (see p. 98 note 20); 161:5 (misleadingly incomplete); 162:15 and 163:5 (see p. 99 note 20). In the third instance his judgment is unsound. Compare again on the question of judgment p. 142 on 155:1 – 2. Compare again on judgment pp. 142 -- 143 on the omission of the reading of B at 156:14 – 15 and the serious consequences. See also in this context p. 116 on a false unique reading printed without comment. In a couple of places he departs from the mss. without telling the reader. See p. 111 on 171:14 and less seriously p. 21 on 132:7. There are random omissions in the collation, some serious. He consistently prints ar-Ra’îs ‫ اﻟﺮﺋﯿﺲ‬with hamzah instead of ar-Rabbîs, e.g. 152:13 and then onwards (Stenhouse’s translation p. 213, thesis page 165 line 11, and notes to his apparatus pp. 149 – 150). At 5:12 (Stenhouse p. 5) he prints Dâr ar-Riyâsah instead of Dâr ar-Ribâsah. This is the abstract noun from the title Rabbîs. On the title see my article Social Anomie. The title was known in Vilmar’s time from Juynboll’s edition of the Arabic Joshua book and Juynboll’s note on the title. For the same reason, at 5:12 (Stenhouse’s translation p. 4, thesis page 3 line 10, notes to the apparatus p. 3), Vilmar prints Dâr ar-Riyâsah ‫ دار اﻟﺮﯾﺎﺳﮫ‬instead of Dâr ar-Ribâsah ‫ دار اﻟﺮﺑﺎﺳﮫ‬. Here Vilmar had four mss., DCBA (Stenhouse HPCF), all with the correct reading. (Stenhouse wrongly collates B (his C) as having the wrong reading). These errors are not typical of Vilmar’s demonstrated quality of work, and some are inexplicable. The translation and commentary volume announced on the first of the two title-pages never appeared. There is a long summary accompanying the Arabic text instead. This first title page, intended as the title page of a set of two or three volumes, is not quoted in Pummer’s Bibliography of the Samaritans, and is not in the reprint of Vilmar’s edition. It seems to be generally unknown. Here it is. The words are printed in capitals in the original, as on the second title page. Abulfathi Annales Samaritani quos Arabice Edidit cum Prolegominis Latine Vertit et Commentario 245 Illustravit Eduardus Vilmar. Very little was published by him afterwards. He died young, at 39, on 30/3/1872. I wonder, then, if he was too sick in 1865 to do a proper revision. 50 The Arabic text edited by P. L. Stenhouse as a doctoral thesis at Sydney University in 1980 has never been published. 51 Stenhouse did not claim to collate all the mss. in full, but there are still a few omissions and errors in the collation of his constant witnesses in important places, and there are some difficult places where all the mss. should have been used but were not. See above p. 120 and p. 121 on 163:5 on the correct form of a name as reproduced by Khaḍir, p. 122 on A.F. 163:5 -- 6 in mss. AL 1 J. See p. 142 note 32 on 155:1 – 2, and p. 142 on 156:14 – 15. He contradicts himself on whether A (his siglum F) is a constant witness. Compare vol. 1 ch. 3 pp. 24 -- 25 against ch. 4 p. 5. In fact he misses many important readings of this ms. See the examples of AF 155:1 – 2 and 156:14 – 15 just mentioned. These examples will do. Despite his claim to have used P (his siglum M) when necessary in ch. 2 of vol. 1, the fact is that it is never used where it would be helpful. This can be seen throughout, but an unmistakable bit of proof can be seen in the collations in the notes to the apparatus to page 169 line 10 of his text, vol. 3 p. 157, Vilmar 157:2, where it is claimed that the readings of all mss. have been quoted. Ms. A (Stenhouse’s siglum F) has the correct reading ‫ ﯾﻘﺒﺮو‬here, though P (Stenhouse M) has an acceptable alternative with ‫ ﯾﻘﺒﺮ‬if read as being in the passive voice. The reading attributed to ms. P (his M) here is false. All other mss. go back to an ancient exemplar with the dots unclear or missing on the second and third letters. See my article Transmission, section 4. 52 There are other mistakes in the collations. Specially serious examples are P51FP51F P A good quality analogue reprint of this book is distributed by Gyan Books in Delhi. ISBN 9 789333 618502. The occasional explanatory rewordings of a sentence or phrase by Khaḍir bin Isḥâq in the Comprehensive History ‫ اﻟﺘﺎرﯾﺦ اﻟﺸﺎﻣﻞ‬are often helpful. 50 I have examined the exemplar legally deposited in Sydney University Library on and off since 1983 and made photocopies as needed. For about five years it has been possible to get three pdf files of the three vols. from the library. My copies dated 18th May 2019 were the first ever, and I was charged accordingly for the labour of the initial page by page photographing of the pages of the bound volumes. This date will reappear on all future reproductions. It must be wondered, then, what the authors that worked with the translation over the years but claimed to have used the thesis along with it actually had in their hands. The microfiche offered by the Mandelbaum Trust (not Sydney University Library) was sold out by 1985. The microfiche is unusable anyway because the apparatus is not under the text but in separate volumes. This is workable though awkward when handling the three original bound volumes in the library, but to use the microfiche you would need to have two microfiche readers side by side. Otherwise you would need a complete printed copy of the collating base ms. D (Stenhouse’s H) to hand, with Stenhouse’s own new inexplicably different page numbering put in by hand page by page. Quite a few authors claiming to have used this thesis along with the translation over the years have actually only used the translation, as can be seen from blunders. I have been told reproachfully and smugly in writing over the years that I don’t know how to get stuff and they used a pdf from Sydney University Library (definitely not a microfiche) over the years i.e. well before May 2019 and I should have done the same. 52 The list of readings in the mss. in the list in the notes to the apparatus just mentioned is inaccurate in regard to the dotting of the letters in the word following wa-min. Stenhouse has put dots on letters that are undotted and therefore ambiguous, and there are a few other details. Correct transcriptions are in my article. The initial flourish before the second letter, wrongly read as a yâ’ in some mss. and written as an undotted letter in others, is ancient, since attested in mss. of both recensions, though not D (Stenhouse H). Only the Comprehensive History by Khaḍir and the Hebrew 51 246 recorded above p. 114 on 72:16 mss. SB, note 27 on p. 116 on 72:16, and p. 122 on 163:5 – 6 ms. A. Wherever textual differences between the mss. matter or might conceivably matter, all information is given by me, from my own collations. Conclusions can always be drawn e silentio. 53 The reader can find references to this unpublished thesis in Stenhouse’s translation, and page nos. to that are consistently given in this monograph. Stenhouse gives a table of correspondence of page nos. between his edition and Vilmar’s at the end of vol. 1 of his work. There are three volumes. 54 There is a published translation by Stenhouse. The Kitāb al-Tarīkh [sic] of Abū ’l-Fatḥ, Sydney 1985. Despite what is said by Stenhouse in his introduction, this translation does not reflect the information in the thesis, and is therefore consistently misleading. At 81:10 (Stenhouse p. 108 line 16) he copies a misreading of a name in one ms. by Vilmar and then speculates on historical events without taking account of the context. His own collations are wrong in this place. More importantly, he does not tell the reader that the reading he chooses, if it were attested, would only be attested in one sub-group of one recension, and that there is stronger evidence for another reading. The speculation on the identification of this person as John Hyrcanus is unscholarly, because the reader is led to believe the form of the name to be certain and the mss. to be unanimous. Later authors on historical themes have accepted all this as a datum. See above p. 116 with note 27. The translation at 157:2 follows obvious nonsense printed by Vilmar. (References in the previous paragraph). A.F. says nothing about water or people covering their bodies. He is talking about funeral customs ! Vilmar wrongly copied the error al-mâ “the water” in some mss. instead of lammâ “when” and Stenhouse copies Vilmar against the ms. evidence. The translation gives the reader no conception of the uncertainty of the text here. The solution is in translation have this word completely right. Neither are used by Stenhouse in this place, with farreaching serious consequences. See below, in the Bibliography, on the Comprehensive History. The Stuttgart ms. is incomplete. It was copied out by someone not knowing how to read Samaritan Hebrew letters, from ms. D (Stenhouse H). (Stenhouse thesis vol. 1 ch. 2 pp. 9 – 11 and ch. 3 pp. 18 – 19). Looking at Stenhouse’s incomplete collation, I have not found one single place where this ms. has a unique reading of any value. All are changes by the copyist, mostly wrong, all pointless. There are worthless pseudo-corrections of the language. The copyist miscopies the title Rabbîs as Ra’îs with a hamzah, showing he does not know what it means --- and confirming he is not a Samaritan. 53 The reference to a fourth volume with a translation in Pummer’s Bibliography of the Samaritans is false. He believed a story bruited about by Crown, the director of the private Jewish organisation linked to Sydney University that published the translation, claiming the translation to be from a critically established Arabic text. Stenhouse’s published translation was a translation done years earlier for the degree of M.A. For this he had used photographs of ms. D but had not had photographs of any other mss. That translation follows what is printed by Vilmar except where it uses a reading of ms. D inferior to what is printed by Vilmar. The translation was published after the doctoral thesis was written but was not revised for publication. More footnotes were added unsystematically. If you read carefully, Stenhouse is careful to say say what would let him say he had never said the translation used the results of the doctoral thesis if asked directly, while at the same time carefully mentioning the doctoral thesis enough to make any unforewarned reader think he used a critically established text. Crown oversaw the whole work of translation years before step by step. Sydney University approved the project for the doctoral thesis with Crown as one of the academic supervisors. Crown spruiked the published translation as being based on a critically established text when it came out. Stenhouse translates from a text worse than Vilmar’s, by nearly always following ms. D, which is not the best ms. anyway, even where it must be wrong. 54 247 my article Transmission, section 4. See again above p. 142 note 32 on 155:1 – 2. Again pp. 142 -- 143 on 156:14 -- 15. What is translated there by Stenhouse is a speculative correction in one ms. of a scribe’s adjustment to another speculative adjustment in another ms. to a misreading in another ms., where the other mss. have a clear meaning obviously original. This error is what was printed by Vilmar. Stenhouse follows this in the translation, because it is the reading of D (his H), his collating base. There is no note telling the reader that the reading is contradicted by every other witness, or telling the reader what the reading of all other witnesses is. Conclusive proof that the translation was made before the thesis was written and not always corrected later on will be seen by comparing the treatment of A.F. 155:1 – 2 in the translation along with its note against the thesis with its notes to the apparatus. The translation follows Vilmar and contradicts Stenhouse’s own conclusions in the thesis. On this see above note 32 p. 142. See above p. 120 on Stenhouse’s note 1065a on A.F. 163:5 and his translation p. 228. The translation is contradicted by the thesis. See above p. 110 on A.F. 171:14 – 15, where the translation and note follow Vilmar against all mss. (including Stenhouse’s collating base). There have been some adjustments of the notes to the translation, but they still constantly leave out information needed by the reader to see that the text is uncertain, or information that would strongly indicate that another reading was better supported. In a similar way, nearly all the significant differences between the recensions are unmentioned. See above p. 115 and note 24, p. 115 on 72:11 – 16 and pp. 119 – 120 on 163:5 – 6 and p. 143 on 156:14 -- 15 ms. A. The last is not in the thesis either. The second is compounded by insertion of the name Dusis against the mss. and against the thesis, as well as incomplete and erroneous collation in the thesis. When it is claimed that the translation follows the critical edition in the thesis, what this means in reality is that it follows the ms. used as the collating base in the thesis, whether its reading is possible or not, except where it follows Vilmar against all mss. See specially A.F. 156:14 – 15 mentioned above. The Arabic behind the translation is thus not as good as Vilmar’s printing. The reader is misled in various other ways. References to the Torah and allusions to it are not recognised, as I have shown in previous articles. There is negligible knowledge of Judaism. See above note 24 p. 114 on A.F. 72:7 -- 16 on the acceptance of sacrifices and note 25 on p. 115 on kinds of sacrifices at A.F. 27:2 – 4 and p. 145 on A.F. at 156:8 on Torah scrolls. Basic realia are not familiar. See above p. 194 on 39:17. Judgment is constantly lacking. See note 24 p. 115 again on the acceptance of sacrifices as well as the self-contradiction in the translation on whether sacrifices were offered, and p. 145 on Torah scrolls again. Absence of rationality is frequent. Note 817 shows that the well known town of Boṣrah in the territory of Reuben is confused with Baṣrah in Iraq leading to the belief that the territory of the two and a half Israelite tribes across the Jordan was in Iraq. See p. 37. See pp. 120 middle – 122 on 163:5 – 7 for a big set of illogical mistakes. The ordinary word ‫ واﺻﺤﺎﺑﮫ‬meaning “and his followers” at 163:5 is made to mean enchantments. The steps include changing the Arabic verb, incomplete collation, not recognising a proper name that had been recognised by Vilmar and inserting the definite prefix to disguise it as a common noun, irrational irrelevant false assertions about the meaning of an unrelated Hebrew word, inserting the name Dusis against the mss. and against the thesis, not noticing an explanatory reference to the Torah, and not noticing explanatory expansions in some mss. Read the details of the mechanism right through as a warning. The syntax has been misunderstood in the next sentence. In 248 the translation, his ms. Y (my siglum is the same) is twice listed as being in Boston and at Yale University at the same time and twice given the same wrong reference, but in the thesis vol. 1 ch. 2 p. 18 the location is correct and the reference is correct. His ms. N (my siglum the same) has been given an inadequate reference and the name of the holding institution is not quite right. (Pages xxi -- xxii of the translation). Correct reference to the specific collection but with a different and worse mistake in the name of the library is given in the thesis vol. 1 ch. 2 p. 21. These two examples add more evidence that the translation was composed before the thesis and not seriously revised. Ignorance of Arabic syntax, with absence of Sprachgefühl, show up constantly. See only as examples note 24 p. 115 again on the grammatical form of two negative verbs at 72:7– 16 and again p. 130 on how he does not know how to recognise that a verb is negative at 162:16 --- 163:1, and pp. 120 – 123 on 163:5 – 7 and p. 92 on 39:7, and p. 194 on a whole sentence at 39:17. See also my chapter Miqra, notes 47, 51, 89, 90, 91; again in my articles Transmission and The First Notice and The Third Notice. There are constant misunderstanding of words and phrases from misuse of a dictionary, apparently Hava’s. (Bowman does the same). There is more, but this will have to do. ‫ להג הרבה יגיעת בשר‬. Mind you, in a lot of places Sergio Noja could not tell the difference between positive and negative verbs, or the difference between positive and conditional mood, when making his partial Italian translation of the Kitâb al-Kâfi, so it is no wonder he never noticed when Stenhouse could not understand what A.F. had written. That explains why Crown replaced Michael Carter, who does know Arabic and was at Sydney University at the time, by Segio Noja as joint supervisor of Stenhouse’s research. It would not have done if Carter had been one of the examiners. Having Noja was safe. I left Sydney University at that time after being there for a year because the set-up was not at university level and association with that place was bad for my academic reputation. Michael Carter went to Harvard. Crown kept telling everyone for years on end that I was working at Sydney University and telling everyone he was the Professor of Semitic Studies and I did research under his direction. Heinz Pohl sent letters to me at that address. He told me so when I met him by accident in Europe. Rudolf Macuch sent a book of his to me at that address, which of course vanished. See the preface to my article La Purification de Jésus on this website, not the preface printed in the article. After that fib stopped working, he told everyone for years on end I was working at Melbourne University, so it would still be hard to find me and no correspondence would get to me. When that stopped working, he told everyone I had stopped working. Here is an example of repeated impossible translation by a long string of authors due to the assumption of some special Samaritan dialect of Arabic and departure from scholarly method, which has caused pervasive damage. In his foreword, p. 5, A.F. lists the histories available to him from the High Priest’s library, but as they are mostly anonymous and untitled he describes them by their outer appearance, script, and language, presumably so they can be located on the shelves. Two are described as ‫ ﻗﻄﻊ اﻟﺒﻠﺪي‬qaṭc al-baladi “ordinary size” or ‫ﺗﺎرﯾﺦ ﻗﻄﻊ اﻟﺒﻠﺪي‬ târîkh qaṭc al-baladi “a history of ordinary size”. This is left untranslated by Stenhouse (p. 4), but comments here and elsewhere show he thinks the second word to be the plural of bilâd ‫ ﺑﻼد‬meaning “country” and supposes these words to the name of a book meaning “the division of countries”. He transcribes qiṭc which is not an Arabic word but correctly baladī. In this impossible interpretation of the word baladi P 249 P Stenhouse follows Ben-Ḥayyim p. 3 = 106, who does not suggest a pronunciation however. It really ought not need to be said that the plural of bilâd is buldân ‫ ﺑﻠﺪان‬. Bonnard or his supervisors go even further on p. 14 by inventing a form bilāday with an alif in the spelling, falsely claiming to copy Ben-Ḥayyim. They too think this word to be the plural of bilâd. 55 Here is the truth. The list of books has been cut drastically by homoiarchon in all the complete mss., but can be restored from St. Petersburg fragments G and in part I. In the full list some of the mss. are described as ordinary “baladi” size “qaṭC ” ‫ ﻗﻄﻊ اﻟﺒﻠﺪي‬, or half ordinary size ‫ ﻧﺼﻒ ﻗﻄﻊ اﻟﺒﻠﺪي‬, or little size. See Jamgotchian’s monograph of 2003, pp. 87 – 88. Bonnard and his supervisors, headed by Joosten, and examiners, headed by Schorch, never read the publicly available facts. Besides, it was a breach of scientific standards not consulting someone with a real knowledge of Arabic, who would have dismissed all this guessing out of hand and come up with the right meaning even without having read Jamgotchian’s work. Stenhouse, Crown, Ben-Ḥayyim, and Bonnard p. 14, all build theories about unknown books listing the tribal divisions of Palestine on this invention, without noticing that A.F. never mentions any tribal boundaries and without thinking either that divisions within Palestine would not be called divisions of countries. A.F. has not made up a new way of forming the plural in Arabic, or a new meaning of the word ‫ ﺑﻼد‬bilâd as if it meant district instead of country. Samaritans write in the standard literary language of their time. This is not classical Arabic, though it is close to it. Neither is it quite the same as modern literary Arabic, though it is close to it. There is no Samaritan Arabic, only readers not following academic method by asking someone with knowledge of Arabic for help. Stefan Schorch keeps saying that when I give advice to get help on what you can’t handle, or when I correct blunders or fiction in published work, it is personal attack. He keeps saying he has nothing to do with me because I make personal attacks. This says a lot about him and his close associates and their attitude to the advancement of knowledge. He says I make personal attacks on my colleagues. I communicate constantly with my colleagues and we give each other information. None of them prefer invention to the normal processes of getting information that is common knowledge. The Arabic language has been thoroughly described, so guessing about its grammar and vocabulary is unnecessary and unproductive and unscientific. The practice is perturbing. Trying to stop the spread of corrections is more perturbing. Some details of spelling in the mss. that have been noticed in academic publications are normal for the period, and remarking on them as if they were unexpected shows that books written by Moslems before modern times have only been read in printed editions. It has been shown that relying on Stenhouse’s translation is unworkable. Read the Arabic or ask someone that can before putting anything using this history in print. The transcription as if there were an alif as in the singular can only be interpreted as an ignorant over-correction, to make the last vowel into a plural suffix. Arabic does not form plurals of nouns by using a suffix the way Hebrew and Aramaic do, and only does this with participles and some feminine nouns. They seem to have made up a piece of grammar saying -ī or ā was a plural suffix not in the grammar books that could be tacked onto a noun, though what was thought is unknowable. What can be said is that basic Arabic grammar was not known and a dictionary was not used, and no-one with knowledge was asked about the grammar. This is not Wissenschaft or even journalism standard. 55 250 Jamgotchian’s translation is accurate but not based on enough mss., so be careful. Stenhouse’s thesis can usually be used for the ms. variants. Ms. S (Stenhouse same siglum) or the old part of ms. B (Stenhouse C) nearly always have the best reading. In a few places work is still needed to restore the correct reading. The Russian translation by my esteemed colleague the late Academician H. S. Jamgotchian of Yerevan must not be overlooked. A. С. Жамкочян, Самаритянская Хроника Aбу-л-Фатха из собрания Российской Национаьной Библиотеки (English title: The Kitab at-Tarikh of Abu ’L-Fath (Samaritan Chronicle 1355 a.D. [sic]) Translated into Russian with Notes by Haroutun Jamgotchian). Moscow 1995. ISBN 5-7262-0203-1. Note that he could never get the microfiche of Stenhouse’s thesis sold under the direction of Crown by the Mandelbaum Trust associated with Sydney University, despite trying, and despite then asking Crown and Stenhouse face to face, including when Stenhouse went to see him to question him about his (Jamgotchian’s) work on his translation when it was in preparation. Crown refused to let me buy it either, but later on I copied whatever I needed of the thesis on paper that was legally deposited in Sydney University Library. Jamgotchian died before I could make a complete copy. In some places Jamgotchian was misled by Vilmar’s collations. Thus he did not know that at 162:15 D has kâf as the second letter in the name Såkte ‫ ﺳﻜﺘﮫ‬or that A has the correct form ‫ طﺒﺮان‬as the name of Såkte’s father at 161:4. See note 20 p. 99. He was seriously misled at 156:14 – 15. See pp. 142 -- 143 above. Again over a whole sentence at 157:2. See above p. 247. Again over the form of a name at 81:10. See p. 116 with note 27. Nevertheless, note what was said above on the overall superiority of Vilmar’s text over the text behind Stenhouse’s translation, even though Vilmar makes some mistakes. Jamgotchian used ms. P (Stenhouse M) and the St. Petersburg fragments for some corrections. This translation eclipses Stenhouse’s because Jamgotchian knew Arabic properly. It is not listed by Pummer in his survey of the field published in 2016. Neither is anything else by Jamgotchian. He had been told of all these in the normal course of activity in the Société d’Etudes samaritaines including as a council member, as well as by Jamgotchian directly. It did not suit the members of the cabal claiming to know everything that could be known about Samaritans for an accurate translation to be known about. The following monograph was ignored by Pummer, Bonnard, Joosten, and Schorch. See above pp. 249 bottom -- 250. A. C. Жамкочян, Древнейшие Фрагменты Арабо-Cамаритянских Хроник из собрания Pоссийской Национальной Библиотеки. (English title: Earliest Fragments of Samaritan Arabic Chronicles in the Russian National Library by Haroutun Jamgotchian). Moscow 2003. ISBN 5-93660-033-5. The sections in A.F. on the Dositheans as edited by Vilmar are reprinted in Isser’s book, with a translation by Lee Scanlon. The translation is mostly accurate, but there are a couple of slips. See Part VI. The excerpts translated by John Bowman consistently show inadequate knowledge of Arabic as well as perturbingly bad judgment. (Samaritan Documents, Pittsburgh U.S.A. 1977). See my book Principles p. 227 for an extended example of both, not as bad as others. My footnote on p. 9 of that book about his kosher fish with feathers says a lot. See p. 223 above on his ignorance of Hebrew in the same context. Bowman constantly misunderstands Arabic words and phrases from misusing Hava’s 251 dictionary. To get some inkling of how weak his command of Arabic was, have a look at the samples of paragraphs of nonsense written by his student, Dorreya ‘Abd el-‘Al, in my book Principles of Samaritan Halachah. It can be seen that she was unable to read connected simple prose. She does not know where each sentence ends. She does not see the relationship between clauses. The paragraphs of translation have no content. Bowman could not see anything wrong. She wrote enough lines over enough pages and got a worthless doctorate from Leeds University. Bowman got the job of Professor of Semitic Studies at Melbourne University by claiming competence in the three Semitic languages taught, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac. He could read straightforward Syriac. He could read Biblical Hebrew with a translation to hand, but was lost without one, as can be seen from the example of his bafflement at the phrase from the Torah mentioned above on p. 223. No-one in the department could handle post-Biblical Hebrew of any period. The Dept. of Semitic Studies changed its name to Dept. of Middle Eastern Studies at Bowman’s insistence. It was closed down a few years after he left because the university administrators saw no use in it. (The Dept. of Semitic Studies at Leeds University was closed down for the same reason). There was no loss and government money was spent on something useful. A good quality Arabic course was set up at Melbourne University in a new department along with good quality new courses on Islam and its history. Hebrew was dropped. Complete photographs of the continuation of the history by A.F. as in ms. C have been published by Milka Levy-Rubin. The Continuatio of the Samaritan Chronicle of Abū l-Fatḥ al-Sāmirī al-Danafī [should be Dinfi]. The Darwin Press, Princeton U.S.A. 2002. There are important historical notes. The translation should not be relied on except for matters of history of government, for reasons shown in detail in my article Social Anomie. Jamgotchian has published three-quarters of what is not printed by Vilmar from fragments in St. Petersburg. A. C. Жамкочян, Петербургские Фрагменты Продолжения “Хроники” Абу-л-Фатха. (English title: St. Petersburg Fragments of the Continuatio of the Samaritan Chronicle of Abū l-Fath al-Danafī [sic] by Jamgotchian H. S.). Moscow 2005. ISBN 5-93660-042-4. A few additional pages in ms. J not the same as in ms. C need investigation. A lot of correct readings in the book by A.F. and its continuation are in my articles mentioned in the Bibliography, along with clarification of the meaning. More textual difficulties are solved here in this work on pp. 20 bottom – 21, p. 99 note 20 twice, pp. 110 -- 111, p. 116 twice, note 27 on p. 116, p. 117 note 28, pp. 117 -- 118 note 29 twice, p. 120, pp. 120 -- 121 note 30, pp. 120 -- 122, p. 130 twice, p. 141, pp. 141 -- 142, p. 143 three times, p. 142 note 32, p. 143 note 33, p. 144 note 34, p. 163, and throughout Part VI. More might come. See my article Transmission section 4 with examples (b) (c) (d) (g) (k) on recensional differences going back to the author himself. See on this p. 143 on 156:14 – 15 ms. A, p. 119 on 157:3 – 4 ms. A, p. 122 on 163:5 – 6, and pp. 114 – 115 on 72:11 – 16 in the two families. See also 161:5 in ms. A. There are more. 252 VIII. 1. SELECT CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY (see also Part VIII) Samaritan Texts (see also under Samaritan Aramaic) ‫חמשה חומשי תורה נוסח יהודי נוסח שומרוני עם הדגשה מדויקת בין שתי הנוסחאות לפי כתב יד שומרוני‬ ‫ ערוכים בידי אברהם ורצון צדקה‬11 ‫( עתיק מן המאה ה‬English title-page: Jewish and Samaritan Version of the Pentateuch). Tel-Aviv, 5 fascicles 1961 -- 1965 or 1 vol. 1966. (The wording on the title-pages is mechanically copied from the Deuteronomy fascicle, which came out first). In Deuteronomy the Abisha Scroll is used, with a ms. by Abi Barakata (late 12th to early 13th c.) for illegible words. This ms. by Abi Barakata was used for the other books. Tal’s edition is not a work of scholarship, though spruiked as definitive. It is taken from what is very likely the worst ms. known to man. Besides this, whole lines or paragraphs or pages have been lifted from some other unknown ms. without letting on. The reader is not told that the extensive vocalisation is left out. Leaving it out hides where a different ms. is being copied. Some use of the Abisha scroll in Deuteronomy is acknowledged, but the reader is not told the extent of use of some other unknown manuscript throughout the whole book. Misrepresented by silence by Schorch in his edition of Leviticus. See my article Editing and Using the Samaritan Pentateuch in BiOr vol. LXXVII, 2020, parts 1 / 2, cols. 5 -- 26. Shoulson copies Tal, though with sporadic correction by Benyamim Tsedaka. Baron von Gall’s edition has not been superseded and was used by me. Chronicon Samaritanum, Arabice conscriptum, cui titulus est Liber Josuae, ed. T. G. J. Juynboll, Leyden 1848. There is a Latin translation. Some authors have carelessly confused the dating of the original material with a long dreary late insertion. Juynboll only had a single ms. to work with, which bristles with errors. All other known mss. are bad as well, but different mss. are corrupt in different places. The ms. of this book used by A.F. was very good. Juynboll’s translation, introduction, and notes are still useful. The core original booklet is chapters 9 – 25 and 39 – 42 (or perhaps 43), which are an account of the entry into Canaan, the Time of Favour, and the end of the Time of Favour. The compiler and translator says it is an Arabic translation of an Aramaic translation of a Hebrew booklet. The first to prove that these were the words recorded in the manuscripts was Jamgotchian in his book of 2003. I added more evidence in my article Transmission. Juynboll’s ms. has a miscopying by homoioteleuton saying the book was translated from Hebrew. All authors have dismissed the compiler’s statement because all have copied Juynboll’s edition without reference to the mss. or without using Jamgotchian’s book or my article. Pummer in his book of 2016 p. 244 misrepresents Jamgotchian’s findings, ignores his book, and ignores my article, which he had been given at his own request before publication and used in a conference in Leiden. I have shown the purpose of the ending of the original booklet (as opposed to the historical appendixes) to have been to set out the doctrine of the occultation of the Mosaic Tabernacle and its paraphernalia in ambiguous wording acceptable to both factions, later called Sebuaeans and Dositheans. There are excerpts from a lost history older than A.F. attached at the end in the mss., not the same in each ms. See above pp. 16 – 17 middle, p. 20 (though the lost history is badly wrong here), p. 123 twice, and pp. 163 – 164 (where the same mistake mentioned on p. 20 is explained). The extent of the prefatory text varies in the mss. There is an English translation: O. T. Crane, The Samaritan Chronicle or the Book of Joshua Son of Nun. New York, 1890. This is 253 based on Juynboll’s edition, along with one other ms. The translator departs from Juynboll’s text or translation in some places. See my article Transmission. The Comprehensive History, ‫ اﻟﺘﺎرﯾﺦ اﻟﺸﺎﻣﻞ‬by Khaḍir bin Isḥâq ‫פינחס בן יצחק‬ Fînẩås ban Yêṣẩåq was composed in 1875 and supplemented a few years later. The information on authorship and date is at the end of the original book, before a few supplementary pages. It was not noticed by Stenhouse (translation of A.F. p. xxii), though Yahuda and Ben-Ḥayyim read it. The narrative goes right up to the year of completion. The first mss. to be written out, including the one used by Yahuda, are untitled. The title seems to first appear in mss. written out by the author’s son, Nâji bin Khaḍir. It was first identified in print by A. S. Yahuda in 1908, again by BenḤayyim in 1970, and again by me in my article Transmission. Pummer in his book of 2016 leaves out any mention of this book in his supposedly complete descriptions of Samaritan chronicles on pp. 241 -- 249. He knew of the book, as can be seen from the earlier book Die Samaritaner, which summarises Ben-Ḥayyim’s article, but he followed the entry in the Companion to Samaritan Studies. See below on the article by Yahuda. In my book Principles, p. 46, are listed the library references of eight mss. of this book, but there are many more. Stenhouse thinks the seven mss. he lists to be various different books, showing that only one has been read, since they are all as alike as peas in a pod. He terms these mss. Fam B* of A.F. Four have been given wrong references, making it doubtful whether they have been seen. This book preserves a good text of A.F. close to A or H or P with some unique or nearly unique correct readings. See the outstanding examples of taḥayyulhum at A.F. 157:2 in section 4 of my article Transmission and ‫ סכתה‬at A.F. 163:5 above pp. 120 --121. There are important data and narratives about Samaritan history otherwise unknown from the Persian period onwards that can be seen to be genuine. See Ben-Ḥayyim’s article, and see p. 12, p. 20, p. 95 note 20, and p. 121. There is no contamination from MT. Yahuda showed at length that the extensive quotations of the MT in the Samaritan Hebrew Joshua book were not taken from the book by Khaḍir but inserted by the translator of the work of Khaḍir into Hebrew. See his p. 903 bottom and the context and p. 904 bottom and the context. On the other hand, not quite everything in this book by Khaḍir is old or Samaritan or even worth having. There is some information on Jesus and the apostles taken from A.F. (107:7 – 108, Stenhouse p. 147), corrected from common knowledge, added to from the author’s own observations and musings on common knowledge, and then expanded from wellknown Christian historical writings (likely by way of modern textbooks) but also from well-known late Jewish fiction explicitly said to be by way of Jewish informants. For the expanded Hebrew version of 1908 all this was expanded with more from wellknown late Jewish fiction and well-known Christian historical writings along with a paraphrase from the gospels, explicitly said to be taken from Jews, well chosen to boost sales to foreigners. Some modern authors have taken these jottings seriously. The two explicit statements that some information about Jesus and Christianity came directly from Jews ought to have been enough. A comparison of the expanded Hebrew book of 1908 with the original Arabic book by Khaḍir would have been conclusive. This section of the book of 1908 has been published with the claim that it is a historical record. (John Macdonald and A. J. B. Higgins, The Beginnings of Christianity according to the Samaritans, NTS vol. 18, 1971 / 72, pp. 54 – 80; also S. J. Isser, Jesus in the Samaritan Chronicles, JJS vol. 32, 1981, pp. 166 – 194. Jürgen Zangenberg treated it seriously in his collection). This later Hebrew version of 1904 and extended in 1908 spruiked by some modern authors as if written from ancient 254 tradition is full of additions from the Jewish scriptures and other well-known books that will stand out for any competent reader. The information has been available for a long while. See Yahuda’s article on the Joshua section from 1904, and Ben-Ḥayyim’s on the whole book from 1908. There is an edition of the first part of the book of 1908 by John Macdonald. The Samaritan Chronicle No. II (or: Sepher Ha-Yamim). From Joshua to Nebuchadnezzar. BZAW 107. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1969. Macdonald lists the article by Yahuda but ignores it. He copies Crown’s method. The Hebrew Joshua book published by Niessen is a translation of the Joshua section of the Comprehensive History. Although Yahuda and Ben-Ḥayyim did not know of the book published by Niessen, their proofs of the origin of the Hebrew book published by Gaster and Macdonald will all apply to his book right down to details, including the personal record by A.F. reproduced by Khaḍir of his own presence at a public viewing of the Abisha scroll, ignored by Niessen. Niessen lists Yahuda’s article and BenḤayyim’s article and ignores both. Chronicle Adler is a condensed and sometimes tendentiously selective or altered translation of the Comprehensive History, and does not use A.F. or the Tûlẩdå directly, as commonly supposed. Serious examples of falsification because of late ideology are quoted above, p. 17 and p. 138. See also p. 261 on how it contradicts its source, the Comprehensive History, as well as contradicting A.F., and misled Magen. Published as Une nouvelle chronique samaritaine, ed. Elkan Adler and Max Séligsohn. REJ vol. 44, 1902, pp. 188 – 122; vol. 45, 1902, pp. 70 – 98 and 223 – 254; vol. 46, 1903, pp. 123 – 146. Appeared as a separate volume, Paris 1903. See my article Transmission on this whole paragraph. ,‫צבי‬-‫ הוצאת יד יצחק בן‬.‫ ההדיר משה פלורנטין‬.‫ פירוש‬.‫תרגום‬. ‫ מקור‬.‫ כרוניקה שומרונית‬.‫התולדה‬ ISBN 965–217–169--7. .‫ירושלים תש"ס‬ ‫ האקדמיה‬.‫ ההדיר לפי כתבי יד וצירף מבוא חסיב שחאדה‬.‫התרגום הערבי לנוסח התורה של השומרונים‬ ‫ اﻟﺘﺮﺟﻤﺔ اﻟﻌﺮﺑﯿﺔ اﺗﻮراة‬.‫ תשס"ב‬-- ‫ כרכים תש"ן‬2 .‫ ירושלים‬.‫הלאומית הישראילית למדעים‬ . ISBN 965-208-098-6; . ۲۰۰۱ – ۱۹۸۹ ‫ اﻟﻘﺪس‬.‫ ﺣﻘﻘﮭﺎ وﻗﺪم ﻟﮭﺎ ﺣﺴﯿﺐ ﺷﺤﺎده‬.‫اﻟﺴﺎﻣﺮﯾﯿﻦ‬ 965-208-157-4. Adalbert Merx, Der Messias oder Ta’eb der Samaritaner nach bisher unbekannten Quellen. BZAW XVII. Gießen 1909. 2. Samaritan Aramaic and Hebrew ‫ עברית וארמית נוסח שומרון‬,‫חיים‬-‫( זאב בן‬English title-page: The Literary and Oral Tradition of Hebrew and Aramaic amongst the Samaritans). 5 vols. in 6 parts. The Academy of the Hebrew Language. Jerusalem 1957 – 1977. See vol. III part 2, 1967, the old Aramaic hymns. The translation of vol. V on Hebrew grammar put out by Tal in 2000 with the claim of his “assistance” brings in numerous errors. The translation of the first half is unusable. See my review in BiOr LX, 2003, cols. 422 – 428, reproduced on this website. See below. ‫ תיבת מרקה והיא אסופת מדרשים שומרוניים‬,‫חיים‬-‫( זאב בן‬English title-page: ‫( תיבת מרקה‬sic, in Hebrew letters) [Tībåt Mårqe] (sic, in Roman letters in square brackets) A 255 Collection of Samaritan Midrashim). Jerusalem 1988. Shortly afterwards Benyamim Tsedaka announced in his periodical his identification of ms. leaves in St. Petersburg with Ben-Ḥayyim’s incomplete ms. K, which has a unique text-form. Tal rejected the identification. An edition of these leaves by Tal appeared in 2019. Benyamim Tsedaka is not mentioned in the foreword. The new material was not relevant to this book. A separate study of the outlook of both recensions is needed. It would be a mistake to assume the text of ms. K is older or better in every place. ‫( התרגום השומרוני לתורה‬English title-page: The Samaritan Targum of the Torah). Ed. Abraham Tal. 3 vols. Tel Aviv University, 1980 – 1983. Rudolf Macuch, Grammatik des samaritanischen Hebräisch. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1969. More systematic and detailed than Ben-Ḥayyim’s vol. V and overall better written and set out, but both are needed for serious work. Rudolf Macuch, Grammatik des samaritanischen Aramäisch. De Gruyter, Berlin 1982. The definitive work. .‫ תשע"ג‬,‫ ירושלים‬.‫ מוסד ביאליק‬.‫ תחביר הצורות של הארמית השומרונית‬,‫ כריסטיאן שטאדל‬. ISBN 978-965-536-114-8. (English title-page. Christian Stadel, The Morphosyntax of Samaritan Aramaic. 2013). A useful addition to the information in Macuch’s book. Abraham Tal, A Dictionary of Samaritan Aramaic (2 vols.). Brill, Leiden, 2000. With a couple of exceptions, only a part of the published liturgy has been collated, the selection by Ben-Ḥayyim. Incomplete, but this would be expected in a first effort. Some examples picked up in the course of reading, without searching. Pp. 150 – 151 ‫ עכר‬twice; p. 164 ‫ ; דריה‬p. 166 ‫ ; מערב‬p. 166 ‫ יוסף‬three times; p. 198 ‫; משתלחם‬ p. 201 ‫ ; בעכר‬p. 203 ‫ ; חופה‬p. 206 ‫ ; אמץ‬p. 213 the meaning of the verb ‫ בטל‬qal and pacel. The word ‫ רבץ‬rêbåṣ, the cognate of the Hebrew form Râbeṣ ‫ רביץ‬and the Arabic form Rabbîs ‫رﺑﯿﺲ‬, which occurs in the Tûlẩdå, is not recorded. See my article Social Anomie. The word ‫ ציבעד‬is recorded as ‫ מציבעד‬at Asâṭîr XI:14, but the form without the < ‫ > מ‬in Gaster’s two mss., which have ‫ וציבעד‬instead, and the construction ‫ כציבעד‬in F, and the construction along with phonetic change ‫ כזיבעד‬in S at the same place, are not entered. (Bonnard does not record this last form). The entry ‫ גג‬is a ghostword. Tal has mistaken ‫ גג‬, the equivalent of an asterisk marking a phrase the scribe thinks ought to be moved in ch. XII of the Asâṭîr, for a word, the proper noun Gog, not known in the Samaritan reading tradition of the Torah but only in the Jewish reading tradition. The name Gog would not be written defectively in the Jewish tradition. The word ‫ קרמט‬at XI:12 is Greek, not Arabic. The meaning given to ‫ בדמסין‬at XII:10 is contradicted by the meaning in Greek and the way Aramaic makes plurals of Greek words. See the Annotations. The meaning of “shore” given to ‫ חופה‬at XII:10 as if it were a borrowing from Arabic makes no sense in the context. Besides this the cognate Arabic word does not mean what Tal thinks it does, and means the same as the Aramaic word. There are dictionaries. Tal is, however, less wrong than Ben-Ḥayyim, who carelessly said the Arabic cognate meant “district”, and used this word as evidence of borrowing from Arabic and thus a late date. Bonnard has correctly seen it as native Aramaic, and seen the general meaning of “edge”, though not the exact meaning. The ancient commercial legal term 256 ‫ מערב‬in XII:20 was already known from the Syropalestinian version of the NT. The significance of the corresponding Greek term of commercial law, itself borrowed from Phoenician, as used by Paul in an important theological argument, is well known. This word is left out and so evidence of antiquity is lost. It is not even listed as unexplained. See the Annotations. The word ‫ קפטאי‬showing antiquity is left out. It is not even listed as unexplained. See my Foreword p. III. The word ‫ ערלתו‬at XII:18 is left out and not even listed as unexplained. This word is evidence of antiquity by its imitation of the Greek (and general Indo-European) use of an abstract noun to denote a collectivity of persons. This is not Semitic usage. The morphology of the word is not normal Aramaic and imitates Greek morphology. The form and usage are obviously artificial but the author expected to be understood. The name ‫בבא‬ is left out. This is not an oversight. For the reason, see note 38 on p. 162. Abraham Tal, In Search of Late Samaritan Aramaic. Aramaic Studies, vol. 7 part 2, 2009, pp. 163 – 188. Abraham Tal, Samaritan Aramaic. (Lehrbücher Orientalischer Sprachen III / 2). Ugarit Verlag, Münster, 2013. A primer for beginners with a chrestomathy. Often misused as a reference grammar, with predictable consequences. Only mentioned here to make sure the reader does not confuse it with the work by Macuch, which is not mentioned in the supposed complete survey from 2016 by Pummer. 3. Samaritan Theology and History F. M. Abel, Histoire de la Palestine depuis la conquête d’Alexandre jusqu’à l’invasion arabe. 2 t. Gabalda, Paris, 1952. Not superseded for political history. ?‫ נביאים ראשונים נוסח שומרון‬,‫חיים‬-‫ זאב בן‬. Leshonenu vol. 35, 1970, pp. 292 – 302. Extends Yahuda’s findings on the Hebrew Joshua book to the whole book published in part by Macdonald under the name Chronicle II. Misrepresented by Pummer in the book of 2016. See note 39 p. 164. Karlmann Beyschlag, Simon Magus und die christliche Gnosis. WUNT 16. J. C. B. Mohr, Tübingen, 1974. Fundamentally flawed, but with useful observations. .‫ ירושלים תשס"ו‬.‫יהודיים מימי הביניים‬-‫ מילון לטקסטים ערביים‬,‫ יהושע בלאו‬. Used once in Part VI. I. R. M. Bóid, Use, Authority and Exegesis of Mikra in the Samaritan Tradition. In Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity. Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum CRINT Part Two, vol. 1. Chapter XVI, pp. 595 – 633. Van Gorcum, Assen / Maastricht and Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1988. Now put out by Brill’s. I. R. M. Bóid, Principles of Samaritan Halachah. E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1989. 257 I. R. M. Bóid, A Samaritan Broadside from the Mid Second Century A.D. ABR [the Australian Biblical Review] vol. 51, 2003, pp. 26 – 36. On the genuineness of the Samaritan anti-Christian missionary tract used by Kelsos (aside from the Jewish proem tacked on later). Partly updated above p. 37. Only parts are quoted in the article. There is a need for a study of the whole tract in the light of the findings in this book. Origen nearly always quotes without abridging, so we have the whole tract. I. R. M. Bóid, The Transmission of the Samaritan Joshua-Judges. DS-NELL [Dutch Studies Published by NELL] (Leiden) vol. VI no. 1, 2004, pp. 1--30. ISSN 1382323X. Includes studies in the text of A.F. beyond the Joshua-Judges part. I. R. M. Bóid, The First Notice of the Dositheans by Abu ’l-Fatḥ bin Abi ’l-Ḥasan adDinfi. BiOr vol. LXV nos. 3 – 4, 2008, columns 356 – 378. I. R. M. Bóid, Social Anomie in the First Three Centuries of Islam, by a Native of Nablus. BiOr vol. LXVI nos. 1 -- 2, 2009, cols. 20 -- 40. On the continuation of A.F. I. R. M. Bóid, Editing and Using the Samaritan Pentateuch, BiOr vol. LXXVII nos. 1 – 2, 2020, cols. 5 – 26. I. R. M. Bóid, Restoring the Traditional Linkage between Samaritan and Foreign Dating. 2024. On the Academia and ResearchGate websites. Among other things, the circumstances of the massacre of Samaritans by Pontius Pilate in 35 A.D. are clarified and the date is settled, and new evidence is given for the antiquity of the Asâṭîr. I. R. M. Bóid, An Ancient Form of the Samaritan Concept of the Tâ’eb. January 2025. On the RessearchGate and Academia websites. Gives evidence from the first century A.D. Josef Frickel, Die “Apophasis Megale“ in Hippolyt’s Refutatio (VI:9 – 180). Eine Paraphrase zur Apophasis Simons. OCA 182. Rome 1968. Does not try to distinguish between a gnostic system (in the loose sense) known to Hippolytus, on one hand, and the incompatible material known to Hippolytus that is consistent with the religion of Israel and uses the Torah in a completely different way, on the other hand, thereby failing the requirements of scientific method by ignoring data. The material from the Apóphasis Megálē is marked off by Hippolytus himself, and easily distinguishable anyway. This is standard basic source criticism. The story that became dogma not to be questioned is not questioned, and the book was officially approved by Rome. G. Scott Gleaves, Did Jesus Speak Greek? The Emerging Evidence of Greek Dominance in First-Century Palestine. Pickwick Publications, USA, 2015. It is proven that Greek was widely used by all components and levels of the population. Stephen Haar, Simon Magus: The First Gnostic? BZNTW 119, Berlin 2003. Not much source criticism. Argues that Simon invented Gnosticism starting from Samaritan religion, but without understanding Samaritan religion as being Israelite, going against irrefutably documented common knowledge. The argument for the process of origin of Gnosticism therefore necessarily has breaks in it. Makes the same 258 mistake as Frickel and Salles-Dabadie in not noticing the clearly marked distinction between the summaries and quotations of Simon’s book and the canonised Christian story about him. Unable to read Ben-Ḥayyim’s edition of Mårqe or his collection of liturgy, but did not seek advice. Guesses without evidence and against known history, e.g. that Samaritans copied Iranian religion, which itself is not properly known to him, so that incompatibility is not noticed. Unaware of the the range of possibilities within Judaism including within Rabbinic Judaism. No research written in Hebrew has been read, but the fact is not mentioned and no reason given. Listed here only as a warning. From a doctoral thesis supervised by the late Michael Lattke in Queensland. Heinrich Hammer, Traktat vom Samaritanermessias: Studien zur Existenz und Abstammung Jesu. Bonn 1913. The usual Jewish fictions about Samaritans get in the way of examination in the usual way. The main thesis that Jesus was a Samaritan is impossible from Jesus’s concern with Jerusalem. Numerous untenable arguments mixed in with numerous useful observations. Proves that the father of John the Baptist officiated in the Samaritan sanctuary. See above p. 67. Evidence of some kinds of connection of Jesus with Samaritans remains after critical sifting. .1952 .111 – 96 ,23 ‫ תרביץ כרך‬.‫ מושג ה"תהב" בדת השומרונית‬,‫מנחם הרן‬. Highly original. Clear tracing of the development of the concept. S. J. Isser, The Dositheans. E. J. Brill, Leiden 1976. See my book Principles on the unreliability of everything on halachah or doctrine whether Samaritan or Jewish. Hans Kippenberg, Ein Gebetbuch für den samaritanischen Synagogendienst aus dem 2. Jh. n. Chr. ZDPV vol. 84, 1968 – 1969, pp. 76 – 103. On the Durrân hymns. Corrects Ben-Ḥayyim’s confusion between the Durrân and cAmråm Dẩre. Hans Kippenberg, Garizim und Synagogue. Traditionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur samaritanische Religion der aramäischen Periode. De Gruyter, Berlin, 1971. A. F. J. Klijn and G. J. Reinink, Patristic Evidence for Jewish-Christian Sects. E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1973. See pp. 162 -- 163 and 176 – 195 on the Samaritan Ebionites. Gary Knoppers, Jews and Samaritans. The Origins and History of their Early Relations. O.U.P. New York, 2013. Not relevant to the period treated in this study, but useful in giving perspective and getting rid of some old phantoms and fictions. Yitzhak Magen, Haggai Misgav, and Levana Tsefania, Mount Gerizim Excavations. Volume 1: The Aramaic, Hebrew, and Samaritan Inscriptions. Yizhak Magen, Mount Gerizim Excavations. Vol. 2. A Temple City. Israel Antiquities Authority, Jerusalem, 2004 and 2008. A fundamental advance in archaeology, but not adequately connected with history. See the next entry. Yitzhak Magen, The Samaritans and the Good Samaritan. Israel Antiquities Authority, Jerusalem, 2008. The author has not read A.F. anywhere at all. On p. 54 column 1, on the destruction of the sanctuary in the time of the emperor Zēnōn, he 259 falsely says “the Samaritan sources” “hint” “neither in detail nor at length” at the replacing of a “synagogue” with a church, flatly contradicting A.F. and showing he has not read the account by Mor. His real source here is Chronicle Adler. The date is badly wrong. He does not know Chronicle Adler left out any mention of the sanctuary out of late nineteenth century ideology, going against its source, the Comprehensive History --- which he has never heard of. He attributes to Procopius of Caesarea the statement that the Mountain was not considered holy, the opposite of what Procopius said. He then treats this supposed statement as fact about Samaritans. The claims on p. 45 that Samaritans were barred from Mt. Gerizim and the Mountain was fortified to make sure and this was why they were massacred by Pilate when they wanted to go up are made without evidence. The question of how the Samaritan Senate could have made a protest with devastating effect if going up the Mountain was not normal is not raised. The evidence that the Samaritans were treated well by Pagan Rome is ignored. See his p. 29 last two lines saying Samaritans were absent from Mt. Gerizim for more than 400 years from 111 B.C. and see above pp. 108 -- 110 and pp. 12 bottom – 14 top on the contrary evidence of A.F., whom he has not read. The evidence is available in translation in Mor’s book. On p. 13 column 2 middle Josephus’s careful misrepresentation that the Samaritan sanctuary was on the plan of the Jerusalem temple is uncritically taken over by him because of not having seen A.F. See above pp. 113 bottom – 114 top. Claims without evidence that religious teaching including on halachah was only ever done by Priests at any time in history, showing he has never heard of any of the authoritative books, not even the Ṭubâkh and the Kâfi. A new decision on halachah for a new situation reached by discussion amongst scholars could only become authoritative by approval of the High Priest, but that is a different question. In practice there can be differences on details in the practice of different communities, and this is seen as authoritative by usage immemorial. Any scholar can record this, and their writings, such as the two just mentioned, have authority. There is a lot on this in the Conclusions of my book Principles of Samaritan Halachah and my chapter Mikra. Described in detail here as a warning, being typical of much writing without knowledge in academic publications, Useful on artefacts and realia. G. R. S. Mead, Simon Magus. An Essay on the Founder of Simonianism. Based on the Ancient Sources with a Re-evaluation of his Philosophy and Teachings. London 1892. Convenient collection of the original sources in a sensitive English translation, though with only an inadequate mention of the Clementine book. He willingly believed the Christian stories about Helen, because of his own Weltanschauung as a member of the Theosophical Society and his mistaken esteem of Gnosticism. He saw there must have been a profound system that had been deliberately obscured, but admits defeat. James Alan Montgomery, The Samaritans. The Earliest Jewish Sect. Their History, Theology, and Literature. Philadelphia U.S.A. 1907. Reprinted New York 1968. It was a long while before outsiders saw Samaritans were not a sect of Jews. ,‫ ירושלים‬.‫ מרכז זלמן שזר לתולדות ישראל‬.‫ העדה השומרונית בעת העתיקה‬.‫ משומרון לשכם‬,‫מנחם מור‬ .2003 Daniel Olson, Second Enoch: A Samaritan Apocalypse. Studia Judaeoslavica vol. 16. Brill, Leiden, 2024. Thoroughly documented. An advance in knowledge of the history of Samaritan religion in the first and second centuries AD at fundamental level. 260 Reinhard Pummer, Early Christian Authors on the Samaritans and Samaritanism. TSAJ 92. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, 2002. There is nothing on Simon. Otherwise the collection is almost complete. Amongst the reports there are some snippets of real data. Most of the reports are vague or wrong or straight lies. Tertullian’s fantasy that there were no Samaritan Priests in the time of Jesus is still to be heard from the pulpit. Most is malicious. Real information on Samaritan religion was inconvenient, for reasons explained at length in this book. Many but definitely not all references to Greek and Latin Christian works in the present work are from this collection. Reinhard Pummer, Was There an Altar or a Temple in the Sacred Precinct on Mt. Gerizim? JJS vol. 47, 2016, pp. 1 – 21. Reinhard Pummer, The Samaritans: A Profile. Eerdmans UK and USA 2016. Omits significant work by some authors, following the earlier Companion to Samaritan Studies edited by Crown, Tal, and Pummer, but taking policy further. Examples are all publications by Macuch except the grammar of Samaritan Hebrew, which was too well-known to leave out, all publications of Jamgotchian’s, some Arabic texts published by me in my book of 1989, and some articles of mine. Another example of copying falsification in the Companion to Samaritan Studies is that the Comprehensive History is left out of the supposedly complete survey of Samaritan historical writing. What was written by Ben-Ḥayyim on this book is misrepresented, contradicting Pummer’s own summary of Ben Ḥayyim’s article in Die Samaritaner, Darmstadt 1992, pp. 23 bottom – 25 top. The information on the Comprehensive History in my article The Transmission of the Samaritan Joshua-Judges is ignored. Reinhard Pummer, An Update of Moses Gaster’s “Chain of Samaritan High Priests”. Pages 149 – 172 in The Bible, Qumran, and the Samaritans, ed. Magnar Kartveit and Gary N. Knoppers. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 2018. J. M. A. Salles-Dabadie, Recherches sur Simon le Mage. I. L’ « Apophasis megalè ». CRB 10. Paris 1969. [This series is now put out by Peeters in Leuven]. Same comments as on Frickel’s book. ? ‫ מתי תפסה הערבית את מקום הארמית השומרונית‬,‫ חסיב שחאדה‬. In Hebrew Language Studies in Honour of Ze’ev Ben-Ḥayyim on his Seventieth Birthday, Jerusalem 1983, pp. 515 – 528. See above, note 22 end p. 102. P. R. Weis, Some Samaritanisms of Justin Martyr. JTS vol. 45, nos. 179 – 180, 1944, pp. 199 – 205. The author assumed that Justin had been a Pagan before becoming a Christian. Now that it has been shown that he was once a nominal Samaritan, the meagre gleanings can be regarded as more reliable. None are relevant to this book. A.S. Yahuda, Über die Unechtheit des samaritanischen Josuabuches. SKPAW volume XXXIX part 2, 1908, pp. 887 – 914. Also appeared separately in Berlin. See the article by Ben-Ḥayyim listed above on the significance of this article. The Comprehensive History by Khaḍir bin Isḥâq is first identified in print in this article. 261 ‫‪Primary documents other than Samaritan‬‬ ‫‪4.‬‬ ‫‪(Greek and Latin Christian texts printed and translated by Pummer or Klijn and‬‬ ‫‪Reinink are not listed. Christian documents are only used in this book for information‬‬ ‫‪on Samaritan religion, or information on changes in Christianity that affected the‬‬ ‫‪Samaritans. That is why Josephus is listed along with Christian works in Greek. There‬‬ ‫‪is no need to give publication details for the LXX or the later Versions. An exception‬‬ ‫‪was made for the commonly neglected edition of Targum Yonatan to the Torah by‬‬ ‫‪Rieder, which has a commentary and references to Rabbinic texts. Melamed’s‬‬ ‫‪translation of the Onomasticon of Eusebius is listed because of being based on an‬‬ ‫‪accurately established Greek text and having necessary notes. The Greek text that was‬‬ ‫‪established is not printed but enough information is given in important places to rely‬‬ ‫‪on it. The English translation published by Carta and taken over by Brill’s is sloppily‬‬ ‫‪done and inaccurate. It does not do any good for Brill’s reputation).‬‬ ‫‪Hebrew and Aramaic in Order of Date of the Original Form‬‬ ‫תרגום יונתן בן עוזיאל על התורה‪ .‬מתורגם לעברית עם באורים ציוני מקורות ומקבילות מאת ד"ר דוד‬ ‫רידר‪ .‬הוגה והושלם על ידי הרב מרדבכי זמיר שליט"א‪ .‬התרגום הארמי ‪ ---‬העתק מכ"י לונדון בריטיש‬ ‫מוזיאון ‪ 2 .ADD. 27031‬כרכים‪ ,‬ירושלים תשמ"ד – תשמ"ה‪] .‬כנראה הוצאה פרטית‪ .‬אין ‪.[ISBN‬‬ ‫תוספתא על פי כתבי יד ערפורט ווינה ‪ ....‬הרב משה שמואל צוקרמאנדל‪ .‬נדפס מחדש ע"י ספרי ואהרמן‪,‬‬ ‫ירושלים תשכ"ה‪.‬‬ ‫תוספתא על פי כתב‪-‬יד וינה ושינויי נוסחות מכתב‪-‬יד ערפורט כתב‪-‬יד לונדון קטעים מן הגניזה ודפוס‬ ‫ויניציה ‪ ,281‬מאת שאול ליברמן‪ .‬כרך ג' סדר נשים‪ .‬בית המדרש לרבנים באמיריקה‪ ,‬ניו יורק‪ ,‬תשנ"ו‪.‬‬ ‫מסכת כותים‪ .‬נדפס בתוך הקובץ שבע מסכתות קטנות ירושלמיות היו טמונים בכתב יד בספרי הרב החכם‬ ‫אליקים כרמולי והוצאתים לאור עם פירוש קצר אנכי רפאל בן שמעון קירכהיים‪.‬‬ ‫ספרי על ספר דברים עם חלופי גרסאות והערות מאת אליעזר אריה פינקלשטין בהשתמשות עזבונו של‬ ‫חיים שאול האראוויטץ‪ .‬נדפס ראשונה בברלין ת"ש ‪ ....‬מופיע שנית ע"י בית המדרש לרבנים באמריקה‪.‬‬ ‫ניו‪-‬יורק תשכ"ט‪.‬‬ ‫מדרש תנאים על ספר דברים ‪ ........‬מאת דוד צבי האפפמאנן‪ 2) .‬כרכים(‪ .‬ברלין תשס"ט‪] .‬נדפס מחדש[‪.‬‬ ‫ששה סדרי משנה מפורשים בידי חנוך אלבק ומנוקדים ניקוד חדש בידי חנווך ילון‪ 6) .‬כרכים(‪.‬‬ ‫מוסד ביאליק ירושלים – דביר‪ ,‬תל – אביב‪ .‬תשי"ט‪ ,‬הדפסה רביעית תשכ"ט‪.‬‬ ‫מדרש בראשית רבא‪ .‬יהודה טהעאדאר וחנוך אלבעק‪ .‬הדפסה שניה עם תיקונים מאת ח‪ .‬אלבעק‪3) .‬‬ ‫כרכים(‪ .‬ספרי ואהרמן‪ ,‬ירושלים תשכ"ה‪.‬‬ ‫תלמוד ירושלמי‪ .‬נדפס בבית דניאל בומברגי מאנדרשא ‪ ........‬בויניציאה‪] .1526 – 1522 .‬נדפס מחדש[‪.‬‬ ‫תלמוד בבלי‪ .‬מהדורת עדין שטיינזלץ‪ .‬המכון הישראלי לפרסומים תלמודיים‪ ,‬ירושלים‪] .‬מביאה חלופי‬ ‫גרסות[‪.‬‬ ‫‪262‬‬ Greek in Order of Date Flavii Josephi Opera Recognovit Benedictus Niese. Editio maior. 6 vols. Berlin 1887 – 1889. [Not to be confused with the editio minor]. Josephus. 9 vols. 1926 – 1960. In the series the Loeb Classical Library. Now distributed by Harvard University Press. Accompanied by an English translation by three hands, by Thackeray, Marcus, and Feldman (the last not always accurate). Clementina. Herausgegeben von Paul de Lagarde. 1865. Reprinted by Otto Zeller, Osnabrück 1966. This edition has not been superseded, despite some claims. Iustini Martyris Apologiae pro Christianis. Iustini Martyris Dialogus cum Tryphone. Ed. Miroslav Marcovitch. Patristische Texte und Studien 47. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1997. The text is taken from a unique ms. The text is sometimes precarious. Irénée de Lyon. Contre les Hérésies. Edition critique par Adelin Rousseau et Louis Doutreleau. Sources Chrétiennes. Les Editions du Cerf, Paris. Dix tomes, 1965 – 1982, corrigé 2002. The only adequate edition. ΦΙΛΟΣΟΦΟΥΜΕΝΑ Η ΚΑΤΑ ΠΑΣΩΝ ΑΙΡΕΣΕΩΝ ΕΛΕΓΧΟΣ. Philosophumena sive Haeresium Omnium Confutatio. Recensuit, Latine Vertit, etc. Patricius Cruice. Parisiis MDCCCLX. There is a faithful Latin translation, better than any other. Later editions don’t add any evidence. Cruice’s judgment has not been improved on. Eusebius Werke. Achter Band, Teil 1. Die Praeparatio Evangelica. Einleitung; die Bücher I bis X. GCS 43 / 1. Her. von Karl Mras. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1954. Eusebius III / 1. Das Onomastikon der biblischen Ortsnamen. Kritische Neuausgabe des griechischen Textes mit der lateinischen Fassung des Hieronymus. Her. von Stefan Timm. GCS Neue Folge 11 / 1. De Gruyter, Berlin, 2017. [Eusebius puts Luza on the meadow right at the foot of the Mountain at Balâṭah]. ‫ תש"ח‬,'‫ תרביץ שנה י"ט ספר ב‬.‫ מלמד‬.‫ צ‬.‫ספר האונומסטיקון לאֶ בסביוס תורגם )בצירוף הערות( בידי ע‬ .[‫ ]ע"פ נוסח יוני מוגה בעיון נמרץ‬.91 – 1 , (1950) ‫ תשי"א‬, '‫ ושנה כ"א ספר א‬, 152– 65 , (1948) Epiphanius. [3 Bände]. I. Ancoratus. Panarion Haereses 1 – 33. II. Panarion 34 –64. III. Panarion 65 – 80. De Fide. Her. Karl Holl, Leipzig 1915; 2. bearbeitete Auflage her. von Jürgen Dummer 1980, 1980, 1985. GCS 25. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin. Theodoret von Kyros. Unterscheidung von Lüge und Wahrheit. Abriss über die üblichen Märchen der Häretiker etc. Her. von Benjamin Gleede. Unter Mitwirkung von Jonathan Bieler. GCS Neue Folge 26. De Gruyter, Berlin, 2020. Latin in Order of Date S. Clementis Romani Recognitiones Rufino Aquilei Presb. Interprete. Curante E. G. Gersdorff. Lipsiae 1838. 263 L. Caelius Firmianus Lactantius. Divinarum Institutionem Libri Septem. Fasc. 2. Libri III et IV. BSGRT. Ediderunt Eberhard Heck et Antonie Wlosok. Berolini et Novi Eboraci. Walter de Gruyter MMVII S. Hieronymi Presbyteri Opera. Pars I, Opera Exegetica, 7. Commentarium in Mattheum Libri IV. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, LXXVII. Brepols, Turnhout, 1969. Syriac Clementis Romani Recognitiones Syriace. Paulus Antonius de Lagarde edidit. 1861. Reprint Otto Zeller, Osnabrück 1966. This edition has not been superseded, contrary to some common assertions. Arabic Kitāb al-Anwār wal-Marāqib. Code of Karaite Law by Yacqūb al-Qirqisānī. Edited …. by Leon Nemoy. Volume I. The Alexander Kohut Memorial Foundation, New York, 1939. Title-page at the other end before the text: ‫ ﻛﺘﺎب اﻻﻧﻮار واﻟﻤﺮاﻗﺐ‬. Translations Edgar Hennecke. New Testament Apocrypha, ed. by Wilhelm Schneemelcher. English Translation. Volume One: Gospels and Related Writings. SCM Press Ltd, 1963. An exact reproduction of Edgar Hennecke’s Neutestamentliche Apokryphen ed. by Wilhelm Schneemelcher published by J. C. B. Mohr, Tübingen, 1959. Used for the fragments of the Jewish Christian gospels and mentions of them. Used for the Epistle of the Apostles. The two recensions of the Epistle of the Apostles preserved in Coptic and Ethiopic are translated by Hugo Duensing on the basis of his own textual work. This has not been superseded by the translation by Pérès, published by Brepols, which adds nothing of substance and is not based on a better text. The undated translation by Francis Watson on the Academia website is unsound. The worst fault is denying that the part only extant in Ethiopic is an addition to the original book, without trying to answer why the form only extant in Ethiopic has two separate starts each intended as the start to the whole book, or how the new start can contradict what is in the old part, including the most basic of questions, the nature of the conception of Jesus. The extensive collation of variants in Ethiopic mss. adds hardly anything. Josephus’ Jewish War and its Slavonic Version. A Synoptic Comparison …. edited by H. Leeming and K. Leeming. AGAJU 46. E. J. Brill, Leiden, 2003. The New Testament Nestle-Aland Greek-English New Testament. Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart. Twenty-eighth edition 2012. The introduction is designed to give the impression that all variants in wording are recorded, or at least, all that might affect the meaning. The 264 introductions to the next two books to be listed reinforce the false belief. The introduction to the next book is explicit in saying all information needed by translators is given. This is suppression of data, subtly done. Here is an outstanding example. The attestation of forms derived from Chrēstós or Chreistós is left out. There is no explanation, though ideology is the only imaginable explanation, since there is a difference in pronunciation at this period as well as meaning, and there is abundant attestation outside the NT. See the Excursus below. The use of the terms Christós, Chrēstós, and Chreistós has a bearing on part of the subject of this book. This edition was first published in 1898 by Eberhard Nestle. It was a great advance in its time, but flawed from the start. There is no excuse for not using the Peshitta systematically, while deceiving the reader about not doing this by not stating the method of use. No reason is given for not using the Arabic translation of the Syriac Diatessaron. The neglect of the Diatessaron in this edition has got worse. Quotations in works in Syriac amount to enough to reconstruct most of the Diatessaron in Syriac, which was done by Ortiz de Urbina well over fifty years ago. It is usually easy to pick out accommodations to the Peshitta. Most are in Efrem’s Commentary on the Diatessaron, because its form made comparison with the Peshitta easy. The Arabic translation can be used as a sieve. The influence of the Peshitta is slight, and usually not in all the mss. (Three, not two). The edition of the Syriac by Ortiz de Urbina has still not been used up till now. Neither has the Arabic. Here is a bad set of omissions that would have harmed the quality of the argument of this book if I had not been forewarned. The wording saying the Holy Ghost will come, and not come “onto you” in the Peshitta and Diatessaron of Luke I:35 is not recorded. It is not recorded that the Syriac Diatessaron then says the Power of the Most High will come down onto Mary and the Arabic agrees. This critical verse shows Simon’s book has been used or rather misused in formulating Christian doctrine. The Diatessaron says in effect that Jesus is was unique in being potentially the embodiment of the Power. This is the start of misuse of Ebionite doctrine that anyone can make progress, just like Jesus, though Jesus is still not supernatural. The concept must have been standard or widespread Christian doctrine at the time of composition of the Diatessaron. It is well known there is no clear reason why Tatian was declared a heretic by the Greek and Latin Church, but trying to end the use of the Diatessaron could well be it. There are more examples of information in the Diatessaron that is not in the gospels as they stand. It might not be coincidence that the official disuse of the title Chrēstós happened when Tatian started to be branded a heretic for no good reason. See the Excursus. What is in the Peshitta and what is worse in the Diatessaron of Luke I:35 really must be too bothersome to bear to think about. See above Part II, p. 69, for the place of the very late wording here in the growth of doctrine. An Editio Maior is in preparation, but that is not relevant, since standard use of this edition is expected to continue. The Greek New Testament, ed. Aland etc. ….. under the direction of Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland. United Bible Societies. Distributed by the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart. Fifth edition 2014. Purports to give full collation of all text-witnesses for words and phrases where a translator might have to choose. The claim is impossible, as well as being incompatible with the need for more examples in the book mentioned next, which itself is nowhere near complete. Still nothing on the data just mentioned. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament: A Companion Volume to the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament Third Edition, by Bruce M. Metzger etc. United Bible Societies. Distributed by the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart. 265 Second edition 1997. Discussion of all places treated in an earlier edition of the book just listed, along with another six hundred. Still nothing on the data just mentioned. Biblia Polyglotta Matritensia. Series VI. Vetus Evangelium Syrorum et exinde excerptum Diatessaron Tatiani. Editionem curavit Ignatius Ortiz de Urbina. Matriti MCMLXVII. Sumptibus Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas. Diatessaron de Tatien ‫ اﻟﺪﯾﺎطﯿﺴﺮون أي اﻟﺮﺑﺎﻋﻲ‬ed. A.-S. Marmardji. Beirut 1935. Done with more understanding than the edition by Ciasca. Has more perceptive and more thorough textual notes. Has a long introduction with a more accurate and more detailed study of the quality of the translation than given by Ciasca, which is scatty. Uses one more good ms. in Jerusalem not known to Ciasca. Not used or mentioned in any of the publications of the United Bible Societies listed above. This fits in with the consistent unscholarly careless neglect of the Diatessaron. ----------------------------------------------------------------------EXCURSUS TO THE BIBLIOGRAPHY ON THE TITLES XPIΣTOΣ AND XPHΣTOΣ AND XPEIΣTOΣ This book is about Samaritans. The term Chrēstós has a connection with the essence of the Ebionite outlook, and this outlook can be used to cast light on Samaritan religion, if used carefully. The evidence of forms of words derived from Chrēstós or Chreistós in mss. of the NT is not mentioned in standard handbooks or the most commonly used critical editions. Equally disgracefully, the data in the Nag Hammadi texts are always hidden away in the critical apparatus of a few editions, and always with false translation. All translations of the Gospel of Philip in all languages transcribe the Coptic forms of Chrestians and Christians correctly in the critical apparatus while using the same translation, Christians, always without letting on. Chrestians occurs four or five times in this book, but Christians occurs twice. Proper scholarly practice would be to print what is written in the manuscript and is clearly not a mistake. There are numerous other forms treated as the word “Christian”. The Coptic equivalent of the form Chrēstós itself is attested. See the complete survey by Martijn Linssen, Jesus the Chrest --- Nomina Sacra in the Nag Hammadi Library, [Thomas Miscellaneous, Part V], 2022, on the Academia website. (Linssen’s observations on terminology are indisputable. This is not the place to evaluate his theoretical construct. It is enough to say that his post-Christian dating of the original form of the Old Greek depends on denying evidence, but much of the rest will stand if unentangled from this). The form Chrēstós quoted by Pagan authors is always dismissed as a mistake, with nary a mention of the Christian attestation, or the Nag Hammadi attestation. It is never mentioned that the title Christós is never ever written out in full anywhere in any ms. of the NT, and the vowel is often not put in. Here is a gem found by Martijn Linssen and passed on to me privately. In ch. 4 of Justin’s First Apology the sole extant manuscript has Christianói in sentence 5, but the argument assumes not only the appropriateness, but also the correctness, of the term Chrēstianói. Notice that unlike Tertullian later on, Justin never says the wrong name is being used. Tertullian 266 copies a long argument taken from Justin saying that persecution of Christians without any criminal charges is happening because of the name, saying this is senseless. Justin niftily skates over the question of whether there could be some other reason by distracting the reader by saying any individual Christian that commits a crime ought to be prosecuted. Tertullian takes Justin’s whole argument including the deliberate distraction over while flatly contradicting him over what the name ought to be. (To the Nations Book I ch. 3 end. Any edition will do). He writes in Latin, but makes it clear that he regards the forms Christianói and Chrēstianói as different words. He says he knows Pagans always use the second, but says Christians don’t. The official change of name must have been very recent. He glosses over the obvious question of how it is that all Pagans could get the name wrong, while saying the name Chrestiani is appropriate even if wrong. From these two passages a time period can be established for the official change of name. (Imposing it took longer, as can be seen from mss. of the NT. Remember there was still a three-way phonemic difference between [i] and [ɛ:] and [i:] for a few more centuries, so changes by scribes can’t explain evidence of the titles Chrēstós [xrɛ:stɔs] and Chreistós [xri:stɔs]). I think it can be narrowed down a bit further. The first chapters of the First Apology can be dated very early, when Justin was still living in Neapolis. The Dialogue, with its length and complexity, and with the internal contradictions in ch. 120 showing use of material from different stages of his missionary work that were proven above in Part II, would have been written when he was mature. What is remarkable is that in the Dialogue Justin does not say Jesus has been made an anointed king. This argument is stronger than it might seem, since a mention of an anointed king would have been expected to have come up in ch. 52 and ch. 120, where the argument is that Jesus was the king from the tribe of Judah promised in the Torah. It follows that the official change of name came after Justin’s unsurprising execution in 165. The official change of name can be explained as a sign of rejection of a form of doctrine using the term Chrēstós or its near-synonym Chreistós. The policy of using the power of the state against the Samaritan form of the religion of Israel is first expressed by Justin, but he must have represented a powerful movement or faction. Rejecting Jewish Christianity and Samaritan Christianity would be consistent with this. The ending of the persecutions in the reign of Commodus when Severus became emperor in 193 A.D. would fit a need to be seen to be different to Jewish Christians and Samaritan Christians, with a different official designation. The translation ‫ ܡܫܝܚܐ‬in the Peshitta does not have to reflect Christós, and even if it did by then, it did not mean a king to the authors of the gospels or Paul or the framers of the Nicene Creed. It is not used at Acts II:30. Now for the attestations of the other two titles. A few occurrences of forms of derivations from Chrēstós or Chreistós in the New Testament are not abbreviated: Codex Sinaiticus Chrēstianói singular or plural at Acts XI:26; XXVI:28; I Peter IV:16; Codex Vaticanus Chreistianói singular or plural at all three places; Codex Bezae Chreistianoi at the first place; Codex Vaticanus Antichreistos singular or plural at I John II:18; II:22; IV:3 (uncertain); II John I:7. The vowel of Chreistianói and Antichreistos is certainly meant to be [i:] in the spelling of this period: the length is phonemic and the spelling could not be a mistake. A big minority of minuscules have the abbreviation chrēs, but no-one tells you that. (Remember Christós is never written out in full in any ms. whether uncial or minuscule. Theological students are led to think that what is printed is what is in the mss., or perhaps more accurately, are not told enough about how mss. look). In line with this, the form Chrēstós quoted by Pagan authors is always dismissed by church historians as a mistake. It is dishonestly used as evidence that Roman authorities did not know much about Christianity. 267 All the examples from manuscripts of the NT and the Nag Hammadi writings just quoted show a policy of suppression of data for the sake of ideology, a collective breach of scientific method. Policy is dictated by academics with jobs in universities requiring them not to say the wrong thing and offend the administrators or other academics or the vocal general public. This is not imagination. Think of the attacks by academics on Morton Smith, sinking to the depths of mentioning in writing that he was bald (yes, really) and making sny written suggestions about his sexuality, and his heartfelt expression of thankfulness that he had tenure in the foreword to his bestknown publication. Then there is the well known story of the university in the USA that appointed Bertrand Russell to an academic position and then broke the contract when members of the management board heard he had written a little book called “Why I am not a Christian”. I mention Bertrand Russell to show how behaviour has been consistent over time. This kind of danger now takes a new form, less blatant but more harmful. A lot of the policy-makers in any country behind publications touching on the NT barely marginally, or often even Judaism which is treated as a tool for the study of Christianity, are ordained Christian clergy, and the rest are nearly all Christian. This includes people doing peer review. The policy of hiding information can be seen in all translations and studies of the Nag Hammadi texts by academics, Christians to a man, and often ordained. But putting that aside, you have to wonder whether they understand their own scriptures. Paul saw that deriving the christological predicates from a unique king of Israel would be a fallacy, and never tried. When he talks about the exalted status of Christ, the word “king” does not come up, even where the concept of a heavenly ruler is used. Such a derivation had been tried out at the start of Matthew and Luke, it but neither of these gospels builds on it. John’s gospel cleverly thoroughly rejects it without actually mentioning it. Mark’s gospel leaves it out. In Peter’s speech in Acts II:14 – 36 Jesus is called christós but with no connection of the word christós with kingship. On the contrary, the term is explained at length as having a different meaning. Christian exegetes will say this meaning is compatible with kingship, but compatibility is not relevance and still less is it being the same. (The use of the term Messias in John IV:25 has no bearing. It was shown at length in Part II of this book that it is part of a way of rejecting the concept of a special king of the line of David. The gloss christós is not original). The verse from Genesis about rulers from Judah used by Justin is not used in the NT. Justin does not make any connection of the verse with the title Christós. How could he not have used the verse this way if he used the word Christós? The title Christós is not used to mean “king” in the Nicene Creed. Not even the later term Christós Pantokrātōr was devised this way. Christianity has always had the difficulty of how to use the authority of what it calls the Old Testament while contradicting the religion of Israel. The argument that Christós translates the Hebrew word ‫ משיח‬and this word is sometimes applied to a king in what is called the Old Testament starts later than the NT. It is unthinkingly assumed these days that the NT uses the argument. I have heard it said by Christian clergy, without knowing what to quote. Handel’s oratorio without the words “over the house of Jacob” in its interminable misquoting and misuse of “he shall reign for ever and ever” from Luke I:33 is promoted by all denominations every Christmastime. One wonders how seriously Christian clergy take their own scriptures. This argument can be heard constantly from Christian missionaries to Jews and is their favourite first approach. One of the two main conversionary organisations calls itself Messianic Judaism, with 268 the assumption that the title is self-evidently accurate. None of these conversionary set-ups understand either Judaism or Christianity. The title of Handel’s oratorio shows deep ignorance of both. After the disputation at Barcelona, the Ramban said privately to the king “Even if someone could prove Jesus was the Mashiach, I could not be a Christian”. Incompatibility with what Paul or the Nicene Creed say or don’t say was skated over long after the NT was composed by reading Luke I:33 a new way, so that it changed from saying Jesus would be king of Israel to king of the universe, and instead of him being a unique king with unique God-given qualities, being a supernatural or divine power. Luke I:33 was then a new explanation of the present Greek text of Luke I:35, with its invention of a pagan divine father for Jesus, with more information read into verse 33 than is actually written. Christós means smeared, not anointed. The verb is used to mean smearing all over with olive oil for cleansing. Anointing is only dabbing at a couple of spots, not smearing all over as if with mosquito repellent. This is a flagrant example of how the inventors of Christianity knew Latin better than Greek. Christós conveniently resembles chrēstós in sound with a difference of one phoneme. Martijn Linssen states quite a few times that the assertion by Christian theologians that it translates the Hebrew ‫ משיח‬shows how bad their command of Greek is to this very day, or how it suits them not to notice what is wrong. The belief that christós translates a word meaning anointed only looks right to anyone that has learnt Greek in a theological institution. The word christós would not be used naturally within a culture that had a practice of formal symbolic anointing. It is not used in the Greek translations of the OT, except in the extant mss. of the Old Greek, all written out by Christians. If the word christós were original in the LXX, it would be expected to have been used when the anointed High Priest is spoken of, but it is not. The anointed High Priest is called ēleimménos. There is no need to suppose that the writings attributed to Josephus were done by the Christian Church. This would have been using a hammer to kill a gnat. It is quite plausible that the Roman administration might have wanted a history of the war saying what was wanted by Rome and looking like an unbiassed record by someone not a Roman. It is plausible that this could have been expanded by the real Josephus into a history from Creation to the present, and the records were mostly already there in the form of the Jewish scriptures. It is my judgment that the Christian Church would not have had the materials needed to write the history of the war in such detail, and besides, a shorter simpler book would have suited its needs just as well. All that need be supposed is that the translation by ēleimménos was changed to christós by the scribes. It still needs to be asked if the unnatural invention christós was suggested by any usage at the time. Hippolytus says the Ebionites used the word christós to describe Jesus, but this is not proof, first because Christian reporters would have changed chrēstós and chreistós to christós, and second because he could have paired Christós with Jesus out of habit. Hippolytus’s words say that Jesus attained the level designated Jesus and seem to say he attained the level designated Christ and this is the same, but this is not proof either, since he would certainly have changed chrēstos to christós if he had heard it. The Ebionites could have used both chrēstós and chreistós as an important theological term, with each expressing different aspects of a single concept of theirs that is well attested. There is no direct proof that they did though. None of the other reports mention this term christós. Most of the reports are cursory and their silence is not evidence, but it might matter that Epiphanios does not mention the term. More consideration is needed. ‫ צ"ע‬. 269 It seems that the word ēleimménos had to be changed in the Old Greek so that the new term christós would seem old, and the new term had to sound like the known terms chrēstós and probably chreistós, both with unrelated meanings to the new term christós, so it would sound familiar and seem old. Both changes were needed at once for them to work. Anyone knowing Latin better than Greek might not have noticed the phonemic difference in length between the first vowels of chreistós and christós. I am told that early verse in Latin shows that the first vowel of Christus was long. Anyone that has learnt a little bit of Christian theology will tell you confidently that christós means anointed, and translates a Hebrew title of a king. Dictionaries of NT Greek say the same. Such dictionaries never mention that it is not real Greek. Christian theological students are confessedly not taught koinē Greek but only NT Greek. Using Bauer’s dictionary, which gives attestations outside the NT, is not enough to make any difference if it is not used properly. Like all the rest Bauer says christós translates a royal epithet. The fly in the literal ointment is that although an artificial connection to some Psalms in the LXX is made using the new word, there is no connection with kingship this way. An artificial bridge was thought up later on. It was stated that since the word christós in the Former Prophets corresponded to a Hebrew title of a king meaning “anointed”, Christós must be a translation of a title of kings. Undeniably true but contradicted by usage in the Psalms and Trito-Isaiah and the Christian concept of incarnation; and besides this, christós still means smeared all over. Most early Christian authors avoided the awkward question of the bad Greek, but Lactantius at IV:7 of his Divine Institutes says a lot of words without saying anything. He wrote long after the new term came into use, but still needs to justify it, so too many people must have been voicing what anyone could see. He cheats. He refers to a passage from Homer saying the new Christian usage is documented there, but what he does is quote one sentence with the noun corresponding to the verb chriein in, but not quoting enough for the reader to know what was meant, smearing olive oil over most of the body and then removing it. Pathetic. If this is the best that could be done, then what has been said here about normal usage is undeniable. Here is how the invented word christós fits into the new pagan invention called Christós in its final form, with the concept of incarnation. It is asserted that christós means anointed, and kings of Israel were anointed, and Jesus’s mother’s husband was one of thousands descended from David that never became king, and Jesus is Christós supposedly meaning anointed without having been anointed or being king, and christós supposedly meaning anointed actually means being the incarnation of God, which must be right because he had no father anyway. Logical connection is not needed: lumping together will do nicely. A Hebrew word and a Greek word are bandied about to make it sound like technical explanation. This argument is later than any part of the NT, contrary to common belief. The gospels show clear signs of an earlier stage, adoptionism, equally pagan. (Arianism did not start with Arius). This is the concept of a temporary indwelling of something godlike from when Jesus was baptised till just before he died, and then again after his resurrection. It has been shown that there was un-Israelite Christianity before the use of the term Christós. This means that the pericope about Peter in ch. II using the term must be later than the time of Justin’s writing. Given that the invention about Simon in Justin’s First Apology and Second Apology and the Dialogue with Trypho is better thought out than the picture in ch. VIII of Acts and shows misuse of more knowledge, it seems that ch. VIII of Acts must be older than Justin’s time and older than the book 270 of Acts in its final form. Argument for a date of ch. VIII of Acts well before Justin was given in Part II of this book. If these two conclusions about dating of ch. II and ch. VIII of Acts are right, the book would have had to be composed in stages or put together from shorter parts. Such is the consensus of scholarship, but that does not necessarily mean there is agreement on the place of ch. VIII or ch. II. Nothing much was done with the concept of kingship before Justin, and he still did not connect the title Christós with kingship, because he had not heard of any connection. It would have been inconvenient to try to make this connection before the Christian Church was well understood by Rome and seen as harmless or useful. It is argued in this book that Pilate released Jesus and he was murdered by Jews. See above p. 71. It is often pointed out that the Sanhedrin did not have authority in this respect. This need not have stopped some members from paying criminals. Besides, Jesus himself had pointed out when he was seized the first time that he had not been arrested by the temple police, but by the Sanhedrin exceeding its authority, which meant the Sanhedrin was trying to make Rome take the blame for his death. Pilate outmanoeuvred them. It would have been useful to Rome for kingship over the Jews to be removed to another world. There might well be fact behind Pilate saying “What is truth?”. There might well be a real act or statement behind the story of the sign saying “Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews”. The plausibly fictionalised record was needed by the Christian Church to neutralise both the memory and the official record that followers of someone called Chrēstós had often been a nuisance to Rome. ‫ סוף סוף‬. Contrary to what is universally said in books on the NT, it is well documented that the Christian Church used the inherited term chrēstianói before changing over to the artificial word christianói. This came after invention of the unIsraelite concept of a christós with a made-up unnatural term conveniently sounding close to chrēstós. Indications are given in this book that the term chrēstos was taken from the Ebionites along with a lot of other trappings used as camouflage to make Christianity seem Israelite. The Hebrew word used by the Ebionites is unknown. Going by the information on p. 65 and p. 155 middle, it might have been ‫ ענו‬. This is enough on Christianity, which was only brought up to help explain Ebionite belief. The Ebionites matter because a lot were Samaritans, though it is not known whether they were regarded as still being Samaritans by the rest of the Samaritans. They matter because there are indications that they were reabsorbed. 271 272