What If? Not Jerusalem but Samaria is the birthplace of the Bible

In between the depressive moments and my community/other commitments I've been reflecting a bit on the history of biblical religion or more precisely on how biblical religion and the corpus of texts that generate it got going. As part of that reflecting I had a little 'what if' moment that I want to share here. What if Jerusalem and its Temple are not the site for the origins of the bible scriptures but somewhere else? Samaria, perhaps?

Before I spell it out I want to first off reprise the standard, dare one say 'traditional', understanding of how the texts we call biblical/Old Testament came to be. In the Bibles used by Christians and Jews, whatever else one can say, Jerusalem and its Temple are so very central. One could say the Old Testament collections are really arguing about who should be in control of Jerusalem and its Temple. These arguments occur again in the New Testament collections which go on to say that the days of Jerusalem are over and that the Christian community gathered together is the New Temple, a Temple of the Spirit to replace the Temple of Stone. But that Temple of Stone was in Jerusalem and the new Christian regime is signified by a New Jerusalem that comes down from heaven, a New Jerusalem with no need for a Temple of stone.

This scriptural centrality of Jerusalem is such that in the various hypotheses of the origins of these texts, it's always assumed that the biblical enterprise begins in Jerusalem. The classic example is the documentary hypothesis of the origins and composition of the Torah, the 5 books of Moses, at the heart of Tanakh and Old Testament. The first version of the Torah, the famous book of J, is composed and written by the mythical Yahwist in Jerusalem sometime around when David or Solomon were supposed to have reigned. Deuteronomy, the D or Deuteronomist component, is likewise believed to have been composed in Jerusalem, and 'traditionally' understood to be the scroll of the Law found in the Temple in Josiah's day, prompting him to undertake a major reform and centralisation of the cult in the last days before the Babylonian conquest. Post-Babylon the Torah collection is further revised and edited by priests in Jerusalem, the P or Priestly component. At some stage, however, following the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel/Samaria, refugees from the north brought their own traditions which were also incorporated into the growing Torah corpus, the E or Elohist component, at some stage before the days of Josiah. The north then is ancillary to the whole process which is understood as being located in Jerusalem. Biblical minimalists, too, locate the entire process of Torah composition in a Persian or Hellenistic period Jerusalem.

The curious thing, though, is that there is no clear reference Jerusalem or its holy mountain, Zion, anywhere in the Torah, with the possible exception of the story of Melchizedek of Salem in Genesis 14, to which I will return later. On the other hand, various northern sanctuaries and even the Samaritan holy mountain, Ha Gerizim, are both present and important sites in the Torah. Mt Gerizim and its twin or sister peak, Mt Ebal, appear in Deuteronomy itself (11.29, 27.12), a text generally understood as representing the platform or core agenda of the Jerusalem-only trajectory in the scriptures and presumably of a Jerusalem based party in the period of composition. In Deuteronomy and again in Joshua (8.33) Mt Gerizim is clearly a site of considerable significance for the Israelites, a place of meeting for cultic obligations laid down by Moses himself.

As for Melchizedek, while nowadays it's generally accepted that the Genesis story is a reference to Jerusalem, Samaritan tradition understands Salem to have been at Shechem at the foot of Mt Gerizim. Curiously both in early Christianity and early Judaism Salem is identified with Shechem and there are stories of Melchizedek as a king of the north and not of Jerusalem. In part, this identification of Salem and Shechem is made possible by the Hebrew of Genesis 33.18, 'and Jacob came safely to the city of Shechem', the word for 'safely' is salem. Consequently, the Latin, Greek and Syriac versions of the text say 'and Jacob came to Salem, the city of Shechem'. Samaritans identify Mt Gerizim with Mt Moriah the site where Abraham took Isaac for sacrifice; Jews of course identify it with Mt Zion. The Binding of Isaac is not historical, of course, but a myth deriving from ancient Temple theologies of sacrifice, so the location of any (central) temple will likewise be the location for the events of the myth (just as, for Muslims, Mecca is the site for Ibrahim's binding of Ismail, the same mythic pattern).

It used to be thought, following Josephus, that the Temple in Jerusalem was the first to be rebuilt, in the Persian period, with the Samaritans only building theirs on Mt Gerizim in the time of Alexander the Great. Archeology has given the lie to that. It would appear that the re/building of both Temples began at about the same time early in the Persian period. Likewise it would appear from the evidence of the ancient Jewish community at Elephantine in southern Egypt, that both Jerusalem and Samaria were recognised as authoritative centres for Jews (or would it be better to designate these communities as Yahweh worshippers?).

What's been most interesting for me in my reading is to discover that, geographically, the northern regions of Samaria are much richer country for farming and other activities, than the southern regions of Judah/Yehud. The imaginative centrality of Jerusalem obscures that fact. Judah began as a poor client kingdom of the much richer Israel/Samaria/House of Omri in the north. And it would seem that the Persian province of Yehud and its capital, Jerusalem, were likewise much poorer than the province of Samaria to the north. So to return to my what if, what if the origins of the biblical process lay in Samaria, and specifically, the Temple at Mt Gerizim, and not Jerusalem. What if the great stories of Eden, Noah, Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah and Bilhah and Zilpah and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers and sister, Moses and Miriam and Aaron and Joshua, have their origins entirely in the north and not the south? What if the process of scripture/Torah composition began at Ha Gerizim but expanded into a bigger collaborative exercise incorporating the other sanctuaries of 'Israelite' religion. I have been thinking for a while that one of the factors important to the transformation of ancient Palestinian religion into Judaism(s), Samaritanism(s?), Christianity, Gnosticism, Islam, Bahai etc, was the critical question, what does a cult focused on a local king-priest (a Melchizedek) do when the local kings have gone, to be replaced by a distant imperial ruler of a world empire, in which once local cults have to face realities of globalisation and diaspora. In part this process, may well have been initiated by the colonisers, the imperial power itself (hence the generally positive image of the Persians in the Hebrew scriptures). But I think that the colonised took advantage of the process making it a sort of pas de deux, or even a pas de trois.

Somewhere along the way, there was a falling out between north and south. Perhaps the centralising logic of Deuteronomy, prompted a radical pre-emptive and defensive strike on the part of Jerusalem against its wealthier and more prestigious partner to the north. So Jerusalem set out to further develop the story but with Jerusalem at the heart of it all., not Ha Gerizim and, furthermore, to traduce all those sacred centres of the north that are so important to the sacred story of Genesis and even Joshua. That way Jerusalem successfully resisted control or worse from the north. Or maybe Jerusalem's motive was a far more mundane matter of cashing in on the pilgrim trade. Jerusalem and Yehud is poor and pilgrims bring money. We have plenty of examples in the ancient world of Temples with an international appeal. The Temple of Artemis in Ephesus was one such rich and internationally popular sanctuary. And certainly Jerusalem has known many periods of prosperity all thanks to its centrality in the religious imagination of countless numbers of people.

Sadly however, the Temple at Ha Gerizim lost out in the struggle and was finally destroyed at the behest of a Jerusalem high priest and de facto king, almost 130 years before Christ. But the people whose faith was centred on that northern sanctuary held on to their scriptures, the Torah of Moses. Their numbers would gradually dwindle in the face of Roman (the Samaritans joined with the Jews in the first Jewish War against Rome 66-72CE), Christian (the Samaritans rebelled unsuccessfully against the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire several times in the 5th and 6th centuries and were brutally suppressed by Emperor Justinian) and Muslim power (in the centuries of Muslim rule they suffered periodic forced conversions), to the tiny handful that they are. But the greatest tragedy is that they would never be credited with that immense achievement in human religious imagination (and to which they cling tenaciously) the Torah, the 5 Books of Moses.

Of course, it might not have been like that but what if...

Bible and History 1

I want to resume my discussion of bible and history as it pertains to the texts of the Old Testaments, ‘ancient Israel’ and biblical religion. To start off, I have to state that, with a handful of exceptions, we have no idea of when, where, or by whom any of the Old Testament texts were written. Only one text, the Wisdom of ben Sirach tells us who its author was, and that only because his grandson who translated it into Greek tells us in a prologue to the Greek version. From that prologue we know ben Sirach wrote early in the 2^nd century BCE while his grandson translated the text some fifty years later. The author of 2 Maccabees tells that the text is a précis of a (now lost) 5 volume work by a Jason of Cyrene. But the author remains anonymous although it appears they wrote in the late 2nd century BCE. The Greek version of Esther also seems to indicate that it was translated in late 2nd century BCE. Daniel and 1 Maccabees likewise can be dated to the 2nd century BCE. Daniel is about the crisis caused by Antiochus Epiphanes’ suppression of traditional religious practices in Judah and ‘paganisation’ of the Jerusalem Temple. 1 Maccabees recounts the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes that gave birth to the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom in Palestine. However in the case of Daniel, Greek Daniel has got more stories about the prophet than Hebrew Daniel and at Qumran we have remnants of other Daniel stories that were never included in either books of Daniel.

In contrast to these few texts, all the rest of the Old Testamental literature is anonymous. Authorship has been attributed to various biblical figures, most famously Moses traditionally understood as the author of the Pentateuch (with the exception of the account of his death at the end of Deuteronomy, attributed to Joshua). Samuel was often understood to have written Judges and part of Samuel while Psalms are attributed to David (for the most part) and other wisdom texts to Solomon but the texts themselves remain anonymous. It’s anyone’s guess who wrote Job or Song of Songs. As for the Prophets, Baruch is traditionally believed to have compiled Jeremiah, but the book itself never says so. Jubilees never names its author and as for the Enoch literature, there are great quantities both canonical (1 Enoch in the Ethiopian bible) and non-canonical (as well as texts of 1 Enoch there was a lot of other Enoch associated material at Qumran and there is the 2 Enoch Slavonic corpus and a much later Rabbinic 3 Enoch). Who wrote any of this we don’t know. Interestingly 4 Ezra/2 Esdras reckons that Ezra and five other men wrote most of the Old testament literature following the return from Babylonian captivity. The Babylonians had destroyed all the old sacred texts so under divine inspiration Ezra and his companions rewrote it all ... ‘ninety four books were written ... the Most High spoke...saying “Make public the twenty four books you wrote first and let the worthy and the unworthy read them... but keep the seventy ... (and) give them to the wise among your people”’ (14:44-46). In Jewish tradition it was Ezra who at least gave the final form to the Law following the return from Babylon.

What is most fascinating about these Ezra stories is that they recognise one definite fact about the bulk of the Old Testament literature. All of these texts know in some way of the destruction of the ‘Israelite’ states in Palestine by the Assyrians and Babylonians in 723 BCE and 600-586BCE respectively. In my previous post on this topic I linked to an article on Israeli archeologist, Israel Finkelstein. In that article, Finkelstien was presented as a radical for arguing that the stories of David and Solomon were fictions written in the reign of Josiah to justify a Jerusalemite claim to suzerainty over central or northern Palestine following the eclipse of Assyrian power. The only problem for Finkelstien’s theory is that the story of Solomon is part of the scroll of Kings (3 & 4 Reigns in the Greek bible) which goes on to recount the story of Josiah’s reign and the destruction of the Jerusalem kingdom itself by Babylon. In other words, Kings dates itself as a text to a post-monarchical present. It was also common to place the writing of Deuteronomy in the reign of Josiah because of the account in 2 Kings/4 Reigns 22 about the finding of a scroll of the law in the Temple and Josiah’s move to reform Judahite religion. The only problem is that we know little or nothing about the reign of Josiah apart from what’s in Kings and Chronicles. Furthermore the book of Deuteronomy itself knows that that the Israelite ‘experiment’ will end in tears. Indeed, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings can be read as a saga in which the Israelites are set up to fail over and over again culminating in the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and the end, once and for all, of the old monarchies in Palestine and the deportation of their priestly and aristocratic elites. The same can be said for the prophetic texts. Isaiah looks back to an Assyrian past from a Persian present, likewise the book of the 12 Minor Prophets. And while I can imagine an aristocrat from Jerusalem lugging a scroll of Psalms or a royal chronicle into exile, I can’t imagine that same aristocrat carting off a miscellany of rabble rousing texts from a ragtag of prophets. Jeremiah and Ezekiel recount the fall of Jerusalem and beyond while 1 Enoch has a panoramic vision stretching from the pre-diluvian world right through the Babylonian crisis to the (eagerly anticipated) fall of the second Temple.

I hold the view that the Old testament scriptures were composed and collated in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, and are a product of the Imperial age in the eastern Mediterranean. This period was marked by the rise and fall of empires and the resulting intermingling of cultures and religions. The Persian Empire was the first to bring together under one rule the eastern Mediterranean world. Established under Cyrus the Great in 559 BCE, at its peak the empire would stretch from Egypt and the Balkans in the west to Afghanistan and Central Asia in the east. Before Cyrus, the Fertile Crescent had been subject to the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires through most of the first half of the first millennium. Canaan and the broader Levant had been caught up in these imperial progressions from the 9th and 8^th centuries BCE onwards. I would argue that the Hebrew scriptures and the associated Greek and Samaritan scriptures, Pseudepigrapha and Qumran literature then are better understood as representing a religious project(s) of engaging with and transforming that older Canaanite-Levantine religio-cultural matrix. This project was part of major religious movements then occurring in the ancient eastern Mediterranean world in the first millennium BCE in response to the upheavals and transformations brought about by the imperial progressions. In this biblical project elements of older mythology, imagery, ritual, history were taken up and deployed to experiment with, explore and debate questions of universalism and diversity, the One and the Many, together with the allied questions of justice, good and evil, suffering and death. Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Persian and Greek religious ideas are also deployed as befitted the multi-cultural imperial background. This project was open-ended, pluralistic. There was no single monotheistic vision but several and I would argue the project continued even after the construction of biblical canons and the rise of Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity (For a very good analysis and overview of questions of Bible and history see Thomas Thompson The Bible In History: How Writers Create A Past, 2000).

Rene Girard argues that the biblical literature displays a deliberate anti-sacrificial movement, one that stands for the victim against the oppressor and scapegoater. He would argue that it is intentional on the part of the biblical authors. I think he is partially correct here. This literature is rewriting a religious world, a religious legacy. One can even say it is demythologizing the old religious order, but only because, in part, it is remythologizing a new religious order. But the demythologizing and mythic experimentation gives these texts an unanticipatad power. Furthermore the biblical project is not a coordinated process. There are a variety of projects unfolding here and a number of utopian visions. And beleive me these texts, including (especially?) such legal texts as Leviticus are utopian texts. but they all have one thing in common, the Temple. Old Palestine was a land of small monarchies and royal cults. But following the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions and the rise of the Persian rule over all of the Middle East,what happens to the Temples and their royal cults when here are no longer local kings?