Continuing with Part 3….

This time I will skip the background introduction and begin with a list of English language articles by Yitzhak Magen. There are no doubt other articles that I have not noticed but I am more than willing to address anything of relevance if they come to my notice. Do the following writings add anything to Magen’s claim that he has published “unequivocal” proofs of a Samaritan Temple in Mount Gerizim in Persian times?

• Magen, Yitzhak. “The Dating of the First Phase of the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim in Light of the Archaeological Evidence.” In Judah and the Judeans in the Fourth Century B.C.E, edited by Oded Lipschits, Gary N. Knoppers, and Rainer Albertz. Eisenbrauns, 2007.
• Naveh, Joseph, and Yitzhak Magen. “Aramaic and Hebrew Inscriptions of the Second-Century BCE at Mount Gerizim.” ’Atiqot 32 (1997): 9–17.
• Stern, Ephraim, and Yitzhak Magen. “Archaeological Evidence for the First Stage of the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim.” Israel Exploration Journal 52, no. 1 (2002): 49–57.

I’ll address them in chronological order.

Article 1

• Naveh, Joseph, and Yitzhak Magen. “Aramaic and Hebrew Inscriptions of the Second-Century BCE at Mount Gerizim.” ’Atiqot 32 (1997): 9–17.

Magen begins by explaining a detail that partly contradicts something he wrote in a later work and that was discussed in Part 1 of this series. In this 1997 article, the massive wall with its three imposing gates, the same that reminded him of Ezekiel’s description of a gated wall surrounding the Jerusalem Temple, was not from the Persian period at all.

The area of the sacred precinct on the summit of the mountain is about 5 acres. Two building  stages have been identified: the ancient precinct, dating to the Persian period, and a later one, from  the Hellenistic period; the precinct occupied the  same area in both stages. The later precinct was  surrounded by a particularly thick wall, built, like the residential buildings, of dressed quarried  stones, and coated on the outside with three layers of plaster. . . . Three gates can  be dated to this stage: the southern gate, originally  used by worshippers as the main entrance gate, of which a tower and a broad staircase have survived;  and the northern and eastern gates, of which  several cells have survived, recalling the structure  of the gates in the book of Ezekiel (40:6-16) and  the Temple Scroll. (my bolding and italics in all quotations)^[1]

Later Magen wrote that some of the Persian period gates also reminded him of Ezekiel’s description. Details to help the reader decide what was so Ezekiel-like in the Persian wall are not abundant in his later post.

Again, Magen makes his emphatic declaration of what “we know” about the date of this temple for which he has provided no evidence:

However, while Josephus dates the construction to the reign of Alexander the Great, we now know that it was built in the time of Nehemiah.^[2]

The remainder of the article addresses the inscriptions on the stones within the area of the precinct. All that needs to be pointed out here is that all of these inscriptions are dated from the Hellenistic era and later.^[3]

The unprecedented large number of inscriptions at one site indicates that the Samaritans habitually wrote inscriptions on building stones, from the Hellenistic period onward.^[4]

So when one quotes Magen’s translations of the inscriptions that seem to suggest the existence of a temple connected in some way to the stones, one is doing nothing more than sharing evidence suggesting a temple in the Hellenistic period or later. We will return to the dating of the inscriptions in the last part of this post.

Article 2

• Stern, Ephraim, and Yitzhak Magen. “Archaeological Evidence for the First Stage of the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim.” Israel Exploration Journal 52, no. 1 (2002): 49–57.

Now here we have a most interesting article. Two capitals of Phoenician design, bearing Phoenician and Egyptian religious motifs, were discovered on Mount Gerizim by Yitzhak Magen’s team.

^[5]

They consist of two motifs, “the central triangle with the two spiralling volutes and a Phoenician palmette”, very common among the Phoenicians and Iron Age Israel (that is before the Assyrian captivity).

[T]hey represent the Phoenician-Israelite version of the ‘tree of life’ (fig. 7), that major and most common ancient Near Eastern motif (Stern 1995: 319-334), towards which devotees turned with raised hands, standing or kneeling on both sides. This motif . . . was adopted from an Egyptian prototype, and is depicted . . . on a number of ivories found in the palace of the Israelite kings at Samaria . . . ^[6]

^[7]

The article continues:

It now seems almost certain that the ‘tree of life’ in these times symbolised the goddess ‘Astarte, the main Phoenician female deity. . . .

The other sacred emblem appearing on one of our capitals (fig. 1) is that of seven uraei [raised cobra heads], the heads of whom were cut away, . . . . In Egypt, uraei symbolised divine protection and as such they served as guardians to sacred locations . . . ^[8]

Stern and Magen conclude that the capitals were originally made in the time of the Israelite monarchy, perhaps for use in Shechem. So how to explain their presence on Mount Gerizim? Their answer: they were relics of the old “House of Yahweh” in Shechem but were taken from ruins there and re-used for the Temple on Mount Gerizim in Persian times.^[9] This is their conclusion, even though they earlier wrote,

[B]oth capitals exhibit the motifs of the ‘tree of life’ and the uraei, which were prohibited during the Persian and Hellenistic periods by the Samaritan religious authorities, who—at this period—were strictly monotheistic. To the best of our knowledge, these two emblems are strict exceptions among the finds of the Mount Gerizim temple.^[10]

^[11]

Surely a simpler explanation is that the Persian period Samaritans continued the same form of Yahweh worship much as it had been practised in the days of the kingdom – and as it still appeared to be practised among Jews at Elephantine in Egypt, complete with a pantheon of gods alongside Yahweh. In other words, the capital with those “pagan” motifs was on Mount Gerizim because they were not forbidden in Persian times.

So I don’t see any evidence in this article for the kind of temple Magen would want us to imagine was constructed in Persian era Mount Gerizim.

Article 3

• Magen, Yitzhak. “The Dating of the First Phase of the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim in Light of the Archaeological Evidence.” In Judah and the Judeans in the Fourth Century B.C.E, edited by Oded Lipschits, Gary N. Knoppers, and Rainer Albertz. Eisenbrauns, 2007.

Once more Yitzhak Magen begins his discussion by claiming the two-stage construction on Mount Gerizim’s “sacred precinct” area: the Persian period of the mid-fifth century BCE and the Hellenistic period of the early second century BCE. Magen describes the layout of the “sacred precinct”, its measurements, and so forth. The western wall has no discernable gate and Magen believes this is because it was closest to a Temple’s “holy of holies”:

This lack of gates may be due to the location of the Holy of Holies, the extremely hallowed rear extremity of the temple. I believe that the current Samaritan sacred site known as “The Twelve Stones” is located in the area of the Holy of Holies.^[12]

Unfortunately “belief” is not evidence. Magen continues:

The Persian-period enclosure most likely featured three chamber gates: to the north, the east, and the south, reminiscent of the temple gates depicted in the book of Ezekiel (40:10–16), which was the basis for the temple built by the returning Babylonian exiles. The temple built by the returnees served, in turn, as the model for the temple erected by the Samaritans on Mt. Gerizim.^[13]

So gates that “most likely” were there are “reminiscent” of Ezekie’s gates, which was the blueprint for the Jerusalem Temple supposedly built by returnees from Babylon – even though we have even less evidence for such a temple in Jerusalem at this time nor any for waves of returnees from Babylonian captivity. (See Evidence Against Jerusalem in Persian Times Producing the Hebrew Bible)

The closest Magen comes to offering any semblance of a Persian period temple is the following:

The precinct yielded thousands of pottery vessels and burned bones of sacrifices—of sheep, goats, cattle, and doves. The coins from the Persian period, the pottery vessels, and Carbon 14 (C-14) testing at the site enable us to ascribe the first phase of the temple to the mid-fifth century b.c.e. This temple was active for approximately 250 years, until the establishment of the new temple in the Hellenistic period.^[14]

And then,

Numerous discoveries from the sacred precinct substantiate the existence of a Temple to the Lord. Dozens of finely dressed ashlars of similar size and fashioned with stone masons’ marks had been removed from the temple’s walls and were unearthed in the excavations. These stones, the only ashlars discovered on Mt. Gerizim in either private or public construction, were quarried away from Mt. Gerizim before being brought to the site. The debris yielded proto-Ionic or Aeolic capitals belonging to the early temple from the Persian period (fig. 8). The inscriptions discovered on Mt. Gerizim are the most striking indication of the existence of a temple.^[15]

Those inscriptions, as we have seen, are acknowledged by Magen elsewhere to belong to the Hellenistic and later periods, not the Persian period. And figure 8 is a repeat of the one we saw bearing the pagan motifs associated with Astarte’s Tree of Life and the Egyptian guardian cobra (uraei).

^[16]

Concerning the inscriptions, Magen explains their relevance for a temple:

The inscriptions discovered on Mt. Gerizim are the most striking indication of the existence of a temple. Some contain the titles of the priests who served as religious functionaries (fig. 9),4 while others contain the formulas “before the God in this place,” “before (the) God,” or “before the Lord,” which are always indicative of a temple (fig. 10).5 An additional inscription in Hebrew notes “that which Joseph offered for his wife and his sons before the Lord in the temple” (fig. 11).6 Yet another inscription mentions the “house of sacrifice,” an expression that parallels an expression used to refer to the temple in Jerusalem (2 Chr 7:12).7 An inscription in Paleo-Hebrew script contains the Tetragrammaton, apparently as part of the phrase “the house of the Lord” (fig. 12).8 A Greek inscription on a sundial contains the phrase “Highest God,” which is the name of the Lord in Greek. Perhaps the most fascinating discovery is a small gold bell with a silver clapper from the fringes of the high priest’s ephod (Exod 28:33–35; fig. 13). ^[17]

Each of the footnotes I have preserved in the above quotation (from 4 to 8) point to twenty translations of inscriptions found in the volume that we discussed under the heading JSP vol. 2 in Part 1 of this series. Recall that Magen had introduced all of those inscriptions with this observation of their post-Persian date:

The excavations of Mt. Gerizim brought to light some four hundred inscription fragments in Neo-Hebrew and Aramaic (lapidary and Proto-Jewish) scripts, inscribed on building and paving stones, that were found inside the city’s Hellenistic period sacred precinct. Scores of Greek inscriptions were uncovered as well, some from the Hellenistic period, but most dating from the  reconstruction of the Samaritan sanctuary in the reign of Constantine I in the fourth century CE; some also dated from the time of the subsequent Byzantine church. Also found were a few inscriptions in the Samaritan script, whose style dates them to the medieval period. The unprecedented large number of inscriptions at one site indicates that the Samaritans habitually wrote inscriptions on building stones, from the Hellenistic period onward. . . .

We believe that most of the early inscriptions should  be dated to the Hellenistic period (third-second centuries BCE), although some may belong to the  earliest period of the sacred precinct (fifth-fourth centuries BCE).^[18]

No further discussion attempts to justify the “belief” that “some may” belong to the fifth-fourth centuries.

As for the “dating the first phase of the Temple and the surrounding precinct”, Magen refers readers to the finds already covered in this series:

This section is devoted to the Persian period, with the goal of ending the long-standing debate concerning the beginnings of the Samaritan temple at the site. I anticipate that the presentation of the ceramic finds, the coins, and the C-14 examinations of the bones and ashes of the sacrifices will securely date the construction of the first phase of the temple to the mid-fifth century B.C.E. and not to the late fourth century B.C.E.—the time of Alexander the Great—as was claimed by Josephus (and subsequently by later scholars). ^[19]

As we have already seen, Magen does well enough in convincing us of the date of the pottery but continues to fail to explain how this pottery is evidence of a nearby temple:

[A]ll the pottery discovered at the site’s sacred precinct is to be securely dated to the period between the fifth and the fourth centuries b.c.e., that is, before the conquest of Alexander the Great. This dating is further supported by the numismatic finds.^[20]

Similarly, again as we have seen by now, with the coins:

Despite the abundance of coins at the site, the number of coins from the Persian period is relatively small. . . .

I conclude, therefore, that all the Samaritan coins found on Mt. Gerizim, even if undated, preceded the time of the conquest of Alexander the Great (figs. 27–29).^[21]

And the date of the ashes of the sacrificed animals? As we would expect:

Several C-14 samples were taken of charred wood and bones found at the site, all from the strata belonging to the early phase of the sacred precinct—the Persian–Ptolemaic period (450–200 B.C.E.), preceding the Seleucid conquest of the land of Israel in the time of Antiochus III.^[22]

And we recall Magen’s perhaps inadvertent reminder elsewhere that there were more common centres for regular sacrifices than temples:

The sole acceptable fashion of worshiping a deity, whether YHWH or some other god, was by the construction of altars, shrines, and temples and offering sacrifices and burning incense.^[23]

Conclusion

I believe that I have given Yitzhak Magen a fair chance to demonstrate the existence of a temple on Mount Gerizim in Persian times. When I first saw his emphatic claims (e.g. “unequivocal proof”) I assumed that he must have published irrefutable material evidence for that temple. I remained puzzled, however, by a few remarks of other scholars holding on to doubts or even outright rejection of such a temple. And the only other scholars who insisted on the temple cited the same source: Y. Magen. So I read and re-read Magen’s volumes on the archaeological finds and have presented the main points in this series of posts. I fail to see how Magen has come close to demonstrating that a Samaritan temple was built on Mount Gerizim in the Persian period.

And without that evidence, we cannot assume that Deuteronomy or any other work reflecting temple ideologies of the Pentateuch was being composed.

The fact is that Magen has left indications in his writings that support the alternative view that Samaria in Persian times embraced a polytheistic cult worship of Yahweh. Evidence for Pentateuchal ideas does not surface until well into the Hellenistic period.

Notes

^[1] Joseph Naveh and Yitzhak Magen, “Aramaic and Hebrew Inscriptions of the Second-Century BCE at Mount Gerizim,” ’Atiqot 32 (1997): 9. Bolded highlighting is mine.

^[2] Naveh and Magen, “Aramaic and Hebrew Inscriptions of the Second-Century BCE at Mount Gerizim,” 10.

^[3] Naveh and Magen, “Aramaic and Hebrew Inscriptions of the Second-Century BCE at Mount Gerizim,” 10ff. The same article covers inscriptions clearly made in the Christian era.

^[4] Yitzhak Magen et al., Mount Gerizim Excavations. Volume I: The Aramaic, Hebrew and Samaritan Inscriptions, trans. Edward Levin and Michael Guggenheimer, JSP Series Judea and Samaria Publications 2 (Israel Antiquities Authority, 2004), 13. Magen does qualify this point by saying that “some may belong to the earliest period of the sacred precinct (fifth-fourth centuries BCE). (p.14)

^[5] Ephraim Stern and Yitzhak Magen, “Archaeological Evidence for the First Stage of the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim,” Israel Exploration Journal 52, no. 1 (2002): 49.

^[6] Stern and Magen, “Archaeological Evidence for the First Stage of the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim,” 53.

^[7] Stern and Magen, “Archaeological Evidence for the First Stage of the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim,” 53.

^[8] Stern and Magen, “Archaeological Evidence for the First Stage of the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim,” 54.

^[9] Stern and Magen, “Archaeological Evidence for the First Stage of the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim,” 56.

^[10] Stern and Magen, “Archaeological Evidence for the First Stage of the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim,” 55.

^[11] Stern and Magen, “Archaeological Evidence for the First Stage of the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim,” 55.

^[12] Yitzhak Magen, “The Dating of the First Phase of the  Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim  in Light of the Archaeological Evidence,” in Judah and the Judeans in the Fourth Century B.C.E, ed. Oded Lipschits et al. (Eisenbrauns, 2007), 160.

^[13] Magen, “The Dating of the First Phase of the  Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim  in Light of the Archaeological Evidence,” 161.

^[14] Magen, “The Dating of the First Phase of the  Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim  in Light of the Archaeological Evidence,” 164f.

^[15] Magen, “The Dating of the First Phase of the  Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim  in Light of the Archaeological Evidence,” 166.

^[16] Magen, “The Dating of the First Phase of the  Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim  in Light of the Archaeological Evidence,” 166.

^[17] Magen, “The Dating of the First Phase of the  Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim  in Light of the Archaeological Evidence,” 166ff.

^[18] Magen et al., Mount Gerizim Excavations. Volume I, 13f.

^[19] Magen, “The Dating of the First Phase of the  Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim  in Light of the Archaeological Evidence,” 176.

^[20] Magen, “The Dating of the First Phase of the  Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim  in Light of the Archaeological Evidence,” 179.

^[21] Magen, “The Dating of the First Phase of the  Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim  in Light of the Archaeological Evidence,” 179f. Coins are from pages 207, 209, 211.

^[22] Magen, “The Dating of the First Phase of the  Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim  in Light of the Archaeological Evidence,” 180.

^[23] Yitzhak Magen, The Samaritans and the Good Samaritan, trans. Edward Levin, JSP Series 7 (Israel Antiquities Authority, 2008), 10.