exchange Him for any other god, and He also has sworn to us that He will not change us for any other people. The Emperor then said to him: I will throw down my seal before you and you can stoop down and pick it up, so that they will say of you that you have conformed to the desire of the king. He replied: ›Fie on thee, Caesar, fie on thee, Caesar; if thine own honour is so important, how much more the honour of the Holy One, blessed be He!‹ They were leading him away to kill him when his mother said: ›Give him to me that I may kiss him a little.‹ She said to him: ›My son, go and say to your Father Abraham: Thou didst bind one [son to the] altar, but I have bound seven altars.‹ Then she also went up on to a roof and threw herself down and was killed. A voice thereupon came forth from heaven saying, ›A joyful mother of children.‹ (Ps 113:9).62
The dating of the narrative is close to the time of composition of 4 Maccabees and should be regarded as an updating of the old tradition during the Hadrianic persecution. The heavenly voice proclaims the justification of the martyrs who died for the sake of the oneness of God.63
5 The Samaritans
5.1 On the history of the Samaritans
In the Maccabean period, a community geographically and religiously close to Judea came into disagreement and competition with Jerusalem and its cult: the Samaritans, whose center lay in Shechem (old Samaria), who worshiped YHWH on Gerizim. Since the excavations by Yitzhak Magen64 there is no doubt that a temple stood there.65 They have the Pentateuch in common with the Judeans, although in its own paleo-Hebrew form of writing, with specific deviations in content substantiating their sole legitimacy as followers of the Torah over against the Judeans.
The question of their historical background is complex and must be considered within the context of the history of Samaria. The starting point is the subjugation of the Northern Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in 721 BCE and the deportation of part of the population of Samaria and the resettlement of foreign peoples:
The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and he settled them in the towns of Samaria in place of the Israelites; they took possession of Samaria, and dwelt in its towns (2 Kgs 17:24 JPS).
This looks like a complete population exchange, but such was not really the case. The report in 2 Kgs 17:25f. continues saying that those peoples brought their own gods with them and worshiped them instead of YHWH, whereupon the latter sent a plague of lions. To avoid this, the king of the Assyrians sent an exiled priest back, who taught the worship of YHWH in Bethel (2 Kgs 17:27f.). But this did not make the inhabitants of Samaria worshipers of YHWH exclusively; rather, the new settlers worshiped him alongside their own gods.
Those nations worshiped YHWH, but they also served their idols. To this day their children and their children’s children do as their ancestors did (2 Kgs 17:41).
This gave rise to the theory that the Samaritans of the Hellenistic-Roman period were the product of this syncretism. This view is not tenable, as the (supposed) Samaritan mixture of religions from the eighth century had nothing to do with the Samaritans’ strict faithfulness to the Torah from the second century BCE onwards.
A more realistic hypothesis starts with the deportation of the indigenous population and the resettlement of foreign peoples, but rightly acknowledges that this population exchange was only partial, and that some YHWH-worshipers had remained in their land. Afterwards, the practice of religion in the cities of Bethel and Samaria gained syncretistic features, but YHWH-worship had remained in effect in the countryside.66 But this did not lead to the shape of Samaritan YHWH-worship in the Hellenistic-Roman period either.
A fundamental paradigm shift is called for. Samaritan Torah religion did not emerge from the (possible) syncretism of the early period but after Alexander, primarily in the Maccabean period. Hans Gerhard Kippenberg pioneered this theory:
The Samaritan sect seems to have constituted itself essentially in the second century BCE. The sect was born of Israelite priests who understood themselves as sons of Eleazar and denied the office of High priest to Zadokites, Elides and Levites. During the third century BCE the rivalry of two priesthoods in Shechem and Jerusalem does not seem to have been understood as a definitive antithesis. It was not until the second century BCE, when the Jerusalem High priestly succession collapsed, that there was dispute over the legitimate cult.67
The Torah manuscripts found at Qumran are also significant in this regard, as a number of them display (proto-) Samaritan variants.68 A key part in the background of the Samaritan Pentateuch was certainly played by the destruction of the temple under John Hyrcanus I, »but the pre-Samaritan material will have been much older.«69
Hyrcanus I destroyed the Samaritan temple in 111/110 BCE (not 128 BCE as previously thought).70 Since then, the Samaritans have had no sacrificial cult, except for the Passover lamb, which lives among the Samaritans, even after the destruction of their temple, on to the present day.71
Half a century earlier, however, there was a confrontation when, in the process of Hellenization efforts in Jerusalem and on Gerizim, the YHWH-cult was opened to heathen variants—in Jerusalem for Zeus Olympios, on Gerizim for Zeus Xenios. In this context the Samaritan supplicants declared to King Antiochus IV Epiphanes that they were not related to the Judeans (i.e. the Jews) in Jerusalem. Their hope was that this would give them greater recognition on the part of the Seleucid king.
The conflict or quarrel between Jews and Samaritans took grotesque forms in the first century CE, when at Passover of the year 6 or 7 CE bones were scattered by Samaritans in the area of the Jerusalem Temple in an attempt to defile it (Josephus, Ant. 18.29f.) or when under Pilate in 35/36 CE the Samaritans led a revolt, the cruel suppression of which eventually cost Pilate his office (Ant. 18.18–89).
5.2 Basic features of Samaritan theology in Antiquity
The fundamental element is the link to the Torah of Moses. The Samaritans held to the Torah alone, not recognizing the »Prophets and Writings« which came into the canon in the two centuries on either side of the turn of the era. In this regard the Samaritans were closer to the Sadducean wing of Judaism than the Qumran Essene wing or even the Pharisaic. In their exclusive observance of the Torah, they are best comparable to the Karaites.72 Their Torah loyalty did, however, display features in which self-interest is also apparent. The most important change was made, of all things, to the Decalogue, where as a tenth commandment, the building of an altar on Mount Gerizim was added following Deut 27:4–7. This passage also altered vis-à-vis the MT:
(4) When you cross the Jordan, you shall set up these stones (cf. Deut 27:2f.), which I command you this day to set up, on Mount Gerizim (MT: Mount Ebal). You shall brush them with lime. (5) There you shall build an altar to Yahweh, your God, an altar of stones. You shall not work it with iron tools. (6) You shall build the altar of Yahweh, your God, of unhewn stones, and on it you shall offer burnt offering sacrifices for Yahweh, your God. (7) There you shall slaughter and consume salvation sacrifice animals and celebrate before Yahweh, your God.73
This is the legitimation of an exclusively Samaritan YHWH-cult on Mount Gerizim. Whether Samaritan synagogues were already formed at the time when the temple on Mount Gerizim existed or only after its destruction, remains an open question. »Next to nothing is known of the origins of the Samaritan synagogue.«74 It is only very recently that interest in the current history of the Samaritans has resurfaced.75
To summarize: The Samaritans were not a »Jewish sect«—as strictly speaking Jewish sects did not exist before the canonization of rabbinic Judaism in the second century CE—and they never saw themselves as such. They are an Israelite community focused on Torah alone, whose background may indeed be influenced by northern Israelite syncretistic elements, but which committed itself to exclusive Torah observance from the third or second century BCE. In the Samaritan Pentateuch we meet scripture that is strictly focused on the Mosaic Torah and which deviates from the »Judean« Pentateuch at specific points. These divergences are part of the self-portrayal of the Samaritan religious self-understanding.