The Samaritan Pentateuch reads the command about the chosen place as a place God has chosen, and names Gerizim; the Jewish text leaves the choice in the future and names no mountain, and Jewish tradition supplies Jerusalem. The Samaritan tenth commandment, built from verses that stand elsewhere in the Jewish text, commands an altar on Gerizim. Everything else in the division follows from this one reading: two sanctuaries, two priesthoods and two accounts of the same books. Samaritans face Gerizim in prayer, keep the Passover sacrifice on its slope, which is the only place where the rite set out in Exodus is still performed with lambs, and are buried facing it. Excavation on the summit has recovered a substantial sacred precinct in use in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, so the site was a working centre of worship long before the polemics on either side were composed, and the destruction of that precinct by the Hasmoneans in the second century BCE is the injury the tradition remembers.
Facts
Position Profile
Key TextThe Samaritan Pentateuch, which reads the command about the chosen place as a place God has chosen and names Gerizim, and whose tenth commandment, built from verses that stand elsewhere in the Jewish text, commands an altar on Gerizim. 1 Origins
Defining MomentThe destruction of the precinct on the summit by the Hasmoneans in the second century BCE, which is the injury the tradition remembers. 1 Attestation
Earliest AttestationExcavation on the summit has recovered a substantial sacred precinct in use in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, so the site was a working centre of worship long before the polemics on either side were composed. 1 Status
Status Within the TraditionDefined and binding within this tradition 1 Doctrinal CategoryRevelation, Covenant and Prophecy 1 Learn More
What the Excavation Found Before the Polemics Were Written
Yitzhak Magen's excavations on the summit of Gerizim recovered a sacred precinct considerably larger and older than the polemical Jewish and Samaritan sources on either side had prepared scholars to expect, with construction phases running from the Persian period through the Hellenistic, centuries before the doctrinal arguments that later defined the split were even being made in their present form. The scale of what was found there, a substantial temple complex with extensive associated animal bone deposits consistent with regular sacrificial worship, makes clear that Gerizim was a working religious center in its own right and not merely a claim invented to rival Jerusalem after the fact.
The textual side of the dispute is built with equal deliberateness. The Samaritan Pentateuch does not simply interpret an ambiguous verse in Gerizim's favor, it constructs a tenth commandment from verses that exist elsewhere in the shared text, compiled and relocated so that the command to build an altar on Gerizim appears within the Decalogue itself rather than as a later, lesser instruction, giving the location the same scriptural weight as the commandments against theft or false witness. The Hasmonean destruction of the precinct in the second century BCE, which the excavation's destruction layer corroborates independently of any textual account, is the injury Samaritan tradition has organized its memory of the dispute around ever since.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
The textual divergence and the excavated precinct on the summit are independent lines of evidence for the same claim.
Sources
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