Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/265

Rh SAMARITANS 245 breach of continuity. They must indeed have felt that they had fallen behind the Judceans in religious matters, and the opportunity of putting themselves on a par with them by securing a copy of the institutes of Moses and the services of a Judsean priest would naturally be grasped at. But what is remarkable is that, having got the Pentateuch, they followed it with a fidelity as loyal and exact as the Jews themselves, save in the one matter of the change of the sanctuary. No concessions were .made to heathenism or to the old lax Jehovah-worship ; the text of the sacred book was transmitted with as much conscientiousness as was practised by Jewish scribes in the first centuries after Ezra ; l and even from the unwilling witness of their enemies the Jews we can gather that they fulfilled all righteousness with scrupulous punctiliousness so far as the letter of the written law was concerned, though of course they did not share in the later developments of the oral law, and so were heretics in the eyes of the Pharisees. 2 That it was possible to establish such a community on such a soil is a remarkable evidence that in that age the tendency to a legal religion was favoured by general causes, not confined to Judsea alone ; it must be remembered that elaborate hierocracies sprang up after the fall of the old nationalities in many parts of western Asia (comp. PRIEST, vol. xix. p. 729). At the same time it must be remembered that, as Ezra could not have succeeded without Nehemiah, Manasseh had Sanballat's civil authority to back him. It is probable, too, that Josephus is right in assuming that he was strengthened by a considerable secession of Judaeans, and it is not to be supposed that the "Samaritans" ever embraced anything like the whole population of the Samaritan country. Samaria itself was Hellenized in the time of Alexander ; and in Ecclus. 1. 26 the foolish people that dwell at Shechem are distinguished from the inhab- itants of the Samaritan hill-country in general. 3 The Samaritans, like the Jews, throve and multiplied under the discipline of the law, but at no time in their history do they appear to have had the political importance that would have accrued to so closely knit a religious body if it had held all the fertile Samaritan district. Jews and Samaritans were separated by bitter jealousies and open feuds (Jos., Ant., xii. 4, 1), but their internal development and external history ran closely parallel courses till the Jewish state took a new departure under the 1 This appears especially by comparison of the Samaritan Pentateuch with the Septuagint. It is not of course to be wondered at that the Juda:an text is on the whole superior to the Samaritan, for the Samaritans had no opportunity of revising their text by Judsean copies. The Samaritan character is an independent development of the old Hebrew writing as it was about the time when they first got the Pentateuch. This in itself is an indication that from the first their text ran a separate course, and that there was no opportunity of checking corruptions that had got into it by reference to different recensions. In Judaea also there were important variations between MSS. down to the time of the Septuagint and even later, and in many cases the Septuagint readings agree with the Samaritan Pentateuch, showing an affinity between the sources of these two texts. But ultimately the Jewish scribes were able to constitute or rather to select an authoritative text, and whether by good luck or by judgment the text they chose was on the whole one of a singularly good type. The Samaritans never had opportunity to do anything of this kind. 2 Compare, for details and references, Nutt, Fragments of a Samaritan Targum, p. 37 sq., 42 sq., and Schiirer, Gesch. des Jiidischen Volkes, p. 7 Josephus (Ant., xi. 8, 7) says they received Judaeans who were accused of ritual irregularities, but, as he adds that the fugitives pro- fessed that they were falsely accused, it is plain that even this partisan writer did not venture to represent them as indifferent to ritual orthodoxy. No doubt, in addition to the legal ordinances, the Samaritans retained some ancient traditional practices, as they certainly introduced some new observances. Their passover, for example, has some peculiar features, one of which, viz., the application of the sacrificial blood to the faces of the children, has an exact parallel in the old Arabic 'aklka. See the account of an eye-witness (Prof. Socin) in Badeker's Palestine. 3 So all Greek MSS. The old Latin substitutes Mount Edom ; the Syriac has "Gbel," which may mean Ebal or the Edomite country. Maccabees. The religious resemblance between the two bodies was increased by the adoption of the institution of the synagogue, and from the synagogue there certainly grew up a Samaritan theology and an exegetical tradition. The latter is embodied in the Samaritan Targum or Aramaic version of the Pentateuch, which in its present form is, according to Noldeke's investigations, not earlier than the fourth Christian century, but in general agrees with the readings of Origen's TO Sa/aapemKoV. For the dogmatic views of the Samaritans our sources are all late; they embrace hymns and other books of little general interest, and mainly at least of mediaeval origin. Like the Jews, too, the Samaritans had a haggada ; indeed the Arabic books they still possess under the name of chronicles are almost entirely haggadic fable with very little admixture of true tradition. The recent date of all this literature seems to show that the old Samaritans had not nearly so vigorous an intellectual life as the Jews, though what life they had moved in similar lines ; indeed, having no sacred book but the Pentateuch, and having passed through no such national revival as that of the Maccabees, they lacked two of the most potent influences that shaped the development of Judaism. On the other hand, they shared with the Jews the influence of a third great intellectual stimulus, that of Hellenism. Samaritans as well as Jews were carried to Egypt by Ptolemy Lagi ; the rivalry of the two sects was continued in Alexandria (Jos., Ant., xii. 1, 1), and Hellen- ized Samaritans wrote histories and epic poems in Greek with exactly the same patriotic mendacity which charac- terizes Jewish Hellenism Of this, the oldest surviving Samaritan literature, some fragments have been preserved in the remains of Alexander Polyhistor. 4 The troubles that fell on the Jews for their fidelity to the law, under Antiochus Epiphanes, were not escaped by the Samaritans (2 Mac. v. 23, vi. 2) ; the account in Josephus (Ant., xii., 5, 5) which makes them voluntarily exchange their religion for the worship of the Grecian Zeus is certainly a malignant falsehood. 5 Under the Maccabees their relations with Judaea became very bitter, and they were severely chastised by Hyrcanus, who destroyed their temple. Hostilities between the two nations recurred from time to time ; and in the New Testa- ment, in Josephus, and in Jewish tradition we see how deep-seated was their mutual abhorrence. 6 But, with all this, the sects were too nearly alike not to have much in common. The Roman yoke galled both in the same way ; the Samaritan false prophet whose movement Pilate put down with cruel slaughter (Jos., Ant., xviii. 4, 1), and pro- bably also Simon Magus and Dositheus (Orig., Cont. Gels., i. p. 44), are parallel phenomena to the false Messiahs that arose among the Jews. The original views of the Samaritans were like those of the Sadducees, and they did not believe in a resurrection or a Messiah ; but it was impossible for their faith to survive under the cruel pres- sure of foreign bondage without absorbing something from Jewish eschatology. And so too, in the struggle of the Jews with Vespasian, perhaps also in that with Hadrian, the Samaritans forgot their old feud, and took part against the Romans. They seem also to have shared in great measure in the subsequent dispersion, for in later times we hear of Samaritans and Samaritan synagogues not only in Egypt but in Rome, and in other parts of the empire. 4 See especially Friedlander, Hellenislische Studien (1875), p. 82 sq. An Egyptio- Samaritan fragment has also been suspected by Ewald to be imbedded in the Sibyllina, xi. 239-244. 5 See Appel, Qu&stiones de Rebus Samaritanorum, 1874, p. 3/ sq. 6 Josephus calls them Cuthseans (from 2 Kings xvii. 30), and will not admit that they are of Hebrew blood at all ; the Rabbins use the same name, but are not always so positive in calling them pure Gen- tiles. The groundless accusation of dove-worship (which makes their religion that of the Syrian Aphrodite) arose in post-Mishnic times.