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Page 189
189 RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
35 A.D. a false prophet promised to show the Samaritans the sacred vessels buried by Moses upon the mountain; in consequence there was an assemblage of people at a village near by called Tirathana which Pilate attacked, slaying many; and his violence and cruelty caused his deposition. That the mutual hatred of the two peoples did not bar the Samaritans from the Gospel is shown by Jesus' employment of the Samaritan as the merciful man in Luke x. Further testimony is found in Luke xvii. 16; John iv. 39 sqq.; Acts viii. 5 eqq., 14 sqq.
On the outbreak of the Jewish war in 66 the Samaritans were undecided which of the two hated parties they should choose as enemies. In June, 67 (Josephus, War, III., vii. 32), an armed assemblage
4. Later gathered on Gerizim, against which History. Vespasian sent Cerealis with 600 horse and 3,000 foot, who stormed the hill and killed 11,600 of them. After that the Samari tans dropped out of history for a time, but in 194 are heard of as partizans of Pescennius Niger against Septimius Severus. Roman laws of the end of the fourth century show Samaritan communities in Egypt, on some islands of the Red Sea, and else where; and in Rome at the beginning of the sixth century they had a synagogue. Toward the end of the fifth century began the insurrections of this peo ple which revealed their hate of the Christians and led to their suppression. The Emperor Zeno re placed their synagogue on Gerizim with a church to the Virgin, and under his successor they stormed the mountain and slew the keepers of the church. In 529 under Justinian they rebelled and crowned their leader Julian king, plundered and burned Christian villages and churches, until Justinian in a pitched battle conquered and slew many of them, and proclaimed severe laws against them. The next report concerning the Samaritans comes from Ben jamin of Tudela c. 1170, who says that the "Cu theans " of Shechem, about 100 in number, cele brate their Passover festival on Gerizim, and speaks of about 900 Samaritans distributed in Cwsarea, Ascalon, and Damascus (for the latter cf. A. Musil, Sieben aamarit. Inschriften aus Damascus, in SWA, xxxix., 1903, pp. 127-128). Since the end of the sixteenth century the Samaritans of Shechem and Cairo have been in communication with Christian travelers and scholars, the point of interest to the latter being the Samaritan recension of the Penta teuch. In 1853 Heinrich Petermann reported the number of Samaritans in Nablus as 122; in 1884 there were reported fifty-three men, forty-six women, thirty-six boys, and sixteen girls, while in 1904 the total number was given as 175, but there are no colonies of Samaritans outside Nablus. In Nablus this people inhabits its own quarter in the southwestern part of the city, living in great poverty, with a priest (kohin) who claims to be a Levite, though the Aaronic line is conceded to have been ex tinct since 1658. The present priest has the power, either at his own initiative or at the wish of the community, to anoint others to the office. He re ceives-tithes from the community, and from this and an accessory source the income is about sixty-four dollars. The clothing is white with a red turban. The civil control is under a ahophet, " judge ."8. Doctrines Their doctrine, apart from the special significance of Mt. Gerizim, is like that of the Jews. They emphasize the unity of God, and reject all kinds of image worship, anthropomorphism, and anthropopathism, though between God and man they conceive of mediating spirits. Moses was the greatest of the prophets, whose law is holy. The cultus on Gerizim they refer to Deut. xxvii. 4, where they read " Gerizim " for " Ebal." The Messiah (John iv. 25) is to come 6,000 years after the creation, and he will establish the Tabernacle, holy vessels, and manna on Gerizim, renew the worship, and convert all people to the true faith; he will live to the age of one hundred and be buried on Gerizim. The final judgment is to come at the end of 7,000 years, the result of which will be eternal, with a period of penance in hell for those whose lives have mingled good and evil. In the matter of the levirate marriage (Deut. xxv. 5 sqq.) the Samaritans construe " brother " as " nearest friend," and the levirate is not binding if the friend has two wives already (a second wife being allowed in case of sterility of the first). Marriages are contracted early, and divorce is extremely rare; the value or purchase price of a bride is from $300 to $115, which the bride receives. Circumcision is on the eighth day. The Samaritans follow for their religious festivals the calendar of Lev. xxiii., marking the three chief ones by processions to Gerizim. They regard the Hebrew (being the tongue of the Pentateuch) as the holy language, and some of them possess a passable knowledge of the text; their pronunciation in some particulars serves to correct the JewishChristian.
3. Language and Literature: The colloquial language of the Samaritans from the last century B.c. till the first centuries of the Mohammedan hegemony was a dialect of the West Aramaic, usually designated Samaritan; it presented few differences, apart from loan words from
1. Penta- Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, as com teuch, Tar- pared with the ordinary Palestinian
gam, and Aramaic found in the Ta s and in TAra certain parts of the Talmud The fact dons. that c. 1100 A.D. the Samaritan Penta teuch was translated into Arabic shows that already the Samaritan had become a dead tongue; even earlier than that, the Arabic version of Saadia had been used. In their literature the Penta teuch takes first place. Among the tendencial text alterations the most noticeable is that already noted in Deut. xxvii. 4; there are also wide differences in the term of life given the patriarchs in Gen. v. and xi. It is said that the variants from the Hebrew text num ber 6,000. The theory that the Samaritan Penta teuch was the basis of the Septuagint version, though this is regarded as a falsified and corrupt recension of the Hebrew, was restated by S. Kohn, De Pen. tateucho Samaritano (Leipsic, 1865). Besides this work, the Samaritans possess the Samaritan Tar gum, a translation of the Pentateuch into the Sa maritan; this the Samaritans claim to have been made between 50 and 1 s.c.; really it was made in the second or beginning of the third century A.D. Field's Hexapla (prolegomena, pp. lxxxii. lxxxiii.) remarks that of forty-three readings in the Greek