Description
According to Josephus (Ant 11.310; 13.256; War 1.63) the temple on Mount Gerizim was built by Sanballat, the governor of Samaria, at the time of Alexander the Great. Sanballat modeled the temple on Gerizim after the temple in Jerusalem and built it to persuade his son in law, Manasseh, to stay married to Sanballat’s daughter, Nikaso.Following the publication of the Mount Gerizim Excavations, carried out between 1982 and 2006 and directed by Dr. Yitzhak Magen, it has become clear that Josephus’ account of the founding of the Gerizim temple cannot be confirmed. Magen’s dating of the first building phase of the sanctuary to the fifth century BCE definitively rebuts a dating of the foundation of the temple to the reign of Alexander the Great in accordance with Josephus’ account in the passages mentioned above.
It has long been assumed that Josephus’ account to some extent was dependent on Nehemiah 13:28, where it is stated that a son in law of Sanballat the Horonite and son of Eliashib the high priest was chased away from Jerusalem, possibly because of his marriage to a foreign woman. Magen accepts that the reason for founding the temple on Mount Gerizim in the 5th century matches Josephus’ account, but that Josephus simply got the date wrong and that the Sanballat in question is Sanballat the Horonite, a contemporary of Nehemiah, in accordance with Neh 13:28. According to Magen, the temple on Mount Gerizim was modeled after the temple in Jerusalem and built by priests who followed the grandson of Eliashib.
The question of whether the Gerizim temple was modeled after the temple in Jerusalem is an important one for our understanding of the sanctuary on Mount Gerizim and the people who worshipped there; if indeed the Gerizim temple was formed after the pattern of the Jerusalem temple the argument in favor of the Gerizim cult as derived from the cult in Jerusalem is strengthened. On the other hand, if no such connection can be demonstrated convincingly the argument for an independently developed or even primary Northern tradition gains strength.
This paper offers a critical examination of the similarities between the Jerusalem temple and the Gerizim temple and an assessment of our knowledge of the two sanctuaries and its implications.
| Period | 25 May 2012 → 28 May 2012 |
|---|---|
| Event title | The Other Temples: Hekhal: The Irish Society for the Study of the Ancient Near East |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Dublin, IrelandShow on map |