Mount Gerizim

The two summits stand at either side of a pass in the central hill country, and the mound of Tell Balata, identified as biblical Shechem, sits at the eastern mouth of that pass. The Shechem page carries the case for that identification and calls it not seriously contested, so this page does not re-argue it. The coordinates this site holds for the two summits differ by about two ten-thousandths of a degree of longitude and by 0.0334 degrees of latitude, which works out to roughly 3.7 kilometres summit to summit in a straight line. That is arithmetic on the site's own two coordinate pairs rather than a surveyed distance. Gerizim's summit stands about 881 meters above sea level. No elevation for Ebal is in this site's data, so none is stated here. Yitzhak Magen excavated on Mount Gerizim over a long campaign, from 1983 to 2006 across more than nineteen seasons. He reported a walled sacred precinct on the summit with a substantial settlement around it, expanded in the early second century BC. His excavation volumes were published by the Israel Antiquities Authority from 2004. Josephus is the literary account standing beside that excavation. He tells the story of the temple's founding in the time of Alexander, Antiquities of the Jews 11.302 to 11.347, and records its destruction by the Hasmonean high priest John Hyrcanus, Antiquities 13.254 to 13.256. No sentence of Josephus is quoted on this page, because no text of either passage was checked byte for byte in the research behind it. The excavated dating for the earliest phase of the precinct is earlier than the date Josephus implies, and that gap is a live question in the field. This site's featured study of the Samaritans dates the founding to the Persian or early Hellenistic period, and that is as far as the evidence here is taken. Adam Clarke, writing in 1832, reports the traditional reading of Josephus as a temple built by Sanballat about 332 years before the incarnation, citing Antiquities 11.8.4 and 2 Maccabees 6:2. That is his report of how the passage was read in his day rather than a settled date. The destruction is dated two ways in work this site already carries. The Shechem record gives it as usually dated about 128 BC. The featured study of the Samaritans gives around 111 to 107 BC and marks the date contested in its own timeline. Both are live positions in the field. This page names both and settles neither. The sharpest textual question between the two traditions is one word. At Deuteronomy 27:4 the Masoretic Text reads Mount Ebal and the Samaritan Pentateuch reads Mount Gerizim, and that word decides which mountain the altar and the inscribed stones belong to. Albert Barnes argued in his Notes that the Masoretic reading is original, and reported that nearly all the modern authorities he knew held it. Adam Clarke reported in 1832 that Benjamin Kennicott had defended the Samaritan reading at length in his second dissertation on the Hebrew text, that Parry answered him in The Case between Gerizim and Ebal Fairly Stated, that J. H. Verschuir answered in his Dissertatio Critica, and that many in Clarke's own day found Kennicott's arguments unanswerable. Support for the Gerizim reading has also been claimed from an Old Latin manuscript, catalogued as Vetus Latina manuscript 100 in the Beuron numbering, and from a Dead Sea Scroll fragment from Qumran Cave 4, catalogued as 4Q33 and published in 2008, and both claims are argued over. How this site handles that dispute is worth stating plainly. Each community reads its own text. Neither text is called a forgery here, and no community is accused of tampering with Scripture. The nineteenth-century notes on both sides of this question carry a charge of that kind aimed in opposite directions, and those notes are left off this page for that reason. The positions themselves are given above in the site's own words. Whether a man on the summit could be heard in the town below is treated in the older commentaries as a plain acoustic fact rather than a figure. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown observe that the top of Gerizim is not so high in the rear of the town as it is nearer the plain. John Gill says the summit was near enough to Sychar that Jotham's voice carried. Adam Clarke adds a note on how far the human voice travels in hill country. All three are eighteenth and nineteenth-century observations and are given here as that. The old claim that Gerizim is green and Ebal bare is not agreed even among the commentators this site holds. Clarke reports the fertile Gerizim and the barren Ebal as the united testimony of the travellers he had read, and names Ludolf, Reland, Benjamin and Maundrell. Barnes, writing in the same century, says that Gerizim is barren like Ebal, and proposes instead that it was chosen as the hill of blessing because it is the southern of the two, the south being for Hebrew thought the region of light. Two respected commentators, two flat contradictions, and this page reports both rather than picking. One further note for a reader who has met the claim elsewhere: 1 Enoch does not name either mountain.