Samaria

One thing has to be said before the evidence, in plain words. Samaria is also a present-day political term. This page keeps to the Bible's use of the word: the city Omri built, the kingdom whose capital it was, and the region that carried the name into the first century. It names modern excavators and their dates, because that is what archaeology is. It names no modern state, government, boundary or claim, and it takes no side in any present-day dispute over the territory or its name. The city is Tell Sebastiyeh, beside the village of Sebastia, about 11 km northwest of Nablus. The Arabic name preserves the Greek Sebaste, the name Herod gave the city, and Sebaste is the Greek for Augusta, so the place name is three languages deep and still carries Herod's compliment to his patron. The Hebrew name is Shomron (Strong's h8111), from Shemer of 1 Kings 16:24 and from the root that gives the ordinary verb shamar, to keep or to guard (h8104). Origen reports that guard etymology as a Hebrew tradition in the third century. Albert Barnes describes the hill in the quote this page carries, and Adam Clarke quotes the traveller Henry Maundrell, who saw it in 1697, on the same view: a hill in a fruitful valley with a ring of hills running round about it. That bowl-and-hill shape is what Isaiah 28:1 is looking at. Two campaigns did the work a reader has heard of. The Harvard Expedition ran from 1908 to 1910. Gottlieb Schumacher opened it, George Andrew Reisner took the direction in 1909 and 1910 with the architect Clarence Stanley Fisher, and the final report is Reisner, Fisher and Lyon, Harvard Excavations at Samaria, 1908 to 1910, published in 1924. The Joint Expedition ran from 1931 to 1935 under John Winter Crowfoot, with Kathleen M. Kenyon on the stratigraphy, Eleazar Lipa Sukenik for the Hebrew University, and Grace Mary Crowfoot on the ivories. Its reports are the Samaria-Sebaste volumes: The Buildings at Samaria (1942), Early Ivories from Samaria (1938), and The Objects from Samaria (1957). The stratigraphic method Kenyon worked out here is the method she later carried to Jericho. On the summit the excavators found a royal quarter on an artificial platform, enclosed by a casemate wall, which is a double wall with rooms built between its two faces. Inside it stood a large building they identified as the palace of the Israelite kings, built with fine ashlar masonry that matches the best Iron Age construction in the region. Kenyon assigned the earliest two building periods to Omri and Ahab, which fits 1 Kings 16:24 and 16:29 exactly. A rock-cut pool in the royal quarter has been connected with the pool of 1 Kings 22:38 where Ahab's chariot was washed, and that connection is a proposal rather than a proof. The dating is argued. Kenyon dated the periods by the pottery sealed in the construction fills. Ron E. Tappy re-examined the whole stratigraphic record in The Archaeology of Israelite Samaria (1992 and 2001) and argued for a revised reading. Israel Finkelstein has argued from a low chronology that some material Kenyon placed in the ninth century belongs later. Norma Franklin has worked on the masons' marks and the rock-cut tombs. The traditional position, that the platform and the casemate wall are the work of Omri and Ahab in the ninth century, remains the majority reading, and the revisions stand here with their authors and their arguments. Two finds speak directly to the text. Both expeditions recovered carved ivory plaques and fragments from the royal quarter, several hundred pieces, in Phoenician and Syrian style with Egyptian motifs, which is what a marriage into the house of Ethbaal of Sidon would predict. They are furniture inlay and wall panelling rather than building material, which is what the houses of ivory in Amos 3:15 means. The Joint Expedition published them as Early Ivories from Samaria in 1938. The dating of part of the collection is argued, and the present museum holdings should be checked before any museum is named, because the Samaria ivories are often confused with the much larger Nimrud collection. The second find is the Samaria ostraca, a group of inscribed potsherds found in 1910 in a building beside the palace that the excavators named the Ostraca House. The count usually given is 102 sherds, of which roughly 63 are legible. They are administrative dockets recording deliveries of wine and oil, each naming a regnal year, a place and personal names, and they are among the largest bodies of Hebrew writing recovered from the northern kingdom. Two things on them matter here. The personal names carry both the divine name, in the short form -yaw, and Baal, so families in the same administration named their sons for both, which is 1 Kings 16:32 and 2 Kings 17:33 showing up in ordinary paperwork. And the dating is disputed: some scholars assign the dockets to Ahab in the earlier ninth century, while the more common reading places them under Jeroboam II in the first half of the eighth. The honest range is roughly 850 to 750 BC. The fall of the city is where the external records meet the biblical account, and where a genuine dispute sits. The earliest Assyrian kings did not call the place Samaria at all. They called it Beth-khumri, the house of Omri, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown note the inscription naming it so on a tablet dug out of the ruins of Nineveh. Scripture says Shalmaneser besieged the city and that the Assyrians captured it at the end of three years, in the ninth year of Hoshea, and the conventional date is 722 BC. The Babylonian Chronicle records that Shalmaneser V shattered Samaria. His successor Sargon II claims the conquest as his own in inscriptions from his palace at Khorsabad, and the Display Inscription reads, in the standard translations, that he besieged and conquered Samaria and carried away 27,290 of its inhabitants; the Nimrud Prism gives 27,280. Three positions are held. One is that Shalmaneser took the city in 722 shortly before his death and Sargon claimed the credit. A second is that Sargon took it again about 720 after a revolt, which is the case Hayim Tadmor argued in 1958. A third takes Sargon's claim at face value. Bob Becking in 1992 and K. Lawson Younger Jr. in 1999 have each surveyed the evidence at length. This page states the positions with their holders and settles nothing. One point about the number: 27,290 is a large deportation and a small fraction of a kingdom. Read beside 2 Kings 17:24, where peoples are brought in to replace the Israelites rather than to fill an empty land, and beside 2 Chronicles 30:10 to 30:11, where some from Asher, Manasseh and Zebulun later come south to Jerusalem, the evidence points to a population reduced and mixed rather than removed to the last person. The origin of the Samaritans is the most contested question this page touches, and both accounts belong here in the terms each community uses. 2 Kings 17 records the five peoples settled in the towns of Samaria and the mixed worship that followed. Jewish tradition takes that as the origin of the community and uses the name Kutim, after Cuthah, one of the five cities. Josephus follows the same line in the Antiquities, written in the AD 90s, and he writes as a Jewish historian with a stated view of the community rather than as a neutral chronicler. The Samaritans give a different account. They call themselves Shamerim, the keepers of the Torah, from the same root shamar that Origen reports. On their telling they descend from Ephraim, Manasseh and a line of Levites who kept the original worship at Mount Gerizim, and the break came when Eli moved the sanctuary to Shiloh, so that Judah is the departure. Rabbinic literature carries a small tractate on them, Masekhet Kutim, one of the minor tractates appended to the Talmud, which sets out where a Kuti is treated as an Israelite and where he is not; the Babylonian Talmud, compiled in Babylonia and closed around AD 500, discusses their status in several places. That material is law and reception history from a specific community at a specific date, not a neutral report on origins, and this site reads it that way. See the wing on the Jewish writings and the page on reading rabbinic sources as a Christian. One divergence is stated plainly at the point it arises: the Samaritan community holds only the Torah as Scripture and does not receive Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah and Lord. That is a plain difference from the Christian confession, said without disparagement and without hiding it, and John 4:39 to 4:42 records Samaritans of a town believing and calling Him the Savior of the world. Studies of the genetics of the surviving community exist and have been read in more than one direction, and no single study settles a question of identity. The Samaritan Pentateuch is a second ancient Hebrew text of the five books of Moses, written in a script descended from the old palaeo-Hebrew letterforms rather than the square Aramaic script of the Masoretic Text. It differs from the Masoretic Text in a few thousand places, most of them small matters of spelling and grammar. Several hundred of its readings agree with the Septuagint, and Hebrew manuscripts from Qumran carry readings of the same family, so it stands in a real ancient stream. A small number of readings are sectarian, and the clearest is the Samaritan tenth commandment directing an altar on Mount Gerizim where the Masoretic Text of Deuteronomy 27:4 reads Mount Ebal. Scholars generally judge that reading a later expansion, and saying who judges it so is a different thing from calling anyone a forger. Neither text is a forgery and neither community is accused of tampering. What a visitor sees on the ground today is mostly later than all of this. On the acropolis stands the temple of Augustus with its monumental staircase, built by Herod and rebuilt in the Roman period. Below it are a theatre on the northern slope, a stadium in the valley, a forum and basilica, and the colonnaded street that appears in most photographs, which is largely Severan work of the late second or early third century AD rather than Herodian. On the southern slope is a Byzantine church of the fifth or sixth century associated with John the Baptist, with a Crusader cathedral built over the site later. The burial of John at Sebaste is a tradition, and its earliest witnesses can be named and dated: Rufinus of Aquileia writes about AD 402 that the tomb there was violated under the emperor Julian around AD 362, and Jerome knows the tomb at Sebaste in his account of Paula's pilgrimage about AD 404, so the site was identified and venerated before the middle of the fourth century. No text of Scripture says where John was buried. Matthew 14:12 and Mark 6:29 say only that his disciples came, took the body, and laid it in a tomb.