Current State of Samaritan Studies (Hexateuch)

Discussion about the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, Talmud, Dead Sea Scrolls, archaeology, etc.
Secret Alias
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Re: Current State of Samaritan Studies (Hexateuch)

Post by Secret Alias »

Nice to know you're know the referee. We can't use Josephus to determine what is known through other (Samaritan) sources? That Alexander's conquest occurred in a Sabbatical year? That's off limits? So Gmirkin is right because we ban all evidence to the contrary? Isn't that how they prove the empty tomb was proof of the Resurrection? I guess if we eliminate all evidence which contradicts Michael Jackson wrote the Pentateuch it's possible to prove the Pentateuch was written after Thriller and before Bad.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Current State of Samaritan Studies (Hexateuch)

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Secret Alias wrote: Fri Nov 11, 2022 5:37 pm Nice to know you're know the referee. We can't use Josephus to determine what is known through other (Samaritan) sources? That Alexander's conquest occurred in a Sabbatical year? That's off limits? So Gmirkin is right because we ban all evidence to the contrary? Isn't that how they prove the empty tomb was proof of the Resurrection? I guess if we eliminate all evidence which contradicts Michael Jackson wrote the Pentateuch it's possible to prove the Pentateuch was written after Thriller and before Bad.
No, I'm not the referee. But here you go again -- insulting the messenger who is trying to clarify a few basic principles about historical research.

I am simply repeating truisms, the fundamentals you will find expressed in any work by a professional historian explaining how research is done.

And the principles are the same for any field of serious human experience where it is important to find out "what happened" in the past.

I could do what you do and appeal to dozens of scholars, books and articles, but since that's something you condemn others for doing, for now I will simply ask you to think it through:

How could Josephus know what happened centuries before his time? He wasn't there. He could only rely on what he heard from others. How did they know? They repeated stories that had been told to them.

Sometimes, somewhere along the line, we know from general human experience, that stories are manufactured or interpreted to meet certain needs of the day. Reports of Martin Luther's suicide emerged twenty years after his death. Historians discount those reports because they are twenty years after the event and were not contemporary witness. Josephus clearly could not tell the difference between past myths and past historical facts --- as anyone can see from reading his work. He had no way of knowing the difference. Homer is not evidence of a ten year long Trojan war. How can he be? There are myths in abundance much younger than that in today's world but one needs always to check the original and contemporary sources to verify these before believing them to have happened.

No historian I know uses sources centuries after an event to prove what happened -- unless there are other corroborating sources making a clear link between that event and those sources.
Last edited by neilgodfrey on Fri Nov 11, 2022 6:54 pm, edited 2 times in total.
John2
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Re: Current State of Samaritan Studies (Hexateuch)

Post by John2 »

... the Pentateuch was written after Thriller and before Bad.

That's crazy. It was after Off the Wall and before Thriller.
Last edited by John2 on Fri Nov 11, 2022 8:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Current State of Samaritan Studies (Hexateuch)

Post by neilgodfrey »

SA, think of historians as "fact checkers". A source says X. The fact-checker's job is to ask: How do you know that? What is your evidence? The source says "I read it in Y". The fact-checker turns to Y and says, "Did you say such and such? How did you know?" etc....

That's what all archivists, detectives, and even historians do.
Secret Alias
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Re: Current State of Samaritan Studies (Hexateuch)

Post by Secret Alias »

I think it's a bad look when we decide to throw out evidence merely because it contradicts our presuppositions. Josephus says that Samaritans and Jews calculated the same sabbatical year. It is generally recognized that the year of Alexander's conquest was a sabbatical year. How and why did Josephus "make this up"?
Secret Alias
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Re: Current State of Samaritan Studies (Hexateuch)

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So if Josephus's account of the sabbatical year celebration coinciding with Alexander's entry into Judea is fiction then all these papers on the Sabbatical years need to be thrown out or revised

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23507728

https://www.academia.edu/49057512/Josep ... riods_2021 (2021)

https://www.academia.edu/41705058/Consu ... _the_Great (2020)

So (a) there was a Samaritan temple from the Persian period.
The archaeological digs carried out by Yitzhak Magen from 1982 to 2006 have confirmed the existence of a Samaritan temple on Mt. Gerizim although, so far, only its temenos (surrounding precinct) has been unearthed. In contradistinction to the data provided by Josephus, Magen dates the erection of the Samaritan sanctuary not to the time of Alexander the Great, but to the Persian period (mid-fifth century BCE); later on, it underwent a second phase of construction during the Hellenistic period (early second century BCE). Moreover, the remains of a large city that surrounded the sacred precinct from the late fourth century onward have been unearthed. Magen considers that this urban center “reached its maximal size in the second century BCE, with an overall area of about 400 dunams (800 m long and some 500 m wide), becoming the capital of the Samaritan people and its religious and cultic center.”6 https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/10/11/628/htm
(b) since this contradicts what Josephus says about the Samaritan temple only being erected after Alexander we have to accept what Josephus says with a grain of salt. But where does this leave us with respect to the statement that the entry into Judea by Alexandria coincided with a Sabbatical year? That is clearly true.

331/330 Josephus AJ 11:347 Alexander the Great exempts Jews on Sabbatical Year

331 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 -7 -7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 = 261 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 = 191 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 = 163 BCE

163/162 I Macc. 6:49, 53 Judas Maccabeus defeated due to Sabbatical Year

163 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 = 135 BCE

135/134 Josephus AJ 13:234 Seleucid siege of Jerusalem during Sabbatical Year

135 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 = 65 - 7 - 7 - 7 - 7 = 37 CE

37/6 Josephus AJ 14:475 Herod’s siege of Jerusalem during Sabbatical Year

So Josephus made up his own sabbatical year model and 'pasted' stories into the model?

All of history now has to be revised owing to the 'attractiveness' of a certain theory.
Secret Alias
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Re: Current State of Samaritan Studies (Hexateuch)

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The alternative to rearranging known historical events - like Samaritans and Jews dealing with the coming of Alexander during a shared Sabbatical year - the easier way to deal with it is to just accept the Samaritans and Jews shared a Sabbatical year because they shared a common written text which dated humanity back to Creation (= the Torah).
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Current State of Samaritan Studies (Hexateuch)

Post by neilgodfrey »

Secret Alias wrote: Sat Nov 12, 2022 10:22 am I think it's a bad look when we decide to throw out evidence merely because it contradicts our presuppositions. Josephus says that Samaritans and Jews calculated the same sabbatical year. It is generally recognized that the year of Alexander's conquest was a sabbatical year. How and why did Josephus "make this up"?
SA -- I think you missed what i wrote. No -- no-one, least of all me, is throwing out "evidence merely because it contradicts our presuppositions".

Did you read what I wrote? Can you please respond to what I actually said?
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Current State of Samaritan Studies (Hexateuch)

Post by neilgodfrey »

Secret Alias wrote: Sat Nov 12, 2022 10:35 am So if Josephus's account of the sabbatical year celebration coinciding with Alexander's entry into Judea is fiction then all these papers on the Sabbatical years need to be thrown out or revised

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23507728
If you read that paper by Blosser you will see that it criticizes Josephus for errors re the sabbatical years; further, if you go through Jstor you will find a response to Blosser's paper argues that it should indeed by "thrown out or revised".

The respondant, Wacholder, seeks to confirm Josephus's accounts by reference to independent, external sources by which to test Josephus's claims. He does not believe we can simply assume Josephus is giving us a true account. We need independent confirmation -- which is what all historians, at least serious ones, understand about how to analyse and use sources.

Further, neither Blosser nor Wacholder address the Alexander event that you refer to.

Wacholder simply says we can dismiss arguments against the historicity of Alexander and his grant on the sabbatical year but gives no reasons. Simple denial. No argument. Consult the literature and one soon finds good reason to believe that Alexander did not give any grant in a sabbatical year but that such a story grew up later in the Hellenistic era for "nationalistic" and "ideological" reasons.
The author of this article, Daniel Schwartz, points out that Josephus is simply using data from the Bible. He has no independent source. Nor does Schwartz make any reference to Alexander the Great.
This paper by Steinmann and Young flatly contradicts your attempt to use Josephus as a reliable historical source for the sabbatical year. They write:
The purpose here is not to repeat Wacholder’s argu­ments, some of which are not well reasoned, such as his assump­tion that the year in which Alexander the Great granted the Jews relief from taxes for a Sabbatical year must have itself been a Sab­batical year. (p. 454)

Continuing with your point:
Secret Alias wrote: Sat Nov 12, 2022 10:35 am
So (a) there was a Samaritan temple from the Persian period.
The archaeological digs carried out by Yitzhak Magen from 1982 to 2006 have confirmed the existence of a Samaritan temple on Mt. Gerizim although, so far, only its temenos (surrounding precinct) has been unearthed. In contradistinction to the data provided by Josephus, Magen dates the erection of the Samaritan sanctuary not to the time of Alexander the Great, but to the Persian period (mid-fifth century BCE); later on, it underwent a second phase of construction during the Hellenistic period (early second century BCE). Moreover, the remains of a large city that surrounded the sacred precinct from the late fourth century onward have been unearthed. Magen considers that this urban center “reached its maximal size in the second century BCE, with an overall area of about 400 dunams (800 m long and some 500 m wide), becoming the capital of the Samaritan people and its religious and cultic center.”6 https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/10/11/628/htm
Of course there was. If you read the comments that have been made here by others, including me, you would know that we have always said that there was a temple at Gerizim in the Persian era. We also know that there was a temple to the same god at Elephantine and that nobody in either place seems to have heard of Moses or the sabbath rest or of monotheism.

Secret Alias wrote: Sat Nov 12, 2022 10:35 am (b) since this contradicts what Josephus says about the Samaritan temple only being erected after Alexander we have to accept what Josephus says with a grain of salt. But where does this leave us with respect to the statement that the entry into Judea by Alexandria coincided with a Sabbatical year? That is clearly true.
Why is it "clearly true"? You cited various scholarly articles above. If you read them and the related literature that they cite you will find that scholars do not agree that it is "clearly true". In fact they set out arguments that affirm it is "clearly false".

Secret Alias wrote: Sat Nov 12, 2022 10:35 am So Josephus made up his own sabbatical year model and 'pasted' stories into the model?
If you read the articles you linked to and follow up their citations you would know that Josephus didn't just "make it up" but that he inherited a tradition that appears no older than the Hellenistic -- post Alexander -- era.
Secret Alias wrote: Sat Nov 12, 2022 10:35 am All of history now has to be revised owing to the 'attractiveness' of a certain theory.
You are simply ignoring what others are saying, their arguments, their evidence, their methods, and seem hell bent on being sarcastic to anyone who disagrees with your beliefs. They are not analysing Josephus to make him fit an attractive theory. They are applying uniform methods to see what we can know about the past. The sources need to be subjected to critical analysis and no historian can simply take their word for this or that. Corroboration and independent confirmation is needed, and where that is lacking and we see other very likely reasons for what a text says, then the historians must follow the evidence as critically assessed -- without naively just believing whatever it says because it suits an attractive theory.

You make fun of others but your own methods appear to be an uncritical acceptance of any piece of data that you think supports your beliefs and to hell with what historians and scholars say about that evidence or their critical assessments of it. You quote scholars and link to their articles but you don't read them, at least not with any care.
Secret Alias
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Re: Current State of Samaritan Studies (Hexateuch)

Post by Secret Alias »

I have to go to an international funeral. But let's remember what your point was originally. You said that Josephus's testimony about Alexander's arrival in Samaria/Judea can't be reliable in an of itself. I provided a number of recent studies which take different sides on the issue. But the idea that Josephus's story should be rejected is ridiculous. And that was your position.

Can we at least agree that IF we accept Josephus's testimony about Alexander's entrance into the land as being based on something historical that all of Gmirkin's theory comes down to whether or not what is being described therein is a Sabbatical year? Can we at least agree on that much?

Gmirkin's theory depends entirely on whether the 'tax' associated with agricultural produce NORMALLY ASSOCIATED WITH THE SABBATICAL YEAR is what it appears to be - a reference to the existence of 'Judaism' and 'Samaritanism' based on the observance of the Torah ALREADY IN THE PERSIAN PERIOD (i.e. 6 years before Alexander's entry).
Last edited by Secret Alias on Mon Nov 14, 2022 9:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
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