How to Be a Bad Samaritan: the Local Cult of Mt Gerizim

how to be a bad samaritan 155 HOW TO BE A BAD SAMARITAN: THE LOCAL CULT OF MT GERIZIM JONATHAN KIRKPATRICK Introduction Flavia Neapolis, in the middle of Samaria and dominated by Mts Gerizim and Ebal on either side, has a fascinating and tantalising archaeological record. Founded as a city with a Greek constitution after the First Jewish Revolt, it was made a Roman colony in the mid-third century by Philip ‘the Arab’ and evidently flourished dur- ing the second and third centuries. Its location in Samaria has been of great significance for its treatment in modern scholarship, for it is in the middle of the land of the Samaritans, and it has essentially been seen as a pagan city in their midst. When looking at a source from Samaria, we ask the question, is it pagan or is it Samaritan? If Samaritan, it is local and part of a tradition that stretches from long before the coming of the Romans up until the present day. If, on the other hand, it is pagan, then it is classed as alien, a product of Roman imperialism, and not by any means local. In this paper I mean to challenge this dichotomy in our way of thinking. I will sug- gest that the division between ‘alien pagan’ and ‘local Samaritan’ is anachronistic for the Roman period, and I will aim to look at the evidence afresh, setting aside this assumption. After taking a closer look at the assumptions inherent in the study of the Samaritans, I will consider the literary sources for Gerizim, Neapolis and the Samaritans, and then I will move on to the material remains of Neapolis itself. What sort of thing was a Samaritan and how do you recognise one when you come across one? This question has proved a testing conundrum for students of the ancient period. The search for the Samaritan synagogue is a case in point: how do you distinguish it from the Jewish variety? R. Pummer made use of the distinctive Samaritan script, which has been found in the Byzantine synagogues of Beth She‘an, Sha‘alvim and Ramat Aviv (in Tel Aviv). In fact, in the recent Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East he explained 156 jonathan kirkpatrick that in the Graeco-Roman and Byzantine periods Samaritan material culture was “practically indistinguishable from its Jewish coun- terpart.”1 The only distinguishing mark is the script. Meanwhile, Y. Magen exemplifies another approach. In a report on recent discov- eries he set out his methods: “the basic principle guiding our search for the synagogues was their orientation facing Mount Gerizim.”2 He then proceeded to describe the new synagogues, and rounding up in pleasing manner he reported that “in conclusion, all the buildings which have been uncovered to the present and which have been clearly defined as Samaritan synagogues are oriented precisely towards Mount Gerizim.”3 In the course of the discussion he cov- ered the three synagogues which Pummer dealt with. Not convinced that the so-called Samaritan script was necessarily confined to the Samaritans, he dismissed the buildings in Beth She‘an and Ramat Aviv, which are not directed towards Mt Gerizim. Sha‘alvim, fortu- nately, is pointing the right way and is included in Magen’s corpus. One compromise position has been to describe the Ramat Aviv building as a Samaritan church. Evidently, all is not as clear as one might wish. The Samaritan script and their presumed synagogues are only found in archaeological contexts of the fourth century AD or later, so the situation is even bleaker for the first three centuries of this era, the period in which I am interested. Even more basic than recognising a Samar- itan is defining a Samaritan. Such a designation as ‘Samaritan’ is bound to be to a certain degree subjective, and so it has been for centuries. To sum things up briefly, the Samaritans themselves call themselves ‘Israelites’, denoting their direct and authentic descent from the people led out of Egypt by Moses; the Rabbinic Jews (who, of course, call themselves ‘Israelites’) talk of the Kutim, that is immi- grants from Persia; while those Jews, Christians and other Classical authors writing in Greek use the terms Samarit¿s or Samareus, which denote the people who live in the land of Samaria—as I shall argue, this is a geographical designation, but the Greek terminology assumes that a particular people or ethnos lives in each area and that they will have their distinctive religious customs. It is not, however, a religious 1 Pummer (1997), p.471. 2 Magen (1993), p.228. 3 Ibid., p.229..

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