Renewed

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Now, here he was lying belly down in the sand. He hoped the Assyrian had gone. He lay there long enough to risk raising his head. He looked around. The soldier had disappeared and Josh could not find any trace of him. Why would there be an Assyrian there?

He slowly set out again, but carefully watching in all directions. He had food provision in a knapsack consisting of bread, dried raisins, figs and dates. Some dried salted beef too. He took water from the Jordan to drink and to counter the dryness of his food.

The fourth day from home he sighted Mt. Gerizim. He stood afar off, and saw the twin hills of Gerizim and Ebal, with the city of Shechem nestled in between. It was an almost spiritual sight. Here Joshua had gathered and instructed the people to build the altar, and the pile of twelve whitewashed stones upon which the law was written. Shechem, the city of refuge. Shechem, where the grave of Joseph lay. Where Gideon had kept his concubine, the capital of Ephraim, the place of the coronation of Rehoboam.

He slowly walked toward the city, taking cover in groves of trees until he had to divert to start to climb Gerizim. He walked until he found the structure. There stood the Samaritan Temple. Not an imposing edifice, but it still possessed a certain grandeur. Josh walked up the hill a little so he could get a good look down on the Temple. It was plain in design, without the artwork of the First Temple. No pomegranates, no palms and the laver was not balanced on the back of twelve bulls. No Boaz and Jachin stood by the entrance. Just square cut plain stone blocks. The temple itself seemed to be comprised of two sections, the front seemed to be a rectangular prism, with the longer side vertical. Behind this ‘entrance’ was another rectangular structure with the longer side in the ‘normal’ horizontal position. He couldn’t see into the entrance door, but it was quite high; maybe four times as tall as a man. In front of the Temple door stood the alter of burnt offerings with an earthen ramp from the floor to the altar. Priests were attending it, and a wood fire was burning with some animal on top. Smoke coiled upwards. The priests were dressed completely in white.

The temple was surrounded by a large quadrangle of an area which had been  levelled from the side of the mountain. The door of the Temple faced east, and that was where he was standing. So, he viewed the quadrangle from the direction of the temple entrance. There was what appeared to be a cuboidal entrance to the quadrangle facing him on the east side, with two sets of stairs leading up to a door allowing entrance to the cube and hence to the quadrangle. The east side faced down the mountain side, so the stairs were needed to access the flattened quadrangle. He looked to the left side of the quadrangle, and in the centre of the wall was another cuboidal entrance, but with a level path leading in from the outside. On the right side of his vision was another mid wall cuboidal gate but with another rectangular prism structure adjacent to it. In the far-right hand corner was yet another cube gate and in the far-left corner was some structure which didn’t seem to be a gate at all. He couldn’t quite guess what it may be.

There were priests milling around, and it seemed to be quite busy. Animals waited in a corral, oblivious of their fate. Josh watched for what seemed like hours. It was interesting, and quite different to the Jewish Temple. Still, to each his own he thought. He couldn’t quite guess who was allowed access to the quadrangle, as there seemed to be some ordinary ‘citizens’ in the quadrangle with their sacrifices, and some just chatting to the priests. To Josh’s surprise, there seems to be women milling around with no distinctions from the men. The Jewish Temple at Jerusalem has a distinct ‘court of the women’ past which no woman was allowed to venture. Didn’t seem so here. Also, the Jewish temple had a distinct barrier for the goyim, past which none could trespass under pain of death. These barriers, so obvious in the Jewish Temple, seems strangely absent here.

He just stood watching for a long while. What was so different from the Jewish Temple? Yes, this one was plainer, less intricate, less adornments, but something else. Priestly vestments were a simple white, without the embellishments of the Jewish ones. It was the priests – that was what made it different. They were mixing with the people. No reserve, no aloofness, no superiority as there was in the Jewish ones. That was it. The people seemed at ease to converse, even laugh with the priests. Strange.

He sat there watching until night fell and the evening sacrifice was made. The darkness enveloped the Temple. He lay down and tried to sleep. How strange the last days had been. He almost felt that the Assyrian was meant to be there, in his path. Why? Why had Adonai sent Jonah and Nahum with messages of salvation to Assyria? What had Adonai to do with them? They were not Abraham’s children. And now, here he was, with this mongrel race of half Jews, deserters from the true faith. And yet they seemed at peace with their concept of Adonai.

He slept; dreamed. He dreamed of shady summertime in the olive groves. Figures seemed to flit between the trees. Messengers. They seemed to appear like apparitions and disappear again. Hiding behind tree trunks. They seemed to taunt him until he awoke to see sandaled feet next to his face.

There was no point trying to escape. He just lay there. He let his eyes drift up from the sandals to see a white tunic. The figure squatted down so their faces were closer. Josh looked up further. The man seemed to be one on the priests. Just to his rear were two other men in grey tunics but with leather helmets. Each carried a spear, but no other weapon or armour. Temple guards? Josh rolled onto his back and looked the priest in the face. The priest spoke.

‘You’re Jewish – why are you here?’ The voice was not threatening, just curious.

‘How do you know I am Jewish?’ Josh muttered.

‘Your beard has a Jewish cut. We shape ours slightly differently.’ The priest smiled. ‘And now that you speak, that gives you away too.’

Josh could see no reason to make any pretext as to why he was there, looking at their temple. ‘I came to see your Temple, and how you worship.’

‘Ah, a curious young man. I may suspect you of being a spy, but those days of hostility are long gone. We may not get on with each other, but there has been no war between Israel and Judah since the days of Baasha and Asa. I believe the Jews consider themselves ‘pure’ and see us Samaritans as a mixed race made of Israel and some other races imported into Israel by the great Assyrian King Ashurbanipal. That is true, but mixed or not, we all worship Adonai now. Our Torah commands us to accept the stranger or foreigner as one of us. Moses told us; “when a stranger lives with you, and wants to keep the Passover to the LORD, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near and keep it; and he shall be as one that is born in the land. One law shall be to him that is a native Israelite, and the same law unto the stranger that lives among you”.

So, you see, we treat those who came with Ashurbanipal as our own so long as they obey Torah, keep the Passover and love Adonai.’

‘But’, Josh stumbled, ‘doesn’t Torah forbid marrying the goyim? Moabites and Ammonites are forbidden to be in the assembly for generations. It was the goyim princesses who seduced Solomon away from Adonai.’

‘Ah,’ the priest said, ‘The minute a goyim espouses Adonai, he ceases being a goyim. When Ruth said to Naomi, “your God will be my God”, she ceased being a Moabite and became an Israelite. Why did King David have Uriah the Hittite in his famous thirty? Why was David’s army full of Philistines? Gittites. Why was Jonah sent to save the Assyrians? All peoples may come to Adonai’.

‘But…’ Josh had no answer. The logic seemed flawless, and yet it ran contrary to all he’d ever been taught. ‘Haven’t you changed the Torah? Made your own version?’

‘We believe that we have preserved the original Torah. The Jewish one has been revised. Firstly, our Torah is written in the same script as was used by King David and Solomon. The same script that was used to write the hidden scroll which Josiah found. The same script used by all Israel. Your Torah was re-written in Babylonian Aramaic by Ezra and his scribes. It is a foreign language. Some errors must occur as you transcribe such a wealth of spiritual knowledge from original Hebrew to Aramaic Hebrew.

There are other differences. We believe that Adonai has set his name on Mt. Gerizim, here where we sit. We have the same ten commands as you do, but some are compressed together leaving room for a tenth which is very different. It commands that twelve whitewashed uncut stones be placed on Mt Gerizim, and that the law be written on these stones. This is replicated in your Jewish Torah, although not as one of the ten commands, but the site is changed to Mt Ebal. Ask yourself, where would Adonai want his laws placed, on the mount of blessing or of cursing?’

‘Is that the only difference?’ Josh asked.

‘No, there are other difference, but minor. We have always asked to be accepted by those in Judea. We are sure that our minor difference could be settled. When Zerubbabel started the temple in Judea, we offered to help, to unite in worship. But we were rejected, because we are not of pure Hebrew blood. So, after a futile attempt to frustrate the building of the Judean Temple, we decided to build our own.’

Josh was silent. The priest then rose and invited him back to Shechem where he could rest, talk with Samaritans, and finally sleep.

They wandered down the slope of the mountain towards a township nestled between the two mounts. The path was unmade, but well worn so the going was easy enough. Josh thought the trek uphill would be more of a task. As they walked toward the town, they passed people travelling outward who seemed to not find it odd to see a priest travelling with a ‘commoner’. The town was smaller than he had imagined. Shechem was once the secular capital of all Israel in the time of the judges and near it was Shiloh, the religious capital with the tabernacle. Shechem had been the capital of Ephraim, the most numerous of the tribes. But centuries of war and finally captivity had changed all that.

As they came into Shechem, Josh walked with the priest to his house where the two guards left them, seemingly satisfied that Josh would not be a threat. The town seemed to be laid out in a roughly oval shape with a ‘town square’ in the centre. They came to a house near the centre of the town.  The priest’s house was humble, appearing to be made of mud brick. They entered a ‘family’ room, with a stove in one corner.

‘Oh!’, the priest said, ‘I did not introduce myself. I am Othniel Ben Haddad, a priest of Adonai. This is my wife, Miriam.’ The woman who stood before them was tall, not beautiful, but possessed a certain ‘presence’ which made her seem somehow regal. She smiled and nodded. Josh expected her to withdraw and leave the men to ‘business’ but she stayed.

‘And I am Joshua Ben Shimon.’ Josh said. ‘Of the tribe of Judah’.

Othniel smiled. ‘We have no tribes, no tribal lands. We share our land and our wealth. So, you are a Joshua. Named after the great hero of the subduing of Canaan or the High priest at the right hand of Zerubbabel?’

‘I don’t know.’ Josh replied. ‘My parents never told me, but I suspect it would be the priest. It’s not a family name’

‘Probably so.’ Othniel replied and changed the subject. ‘We are not a very plentiful people, us Samaritans. When the Assyrian kings Tiglath-Pileser and Shalmaneser defeated us, they took a mere twenty-seven thousand into captivity, and left about as many behind. So, there were a mere fifty odd thousand of us. In the days of Jeroboam the first, Israel had an army of over eight hundred thousand, meaning a population of over two and a half million.

Then Ashurbanipal brought in some thirty thousand displaced persons from Damascus, Moab, Ammon, Edom and Arabia and the groups mixed. But, curiously, they all gravitated to the worship of Adonai of Israel. And so, to this day, we worship as one. We wanted to join with those of the Babylonian exile, but Zerubbabel would have none of it.’

‘We were told that to accept your help would pollute our worship.’ Josh said. ‘I, of course wasn’t born then, but our leaders tell us that now. They never did explain why the Phoenicians were allowed to help with the first temple. Or why the great prophet Ezekiel said the King of Tyre was “anointed as a guardian cherub, for so I ordained you. You were on the holy mount of God; you walked among the fiery stones”.’

‘Ah, you are beginning to see.’ The priest said. ‘You see why rejection caused us to build our own temples.’

‘Temples?’ Josh said. ‘You mean there is more than one?’

‘Oh, of course you don’t know of our Egyptian brothers! When the Judean prophets warned us of the coming fall to Babylon, they said to accept the banishment and go to live in Babylon. They exhorted us to accept Adonai’s punishment and to accept the exile. Many, however, refused this advice and fled to Egypt to escape the Babylonian army. They settled in the land that Pharoah had given to Joseph, in Goshen in the Nile delta. They chose an island in the delta, called Elephantine. There they were joined by many Jewish mercenaries who were hired by Egypt to thwart the Babylonians. Together they formed a Jewish colony and they set about building a Temple*² there. That Temple still stands to this day, although there may be trouble brewing. Unfortunately, this very island was home to Egyptian god, Khnum and his priests and there have been conflicts. However, they have resolved them so far, but I fear trouble may be just around the corner.’

‘I had no idea of this.’ Josh said. ‘Why have all these details of the people of Israel been kept from us?’

‘Probably because those Jews in Elephantine are mostly from Israel and not Judah. The purity thing again. Maybe you should extend your journey to Egypt.’ He smiled. ‘No, just kidding, I believe it may be dangerous to go there as I have said. The priests of Khnum are not kindly disposed to more Jews coming.’

Josh stayed on for five more days, living with Othniel and Miriam. He served as a keeper of flocks, and gardener to earn his keep, but he drew the line at preparing animals for sacrifice. He was not yet prepared to support Samaritan religious practices.

^*2   A temple to YHWH was built at Elephantine, in Egypt, mid 5^th Century BC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephantine_papyri_and_ostraca

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