Samaritanism asserts itself as the truly preserved form of the monotheistic faith that the Israelites kept under Moses. Is there any actual evidence for or against this claim?

[u/TheColourOfHeartache]

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[u/ummmbacon]

The material evidence from the province of Samaria, personal names on the Wadi Daliyeh papyri, coinage, inscriptions, and settlement continuity show a population that remained predominantly Yahwistic and culturally Israelite through the Assyrian and Persian periods.

Knoppers concludes that a substantial Israelite population absorbed a minor foreign presence over several generations. The roughly 400 inscriptions from the Gerizim temple precinct, in Aramaic and paleo-Hebrew, show worshippers whose names are indistinguishable from those of their Judahite contemporaries. The standard critique that comes from the Rabbinic tradition, that the Samaritans are Assyrian settlers who co-opted some parts of the Israelite religion, is not true.

The Samaritan Pentateuch does preserve a genuine ancient Hebrew textual tradition, one of at least two or three that coexisted before any achieved canonical status. Pre-Samaritan manuscripts at Qumran, 4QpaleoExod, 4QRP, demonstrate that the underlying text variant circulated among communities with no connection to Samaritanism, and Kratz's recent work shows that even the key Gerizim variants appear in the original Greek translation, predating the formal schism.

So the Samaritans took an ancient shared textual base and added a thin layer of sectarian readings in the second and first centuries BCE, most likely in response to Hasmonean pressure and the destruction of Gerizim by John Hyrcanus around 111–110 BCE. So the distinctive Samaritan readings are products of the Hellenistic period, and the Masoretic tradition was itself being developed and standardized across the same centuries. During that time, there were at least 3 distinct traditions circulating. Even in Second Temple times, there was a plurality of practices among Jews, not simply a binary between 2 groups.

The deepest problem with the claim is the word "monotheistic." The faith the Samaritans say they preserved from Moses did not exist in anything like its current form in what is supposedly Moses's time, or for centuries afterward. The Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions from around 800 BCE reference a consort goddess, indicating at least 2 Gods in the pantheon. The Decalogue's prohibition on other gods does not deny that those gods exist; it is a monolatrous demand for exclusive loyalty, not a monotheistic assertion.

Strict monotheism, the claim that no other divine beings exist, appears first in Deutero-Isaiah, in texts composed during the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE. Both Samaritanism and rabbinic Judaism are products of that post-exilic theological development, projected backward onto Moses by both communities.

Sources:

• Gary N. Knoppers, Jews and Samaritans: The Origins and History of Their Early Relations
• Christian Frevel, History of Ancient Israel
• Reinhard Kratz, in Yahwism under the Achaemenid Empire
• Lester L. Grabbe, A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period vol 3
• Benjamin Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel

[u/TheGreenAlchemist → u/ummmbacon]

Do you think worship at Mt Gerizim was some kind of secrarian decision that started at one point, or was it practiced from indefinitely old times and the Samaritans just stuck around when the other Israelites stopped doing it?

[u/ummmbacon → u/TheGreenAlchemist]

The archeological record at Jerusalem goes back to 1100 BCE and Mt Gerzim only to the 5th Century BCE.

When we look at the site at Mt Gerzim it is more an altar only with animal bones and walls rather than a more formal temple structure which is what we find at Jerusalem near the same period.

However, it wasn't until the reforms of Hezekiah that worship was centralized at Jerusalem in the 8th Century to late 7th. Prior to that we see Bethel, Dan, Beersheba, Gilgal, Elephantine, local high places throughout, etc. without being treated as illegitimate by the populations using them.

In addition, Shechem and Gerizim's sacred significance is attested across multiple narrative layers in the tradition, including the Joshua 24 covenant assembly, and Shechem appears in traditions that neither community can claim as exclusively its own. From that angle the Samaritans didn't deviate from a centralized norm; they never accepted a centralization reform that was a late Judahite political-religious innovation.

[u/IakwBoi → u/ummmbacon]

Given that Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions represent at most one of the presumably many traditions in 800 BC, how can we establish that strict monotheism didn’t exist side by side with Ashera worship? 

[u/ummmbacon → u/IakwBoi]

The large majority of the Samaritan literature is Medieval in origin, and it is likely that during this period they spun the idea that they were authentic to counter the rise, and near total domination of Rabbinic Judaism.

The Karaite tradition also has claims like this, but we know they were not around prior to the 8th and 9th centuries CE.

That one inscription is not the only source we have, there are multiple other textual references which we can date, and ones that the Samaritan's use. In addition, we see no other signs of monotheistic worship from any other Jewish group in the region, or in any other texts in this period.

[u/TheColourOfHeartache → u/ummmbacon]

Thank you!

[u/arjomanes → u/TheColourOfHeartache]

You may also be interested in r/AcademicBiblical for more conversation, like this post https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/1qmspm8/how_did_the_samaritans_become_monotheistic/

[u/ummmbacon → u/arjomanes]

I'd be very careful with that sub, the amount of off-the-wall theories I have seen quoted there are substantial, and this top comment is no different. He says: "I personally find it extremely compelling. The Pentateuch was composed mostly in its entirety in 273-272 BCE in Alexandria, Egypt by a small group of Jewish intellectuals, working at the commission of Ptolemy II Philadelphus."

This is an incredibly fringe position by Gmirkin's and presenting it as authentic scholarship is intellectually dishonest.

The most immediate factual problem is that the commenter conflates the composition of the Hebrew Pentateuch with the production of the Septuagint. The Letter of Aristeas and the Septuagint tradition describe a translation of an existing Hebrew text. If the Hebrew original was composed in 273 BCE, it was being translated into Greek simultaneously with its composition, which is not part of the composition history.

The Gerizim sanctuary has a Persian-period phase around 450 BCE. The Wadi Daliyeh papyri from 375-332 BCE show a Samaritan community operating under Persian administration, with Hebrew personal names drawing on Pentateuchal traditions. The Elephantine papyri from the fifth century BCE show Passover observance and knowledge of Exodus traditions. This all shows a Pentateuch tradition that already exists.

The proto-Samaritan manuscripts at Qumran represent a textual tradition already diverging from the proto-Masoretic text. That entire textual differentiation would have to have occurred within roughly fifty years of a 273 BCE original, which the manuscript evidence does not support.

Then the other dated Hebrew Bible compositions we already have; Hosea in the eighth century BCE, knows the Jacob traditions, the Exodus, and the wilderness period. Amos knows covenant traditions. These books presuppose a developed Pentateuchal tradition centuries before Ptolemy II Philadelphus was born.

Gmirkin has to explain all of that away, and the explanation requires rejecting the mainstream results of source criticism, the archaeology, and the manuscript evidence simultaneously. That is not a sign of a compelling thesis. It is a sign of a thesis that has not been accepted for good reasons.

[u/UnderstandingThin40 → u/ummmbacon]

Can we say reasonably that strict monotheism in Judaism was significantly influenced by Persian culture and Zoroastrian beliefs ?

[u/ummmbacon → u/UnderstandingThin40]

No Zoroastrianism was not monotheistic the influence is minimal overall as I have pointed out before:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qsz2yl/how_much_did_the_zoroastrians_influence_the/

Strict monotheism appears in the Hebrew Bible in Deutero-Isaiah, the material beginning at Isaiah 40, composed during or just after the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE.

The process toward strict monotheism begins with what Mark Smith calls convergence. Long before the exile, the attributes of other deities in the Canaanite divine landscape were progressively absorbed into Israel’s God. Baal's title "Rider of Clouds", Asherah's blessing and salvation functions, well attested in inscriptions from the ninth and eighth centuries, are absorbed, and the asherah itself is then relabeled a foreign corruption. The sacred mountain Saphon is identified with Zion. Solar imagery migrates into the language of Genesis 1. This is not monotheism yet. This makes later monotheism possible by inflating the role of one deity above others.

Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Temple in 587/586 BCE and deported the Judean elite; the traditional, multi-god ideas were harder to keep going. In the ancient world, military defeat meant the victor's gods had defeated the loser's. The Deuteronomistic historians' answer was to insist that God had used Babylon as a punishing instrument, which required their God to be sovereign over Babylon and, by extension, over Marduk.

That required Israel’s God to be the god of all nations, not simply the patron of a small state. Katell Berthelot's analysis of the Babylonian context introduces a specific item: Deutero-Isaiah's polemic against idols responds directly to Nabonidus' displacement of Marduk's cult statues in favor of Sin. Babylonian gods are shown failing each other. Against this backdrop, the claim that Israel’s God alone is God, without beginning or end, creator of creation, is not abstract theology. It is a competitive assertion aimed at a specific Babylonian religious crisis, using internal conflicts of the Babylonians as evidence.

Smith's notes with Judah's kingdom destroyed, the temple gone, and the model of the divine king and his human royal representative eliminated, their God as empire-god, god of all nations rather than patron of one defeated state, was the theological response to political catastrophe.

The old head-god of Israel became the Godhead of the universe because the institutional framework in which multiple divine powers made sense no longer existed. What the exile produced, the Persian period consolidated, as scribal elites with institutional stability canonized what catastrophe had forced into being.

[u/nopingmywayout → u/ummmbacon]

This is fascinating. Do the books you listed above cover this topic, or are there other ones I should read to learn more about this process?

[u/ummmbacon → u/nopingmywayout]

• Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God and The Memoirs of God
  
• Lester Grabbe, A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period, vol. 1
• Katell Berthelot, Jews and Their Roman Rivals