Mount Gerizim

Mount Gerizim, as an excavated site, is the main summit of the mountain that rises south of Shechem and overlooks Nablus, where the sacred precinct of the Samaritans and the Hellenistic town around it were uncovered. Deuteronomy names Mount Gerizim as the mountain where the blessing was to be proclaimed (Deuteronomy 11:29), and on its main summit stood the Samaritans' sacred precinct, which John Hyrcanus I destroyed; no temple building has been found there, though the excavator holds that a temple stood in it.

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The Excavations

The first major excavation on the mountain, in 1928, was in its Byzantine church. From 1964 to 1968 Robert J. Bull directed work on Tell er-Ras, a lower peak north of the main summit, as part of the Joint American Expedition's work at Tell Balata. By Yitzhak Magen's 2008 account, excavations on the summit under his direction began in 1983 and ran for twenty years, to 2003. He writes elsewhere that he led them as Archaeological Staff Officer for Judea and Samaria.

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The First Sacred Precinct

From the thousands of pots and the coins of the Persian period found in the first sacred precinct, together with radiocarbon dating, Magen dates it to the middle of the fifth century BC. In another account, Magen ties the first precinct to the final years of Sanballat I, the rival of Nehemiah. Almost all scholars who studied this phase accepted a Persian-period date. Eran Arie, in a 2021 study, pointed out that the three fragments of Proto-Ionic capitals found at the site, a type usually dated to the Iron Age, posed difficulties for that date, though Magen had come to assign them to the Persian period. Arie concluded in a 2023 article in the journal Semitica that the precinct was founded earlier, about 650 to 550 BC, and he writes that this has major consequences for the question of the population Assyria brought to Samaria and of the causes of the dispute between Samaritans and Jews.

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The Hellenistic Precinct and Town

By Magen's account, a town grew around the precinct from the late fourth century BC, after Alexander destroyed the city of Samaria. Under Antiochus III the Great the precinct was rebuilt and its enclosure enlarged to 696 by 446 feet (212 by 136 m), and the town expanded greatly. The town covered 2,625 by 1,640 feet (800 by 500 m), with fortifications, separate quarters, public buildings and houses. Magen describes it as a sanctuary and a city of priests, founded for religious reasons at a holy site.

Over 500 inscriptions were found in the precinct, among them some 400 in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic from the Hellenistic period and 83 in Greek. Most are dedications left by pilgrims who came to sacrifice, and the titles Cohen (priest) and Levite appear in them. One, in Neo-Hebrew script, gives the divine name YHWH, and another records "that which Joseph offered for his wife and his sons before the Lord in the temple." Magen calls the inscriptions "the strongest evidence for the existence of a temple there." More than 400,000 burned bones of sheep, goats, cattle and pigeons, mostly under a year old, lay in layers of ash at the site.

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The Destruction

Under John Hyrcanus I the sacred precinct and the town were destroyed in a great fire. Magen dates the destruction by the coins found at the site to about 110 BC, not 128 BC as Josephus recounts. The town was not resettled, and both the town and the sacred precinct lay abandoned in the Hasmonean and Roman periods.

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Later Buildings

On Tell er-Ras, Bull uncovered a temple of Zeus and the stairway that linked the Roman city of Neapolis with it. That temple was first dated to the reign of Hadrian; Magen dates its inauguration to AD 160, under Antoninus Pius. In AD 484 the Byzantine emperor Zeno drove the Samaritans from the mountain and built on its summit a large octagonal church of Mary Theotokos, the Mother of God. In the sixth century, after Samaritan attacks, Justinian fortified it with a massive wall flanked by seven towers.