Part 31

Our road now lay through a fertile plain, called The Meadow of the Feast, possibly in some connection with the yearly feast which used to be held by the Jews in old times at Shiloh, from which historical site we were not far distant. It is a comfort now and then to come upon a Biblical site about the identity of which there is not the slightest doubt, and such is the case with Seilun, the modern name for Shiloh. It stands in an extremely retired valley, and on our way to it we put up the third batch of gazelles we had started in one day. This was the spot where the Tabernacle was first permanently set up in Canaan, and where the Israelites assembled to allot the Promised Land. They were probably encamped hard by on The Meadow of the Feast, across which we had just been riding, and it was probably on this meadow, while the maidens were dancing at the festival in honour of the ark, that the remnant of the Benjamites concealed themselves among the vineyards on the hillsides and carried off two hundred maidens. At present it is impossible to be certain whether any of the remains now visible existed at the time when the Tabernacle was there. The ruins which first strike the eye on the hillside are evidently those of a comparatively modern village, with here and there fragments of masonry which may date back to Crusading times. Then there is a low, square building supported by two rows of columns, which has been used as a mosque, but in early times may have been a Christian church; but the most remarkable monument is a square building of which only the walls remain. It is apparently of three architectural periods, and it is just possible that the oldest may have been Jewish. The original walls have been added to by a sloping scarp having been built against them, so that the wall, which is about fourteen feet high, is nine feet thick at the bottom, and about three feet thick at the top. Inside are some fragments of columns, capitals, and a door lintel, which has recently fallen from the principal entrance, on which are carved two wreaths, flanked by two double-handled pitchers, and in the centre an amphora.

There are no inhabitants at Shiloh now, so we pushed on to Singil, a village situated about three thousand feet above the sea-level, and commanding a most magnificent view. The villagers here showed me some foundations of what they said had been an old castle built by a certain King Sinbil, but I strongly suspect that they substituted the b for a g, as the village takes its name from a certain Crusading hero, who was afterwards canonized and became St. Gilles, and that here he built himself a castle. The natives also sent me into a cave on a wild goose chase after an inscription, which, after much scrambling with lighted tapers, I failed to find.

We had now left Judea, and were entering ancient Samaria, which is governed, not from Jerusalem, but Damascus, the seat of government being Nablous, a large town of about twenty thousand inhabitants, whose principal industry is the manufacture of soap, with which they supply almost the whole country. The town is squeezed in between the lofty hills of Ebal and Gerizim, both of which are over three thousand feet above the sea-level. This is the valley of Shechem. Nothing can exceed in picturesqueness the situation of this place and the beauty of its surroundings, especially when the almond and peach trees are in bloom in the valley. The steep hillsides seem to be a mass of huge cactuses; these are used to line the terraces of the vineyards as hedges, but as they are great absorbers of vitality from the soil, I should think they must impoverish the land. In the autumn these ungainly plants are thickly covered with fruit about the size of a large fig, when ripe of a bright red. They are full of small seeds, but sweet and refreshing. The natives gorge themselves upon them, as they are esteemed wholesome, but they are traps to the unwary and inexperienced of the most painful kind, being covered outside with diminutive and almost invisible prickly hairs. The first time I ever tried to eat one I filled my mouth with these unpleasant little spikes, and spent half an hour with my tongue out, while a friend was engaged with a pair of tweezers extracting each individual irritant, but then he only partially succeeded, and for the rest of the day I felt as if I had tried to swallow half a chopped-up hair-brush. The natives pick the fruit by digging a pronged iron into them, with which they twitch them off the stalk; they then roll them on the ground, so as to get the hairy prickles off, and then carefully peel them. The great green leaves have spikes like pins half an inch long upon them, which inflict a most vicious and poisonous prick. I once tumbled into a cactus bush, and really suffered severely for many hours. Under these circumstances it is something amazing to see camels munching these leaves, prickles and all, with apparent relish; a donkey eating thistles is a joke to it.

Nablous is also surrounded by extensive olive groves, and the oil is celebrated throughout Palestine; it also exports cotton of native growth. In fact, for a Moslem city, it may be considered an enterprising and go-ahead place. At present it lacks the prime necessity of a carriage road to the sea-coast. All its exports and imports have to be conveyed on the backs of camels. If the long-projected railway from Haifa to Damascus could ever be consummated, a wagon road could easily be constructed in connection with it, and Haifa would then become the port of Nablous, instead of Jaffa, which is slightly nearer to it. With the exception of the long central street, which forms the principal bazaar, the streets as a rule are more gloomy and tunnel-like than most Oriental towns, though there are many handsome stone houses, and the building of new ones afforded evidence of the growing wealth of the inhabitants. The consequence is an improvement in the reputation of the population, who have in former times been notorious for their turbulent fanaticism, but of late years the Turkish government has succeeded in establishing its authority on a firmer foundation and making its exercise felt. Indeed, the superficial traveller in the Turkish empire, who only sees the defects of the existing system of administration, is hardly a fair judge of the progress that has been made in a certain direction unless he is able to compare it with what has been.

There can be no doubt that during the last twenty years a great change has been worked in the establishment of law and order and in the security of life and property. If oppression has the disadvantage of grinding the people and making their lives miserable, it, at all events, has the merit of intimidating them and restraining them from acts of violence and crime. If the unjust judge and extortionate tax-gatherer are taking the heart out of the people, they are taking the pluck out of them, too, and one result is that the stranger can now travel in safety through regions where he was once sure of being plundered and possibly murdered, and walk unmolested through Moslem crowds, where formerly he might have been subjected to insult. Nor is this due to the direct action of any foreign power or to the exercise of any diplomatic pressure in favor of reform. On the contrary, the influence of foreign powers was never so low as it is at present, and I am convinced that all attempts on the part of foreign powers to enforce reforms on Turkey only hinder them. The influence of the sultan and his government is not to be maintained throughout Islam by any action in obedience to the dictates of Christian powers. They resent it, just as the South used to resent the interference of the North in the matter of slavery; but this does not prevent their being alive to any advantages which accrue to the empire by enforcing, as far as may be, a respect for law and order; and, so far as it is possible, to develop its resources without being beholden to foreign capital, or increasing the power and influence of the native Christian population. The difficulty is that the instinct of the Moslem is not in favor of progress, and that he is always outstripped in the race by his Christian neighbour.

Again, the country can only be developed through the education and enlightenment of the people; but where an administrative system is in itself corrupt and unenlightened, the education and illumination of the masses means their endowment with the faculty of perceiving abuses, and possibly with a determination to resist them; and this danger is so great that it must be averted, even at the cost of the national prosperity. For this reason the government sets its face against the education of Moslems in Christian schools, not because they are afraid of the Moslems being converted to Christianity—there is not the slightest danger of that—but because they are afraid of their imbibing Western ideas of social and political life, which are opposed to the conditions which characterize the existing administration of affairs. In fact they are not opposed to reform, but it must be a reform not suggested from without, nor imposed upon them from within; it must neither be in obedience to diplomatic pressure nor to popular clamour; it must be a reform of their own initiative, and as any such reform, to be effectual, must begin by the authorities with whom it is to originate reforming themselves, the process seems almost hopeless. Still, as I have already remarked, there has distinctly been change, and change for the better, so far as security for life and property and the extension and enforcement of official authority are concerned, during the last twenty years—security of property to the people, be it understood, from their own mutual plundering propensities. Whether this security extends to the demands of the tax-gatherer, and how far it has conduced to their own material welfare and happiness, is quite another question.

SACRED SAMARITAN RECORDS.

Haifa, Oct. 15.—The chief interest connected with Nablous lies in the fact that it is the residence of the remnant of those Samaritans who were colonized here by Shalmaneser, King of Assyria, when he carried away the children of Israel captive. From the Biblical record (2 Kings xvii.), it would appear that the new settlers were drawn from mixed nationalities and various cities within his dominions. Some came from Babylon itself, some from Hamath, a town between Damascus and Aleppo, and others from Cuthah—probably the Kutha of Arabian geographers, a town and district between the Tigris and Euphrates—some from Ava, which has been identified with the modern Hit, and some from Sepharvaim, once the famous city of Sippara, both cities on the Euphrates, in lower Mesopotamia.

We are also told that the new colonists petitioned the King of Assyria to be taught the religion of the Jews, and that he sent them a Jewish priest to teach it to them, and that they added it on, after a curious fashion, to the various forms of idolatry which they had imported from their different localities, and hence established a mongrel sort of worship, which became afterwards purified, but which nevertheless rendered them especially obnoxious to the Jews of Judea, all the more so because they intermarried with the remnant of the tribes of Israel which had escaped the captivity, thus forming a race as mongrel as their religion. It is about twenty-six hundred years since this event took place, but the ancient worship of the Samaritans exists to this day; so also does the bitter antagonism which they and the Jews entertain for each other.

This is the oldest national feud, probably, in existence, but is as fresh as if it only originated yesterday. Like the Jews, the Samaritans have managed to survive all the vicissitudes of fate, but with the difference that a small remnant has clung through them all to the locality in which they were originally established, though they have dwindled in numbers to one hundred and sixty souls. As an ethnological fraction of antiquity they are, perhaps, the most interesting group of people extant. The first one I ever made acquaintance with was a young man who called upon me in a mysterious manner one day in Haifa. He handed me a document in Arabic, in which, after stating that for certain reasons, which he implied were by no means discreditable to him (he was an outcast from his own people), he implored charity, and requested me “to cast upon him a regard of compassion and benevolence.” The document further said:

“All that I have inherited from my parents and ancestors is a manuscript written in ancient Hebrew, nine hundred years old, containing two chapters of the Bible, including the commandments, which I beg to offer you, in the hope that you will recompense me in return by a sum which will relieve my distress.”

He signed himself “Shellabi, the son of Jacob, the Samaritan.” Now, I knew that Jacob es Shellabi was once the spiritual head of the sect, for he had been in London under the title of “The Prince of the Samaritans,” and the romance which attended his style and dignity had, it was reported, even captivated a fair Englishwoman, who was willing to become a Samaritan for his sake. Fortunately for her “the Prince” was already married, a fact which I believe he only divulged on his return to his native land.

Anyhow, here was the son of a prince in distress, and here was an extremely ancient and curious manuscript for sale. The youth looked such a scamp, however, that he did not enlist my sympathies. I suspected that he had lost his money by gambling, which proved afterwards to be the case; so when he said he considered the manuscript worth ten dollars I offered him one dollar, on which he retired indignantly. A few days later, however, he reappeared, took his dollar thankfully, and I retain possession of the manuscript. It is on coarse parchment of a yellowish-brown color, two feet six long, and fifteen inches wide. It was evidently originally longer, but has been torn off. One edge has been subjected to the action of fire. The writing is in transverse columns, each column thirteen inches long by five wide, and containing from sixty to seventy lines. The characters are of the old Samaritan type, small, rude, and irregular, differing in many important respects from the ancient Hebrew, and illegible to a good modern Hebrew scholar to whom I have shown it. I have no doubt, however, that it could be deciphered by an expert in such matters, who would also be able to establish from the formation of the characters its antiquity.^[6]

This incident excited my interest in the Samaritan question, and when I was at Nablous I visited the synagogue, examined the ancient Thorah, or book of the law, and have since looked into the subject generally. The ancient synagogue was appropriated by the Moslems some centuries ago. The modern building is a small, unpretentious, oblong structure. The walls are rough and whitewashed, and the roof is vaulted with two little domes in the centre. The mizbah, or altar, is about five feet square, covered with a veil of yellow silk. Within are receptacles for the sacred books. Of these the most valuable are never shown to strangers. One or two persons have, however, seen the most ancient, which the Samaritans claim to have been written by Abishua, the son of Phinehas, thirty-five hundred years ago. It is only seen by the congregation once a year, when elevated above the priest's head on the Day of Atonement.

The Thorah was rolled round a cylinder of wood similar to those used in ordinary Jewish synagogues, and I was gratified to observe that it exactly resembled the fragment in my possession. It was evidently very ancient. The priest who showed me the synagogue was a remarkably handsome, dignified-looking man about forty years old. I asked him whether he was the chief priest. He said he was, and that Jacob Shellabi no longer had any position among them. I then said I had obtained a piece of manuscript from his son, to which he made no reply, but at once turned the subject. I suspect the youth was a _mauvais sujet_, who committed an act of sacrilegious theft before leaving the paternal mansion, and who did not, therefore, deserve more than he got.

Now, with regard to the sacred books which I did not see: They are in some respects in the highest degree interesting, as throwing light upon the Biblical record. In the first place, from what is known of the most ancient version, claiming to be by Abishua, Gesenius and other great scholars have given it as their opinion that if it could be collated, it would be found in many cases to preserve the sense, which has been lost in the Jewish version. This opinion is founded upon the results of such collation as has been possible with Samaritan texts which have fallen into the hands of scholars.

Besides the most ancient roll there are three other books known to be in the possession of the Samaritans.^[7] These are the Samaritan book of Joshua, the Samaritan Chronicle, and the so-called “Fire-tried Manuscript.” The Samaritan book of Joshua probably dates from the thirteenth century. It was published at Leyden about forty years ago from an Arabic manuscript in Samaritan character, and is thought to have been compiled from an early Samaritan and three later Arabic chronicles. It is invested with a peculiar interest from the fact that it helps to supply a remarkable lacuna in the Biblical record, which does not appear to have received the attention it deserves from Biblical students. It is, in fact, evident that a large portion of the present book of Joshua is missing. That book purports to be an account of the conquest of Canaan and its allotment among the twelve tribes. Under these circumstances it is most remarkable that we have no account of the conquest of Samaria, though the campaigns in the south, including the siege and taking of seven cities, and the invasion of Galilee, and the defeat of the league of six kings of Northern Palestine, are fully described. Then we have no list of royal Samaritan cities, though all of them in the other parts of the country are carefully enumerated. We have no description of the boundaries of the two tribes to which Samaria was allotted, nor any list of the cities awarded to them. Some of the Levitical towns mentioned in Chronicles as belonging to Samaria are not to be found in Joshua. It will be found also that, taken as a whole, there are only about forty Samaritan places noted out of some four or five hundred places in Western Palestine.

The Jewish hatred of the Samaritans rose in the early Christian period to so great a pitch that the Mishnic doctors avoided even mentioning the name of Samaria. Thus, in the Talmud only some half-dozen Samaritan towns are noticed. In describing Palestine the Mishna divides it into Judea, Galilee, and Peræa, leaving out all mention of Samaria. It is just possible that long before this an omission may have been purposely made by the early transcribers of the Biblical book of Joshua in regard to Samaria. At all events, the meagre record which it contains is richly supplemented by the Samaritan book of Joshua, which brings down the history of Israel from the date of the conquest to the time of Samuel, whose predecessor, Eli, was, from a Samaritan point of view, the earliest schismatic, and the founder of a new and heretical temple at Shiloh in opposition to that built by Joshua on Mount Gerizim. The divine glory rested upon Gerizim for two hundred and sixty years, or during the reign of nine successors of Joshua, the schism between the children of Judah and the orthodox, as the Samaritans call themselves, dating from the time of Sin, after the death of Samson.

The book opens much in accordance with the Biblical narrative, but no less than four chapters are devoted to the history of Balaam and his death, being an enlargement of one Biblical verse. The conquest of Shechem by Joshua contains an account of the miraculous discomfiture of the enemy, and of a letter sent by him announcing it to Eleazar, the priest, fastened to the wings of a dove. It contains also the account of a new league against the children of Israel under a king called Saubac, in conjunction with the kings of five other towns, which can all now be identified. A thrilling narrative of the battle which takes place between Joshua and these kings at El-Lejjun, on the ancient Megiddo (Armageddon), is also given. With this episode the history of the war ends. The chief value of the book lies, however, in the light it throws upon the ancient geography of Samaria. Out of a total of thirty-one places mentioned in it, thirteen are within the confines of Samaria, and most of these are not to be found in the Bible.

The Samaritan chronicle goes back to the beginning and gives the astronomical reckoning from Adam. Some of its topographical details are of much value. Thus it contains a list of twenty-two towns where the high-priest who succeeded Tobiah resided, all being apparently in Samaria as far as they can be identified. It is known that in the second and third centuries the Samaritans were in a very flourishing condition, and had colonies in Egypt, and even a synagogue in Rome. The chronicle gives their possessions in Palestine as allotted by the High-Priest Baba the Great, about one hundred and sixty years after the destruction of Jerusalem. This description is interesting, as it seems to include all Palestine, with the exception of Judea proper, to the mountains of which the Jews are confined.

At a later period the chronicle gives a list of those towns which were inhabited by the Samaritans after the Hegira. This is a period when very little is known of this nation. The places mentioned extend nearly over the whole of Palestine outside of Judea, and colonies are also mentioned in Damascus, Cairo, and Baalbek. There is a ruin about five miles from Haifa called Kefr Samir, or the town of the Samaritans, which I occasionally visit to grub for inscriptions, which was one of their colonies. Those at Gerar and Gaza lasted till the present century, but none are to be found now outside of Nablous. It is only to be expected that the chronicle should centre all the holy places of the Samaritans at Shechem or Nablous.

The fifth article of the Samaritan creed was the assertion that Gerizim was the chosen abode of God upon earth. Here Adam and Seth raised altars; here Melchisedec, servant of the Most High God, was met by Abraham—for Gerizim the Samaritans hold to the present day is the highest mountain in the world, the only one not covered by the flood. Here Abraham offered up Isaac, the very spot being shown on the eastern brow of the mountain; and, indeed, as Dean Stanley has argued, it is as likely to be here as at Jerusalem, as Josephus and the Talmudists affirm. Gerizim was also the site of Jacob's vision, and, finally, it was on Gerizim, and not on Ebal, just opposite, as stated in the Bible, that, according to the Samaritans, Joshua erected, first an altar, afterwards the tabernacle, and lastly a temple.

The fourth and last of the known ancient sacred books of the Samaritans is the fire-tried manuscript. It consists of two hundred and seventeen leaves, containing the law from the twenty-ninth verse of the first chapter of Genesis to the blessing of Moses in Deuteronomy. It is much worn; the letters are not so small as those of Abishua's roll, nor as large as those of the later roll. The hand is steady and uniform, and the character of the letters indicates that it is of very ancient date. A note at the end of the book of Numbers connects the manuscript with a story in the Samaritan book of Joshua. It runs:

“It came out from the fire by the power of the Lord to the hand of the King of Babel in the presence of Zerubbabel the Jew, and was not burned. Thanks be to the Lord for the law of Moses.”