After two weeks of the most important laws of the Torah, Moses now gives instructions about what the Jewish people should do when they enter the land of Israel.

The first command concerns first fruits. Moses says that since they now have a land of their own, the Jewish people should dedicate their first harvest to God, out of gratitude.

The Torah specifies that we should take them to, “the place which God has chosen to be the repository of his name,” which was taken to mean the Tabernacle (which, in due course, would be transferred into a permanent temple). Then the Torah goes on to command them to erect two stone tablets and cover them with plaster, onto which the laws of the Torah would be written for all to see. This was an important signal that the law had to be accessible to everyone.

This would be followed by a public ceremony that would take place on the West Bank at two mountains, Gerizim for the blessings, and Eyval for the curses. The tribes would be divided into two, with half on one and the other half on the other. They would say aloud the blessings that would follow if they were true to God, and the curses that would follow if they abandoned him.

I do not like the translation of blessings and curses. Rather, I believe we should emphasize that good things or bad things will happen depending on people’s behavior. The Torah is emphasizing that for a country, a people, or a community to function effectively, the laws are not enough. The spirit of the law is what matters, and the relationship between people is what will bring blessings as opposed to what will bring curses.

Returning to the two mountains, Gerizim and Eyval, King David conquered Jerusalem roughly 3,000 years ago, and his son Solomon built the temple there. Why was no temple built on Mount Gerizim, which was specified in the Torah?  Some 300 years later, the country split into two kingdoms, Judah in the South and Israel in the north. In 720 BCE the north was destroyed by the Assyrians, and its inhabitants were exiled and scattered around the empire, which extended from the Euphrates River eastwards. Other peoples defeated by the Assyrians were then resettled in that conquered territory to make sure that the original inhabitants would not re-constitute.

According to our Bible, some of these other conquered people settled in the north, Samaria, and became known as Samaritans. And they adopted the Torah as their religious authority, but built their temple on Mount Gerizim in the north.

The Samaritan version of their origins is different from ours, in that they claim they were the remnant of the Ten Lost Tribes of the North who managed to hide from the Assyrians, and reconstituted the community in the absence of the Judeans. The rivalry between the Jews and the Samaritans continued  until the Roman exile, and was sometimes close and sometimes distant.

Mount Gerizim, which is near Nablus on the West Bank, remains their holy place to this day — even though their temple was destroyed by the Maccabean King John Hyrcanus, and later by the Byzantine Christians. To this day, there are still small communities of Samaritans in Samaria as well as settlements in Holon in Israel and in parts of America.

And it might seem from this week’s Torah portion that their choice of Holy Mountain was more authentic than ours.

The other is a writer and rabbi, currently based in New York. 

The post Examining the History of Mount Gerizim: The Samaritans’ Holy Temple first appeared on Algemeiner.com.