Robert J. Bull
Drew University
While at Jacob’s Well and during the course of an argument with Jesus about the proper place to worship God, a Samaritan woman exclaimed, “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain,” and thereby directed attention to Mt. Gerizim. It has been assumed that she was referring to the mountain in general as the location of Samaritan worship. Recent archaeological discoveries suggest instead that she was directing attention to a particular place on Mt. Gerizim and that her reference to the termination of Samaritan worship in the past may have been attached to the ruins visible to Jesus and herself as they talked at the well.
The eastern slopes of two of the five major peaks of the sprawling mountain rise from beside the current traditional site of Jacob’s Well and a little to the south of nearby Tell Balatah where lie the remains of the city of Shechem, the erstwhile chief city of the Samaritans (see the map). From both well and tell, the higher (elevation 2858 ft.) and more distant of the two peaks can be seen, its rocky slopes devoid of trees. At its summit, the tomb or weli of Sheikh Ghanim, built on the northeast corner of a fortification the Emperor Justinian (A.D. 527-65) had constructed to protect the 5th century octagonal Theotokos church from Samaritan attack, is the one building visible. (It is Procopius of Caesarea who reports on the work of Justinian, in his De Aedificiis V. 7.)
A hundred yards south of the weli on the same summit is a flat rock which the Samaritan community has designated as the place where their temple once stood (see the map, and photo on page 59). The nearer and lower of the two peaks (elevation 2727 ft.), however, is the one which looms immediately above anyone viewing the mountain from Jacob’s Well or from the nearby remains of the destroyed city (see photo on page 60). This peak, representing the northernmost extension of Mt. Gerizim, is now partly covered by a
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Map of Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Ebal with the Nablus-Shechem Valley between them, locating Tell er-Ras and the site of Jacob’s Well. Drawn by O. Unwin and adapted by S. Karman.
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Aerial view of two peaks of Mt. Gerizim, looking north past the summit toward Tell er-Ras. From tower left to upper right, the numbers indicate 1) the traditional site of the Samaritan temple; 2) the weli of Sheikh Ghanim on the NE corner of the Justinian fortification enclosing the octagonal Theotokos Church; 3) Tell er-Ras. Photo by R. Cleave.
stand of pine trees planted in regular terraces over fifty years ago under British Mandate rule. Close inspection of the saddle which joins the northern promontory with the higher peak to the south discloses that a transverse fosse or ditch some 250 feet across and thirty feet deep was hewn from the solid rock of the ridge in an ancient effort to separate the northern peak more noticeably from the rest of the mountain. At the summit of this northern, lower peak is a small bare mound called Tell er-Ras, and the mound is visible through the pines on the slope from Jacob’s Well in the valley below.
The prospect before Jesus and the Samaritan woman when she called attention to Mt. Gerizim would have been the mountain profile described above, minus the more recent additions of the weli and the terraced stand of trees. But the prospect would have included a large ruined structure of the near promontory.
In the summers of 1964, 1966 and 1968, there was discovered and excavated on Tell er-Ras a temple of Zeus Hypsistos built under the aegis of the Emperor Hadrian (A.D. 117-38). Beneath the Zeus temple was discovered a second structure which we first called
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Building B. Building B was founded on the bed rock of the mountain top and was set in the midst of a surrounding rectangle of walls which were also for the most part founded on bed rock. The remains of Building B constituted a half cube, sixty-five feet on a side and standing thirty-two feet high. It was constructed of unhewn stone laid in without cement and without any kind of internal structuring (see photo on page 61). The surrounding rectangle of walls, four and a half feet thick, rise to a height of about sixteen feet; together they formed a courtyard 135 feet wide with the half cube in the center. Pottery taken from a foundation trench into which part of one of the walls was set, belonged to the 3rd century B.C.
The existence of a monumental structure from the Hellenistic period, built immediately above ancient Shechem the former chief city of the Samaritans, combined with such literary evidence as Josephus in his Antiquities 13.254-7 that the Samaritan temple on Mt. Gerizim continued its life until John Hyrcanus destroyed it in 127 B.C., led us to conclude that Building B and its related walls were part of the Samaritan temple complex and that the half cube of unhewn stones was probably the remains of the Samaritan altar of sacrifice. From the top of the existing remains of the altar (elevation 2691 feet), one can see through the trees on the slope of the mountain the location of the Well of Jacob.
View of the east slope of Mt. Gerizim looking NNE. Note 1) Tell er-Ras; 2) Tell Balatah-Shechem; 3) unfinished church at Jacob’s Well.
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Trench on Tell er-Ras showing at the left the eastern face of the Samaritan altar. Note the rubble at right laid in by Hadrian’s engineers; the Zeus temple rode on a podium set atop the Samaritan altar. Photo by J. Kellers.
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The well had a church built over it by A.D. 380, but the church was probably destroyed by the Samaritans in A.D. 529. Its cruciform shape, however, could be sketched by Arculf in A.D. 670. The Crusaders found it in ruins, and in the 12th century built a church with a nave and two aisles above a crypt which contained the well. The Greek Orthodox Church bought the land in 1885 and began to build the present unfinished church in 1903. Construction was stopped during World War I and has not been resumed.
The mouth of Jacob’s Well (elevation 1641 feet, just 1050 feet below the top of the altar on Tell er-Ras) is found in the crypt mentioned above, some ten feet beneath the floor of the unfinished Greek Church. It required a theodolite and some trigonometric calculation to determine it, but it is clear that the remains on the top of Tell er-Ras could have been seen from the well mouth. And this well mouth, by the way, is one of those traditional locations of places in Palestine which scholar and pilgrim alike can take as extremely likely to be genuine. That the existing top of the ruined altar and the present height of its surrounding courtyard walls were standing in the first century A.D. at least as high as they are now is assured by the fact that the Roman engineers of the 2nd century A.D., when charged by Hadrian with building a Zeus temple on an elevated platform, did their job by covering all of the existing
Jacob’s well beneath the Church of the Samaritan Woman.
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remains within the perimeter walls of the Samaritan platform with rubble and cement to a depth of thirty-two feet.
When the Samaritan woman called to the attention of Jesus that her forebears had worshiped on Mt. Gerizim, there was visible to both, immediately above them, on the nearest peak of that mountain, the ruin of the Samaritan temple. And when the woman referred to the termination of Samaritan worship in the past, the poignancy of her remark would have been appreciated by her hearer, since near them both lay the ruins of Shechem, capital of her people, destroyed by the “Jerusalem” Jew John Hyrcanus some 150 years before, while above them could be seen, as the most evident ruin in the destroyed Samaritan temple complex, the great altar of daily sacrifice, disused since its destruction by that same John Hyrcanus.
(Reprinted by permission from The Biblical Archaeologist, Vol. 38, No. 2, May, 1975.)
Bible and Spade 5:3 (Summer 1976)