garrison, was certainly more important and cosmopolitan than Jerusalem.
Several periods of excavation have uncovered substantial remains from the
third centuryb.c.e., among them houses with painted stucco, Greek in-
scriptions, and imported Greek pottery. It seems that the population was
largely pagan.
The second, certainly smaller city was the old site of biblical Shechem
(Tell Balata), which was resettled at the end of the fourth centuryb.c.e.
Contrary to many scholars who suppose that the new city was inhabited by
Samaritans, the evidence points in the opposite direction. If Josephus is
right (Ant.11.344), we can assume that Shechem was a settlement of
Sidonian colonists who wanted to control the strategically important val-
ley between Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Ebal and the traffic crossing the fertile al-
Askar plain. Material culture from Hellenistic Shechem was considerably
poorer than from Samaria. All earlier structures on the tell were covered by
a thick layer of fill; the Middle Bronze Age city wall was used as a founda-
tion for new fortifications; and the interior was filled with regularly built
private houses. 2 Maccabees 6:2 mentions a temple dedicated to Zeus
Xenios on Mt. Gerizim, probably on Tell er-Ras, the eastern summit of Mt.
Gerizim, which served as an acropolis for Shechem.
Around 200b.c.e.at the latest, a third city existed on the summit of
Mt. Gerizim, surrounding an older sanctuary. The sanctuary consisted of a
large open courtyard measuring about 90 by 90 meters that was accessible
over large stairways and surrounded by halls, rooms, and massive fortifica-
tions. Unlike the situation in Jerusalem, the sacred precinct does not seem
to have housed a temple building but a large open altar. The remains of the
altar were later obliterated by the construction of a Byzantine church. Out-
side the sacred precinct, archaeologists have excavated parts of a large city
that, together with the sanctuary, was protected by a wide city wall. The
houses were all very well built; many had large courtyards and rooms for
processing agricultural produce (oil presses). Greek style bathtubs in some
houses indicate a high standard of living. Many inscriptions in a recently
published corpus of some 400 fragments (most of them dating to the third
and second centuryb.c.e.) contain dedicatory formulae and mention
names and titles of cultic personnel in Aramaic and Paleo-Hebrew. Al-
though found in secondary use, it is possible that the inscriptions were
once on display somewhere in the sacred precinct. On the basis of the
epigraphic evidence, there can be no doubt that the city was the main set-
tlement of the Samaritans, and that the sanctuary was their central place of
worship, which included sacrifices and pilgrimages. Due to the lack of a326jürgen k. zangenbergEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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