Benyahu outlook near Elon Moreh. It shows : Mount Ebal (right ) and Mount Gerizim (left ) and in the middle the city of Shechem. Wikimedia
An Altar on Mt Ebal or Mt Gerizim? – The Torah in the Sectarian Debate
The textual remnants of a Second Temple religious polemic between Judeans and Samaritans about where God’s chosen mountain lies.
Published: September 21, 2016
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Last Updated: September 7, 2026
James Kugel, The Bible as it Was (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Literature on this theme is vast; see the recent work of Michael Satlow,How the Bible Became Holy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
See Aharon Shemesh, Halakhah in the Making. The Development of Jewish Law from Qumran to the Rabbis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 72-106.
See for example Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: A Study of the Relations between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire (AD 135-425), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
For more on the Gerizim vs. Jerusalem debate, see Eyal Baruch’s TABS essay, “Mount Gerizim and the Polemic against the Samaritans.”
See recently Gary N. Knoppers, Jews and Samaritans: The Origins and History of their Early Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
These two mountains are commonly considered to be in the Shechem area. The wording of 11:30 somewhat ambiguously hints to a place nearer to the Jordan River. This confusion caused much trouble among early interpreters who tried to match Deuteronomy 11 with Joshua 3-4. But the matter cannot be developed further here.
See in general H.L. Ginsberg, The Israelian Heritage of Judaism (New York: JTS, 1982)
The exact relation between the stones and the altar is not clear, nor is it clear where exactly the Torah should be written. But this is not our concern here. The building of that altar is reported in Joshua 8:30-35, and a description of the stones appears as part of the crossing of the Jordan in Joshua 3-4.
For a discussion of this variant between the SP and the MT and how it developed, see, Stefan Schorch, “The Samaritan Version of Deuteronomy and the Origin of Deuteronomy,” in Samaria, Samarians, Samaritans: Studies on Bible, History and Linguistics (ed., József Zsengellér; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 23-38.
Adam Zertal, A Nation Is Born: The Mt. Ebal Altar and the Emergence of Israel (Tel-Aviv: Yedioth Ahronoth, 2000 [Hebrew]).
Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Third, revised edition; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 74-79.
See a convenient summary and discussion in Knoppers, Jews and Samaritans, 185. More recently, a fragment of parchment surfaced in the antiquities market representing the Gerizim reading in Deut 27:4, once again against MT. See: James H. Charlesworth, “What Is a Variant? Announcing a Dead Sea Scrolls Fragment of Deuteronomy,” Maarav 16 (2009), 201-212, 273-274. Doubts have been raised, however, about the authenticity of that fragment.
For the debate, see the recent evaluation by Ralph K. Hawkins, The Iron Age I Structure on Mt. Ebal: Excavation and Interpretation (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012). For earlier doubts about Zertal’s thesis see Hershel Shanks, “Two Early Israelite Cult Sites now Questioned”, Biblical Archaeology Review 14, 1 (1988), 48-52.
One can raise additional possibilities. For example, it is possible that “Gerizim” and “Ebal’ readings in Deuteronomy go back to earlier stages in Second Temple times, which only surfaced in later witnesses. Alternatively, an early Deuteronomy did not mention any mountain, the debate only being created at a later stage when each sect strove to buttress its own temple.
