I am very upset right now, since I just lost a post that I worked about an hour on. But I’ll give you the gist.
1. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001) 94-95.
Tov talks about how the Samaritans viewed Mount Gerizim as the site of the central sanctuary. Mount Gerizim was in Shechem, in the lower part of the tribe of Manasseh, in what is today called the “West Bank.” The reason they consider it holy is because Genesis 12:26 and 33:18-20 present the patriarchs Abraham and Jacob (respectively) building an altar in Shechem.
When I did my weekly quiet time in Joshua, I learned that there are scholars who believe the central sanctuary was once in Shechem (see Joshua 24 for Shechem's importance), but it got moved to Shiloh, probably because Shechem was destroyed by Abimelech in Judges 9. That shows me the Samaritans may have a basis for their claim that once all Israel honored Shechem, but they left for another sanctuary.
But I wondered why the Samaritans honored Mount Gerizim, especially when God commands the Israelites to build an altar on Mount Ebal, also in Shechem (Deuteronomy 27). My guess was that they chose Gerizim because it was the mountain on which the Israelites pronounced blessings for obedience to God’s law, whereas they chanted the curses for disobedience on Ebal. So why not focus on the blessings mountain, since God is a good God?
I also wondered why Samaritans say Gerizim is God’s only sanctuary on the basis of Genesis 12:26 and 33:18-20, when the patriarchs built altars in other places as well, including in Bethel (Genesis 12; 28), which Jeroboam honored (I Kings 12).
2. Gerson Cohen, “The Talmudic Age,” Great Ideas and Ages of the Jewish People, ed. Leo Schwarz (New York: Random House, 1956) 184-185.
Cohen describes how the Jews stood out because their customs were so different, and they ended up offending Gentiles, not because they necessarily aimed to, but because their monotheism discouraged them from participating in Gentile customs.
Cohen compares the Jews to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and he cites the story of Esther, in which Mordecai refused to bow to Haman while everyone else around him was paying him that honor.
I referred to a discussion I had with an atheist/agnostic under my WordPress post, Deism, Separation of Church and State. He was arguing for government neutrality in the area of religion, and he cited the example of an evangelical friend of his in Hawaii. At a high school football game, everyone was encouraged to stand for prayer, and the prayer turned out to be Buddhist, because of the large Buddhist population of that state.
I recalled a Jehovah’s Witness kid in elementary school who couldn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance, since JWs consider it a form of idolatry. Yet, his teachers still wanted him to stand for the Pledge, even if he didn’t say it with the rest of the class. I wondered if that was pressuring him to honor an idol, according to the mindset of his parents.
Then, I said that I could sympathize with the anti-school prayer argument that says school prayer pressures people to violate their beliefs, to honor what they do not honor. Yet, I also said I didn’t sympathize with the view of some atheists that they have a right never to be offended, which is why some of them seek to remove religion from publically-owned places. Where is their sympathy for the Christians offended by evolution or sex ed in schools?
That’s the gist.