TEX COMMANDMENTS
274
TEN COMMANDMENTS
this places the fifth comniaiulmeiit in a wrong position ; that a duty to parents is a lUiiy towanis our iiciijlihor. From the jewisli pt»int of view, it is beUeved, the place thus given to that cominauilnicnt was essentially the right one. Instead of ihities towards God, and duties towards our neighbors, we must think of the first table as containing all that belonged to the EiifrslSHa of the Greeks, to the Fields of the Homans — duties, i. e., with no corresponding rights; while the second deals with duties which involve rights, and come, therefore, under the head of Justltia. The duty of honoring, i. e. sup- porting, parents came under tlie former head. As soon as the son was capable of it, and the parents required it, it was an absolute, unconditional duty. His right to any maintenance from them had ceased. He owed them reverence as he owed it to his Father in heaven (Heb. xii, 9). He was to show piety {thatjiCn') to them (1 Tim. v, 4). What made the "Corban" casu- istry of the Scribes so specially evil was that it was, in this way, a sin against the piety of the first table, not merely against the lower obligations of the sec- ond (Mark vii, 11). It at least harmonizes with this division that the second, third, fourth, and fifth commandments all stand on the same footing as having special sanctions attaching to them, while the others that follow are left in their simplicity by themselves, as if the parity of rights were in itself a sufficient ground for obedience. A further confirma- tion of the truth of this division is found in Rom. xiii,9. Paul, summing up the duties "briefly comprehended" in the one great law, " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," enimierates the last five commandments, but makes no mention of the fifth.
VI. Addition. — To these ten commandments we find in the Samaritan Pentateuch an eleventh added :
"But when the Lord thy God shall have brought thee into tlie land of Canaan, whiUier thou goest to possess it, thon shiilt set thee up two ijreiit stones, and shalt plaster them wlih plaster, and shalt write upon these stones all the words of this law. Moreover, after thou shalt have passed over Jordan, thou shalt set up those stones, which I command thee this day, on Mount Gerizim, and thou shalt build theie an altar to the Lord thy God, an altar of stones: thou shalt not lift up any iron thereon. Of un- hewn stones shalt thou build that altar to the Lord thy God, and thou shalt offer on it burnt-oft'erings to the Lord thy God, and thou shalt sacritice peace-offerings, and shalt eat them there : and thou shalt rejoice before the Lord ihy God in that mountain beyond Jordan, by the way where the sun goeth down, in the land of the Canaanite that dwelleth in the plain country over against Gilgal, by the oak of Moreh, towards Sichem" (Walton, Bibt. Puiy- (tlott.).
In tlie absence of any direct evidence, we can only guess as to the history of this remarkable addi- tion. (1.) It will be seen that the whole passage is made up of two which are found in the Hebrew text of Dent, xxvii. 2-7 and j j- j t XI, 30, with the substitution, m the former, Dual of Gerizim for Ebal. (2.) In the absence of
confirmation from any other version, Ebal ""^"^
must, so far as textual criticism is concerned. Reciprocal. be looked upon as the true reading; Gerizim as a falsification, casual or deliberate, of the text. (3.) Probably the choice of (ierizim as the site of the Samaritan temple was determined by the fact that it had been the iMount of Blessings, Ebal that of Curses. Possibly, as Walton suggests {Prolerj. c. xi), the difficul- ty of understanding how the latter should have been chosen instead of the former as a place for sacrifice and offering may have led them to look on the reading Ebal as erroneous. They were unwilling to expose them- selves to the taunts of their .Judican enemies by build- ing a temple on the Hill of Curses. They would claim the inheritance of the blessings; they would set the au- thority of their text against that of the scribes of the Great Synagogue. One was as likely to be accepted as the other. The " Hebrew verity" was not then ac- knowledged as it has been since. (4.) In other repeti- tious or transfers in the Samaritan Pentateuch we mav
perhaps admit the plea which Walton makes in its be- lialf (/(«•. cit.') that, in the first formation of the Penta- teuch as a Codex, the transcribers had a large number of separate documents to copy, and that consequentlj' much was left to the discretion of the individual scribe. Here, however, that excuse is hardly admissible. The interpolation has every mark of being a bold attempt to claim for the schismatic worship on Gerizim the sol- emn sanction of the voice on Sinai, to place it on the saine footing as the ten great words of God. The guilt of the interpolation belonged, of course, only to the first contrivers of it. The later Samaritans might easily come to look on their text as the true one; on that of the Jews as corrupted by a fraudulent omission. It is to the credit of the Jewish scribes that they were not tempted to retaliate, and that their reverence for the sa- cred records prevented them from suppressing the his- tory which connected the rival sanctuary with the bless- ings of Gerizim. See Samauitan Pkntateuch.