Samaritan Sects.
Samaritan Sects. [1]
Corrected by the congregation. he still persevered, crying, "This is right, as God hath said by his prophet Ddsis, on whom be peace! Ye are all worthy of death for denying the prophetic office of his servant Ddfsis, altering the feasts, falsifying the great name of Jehovah, and persecuting the second prophet of God, whom he hath revealed from Sinai! Woe unto you that you have rejected and do not follow him!" Levi was stoned. His friends dipped a palm leaf in his blood, and ordained that whoever would read Dusis's writings and see the leaf must first fast seven days and nights. They cut off their hair, shaved their beards, and at their funerals performed many strange ceremonies. On the Sabbath they would not move from their place, and kept their feasts only on this day, during which they would not remove their hands from their sleeves. When one of their friends died, they would gird him with a girdle, put a stick in his hand and shoes on his feet, saying, "If we rise, he will at once get up," believing that the dead man, as soon as he was laid in the grave, would rise and go to Paradise. As to the age in which Dusis lived, it must have been long before Origen, for this father, in his Commentary on John 13, 27 (ed. Lommatzsch, 2, 49), tells us that a "certain Dositheus arose and claimed to be the Messiah; his followers are called Dositheans, who have his books and tell wonderful stories of him, as if he had not died and is still alive somewhere." This agrees with the statement of Abul-Fath concerning Dusis. According to Origen, Dositheus must have lived long before himprobably in the 1st, or at least in the 2d century of the Christian era. That he was the teacher or pupil of Simon Magus, as some have asserted, is an untenable conjecture. See Petermann in Herzog, 13, 387 sq.; Nutt, Samaritan History, p. 46 sq.; Basnage, Histoire des Juifs (Taylor's transl.), p. 94 sq.; Jost, Gesch. des Judenth. u. s. Secten, 1, 62 sq.; De Sacy, Chrestom. Aroabe, 1, 334 sq. (B.P.)
