the chief or governor of the Cathites or Samaritans, was always a great enemy to the Jews. He was a native of Horon, or Horonaim, a city beyond Jordan, in the country of the Moabites. He lived in the time of Nehemiah, who was his great opponent, and from whose book we learn his history. There is one circumstance related of him which has occasioned some dispute among the learned. When Alexander the Great came into Phoenicia, and sat down before the city of Tyre, Sanballat quitted the interests of Darius king of Persia, and went at the head of eight thousand men to offer his service to Alexander. This prince readily entertained him, and being much solicited by him, gave him leave to erect a temple upon Mount Gerizim, where he constituted his son-in-law Manasseh the high priest. But this story carries with it a flagrant anachronism. For a hundred and twenty years before this, that is, in the year of the world 3550, Sanballat was governor of Samaria; therefore Dr. Prideaux, in his Connexion of the Histories of the Old and New Testament, supposes two Sanballats, and endeavours to reconcile it to truth and probability by showing it to be a mistake of Josephus. This author makes Sanballat to flourish in the time of Darius Codomannus, and to build his temple upon Mount Gerizim by license from Alexander the Great; whereas it was performed by leave from Darius Nothus, in the fifteenth year of his reign. This takes away the difficulty arising from the great age of Sanballat, and brings him to be contemporary with Nehemiah, as the Scripture history requires.