The Jewish Society in Roman Palestine (3)

The Samaritans

The best-known incident in the Bible regarding the Samaritans is of course the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25–37: A priest and a Levite both pass by a man who has been robbed and beaten. The Samaritan, however, stops and takes care of him. Then, as now, Samaritans were not at the top of the social pecking order, and that is precisely the point of the story.

The Gospel of John contains another well-known account involving Samaritans. Jesus meets a Samaritan woman by Jacob’s well near Shechem and asks her for a drink. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” she asks (John 4:9). Eventually, Jesus reveals himself to her as the Messiah (John 4:25–26). In the course of their conversation, the woman points to Mt. Gerizim and tells Jesus that her forebears “worshipped on this mountain,” whereas the “Jews say that the Temple where God should be worshipped is in Jerusalem” (John 4:20).

A Samaritan temple indeed once stood on Mt. Gerizim, the Samaritan’s holy mountain. But by the time of Jesus it was in ruins, destroyed by John Hyrcanus, the second-century BC Jewish ruler of Judea, a member of the Hasmonean dynasty. Since 1984, archaeologists have been excavating on Mt. Gerizim, seeking to uncover Samaritan history. As many as 10,000 people may have lived here before Hyrcanus destroyed the site. 

The enmity between the Samaritans and the Jews at the time the Gospels were written is clearly reflected in the two New Testament references recounted above. Yet both groups held as sacred the five books of Moses, although their texts varied somewhat, especially regarding the identity of the holy mountain. As the passage in John’s Gospel attests, for the Jews, it was the Temple Mount in Jerusalem; for the Samaritans, it was Mt. Gerizim. A passage in 2 Kings 17 implies that after the Assyrian conquest and destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel in 721 BCE, the Assyrians brought foreigners into the land who intermarried with those Israelites who had not been deported; the progeny of these marriages between Israelites and foreigners mixed foreign ways and foreign gods with their allegiance to the Israelite God; these people became the Samaritans (see 2 Kings 17:6, 24, 29–41). The view that the Samaritans emerged from this mixture of northern Israelites and foreign settlers brought into the country by the Assyrians was long the regnant understanding of Samaritan origins. Some hold it even today. But recent research makes it increasingly clear that such a picture does not account for the beliefs and practices of the Samaritans as we know them from ancient sources and modern observation. Nothing points to a pagan, non-Israelite background from which Samaritanism would have evolved. On the contrary, their sacred Scripture—the Pentateuch—their rituals and their customs all manifest a close affinity to Judaism.

Relations between the Jews and the Samaritans were always strained. Jesus ben Sirach, the author of Ecclesiasticus  (ca. 180 BC) referred to the Samaritans as “the foolish people that dwell in Shechem” (Sir 50:26). There is a tradition that 300 priests and 300 rabbis once gathered in the temple court in Jerusalem to curse the Samaritans with all the curses in the Law of Moses. The Samaritans are important to biblical studies for several reasons : (1) They claim to be the remnant of the kingdom of Israel, specifically of the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, with priests of the  line of Aaron/Levi. (2) They possess an ancient recension of the Pentateuch which. is non-Masoretic and shows close relationship to a  text type underlying both the LXX and some Hebrew manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and are therefore important both for textual criticism of the OT as well as the study of the history of Hebrew. (3) They appear several times in the NT, especially in Luke, John, and Acts, and may provide the background for controversies related in Ezra, Nehemiah, and other post-exilic writings. (4) They provide much insight into the cosmopolitan nature of Palestinian religion and politics before and at the time of Christ. (5) At one time the community was large enough to exercise considerable influence in Palestine, Egypt, Syria, and even Rome. (6) And they were important enough to be a subject of controversy in Josephus and Rabbinic literature (notable among which are many references in the Mishnah and an extra tractate in the Talmud).

The sources for a history of the Samaritans are predominantly anti-Samaritan: 2 Kings 17; Ezra and Nehemiah; Sira 50:25-26; 2 Maccabees 6:2; the Assyrian Annals of Sargon; the Elephantine Papyri; the  Mishnah; the Babylonian Talmud (Masseket Kutim); the New Testament (Matthew, Luke, John, Acts); and Josephus (especially Antiquities 9, 11, 12, 13, 18, 20).   Samaritan literature is largely late; the Samaritan Pentateuch, however, though copied in the 14th century, dates back in recensional form at least to the Hasmonean period (ca. 100-150 BC). Many of its peculiarities reflect Samaritan religious tendencies, and it is thus an early witness to their beliefs and claims.

The problem of sources is compounded by the fact that the name “Samaritan” occurs only once in the OT (2 Kgs 17:29-translated in the NASB as “the people of Samaria”), and there it refers not to the “Samaritans” as they appear in the Talmud, Josephus, and the NT, but rather to the people of the Northern Kingdom of Israel before its captivity by Assyria! An accurate understanding of the Samaritans as a religious people must therefore depend on much more than a simple identification based on names and geography.

Theories Of Samaritan Origins

The traditional theories of Samaritan origins are reduced by Purvis to four basic positions:  (1) the view of the Samaritans themselves, that their movement is a perpetuation of the ancient Israelite faith as it was practiced in the pre-monarchical period at Shechem (ca. 1400-1100 BC); (2) the counterclaim of Judaism, that Samaritanism is a heresy derived from a corrupt worship of Yahweh which developed in northern Palestine after the Assyrian conquest of that area about 722 BC; (3) an interpretation based on Ezra, Nehemiah, and Josephus, that the Samaritans broke away from the Jews in the Persian period; and (4) the assertion that a Samaritan schism occurred in the early Greek period.

All views demonstrate that there was a definite schism,  followed by a long period of independent development of the two groups. The Samaritans place the schism in the twelfth century BC, at the time of Eli. The Jews date it in the eighth century BC Modern critics have tended to date the schism much later, but most have retained the schism concept. Some scholars, however, have begun to question this notion. As Coggins points out:
Two points in particular have remained characteristic of many descriptions: the view of Samaritanism as a debased form of religion, containing many syncretistic elements; and the notion of a schism-with its twofold connotation, of a definite break that took place at a specific moment in history, and of that break as implying the departure of the schismatic from the accepted norm. …It is hoped that it will become clear that neither of these features should be taken for granted as truly characteristic of the situation.

Purvis stresses that “the so-called Samaritan schism, or withdrawal  from the mainstream of Judaism, was not so much an event as a process–a process extending over several centuries and involving a series of events which eventually brought about estrangement between the two communities.”  Historians have tended to select one event and to declare that it was this that caused the emergence of the Samaritan sect. They have also disagreed as to which element of Samaritanism represents its crucial distinction from Judaism. The as Samaritans, for example, say that worship at Gerizim rather than elsewhere has always been the determining factor. The Jews regard the intermarriage of Assyrian colonists and northern Israelites and the development of a syncretistic religion as the origin of the heresy. Others refer to the erection of a temple on Mt. Gerizim, or the rejection of the post-Pentateuchal scriptures, as the crucial event.

The thesis of this article is that the origin of Samaritanism was indeed a process–a process which began at least with the division of the kingdom (by ca. 931 BC) and continued through each successive incident, including the importation of foreign colonists and the building of the Gerizim temple, right up to their final excommunication by the Jews about. 300 CE. Thus even in NT times the process of estrangement was still going on, although the sect could surely be considered distinct once it had its own temple and worship on Gerizim.

Most modern critics tend to minimize the OT’s witness to the origin of the Samaritan people and religion, assuming that such “Jewish” accounts are too prejudiced to be reliable. This attitude must be avoided, however, since the statements of Jesus Christ show that he also recognized the dubiousness of their origins and the falsehood of their religious claims.

Otherwise, the Samaritans are not semi-pagans but rather an offshoot of ancient Judaism, probably from the second or first century BCE (some authorities give an earlier date for the schism). The form of the Samaritan script, the orthography (spelling) and textual characteristics of the Samaritan Pentateuch and the religious festivals they celebrate all point to this as the period when the Jewish and Samaritan communities went their separate ways.

 Bibliography for the Hasmonean Kingdom and Roman Palestine

1. Bickerman, Elias Joseph. The God of the Maccabees : studies on the meaning and origin of the Maccabean revolt. Translated by Horst R. Moehring. Pp. xiii, 122. Leiden: Brill, 1979
2.  Bickerman, Elias Joseph. The Jews in the Greek Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.
3.  Boccaccini, Gabriele. Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Parting of the Ways between Qumran and Enochic Judaism Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans 1998).
4. Boederman, John. The Cambridge Ancient History. Cambridge University Press 2002
5. Bultmann, Rudolf. Jesus Christ and Mythology, Prentice Hall, 1997
6. Carson, D. A. O’Brien P.T,. Seifrid M.A Justification and Variegated Nomism:A Fresh Appraisal of Paul and Second Temple Judaism 2001
7. Coogan, Michael D., (ed.): The Oxford History of the Biblical World Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
8. Coggins, R. J. Samaritans and Jews (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975).
9. Gaster, Theodore H. “Samaritans,” IDB
10.  Gelston, “Samaritans,” New Bible Dictionary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962)
11.  Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period, 2 vols. (London: SCM Press; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974).
12.  Kessler Edward, Wenborn Neil, A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations, Cambridge University Press.
13.  Nickelsburg, George W. E. Nickelsburg, Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism and Early Christianity (Harvard Theological Studies, 56; Expanded Edition; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006
14.  Purvis, James D. The Samaritan Pentateuch and the Origin of the Samaritan Sect (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1968)
15.  Tcherikover, Victor. Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews, Hendrickson Publishers, 1998
16.  VanderKam, James C. An Introduction to Early Judaism Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001