Samaritan

Samaritans today are both a religious and an ethnic group located mainly in the Palestinian terrority of Israel. Ethnically, they are descended from a group of inhabitants that have connections to ancient Samaria from the beginning of the Babylonian Exile up to the beginning of the Christian era. In 2005, there were about 700 Samaritans, living mostly in the city of Nablus in the West Bank and some in the city of Holon in Israel. The Samaritans speak either Modern Hebrew or Palestinian Arabic as their mother language. For liturgical purposes, Samaritan Hebrew and Samaritan Aramaic are used.

Religiously, they are the adherents of Samaritanism, a belief system based on the Torah, or frist five books of Moses in the Bible. Like Judaism, it is descended from ancient Israelite religion. It is closely related to Judaism in that it accepts the Torah as its primary holy book, though there are differences in the version accepted. Their temple was at Mount Gerizim, not Jerusalem.

Normative Judaism rejects Samaritanism, while the Samaritans believe that Judaism has strayed from the original teachings of Moses. Historically, Samaritans were rejected by orthodox Jews because of their allegedly mixed blood and because they insisted that God should be worshipped at their sanctuary at Mt. Gerizim rather than the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. In the New Testament, Samaritans were despised by the Judean Jews; and Jesus used the parable of the "Good Samaritan" to dramatize the imporance of ethics and charity over religious formalism.

This theory is problematic because then the Hebrew people remaining at the land of Israel would vastly outnumber those who returned, and there are no indications of this in either the Bible or in secular history. The biblical story hardly seems more probable, given the logistical issue of deporting entire tribes and a unified return as a single event.

History

Origins

The Exact historical origins of the Samaritans are controversial. The Samaritans themnselves claim to be the descendants of Israelites of the Northern Kingdom who remained behind during the Babylonian Captivity, and thus introduced none of the Babylonian religious tendencies that influenced the Jews during this time. The Jews, on the other hand, believe that the Samaritans lost their standing as true Israelites by engaging in intermarriage and adopting pagan attitudes.

Ancient inscription in Samaritan Hebrew. From a photo c.1900 by the Palestine Exploration Fund

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It is agreed that when the Assyrians and Babylonians conquered the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, they forced many of the inhabitants into exile. How many remained in the land is debated, as is the question of their faithfulness to the Israelite religious tradition. One theory states that the conquerors deported only the middle and upper classes of the citizens of Judah and Israel, replacing them alone with settlers from other parts of the Assrian and Babylonian empires. The lower classes and the settlers intermarried and merged into one community. Decades later, the descendants of the Jews exiled in Babylon were permitted to return, and many did. These upper class Jews refused to recognize the descendants of the native Israelites and Judahites as legitimate Jews, due to their intermarriage and merger with pagan settlers.

According to this theory, the native group largely followed the same religion that the Jews had followed before the exile, but the Jewish religion underwent considerable reforms during the exile. Another element in the Jewish rejection of the native group was the issue of the Jerusalem Temple. In the days of the Judges and Kings, the Israelite God was worshipped in various "high places" and shrines. But later, after the Temple was built in Jerusalem, a movement to centralize the religious tradition emerged. The Northern Kingdom of Israel strongly resisted this tradition, and so did some groups in the Southern Kingdom of Judah. Those Jews returning from exile, however, strongly upheld the centrality of Jerusalem. They also insisted that those who had intermarried must put away their foreign wives.

A genetic study (Shen, et al., 2004) concluded from Y chromosome analysis that Samaritans indeed descend from the Israelites (including Cohen, or priests), and mitochondrial DNA analysis shows descent from Assyrians and other foreign women, effectively validating both local and foreign origins for the Samaritans.

Mount Gerizim in Scripture

Archaeological excavations at Mount Gerizim suggest that a Samaritan temple was built there c. 330B.C.E., and when Alexander the Great (356-323) was in the region, he is said to have visited Samaria and not Jerusalem. Earlier temples have not been discovered.

File:Shechem.jpg

Mt. Gerizim and the town of Shechem

Mt. Gerezim overlooks the biblical town of Shechem, where Abraham reportedly built an altar and made his initial covenant with God (Gen 12: 6-7). The Bible says that Abraham's grandson Jacob purchased land there and built another altar on the site (Gen. 33:18-19. When the Israelites entered Canaan after the exodus, Joshua assembled the tribes as Shechem to renew God's covenant with them (Josh. 24). It was also the first capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.

The Samaritans understand Mt. Gerizim to be the place where God chose to establish "His Name" (Deut 12:5). Deuteronomy 11:29 states:

"When the Lord your God has brought you into the land you are entering to possess, you are to proclaim on Mount Gerizim the blessings, and on Mount Ebal the curses."

However, after the split between Judah and Israel, the sacred nature of Mt. Gerizim became a bone of contention. Orthodox Judaism forbade offering sacrifice to God outside of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Israelite shrines at and Bethel, Dan and other "high places" were explicitly condemned by the prophets and the authors of biblical books such as Kings and Chronicles.

The New Testament (John 4:7-20) records the following illustrative exchange between a Samaritan woman and the Jewish teacher Jesus of Nazareth regarding the Samaritan Temple and relations between Samaritans and Jews:

Jesus said to her, "Will you give me a drink?" The Samaritan woman said to him, "You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?"... Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem."

200 B.C.E. to the Christian Era

After the coming of Alexander the Great, Samaria, like Judea, was divided between a Hellenizing faction based in its towns and a pious faction, which was led by the High Priest and based largely around Shechem and the rural areas. Antiochus Epiphanes was on the throne of Syria from 175 to 164 B.C.E. His determined policy was to Hellenize his entire kingdom. A major obstacle to Antiochus' ambition was the fidelity of the Jews to their historic religion. The military revolt of the Maccabees against Antiochus' program exacerabated the schism between Jews and Samaritans. The degree of Samaritan cooperation with the Greeks is a matter of controversy.

Josephus Book 12, Chapter 5 quotes the Samaritans as saying:

We therefore beseech thee, our benefactor and saviour, to give order to Apolonius, the governor of this part of the country, and to Nicanor, the procurator of thy affairs, to give us no disturbances, nor to lay to our charge what the Jews are accused for, since we are aliens from their nation and from their customs, but let our temple which at present hath no name at all, be named the Temple of Jupiter Hellenius.

II Maccabees 6:1-2 says:

Shortly afterwards, the king sent Gerontes the Athenian to force the Jews to violate their ancestral customs and live no longer by the laws of God; and to profane the Temple in Jerusalem and dedicate it to Olympian Zeus, and the one on Mount Gerizim to Zeus, Patron of Strangers, as the inhabitants of the latter place had requested.

Both of these sources, of course, are Jewish. The the "request" of the Samaritans to rename their temple was likely made under duress. However, the Samaritans apparentely did not resist nearly as strenously as did the Jews. In any case, the schism between the Jews and Samaritans was now final. After the victory of the Maccabees, this incarnation of the Samaritan Temple at Mount Gerizim was destroyed by by the Jewish ruler John Hyracanus in about 128 B.C.E., having existed about 200 years. Only a few stone remnants of it exist today.

Samaritans also fared badly under the early part of Roman rule. In the time of Jesus, they were a despised and economically depressed people.

The Common Era

In the first part of the Common Era, Samaria was incorporated into the Roman province of Judea. In the early part of the second century a period of Samaritan revival began. The Temple of Gerizim was rebuilt after the Bar Kochba revolt, around 135 C.E. Much of the current Samaritan liturgy was set by the high priest Baba Rabba in the fourth century.

There were also some Samaritans in the Persian Empire, where they served in the Sassanid army.

Later, under Byzantine Emperor Zeno in the late fifth century, Samaritans and Jews were massacred, and the Temple on Mt. Gerizim was again destroyed. In 529, led a charismatic messianic figure named Julianus ben Sabar (or ben Sahir), the Samaritans launched a war to create their own independent state in 529. With the help of the Ghassanid Arabs, Emperor Justinian I crushed the revolt; tens of thousands of Samaritans died or were enslaved. The Samaritan faith was virtually outlawed thereafter by the Christian Byzantine Empire; from a population once at least in the hundreds of thousands, the Samaritan community dwindled to near extinction.

[[Image:Gerizim2.jpg|left|thumb|300px|Samaritan cultic center on Mount Gerizim. From a photo c.1900 by the Palestine Exploration Fund.

A large number of Samaritans fled the country in 634 C.E., following the Muslim victory at the Battle of Yarmuk. Samaritan communities were established in Egypt and Syria but they did not survive into modern times. During the mid 800s Muslim zealots destroyed Samaritan and Jewish synagogues. During the 10th century relations between Muslims, Jews and Samaritans improved greatly. In the 1300s the Mamluks came to power; they plundered Samaritan religious sites, and turned their shrines into mosques. Many Samaritans converted out of fear. After the Ottoman conquest, Muslim persecution of Samaritans increased again. Massacres were frequent. According to Samaritan tradition, in 1624, the last Samaritan high priest of the line of Eleazar son of Aaron died without issue, but descendants of Aaron's other son, Ithamar, remained and took over the office.

By the 1830s only a small group of Samaritans in Shechem remained extant. The local Arab population believed that Samaritans were "atheists" and "against Islam", and they threatened to murder the entire Samaritan community. Since Jews and Arabs had good relations at this time, the Samaritans turned to the Jewish community for help; and Jewish entreaties to treat the Samaritans with respect were eventually heeded.

Persecution and assimilation reduced their numbers drastically. In 1919, an illustrated National Geographic report on the community stated that their numbers were less than 150.

Modern times

Samaritan and the Samaritan Torah

The Samaritans now number around 650, divided about equally between their modern homes in the settlement of Kiryat Luza on their sacred Mount Gerizim, and the Israeli town of Holon, just outside of Tel Aviv.

Until the 1980s, most of the Samaritans resided in the Palestinian town of Nablus below Mount Gerizim. They relocated to the mountain itself as a result of the first Intifada, and all that is left of their community in Nablus itself is an abandoned synagogue. But the conflict followed them. In 2001, the Israeli army set up an artillery battery on Gerizim.

Relations with the surrounding Jews and Palestinians have been mixed. In 1954, Israeli President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi created the Samaritan enclave in Holon but Israeli Samaritans today complain of being treated as "pagans and strangers" by orthodox Jews. Those living in Israel have Israeli citizenship. Samaritans in the Palestinian territories are a recognized minority and they send one representative to the Palestinian parliament. Palestinian Samaritans have been granted passports by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

As a small community divided between two mutually hostile neighbors, the Samaritans are generally unwilling to take sides in the conflict, fearing that whatever side they take could lead to repercussions from the other.

One of the biggest problems facing the community today is the issue of continuity. With such a small population, divided into only four families (Cohen, Tsedakah, Danfi and Marhib; a fifth family died out in the last century) and a refusal to accept converts, there has been a history of genetic disease within the group. To counter this, Samaritans have recently agreed that men from the community may marry non-Samaritan (i. e. Jewish) women, provided that they agree to follow Samaritan religious practices.

In 2004 the Samaritan high priest, Shalom b. Amram, passed away and was replaced by Elazar b. Tsedaka. The Samaritan high priest is selected by age from the priestly family. The high priest resides on Mount Gerizim.

Religion

[[Image:Samaritans.jpg|thumb|Samaritans, from a photo c. 1900 by the Palestine Exploration Fund.]]

The Samaritan religion is based on some of the same books used as the basis of Judaism, but these religions are not identical. Samaritan scriptures include the Samaritan version of the Torah, the Memar Markah, the Samaritan liturgy, and Samaritan law codes and biblical commentaries. Samaritans appear to have texts of the Torah as old as the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint; scholars have various theories concerning the actual relationships between these three texts.

Religious beliefs

There is one God, the same God recognized by the Hebrew prophets;
Their view of God is the same as the Jewish biblical view of God;
The Torah was dictated by God to Moses;
Mount Gerizim, not Jerusalem, is the one true sanctuary chosen by Israel's God;
Many Samaritans believe that at the end of days, the dead will be resurrected by Taheb, a restorer (possibly a prophet, some say Moses);
They possess a belief in Paradise (heaven);
The priests are the interpreters of the law and the keepers of tradition; unlike Judaism, there is no distinction between the priesthood and the scholars;
The authority of classical Jewish rabbinical works, the Mishnah, and the Talmuds are rejected;
Samaritans reject Jewish codes of law;
They have a significantly different version of the Ten Commandments (for example, their 10th commandment is about the sanctity of Mt. Gerizim).

Samaritan law is not the same as halakha (Rabbinical Jewish law). The Samaritans have several groups of religious texts, which equate to Jewish halakhah. A few examples of such texts are:

Samaritan Chronicle, The Tolidah (Creation to the time of Abishah)
Samaritan Chronicle, The Chronicle of Joshua (Israel during the time of divine favor)
Samaritan Chronicle, Adler (Israel from the time of divine disfavor until the exile)
Samaritan Halakhic Text, The Hillukh (Code of halakhah, marriage, circumsion, etc.)
Haggadic Midrash, Abu'l Hasan al-Suri
Haggadic Midrash, Mamar Markah
Haggadic Midrash, Pinkhas on the Taheb
Haggadic Midrash, Molad Maseh (On the birth of Moses)

The Samaritans retained the Ancient Hebrew script, the high priesthood, animal sacrifices, the actual eating of lambs at Passover, and the celebration of Aviv in spring as the New Year. The original name of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Teruah, at the beginning of Nisan, is not considered a new year as it is in Judaism. Their main Torah text differs from the Masoretic Text, as well. Some differences are doctrinal: for example, their Torah explicitly mentions that "the place that God will chose" is Mount Gerizim. Other differences seem more or less accidental.

List of the Samaritan High Priests (from 1613)

For a complete listing of Samaritan High Priests, see [1]; [2]

Line of Eleazar:

1613-1624 Shelemiah ben Pinhas

Line of Itamar:

1624-1650 Tsedaka ben Tabia Ha'abta'ai
1650-1694 Yitzhaq ben Tsedaka
1694-1732 Abraham ben Yitzhaq
1732-1752 Tabia ben Yiszhaq ben Avraham
1752-1787 Levi ben Avraham
1787-1855 Shalma ben Tabia
1855-1874 Amram ben Shalma
1874-1916 Yaacov ben Aaharon ben Shalma
1916-1932 Yitzhaq ben Amram ben Shalma ben Tabia
1933-1943 Matzliach ben Phinhas ben Yitzhaq ben Shalma
1943-1961 Abrisha ben Phinhas ben Yittzhaq ben Shalma
1961-1980 Amram ben Yitzhaq ben Amram ben Shalma
1980-1982 Asher ben Matzliach ben Phinhas
1982-1984 Phinhas ben Matzliach ben Phinhas
1984-1987 Yaacov ben Ezzi ben Yaacov ben Aaharon
1987-1998 Yosseph ben Ab-Hisda ben Yaacov ben Aaharon
1998- 2001 Levi ben Abisha ben Phinhas ben Yitzhaq
2001- 2004 Shalom ben Amram ben Yitzhaq (Saum Is'haq al-Samiri)
from 2004 Eleazar ben Tsedaka (he is the 131-st Samaritan High Priest)

Samaritans in the Gospels

Because of the mutual dislike between Jews and Samaritans, the Gospels twice mention good deeds by Samaritans. Jesus teaches that actions speak louder than ethnic identity or pious appearances:

The parable of the Good Samaritan.
Jesus asks water from the Samaritan Woman of Sychar.

"The Good Samaritan".
From a collection of public domain Christian clip art.

The Good Samaritan is a famous New Testament parable appearing only in the Gospel of Luke (10:25-37). The parable is told by Jesus to illustrate that compassion should be for all people, and that fulfilling the spirit of the Law is more important than fulfilling the letter of the Law.

In Luke, a scholar of the Law tests Jesus by asking him what is necessary to inherit eternal life. To begin his answer, Jesus asks the lawyer what the Mosaic Law says about it. When the lawyer quotes the basic law of loving God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and all your mind, and the parallel law of loving one's neighbour as oneself, Jesus says that he has answered correctly— "Do this and you will live," he tells him.

When the lawyer then asks Jesus to tell him who his neighbour is, Jesus responds with a parable about a traveler who was attacked, robbed, stripped, and left for dead by the side of a road. Later, a priest saw the stricken figure and avoided him, presumably in order to maintain ritual purity. Similarly, a Levite saw the man and ignored him as well. Then a Samaritan passed by, and, despite the mutual antipathy between his and the Jewish populations, immediately rendered assistance by giving him first aid and taking him to an inn to recover while promising to cover the expenses.

At the conclusion of the story, Jesus asks the lawyer, of the three passers-by, who was the stricken man's neighbour? When the lawyer responds that it was the man who helped him, Jesus responds with "Go and do the same."

This parable is one of the most famous from the New Testament and its influence is such that to be called a Samaritan in Western culture today is to be described as a generous person who is ready to provide aid to people in distress without hesitation. In many English-speaking countries, a Good Samaritan law exists to protect from liability those who choose to aid people who are seriously ill or injured.

It is important to note that Samaritans were despised as apostates by the story's target audience. Thus the parable, as told originally, had a significant theme of non-discrimination and interracial harmony. But as the Samaritan population dwindled to near-extinction, this aspect of the parable became less and less discernible: fewer and fewer people ever met or interacted with Samaritans, or even heard of them in any context other than this one. To address this problem with the unfamiliar analogy, the story is often recast in a more recognizable modern setting where the people are ones in equivalent social groups known to not interact comfortably. For instance, in a telling to a conservative middle class audience, the assaulted man could be a middle class businessman, the unhelpful passers-by could be presumably respectable people like a pastor and the substitute for the Samaritan could be some disliked minority such as a homosexual, atheist, or biker gang member. Thus cast appropriately, the parable regains its socially explosive message to modern listeners: namely, that an individual of a social group they disapprove of can have a superior moral behaviour to individuals of the groups they approve. It also means that not sharing the same faith is no excuse to behave poorly, as there is a universal moral law.

Footnotes

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