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Historical context

The Samaritans

The avoided people

Neighbors despised by the Jews, whom Jesus places at the center of encounters and parables.

Neighbors with the same Law

Between Judea to the south and Galilee to the north lay the hill country of Samaria, with Shechem and Mount Gerizim at its center. There lived a people who called themselves Shamerim, the keepers of the Law, and saw themselves as descendants of the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh: the true Israel, which had never abandoned the place God chose. They worshiped the same God, kept the Sabbath, circumcised their sons and awaited a prophet like Moses. The difference lay in place and history. For many Jews, the Samaritans descended from the peoples Assyria settled in the region after 722 BC, according to 2 Kings 17, and their worship was mixed; Josephus calls them Cutheans. The Samaritans, for their part, said it was the Jews who had strayed. Historians today see a slow separation, built over centuries, between two heirs of ancient Israel.

Two mountains, one dispute

At its heart, the dispute was about geography. Deuteronomy commands that the blessings be pronounced on Mount Gerizim, and the Samaritans held that it was there, not Jerusalem, that God had chosen. Josephus links the building of a temple on Gerizim to the time of Alexander the Great, but excavations led by archaeologist Yitzhak Magen from the 1980s onward point to a sacred precinct already in the mid-fifth century BC, in Nehemiah’s day. Around 111–110 BC (the date is debated), the Jewish ruler John Hyrcanus destroyed that temple and, soon after, the city of Shechem. The wound never healed. Even without a temple, the Samaritans kept going up the mountain to pray and sacrifice. That is why the woman of Sychar, pointing to Gerizim, tells Jesus that her fathers worshiped on that mountain, while the Jews say the place is Jerusalem.

The same Torah, with differences

The Samaritans accepted only the five books of Moses as Scripture, copying them in a script derived from the old Hebrew alphabet. The so-called Samaritan Pentateuch differs from the Hebrew text used by Jews in a few thousand places, most of them spelling and minor details. Some, however, are theological: after the Ten Commandments there is an addition commanding an altar on Mount Gerizim, and where Deuteronomy speaks of the place the Lord will choose, the Samaritan text reads the place the Lord has chosen. The Dead Sea Scrolls showed that some of these textual forms already circulated among Jews before the Samaritans adopted them, which makes this Pentateuch valuable for studying the history of the Bible. Without the books of the Prophets, Samaritan hope centered on the Taheb, the one who returns or restores: a prophet like Moses who would teach all things.

Centuries of wounds

In Jesus’ day the hostility was real and recent. Josephus reports that when Coponius governed Judea (between AD 6 and 9), some Samaritans slipped into the Temple before dawn during Passover and scattered human bones in the porticoes, defiling the place. Around AD 51, Galilean pilgrims crossing Samaria on their way to a festival were attacked near the village of Ginae; reprisals, killings and a legal case followed that reached the emperor Claudius. On the other side, in AD 36 Pilate attacked a Samaritan crowd gathered on Gerizim around a prophet who promised to reveal sacred vessels hidden by Moses; the Samaritans’ complaint led to his removal from office. Even so, the shortest route from Galilee to Jerusalem ran through Samaria, about a three-day journey, according to Josephus. Avoiding the neighbor cost time; crossing his land took courage.

Jesus at the well

This is the backdrop of the encounter in John 4. Jesus, tired, sits by Jacob’s well near Sychar around noon and asks a Samaritan woman for water. She is surprised for three reasons: he is a Jew, she is a Samaritan, and a teacher did not usually talk alone with a woman. The evangelist’s comment that Jews have no dealings with Samaritans may mean, in Greek, that they did not share vessels, for reasons of purity, and Jesus asks to drink precisely from her jar. When the conversation turns to Mount Gerizim, Jesus does not pretend the question is unimportant: salvation is from the Jews. But he announces the hour when the Father will be worshiped in spirit and truth, neither on that mountain nor in Jerusalem. The woman speaks of the Messiah who will declare all things and hears the answer: I am he. Many Samaritans of Sychar believe and call him the Savior of the world.

From insult to mission

The Gospels do not hide the tension. A Samaritan village refuses to receive Jesus because he is heading to Jerusalem, and James and John want to call down fire from heaven; Jesus rebukes them. In one argument, opponents insult him by calling him a Samaritan. Yet it is precisely a Samaritan whom Jesus chooses as the hero of the parable about who one’s neighbor is, told to an expert in the Law. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho drops about a thousand meters (over 3,000 feet) in some 25 to 30 kilometers, through a desert known for robberies; the priest and the Levite pass by, and the Samaritan stops, cares and pays. At the end the expert cannot even bring himself to say the word Samaritan: he answers that the neighbor was the one who showed mercy. In Luke, of ten lepers healed, only one comes back to give thanks, and he was a Samaritan. In Acts, after Jerusalem and Judea, the mission reaches Samaria with Philip, Peter and John, just as Jesus had said.

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