Who they were, why Jews and Samaritans could not stand each other, and why Jesus kept making a Samaritan the hero of the story.
The Samaritans in the Bible were a people of the old northern heartland around Shechem and Mount Gerizim. They worshiped the God of Israel, kept the five books of Moses, and believed Gerizim, not Jerusalem, was the place God had chosen.
Judeans said they were foreigners with a borrowed religion. Samaritans said they were the faithful remnant of Joseph's tribes. Jesus walked straight into that feud and kept holding up Samaritans as the example.
The Samaritans are where the Gospels test whether our love has a border.
Ask a Judean and a Samaritan where Samaritans came from and you get two histories. Both deserve a hearing, because the Bible only tells one.
“The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Kuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim and settled them in the towns of Samaria to replace the Israelites.”
2 Kings 17:24 (NIV)After Assyria took the city of Samaria in 722 BC, it deported Israelites and brought in settlers from across its empire. Verse 33 says the newcomers worshiped the Lord and also served their own gods. Josephus later wrote that these people were called Cutheans in Hebrew, after Kuthah, and Samaritans in Greek. That is how Jerusalem remembered them.
The community calls itself the Keepers, keepers of the Torah, and traces its descent to Joseph and to the priestly tribe of Levi. Their chronicles place the break centuries earlier, when the priest Eli left Mount Gerizim and built a rival sanctuary at Shiloh. In their telling, the Jews are the ones who walked away.
Assyria deported the leading families, not every farmer in the hills. Many Israelites stayed on the land. Most historians now think the Samaritan community grew out of that remaining northern population over a long stretch of time, which gives each story a real piece of the truth and neither story all of it.
Keep in mind that 2 Kings was written from Jerusalem's side of a long argument. That does not make it false. It does mean it is a prophetic verdict on the north rather than a neutral census. For the bigger picture, see why the kingdom of Israel split and our study of Israel in the Bible.
Hostility this deep never comes from one event. It stacks up.
After Solomon, the northern tribes break from Rehoboam. Jeroboam sets up shrines at Bethel and Dan so his people will stop going to Jerusalem (1 Kings 12). Worship becomes politics.
Assyria takes the northern capital. 2 Kings 17 reads the fall as judgment on generations of idolatry.
In Ezra 4 northern neighbors offer to help rebuild the Jerusalem temple and are turned away. Sanballat of Samaria fights Nehemiah's wall (Nehemiah 4 and 6). Around then, a temple rises on Mount Gerizim.
The Jewish wisdom book Sirach lists “the foolish people who live in Shechem” among the nations the writer's soul detests (50:25 to 26). The insult has become literature.
The Judean ruler John Hyrcanus destroys the Gerizim temple and its city. Josephus's account points to about 128 BC, but coins found at the site put the destruction around 110 BC, and the archaeologists follow the coins.
By the time Jesus sat down at Jacob's well, both sides had real wounds, and both sides had given them.
Samaritans accept only the five books of Moses as Scripture, copied in their own form of the old Hebrew script. It is close to the Torah in your Bible, with a few differences that matter a great deal.
Some six thousand differences separate the Samaritan Pentateuch from the Masoretic text behind most Old Testaments. Most are small matters of spelling and wording.
Where Deuteronomy in Jewish Bibles speaks of the place God will choose, the Samaritan text reads the place God has chosen. Already chosen, and in their reading, already named.
The Samaritan version of the Ten Commandments includes a command to build an altar on Mount Gerizim.
Jewish Bibles place Joshua's altar on Mount Ebal. The Samaritan text places it on Gerizim, the mountain of blessing in Deuteronomy 11:29.
Scholars still argue about which reading of Deuteronomy 27:4 came first, and that is a genuinely open question. What is not open is what happened next. Each community read the same Torah in a way that confirmed the mountain it already stood on. You can see the Jerusalem side of that story in Mount Moriah in the Bible, and the wider role of the Torah in the Law of Moses.
Two peoples, one Torah, one argument about a mountain. When a text keeps agreeing with whatever side we were already on, that is usually a sign to read it again.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
Jesus did not pretend the differences were nothing. He told the woman at the well that salvation is from the Jews (John 4:22). Then He did something no rabbi was expected to do. He kept putting Samaritans in front of His own people as the ones who got it right.
He asks a Samaritan woman for a drink, and a whole town comes out to meet Him. We walk through it verse by verse in the Samaritan woman at the well.
A Samaritan village refuses Him because He is headed for Jerusalem. James and John want to call down fire. Jesus rebukes them and walks on to another village.
Asked who counts as a neighbor, He tells a story where the priest and the Levite pass by and a Samaritan stops.
Ten men are healed. One turns back, throws himself at Jesus' feet and gives thanks. Luke saves the punch line for the end of the sentence: he was a Samaritan.
“Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?”
Luke 17:18 (NIV)To be honest about the whole record: in Matthew 10:5 to 6 Jesus sends the Twelve first to the lost sheep of Israel and keeps them out of Samaritan towns on that trip. The order mattered, but it had an end point. After the resurrection, Samaria is named out loud.
The parable starts with a lawyer who has just agreed that the Torah says to love your neighbor as yourself. Then, Luke says, “he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” (Luke 10:29). He is asking where the line is. Who is inside, and who can I safely leave outside?
Be kind to strangers. Help people who are hurting. Stop for someone with a flat tire on the Sunrise Highway.
He made the most resented outsider in the region the hero, made two respected religious insiders the failures, and told a Torah scholar to learn from the outsider.
This is our position at Sound of Heaven: the parable of the Good Samaritan is not mainly a lesson in niceness. It is Jesus refusing to let love have a border. He never answers “who is my neighbor.” He asks which of the three was a neighbor, and the lawyer cannot even bring himself to say the word Samaritan. He says “the one who had mercy on him.” Reading this as a pleasant story about roadside help misses the sting, and the sting is the point.
A correction on our own side. Preachers often say the priest and the Levite passed by to avoid ritual impurity from a body. Maybe. Luke never says why, and that explanation is an argument from silence. The parable does not need it.
And it cuts the other way too. This story must never be turned against Jewish people. The priest, the Levite and the lawyer are Jesus' own people, and so is Jesus, as we cover in what ethnicity Jesus was. The target is anyone who wants a list of people they are allowed not to love, church people included.
How does Jesus answer the lawyer's question, “Who is my neighbor?”
Jesus never defines who qualifies. He asks the lawyer which man acted as a neighbor, and then says, “Go and do likewise” (Luke 10:37). The question stops being who deserves my love and becomes whose neighbor I will be.
“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
Acts 1:8 (NIV)Acts 8 is where that map gets walked. After Stephen's death, persecution scatters the believers, and Philip goes down to a city in Samaria and proclaims the Messiah. People are healed, people are set free from what had been tormenting them, and Luke sums it up simply: “So there was great joy in that city” (Acts 8:8).
Then the apostles in Jerusalem send Peter and John. They pray for the new believers, lay hands on them, and they receive the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:14 to 17). Samaritans receive the same Spirit, the same way, with no second-class version. The gifts of the Spirit are still active today, and Acts 8 shows they were never sorted by ethnicity. More on that in when you receive the Holy Spirit.
The same chapter has Simon, a local magician who tries to buy that power with money. Peter tells him flatly to repent. The Spirit is a gift, not a commodity. The whole arc of the book is laid out in our Book of Acts summary.
In Luke 9, John wanted fire from heaven on a Samaritan village. In Acts 8, John is laying hands on Samaritans so they receive the Holy Spirit. That is what Jesus does to a prejudice, given enough time.
The Samaritans never disappeared. They are one of the smallest religious communities in the world. At the start of 2013, their own Israelite Samaritan Information Institute counted 756 people, and their numbers have grown only slowly since, still well under a thousand by their own counts.
Roughly half live in Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim, above Nablus. The other half live in Holon, near Tel Aviv.
Each spring they still sacrifice Passover lambs on Mount Gerizim, following Exodus 12 as they read it.
They read their own Pentateuch in their own script, and a priestly family descended from Levi still leads their worship.
They are not Jews and they are not Christians. They are Israelite Samaritans, and they describe themselves in their own terms.
They are not a sermon illustration. They are a living people who kept their faith through conquest and near extinction, and they deserve to be spoken of the way Jesus spoke to the woman at the well, with respect.
The whole feud came down to one question. Which mountain? Gerizim or Jerusalem? Jesus' answer to the woman at the well was that the question was about to expire: “a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem” (John 4:21).
That time came. The temple on Gerizim had been gone for generations, and the temple in Jerusalem fell in AD 70, at the close of the old covenant age. What remained was a Person. The Kingdom Jesus brought is here now, and it has no ethnic border and no holy mountain. The true worshipers the Father seeks come to Him through His Son, from Shechem, from Jerusalem, from Deer Park.
Almost everyone has a Samaritan, the group your family taught you to distrust. Jesus puts that person in the story as the hero and asks whose neighbor you are going to be.
For related reading, see what it means to worship in spirit and truth and love your enemies. If you are on Long Island, come worship with us.
The Samaritans were Israel's estranged northern cousins, divided from Judea by a mountain, a Torah reading and centuries of wounds, and Jesus crossed that wall on purpose, made them the example, and sent His Spirit to them in Acts 8.
If there is a person or a group you find hard to love, tell us, and someone at Sound of Heaven will pray with you about it.
They were a people centered on Shechem and Mount Gerizim, between Judea and Galilee. They worshiped the God of Israel and kept the five books of Moses, but held that Gerizim, not Jerusalem, was the place God had chosen. 2 Kings 17 describes them as descendants of foreigners Assyria settled in the north. Samaritans describe themselves as the faithful remnant of Joseph's tribes. Each account holds part of the truth.
The hostility built over centuries. The kingdom split after Solomon. Judeans saw the Samaritans as a mixed people with compromised worship. Samaritans were turned away from rebuilding the Jerusalem temple and built their own on Mount Gerizim, which the Judean ruler John Hyrcanus destroyed around 110 BC. By the time of Jesus, both sides carried real grievances and avoided each other.
It is the Samaritan version of the five books of Moses, the only books Samaritans accept as Scripture. Written in their own form of the old Hebrew script, it has around six thousand differences from the Masoretic text, most of them minor. The important ones concern Mount Gerizim, including a command within their Ten Commandments to build an altar there.
A lawyer asks Jesus who counts as his neighbor, looking for the edge of his obligation. Jesus tells a story in which a priest and a Levite pass by a wounded man and a Samaritan, the resented outsider, stops to help. Then He asks which of the three was a neighbor. Love has no border, and the real question is whose neighbor I will be.
Yes. The Israelite Samaritans are a small community, under a thousand people by their own counts, with 756 counted at the start of 2013. They live in Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim and in Holon near Tel Aviv. They keep the Torah in their own script, are led in worship by a priestly family, and still sacrifice Passover lambs on Mount Gerizim each spring.