Samaritans

On this page

At a glance

Ancestry and origins

After Samaria fell in 722 BC, Assyria deported the Israelites and imported settlers “from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the people of Israel” (2 Kings 17:24). Lions attacked the newcomers; concluding they did not know “the law of the god of the land,” the king sent back one of the deported Israelite priests to teach them. The result is summarized in a single devastating verse: “So they feared the LORD but also served their own gods” (2 Kings 17:33).

Not every Israelite was deported — the poor of the land remained — so the population was genuinely mixed. Samaritans themselves claim descent from Ephraim and Manasseh and reject the charge of foreign origin. They accept only the five books of Moses, in their own Samaritan Pentateuch, and hold that the true place of worship is Mount Gerizim, the mountain of blessing in Deuteronomy 11:29 and 27:12, rather than Jerusalem.

Where they lived

The hill country of Samaria — Shechem in the pass between Gerizim and Ebal, and the sites of Israel’s earliest covenant ceremonies. Their temple stood on Gerizim from roughly the fourth century BC until the Judean king John Hyrcanus destroyed it in 128 BC, an act that hardened the hostility for good. Jacob’s well, where Jesus met the woman, lies at the foot of that mountain, in the plot Jacob gave to Joseph (John 4:5-6; Genesis 33:19; Joshua 24:32).

Timeline with Israel

Working with Israel

Almost never in the Old Testament, and remarkably in the New. The Gospels contain three Samaritan portraits and all three are favorable: the woman at the well who becomes the first person in John to whom Jesus openly says “I who speak to you am he,” and the first evangelist to a town; the leper who alone came back to give thanks; and the traveler in the parable who bandaged a stranger’s wounds and paid for his care.

That parable is the sharpest use of all. Jesus told it to a lawyer who wanted to define “neighbor” narrowly, and made the hero the one man in the story his audience would have refused to touch. Then He added, “You go, and do likewise.”

Standing against Israel

Their opposition was real. They tried to join the temple project and, refused, spent the next century obstructing it — writing to the Persian court, hiring counsellors, and intimidating the builders (Ezra 4). Sanballat’s campaign against Nehemiah moved from ridicule to armed threat to attempted assassination and forged letters. The Ezra-Nehemiah generation regarded them as a mixed people with a mixed religion, and Sirach and Josephus record the contempt hardening over the following centuries.

By the first century the estrangement was total: Samaritans refused hospitality to Judean pilgrims and occasionally defiled the Jerusalem temple courts; Judeans routed around Samaria to avoid it and used “Samaritan” as an insult — even against Jesus, “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” (John 8:48).

How their story ends

They never disappeared. A Samaritan community still lives at Nablus and on Mount Gerizim, still keeps Passover with slaughtered lambs on the mountain, and still reads its own Pentateuch. In Scripture, their story ends far better than it began: Samaria is named in the Great Commission between Jerusalem and the ends of the earth, and Acts 8 shows the Spirit given to Samaritan believers with the apostles from Jerusalem laying hands on them — the schism of 722 BC healed in a single chapter.

Christ connection

At Jacob’s well the woman raised the old dispute — “our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship” — and Jesus answered that the argument was about to become obsolete: “the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (John 4:20-24). Not Gerizim, not Zion, but a Person. The oldest religious quarrel in Israel’s history was settled by the arrival of the temple in the flesh.

Key passages

• 2 Kings 17:24-41 — The resettlement of Samaria and a divided worship.
• Ezra 4:1-5 — The offer to help rebuild refused, and the opposition that followed.
• Nehemiah 4:1-8; 6:1-14 — Sanballat’s ridicule, plots, and forged letters.
• John 4:1-42 — The woman at the well; worship in spirit and truth.
• Luke 10:25-37 — The good Samaritan.
• Luke 17:11-19 — “Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”
• Acts 1:8; 8:4-25 — Samaria in the commission, and the gospel received there.