When Jesus
reached the famous well at Shechem and asked a Samaritan woman for a drink, she
replied full of surprise: "Jews do
not associate with Samaritans” (John 4:9).
In the ancient world, relations between Jews and
Samaritans were indeed strained. Feelings of ill will probably went back
before the separation of the northern and southern Jewish kingdoms. Even then
there was a lack of unity between the tribes of Jacob.
Josephus reports
a number of unpleasant events: Samaritans harass Jewish pilgrims traveling
through Samaria between Galilee and Judea, Samaritans scatter human bones
in the Jerusalem sanctuary, and Jews in turn burn down Samaritan villages.
The Samaritans, for their part, did
not accept any scriptural texts beyond the Pentateuch.
After the
separation of Judah and Israel in the ninth century, King Omri of the Northern
Kingdom bought the hill of Samaria from Shemer (1 Kings 16:24). He built there
the city of Samaria which became his capital.
The story of both Israel’s and
Samaria’s failures in keeping to the way of Yahweh is partly told in Chapter 17
of the Second Book of Kings.
There, too, the sacred author tells how the king of As-syria sent a priest
from among the exiles to teach the Samaritans how to worship God after an
attack by lions was attributed to their failure to worship the God of the land.
Second Kings recounts how worship of Yahweh was mixed with the worship of
strange gods.
Nehemiah tells
us (Nehemiah 13:28-29) that a grandson of the high priest, Eliashib, had
married a daughter of Sanballat, the governor of the province of Samaria.
For defiling
the priesthood by marrying a non-Jewish woman, Nehemiah drove Eliashib from
Jerusalem–though Sanballat was a worshiper of Yahweh.
According to the historian Josephus, Sanballat then had
a temple built on Mount Garizim in which his son-in-law Eliashib could
function. Apparently
this is when the full break between Jews and Samaritans took place.
According to John McKenzie in his
Dictionary of the Bible, the Samaritans later allied themselves with the Seleucids in the
Maccabean wars and in 108 B.C. the Jews destroyed the Samaritan temple and
ravaged the territory. Around the time
of Jesus’ birth, a band of Samaritans profaned the Temple in Jerusalem by
scattering the bones of dead people in the sanctuary.
It is with those centuries of
opposition and incidents behind their peoples that we can understand the
surprise of the Samaritan woman (John 4:9) when Jesus rises above the social and religious restrictions not just of
a man talking to a woman, but also of a Jew talking to a Samaritan.
The
Samaritans are adherents of Samaritanism, a religion closely related
to Judaism. Samaritans
believe that their worship, which is based on the Samaritan Pentateuch, is the
true religion of the ancient Israelites from before
the Babylonian captivity, preserved by those who remained in the Land
of Israel, as opposed to Judaism, which they see as a related but altered and
amended religion, brought back by those returning from the Babylonian
Captivity.
The
Samaritans believe that Mount Gerizim was the original Holy Place of
Israel from the time that Joshua conquered Canaan.
The
major issue between Jews and Samaritans has always been the location of the
Chosen Place to worship God: The Temple Mount of Moriah in Jerusalem
according to Judaism or Mount Gerizim according to Samaritanism.