Samaritanism

Traditional accounts

Samaritanism holds that the summit of Mount Gerizim is the true location of God's Holy Place. Samaritans trace their history as a separate entity to a period soon after the Israelites' entry into the Promised Land. Samaritan historiography traces the schism to High Priest Eli leaving Mount Gerizim, where stood the first Israelite altar in Canaan, and building a competing altar in nearby Shiloh. The dissenting group of Israelites who had followed Eli to Shiloh would be the ones who in later years would head south to settle Jerusalem (the Jews), whereas the Israelites who stayed on Mount Gerizim, in Samaria, would become known as the Samaritans.^[13]

Abu l-Fath, who wrote a major work of Samaritan history in the 14th century, comments on Samaritan origins as follows:^[13]

A terrible civil war broke out between Eli son of Yafni, of the line of Ithamar, and the sons of Pincus (Phinehas), because Eli son of Yafni resolved to usurp the High Priesthood from the descendants of Pincus. He used to offer sacrifices on an altar of stones. He was 50 years old, endowed with wealth and in charge of the treasury of the Children of Israel. ...

He offered a sacrifice on the altar, but without salt, as if he were inattentive. When the Great High Priest Ozzi learned of this, and found the sacrifice was not accepted, he thoroughly disowned him; and it is (even) said that he rebuked him.

Thereupon he and the group that sympathized with him, rose in revolt and at once he and his followers and his beasts set off for Shiloh. Thus Israel split in factions. He sent to their leaders saying to them, Anyone who would like to see wonderful things, let him come to me. Then he assembled a large group around him in Shiloh, and built a Temple for himself there; he constructed a place like the Temple [on Mount Gerizim]. He built an altar, omitting no detail—it all corresponded to the original, piece by piece.

At this time the Children of Israel split into three factions. A loyal faction on Mount Gerizim; a heretical faction that followed false gods; and the faction that followed Eli son of Yafni in Shiloh.

Further, the Samaritan New Chronicle or Adler, named after its editor Elkan Nathan Adler (1861–1946), which is believed to have been composed in the 18th century using earlier chronicles as sources, states:

And the Children of Israel in his days divided into three groups. One did according to the abominations of the Gentiles and served other gods; another followed Eli the son of Yafni, although many of them turned away from him after he had revealed his intentions; and a third remained with the High Priest Uzzi ben Bukki, the chosen place.

Scholarly perspective

Modern genetic studies (2004) suggest that Samaritans' lineages trace back to a common ancestor with Jews in the paternally-inherited Jewish high priesthood (Cohanim) temporally proximate to the period of the Assyrian conquest of the kingdom of Israel, and are probably descendants of the historical Israelite population.^[14][15] The religion of the proto-Samaritans at this time was probably no different than that of their southern counterparts in Judea. This likely remained the case for several centuries after the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel, as Judean cultic reforms instituted by the kings Hezekiah and Josiah experience little opposition extending to the Samaritan people in the north, according to the biblical text.^[16]

Though Samaritans certainly were culturally unique, they were closely intertwined with the Jews to the south. As such, Samaritanism likely did not emerge as a distinct tradition until the Hasmonean and Roman era, by which point Yahwism had coalesced into Second Temple Judaism.^{[17][page range too broad]} The temple on Mount Gerizim, the central place of worship in Samaritanism, was built in the 5th century BCE,^[18] as one of many Yahwistic temples in Samaria. However, the temple precinct experienced a centuries-long period of large-scale construction beginning around the 4th century BCE, which indicates that its status as the pre-eminent place of worship among Samaritans had only just been established. Likewise, theological debates between Jews and Samaritans are attested as early as the 2nd century BCE, indicating that the Samaritan Pentateuch had already taken shape, in some form.^[19]

The Hasmonean king John Hyrcanus destroyed the Mount Gerizim temple and brought Samaria under his control around 120 BCE, which led to a longlasting sense of mutual hostility between the Jews and Samaritans.^[20] From this point, the Samaritans likely sought to consciously distance themselves from their Judean brethren, and both peoples came to see the Samaritan faith as a religion distinct from Judaism.

The relationship between Jews and Samaritans only further deteriorated with time. By the time of Jesus, Samaritans and Jews deeply disparaged one another, as evinced by Jesus' Parable of the Good Samaritan.^[21]

Torah and the holy place

As noted above, what most distinguishes the Samaritans from the Jews is that they do not recognize the sanctity that the latter attribute to the Temple of Jerusalem, since for them Gerizim is the true sacred mountain where God resides, and they accept only the authority of the Pentateuch in its Samaritan version;^[27] therefore they reject that of all the other books of the Tanakh;^{[note 1][28]} which are recognized by the Jews, as well as all later Jewish literature (such as the classical rabbinic works of the Talmud, the Midrash and the Tosefta).^[27]

The differences between the Samaritan Torah and the Masoretic Text that are of greater importance are those that concern the status of Mount Gerizim as the principal place of worship instead of Jerusalem, due to their doctrinal character. Above all, in the Samaritan version of the "Ten Commandments", God gives as the tenth commandment that an altar be built for Him, expressly on Mount Gerizim, so that He may be worshipped there, once the Israelites have settled in Canaan.^[29][28][30] This does not break the correspondence of the other commandments with the Jewish ones; since, for the Samaritans, the Judeo-Christian 1st commandment: "I am the Eternal Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage."; is merely a presentation;^[31] therefore the second commandment: "You shall have no other gods before me. [...]"; is the first commandment of the Samaritan Torah;^[32] which leaves room for the one concerning Gerizim, so that in both versions the same number of commandments is considered. In fact, from the Samaritan perspective, the Jewish rabbis made the presentation into a commandment in order to maintain the name "Ten Commandments" (which is mentioned in Exodus 34:28), after having "corrected" their version by removing the tenth from the two passages of 'the Ten Commandments' that exist in the Tanakh^[32] (Exodus 20:1–17 and Deuteronomy 5:5–21).

And not only that, in accordance with the tenth commandment of the Samaritan Torah in which God chooses Gerizim as a sanctuary, in other passages of the Samaritan Pentateuch it is also mentioned without ambiguity that Mount Gerizim is "the place that God has chosen" for His Temple^[29] in contrast to the Jewish Torah, which refers to "the place that God will choose"^[33] (Deuteronomy 12:1–28 and 16:2).

Relationship with Judaism

Samaritans are not usually recognized as Jews by Orthodox Jews, especially by Jewish rabbis, despite the clear kinship between the two groups. This rejection is based on the accounts in the Books of Kings, according to which the Samaritans are descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Israel deported by Assyria around 720 BC who would have intermingled with the local pagan population and therefore would not be pure descendants of the Israelites.^[51]

In the Babylonian Talmud^[52] it is indicated that, in order to convert to Judaism, the first condition a Samaritan must fulfill is to renounce any belief in the sanctity of Mount Gerizim.^[53] Nevertheless, it also states that Samaritans should be treated as Jews in matters where their practices are the same as those of Jews and as gentiles when they differ.

Alternatively, since the 19th century, many Jews have considered the Samaritans to be a Jewish sect, even to the point of granting them the status of "Samaritan Jews".^[54]

For their part, the Samaritans refer to themselves as "Children of Israel", a term used by all Hebrew sects as a concept identifying the Israelite people as a unified whole. However, this does not mean that they refer to themselves as "Jews", which is a separate concept.

Relationship with Christianity

In the Gospels one can find the Parable of the Good Samaritan, as well as some other allusions indicating that Jews and Samaritans did not associate with one another. However, such stories actually refer to the relationship between Samaritanism and Judaism in the time of Jesus, and not to the true relationship between Samaritanism and Christianity. These relations do not appear to have been entirely tolerant during the first centuries of the Christian era, since the Byzantine Empire (Christian) persecuted the Samaritans, practically annihilating them after the Samaritan revolts of the 5th century and the 6th century.^[55] Aside from this historical relationship, however, the religious influence of either religion upon the other appears weak, if not nonexistent.

Relationship with Islam

The Samaritans are recognized as "People of the Book" by Islam, with a status (more or less applied depending on the period) as dhimmi. Again, mutual influence appears nonexistent. Samaritanism was already a minority religion at the advent of Islam, which easily explains the absence of influence upon the new religion. By contrast, the Samaritans have lived fourteen centuries under Muslim domination,^[56][57][58] which might suggest influence in the opposite direction; however, even so, although Arab-Muslim culture has deeply marked the culture of the Samaritans as a people, the same has not occurred in religion, since Islam has left no significant traces in their theology or religious practices.