SAMARITANS (Heb. Sōmērōnīm; Gr. Οἱ Σαμαρεῖται). - At first this name designated the inhabitants of the city and kingdom of the same name of Samaria (v.), whereas after the deportation to Assyria it designated the new population of the semi-desert territory of Samaria. The new arrivals, coming from Babylonia, from Syria and predominantly from Cutha (Tell Ibrahim, ca. 20 km. northeast of Babylon), whence the derogatory name of Cuthites also given to the Samaritans (Flavius Josephus, Antiq. Iud., IX, 14, 3; XIII, 9, 1), while preserving their customs and their beliefs, intermingled with the few Israelites left in the territory, thus giving origin to the hybrid race of the Samaritans.
Meanwhile, in the uncultivated countryside and in the country, largely desert, the wild beasts and the lions, which had never completely disappeared from the Ephraimite thickets, increased in number (I Kings 13, 24; 20, 36); the immigrants attributed the consequences to the vengeance of the local god, no longer venerated in the national cult. The Assyrian authorities sent back from exile one of the Jewish priests, so that he might "teach the immigrants the cult of the god of the region" (II Kings 17, 27); the regional cult thus took on a syncretistic character with a certain predominance of the religion of Israel over idolatrous practices (ibid. 17, 40-41). A blow to this religious deviation was struck by King Josiah, who, crossing the country, destroyed the idolatrous images everywhere (II Chron. 36, 6, 7), and even more by the teaching of the Jewish priests; later, in fact, the Samaritans took care to make pilgrimage, for the feasts, to the temple of Jerusalem (Jer. 41, 4).
After the return of the Jews from exile, the Samaritans were not permitted to collaborate in the restoration of the Temple (Ezra 4, 2); a refusal that further sharpened the mutual aversion (Neh. 4, 1-23). The governor Sanballat, a Horonite, sought to reconcile the two parties by marrying his daughter to a descendant of the high priest Eliashib; but Nehemiah exiled the governor's son-in-law (ibid. 13, 28), who according to the Samaritan chronicles became the high priest of the Samaritan national cult and the initiator of the schism. Sanballat, indignant at the treatment inflicted on his son-in-law by the rigorist authorities of Jerusalem, proclaimed the independence of the Samaritans, building for them a sumptuous temple, likewise Yahwistic, on Mount Gerizim (v.) which dominates the city of Shechem (v.), and called to officiate in it the members of the family of Aaron, which had also been expelled from Jerusalem together with Manasseh.
Criticism, however, tends to assign to the temple of Gerizim a Hellenistic origin. It admits for the schism a slow evolution: the initiative of the construction would have come from the refugee priests of Jerusalem, together with Manasseh, because they were impatient with the rigor established by Nehemiah; having gathered among the Samaritans, they would there have obtained, from the governors of the Seleucid Kingdom, permission to build the rival temple which was destroyed by John Hyrcanus (Flavius Josephus, Antiq. Iud., XIII, 9, 1). This exacerbated the rivalry between the two races. The Samaritans suffered persecutions neither from Pompey the Great nor from Herod; but by order of Pontius Pilate (v.) many of them were killed on the occasion of an assembly summoned by an impostor on Mount Gerizim in 36 A.D. and forbidden by Pilate (ibid., XVIII, 4, 1, 2). The Samaritans took part in the general rebellion of Palestine against the Romans; Cerealis, commander of the V Macedonian legion, besieged them on Mount Gerizim and would have killed more than 11,000 of them on July 15, 67 (Fl. Jos., Bell. Iud., XXXVII, 23).
They regained power and spread everywhere throughout Palestine and also in Transjordan; their hatred against the Jews extended to the Christians. Several times they destroyed churches and killed the faithful, but by the emperors Zeno and Justinian (6th cent.) they were punished so severely that they never rose again. In 1167 the Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela found that the Cuthites were a small minority scattered among Nablus, Ascalon, Caesarea and Damascus (Nablus counted only one hundred families).
There exist today 260 families of Samaritans gathered around their new synagogue at the foot of Gerizim. About 85 of them are scattered between Tel Aviv and Haifa.
Their doctrines are little known; the basis of their faith is the Mosaic law contained in the Samaritan Pentateuch (v.), the only collection of the Sacred Books accepted by them; they preserve its text, altered and interpolated, with practical adaptations, by a further legislation, for a long time transmitted orally and then fixed in writing. Thus arose the Tâbah (10th cent. A.D.), a compilation of norms concerning the priesthood and sacrifices, the Hâlih ("way" along the paths of the Law), etc. The Samaritans still await the Taheb, a kind of reformer Messiah on the model of Moses, who will re-establish for 1000 years after his death a kingdom of glory. They exclude any sensible representation and any anthropomorphism in speaking of God. They faithfully observe the Sabbath and circumcision. They still speak a dialect that seems to derive from the Palestinian Innamaic and use an archaic alphabet derived from the paleo-Hebrew one.
Of the power and diffusion of the Samaritans, before the revolt of 549, the remains of their synagogues found in Palestine and Transjordan, with inscriptions, bear witness; in the excavations of Mount Nebo 8 fragments were found. In 1948 in the village of Salbit, 3 km. east of Qubâb on the Jerusalem-Ramleh road, a synagogue was discovered, facing Mount Gerizim, with an inscription of Ex. 15, 18.
Bibliography4 works
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