Samaritans

The Samaritans are a people who worship the LORD and hold Mount Gerizim, beside Shechem, to be their one holy place. They accept only the five books of Moses, the Torah, as Scripture, not the Prophets and the Writings, and a small community of them survives.

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Samaria resettled

When the king of Assyria captured Samaria in 722 BC, he carried the Israelites away to Assyria (2 Kings 17:5-6). He then brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim and settled them in the towns of Samaria "to replace the Israelites" (2 Kings 17:24). At first these nations in Samaria did not worship the LORD, and He sent lions among them, so the king of Assyria sent back one of the deported priests, who lived at Bethel and taught them how to worship the LORD (2 Kings 17:25-28). Yet each nation went on making its own gods and set them up in the shrines "the people of Samaria had made on the high places" (2 Kings 17:29). "They worshiped the LORD, but they also served their own gods according to the customs of the nations from which they had been carried away," and their children and grandchildren did the same "to this day" (2 Kings 17:33, 41).

Some Israelites were still left in the north: Chronicles records the king's letters to "those of you who remain," and money later collected from "the people of Manasseh and Ephraim, from all the remnant of Israel" (2 Chronicles 30:6; 34:9).

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After the exile

When the returned exiles began the temple, "the enemies of Judah and Benjamin" asked to build with them, saying they had sacrificed to Israel's God since Esarhaddon of Assyria "brought us here" (Ezra 4:1-2). Zerubbabel, Jeshua and the heads of the families refused, and the people of the land set out to discourage the builders (Ezra 4:3-5). A letter from Rehum and Shimshai speaks for the peoples whom Ashurbanipal "deported and settled in the cities of Samaria" (Ezra 4:9-10). In Nehemiah's day Sanballat ridiculed the Jews rebuilding the wall "before his associates and the army of Samaria" (Nehemiah 4:1-2). Nehemiah drove away a grandson of Eliashib the high priest who had become the son-in-law of Sanballat the Horonite (Nehemiah 13:28).

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The temple on Mount Gerizim

Deuteronomy sets the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal (Deuteronomy 11:29). The Samaritans built their temple on the mountain. Yitzhak Magen, who directed the excavations there, dates its first building to the mid-fifth century BC, late in the rule of Sanballat, Nehemiah's rival. Josephus, a Jewish writer of about AD 90, places it later, in the time of Alexander the Great. The Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus I destroyed it. Magen writes that the coins found at the site date the destruction to around 110 BC, not to 128 BC as Josephus recounts. Neither the Hellenistic temple nor its town was rebuilt.

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The Samaritan Pentateuch

In the Samaritan Pentateuch, their own text of the five books, Deuteronomy 27:4 reads Gerizim where the Masoretic Text sets the plastered stones on Mount Ebal. Some scholars have held that Gerizim was the earlier reading and that it was changed to Ebal after the Samaritan schism. Where Deuteronomy 12:5 speaks of the place the LORD "will choose," the Samaritan text reads "has chosen," and the Samaritans take that place to be Mount Gerizim. Their text also adds verses at the end of the Ten Commandments to mark Mount Gerizim as the chosen mountain.

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The community today

The community fell to a little over one hundred people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By January 2003 it had grown to 654, and Reinhard Pummer, of the University of Ottawa, put it at almost eight hundred in December 2015. They live in two centers, Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim and Holon near Tel Aviv. They still offer the Passover sacrifice on Mount Gerizim each year.