The Enmity Between Jews and Samaritans

Rev. Marcel Divine Emeka Okwara, CSsR

Monday, March 9, 2020

Whenever the rift between Jews and Samaritans is referenced or mentioned in church, some people think it is a rift between two different ethnic groups that never had anything in common. But the truth of the matter is that Jews and Samaritans were originally brothers and sisters. Before the division of Israel into two kingdoms, they were one entity. Although the Samaritans were condemned and despised by the Jews, they had as much pure Jewish blood as the Jews who returned from the Babylonian exile. The question then is: How did the enmity between them begin? What led to the intense hatred we see between the Jews and Samaritans that give the Parable of the Good Samaritan such a powerful hard-hitting intent? What led to the deep-seated animosity between them that made a Samaritan woman that Jesus met at the well ask: “How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?”

As we all know, the twelve tribes of Israel were in exile for many centuries in Egypt  before God used Moses to set them free. But shortly after Moses brought them to the Promised Land, trouble started to brew among them. With the death of King Solomon in 975 BC, the kingdom of Israel was divided into two parts— Judah in the south, and Samaria in the North during the reign of Rehoboam. The Northern kings of Samaria rather than promote the worship of Yahweh loved their pagan idols and were constantly at odds with Jerusalem. So, in 724 BC when the Assyrians conquered Samaria, the inhabitants of Judah in the South felt it served them right. They did not offer any support to their brothers and sisters in the North. After conquering the Samaritans, the Assyrians took many of them home as captives, and later sent their own pagan people to occupy the land of Samaria. However, there were some Samaritan remnants, mostly farmers who remained in their homeland. While they continued to practice their Mosaic faith, they were also intermarrying with their pagan settlers, which was against the law. With the passage of time, about hundred years later, Assyrians were also conquered by the Egyptians. Later, Egypt was also conquered by Babylon. In 586 BC, the Southern kingdom—Judah, were also conquered by the Babylonians, and this led to what the Jews refer to as the “Babylonian Exile.” 

Many years after being conquered and taken away, the people of Judah were allowed by the Babylonians to return to their homeland. When they returned home, the volume of the disagreement between them and the Samaritans was raised. The animosity between them worsened. Some authors say that the reason for this heightened enmity was that when the Samaritans offered to help rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, they were rudely refused because their of their pagan impurity. Other authors claim that the Samaritans were actually the ones who refused to assist their brothers and sisters in Judah in the rebuilding of the Temple. 

There were also differences in worship. The Samaritans who refused to partake in idol worshipping developed their own version of worship. They also approved the use of  the Pentateuch, that is the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy as the only books to be used for worship and rejected all other books of the Old Testament. Tension between Samaria and Judah reached its apogee when the Samaritans built their own Temple of worship on Mount Gerizim and then claimed that their own mountain was the dwelling place of Yahweh, and not the Temple in Jerusalem. When this happened, the glimmer of hope of reconciliation between both was lost. It stayed that way until Jesus entered the stage. So, when Jesus later in his ministry presents to his fellow Jews, a Samaritan man as the good person who is able to rise above the bigotry and prejudices of centuries and show mercy and compassion for the injured Jew after the Jew’s own countrymen passed him by, it shocked the Jewish listeners (The Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:29-37). It is this same centuries of hostility and opposition between Judah and Samaria that bewildered the Samaritan woman when Jesus rises above the social and religious restrictions that forbade him a man from talking to a woman alone and also a Jew talking to a Samaritan (John 4:5-42).