The Samaritans: Fewer Than a Thousand People and Two Thousand Years
The Samaritans are an Israelite community of around 900 people who keep their own Torah text, their own priesthood and their own calendar, and who still sacrifice the Passover lamb on Mount Gerizim. This guide covers their scripture, their split from the Jews, their festival year, and how a group that fell to about 140 people survives today in Kiryat Luza and Holon.
Who are the Samaritans and what do they believe?
The Samaritans are an Israelite community of roughly 900 people who hold that they kept the original worship of the God of Israel while the Jews departed from it. They call themselves Shamerim, the Keepers, meaning keepers of the Torah, and in English many members prefer Israelite Samaritans to make the point that they are a branch of Israel rather than a branch of Judaism. Their descent claim is specific: the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, the two sons of Joseph, together with a priestly line of Levi that they hold has never been broken. Their creed has five articles, and Samaritan writers state them in the same order every time. There is one God. Moses is his only prophet. The Torah, the five books, is his only scripture. Mount Gerizim is the place he chose. And there will be a day of vengeance and recompense. Samaritan accounts attach to that last article the expectation of a restorer called the Taheb, though some formulations list the Taheb as a separate item. Everything the Jewish Bible adds after Deuteronomy, the Prophets and the Writings, Samaritans regard as later human composition. The rabbinic oral law collected in the Mishnah and Talmud they reject outright, since a second Torah has no place in a religion built on one.
The community never disappeared, which is the first thing outsiders get wrong. Samaritans have lived beside Mount Gerizim continuously since antiquity, and the priestly genealogy they maintain runs as an unbroken written list, which is why a Samaritan can tell you his generation number. Anyone arriving expecting a vanished people or a lost tribe is in the wrong genre, and Lemuria and Mu: Origins of the Myth and Its New Age Afterlife covers what that genre actually is. The whole religion is also smaller than most readers picture. There are two settlements, one synagogue in each, one high priest, one calendar, one scroll tradition, and roughly 900 people who between them hold the whole thing. Everyday life looks unremarkable. Men in Kiryat Luza work in Nablus and in Israeli towns, children attend local schools, and the ceremonial apparatus that outsiders come to photograph occupies a handful of days a year.
What do Samaritans call themselves?
Samaritans call themselves Shamerim, from the Hebrew root for guarding or keeping, which they gloss as keepers of the Torah. In English their own publications favor Israelite Samaritans. The Hebrew Bible calls them Shomronim, people of Samaria, a geographic label they treat as secondary, and rabbinic literature calls them Kutim, Cutheans, a term carrying the claim that they are foreign settlers rather than Israelites.
Do Samaritans believe in a messiah?
Samaritans expect the Taheb, a name usually translated as the one who returns or the restorer, rather than a Davidic king. The figure is read out of Deuteronomy 18:18, the promise of a prophet like Moses, so the Taheb is a teacher and a restorer of true worship. He is expected to recover the tabernacle vessels held to be hidden on Mount Gerizim and to reopen the era of divine favor.
What do Samaritans do with the rest of the Hebrew Bible?
Samaritans do not treat the Prophets and the Writings as scripture, because their canon closes with Deuteronomy. Isaiah, the Psalms and the books of Kings carry no authority for them, and the events those books narrate are not binding. The community does keep its own chronicles, among them the Tolidah and the fourteenth-century chronicle of Abu al-Fath, but reads them as records rather than revelation.
How did the Samaritans and the Jews become separate peoples?
The Samaritans and the Jews became separate peoples through a long divergence that neither side's traditional account describes accurately. The rabbinic version builds on 2 Kings 17, which reports that Assyria deported the northern kingdom in 722 BCE and resettled the territory with foreigners who took up a partial worship of the God of Israel. From that chapter comes the charge that Samaritans are Cutheans, imported converts rather than Israelites. The Samaritan version reverses the accusation and dates the break centuries earlier, to the priest Eli, who is said to have abandoned the sanctuary on Mount Gerizim and set up a rival shrine at Shiloh, opening the era of divine disfavor the community calls Fanuta. Everything the Jews later built at Jerusalem follows, on this reading, from that first desertion. Each side casts the other as the one who walked away. Historians who have worked the question in recent decades, among them Gary Knoppers, Reinhard Pummer and Magnar Kartveit, describe something less dramatic. Two Yahwistic communities in the Persian period shared a Torah, a priesthood and a language, then drifted apart over which sanctuary was legitimate, and hardened into open hostility only in the Hellenistic centuries.
The documentary evidence sits between the two stories. Nehemiah records a running conflict with Sanballat the Horonite over the rebuilding of Jerusalem, and gives him no title. The Elephantine papyri of 407 BCE name the sons of a Sanballat who was governor of Samaria, and a Sanballat family turns up again in the Wadi Daliyeh papyri and in Josephus, which points to a Samarian governing house rather than a foreign administration. The sacred precinct on Mount Gerizim excavated by Yitzhak Magen was built in the middle of the fifth century BCE, well before Alexander, which contradicts the claim in Josephus that it went up with Macedonian permission. The final rupture came with force. John Hyrcanus, the Hasmonean ruler in Jerusalem, destroyed the Gerizim precinct and the city around it late in the second century BCE. The date usually derived from Josephus is 128 BCE, while the coin evidence from the excavation points to about 111 to 110 BCE. A Samaritan diaspora already existed by then. Two Greek inscriptions found on Delos in 1979 and 1980, published by Philippe Bruneau in 1982, come from men who call themselves Israelites and send their first fruits to the holy precinct Argarizein, which is Har Gerizim run into one Greek word.
Does 2 Kings 17 describe the Samaritans?
2 Kings 17 describes an Assyrian deportation and resettlement, and it never names the community that exists today. The inscriptions of Sargon II claim 27,290 people deported from Samaria, a figure far short of the region's population, so the countryside was not emptied. Most historians now read the chapter as Judean polemic against northern worship rather than as an account of Samaritan origins.
What do the Wadi Daliyeh papyri show?
The Wadi Daliyeh papyri are fourth-century BCE legal documents, mostly slave sales, found in a cave north of Jericho with the remains of people who appear to have fled Samaria and died there around the time of Alexander's campaign. The names in them are heavily Yahwistic, and they attest a governing family using the name Sanballat, which supports an Israelite rather than an imported population in Samaria.
When did the break become final?
The break became final late in the second century BCE, when John Hyrcanus razed the sanctuary on Mount Gerizim and the Hellenistic city beside it. Before that, Judeans and Samarians disagreed about a sanctuary while sharing a scripture. After it, the two groups had a war and a ruined holy place between them, and the sectarian layer in the Samaritan Torah looks like a response to exactly that.
What is the Samaritan Pentateuch and how does it differ from the Jewish Torah?
The Samaritan Pentateuch is the community's text of the five books of Moses, written in the Samaritan script, a direct descendant of the paleo-Hebrew alphabet that Jews abandoned for the square Aramaic letters still in use today. Compared with the Masoretic Text behind Jewish and most Christian Bibles, it carries roughly six thousand differences, a number that sounds enormous until the differences are sorted. The great majority are spelling, grammar and small harmonizations, where a command given in one book is written out again at the point where it was carried out. Around a third of the variants agree with the Greek Septuagint against the Masoretic Text, which told scholars something important once the Dead Sea Scrolls were read: manuscripts from Qumran, including the paleo-Hebrew Exodus scroll and one of the Numbers scrolls, share the same expansionist habits with no Samaritan content in them at all. The distinctively Samaritan layer is thin. It concerns Mount Gerizim, and it can be counted on one hand. That thinness is itself the argument, since it means the Samaritan Torah is an old branch of the text rather than a late rewrite.
The sectarian additions are worth stating exactly. The Samaritan Decalogue treats the opening line, I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, as a prologue rather than as the first commandment, which leaves nine where the Jewish count has ten. The tenth slot is filled by a passage built from Deuteronomy 11:29 to 30 and 27:2 to 8, instructing Israel to build an altar of unhewn stones on Mount Gerizim. The passage exists in the Jewish Torah as well; the Samaritan text moves it into the Ten Commandments in both Exodus and Deuteronomy. A second difference runs through the repeated formula in Deuteronomy for the sanctuary. Where the Masoretic Text has the place the LORD your God will choose, the Samaritan text reads has chosen, in the perfect tense, which settles the question in favor of a site already designated at Sinai. Benyamim Tsedaka, a Samaritan editor from Holon, published an English translation with Sharon Sullivan in 2013, set beside the Jewish text, which lets a reader watch the two columns diverge line by line.
How old is the Samaritan Pentateuch?
The text type of the Samaritan Pentateuch is older than its sectarian layer, and Qumran manuscripts copied before the common era show the same expansionist form without any Gerizim material. European scholarship met the text in 1616, when the traveler Pietro della Valle bought a manuscript in Damascus. Jean Morin printed an edited copy of that manuscript in the Paris Polyglot in the early 1630s, sources giving 1631 and 1632, and it was the first time the Samaritan script appeared in print in Europe. The argument about the text's value has run ever since.
Is the Samaritan text more accurate than the Masoretic Text?
Neither text wins across the board, and text critics stopped framing the question that way after the Dead Sea Scrolls showed several forms of the Torah circulating side by side before the common era. In some readings the Samaritan Pentateuch preserves an older wording. In others it smooths a difficulty the Masoretic Text leaves rough. The Gerizim passages are the clearest case of deliberate sectarian editing in either direction.
What is the Abisha Scroll?
The Abisha Scroll is the community's most venerated Torah manuscript, kept in Nablus and brought out on festivals. Samaritan tradition credits it to Abisha, a great-grandson of Aaron, writing in the thirteenth year after Israel entered Canaan, and a cryptogram running down one column carries that claim. Scholars who have examined the scroll read it as a composite object, with most of the surviving material copied in the medieval period.
Why do Samaritans hold that Mount Gerizim is the place God chose?
Samaritans hold that Mount Gerizim is the chosen place because their Torah says so in words the Jewish Torah does not contain, and because Deuteronomy never names Jerusalem at all. Their tenth commandment orders an altar on Gerizim. Their Deuteronomy 27:4 puts that altar on Gerizim, where the Masoretic Text puts it on Mount Ebal, the facing mountain across the valley. Their Deuteronomy speaks of the place the LORD has chosen rather than will choose, so the choice was made before Israel crossed the Jordan and no later king could relocate it. Around that legal core the community reads a chain of earlier events onto the same ground. Abraham built his first altar in the land at Shechem, directly below the mountain. Jacob bought a field there and set up an altar of his own. Samaritan tradition places the binding of Isaac on Gerizim rather than at Jerusalem. And Deuteronomy 11:29 puts the blessing on Gerizim and the curse on Ebal, which the community treats as the plainest statement of the mountain's standing anywhere in the Torah.
The physical mountain is modest by the standards of famous holy peaks. Gerizim rises to roughly 880 meters above sea level, with published figures varying by a few meters, its northern slope drops into the valley where Nablus sits on the site of Roman Neapolis, and the Samaritan village of Kiryat Luza occupies a shoulder below the summit. Yitzhak Magen directed excavations there from 1982 to 2006. He found a sacred precinct of the mid-fifth century BCE, rebuilt on a far larger scale early in the second century, with a surrounding city, ash and animal bone from sacrifice, and more than four hundred inscriptions in Aramaic and paleo-Hebrew. Several of them use a formula about what a person offered before God in this place. The excavation settles that a large sanctuary operated there for centuries. It does not adjudicate the theological claim, and Magen did not present it as doing so. For how excavated evidence and speculation get separated at an ancient site, see Giza Pyramids: History, Alignments and Spiritual Significance.
What does Deuteronomy 27:4 say in each version?
Deuteronomy 27:4 instructs Israel to set up plastered stones and build an altar after crossing the Jordan, and the two traditions name different mountains: Ebal in the Masoretic Text, Gerizim in the Samaritan Pentateuch. An Old Latin manuscript, the Codex Lugdunensis, also reads Gerizim, and a small Dead Sea Scrolls fragment was read as Gerizim by its editor, though that reading is contested.
Do Samaritans go up the mountain?
Samaritans make three pilgrimages up Mount Gerizim each year, at Unleavened Bread, Shavuot and Sukkot, walking from Kiryat Luza toward the summit before dawn. The route moves through a fixed sequence of stations, each with its own Torah reading, and the priests lead carrying a scroll. The whole community walks, small children and the elderly included. For pilgrimage to a mountain as a devotional form across traditions, see Mount Kailash: History, Alignments and Spiritual Significance.
What sits on the summit now?
The summit holds ruins rather than a working sanctuary. Foundations of the Hellenistic precinct are exposed, and above part of them sit the remains of a large octagonal church dedicated to Mary Theotokos and built under the emperor Zeno in 484, the same year as a Samaritan revolt against him. Sources disagree about which came first. The area is managed as an Israeli national park, with the Samaritan sacrificial terrace and the village lower down the slope.
What happens at the Samaritan Passover sacrifice on Mount Gerizim?
The Samaritan Passover sacrifice takes place at dusk on the fourteenth day of the first month, on a terrace below the summit of Mount Gerizim beside Kiryat Luza, and it is the only place in the world where the Israelite paschal offering described in Exodus 12 is still carried out. The whole community attends, dressed in white. Family groups bring their lambs, male and a year old, and pen them beside stone-lined roasting pits dug into the ground. The high priest and the other priests recite the Exodus account in Samaritan Hebrew from a raised position, and at the appointed word the lambs are slaughtered at once, within seconds of each other. Blood is marked on the foreheads of the children. The carcasses are then scalded, fleeced, salted and inspected, threaded onto long spits, and lowered into the pits, which are sealed over and left for several hours while the fires burn down. The meat comes out near midnight and is eaten standing and quickly, with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, belts fastened and staffs in hand as the text prescribes. Anything left is burned before morning.
The sacrifice is a live obligation rather than a reenactment, and the difference matters to the people carrying it out. Samaritans do it because the Torah commands it at the chosen place and attaches the penalty of being cut off from the people to skipping it, which is why Passover is the single offering they continued after the Gerizim sanctuary was destroyed. Every other sacrifice in the Torah requires the sanctuary itself, so those stopped and never resumed. The audience is the strange part. The terrace fills with Israeli visitors, Palestinian officials from Nablus, journalists and tourists, so a rite belonging to a few hundred people happens in front of a few thousand onlookers behind a barrier. Only Samaritans eat, and the rule that no uncircumcised person may share the meal is enforced. Preparation runs for days beforehand, with ritual immersion, the clearing of leaven from the houses, and inspection of the animals by the priesthood.
How many lambs are sacrificed?
A few dozen lambs are slaughtered, and counts reported by journalists in recent years have run from under thirty to around sixty. The number is set each year by the priesthood according to how many family groups have registered and how many people each group will feed. The Torah's rule is that a household too small for a whole lamb joins with its neighbor, so the count tracks the size and household structure of the community rather than being fixed from year to year.
Can visitors attend the Samaritan Passover?
Visitors can attend, and thousands do. The sacrifice is open to the public, coordinated with local authorities, and viewing space is set aside for guests behind the working area. Photography is permitted and the event is heavily covered by media. What visitors cannot do is eat, since the meal is restricted to members of the community, and most guests arrive hours ahead because the terrace fills early.
Why is Passover the only sacrifice Samaritans still perform?
Passover survived because the Torah ties it to a date and a place rather than to a standing temple, and because omitting it carries the penalty of karet, being cut off from the people. Burnt offerings, sin offerings and the other festival sacrifices all presuppose the sanctuary that Hyrcanus destroyed, so the Samaritan priesthood suspended them and has never restarted them.
How does the Samaritan calendar and festival year work?
The Samaritan calendar is lunisolar and calculated rather than observed. The reckoning belongs to the priesthood, so the community learns its festival dates from the high priest's published calendar rather than from anyone sighting the new moon. Months begin from a computed conjunction, and the year is intercalated to keep Passover in the spring. The rules differ from the rabbinic ones. Samaritan dates commonly land a day away from Jewish dates, and in some years a whole month away. The festival list is short, because it contains only what the Torah names. There are seven: Passover, the seven days of Unleavened Bread, Shavuot, the first day of the seventh month, the Day of Atonement, Sukkot, and the eighth day of assembly. Three of them are pilgrimage festivals and send the community up the mountain. Shavuot always falls on a Sunday, because Samaritans read Leviticus 23:15 literally and count fifty days from the Sabbath falling within Unleavened Bread, a reading they share with the Karaites and, in antiquity, with the Sadducees, against the rabbinic count from the first day of the festival.
The Day of Atonement is the year's heaviest observance. The entire community fasts, young children included, which outsiders often find hard to credit until they see it, and the day is spent almost entirely in the synagogue, where the complete Torah is recited aloud across roughly twenty-four hours. Sukkot inverts what most people expect. The Samaritan sukkah is built inside the house, under the ceiling, as a dense frame hung with citrus, pomegranates, dates and myrtle rather than a hut in a yard. The community explains this partly from its reading of the text and partly from centuries in which a booth standing outdoors invited attack. Sabbath practice is stricter than the rabbinic norm in one specific way. No fire is left burning at all, so nothing is kept warm overnight, and movement outside the house is limited to the walk to the synagogue and back.
Why do Samaritan festival dates differ from Jewish ones?
Samaritan and Jewish dates differ because the two calendars use different intercalation rules and different starting assumptions. The rabbinic calendar applies postponement rules that shift certain festivals off particular weekdays, and the Samaritan calculation does not use them. The two systems also fix the beginning of the month by slightly different methods, so a one-day gap is common and a full month of divergence happens in some years.
Do Samaritans keep Hanukkah or Purim?
Samaritans keep neither Hanukkah nor Purim, and they do not observe Tisha b'Av or the rabbinic fast days. All of those come from books or events outside the Torah, and Purim in particular belongs to a scroll that is not scripture for them. The Hasmonean victory that Hanukkah remembers was also won by the dynasty whose ruler destroyed their sanctuary, which does not help.
What is distinctive about the Samaritan Sabbath?
The Samaritan Sabbath permits no burning fire at all, so food is cooked before sunset and eaten without being kept warm, and no light or heat source is left running through the day. Members stay at home or at the synagogue, with long services morning and afternoon. The strictness follows from reading Exodus 35:3 without the rabbinic distinction between kindling a fire and letting one burn.
Who are the Samaritans of the New Testament, and are they this community?
The Samaritans of the New Testament are the ancestors of the community living on Mount Gerizim today, and the Gospel of John preserves their central claim in their own words. In John 4 a Samaritan woman at Jacob's well tells Jesus that our fathers worshipped on this mountain, while you say that Jerusalem is where people ought to worship. That is the sanctuary dispute exactly, recorded from the Samaritan side in the first century. The parable of the good Samaritan in Luke 10 depends for its force on the audience's contempt for the group, since the point collapses if the traveler who stops is not an outsider. Luke 17 has ten lepers healed and only the Samaritan returning to give thanks. Acts 8 sends Philip into a Samaritan city and reports wide interest there, along with the figure of Simon, who became a fixture of later heresy writing. Josephus, working in the same period, describes a distinct Gerizim-centered group in conflict with Judea, which corroborates the Gospel picture from a hostile but independent direction.
What these texts confirm historically is worth separating from what they were written to argue. They establish that in the first century a distinct community around Shechem worshipped the God of Israel, held Gerizim as the chosen site, expected a coming prophetic figure, and was on bad terms with Judeans. The woman's line in John 4:25, that a Messiah is coming who will tell us all things, matches the Samaritan Taheb, a teacher and restorer rather than a warrior king, and a Judean author would have been unlikely to invent a theologically accurate Samaritan expectation by accident. The English afterlife of the parable has been mixed for the community. The word samaritan came to mean a stranger who helps, a generous drift, and the British helpline charity founded in 1953 took the name from it. The cost is that living Samaritans get taken for a figure of speech. A people with a high priest, a printed calendar and a census of its own is known to most of the world through a story someone else told about it.
Is the theology in John 4 recognizably Samaritan?
The theology in John 4 is recognizably Samaritan on two counts. The woman frames the dispute as mountain against Jerusalem, which is the Samaritan issue and not an internal Jewish one, and she expects a coming figure who will explain everything rather than a Davidic king, which matches the Taheb. Both details are specific enough that the passage reads as informed about actual Samaritan belief.
Does the community mind the phrase good Samaritan?
Reactions inside the community are mixed rather than hostile. The charitable meaning is welcome, and Samaritans have used it themselves when explaining who they are. The complaint is narrower: the phrase is so familiar that people meeting Samaritans assume the word names a virtue rather than a living people with a priesthood, a calendar and a village. The British charity called Samaritans has no connection to them.
What happened to Samaritans after the New Testament period?
Samaritan numbers were substantial through late antiquity, enough to mount serious revolts against Byzantine rule in 484 and again in 529 under a leader called Julianus ben Sabar. Both were crushed, the second with heavy loss of life, and imperial law afterward restricted the community sharply. Decline continued under later rulers, and by the Ottoman centuries Samaritans were a small population concentrated at Nablus.
How many Samaritans are there today and where does the community live?
There are roughly 900 Samaritans today, living in two places: Kiryat Luza, the village on Mount Gerizim above Nablus in the West Bank, and a neighborhood of Holon, just south of Tel Aviv. The split between the two is close to even. That total is a recovery from the community's low point. A count published for 1917 gives 146 people, and a survey made under the high priest Yitzhaq ben Amram put the community at 140 on the first of March 1919, small enough that its survival was an open question and several visitors wrote about it as a religion about to end. Growth since then has come from better medical care, a deliberate widening of the marriage pool, and the establishment of the Holon settlement in the 1950s, which Israel's second president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi pressed for after years of contact with the community. The Samaritans keep a community register that is updated continuously, and population surveys drawn from it are published in A.B. The Samaritan News, a paper founded in Holon in 1969 by Benyamim and Yefet Tsedaka. Members hold Israeli citizenship, and those on the mountain also carry Palestinian Authority documents. The Palestinian Legislative Council reserved a seat for the community in the 1996 election, held by a Samaritan from Nablus, though the seat was not carried into later electoral law.
A population this small carries specific problems, and the community addresses them openly. Generations of marriage inside a few hundred people concentrated several recessive genetic conditions, and since the 1990s Samaritan families have worked with Israeli medical geneticists on screening and premarital counseling, with the high priest's backing. There have also been more men than women for much of the last century, and the response was to permit marriages with women from outside. That has included Jewish Israeli women and, in the 2000s, women from Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, who take on Samaritan practice under instruction and priestly approval before the wedding. The political position is delicate by construction. Kiryat Luza sits in territory administered under one authority while its residents carry the citizenship of another, and the community's standing policy is neutrality: Arabic and Hebrew both spoken, working relations kept in both directions, and no participation in the conflict. Festivals bring the Holon half up the mountain, which keeps the two settlements one community rather than two.
Where is Kiryat Luza?
Kiryat Luza is a village on the northern shoulder of Mount Gerizim, above Nablus in the northern West Bank, reached by a road that climbs out of the city. It holds a synagogue, a small museum, family houses and the ground used for the Passover sacrifice. Most of its families moved up from Nablus itself during the later twentieth century, when living in the city became unsafe for them.
Why did part of the community move to Holon?
Part of the community moved to Holon for work, schooling and safety, in a process that began in the 1930s and produced an established neighborhood with its own synagogue in the 1950s. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who studied the Samaritans for years before becoming Israel's president, pressed for their settlement and support. The two halves marry each other and travel between the two places constantly.
Is the Samaritan community growing?
The community is growing slowly, from the 140 counted in 1919 to around 900 now, roughly a sixfold increase. Growth is limited by the size of the marriage pool, by the emigration of individual families, and by the requirement that children be raised inside a demanding religious system. The community's own surveys record 313 people in 1954, 756 at the start of 2013, and higher figures since.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are Samaritans Jewish?
Samaritans are Israelites but not Jews, and they draw the distinction themselves. The word Jew derives from Judah, the southern kingdom and the tradition that produced rabbinic Judaism. Samaritans trace descent from Ephraim, Manasseh and Levi, keep a different Torah text, a different sanctuary and a different calendar, and reject the oral law entirely. Samaritans in Israel and on Mount Gerizim hold Israeli citizenship, and Israeli records treat them as a distinct group rather than as Jews, while the Orthodox rabbinate does not accept a Samaritan as Jewish without formal conversion. Both communities acknowledge a shared origin without claiming to be the same people.
Can someone convert and become a Samaritan?
Conversion into the Samaritan community happens in practice only through marriage, and almost only for women. Membership runs through patrilineal descent, and there is no general conversion procedure open to an interested outsider. A woman marrying a Samaritan man goes through a period of instruction in Samaritan law and practice, accepts the community's purity rules, and is approved by the high priest before the marriage proceeds. Men from outside effectively cannot join, since a Samaritan woman who marries out normally leaves the community rather than bringing a husband into it.
What language do Samaritans speak?
Samaritans speak Palestinian Arabic in Kiryat Luza and Modern Hebrew in Holon, and most adults use both fluently, which is one reason the community moves between Israeli and Palestinian society so easily. Their liturgical language is Samaritan Hebrew, read from scrolls and books written in the Samaritan script, an old form of the alphabet with its own pronunciation tradition that sounds audibly different from Jewish Hebrew. Samaritan Aramaic survives in medieval liturgical poetry and legal texts, but it has not been a spoken language for many centuries.
What happened to the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim?
The sanctuary on Mount Gerizim was destroyed by John Hyrcanus of Jerusalem late in the second century BCE and never rebuilt. Excavation directed by Yitzhak Magen dated its first construction to the middle of the fifth century BCE, with a large Hellenistic expansion and a city around it. The date usually read out of Josephus is 128 BCE, while coins from the site point to about 111 to 110 BCE. In 484 the emperor Zeno had a church built over part of the site. Samaritans have offered the Passover sacrifice at an altar on the mountain, without a temple, ever since.
Do Samaritans still have a high priest?
Samaritans still have a high priest, and the office has never lapsed. It passes to the eldest qualified male of the priestly family, and the community maintains a written list of holders that it traces back to Aaron. The line descended from Aaron's son Eleazar died out in 1624, after which the office passed to another priestly family, which Samaritan tradition traces to Aaron's other son Ithamar and which holds it today. The present high priest, Aabed El ben Asher ben Matzliach, took office in 2013 and is counted by the community as the 133rd generation. The high priest issues the calendar, leads the Passover sacrifice and the pilgrimages, keeps custody of the Abisha Scroll, and represents the community to outside authorities.
Do Samaritans marry outside the community?
Most Samaritans marry within the community, and endogamy has been the rule for centuries. Two pressures have loosened it. A long imbalance of more men than women left some men unable to find a wife inside, and the genetic screening introduced in the 1990s ruled out some matches between close relatives. The response was to permit marriage to women from outside who commit to Samaritan practice, including Jewish Israeli women and, since the 2000s, women from Eastern Europe. Samaritan women who marry outsiders generally leave the community.
Do Samaritans serve in the Israeli military?
Samaritans in Holon hold Israeli citizenship, are subject to conscription like other citizens, and men from that half of the community do serve. Those living in Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim are residents of the West Bank, and although they also hold Israeli citizenship they are generally not called up. The community treats the asymmetry as part of a wider policy of neutrality: it keeps working relations with both Israeli and Palestinian authorities and avoids taking a public side in the conflict.
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