The Samaritans: Fewer Than a Thousand People and Two Thousand Years

Who are the Samaritans and what do they believe?

Imagine you grew up hearing the parable of the good Samaritan, so the word just means a kind stranger to you. Then a video pops up: people in white on a mountain at dusk, lambs, fire, prayers in a language you cannot place. The caption says these are Samaritans, and they are still here.

The short answer: 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 are not a lost tribe or a legend. They are a living people with a high priest, a calendar and a village.

They call themselves Shamerim, the Keepers, meaning keepers of the Torah, and in English many prefer Israelite Samaritans: a branch of Israel, not of Judaism. They claim descent from Ephraim and Manasseh, the two sons of Joseph, plus a priestly line of Levi they hold has never been broken.

Their creed has five articles, always stated in this order. 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, to which Samaritan accounts attach the expectation of a restorer called the Taheb, though some list the Taheb separately.

The Prophets and the Writings they regard as later human composition. The rabbinic oral law of the Mishnah and Talmud they reject outright, since a second Torah has no place in a religion built on one.

If you assumed they vanished long ago, you are not alone; outsiders usually do. Samaritans have lived beside Mount Gerizim continuously since antiquity, and their priestly genealogy is an unbroken written list, so a Samaritan can tell you his generation number. Lost-tribe stories are another genre, covered in Lemuria and Mu: Origins of the Myth and Its New Age Afterlife.

Picture the whole religion fitting inside a large school: two settlements, one synagogue in each, one high priest, one calendar, one scroll tradition, and roughly 900 people holding all of it between them.

Daily life looks ordinary. Men in Kiryat Luza work in Nablus and in Israeli towns, children go to local schools, and the ceremonies outsiders come to photograph fill only a handful of days a year.

How did the Samaritans and the Jews become separate peoples?

If you have ever been in a family feud where both sides swear the other one left, you already understand this story.

The rabbinic version builds on 2 Kings 17: Assyria deported the northern kingdom in 722 BCE and resettled it with foreigners who took up a partial worship of the God of Israel. From this comes the charge that Samaritans are Cutheans, imported converts.

The Samaritan version reverses it and dates the break centuries earlier, to the priest Eli, who is said to have abandoned the sanctuary on Mount Gerizim for a rival shrine at Shiloh. That opened the era of divine disfavor the community calls Fanuta, and on this reading everything later built at Jerusalem follows from that first desertion.

Historians of recent decades, among them Gary Knoppers, Reinhard Pummer and Magnar Kartveit, describe something quieter and more human. Two Yahwistic communities in the Persian period shared a Torah, a priesthood and a language, drifted apart over which sanctuary was legitimate, and hardened into open hostility only in the Hellenistic centuries. Neither traditional account gets it quite right.

The documents sit between the two stories. Nehemiah records a running conflict with Sanballat the Horonite over rebuilding 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 appears again in the Wadi Daliyeh papyri and in Josephus. That points to a Samarian governing house, not a foreign administration.

The Gerizim precinct excavated by Yitzhak Magen was built in the middle of the fifth century BCE, well before Alexander, contradicting Josephus's claim that it went up with Macedonian permission.

The final rupture came with force. John Hyrcanus, the Hasmonean ruler in Jerusalem, destroyed the precinct and its city late in the second century BCE: 128 BCE by the date usually derived from Josephus, about 111 to 110 BCE by the excavation's coins.

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 first fruits to the holy precinct Argarizein, which is Har Gerizim run into one Greek word.

What is the Samaritan Pentateuch and how does it differ from the Jewish Torah?

Picture two copies of one family recipe passed down different branches.

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 used today.

Against the Masoretic Text behind Jewish and most Christian Bibles, it has roughly six thousand differences, which sounds enormous until you sort them. Most are spelling, grammar and small harmonizations, where a command given in one book is written out again where it was carried out.

Around a third agree with the Greek Septuagint against the Masoretic Text. Then the Dead Sea Scrolls showed Qumran manuscripts, including the paleo-Hebrew Exodus scroll and one of the Numbers scrolls, sharing the same expansionist habits with no Samaritan content at all.

The truly Samaritan layer is thin. It concerns Mount Gerizim and can be counted on one hand. That thinness is the argument: the Samaritan Torah is an old branch of the text, not a late rewrite.

Here are the sectarian additions 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, not the first commandment, leaving 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. That passage exists in the Jewish Torah too; the Samaritan text moves it into the Ten Commandments in both Exodus and Deuteronomy.

A second difference runs through Deuteronomy's repeated formula 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, settling the question in favor of a site already designated at Sinai.

If you want to see it for yourself, Benyamim Tsedaka, a Samaritan editor from Holon, published an English translation with Sharon Sullivan in 2013, set beside the Jewish text, so you can watch the two columns diverge line by line.

Why do Samaritans hold that Mount Gerizim is the place God chose?

Think of the place that feels most like home to you. For Samaritans it is one mountain.

They hold that Gerizim is the chosen place because their Torah says so in words the Jewish Torah lacks, 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 has Mount Ebal, the facing mountain across the valley. Their Deuteronomy speaks of the place the LORD has chosen, not will choose, so the choice was made before Israel crossed the Jordan and no later king could move it.

Around that legal core they read 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. Samaritan tradition places the binding of Isaac on Gerizim, not 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 in the whole Torah.

The mountain itself is modest. 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 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 far larger 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 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 judge 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 happens at the Samaritan Passover sacrifice on Mount Gerizim?

This is what the video from the opening showed: the only place in the world where the Israelite paschal offering of Exodus 12 is still carried out.

It happens at dusk on the fourteenth day of the first month, on a terrace below the summit beside Kiryat Luza. 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. At the appointed word, the lambs are slaughtered within seconds of each other, and blood is marked on the children's foreheads.

The carcasses are scalded, fleeced, salted and inspected, threaded onto long spits and lowered into the pits, which are sealed for several hours while the fires burn down. Near midnight the meat comes out 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.

This is a live obligation, not a reenactment. The Torah ties it to a date and the chosen place, not a standing temple, and attaches the penalty of karet, being cut off from the people, to skipping it. So Passover is the one offering Samaritans continued after Hyrcanus destroyed the sanctuary. Burnt offerings, sin offerings and the other festival sacrifices all presuppose the sanctuary itself, so the priesthood suspended them and has never restarted them.

The audience is the strange part. Israeli visitors, Palestinian officials from Nablus, journalists and tourists fill the terrace, so a rite belonging to a few hundred people happens before a few thousand onlookers behind a barrier. Imagine your family's most sacred night watched by a crowd with cameras.

Only Samaritans eat, and the rule that no uncircumcised person may share the meal is enforced. Preparation runs for days: ritual immersion, clearing leaven from the houses, and inspection of the animals by the priesthood.

How does the Samaritan calendar and festival year work?

If you know the Jewish calendar, you may notice Samaritan dates landing on different days. Here is why.

The Samaritan calendar is lunisolar and calculated, not observed. The reckoning belongs to the priesthood, so the community learns its dates from the high priest's published calendar, not from anyone sighting the new moon. Months begin from a computed conjunction, and the year is intercalated to keep Passover in spring. The rules differ from the rabbinic ones, so dates commonly fall a day apart, and some years a whole month.

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 are pilgrimage festivals that send the community up the mountain.

Shavuot always falls on a Sunday. Samaritans read Leviticus 23:15 literally and count fifty days from the Sabbath within Unleavened Bread, a reading shared with the Karaites and, in antiquity, the Sadducees, against the rabbinic count from the festival's first day.

The Day of Atonement is the heaviest observance. The entire community fasts, young children included, which outsiders find hard to believe until they see it. The day is spent almost entirely in the synagogue, where the complete Torah is recited aloud across roughly twenty-four hours.

Sukkot turns expectations upside down. The Samaritan sukkah is built inside the house, under the ceiling, as a dense frame hung with citrus, pomegranates, dates and myrtle, not a hut in the yard. The community explains this partly from its reading of the text and partly from centuries when an outdoor booth invited attack. Picture a ceiling of fruit glowing in the lamplight.

The Sabbath 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.

Who are the Samaritans of the New Testament, and are they this community?

If the good Samaritan is where you first met this name, here is the connection you have been waiting for. Yes: the Samaritans of the New Testament are the ancestors of the community on Mount Gerizim today.

The Gospel of John even 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 on the audience's contempt for the group; 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 Simon, who became a fixture of later heresy writing.

Josephus, writing in the same period, describes a distinct Gerizim-centered group in conflict with Judea, confirming the Gospel picture from a hostile but independent direction.

Separate what these texts confirm 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, not a warrior king. A Judean author was unlikely to invent a theologically accurate Samaritan expectation by accident.

The English afterlife of the parable has been mixed for them. Samaritan came to mean a stranger who helps, a generous drift, and the British helpline charity founded in 1953 took its name from it. The cost is that living Samaritans get taken for a figure of speech. How would it feel if the world knew your people mainly through a story someone else told about you? A people with a high priest, a printed calendar and its own census lives with that every day.

How many Samaritans are there today and where does the community live?

Here is the part that may move you most: this is a people that nearly ended, and did not.

There are roughly 900 Samaritans today, split almost evenly between Kiryat Luza, the village on Mount Gerizim above Nablus in the West Bank, and a neighborhood of Holon, just south of Tel Aviv.

That is a recovery. A count published for 1917 gives 146 people, and a survey under the high priest Yitzhaq ben Amram counted 140 on the first of March 1919, so few that several visitors wrote about a religion about to end. Like a candle burning very low and catching again, the community grew back through better medical care, a deliberate widening of the marriage pool, and Holon. Families began moving there in the 1930s for work, schooling and safety, and by the 1950s it was an established neighborhood with its own synagogue, a settlement Israel's second president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who had studied the Samaritans for years, pressed for and supported.

The Samaritans keep a continuously updated register, and population surveys drawn from it are published in A.B. The Samaritan News, 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 faces specific problems, and the community talks about them openly. Generations of marriage within a few hundred people concentrated several recessive genetic conditions. Since the 1990s, Samaritan families have worked with Israeli medical geneticists on screening and premarital counseling, with the high priest's backing.

For much of the last century there were also more men than women. The response was to permit marriages with outside women, including 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 design. Kiryat Luza sits in territory run by one authority while its residents carry another's citizenship. The standing policy is neutrality: Arabic and Hebrew both spoken, working relations kept in both directions, no part in the conflict. The two halves marry each other and travel back and forth constantly, and festivals bring the Holon half up the mountain, keeping them one community.

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