Biblical Profile: Samaritans

Samaritans

Samaria was a geographic region north of Judea centered around the ancient city of Shechem (Sychar in the New Testament was located at or near the site of Shechem). After Israel was conquered in 722 BC and the cities of Samaria and Shechem were destroyed, this region was repopulated with people from throughout the Assyrian empire (2 Kgs 17:21-41). These inhabitants introduced countless pagan practices, making the religious impurity of the land infamous. In time, the monotheism of Judaism prevailed, but with significant modifications: The Samaritan scriptures were limited to the Pentateuch, and their worship was centered on a new temple on Mount Gerizim above Shechem.

The Samaritans also had a long history of conflict with the Jews, beginning after the Jews’ return from exile (see Ezra 4:1-5; Neh 4:1-23). Alexander the Great and later Greek generals made Shechem an important base, knowing that they could find sympathetic, anti-Jewish allies there. The Jews destroyed Shechem in 128 BC and burned the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim. The Samaritans returned the favor in AD 6–9 when they desecrated the Jerusalem Temple by scattering human bones from a cemetery during one Passover. By Jesus’ day, smoldering tension existed between Judea and Samaria.

Jews in the time of Jesus therefore avoided traveling through this land whose people they perceived as hostile and impure. When Jesus traveled through Samaria and met a Samaritan woman, all of the fraught tensions of this relationship are in view. A first-century reader would barely expect Jesus and the woman to acknowledge each other, much less speak. Yet Jesus reached beyond his ethnic identity to call even a Samaritan woman of ill-repute to believe.