Samaria

Samaria is the hill country north of Judea, the heartland of the northern kingdom of Israel and the homeland of the Samaritans, and the whole of its religious significance turns on a single disagreement.

The Samaritans hold that the place God chose for worship is Mount Gerizim, above Nablus, and not Jerusalem. Their Torah, which differs from the Jewish text in a number of places, makes that explicit, and they read Jewish scripture and Jewish institutions as a later departure from the original arrangement rather than the reverse. They accept only the five books of the Torah, not the prophets or the writings, and they trace their priesthood to Aaron through a line they hold to be unbroken.

Jewish sources tell the story the other way, as the descent of a population settled in the north by Assyria after 722 BCE, worshipping the God of Israel alongside other gods. Modern scholarship generally treats the Samaritans as a genuinely Israelite community that separated from the Judean one gradually, over centuries, rather than as either a survival or an import, with the destruction of the Gerizim temple by a Hasmonean ruler in the second century BCE as a decisive moment.

Reinhard Pummer's survey of the evidence sets out how much of the traditional Jewish and Christian account of Samaritan origins reflects polemic rather than history, and how the group's own claims have fared under examination.

The Samaritans are among the smallest religious communities in the world with a continuous history, and they are the only one that still performs the Passover sacrifice as the Torah describes it.

Numbers fell to roughly a hundred and fifty people in the early twentieth century and have since recovered to something over eight hundred, living in two communities: one on Mount Gerizim itself and one at Holon, near Tel Aviv. The Gerizim community holds Palestinian identity documents and the Holon community Israeli ones, so the group straddles a political line that has cut through many other things.

Each spring the whole community assembles on the mountain and slaughters sheep at sunset on the fourteenth of the first month, roasts them in pits, and eats them in haste that night with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Jewish practice has substituted a retold seder for the sacrifice since the temple's destruction, and Samaritan practice has not, because Gerizim is where their sanctuary stood and, in their reading, still is.

The community's size creates practical problems that its priesthood has had to address directly, including a shortage of marriage partners, and it has admitted converts under specific conditions in recent decades. Its own institute publishes population figures annually. A group this small, holding a complete alternative version of the same tradition, is unusually valuable for understanding what the tradition looked like before it settled.