Samaritans? Help me understand

[Cjbhoward]

Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? 18 Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?”

I’ve never got a good answer to this, but weren’t Samaritan’s just as much Israel as Gallileans? Why were they shunned & considered foreigners?

 

[CzechMan]

The reason is 1 Kings 17:24-41, according to which the Samaritans are mostly descendants of gentiles. However, Samaritans themselves don’t believe that, they say that they are Israelites who returned from exile, and have the right Israelite faith.

 

[midori]

Samaritans were pretty much pagan half-Jews, so their Jewish brethren who had remained faithful were scornful towards them.

Remember how Israel was only united for a relatively brief period. After the death of Solomon, the northern tribes refused to accept Rehoboam, his son, as their king. The tribes of Benjamin and Simeon were in the south, and their capital was Jerusalem, and their kingdom was called Judah. The other ten tribes were in the north, and their capital was Samaria, and their kingdom was called Israel.

The Israelite kings were unfaithful, their kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians, and much of the ancestral integrity was lost. The bloodlines were intermingled with the pagans, and much of the Jewish cultural identity was destroyed. Later on, the Egyptians conquered the Assyrians and killed the Judean king, and eventually, the Babylonians took over everything and you had the Babylonian captivity. Then the Persians took over everything, and allowed the Jews to return to their ancestral lands— but by this time, a lot had been lost. The Samaritans offered to help with the rebuilding of Jerusalem, but there was a lot of ill-will, and their offer was rejected.

So eventually, the Samaritans decided to worship God on their own mountain, and built their own temple, rather than sharing Jerusalem. They even had their own Pentateuch. The Jews who worshipped at the Temple perceived the Samaritans to not only be political and cultural traitors, but to be ignorant/superstitious/wrong in their religious practices/beliefs.

The rift still existed in Jesus’ time.

 

[Thom18]

The Samaritans were the descendants of Jews who married gentiles, and they practiced a form of Judaism that couldn’t be reconciled with authentic Judaism (for example, they didn’t offer sacrifice at the Temple in Jerusalem, but had their own temple). They were looked down upon by the Israelites and were to be avoided.

That’s why it’s so important that Jesus commended the “foreigner” who did praise God. Even though the Jews shunned the Samaritans, Jesus healed them and praised them if they were faithful regardless of who they were or what others thought of them.

 

[Cjbhoward]

Remember how Israel was only united for a relatively brief period. After the death of Solomon, the northern tribes refused to accept Rehoboam, his son, as their king.

Galilee was north of Samaria right? Did they reject Rehoboam as well?

 

[midori]

I hadn’t really thought about it much, but that’s a great point. Here are a couple of maps to help visualize.

And here’s a commentary from a Biblical scholar blog.

R. T. France, in his very fine commentary on The Gospel of Matthew (NICNT, 2007), laments:

Modern readers of the NT often know little about the geopolitical world of first-century Palestine. It is commonly assumed that “the Jews” were an undifferentiated community living amicably in the part of the world we now call “the Holy Land” united in their resentment of the political imposition of Roman rule to which all were equally subject.

But, he says, “this is a gross distortion of the historical and cultural reality.”

The northern province of Galilee was decisively distinct—in history, political status, and culture—from the southern province of Judea which contained the holy city of Jerusalem.

Admitting that the following is a drastic oversimplification but hoping that it’s not a complete caricature, Professor France summarizes seven differences:

1. Racially the area of the former Northern Kingdom of Israel had had, ever since the Assyrian conquest in the eighth century B.C., a more mixed population, within which more conservative Jewish areas (like Nazareth and Capernaum) stood in close proximity to largely pagan cities, of which in the first century the new Hellenistic centers of Tiberias and Sepphoris were the chief examples.
2. Geographically Galilee was separated from Judea by the non-Jewish territory of Samaria, and from Perea in the southeast by the Hellenistic settlements of Decapolis.
3. Politically Galilee had been under separate administration from Judea during almost all its history since the tenth century B.C. (apart from a period of “reunification” under the Maccabees), and in the time of Jesus it was under a (supposedly) native Herodian prince, while Judea and Samaria had since A.D. 6 been under the direct rule of a Roman prefect.
4. Economically Galilee offered better agricultural and fishing resources than the more mountainous territory of Judea, making the wealth of some Galileans the envy of their southern neighbors.
5. Culturally Judeans despised their northern neighbors as country cousins, their lack of Jewish sophistication being compounded by their greater openness to Hellenistic influence.
6. Linguistically Galileans spoke a distinctive form of Aramaic whose slovenly consonants (they dropped their aitches!) were the butt of Judean humor.
7. Religiously the Judean opinion was that Galileans were lax in their observance of proper ritual, and the problem was exacerbated by the distance of Galilee from the temple and the theological leadership, which was focused in Jerusalem.

 

[midori]

The result, he says, is that

even an impeccably Jewish Galilean in first-century Jerusalem was not among his own people; he was as much a foreigner as an Irishman in London or a Texan in New York. His accent would immediately mark him out as “not one of us,” and all the communal prejudice of the supposedly superior culture of the capital city would stand against his claim to be heard even as a prophet, let alone as the “Messiah,” a title which, as everyone knew, belonged to Judea (cf. John 7:40-42).

This may at first blush sound like interesting background material that is not especially helpful for reading and interpreting the gospels. But Mark and Matthew have structured their narratives around a geographical framework dividing the north and the south, culminating in the confrontation of this prophet from Galilee and the religious establishment of Jerusalem.

Professor France writes: “To read Matthew in blissful ignorance of first-century Palestinian sociopolitics is to miss his point. This is the story of Jesus of Nazareth .”

 

[twf]

There still are Samaritans. Very few in number, but the ancient ethnoreligious group still exists.

 

[NotThatHarvey]

Herod the Great built the Samaratans a Temple complex that, according to Josephus, was every bit as sumptuous as the one in Jerusalem.

 

[Start]

Yes. Only Benjamin and Judah stayed with him and the rest of the tribes went to Solomon’s prime minister.