I was under the impression that the Samaritan religion was close to Judaism and only believed in one God. In a nutshell, i think the Samaritans say they practice the origional religion of the Isralites as was practiced before the Babylonian(?) exile.
Correct. Samaritans are strict monotheists and followers of the Mosaic Law. The Samaritans consider themselves to be Israelites, genetically speaking they’re pretty much the same as (other) Jews (DNA tests showed that they aren’t different from Jews), and they follow much of the same tenets as Judaism (strict monotheism, Sabbath observance, circumcision, celebration of feasts as set out in the Torah); it’s only their chosen place of worship that really sets them apart.
To put it in a nutshell: the semi-pagan ‘Samarians’ described in 2 Kings and the Samaritans that existed during the time of Jesus and today are actually two different, unrelated groups. It’s just later Jewish polemics - which unfortunately, quite a lot of people (especially Christian commentators) have taken literally - that made the latter group out to be the direct descendants of the former. The former was an
ethnic group, the latter a
sectarian group.
Quoting myself from elsewhere:
[T]he Samaritans were and are monotheistic Yhwh-worshipers and Torah observers for as far as we can tell. In fact, the Jewish-Samaritan feud doesn’t center on whether or not they worship the same God as the Jews (both sides accept that they do), but
where they worship Him - which was considered to be just an important an issue. Granted, some Jewish sources do try to depict the sectarian Samaritans as originating from the foreign settlers of 2 Kings (thus robbing them of any real ethnic/racial Israelite identity), and generations of Christian commentators sort of just accepted the Jewish story - and the myth of the ‘Ten Lost Tribes’ - uncritically.
In reality, however, we really shouldn’t be taking these - biased against Samaritans, obviously - sources at face value with what we know from elsewhere (
including the Old Testament itself). In reality, Samaritanism most likely originated later, in a different context: northerners (comprised of Israelites and by-now assimilated foreigners) building a temple to Yhwh in Gerizim as a religious-political rival to the Temple in Jerusalem perhaps somewhere around the 5th century BC, not so much the Assyrian conquest of Samaria two centuries earlier.
