Samaritans

Overview

The Samaritans are an ancient Israelite religious community whose sacred scripture consists of the five books of Moses. Their religious life centers on Mount Gerizim, which rises about 880 meters above sea level beside the biblical city of Shechem, overlooking modern Nablus in Judea and Samaria. Samaritans regard Gerizim as the place God chose for worship, turn toward it in prayer and maintain an annual Passover lamb sacrifice there. Their attachment to the mountain distinguishes Samaritan worship from Jewish worship, which identifies Jerusalem as the site of the Temple. The difference concerns sacred geography, scriptural interpretation and the community’s account of its own ancestry. Both traditions preserve connections to ancient Israel, but they give different explanations of how the Samaritan community emerged and where its central sanctuary belongs.

Mount Gerizim is more than the setting of an ancient sanctuary. It remains a place of communal prayer, pilgrimage and ritual observance. The Samaritan Pentateuch gives the mountain a place in commandments about worship, while the community’s oral reading tradition preserves the pronunciation of its Hebrew text. Samaritan Aramaic, once a spoken language of the community, survives as another part of its literary and linguistic inheritance. These traditions continued after the destruction of the Samaritan temple, through changes of imperial rule and into the modern era. Today the community has centers on Mount Gerizim and in Holon near Tel Aviv. Its continued existence is especially notable because only about 150 Samaritans remained at the beginning of the twentieth century; the population has since recovered from that low.

Background

The Assyrian Empire conquered the kingdom of Israel in 722 BC and exiled much of its population. Samaritan and Jewish traditions differ over what followed. Samaritan tradition describes the community as descended from ancient Israelites who remained in the land and continued worship centered on Mount Gerizim. The Jewish account connects Samaritan origins to populations brought into Samaria after the Assyrian conquest. These are distinct accounts of ancestry, not interchangeable versions of a single tradition. The religious separation also concerns the chosen place of worship: Samaritans identify Gerizim as Israel’s sanctuary, while Jews identify Jerusalem as the site of the Temple. Understanding those differences is essential to understanding why the same five books of Moses occupy central places in both communities yet are read within different religious traditions.

Mount Gerizim stands south of Shechem, with Mount Ebal to the north. Deuteronomy associates Gerizim with blessing and Ebal with curse. The mountains and the valley between them form the setting for biblical passages that became especially important in Samaritan worship. Samaritans call Gerizim the “mountain of blessing” and regard it as their holiest place. The fourth article of the Samaritan creed proclaims its holiness. Samaritan tradition also gives the mountain thirteen names and places numerous biblical patriarchal events and sites there, including Moriah and Beth-El. It regards Gerizim as the chosen mountain from the creation of the world and holds that it was not submerged during the Flood. Samaritan writer Markah devoted a chapter of his Memar to praising the mountain, reflecting its place in religious teaching as well as ritual life.

The location of the biblical mountains acquired a separate history of interpretation. The longstanding identification places Gerizim and Ebal beside Shechem. A later rabbinic tradition attributed to R. Eliezer identified them instead with two mounds near Gilgal. Early Christian Church fathers adopted that rabbinic identification. The Madaba Map records both traditions: it places Tur Garizin beside Shechem and Ebal-Gerizin beside Jericho. The map thus preserves evidence of competing identifications without making the two locations identical. The distinction matters because Gerizim beside Shechem is the mountain on which Samaritan worship developed and continues. References to mounds near Gilgal belong to a later interpretation of the biblical geography, rather than to the site of the Samaritan sanctuary and its continuing ceremonies.

Samaritan religious scripture is the Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Its text differs at consequential points from the Masoretic text used in Jewish tradition. In Deuteronomy 27:4–5, the Samaritan text names Mount Gerizim as the place for setting up stones and building an altar, where the Masoretic text names Mount Ebal. The Samaritan text also adds an instruction concerning Mount Gerizim at the end of the Ten Commandments in both Exodus and Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy 12:14, Samaritans read “has chosen” where the Masoretic text reads “will choose.” Together, these readings present Gerizim as an already chosen sanctuary. They show why textual differences cannot be treated merely as variations in spelling: particular readings bear directly on Samaritan sacred geography.

The Samaritan Pentateuch is also a living text read aloud within the community. Its traditional pronunciation does not depend on written vowel marks. Readers supply pronunciation through an oral tradition transmitted from one generation to the next. That practice links the written books to instruction, worship and communal memory. The Samaritan script preserves an ancient form of Hebrew writing, while the spoken reading preserves features that differ from other traditional pronunciations of Hebrew. Written text and oral transmission therefore serve related purposes without being identical. The letters preserve a scripture; the inherited reading tells community members how to voice it. This relationship helps explain how a small population maintained a recognizable textual tradition over centuries of political change and linguistic transition.

Course of the war

There was no single Samaritan war. Armed campaigns and uprisings nevertheless affected the community and its sanctuary across several periods. Samaritans erected a temple on Mount Gerizim around the time of Nehemiah, establishing a sanctuary that became central to the religious divide with Jerusalem. In 111 BC, Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus conquered the area around the mountain and destroyed the Samaritan temple. Destruction of the building did not end the mountain’s religious status. Samaritans continued to regard its summit as sacred, and the community’s scriptural readings and worship kept Gerizim at the center of religious life. The episode is therefore both a military event and a turning point in the physical history of the Samaritan sanctuary, distinct from the much longer history of the people who worshiped there.

Under Roman rule, Mount Gerizim remained a focus of Samaritan gatherings. A large assembly on the mountain during the governorship of Pontius Pilate ended in violence when Roman forces attacked it. During the war against Rome in 66–70 CE, Samaritans gathered on Gerizim and opposed Roman forces. Roman troops besieged the gathering and killed thousands in 67 CE. Later imperial decisions again changed access to the mountain and the use of its sacred spaces. A Samaritan uprising under Emperor Zeno was followed in 484 CE by the community’s expulsion from Gerizim and the loss of its synagogue there. Another rebellion under Justinian preceded the fortification of a church on the mountain. These episodes occurred under different rulers and had different immediate causes; together they show how control of Gerizim repeatedly affected Samaritan religious life.

Outcome

The destruction of the temple and later restrictions on Mount Gerizim did not remove it from Samaritan worship. The community retained the mountain as the direction of prayer and the setting for major public ceremonies. Each year, Samaritans perform a Passover lamb sacrifice on Gerizim, following the rite described in Exodus. The sacrifice takes place on the mountain where their tradition locates the chosen sanctuary, even though the ancient temple no longer stands. Gerizim’s continuing use gives the site a role that is both historical and present: it is associated with the lost temple, but its significance does not depend solely on that building’s survival. The annual rite makes the community’s interpretation of the Pentateuch visible in a shared act of worship.

The Samaritan community also survived through priestly leadership and reform. Baba Rabbah, a fourth-century Samaritan high priest, became its foremost remembered political leader and reformer. He was the eldest son of high priest Nethanel, whose tenure is dated to 300–332 CE. Accounts of Baba Rabbah survive in Samaritan chronicles, including the Tolidah, the Samaritan Book of Joshua, Kitāb al-Taʾrīkh and the New Chronicle. Those works are central to his later reputation, though their narratives also preserve legendary episodes. His remembered leadership belongs to the period after the destruction of the ancient Gerizim temple, when Samaritan institutions, teaching and worship still had to be sustained. His reform legacy reflects the importance of communal organization alongside scripture and ritual.

One chronicle recounts that a Roman agent named Jarman defied an imperial order intended to prevent Baba Rabbah’s circumcision. Two other Samaritan chronicles identify Akbon, Baba Rabbah’s brother and successor, as the high priest in the Jarman account. The variation concerns the identity of the priest in a remembered episode; it does not erase the episode’s place in Samaritan tradition. A blessing for Jarman survives at Samaritan circumcision ceremonies at the end of a poem composed by Markah. That continued use illustrates how a chronicle narrative could become part of recurring communal practice. The story is significant as a record of Samaritan memory about fidelity to religious obligations under imperial pressure, with the differing chronicle accounts kept distinct.

Aftermath and legacy

Language preservation is another part of Samaritan continuity. Samaritans spoke a distinct Aramaic dialect until approximately the tenth century CE. Samaritan Aramaic did not develop a full written system of vowel marks, so its historical pronunciation cannot be read directly from a complete system of written signs. Z. Ben-Ḥayyim’s studies of texts and the community’s reading tradition enabled scholars to reconstruct the dialect’s grammar. The work connects surviving manuscripts with oral transmission: each supplies information the other cannot provide alone. Samaritan Aramaic forms part of the community’s wider literary inheritance, while the continued reading of the Hebrew Pentateuch preserves a separate but closely connected tradition. Their histories demonstrate that Samaritan survival involved more than residence in one place; it involved transmitting words, sounds and interpretations.

Samaritan Hebrew pronunciation occupies a distinct place among traditional pronunciations of Hebrew. Its reading tradition has four degrees of vowel length, two of which distinguish meaning. It no longer distinguishes the historical ū and u vowels from ō and o. The Hebrew word סוּס, meaning “horse,” is pronounced [sos] in Samaritan Hebrew. A historical long [i] is realized as [ә] in some words. Among consonants, the pronunciation has lost the sound of ח entirely and often loses the sound of ע; the letter ו is pronounced as a [b] sound. These features identify a systematic inherited pronunciation, rather than occasional differences among individual readers. Because the Pentateuch is read without relying on written vowel marks, the oral tradition remains indispensable to the form in which scripture is heard.

Material traces of Samaritan life also extend beyond Mount Gerizim. A Samaritan community lived in Rafah during the medieval period. Manuscripts, inscriptions, chronicles and ritual texts preserve evidence of communities and practices across a longer history than the present population centers alone might suggest. On Gerizim, remains associated with successive sacred and political uses of the mountain mark changes in authority over the site. The ancient temple’s destruction, later imperial interventions and the persistence of Samaritan ceremonies belong to different chapters of that history. Keeping those chapters separate avoids reducing the community either to a lost ancient sanctuary or to a sequence of conflicts. Its history includes continued religious practice, the adaptation of communal institutions and the preservation of a distinctive textual culture.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Samaritan population had fallen to about 150. The modern community recovered from that low and is divided between Mount Gerizim and Holon near Tel Aviv. The two centers connect daily communal life with the mountain that remains the focus of worship. Families living away from Gerizim continue to share a religious tradition oriented toward it, while public observances there bring the community together. The annual Passover sacrifice is its best-known ceremony, but the mountain also remains the direction of prayer and a place associated with other festivals. Modern Samaritan life therefore retains a direct relationship with the biblical landscape described in its Pentateuch, even as part of the community lives within a city elsewhere in Israel.

The Samaritans’ legacy lies in the endurance of a distinct Israelite religious tradition. Their account of descent from Israelites who remained after the Assyrian conquest differs from the Jewish account of their origins. Their identification of Mount Gerizim as the chosen sanctuary differs from Jewish identification of Jerusalem. Their Pentateuch preserves readings that give those convictions textual expression, and their oral tradition preserves a way of reading its Hebrew that remains their own. Conflict and population decline changed the circumstances in which these traditions were practiced, but did not end them. Mount Gerizim, the Passover sacrifice, Samaritan Aramaic, the Hebrew reading tradition and the remembered leadership of Baba Rabbah together show how the community maintained religious identity across more than two millennia.