Samaria

I

Introduction

Samaria, ancient city and state in Palestine. The city was located north of present-day Jerusalem east of the Mediterranean Sea.

II

History

The city of Samaria was first built on a hill overlooking a main road to Jerusalem, the capital of King David. It was chosen by Omri, king of Israel (reigned 876-869 bc), who made it the capital of the northern kingdom. The Assyrians conquered the region late in the 8th century bc, as recorded in 2 Kings 17:1-6, 24.

After the Assyrian conquest, the conquerors carried off many of the inhabitants, replacing some of them with people that were from other conquered lands. Nevertheless, the people of the region thereafter known as Samaria practiced a form of Judaism and preserved the so-called Samaritan Pentateuch which is claimed to have retained an older text of the first five books of the Bible than is currently known in the Jewish Torah.

When the Assyrian Empire itself was overthrown, Samaria passed to the Babylonians and then to the successive conquerors of Palestine. In Roman times, the city was called Sebaste, and a modern village nearby preserves that name in its own Sebastiyeh or Sabastiya.

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In New Testament times (1st century ad) the Samaritans were considered heretical and hostile to the Jews, as is shown by the irony of the Tale of the Good Samaritan, who aided a sick Jewish traveler although members of his own faith would not (see Luke 10:30-37), and by the story of the conversation between Jesus and the woman of Samaria (see John 4:5-42).

On the ruined site of the ancient place, there still exist parts of a colonnade from the age of Herod, remains of a temple to Augustus, and other antiquities. A Harvard University expedition (1908-11) made important discoveries on the site, which was subsequently excavated in the 1930s and the 1960s by other major Palestinian archaeologists.

III

Modern Samaritans

In modern times, a sect of Samaritans practices a religion similar to that of the biblical Jews, with some admixture of Islam. Few in number, they make their home around their ancient temple site of Mount Gerizim, near modern Nābulus, in the area now known as the West Bank.

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