Samaritans – Ancient form of Judaism? | eTeacher Hebrew Official Blog

Who are the Samaritans? Are they Jews or other tribe? Are they Josef’s sons or the true religion of Israelis as they call themselves? Or maybe they are one of the Palestinian groups which live in Israel?

The Samaritans are an ethnoreligious group of the Levant. Religiously, they are the adherents to Samaritanism, a parallel but separate religion to Judaism or any of its historical forms. Based on the Samaritan Torah, Samaritans claim their worship is the true religion of the ancient Israelites prior to the Babylonian Exile, preserved by those who remained in the Land of Israel, as opposed to Judaism, which they assert is a related but altered and amended religion brought back by the exiled returnees.

Ancestrally, they claim descent from a group of Israelite inhabitants who have connections to ancient Samaria from the beginning of the Babylonian Exile up to the beginning of the Common Era. The Samaritans, however, derive their name not from this geographical designation, but rather from the Hebrew term שַמֶרִים, “Keepers [of the Law]“

Picture courtesy http://en.wikipedia.org

Although historically they were a large community — up to more than a million in late Roman times, then gradually reduced to several tens of thousands up to a few centuries ago — their unprecedented demographic shrinkage has been a result of various historical events, including most notably the bloody repression of the Third Samaritan Revolt (529 CE) against the Byzantine Christian rulers and the mass forced conversion to Islam in the Early Muslim period of Palestine.

With the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language by Jewish immigrants to pre-state Israel, and its growth and officialization following the establishment of the state, most Samaritans today speak Modern Hebrew, especially in Israel. As with their counterpart Muslim, Christian, Druze and other Palestinian religious communities, the most recent spoken mother tongue of the Samaritans was Arabic, and it still is for those in the West Bank city of Nablus.

Highlights of Samaritan Belief

There is one God, the same God recognized by the Hebrew prophets.
The Torah was given by God to Moses.
Mount Gerizim, not Jerusalem, is the one true sanctuary chosen by Israel’s God.
Many Samaritans believe that at the end of days, the dead will be resurrected by Taheb, a restorer (possibly a prophet, some say Moses).
They believe in Paradise (heaven).
The priests are the interpreters of the law and the keepers of tradition; scholars are secondary to the priesthood.
The authority of classical Jewish rabbinical works (the Mishnah and the Talmud) is rejected.
They have a significantly different version of the Ten Commandments (for example, their 10th commandment is about the sanctity of Mount Gerizim.

Relationship to mainstream Judaism

Samaritans refer to themselves as Bene Yisrael (“Children of Israel”) which is a term used by all Jewish denominations as a name for the Jewish people as a whole. They however do not refer to themselves as Yehudim (Judeans), the standard Hebrew name for Jews, considering the latter to denote only mainstream Jews.

The Talmudic attitude expressed in tractate Kutim is that they are to be treated as Jews in matters where their practice coincides with the mainstream but are treated as non-Jews where their practice differs. Since the 19th century, mainstream Judaism has regarded the Samaritans as a Jewish sect and the term Samaritan Jews has been used for them.

Samaritan law is not the same as halakha (Rabbinical Jewish law). The Samaritans have several groups of religious texts, which equate to Jewish halakhah. A few

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