The Secret History of the Samaritans

There are about 850 Samaritans alive today. You know them from the Christian Gospels: the Good Samaritan, the woman at the well. But their real history is stranger, older, and much more uncomfortable. In the late Second Temple period, the Jewish calendar included a victory day called Yom Har Gerizim – Mount Gerizim Day. It commemorated the day in 111 BCE when the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus destroyed the Samaritan sanctuary on Mount Gerizim. The Jewish calendar marked it as a victory. The community whose sanctuary was destroyed still exists. Half of the Samaritans live in Holon, near Tel Aviv. Half live on the slopes of Mount Gerizim itself. Every year on the fourteenth of Nisan, they still ascend the mountain. Lambs are slaughtered at twilight. The carcasses are roasted whole in pits. The community eats them in haste, dressed for travel, just as Exodus 12 prescribes. This video tells the story of the Samaritans from the Assyrian deportation account in 2 Kings 17, through the Cuthean origin story preserved in Jewish tradition, through the archaeology of the Persian-period sanctuary on Mount Gerizim, through the Gerizim/Ebal textual variant in Deuteronomy 27, through the Hasmonean destruction, Roman and Byzantine repression, near-extinction in the twentieth century, and survival into the present. It is a story about two communities that both claimed ancient Israel. One became Judaism. The other survived on the mountain. Sources discussed include: 2 Kings 17 Josephus, Antiquities Megillat Taanit Gary Knoppers, Jews and Samaritans Yitzhak Magen's Mount Gerizim excavations The Samaritan Pentateuch The Old Latin tradition preserving the Gerizim reading in Deuteronomy 27 Modern Samaritan Passover documentation