The Levantini Podcast
The Levantini Podcast is a show about the ancient Near East with a focus on biblical archaeology, Judaism and Islam.
The Levantini Podcast
The Samaritans
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Matthew Chalmers is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Religious Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Northwestern University’s Department of Religious Studies. He is a scholar and theorist of religion, working with texts and traditions of the late antique eastern Mediterranean in Greek, Coptic, Aramaic, and Hebrew. In his current book project, The Samaritan Other: Representation, History, and Lost Late Antique Difference, he spotlights the continuous participation of Samaritans – a third Israel – in the historical and cultural processes that defined imperial Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. Our discussion focused on the origins of Samaritan religion and identity and how both Judaism and Christinaity have dealt with the issue of Samaritan claims to the Israelite tradition.
I'm your host, Alex, and welcome to the Levantine Podcast, a show about Near Eastern history, language, and culture. To learn more about the show and get in touch, you can visit our website at LeventinePod.com. This episode of the podcast, I spoke with Matt Chalmers, who's a scholar and theorist of religion. He's currently a visiting assistant professor in religious studies at Northwestern University, and he works with texts and traditions of the late antique Eastern Mediterranean in Greek, Coptic, Aramaic, and Hebrew. Our discussion focused on the origins of Samaritan religion and identity, and how both Judaism and Christianity have dealt with the issue of Samaritan claims to the Israelite tradition. I had a great time speaking with him, and I hope you enjoy the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. So when did you first start to get interested in the Samaritans?
SPEAKER_00This is a really interesting question. So when I came to graduate school, I had no idea that I would be researching any of this. I was really interested in Alexandrian Christianity in late antiquity. That was kind of my jam. And then it was one of the first courses I took as a graduate student. The title of the course was something like Jewish and Christian Identity in Antiquity, or something like that. And for one of the assignments, I did a little bibliographic essay, pretty standard stuff, on an aspect of late antique religion that was underappreciated or understudied, somewhere there was a gap. And the gap that sprang out to me via Christian writings about heresy from the fourth century CE was Samaritan studies. And I realized that not only was Samaritans and Israel facing tradition in late antiquity when we were really concerned about figuring out how Israel facing traditions in late antiquity became religions. I also realized they are not integrated at all into the mainstream of the contemporary study of religion or the contemporary study of the history of the region, really. If you do Samaritan studies, you're in a little box somewhere in the corner with the other three people who do it. And I thought that seemed like a bit of an oversight. I didn't come back to it at all during coursework, pitched it to my graduate advisor as a dissertation topic. I said two sentences, she said, Oh, yeah, that sounds great.
SPEAKER_01And we took it from there. And you can go your entire life being Jewish or Christian and not have ever heard about the Samaritans or know who they are beyond the phrase the good Samaritan.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's totally true. I actually have a little anecdote about this, if you'll indulge me, which is that the first conference, it was a graduate student conference within Jewish studies. It was at NYU. It was the first conference that I presented any of my dissertation research. And the dissertation research I presented was on representations of Samaritans called Khutim in rabbinic literature. And I presented this whole, this whole little argument. The first question I got, Jewish studies guy, rabbinics guy, thoroughly embedded in Talmud, specifically in the Talmud in the context of Sasanian Iran. That's his stuff. He puts his hand up, he doesn't ask about any of that. He says, Doesn't the story of the Good Samaritan prove that there is ethnic tension between Jews and Samaritans categorically? And that was the first question. A conference which is packed full of rabbinicists. I fielded the question. I didn't know exactly what to say to it because this kind of like the shadow cast by the parable of the Good Samaritan is so large on the field. And at the time I didn't know what to do with it. But you're totally right. You can be Jewish, be Christian, you can work in as a specialist in the study of religion for years and years, and you can have a vague cognizance that there are people who other people call Samaritans, but you might not know anything about the history of those people, you might not know anything about kind of where they come from, what what their identity is, or about how they connect with Judaism and Christianity diachronically.
SPEAKER_01And going to the Gospel of Luke, what is the parable of the Good Samaritan for people who don't even know what that is beyond just knowing that they've heard a Good Samaritan before?
SPEAKER_00So the parable of the Good Samaritan is in the Gospel of Luke in the Christian New Testament, chapter 10. I know it's something like this. There's a teacher of the law who comes to Jesus and asks, okay, bunch of questions. What do I need to do to be considered, you know, a righteous person? Jesus tells him, and he tells him that amongst other things, the most important thing is care for your neighbor. The teacher of the law is not yet satisfied. He asks, well, who is who is my neighbor? And Jesus tells him the parable. The scholars debate whether this first section is a literary frame around a historical parable, so whether this is actually two units. But that's not really relevant for the point of the story, which works pretty well as a cohesive whole. The parable then goes something like this: there is a man. The ethnicity or the religious identity of the man is not stated. It's just a man, it's just an anthropos in Greek, is going up to Jericho from Jerusalem. He's set upon by robbers who beat him, take all his stuff, leave him on the road. He's in a pretty bad way. And three characters come by. There's a priest, there's a Levite, and there's a Samaritan. The priest and the Levite end up walking past the Samaritan, not helping out. The Samaritan stops and helps. He picks up the man, he dresses his wounds, he takes him to a nearby inn, he pays for the Samaritan's stay in medical treatment, and then he offers to pay more, if needed, for the innkeeper to look after the guy. Jesus asks, well, who was the person's neighbor? Everyone gets the message. The Samaritan is the neighbor, or specifically the one who shows mercy, then Jesus says, go and do the same.
SPEAKER_01Got it. And just out of curiosity, when they're constructing that parable, what would be a reason they wouldn't say who the man was? Is that just is there nothing behind that, or could there possibly be something behind that? It depends who you ask.
SPEAKER_00This parable, in terms let me answer the question in two different ways. In terms of the construction of the parable in its kind of first literary context, I think it's quite likely that an audience simply assume that the man is someone who is worth sympathizing with. Christian interpretation does a bunch of funky things with the parable, but one thing they really like doing is identifying the man with kind of your everyday Christian, or even identifying the man sometimes with kind of a specific person in the audience.
SPEAKER_01Weren't Levites priests at that time? Or had that split already happened where there it was always it was a little fuzzy by by then?
SPEAKER_00So there was a distinction between the two, the two groups. There was, for what it's worth, by the time of the writing of the New Testament, there's also division between different branches, if you like, of priesthood. So whether someone can be identified as what's called a Zadekite priest or not. Second Temple Jews are already very aware of these distinctions, and they have a category of Levite as distinct from other priests. So there is that sort of like, I guess the division of labor or the division of degree of priesthood, especially a division of degree of priesthood based in ancestry, is very much something that would have been familiar to people at the time.
SPEAKER_01It's interesting. So for people unfamiliar with the Samaritans at a high level, who are they and where are they located today?
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm. So Samaritans or Samaritan Israelites are Israel-facing tradition that track their identity, both religious and ethnic, to ancient Israel. In that respect, comparable to Jews. The main differences, if you like, are, well, once you get into the weeds, it's a little complex. But the main identifiable differences are that Samaritan Torah contains only the five books traditionally attributed to Moses, Genesis through to Deuteronomy. Samaritan Israelites have held and seem to have held, basically for as long as we know there are Samaritan Israelites, that the proper site for devotion to the God of Israel is Mount Gerizim, which is about, I think it's about 40 kilometers to the to the north of Jerusalem. Not in Jerusalem itself. They tell stories about how ultimately they are the inheritors of the proper practices and piety of ancient Israel. Then there are a bunch of spin-offs, and amongst the spin-offs are included the Jewish people who made a mistake with Jerusalem, and according to Samaritan Israelites, have never looked back. There aren't a lot of Samaritans now. Now in 2021, there's not a huge community, but there is a community who live as a minority in the modern-day region, Israel-Palestine, in kind of a couple of communities, but with the largest being on the slopes of Mount Gerasim.
SPEAKER_01And I think their population is somewhere around like 700, 800 people now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. If people are interested in that, there's a Samaritan-Israelite website which is run by the community and has a newsletter, and amongst other items on the newsletter, is it they have a counter of people who have passed, people who have been born. The other thing to mention about Samaritans is that, and this is this is something more emergent, so it's not something that a lot of people have written on yet, although there are a couple of anthropologists who are sort of dancing around the topic. There is an emergent population of what we might call proselytes to Samaritan identity in South America, specifically in Brazil. This is sort of fascinating for a number of reasons. It's especially fascinating because, of course, if your community is a community of maybe, let's say, just shy of a thousand people, any number of proselytes is actually gonna, especially in a populous country, quickly going to grow to be bigger than your community itself. And this is a source of some contention within the contemporary Samaritan Israelite community. But I thought it worth mentioning because it is, it is very interesting. It's a good illustration that while we often look back when we think about Samaritan Israelites, like back to the distant past, we attach this minority to this long lineage. I've already said Israel facing Samaritan identity is still an emergent and shifting thing. And if Samaritans are not a fixed community, we should sometimes avoid talking about them as if they are. It's a bit of a trap, especially with like minority groups.
SPEAKER_01And in antiquity, were they would they be considered a minority group in antiquity or was their population much larger?
SPEAKER_00Much larger. It's difficult with ancient demographics to pin down exactly how a large a community is, especially because in terms of, for example, material evidence, stuff that you could get at with archaeology, you're not necessarily going to know that a lamp, for example, is a Samaritan lamp. You're not necessarily going to be able to distinguish a Samaritan tomb even from a Jewish tomb. And these are two of the most common ways that scholars have used archaeology to identify ancient communities. But that said, we can put together some of the pieces. And when we put some of the pieces together, a little bit of archaeology, a little bit of textual evidence, we know two things. One, the Samaritan-Israelite community was much larger in antiquity than it was today. Samaritans were very visible both to Roman authorities and to Christian and Jewish, well, Christian, Jewish and later Muslim writers. We also know that there was a Samaritan diaspora, as well as the populations based in Palestine. We know this from inscriptions ranging as far as Sicily in the West. There's a really fascinating little inscription from Thessaloniki as well. And we know this because of literary evidence. Again, for some reason, the Sicilian Samaritans come up a couple of times. There's a really interesting pair of letters from the early 7th century, which relate a legal case that has come to the attention of the Bishop of Rome to do with Samaritan. So we know that there is a Samaritan diaspora, and the Samaritan diaspora is the Samarit Samaritans retained communities in diaspora through till really the 17th century, a sort of middle Ottoman period, when the Samaritan communities in Egypt and in Syria finally kind of seem to disappear, or they simply up and migrate to Palestine, which is what happens with the with the Syrian Samaritan community.
SPEAKER_01So what are the main differences and similarities between their version of the Torah or the Pendaduch and the Jewish one as it stands today?
SPEAKER_00So there was an idea back in the 19th century, and this is something that if you if you put that question into Google, this is what will come up. And what will come up is the work of a scholar called Gazanius, who wrote a dissertation, basically, on the differences between the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Jewish Pentateuch. And what Gazanius says is that there are about 6,000 differences, some major and subminor, between the Jewish Pentateuch and the Samaritan Pentateuch. The minor differences are things like this, variant spellings, or readings that emerge from the distinctive Samaritan vocalization of Hebrew. The major differences, what have sometimes been called sectarian differences, are a little more striking. So for example, where there are references to Zion in the Jewish text, the Samaritan text will read Gerizim, right? We'll shift the location of, for example, a prophecy or a description of something that Moses does at a particular site. It won't be at Zion, it'll be at Gerizim. In some places also there are expansive harmonizations where big sections are taken from elsewhere in the Pentateuch to expand on an underdeveloped, or what is seen as an underdeveloped or an unclear passage elsewhere by the Samaritan scribe. So that's that's more or less what you'll get. The reason that I say this is sort of this has been a prevailing sense of, okay, the difference for for basically coming up to 200 years now, people have started to pick away at this. And that's partly because people have started to complicate how we understand the Bible. Do we understand the Bible as being a fixed text during the site time of Second Temple Judaism? Well, probably not. And if we don't, then at what point do we think there is a difference between a Jewish Torah and a Samaritan Torah, between a Jewish Pentateuch and a Samaritan Pentateuch? But it's also for a second reason, which is it turns out that a number of the so-called sectarian readings in the Samaritan Pentateuch might be earlier than the readings in the Jewish Pentateuch. And if they are earlier, then it's impossible to understand them as the result of sectarian editing from a base Jewish text. There must be something else going on. And so people have started to pick away at this kind of gazanius 6,000 differences thing to say, well, what's your starting point? Where do you come at the kind of Pentateuch from? And there are some scholars, and I'm not I'm I think I would lean towards this position, although I wouldn't say necessarily fully endorse it, that maybe we should understand the Samaritan, Israelite, and the Jewish Israelite Pentateuches as simultaneous developments out of a practically managed set of Israel-facing texts.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a really good point. I'm glad you got to it because it's, I mean, it's very confusing and you get into pretty muddy water when you start trying to put those pieces together, but I'm gonna ask you to do it anyways. Uh-huh. So, in regards to the similarities that exist between the Torah of both faiths, it'd be helpful if you could provide some background on what the current research appears to show about the northern origins of many of the stories in the Pentateuch, both Jewish and Samaritan, which contradict the theory that the Torah as as we know it today was a solely southern work composed in Judah.
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm. Oh, that is a good question. Yeah, we are getting into the weeds. I like it. So, yeah, just to kind of rephrase back the question to make it clear where I'm starting from when I kind of go off on the explanation. The idea that Torah was predominantly produced in the South, in Judah, has been buzzing around for quite some time, right? And reason being because it's quite clear from a lot of the Hebrew Bible that there is this sequence of kind of the location, the main focus point of the story. It shifts from the north to the south, and it's often kind of a relatively extreme degree of polemic against northern Israel. Certainly it would remain true that the a fair amount of what it now is in the Hebrew Bible retains that Judahite emphasis. It's like, okay, the southern Judahites are at least not as bad as the northern Israelites. And when the southern Israelites are bad, it's because they converge with the mistakes that the northern Israelites made before them. But increasingly, scholars have started to push on this to find sections and stories scattered throughout the Hebrew Bible that don't quite match this idea that scribes sat down and produced something which is just focused on Judah, is just focused on how the South, Israelites in the South are doing it right. So one example of this might be, for instance, a story in two chronicles of Hezekiah trying to unite northern and southern Israelites at a festival. What exactly is going on there? Why would that story be in a text which is emphasizing that only Judah is doing it right? That's a particularly kind of obvious example, but there are plenty of other examples scattered throughout the Hebrew Bible from Joshua, right, especially the especially the historical book. Joshua, judges, kings. These stories and passages have little bits in them that seem not to just emphasize Judah, that draw attention to kind of cultic sites in northern Israel, and seem to assume that those cultic sites are totally valid. And what this has led a number of scholars to suggest is that, okay, let's say that the a lot of what is now the Bible was written in the South. Okay. Well, these passages suggest it wasn't only written by it wasn't written only by people who cared about Judah and the South. These north-facing traditions suggest it that at least some people also cared about the north. Who might those people have been? And the jury's out on those questions, but one answer is scribes from the north, right? Northern Israelites who saw the fall of the northern kingdom as kind of a problem, certainly, to be overcome, something to be explained, but still something attached to kind of the continued destiny of Israel.
SPEAKER_01In terms of Mount Grisim, how does that appear in the Old Testament? What references are there to that mountain and its importance?
SPEAKER_00Perhaps the most illustrative example is right at the, well, in the closing phases of Deuteronomy, where you have meeting of Israelites at the Mount of Blessing and the Mount of Curses. And what's so interesting about this section is that Samaritan tradition associates the Mountain of Blessing with Gerizim and the Mount of Curses with Mount Ibba. And Jewish tradition actually flips those. So that would be, that would be the most obvious example of okay, this is a Gerizim story. It's a Gerizim story that is interpreted differently within the communities. But what's crucial for the Samaritan Pentateuch is that Gerizim also appears kind of. Elsewhere in the Torah. So you do end up with Gerizim appearing, for example, as the site where Abraham was ready to offer up Isaac. Within Jewish tradition, that's Mount Moriah. In Samaritan tradition, it's Mount Gerizim. Another example is at the end of what would be called the Ten Commandments section in Exodus. Samaritan tradition appends another little section stating that proper devotion to the God of Israel should take place on Gerizim. So Gerizim finds its way into the Samaritan texts in various different places. It does appear in the Jewish text, but not as this kind of centralized crux of a lot of the narrative.
SPEAKER_01And what about the difference in the Hebrew script that the Samaritan Torah is written in versus the Jewish one?
SPEAKER_00It's really interesting. Because this is one of the most visible things that strike you if you look at a Samaritan manuscript. And there will actually be, I don't know if it's this year. I should email and find out about this. Yeshiva University in New York is this year, it was supposed to be this year, but who knows with the pandemic, working on an exhibition headed by Stephen Fine on the Samaritan Israelites. One of the things that is most noticeable if you look at a Samaritan manuscript is that the script is not the same. The script is a version of an older mode of writing, Paleo Hebrew, called Paleo-Hebrew. We actually find Paleo-Hebrew used in a number of Second Temple Jewish contexts. So if you look at, for example, coins stamped during Jewish revolts, you'll see the script is not square script, the script that would be standard if you were to kind of open any book in Hebrew today. The script is Paleo-Hebrew. The Samaritans use a version of this script. It's not identical, but it is a version. What's so interesting about this is that the rabbis of the Talmud actually know that the Samaritans use this script, and they know that the script is older than the square script, or that it resembles an older script, rather, and it makes them super anxious. There's this whole section where they kind of go back and forth and back and forth on kind of where this script came from and why the Samaritans end up using a different script, but it's still the Torah, trying to juggle how that can be a thing, how you can maintain kind of the interpretive, interpretational authority of rabbis when there's this whole other bunch of people who are actually using a different script.
SPEAKER_01And that's kind of the I mean, the the symbolic nature of that Proto-Hebrew script, whether it was used on revolt coins from the Barkopa era or you know other ancient, you know, whether it was the Maccabees also did something similar, right? Where on their coins they they use this this proto-Hebrew script and the Samaritans use it, but the symbolic nature is kind of the point, right? They were by doing that, they were making a point. Can you touch on that? On when we think that what's the scholarly scholarly consensus on when the Samaritan Pentateuch was was composed and why they chose that script?
SPEAKER_00There is a a loose scholarly consensus. And I say loose because this is an area of research where things could change and things might change. But the consensus is that the Samaritan Pentateuch is identifiable to us, likely compiled, started to circulate as a distinct and separate document, sometime in the late 2nd century BCE. And the event this is attached to is quite specific, which is the destruction of the Samaritan Israelite sanctuary on Gerizim by John Hercanus. Scholars used to date this to 128, it's now dated to 111 or 110 on the basis of different numismatic evidence, so different coins, basically, while we're talking about coins. The general consensus is that up till this point it was possible for Samaritan Israelites and Jewish Israelites to it coexist uncomfortably, but to coexist after an aggressive military destruction of a sanctuary, it's more difficult for that to be the case. That but for the Samaritans. So that's typically been the moment at which scholars have said, okay, it is likely that this event caused the consolidation of boundaries between Jews and Samaritans, and the likely, one of the likely forms that took was the circulation of Samaritan Torah in distinctive script. As for why Samaritans chose that script, I mean the debate goes back and forth. There is an argument that says it's because this was the script that was used. It was an earlier script, and the Samaritan Torah came in kind of crystallized at a relatively early stage, second century moment. Why would they use anything else? That's the first argument. There are three. So I will just label them so it's clear. That's the first argument. The second argument is that Samaritans adopt, well, this distinctive Samaritan script sometime in the sometime in the fourth century, the late third, early fourth century, in the context of a Christianizing Roman Empire, where certain types of religious identity are becoming much more visible because the Christian state is looking at other religious groups and going, hey, what do we do about these groups? What do we do about them legally? How do we deal with that? And that the use of a distinctive Samaritan script is Samaritans kind of playing into the imperial creation of religious boxes into which you can have a defined identity. The third argument, which is not one that very many scholars hold, it's not really an argument at all. It's more a bundle of all the different things that Jews, Samaritans, and Christians have said about this question. What makes this question so hard to answer is that everyone gives you a different answer as to when and why it happened. So some people say, oh, Ezra did it. Ezra lied and gave the Samaritan Israelites only a part of the Torah in bad script to try and keep them away from the other Israelites. Some traditions will say this has been around basically forever. Some traditions will say, okay, so this script was a script given to the simple during the final days of the Northern Kingdom. And that's a sort of rabbinic riff on 2 Kings 17. So it doesn't seem like anyone really knows from this third position. At least this is not a thing that any of the three traditions who have some kind of attachment to this claim know something about. They present such a such a range of narratives about the origins of the script and these origins of Samaritan use of it, that ends up being even more interesting just to see not just to ask, well, we have these other two scholarly positions at the about the moment at which Samaritan script was used, but what if we just looked at all the different stories about when people said it started to be used and what's at stake in telling those different stories?
SPEAKER_01So is it possible that another theory of of why they chose that script was to distinguish themselves at that point when their temple was destroyed to kind of just make a claim and say, you know, we're the original Israelites, look at our script, it's different from yours, we're more authentic.
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's certainly one possibility. It's something that it would be kind of difficult to prove because whilst you can you can see intuitively that that's a that's that's a logic that works, right? And it it is something we find as an argument in some later Samaritan writings, but those writings are significantly later. We're talking like medieval, often in Arabic, so in a in a very different context to say trying to figure out what's happening in the late second century, kind of with Hasmoneans and Second Temple Judaism.
SPEAKER_01So why was their temple destroyed at that time? What were what were the relate what was the relationship dynamic between Jews and Samaritans and and why was the temple destroyed? So this happens in the second century BCE.
SPEAKER_00And depending, like all things with Samaritans, there's at least two type two sides to the story. Some Samaritan Israelite traditions maintain to this day that there was never a temple on Gerizim at all. It was a sanctuary that wasn't a fixed structure. Regardless of that, certainly the sanctuary on Gerizim was was attacked by John Herculeus and destroyed. And who was he? The priesthood displaced. And he was he was one of the Hasmonean kings. So the line of the line of priest rulers who established their rule over an area of what is modern-day Israel after the Maccabean Revolt. So one of the things John Hercanus is well known for is expanding the Hasmonean state. This is one of the things he did. Um and he appears to have done so by military force, largely, where he trots into an area and and compels Agroup to come under the ambit of the state. Gerizim is an interesting case because it's actually very close to Jerusalem. It's not far away at all. And through to this point, we seem to see a degree of kind of awkward coexistence between those who worship Gerizim and those who worship in Jerusalem. This is something that we see throughout the Persian and Hellenistic periods of rule of the area. There is a bunch of decentralized Jewish and Israelite practice. We know that there was a temple at Elephanti in Egypt, for example. We know that communities in diaspora are kind of reaching back to priests and governors, both of Samaria and Jerusalem, being like, hey, what should we do? We have this temple to God. So to some degree, people are okay with, at least practically speaking, even if they're not okay theologically speaking, practically speaking, people seem okay with there being multiple places to sacrifice, even. But John Hyrcanus is trying to consolidate a state. I think the most plausible reason that he goes after Gerizim is that he wants to incorporate the priestly hierarchy of Gerizim in one form or another into the hierarchy of Jerusalem. Like in one form or another, he wants that kind of lineage, he wants that set of priestly authorities to be focused on Judah, on Jerusalem, and on propping up his kingdom, than to be focused on, to be focused on Gerizim to the north.
SPEAKER_01Can you explain why, at least for the Hasmoneans, that they were particularly sensitive to the issue of priesthood and authenticity?
SPEAKER_00So the Hasmoneans care quite a lot about this. They care quite a lot about this because, unlike a lot of rulers, at least within the Hebrew Bible, the Hasmonean king was also held the office of high priest. He drew his authority both from political control of a state, but also from presiding over sacrifices and religious order. It really matters if someone else, somewhere else, is claiming a priestly authority that equals or even supersedes yours, if you being a priest, is part of what makes you a ruler. And this is something Hasmoneans were particularly sensitive about because Hasmoneans presented themselves as, in a sense, reformers and renewers of the priest priest-led religious life of Israel, as opposed to what they argued had been the case under Hellenistic rule previously. So it was both a part of the hybrid role of the Hasmonean ruler and a part of kind of what the Hasmoneans, the story the Hasmoneans told about why they existed and held power in the first place.
SPEAKER_01How do you pronounce the the last one? There's several different pronunciations there, right?
SPEAKER_00There are always several different pronunciations. What I tell my students with these things whenever they whenever they say, Oh, how do you say this? Look, they've been dead a while. However you want how it feels comprehensible to you, and as long as it communicates fine, it's fine. I say Hyrcanus, some people will say Hercanus.
SPEAKER_01So do you suspect that if the Samaritans would have would have submitted to Hercanus and incorporated their priestly class into the one that that that they were setting up in Jerusalem or they had in Jerusalem, that everything would have been okay and the temple would have continued to stand, or was the temple at Garizim a problem for them?
SPEAKER_00What a good question. What a good question. I actually think it's difficult to say because at this point we're kind of there is not a huge amount of evidence to figure out exactly what Herculeus is thinking. But there's not a huge amount of evidence from the second and first century to figure out kind of, okay, well, what are we, how exactly do we narrate this? If we were to, if we go a little later and we look at rabbinic literature, the fact that there isn't a temple on Gerizim doesn't help the Samaritans in rabbinic eyes. In rabbinic eyes, the existence of a structure on Gerizim or not is actually irrelevant. What matters is devotion to the God of Israel in a different place and outside the realms of rabbinic authority. And the rabbis start circulating this story, in fact, about idolatry on Gerizim. The Gerizim is that the Samaritans start worshipping an idol in the shape of a dove on top of Gerizim. And this passes into Muslim Muslim polemic uh via the Karaites, passes into Muslim polemic against Samaritans as well, which is fascinating, but a different story. So would it have been okay if the priests at Gerizim had said, okay, yeah, we're gonna come, we're gonna climb aboard? Maybe. It might have been. It might have been just enough of a capitulation that it worked for Hyconus' state. It might have been just enough of concession to a Hasmonean priest king to be like, hey, these other priests are on side. It might have been enough. But I'm coming at this from the angle of kind of, okay, it it wasn't. But yeah, the thing, the one thing to add to that is I'm coming at this at the angle of, from the angle of the relationship between Jewish and Samaritan religious identities, even at the point of time of the destruction of the Gerizim temple, is still pretty contested. It's not clear to either group how separate their identities are.
SPEAKER_01Do you think it would have been a problem by the time of Herod?
SPEAKER_00Oh, I suspect it would have been more of a problem. But it could go two ways. I mean, this is a bit of an alt-history speculation. I kind of like it. It could have been a problem because one of the things Herod was really interested in was monumentalizing architecture. One of the big best known things he did was renovated and expanded the Jerusalem Temple. But did he do that because he had a particular fondness for the Jerusalem Temple? Or did he do that because it was the cultic focal point of a lot of the people he ruled? I mean, probably the latter, if Gerizim had still some kind of monumental structure on it that was also a focal point for a fair few of the people that he ruled, and there were plenty of Samaritan Israelites in the Herodian period. We know this from Josephus, as well as contemporary Roman sources, maybe he would have monumentalized Gerizim as well. That would have created a particularly interesting alternative history of the Second Temple period, right? Where you have two separately monumentalized temples in two separate places, both by the Herodian dynasty.
SPEAKER_01I mean, yeah, speaking of alternative histories, that could have just changed everything, even modern Judaism is as we know today.
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm. That'd be pretty fascinating. And we we know that Israelites in diaspora were interacting with both sanctuaries. There's a pair of inscriptions from Hellenistic Delos, which is an island and trade hub. Probably these were attached to a synagogue, but they talk about a person sending gifts to Ha Geradzim, to the mountain of Gerizim. So these temples, these sanctuaries were also serving as hubs for overlapping diasporic communities as well, which just adds to this whole like, huh, what if that had stayed that way?
SPEAKER_01Right. And that wasn't uncommon in the ancient world either. I mean, in in our lives now, we've crystallized this thought of one holy place, one place with the ultimate authority. But in antiquity, for people of a certain faith or religious sect to have multiple different holy sites that had just as much authority as as the other was not a rare thing.
SPEAKER_00I think that's right. Yeah. And part of this is this is one reason why it's sometimes, every once in a while, and you see this particularly in New Testament scholarship, people assume very quickly, too quickly, to respond to what you've just said, that something to do with Jerusalem, for example, must be much more significant than anything that anyone else who calls himself an Israelite is doing anywhere. And that's just not necessarily the case. Like, do we think that the Samaritan, the probably relatively small, but do we think that the Samaritan community on Delos like even cared?
unknownYou know?
SPEAKER_00What do we what about Jews on Sicily? Were they, I mean, presumably they were really upset when the Second Temple was destroyed, because it's a big deal, and it did have knock-on effects for like how Jewish people were conceived around the Mediterranean, at least for a short period of time. But they also have their own stuff going on. And this is to some extent the story with synagogues. Not everyone was going to Jerusalem all the time, not everyone was going to Gerizim all the time. And that's not, yeah, that's not necessarily particularly unusual.
SPEAKER_01It's a long way. So let's go back to the Samaritan origins and spend some time there. It's tricky trying to decipher what their origins are or were because they have their version, the Bible has its version, Josephus has his version, which seems to be a combination of multiple other versions. Scholars now have their consensus as well. Could you spend some time breaking down the various versions of Samaritan origins?
SPEAKER_00Sure. Um the way that makes most sense to me to do this is a set of three, basically. The first is kind of the Samaritan-Israelite story. So this is the story that is reflected in Samaritan chronicles. This is kind of the insider narrative. And it goes something like this: you have Moses, you have kind of the events, the experiences of the Israelite people, up to the end of Deuteronomy, you have the entrance into the Holy Land. And like this is the history of Israel, and the history of Samaritan Israel is directly continuous with that history. It is also a history of cycles of what in Samaritan terminology is called disfavor and favor. And typically these moments where you toggle from disfavor to favor map onto a deviation of a group from within the right practice of Israel. So, for example, there's a period of divine disfavor in the time of Eli and his sons set up an alternative site for devotion to God at Shiloh. And they do that. This is a period of divine disfavor. The same with David deciding to place a capital at Jerusalem. Massive mistake within Samaritan Israelite tradition. This is the first one. By and large, there are relatively few scholars who look at this and go, okay, that's that's probably the way it was. Back in the day, that's because scholars relied on quite polemical ancient sources, and to some degree they still do. But it's also because the story doesn't answer the questions that scholars want to ask. Like scholars want to ask, well, um, but when when did like people who are Samaritan Israelites become visible to other people? Like, how does this connect with our existing evidence? And the Samaritan insider narrative doesn't quite answer those questions. So there are some scholars, there are a couple of scholars who who kind of do endorse that position and dig back to try and figure out how to connect various bits of evidence with it, but they would be a minority. The second origin narrative is one which arises from within ancient Judaism and is adopted by most ancient Christians. This idea then fundamentally shapes modern scholarship because of the sources the ancient sources that construct this idea are fundamental sources for modern scholars when they first start thinking about kind of Samaritan origins. So the big player here is Josephus. And then all the early Christians use Josephus and then all the early modernists use Josephus. And actually to this day, people who write history of Second Temporal Judaism use Josephus all the time because he's our longest surviving source. And this story goes something like this after the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE, there is some type of depopulation of the land. A bunch of Israelites are taken away, we don't see them again. The land is repopulated with migrants brought in forcibly from other places in the in the Assyrian Empire, those people intermarry with folks who were left behind. They come to practice a version of Israelite religion but that version is hybridized or more polemically because these sources are typically polemical, bastardized. This story is grounded in a specific interpretation of 2 Kings 17, which narrates a story kind of like this, but par but very much channeled through Josephus' understanding of what this process produced, which in his understanding of in his kind of polemical representation of Samaritans is a population who lay claim to Israelite lineage when it suits them and deny it when it's convenient to and shouldn't necessarily be considered therefore to be part of the lineage of Abraham, even though they claim they should be this position, as I said, it's polemical, it's grounded in Second Temple Jewish polemic, especially in Josephus against Samaritan Israelites. It ends up being pretty much the stock narrative about Samaritans through till really even the the 20th century, because it ends up dominating the sources. The third position, and this is a position that has grown and I would say flourished, this is pro this is I think it's fair to say a consensus position amongst scholars now, is that Samaritan distinctive Samaritan identity emerges in tandem with distinctive Jewish identity during the Second Temple period. That might be catalyzed by the destruction of the Gerizim sanctuary but even if the destruction of the Gerizim sanctuary catalyzes distinctive Samaritan identity, it does not dictate it and it does not freeze it. So Samaritan identity continues to develop in tandem with Jewish identity through the period of the rabbis. So through into the second century through into the third century Samaritans and Jews are still trying to figure out well exactly what do we do with each other. And we know this because in rabbinic literature the rabbis ask that question like what exactly are we doing with the like Samaritans? Can we say blessings with them?
SPEAKER_01Like can we accept their unleavened bread if we need to buy something for a festival like etc etc etc it's interesting and it kind of changes over the course of history as well at certain points it seems that rabbis are okay with Samaritans. They can be considered Jews or at least of the same family. Yep. And then other you know it's okay to intermarry with them and then at other times that changes right yeah that's right.
SPEAKER_00It seems like in the earliest layers of classical rabbinic literature so in the Mishnah rabbis are pretty open to considering Samaritans as Israelites even for the purpose of things like blessing even for the purpose of some types of religious practice there is talk in the Mishnah of Samaritan priests tithing and this that and the other in general the position of the Mishnah and the Tesefta is that Samaritans are closer to Israelites rabbinically conceived than not. In later Rabbinic literature it kind of goes two ways. So in the Babylonian Talmud is really invested in creating a categorically separate Samaritan as a counterpoint to the Israelite. And as a result it often rearranges and reorients earlier sections from the Mishnah to point it even to an alternative direction. But even while that's happening in the Babylonian Talmud in some places I mean as you know the Babyl is really big. Like in some places in the Babli which is just what how people refer to the Babylonian Talmud in shorthand in some places in the Babyloni we have this kind of really sharp anti-Samaritan rhetoric where the Samaritans are absolute Gentiles and they're just Guain. In other places in the Babylonian Talmud it seems like the rabbis acknowledge kind of the separate Samaritan claim to not only be kind of Israelites but also to be practicing piety properly. So there are other sections in the Babylonian Talmud where a rabbi will say well you know the problem with Samaritans is that they will tell you you're wrong about the Halacha. So even the Babylonian Talmud's kind of exclusion rhetoric as it were isn't universal. It shows in its anxieties that the Samaritans are still an active alternative halakhic people and the rabbis have some significant concerns about that.
SPEAKER_01So in your view this probably aligns with the the current scholarly consensus that the truth of their origins is just like anything a mixture of a bunch of the different versions that are out there.
SPEAKER_00It's somewhere somewhere in between are they are they a split off sect of Judaism or are they another branch of Yahwehism if that's even a word who share a common origin faith with Judaism Yahwehism is I honestly the answer to whether Yahweh is a word is like scholars use it, but I'm still not sure it's a word. Because like I Reinhard Pummer who wrote a very good monograph on the Samaritans a few years ago it's it's the the overview volume on the Samaritan Israelites in English. It's in 2016 I think he happily he happily uses the word Yahweh scholars use it as a technical term. I'm unconvinced by it's as I it just seems like a weird word to me but I know exactly what you you mean by it as do scholars. Yeah I mean generally at the beginning of the 20th century a guy called James Montgomery published a book in English one of the first overviews of the Samaritans ever written and he represented them as the earliest sect of Judaism. So the earliest and first split from the tradition that then developed into rabbinic Judaism. So that's a sort of kind of oh they have a common ancestor but talking about Samaritans is to talk about Samaritans is still to talk in terms of sectarian identity. In general scholars steer away from that for the simple reason that it's not clear in the Second Temple period given how multivalent Jewish identity is it's not clear what it would mean to be a sect of Judaism in a time when Judaism isn't one thing. Is it even Judaism or are you just talking about kind of Israel-facing traditions which is a terminology that I prefer, I think. And that aligns me much more with the second idea that you were pointing to the idea of kind of Judaism and Samaritan religion having a common ancestor in the form of something that some people might call Yahwehism. That's a bit of a mouthful so I prefer to refer to them as Israel facing traditions. The nice thing about referring to them as Israel facing traditions is it doesn't make them an exclusive pair, right? It doesn't reduce them to an exhaustion with each other where it's like oh to say something about Samaritans you have to say something about Jews, say something about Jews you have to say something about Samaritans. The fun and useful thing about talking in terms of Israel facing traditions is that you can also incorporate other religious traditions into your discussion when you need to. So talking about Israel facing traditions that's also a category that includes Christianity and it's a category that includes Islam. And it might not be totally irrelevant to be thinking about what how Christians and Muslims represent Samaritans if we want to understand what Samaritan identity is. Because if identity is generated at least in part by your interactions with other people your interactions with all sorts of other people matter. Not just kind of like the most decisive one.
SPEAKER_01Right well let's let's dive into that so what what can New Testament mentions of the Samaritans tell us about how Jews and I'm going to call them early Christians even though they would have been Jews at the time conceived of the Samaritans?
SPEAKER_00So it sort of depends which bit of the New Testament you read. There are mentions of Samaritans in three Gospels there's a passing mention in Matthew to the cities of the Samaritans. There's two mentions of Samaritans in the Gospel of Luke there's the story of the Good Samaritan and then there's a little later on oh no there's three there's an encounter with the village of the Samaritans there's the parable of the good Samaritans and then there's a Samaritan amongst nine other people with leprosy who are healed a little later on. And in John's Gospel there's a number of mentions of Samaritans there's a famous encounter with the Samaritan woman in John chapter 4 at the well there's an insult thrown at Jesus by some of his followers from amongst the Jews and that means something quite specific in John's Gospel who say do you have a demon you must be a Samaritan there's a number of different mentions of Samaritans in the New Testament. Oh and to these we should add a mention of Simon Magus in the book of Acts who is traditionally thought to be a Samaritan. Certainly he lives and works and teaches in Samaria. What exactly we get from that is dependent on kind of which text you read. So if you're looking at kind of the Gospel of Matthew or if you're looking at the Gospel of Luke, you kind of get the impression that Samaritans are just sort of there you know like the Gospel of Matthew it's a really passing mention. It's like oh don't go into the cities of the Samaritans like go not to the Gentiles. It's like okay well the writer of Matthew's gospel conceives of Samaritans as in some way distinct from the category of Gentile but they're not included in this particular order of Jesus saying go send your disciples away. What does that mean about Samaritans as like an ethnic group or an identity? Very little they're just kind of there you know and that's sort of similar with Luke where the Samaritans are just sort of there. They are part and parcel of a representation of Israel that is variegated. Like the author of the Gospel of Luke has an understanding of Israel as a coalition might be one word for it. This is one of the reasons why the Jesus of Luke spends so much time eating with Pharisees as opposed to either of the other gospels right I either of the either of the other three Gospels. My students basically want to get rid of Mark because they think it doesn't have any original material in it. So clearly I've internalized a little bit of my students John's Gospel, John's Gospel is a little different because John's gospel does have an explicit and quite categorical sense of what a eudaios is of Jews, eudaioi in Greek, being a specific set of people who are opposed in some way to what it is that Jesus is doing. Whether that maps onto kind of the contemporary Jews, as in all contemporary Jews of Jesus, is an open question I think probably it doesn't. The category Jews means something specific for the author of John's gospel. And so Samaritans then play into that in really in quite an intriguing way. From John's Gospel we learn that at least some people in the first century are very capable of narrating a future for Israel and a messianic future for Israel that plays Samaritans and Jews off against each other to represent a third alternative. And that's what we get from this story in chapter four where scholars have fixated on this idea the woman says Jews and Samaritans hold nothing in common at one point and scholars fixate on this idea and go, oh from this we can extract a history we can say this means at this point in time Jews and Samaritans were estranged. But it doesn't. What it means is that for the author of the Gospel of John, playing Jews and Samaritans off against each other to represent a third alternative because then Jesus says a time is coming where neither of you will worship in these places, but you'll worship in spirits and truth, I'm paraphrasing, he plays them off against each other. I think this is actually this is a good way of putting this putting what I'm saying rather than extracting the historical state of the relationship of Jews and Samaritans to one another from the Gospels, I don't think the the evidence of the Gospels is sufficient for us to do that particularly convincingly what we can do is see how important it was for some first century people to think about the difference between Jews and Samaritans as meaningful and to kind of use that difference to point to alternative configurations of Israel facing religion. Which is what I would argue that the author of John's gospel is doing, right? Presenting a messianic version of Israel facing religion that is not contained and practiced by the contemporary Udai and is not contained and practiced by the contemporary Samaritans.
SPEAKER_01So understanding that and I completely understand the point you're making I think you're you're very clear understanding that there was an agenda of telling that story those stories in in in that way is it still possible though to understand if we were to flip it and look at New Testament references to the Samaritans or even rabbinic references to the Samaritans how Samaritans themselves seem to have viewed Jews and and possibly even Jesus?
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm from New Testament texts I don't I don't think so honestly I think the the the stories that we find in the New Testament are so embedded in the literary direction of each of the Gospels that trying to find anything about Samaritans from them, it's not even like looking at a cracked mirror because a cracked mirror still reflects it's like I don't know trying to see a reflection in a piece of wood. Right? The wood is not there for you right it's not there for you to see things it's there to be wood. The New Testament gospels are there to be wood. Rabbinic texts though definitely you can and that's partly because rabbinic texts deliberately and self-consciously reflective like rabbinic texts are another way of putting this is that rabbinic texts are super navel gazing like all the time especially when you get to the Babylon where rabbis will drill down on a previous tradition over and over and over again and just dig in, dig in, dig in. But a rabbinic text yes you can and that's that's a particularly interesting use of evidence for me because we don't have a huge amount of Samaritan literature from antiquity. But when you read some stories in rabbinic texts you can see how rabbis at least were worried that they looked to Samaritans. And you can I think start piecing together how Samaritans viewed rabbinic Israel from what it is that rabbis say about them. Sometimes this is really obvious. So there's a story in one of the earlier Palestinian midrash Genesis Rabbah just a commentary on the book of Genesis and it contains a bunch of stories. One of the stories relates it actually there's two occurrences of the same story in Genesis Rabbah. A rabbi is traveling to Jerusalem and is confronted by a Samaritan when passing by Gerizim and the Samaritan confronts the rabbi and says why aren't you praying on the holy mountain why are you going to the ruined house to pray? And they have a confrontation the story works out in a different way in each case in one case the rabbi refutes the Samaritan. In the other case the rabbi clams up, doesn't know what to say and the rabbi the person who's leading the rabbi's donkey refutes the Samaritan in either case there's a refutation but the main thing you can glean from this if you're interested in like okay well can we get at how Samaritans viewed rabbis is well absolutely we can. Because in this story is a written reflection of well it's written now a written reflection of rabbinic anxiety. Rabbinic anxiety about one being confronted by a Samaritan and two my instinct is that this accusation that Jews were worshipping at a ruined house probably does retain something that was actually said to rabbinic Jews by Samaritans. It's a very specific insult. It turns on a specific on a semantic of like religious corruption that we see at work in in rabbinic texts from the time levied against Samaritans. It's basically Samaritans and rabbis using the same language of corruption almost mirroring each other but against one another's holy places right so in rabbinic texts I think we can absolutely do what you what you what you're talking about. I think it's very possible to see or at least to to reconstruct with relative plausibility how it is at least some Samaritans thought about at least some rabbinic Jews.
SPEAKER_01And in that in that specific reference when they refer to the ruined house the is the Hebrew where where they're using or is it Aramaic Mekulkal like it's yeah. Okay. When they mean ruined do they mean like corrupted like it's a corrupted place of worship or is it because the the Jerusalem temple was already destroyed?
SPEAKER_00I mean I think it's kind of both. I mean Midrash is full of wordplay but the term is is yeah corrupted specifically and what's so interesting about that is that elsewhere in Palestinian Jewish literature this is exactly what rabbis say about Samaritans. The rabbis say to Samaritans you've become you've become corrupted you have corrupted your deeds at a certain point in time. So that's where I'm drawing the parallel to because like it's it strikes me as worth explaining that we find in the mouth of the Samaritan the same sort of references to corruption that we also find rabbis using to try and explain why they're turning against Samaritan.
SPEAKER_01Can you tell us more about the current book that that you're working on?
SPEAKER_00So a lot of what I talked about today is the preliminaries and the state of the field and kind of scholars have reached a moment where I think it's fair to say in print there is a lot more stuff on Samaritan Israelites than there were, especially over the last 30 years or so. 30 years or so ago if you'd wanted to find something out about the Samaritans, you would have had to do some bibliographic deep diving. You still have to do that to some extent. But there's there's just a lot more stuff out there. There is at least one overview volume you can pick it up it's a single volume and it will tell you like a bunch of stuff right my book in progress is about taking the next step connecting that new research and the new stability of research on Samaritan Israelites with ongoing discussion about the generation of religious identity in late antiquity. So one of the I think most important ideas that scholars have been investigating is is this well how do Judaism and Christianity come to have a sense of themselves as these kind of exclusivist religious traditions that seems to happen in this period of time between kind of like 250ish and 750ish at the end of which you have like the Babylonian Talmud which has a very distinct sense of itself as kind of a position that an Israelite could and should take and you also have a highly developed imperial Christian literature which is like this is what a Christian should be and we have a set of like ways of making that happen. Really the book takes that discussion that scholars are having and plugs Samaritans in and goes well one of the things that Jews and Christians talk about all the time is who gets to claim that they are the inheritors of Israel? Who gets to claim that their religious practice is in continuity with what happened before but we habitually reduce this to a binary we habitually reduce this to a to a contest playing out between Jews and Christians. The book goes hey there's another Israel-facing tradition at the same time represented in Jewish and Christian texts with their own liturgy and biblical interpretation what happens if we broaden our horizons how might we think about the generation of religious identity differently if we make it impossible for ourselves to view a contest over the legacy of Israel as a binary thing. So in the process I talk a bunch about representations of Samaritans in rabbinic literature. I talk a bunch about representations of Samaritans in their own literature, in the Samaritan liturgy that we have from late antiquity and in some Samaritans some of the earlier Samaritan Midrash I comment on how that leads us to view Christian policing of Christian identity differently especially in Palestine by analyzing Christian representations of Samaritans. And then I cash out some of the consequences of this for the contemporary study of the history of religion for moving past a binary habitual focus on Jews or Christians or Jews and Christians but so often not something that goes beyond that.
SPEAKER_01Well definitely keep me appraised of progress on the book I'd love to have you back on whenever it's done and and do a deep dive on it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah that would be super I would appreciate that um I'll definitely keep you in the loop.
SPEAKER_01Well this has been great and really fascinating and I appreciate you coming on.
SPEAKER_00Thank you very much