Do Samaritans still exist today?

From 141 people to about 900

The Samaritans came close to vanishing. Once the main population of Samaria, they rose against Byzantine rule in 484 and again in 529, when Justinian crushed them and tens of thousands were killed or enslaved. Conversion to Christianity and later to Islam thinned them further; many Muslim families of Nablus still trace their roots to Samaritans. By 1919 only 141 were left.

Then they recovered, helped by better medicine and by marriages with Jewish women. In 1954 Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, then Israel’s president, helped found a Samaritan quarter in Holon. During the First Intifada, in the late 1980s, the families still living in Nablus moved up the mountain to Kiryat Luza. Today about 900 Samaritans live in the two places, roughly half in each.

On the mountain they speak Arabic, in Holon Hebrew, and they pray in Samaritan Hebrew and Aramaic. The Gerizim community holds both Israeli and Palestinian citizenship, the only group that does.

Passover on Mount Gerizim

The Samaritans are the only people still offering the Passover sacrifice as Exodus describes it.

You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month; and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it at evening.

On the eve of their Passover the community gathers at the ceremonial ground on top of Gerizim, many of the men in white. After prayers, at sunset, the lambs are slaughtered together beside a stone-lined trench, and blood is daubed on worshipers’ foreheads, children’s too. The animals are cleaned, salted, skewered on long wooden poles and lowered into fire pits dug in the ground to roast, then eaten that night, as the law says: “roasted with fire, with unleavened bread” (Exodus 12:8). Every family is meant to bring a lamb; some years about sixty are offered, while visitors watch.

A Torah of their own

Their Bible is the five books of Moses and nothing else: the Samaritan Pentateuch, written in the Samaritan script, a descendant of the old Hebrew alphabet used before the Babylonian exile. It differs from the Jewish text in some 6,000 places, mostly spelling. The famous differences concern the mountain.

• The chosen place. Where Deuteronomy speaks of “the place which Yahweh your God shall choose” (Deuteronomy 12:5), the Samaritan text says “has chosen”: already chosen, and that place is Gerizim.
• The altar. Where the Jewish text of Deuteronomy 27:4 tells Israel to build an altar on Mount Ebal, the Samaritan text says Gerizim.
• A commandment. Their Ten Commandments count the usual ten as nine and add a tenth: build an altar on Gerizim.

About 1,900 of the variants agree with the Greek Septuagint, so scholars treat the Samaritan text as an independent witness to the Torah. Tradition says its most treasured copy, the Abisha Scroll, was written by a great-grandson of Aaron; scholars date its pieces to the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. The community’s high priest, in office since 2013, is the 133rd in the Samaritan count.

How a tiny people stays alive

With so few families, marrying often means marrying a relative, so geneticists at an Israeli hospital check every proposed match. To widen the circle, the Holon community has allowed men to marry Jewish Israeli women willing to keep Samaritan law, and a few women from Russia and Ukraine have married into the Gerizim community. The law they take on is strict: a woman lives apart during her period and after childbirth, following their reading of Leviticus.

The word everyone knows

Most people know the name in another sense: Jesus’s parable made “Samaritan” a word for a stranger who helps. Britain’s helpline the Samaritans, founded by Chad Varah in 1953, and the “good Samaritan” laws that protect people who stop at an accident both borrow it. Why a Samaritan hero was such a shock is told in why Jews and Samaritans hated each other.