Why did Jews and Samaritans hate each other?

What the Gospels show

The New Testament never explains the feud; it takes it for granted. When Jesus asks a Samaritan woman for water at Jacob’s well, she is astonished, and John adds a note for his readers.

The Samaritan woman therefore said to him, “How is it that you, being a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.)

A Samaritan village refuses to receive Jesus “because he was traveling with his face set toward Jerusalem” (Luke 9:53), and James and John offer to call down fire on it. When he first sends out the Twelve, Matthew has him say, “don’t enter into any city of the Samaritans” (Matthew 10:5). And his opponents in Jerusalem use the word as an insult: “Don’t we say well that you are a Samaritan, and have a demon?” (John 8:48).

Two stories about who they were

The quarrel starts with ancestry, and each side tells it differently. The Jewish account begins in 2 Kings 17. Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel around 722 BC, deported many of its people and resettled the land.

The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, from Cuthah, from Avva, and from Hamath and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel.

These newcomers “feared Yahweh, and also served their own gods” (2 Kings 17:33). The rabbis later called the Samaritans Kutim, Cutheans, after one of those cities.

The Samaritans tell the opposite story. They call themselves Shamerim, “keepers” of the law, the descendants of Joseph’s tribes, Ephraim and Manasseh, who never left. In their account the split came centuries earlier, when the priest Eli abandoned Gerizim for a rival shrine at Shiloh. Most historians today think the Samaritans grew mainly out of the Israelites who stayed in the north, and genetic studies agree.

Two mountains

The deeper fight was over where God should be worshiped. The Samaritans read their Torah as pointing to Mount Gerizim, above Shechem, today’s Nablus, the mountain of blessing in Deuteronomy 11:29. When the exiles came back from Babylon to rebuild Jerusalem’s Temple, people settled in the land by the Assyrians offered to help, “for we seek your God as you do” (Ezra 4:2), and were turned away. A temple rose on Gerizim instead, probably in the fifth century BC.

Then came the blow neither side forgot. Around 110 BC the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus took Shechem and destroyed the Samaritan temple (Josephus, Antiquities 13.255–256). More than a century later, the woman at the well still points up at its mountain: “Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship” (John 4:20).

Bones in the Temple, blood on the road

In Jesus’s lifetime the hostility turned violent. Under the Roman prefect Coponius, around AD 6–9, Josephus says, Samaritans slipped into the Temple at Passover and scattered human bones in its porticoes (Antiquities 18.29–30). Around AD 50, villagers at Ginae killed Galilean pilgrims crossing Samaria, and Jewish bands raided Samaritan villages in revenge (Antiquities 20.118–136). In AD 36 Roman troops attacked Samaritans gathered on Gerizim, and the complaint cost Pontius Pilate his post.

Why a Samaritan hero stung

That is the charge inside Jesus’s best-known parable. A man lies beaten on the Jericho road; a priest passes by, then a Levite.

But a certain Samaritan, as he traveled, came where he was. When he saw him, he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine.

For the first listeners the shock was the hero’s identity, the man from the people they trusted least. Luke tells a second story the same way: of ten lepers healed, only one comes back to give thanks, “and he was a Samaritan” (Luke 17:16). The Samaritans are still there, too: about 900 of them live today.