JOHN178 - The Ancient, Bloody Origin Story of the Samaritans

Well, we got juicy stuff today, because we're talking about a blood feud, as from time to time comes up when you study the ancient world or the world. But it's a really juicy blood feud. There's some fascinating stuff we're going to look at today in terms of the history of the bad blood between the Samaritans of the ancient world and the Jews of the ancient world.

And of course, all of this is coming up because we're in John 4, and the whole vision of Jesus thing, the whole idea of the kingdom and the values of the kingdom, it's interesting because if you read it through the lenses of the original audience, in all the Gospels, the test case that it runs up against is either explicitly or implicitly, yeah, but what about the Samaritans?

Like all of this sounds really good. Like love your enemy and turn the other cheek and all that, but what about the Samaritans? And it's interesting when you dig into it and you learn about the blood feud, as we're going to do today, that what you get from Jesus in response to it is kind of none of the popular responses to a blood feud that you would get today.

I mean, the knee-jerk reaction to a blood feud today, for I would say a decent majority of people, is a pretty unprecedented knee-jerk reaction, but it it is how we think now. And that would be well, who has less power of the two parties in the blood feud? Who has most recently lost in the conflict? For whatever reason, the way we're wired, I mean, some people would say it was Marx.

I don't know, maybe, but for whatever reason, the way we're wired culturally in the West is to think, okay, whoever has the the lower hand is probably the ethical one and the good guy here. And we would need to be very gentle in how we analyze the problem with the party that has the weaker hand right now in view.

This is not how people have thought about things throughout history. I'm not saying they're right, I'm not saying we're right now. What I am saying is Jesus does not go with that response. Jesus' response anytime the Samaritan thing comes up is to take the side of the Jewish version of the story. That is to say, Jesus does not treat the Samaritan temple or the Samaritan sacrificial system as being legitimate.

He never talks about that as like, oh, that's also my father's house. He doesn't go and cleanse or purge that. It doesn't really concern him a lot, but he cares about the people. Jesus demonstrates a very unique willingness for this time period to go and engage with the Samaritan people and to pass through Samaritan communities.

And he's even willing to make an effort to go and interact with Samaritans and seems to want Samaritans to be reached with the message of the kingdom. Jesus is very unique when compared to his contemporaries in how he responds to this. He also doesn't seem to treat the whole Samaritan Jewish blood feud thing as being like the reason that he's here.

He's aware of it and he does kingdom ministry in the context of it. So he's not like naive to it or anything. His orientation toward the Samaritan situation should be noted. He's aware of the fight, he has compassion on Samaritans, and in terms of the big theological narrative, yeah, it's not even a question.

The Jewish one is right and the Samaritan one is mistaken. Okay, with that in mind, where did the blood feud come from? Who are the Samaritans? Well, we don't know exactly for sure who the Samaritans are, you know, genetically or as a people group, but we got some pretty good ideas. One thing that is worthy of noting when we talk about this is part of the reason we have some pretty good ideas is because there are still Samaritans.

Not a ton of them. I've heard estimates that it might not even be a thousand people right now who would say we are Samaritans, but they still worship on one of the two mountains that was the heart of Samaritan territory way, way back in the day, and they got like white robe outfits and stuff. I watched some of their worship a while back.

So this is still barely a thing all the way to this day, which means that when our story starts here in about 900 BC, just a little bit after, and we add that up with where we are now, you know, 2000 and change. This is like a 3,000-year-old tradition that we're talking about with the Samaritans. So in 1 Kings 1624, this would be the age of two kingdoms in the Old Testament.

You had a northern kingdom of Israel, and you had a southern kingdom of Judah. Now, before this, there was a United Kingdom, Saul, and then David, and then Solomon were the only three kings of the original United Kingdom of Israel that contained all of the tribes that trace their heritage all the way back to the patriarchs, to the descendants of Abraham.

After those three reigns, Saul went okay, David went pretty well with a few exceptions, Solomon went very well economically, pretty well in a lot of ways, with a few exceptions. After that, stuff gets weird. The northern kingdom is habitually a mess. They don't put one good king on the throne, they engage in idol worship, they reject and persecute the prophets, and as a result, they don't last very long.

The southern kingdom does better, but still not great. They put a la a bunch of lousy kings on the throne, they have a few good ones. So the northern kingdom runs from somewhere in the 900s to 722 BC. So they got a you know 200-year change run. And then finally their awful behavior puts them on a collision course with the mighty, gigantic empire of the Assyrians, and eventually the Assyrians come and wipe them out.

That's very important to our story. Let me just round things out on the Southern Kingdom of Judah, though. So northern kingdom wiped out in 722 by Assyria. Southern Kingdom, which was a little bit better of Judah. Sometimes they kind of listened to the prophets. They had a few good kings. They kept it together longer, and they are very famously hauled away into captivity and have their temple destroyed by the Babylonians under the authority of King Nebuchadnezzar.

That's in 586 BC. So the southern kingdom outlasts the northern kingdom by 135, 140 years, whatever that adds up to. So back when things were a united kingdom in 1 Kings 1624, there's a fella named Omri. And Omri buys the hill of Samaria from somebody named Shamer and builds the northern capital of Samaria.

Here's let me just read you the verse. I got it right here. Uh okay. In the 31st year of Asa, king of Judah, that's the southern kingdom, Omri became king of Israel, that's the northern kingdom, and he reigned 12 years, six of them in Terza. He bought the hill of Samaria from Shamer for two talents of silver, and built a city on the hill, calling it Samaria, after Shamer, the name of the former owner of the hill.

Well, there you go, it's right there in the Bible where the Samaritans get their name. There was some dude named Shamer who had a real estate transaction in 880 BC, and the name stuck. Samaria then is the capital of the northern kingdom, and it gets destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 BC, but it's not so much the destruction of Samaria, and in fact, sometimes Samaria is even used as a substitute name for the northern kingdom or Israel.

So in 2 Kings 17, 5 and 6, we get the calamity of the north. In the 12th year of Ahaz, king of Judah, Hoshea, son of Elah, became king of Israel in Samaria. And he reigned nine years, northern kingdom. Once again, he did evil in the eyes of the Lord. Well, of course he did, they all did, but not like the kings of Israel who preceded him.

Oh, so it was different evil, or maybe slightly less evil, but still evil, like evil plus. Great job. Shalmanesser, king of Assyria, S-H-A-L-M-A-N-E-S-E-R. It's just an awesome name. That's a historically well-known character, definitely a guy, Shalmanesser, king of Assyria, came up to attack Hoshea, who had been Shalmanesser's vassal and had paid him tribute.

But the king of Assyria discovered that Hoshea was a traitor, for he'd sent envoys to So, king of Egypt, and he no longer paid tribute to the king of Assyria as he had done year by year. Therefore, Shalmanesser seized him and put him in prison. The king of Assyria invaded the entire land, marched against Samaria, and laid siege to it for three years.

In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria and deported the Israelites to Assyria. He settled them in Halah, in Gozon on the Habor River, and in the towns of the Medes. This took place because the Israelites had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of Egypt from under the power of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.

They worshipped other gods and followed the practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before them, as well as the practices that the kings of Israel had introduced. So the text is absolutely explicit. This wasn't just a political failure. This isn't the normal comings and goings of warfare in the ancient Near East.

This is the judgment of God per the terms of the covenant. Samaria was lousy, the northern kingdom was lousy, they were unfaithful, they were idolaters. And the author of Second King seems to be saying they absolutely got what they deserved. One quick historical note before I round out this passage and hit pause for the day.

If you go and dig around through Assyrian history, you will note that in 722 there were two kings. One is Shalmanesser, who we've been talking about, but somewhere in that fateful year 722 BC, Sargon II came to power. And he's a pretty interesting historical character for a lot of reasons. Maybe we'll have time to get into that later.

So the Bible talks about Shalmanesser's role in the fall of the North, but history tells us that there was another guy right on his heels who must have done mop-up duty, and that was Sargon II. So both of these kings probably had the same plan for what to do to absolutely punish, crush, and make an example of a traitorous vassal, a traitorous servant state that was paying tribute, but then stopped paying tribute and tried to rope in the Egyptians to help them rebel against Assyria.

The Assyrians were mean, not like the Persians. The Persians were comparably nice. The Babylonians were pretty mean, but the Assyrians were known for their cruelty. Everybody knew as soon as this went public, the northern kingdom's done. Samaria is going to be crushed. This people group is going to be lost to history.

Well, but that leaves us with two questions that we got to tackle tomorrow. What happened to the people who lived in the city of Samaria and the countryside of the northern kingdom when they got deported to those locations? Halal goes on in the towns of the Medes. Did they just vanish? Did they continue to be Israelite?

What happened? Well, we'll try to game that out tomorrow. And then the second question is: well, this was a perfectly nice place to live, Israel. I mean, this is a land flowing with milk and honey. Probably somebody else was gonna live there. Who did the Assyrians move in there in the place of the people they kicked out?

All of this is very important to understanding the ancient blood feud between the Jews and the Samaritans. And we'll keep making progress on this. Manyana. Blood feuds, so, so, so, so fun. And as a final note, if you have one of those, you know, maybe this little section in the podcast is a reminder that it might be worth trying to patch that up, seeing if reconciliation might be possible.

That always feels good when you're just like, dang it, I'm just picking up the phone. I'm just doing it right now. If indeed it is the kind of thing that could be safely or reasonably reconciled. Just food for thought. Today might be a good day to do that. All right, I'm out the door. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast.

Let's do this again soon.

JOHN178 - The Ancient, Bloody Origin Story of the Samaritans

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