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Wednesday, 7 December 2016

Samaritan, member of a community of Jews,





https://www.britannica.com/topic/Samaritan
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Samaritan

Samaritan, member of a community of Jews, now nearly extinct, that claims to be related by blood to those Jews of ancient Samaria who were not deported by the Assyrian conquerors of the kingdom of Israel in 722 bc. The Samaritans call themselves Bene-Yisrael (“Children of Israel”), or Shamerim (“Observant Ones”), for their sole norm of religious observance is the Pentateuch (first five books of the Old Testament). Other Jews call them simply Shomronim (Samaritans); in the Talmud (rabbinical compendium of law, lore, and commentary), they are called Kutim, suggesting that they are rather descendants of Mesopotamian Cuthaeans, who settled in Samaria after the Assyrian conquest.
Jews who returned to their homeland after the Babylonian Exile would not accept the help of the dwellers of the land, who were later identified as the Samaritans, in the building of the Second Temple of Jerusalem.    Consequently, in the 4th century bc, the Samaritans built their own temple in Nāblus (Shechem), at the base of Mount Gerizim, some 25 miles (40 km) north of Jerusalem. The low esteem that Jews had for the Samaritans was the background of Christ’s famous parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37).{
Since the 1970s their population has held at about 500; they are somewhat evenly distributed between Nāblus, which is also the residence of the high priest, and the city of H̱olon, where a synagogue is maintained, just south of Tel Aviv–Yafo. All live in semi-isolation, marrying only within their own community. They pray in Hebrew but adopted Arabic as their vernacular after the Muslim conquest of ad 636.  The current population worldwide is 580 million people that consist of the Pentecostals, Baptists, many Catholics and millions of Protestants who are grafted in by faith in the Spirit.   See Romans 10 and 11. Their faith is to practice the Pikuach Nefesh; the saving of a life.    

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in biblical literature


Two-page spread from Johannes Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible, c. 1450–55.

It was in this period that enmity between the Jews, or Judaeans, as they came to be called, and the Samaritans, a term applied to the inhabitants of the former northern kingdom (Israel), was exacerbated. It has been surmised that this goes back to the old political rivalry between Israel and Judah or even further back to the conflict between the tribes of Joseph and Judah. Scholars ascribe the...
...described in Nehemiah as having taken place on the autumnal New Year festival. The “book of the Torah of Moses” is mentioned and the emphasis is on its instruction and exposition. The Samaritans, the descendants of Israelites intermarried with foreigners in the old northern kingdom that fell in 722 bce, became hostile to the Judaeans in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah...

The Western Wall, also known as the Wailing Wall, in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Outside the pale of Judaism in most, though not all, respects were the Samaritans, who, like the Sadducees, refused to recognize the validity of the Oral Law; in fact, the break between the Sadducees and the Samaritans did not occur until the conquest of Shechem by John Hyrcanus (128 bce). Like the later so-called Qumrān covenanters (the monastic group associated with the Dead Sea...

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