Brent Pollard
A Forgotten People Who Never Left
Would it surprise you to learn that the Samaritans are still with us? Fewer than a thousand of them remain, clustered near Mount Gerizim—the very mountain a weary Teacher once gazed upon as He spoke to a woman at a well. “Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men must worship” (John 4:20, NASB 1995). That sentence has a long history. It reaches back seven centuries before a single water jar was ever left beside that Samaritan road.
Modern genetics has added a curious wrinkle to the account. Commercial DNA analysis reports that Samaritans cluster neither with ethnic Jews nor with Arabs, despite having lived among both peoples for millennia. Their Y-chromosome lineage, however, does appear to link them to ancient Jewish roots. In a strange way, a laboratory has handed us a footnote to 2 Kings 17.
What the Assyrians Really Did
We are prone to imagining the captivities as a total evacuation—every Israelite marched off, every home left empty, every village reduced to a ruin. It is a tidy picture, and it is wrong. The Assyrian Empire was not in the business of emptying lands. It was in the business of breaking identities. Mass deportation and resettlement were policies designed to smother rebellion and to blur the memory of nationhood, and the Assyrians typically removed only the elite: the leaders, the skilled craftsmen, the warrior class—the very people most likely to foment a revolt.
The ordinary farmer, the village potter, the shepherd on the hillside—many of these were left where they had always been.
Sargon’s Oddly Specific Number
Sargon II took credit for the fall of Samaria, though the siege had largely been the work of his predecessor, Shalmaneser V. That is the way of kings and their inscriptions. Still, the figure he recorded is worth pausing over: 27,290 people. That is not the round, swollen number of a boaster; it has the flavor of an actual tally. By contrast, his son Sennacherib claimed to have carried off more than 200,000 captives from the kingdom of Judah—a figure that strains credulity, given that Sennacherib had only swept through several Judean towns before ever reaching the walls of Jerusalem. One wonders whether suburban Judah contained so many souls to take in the first place.
And as every student of Scripture remembers, Sennacherib’s Jerusalem campaign did not end with a triumphal procession. It ended with a single messenger of God walking through a camp at night. “Then it happened that night that the angel of the Lord went out and struck 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians” (2 Kings 19:35, NASB 1995). Isaiah had already announced the outcome: Sennacherib would hear a report, return home, and fall by the sword (cf. 2 Kings 19:7). Every word of it came to pass, though the assassination by his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer would not arrive for another twenty years.
Hoshea’s Samaria, we should remember, was a city of only about eight hectares. Even allowing for the wealth the prophet Amos lampooned with his ivory beds (Amos 6:4), the population could not have been vast. Add to that the earlier Assyrian sweeps under Tiglath-pileser III, when “Ijon and Abel-beth-maacah and Janoah and Kedesh and Hazor and Gilead and Galilee, all the land of Naphtali” were taken away (2 Kings 15:29, NASB 1995), and Sargon’s modest figure begins to look entirely believable.
The Making of a Mixed People
Here is where our story bends. Into the half-emptied villages of the northern kingdom, the Assyrians planted new settlers “from Babylon and from Cuthah and from Avva and from Hamath and Sepharvaim” (2 Kings 17:24, NASB 1995). These newcomers carried their gods with them. God, in turn, sent lions among them. The frightened settlers sent word back to the Assyrian king: they needed someone who could tell them how the local deity wished to be worshiped. A priest from among the exiles was sent to instruct them.
What sort of instruction did he give? We are not told. We know only that a syncretism took root—an uneasy marriage of the worship of the God of Israel with the old inherited cults. It is worth remembering that Israel’s perennial temptation had never been simply to abandon the Lord; it had been to worship Him in vain. Archaeological evidence from the ancient southern Levant suggests that some of YHWH’s worshippers tried to pair Him with Asherah, a thing God Himself would never tolerate. The new Samaria inherited a habit of mind that was already centuries old.
When the Jews returned from Babylon to rebuild the temple, the Samaritans offered to help, insisting they had been sacrificing to God since the days of Esarhaddon (Ezra 4:1–3). Their offer was refused. Whatever their sincerity, the returning exiles saw a people whose worship was not clean.
Josephus and the Muddied Record
The historian Flavius Josephus, writing centuries later, describes a temple on Mount Gerizim founded in the time of Alexander the Great. According to his account, it was built for a priest expelled from Jerusalem for refusing to put away his foreign wife. Nehemiah mentions such a priest, though without naming him (Nehemiah 13:28). Josephus gives him a name—Manasseh—and ties the whole affair to the Hellenistic period. The trouble is that Nehemiah’s ministry lay deep in the Persian period, and the archaeology of Gerizim shows a sanctuary already standing there before the Greeks arrived. Josephus has preserved something of the tradition; he has also compressed the centuries into a shape that does not fit the ground.
Gerizim and the Woman at the Well
Names, we forget, are often given from the outside. Many of the people we call by one name called themselves by another; the label sticks only because the outsiders made it stick. The Samaritans did not call themselves Samaritans. They called themselves “keepers,” or simply Israelites. They were, in their own eyes, the faithful remnant, while the Jews to the south were the innovators. By the time Jesus passed through Sychar, a settled tradition among them claimed that the priest Eli had corrupted the Torah by moving the place of worship from Mount Gerizim to Shiloh. Every Samaritan who looked across the valley at that mountain believed he was seeing the true house of God.
Read John 4 again with this in your ear. When the woman says, “Our fathers worshiped in this mountain,” she is not making small talk. She is stating a creed. Two peoples, two mountains, two rival accounts of where history went wrong. And Jesus answers her not by choosing a side of the valley but by lifting the whole question: “an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father…. But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (John 4:21, 23, NASB 1995).
What the Well Still Says to Us
Every generation wants to relocate worship. Some want to move it up a mountain; some want to move it into a sanctuary; some want to shrink it down into their own private preferences. The gospel moves it somewhere else entirely. It moves it to the heart of the one who worships, and it anchors that heart to the Savior who, of all places, chose a Samaritan well to disclose plainly that He was the Messiah (John 4:26). If a tired Jewish Teacher could cross a valley of seven centuries’ hostility to speak life to a woman drawing water at noon, then there is no history too tangled for Him to untangle and no heritage too mixed for Him to redeem. The Samaritans are still among us—and so is the thirst He came to satisfy.
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