Samaritans

Is anybody here well versed in the history of the Israelites/Samaritans? Lately I've been really intrigued by the latter group. It seems that the Septuagint, Qumran texts, and the many of Vetus Latinae (the old Latin bibles predating the Vulgate) manuscripts agree with the Samaritan bible in many ways. The Samaritan bible also seems to be closer than the Masoretic text to the Hebrew originals, in that they retain a more archaic script, and lack nikkud and other orthographic features which may alter the meaning of a text. That being said, I think the Samaritan version of the 10th commandment is strange, very meticulous and long winded compared to the previous 9, and missing in all save the Samaritan version of Exodus.

So what do you think it is, Veeky Forums? Are the Samaritans just a bunch of converted Assyrian pagans as it is written in 2nd Kings, or are they authentic Israelites? Or is it something in between?

I have been attempting to reconcile myself to Christianity for a long time now, and while it has made me a more peaceful person, I have yet to find any true belief. This issue is among the great stepping blocks in this, that Christianity may have inherited the wrong Torah.

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Bumping.

>are they authentic Israelites?
I'm nowhere near an expert on Samaritans, but considering what research I have done on them, and what I know about their history from the experience I have with second-temple period history (and archaeological knowledge of periods before it), I'm inclined to think that they are.

The split between Jews and Samaritans really only seems to occur after the captivity, and was mostly caused by small differences (like the right location of the temple) at the time. Considering that the people brought to Babylon were mostly elites, and most common people probably stayed behind, something about the situation seems a little fishy. And what is known archaeologically about how religion was structured before the Babylonian captivity makes things very complicated, since it seems like Jerusalem was not really the exclusive place of worship for all Jews, or even an important one for people outside of Judah (which was kind of a backwater). Because of details like this, it's really not hard to see evidence that the Samaritans probably continued practicing Judaism as they had before conquest, and were Jews until a group of priests who had decided on a bunch of new beliefs and practices while in Babylon showed up one day and said they weren't.

Israelite is probably an incredibly correct label for them, since what they practice might be closer to religion as it existed in the Kingdom of Israel. There are certainly a few scholars who see this is a possibility and look at Samaritan texts to try to find information about what early (or more northern) Judaism was like.

There are alot of theories on who the lost ten tribes of Israel are.

>British Israelism
>Black Hebrews
>Folks all over the world claiming to be descendants of Israel

Lots of WeWuzing going on so it's hard to figure out the truth.

Very interesting, I am no expert on the Babylonian exile, in spite of knowing that most of the exiled Jews were the elites, I never considered class to be a possible explanation for the creation of sects. Would you say that the effect of this was immediate? Because the Maccabes seem to have been embraced by all except the Samaritans (for obvious reasons), in spite of class differences.

Well, I think that is a somewhat different subject. It actually says in the Nevim portion of the Jewish Tanakh that the Samaritans are imposters, and not Israelites. It is interesting, I should note, that Samaritans entertain all of the "lost tribe" claims that mainstream Jews do.

>The 2004 article on the genetic ancestry of the Samaritans by Shen et al. concluded from a sample comparing Samaritans to several Jewish populations, all currently living in Israel—representing the Beta Israel, Ashkenazi Jews, Iraqi Jews, Libyan Jews, Moroccan Jews, and Yemenite Jews, as well as Israeli Druze and Palestinians—that "the principal components analysis suggested a common ancestry of Samaritan and Jewish patrilineages. Most of the former may be traced back to a common ancestor in what is today identified as the paternally inherited Israelite high priesthood (Cohanim) with a common ancestor projected to the time of the Assyrian conquest of the kingdom of Israel."

>Archaeologists Aharoni, et al., estimated that this "exile of peoples to and from Israel under the Assyrians" took place during ca. 734–712 BCE. The authors speculated that when the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, resulting in the exile of many of the Israelites, a subgroup of the Israelites that remained in the Land of Israel "married Assyrian and female exiles relocated from other conquered lands, which was a typical Assyrian policy to obliterate national identities." The study goes on to say that "Such a scenario could explain why Samaritan Y chromosome lineages cluster tightly with Jewish Y lineages, while their mitochondrial lineages are closest to Iraqi Jewish and Israeli Arab mtDNA sequences." Non-Jewish Iraqis were not sampled in this study; however, mitochondrial lineages of Jewish communities tend to correlate with their non-Jewish host populations, unlike paternal lineages which almost always correspond to Israelite lineages.

I think class was mostly important in that it gave some people more authority. It's fairly clear that Judaism underwent a lot of changes during the exile, and the people telling the public to accept those changes post-exile were high-ranking priests and nobles. They had they authority to make those changes happen; it's hard to say how long it took, though.

>Because the Maccabes seem to have been embraced by all
Not at all. They just won the civil war and had many enemies like the hellenistic jews, the zadekim priests they deposed (the death sea scrolls sect), the supporters of King David's line whos claim they usurped etc.

the thing is that the Assyrians obviously couldn't and didn't deport everyone in Israel. Kings is flatly wrong on this. What's more likely is that they did the same thing Nebuchadnezzar did to Jerusalem: deport most of the capital's population. In other words Samaria itself would be repopulated, not the entire countryside. However I'm fairly certain that the development of monotheism was a southern tradition. Most if not all of our non-torah literature that makes up the OT is the product of Jews. It's fairly clear that monotheism is primarily a post-babylonian exile development since it figures so prominently in monotheistic tirades from Jeremiah and Ezekiel to even Deuteronomy. Yes Samaritans continued to write in the older script but this is simply the result of Jews not being as isolated from outside influence partially because of the size of the exilic population even before the Jewish Wars of the 60sAD. Knowledge of the older script continued among Jews as it is on Hasmonean coins.