Nadene Goldfoot
Hoshea was the last king of the kingdom of Israel in 721 BCE. It had been kept as the Kingdom of Israel in 933 BCE by Jeroboam after Solomon's death and then later was called the Kingdom of Samaria by 890 BCE as the city Samaria became the capitol. Israel-Samaria existed for 280 years after that as a separate kingdom from the Kingdom of Judah, a much smaller kingdom. The USA is now only 245 years old. It will be 280 by 2056, G-d willing.
When King Solomon died in 933 BCE, there was the question of his son, Rehoboam (933-917 BCE) and Solomon's high taxes. Rehoboam said he would keep these high taxes in his government and the Israelites rebelled. The Israelites were made up of the other 10 tribes of Jacob, and Rehoboam represented the 11th tribe of Judah, the southern end of Israel, of which Jerusalem lay.
The Israelites rebelled and ceded from the union of the 12 tribes or states. They chose their own king, who happened to be the Ephraimite, Jeroboam (933-912 BCE) who was Solomon's superintendent of forced labor during the reign of Solomon. He was the one who had led this revolt that turned into a Civil War causing the ceding from the union. After running to Egypt for safety, he returned when Solomon died and led a delegation to King Rehoboam and talked about the taxes and labor problems. Most kings coming after him were from the tribe of Ephraim. Israel-Samaria was the largest of the 2 kingdoms, made up of the tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh, Issachar, Zebulun, Naphtali, Asher, Dan, and across the Jordan River on the eastern side were Reuben, Gad, and part of Manasseh.
The kingdom of Israel had wealth and political importance that was much greater than Judah had. All Judah had of importance was the city of Jerusalem with the Temple of Solomon. However, one must realize that this new kingdom of Israel without Judah was now born out of violence. It perpetuated this tradition and was the subject of constant revolution. In the course of its existence of 210 years, it had had 19 different kings belonging to 9 different dynasties. 10 had died by violence and 7 ruled for less than 2 years. People had gained the throne by slaying its king, who may have even been a relative. Though this hunger for power wasn't new in the world of Rome or Greece or elsewhere, it was not expected from King Saul's Israel or why he had fought so hard to create their special state.
Peaceful conditions came only under THE HOUSE OF OMRI. King Omri maintained peace and prosperity under 4 successive monarchs from 887-744 BCE. The Assyrians called his kingdom by his name for the rest of its existence, or the Kingdom of Omri. Omri bought the city in 880 BCE of Samaria (Shomron) that was on a hill from Shemer. It occupied 25 acres. It is 7 miles NW of Shehem, now renamed Nablus, occupied by Palestinians. It is part of today's SAMARIA.
Then there was the HOUSE OF JEHU who had 5 rulers from 874-744 BCE. During this period, the kingdom reached its greatest power, conducting successful campaigns against neighboring states, enjoying much luxury, and at one time extending its sway as far as the Gulf of Akaba.
Israel's strength was sapped in being in perpetual warfare with the Kingdom of Damascus (Syria), and both ultimately fell before the advancing power of Assyria.
The capture of Samaria by Sargon II in 721 BCE ended the history of the KINGDOM OF ISRAEL, though some of its traditions were preserved thereafter by the Samaritans.
The religious life of the kingdom of Israel was on a relatively low level. This was partly as a result of the deliberate policy of its first rulers who set up local sanctuaries in order to divert their subjects from Jerusalem. Only a minority of the biblical prophets like Hosea and Amos had worked in the Northern Kingdom of Israel. However, in the Book of Kings, we see lengthy accounts of the prophets Elijah and Elisha's endeavors to put an end to idolatry and social injustice. Over 210 years, they had just 4 prophets teaching them the religion they had thrown down the toilet either accidently or on purpose in favor of the idol-worshipping that took its place.
Sargon II was the King of Assyria from 721-712 BCE. During the siege of Samaria which he brought to a successful conclusion, caused the exiling of many of the Israelite people. Where they were taken was unknown until this date, found to be many of the Pashtuns of India, Afghanistan and Pakistan who are Muslims today. Sargon II resettled the capital of Israel with Cutheans who intermingled with the remnants of the former population. The Cutheans and Israel's former population of who had remained of the 10 Lost Tribes kidnapping became the population of the Samaritans.
In 720 BCE, he defeated a military alliance which included the remnants of the Israelites of Samaria. He was assassinated and was succeeded by Sennacherib, son of Sargon II. King Sennacherib (705-681 BCE) was busy constantly in fighting against Babylon and Elam until 689 BCE. This is when the kings of Phoenicia and Judah, led by Hezekiah, rose in revolt. Sennacherib invaded Judah in 701 BCE. He captured 46 cities, but not Jerusalem, and took many prisoners again from this country. A plague that broke out in his camp caused him to retreat, most likely with his prisoners.
From 701 BCE to 70 CE, what had become of Israel-Samaria? That's a period of 771 years. As we learned, the people became the Samaritans from the natives of Israel and the Cutheans. Who were the Cutheans? They seemed to be the Scythians, described as barbarians, the most savage of all, aliens, uncivilized and uncouth, barbaric.
A Talmudic term for Samaritans, alluding to their reported origin, is the Kutim.(II Kings 17:24). The term was used occasionally to denote any person or group rejecting the Oral Law. It is also the name of one of the minor tractates appended to the Talmud in which the relationships between Samaritans, Jews, and Gentiles are discussed.
The newly created Samaritans kept the capital of Samaria as their capital. They first called themselves Bene Yisrael or Shomerim (the keepers of the Law). They were mostly descended from the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh (II Chron 34:9; and Jer. 41:5). with an admixture of the non-Israelite colonists (II Kings 17:24-41). I notice that the Israelites were still the majority population. Ephraimites were from the younger son of Joseph and Manassahites were from the first son of Joseph and Asenath. Joseph was Jacob's son by Rachel, her first before Benjamin was born. The Tribe of Judah was from Judah, Jacob's 4th son by Leah, Rachel's sister.
A note on Ephraimites: In the period of the Judges, Ephraimites claimed priority among the Israelite tribes, partly because their religious center was situated at Shiloh in their territory. The civil War centered on the tribe of Ephraim to which Jeroboam, the 1st northern King belonged. The prophets would later speak of THE HOUSE OF JUDAH and the HOUSE OF EPHRAIM. as representing the 2 branches of the Hebrew people.
The Samaritan, SANBALLAT, (Sanballat the Horonite – or Sanballat I – was a Samaritan leader and official of the Achaemenid Empire of Greater Iran who lived in the mid to late 5th century BC and was a contemporary of Nehemiah.) attempted to have political and religious influence over Judah. The result was that his son-in-law was driven from Jerusalem. Sanballat then built a rival Temple on Mt. Gerizim which was destroyed by John Hyreanus in about 128 BCE. The territory between Judea and Galilee was still part of Samaria. The Samaritans did not participate in the Jewish revolt from 66 to 70 CE and were not in Jerusalem when the Romans burnt down the city and Temple in 70.
486 CE: Zeno destroyed the 2nd Samaritan Temple on Gerizim and built a Christian church in its stead.
529 CE: Emperor Justinian issued a decree against the Samaritans and thereafter, their autonomous existence practically ended. Samarians were not considered as PEOPLE OF THE BOOK like the Jews were, and suffered under Islam, and their numbers dwindled rapidly.
1990: 530 Samaritans were living in Nablus and Holon. Their synagogue housing the ancient Pentateuch is at Mt. Gerizim near Nablus and there they hold their annual Passover sacrifice.
The present-day population has been consistently divided between the West Bank and Israel.. Samaritans in the West Bank live in Qiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim, while those in Israel are concentrated in the city of Holon, just outside Tel Aviv. ... Samaritans in Holon and Qiryat Luza today speak Hebrew and Arabic. Holon is a city on the central coastal strip of Israel, south of Tel Aviv. Holon is part of the metropolitan Gush Dan area. In 2019 it had a population of 196,282. Holon has the second-largest industrial zone in Israel, after Haifa. Its jurisdiction is 19,200 dunams and its population is about 194,273 residents as of 2018 according to CBS data.
A diaspora of Samaritans existed in Egypt from the time of the Ptolemies and lasted until the 18th century. A Samaritan synagogue in Rome was destroyed in about 500 CE. There were Samaritans in Babylonia in the Talmudic Period and in Syria in the 17th century.
If if were up to me, I'd give them an award for keeping the faith of the Jewish people for this whole time after they had lost their leadership and help that the Temple in Jerusalem gave to them. Evidently they still considered themselves as Jewish or at least the followers of Moses. The Samaritans of today do live in Israel and are citizens. Their differencs from Judaism are: Samaritans believe Judaism and the Jewish Torah have been corrupted by time and no longer serve the duties God mandated on Mount Sinai. Jews view the Temple Mount as the most sacred location in their faith, while Samaritans regard Mount Gerizim as their holiest site.
"Many people who know this parable or the term ‘Good Samaritan’ are unaware of who the Samaritans really are. In actuality, the Samaritans are a unique people whose history can be traced to Biblical times. They are not considered ethnically Jewish or Arab, despite the fact that Samaritans have lived in close proximity to both groups for thousands of years. Though they used to be numerous, there are now only about 700 Samaritans left, divided between two towns near Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. They rarely marry non-Samaritans, and their religious practices are distinct from all Jewish sects. Their ability to remain both (seemingly) genetically and culturally isolated in one of the most diverse regions on Earth has piqued the interest of both geneticists and historians, who have spent years trying to understand this unique group of people tucked away in the Levantine desert.
However, recent archaeological findings, coupled with deeper examination of religious texts, have led researchers to propose that the Samaritans were Jews themselves.
Specifically, researchers argue that during the Babylonian Captivity, not all Jews were rounded up by the Assyrians. Some stayed behind, possibly marrying other Assyrian exiles who themselves had been relocated. This would make sense given that, even though Samaritans are not considered Jews, they share many of the same ancient Hebrew rituals. While these rituals have evolved for hundreds of years among most Jewish sects, they remain unchanged among the isolated Samaritans, even to this day. This also fits well with the historical animosity of Jews toward Samaritans because of their association with non-Jews.
Furthermore, the Dead Sea scroll 4Q372, which recounts the hope that the northern tribes will return to the land of Joseph, remarks that the current dwellers in the north are fools, an enemy people, but does not explicitly refer to them as foreigners. It goes on to say that these people, the Samaritans, mocked Jerusalem and built a temple on a high place (Gerizim) to provoke Israel.[12]
Conflicts between the Samaritans and the Jews were numerous between the end of the Assyrian diaspora and the Bar Kokhba revolt. Jewish historiography describes multiple instigations from the Samaritan population against the Jews and disparages them, and Jesus' Parable of the Good Samaritan also gives evidence of conflict. The destruction of Mount Gerizim's Samaritan temple is attributed to the High Priest John Hyrcanus.
Following the failed revolts, Mount Gerizim was rededicated with a new temple, which was ultimately again destroyed during the Samaritan revolts. Persecution of Samaritans was common in the following centuries.
The Samaritans claim to be descended from the Israelite Tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Levi. This gives us more information about the Y haplogroup of J1, the Cohen gene from Aaron, brother of Moses.
According to Samaritan Law and their interpretation of the Torah, Samaritans were forbidden from marrying non-Israelites, and unlike Jews, they did not accept any converts until 1924. Jews too were forbidden according to Jewish Law from marrying Samaritans. All Samaritans today have only four surviving Y lineages. (A fifth, from the Tribe of Benjamin, died out in 1912). According to the ancient Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, many Samaritans are descended from Jews of Jerusalem who left and moved northward for religious reasons before the time of Alexander the Great in 338 BCE.Indeed, not only are the Y-chromosomes of the Jews and Samaritans more similar to each other than either is to the Palestinians’, the Y-chromosomes of the Samaritans show striking similarities to a very specific Y-chromosome most often associated with Jewish men. Although the Samaritan type is slightly different from the Jewish type, it is clear that the two share a common ancestor, probably within the last few thousand years.
As a result, is that the traditional hypothesis, that the Samaritans were transported into the Levant by the Assyrians and have no Jewish heritage, is largely incorrect. Rather, these Samaritan lineages are remnants of those few Jews who did not go into exile when the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in 721 BC. Those who remained in the Levant may have take non-Jewish wives, which would account for the genetic admixture on the female side. But according to the authors the Y-chromosome clearly shows that the Samaritans and the Jews share common ancestry dating to at least 2,500 years ago."
Ancient Israel was inhabited all this time by the Samaritans since the 10 Tribes of Israel had been taken away and were lost to the major body of Judeans.
Under the Roman Empire, Samaria became a part of the Herodian Kingdom, Herodian Tetrarchy and with deposition of the Herodian ethnarch Herod Achelaus in early 1st century CE, Samaria became a part of the province of Judaea.
Samaritans appear briefly in the Christian gospels, most notably in the account of the Samaritan woman at the well and the parable of the Good Samaritan. In the latter, it is only the Samaritan who helped the man stripped of clothing, beaten, and left on the road half dead, his Abrahamic covenantal circumcision implicitly evident. The priest and Levite walked past. But the Samaritan helped the naked man regardless of his nakedness (itself religiously offensive to the priest and Levite[59]), his self-evident poverty, or to which Hebrew sect he belonged.
The Temple of Gerizim was rebuilt after the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans, around 136 CE. A building dated to the second century BCE, the Delos Synagogue, is commonly identified as a Samaritan synagogue, which would make it the oldest known Jewish or Samaritan synagogue. On the other hand, Matassa argues that, although there is evidence of Samaritans on Delos, there is no evidence the building was a synagogue.
Much of Samaritan liturgy was set by the high priest Baba Rabba in the 4th century.
There were some Samaritans in the Sasanian Empire, where they served in the army.
During the 30 year British Mandate after World War I, The situation of the Samaritan community improved significantly. At that time, they began to work in the public sector, like many other groups. The censuses of 1922 and 1931 recorded 163 and 182 Samaritans in Palestine, respectively. The majority of them lived in Nablus, the former Shechem, now a part of the West Bank of Samaria.
Do Samaritans serve in the IDF? Evidently not. The Israeli military says the Samaritans pose no threat to the area and even serve as a peaceful buffer. But for the Samaritans, living in a militarized zone is not without hardship. "The Samaritans know the value of having the IDF there, but on the other hand," says Tsedaka, "They are suffering from the situation." This is because of those living in the West Bank. "No one will help us," says Joseph Cohen, a Samaritan of Mount Gerizim. "The tanks remain in our front yard, and create dust and mess. When it rains, the mud is so bad, our children can't even go to school." Beyond the inconvenience, transit through the Green Line, the border that separates Israel from the West Bank, can prove perilous, as Cohen lived to tell. Of course, they are living right on the border between 2 opposing forces, and the Palestinians are always attacking Israel, even more so between Gaza and Israel.
As for the Palestinians, "Palestinian claims to be related to the are a recent phenomenon and contrary to historical evidence. The Canaanites disappeared from the face of the earth three millennia ago, and no one knows if any of their descendants survived or, if they did, who they would be.
We can't ignore the fact that the Ottoman Empire was governing the land from Turkey for 400 from 1517 years up to World War I., interested only in the taxes they could collect from the few farmers.
Sherif Hussein, the guardian of the Islamic Holy Places in Arabia, said the Palestinians' ancestors had only been in the area for 1,000 years. Even the Palestinians themselves have acknowledged their association with the region came long after the Jews. In testimony before the , for example, they claimed a connection to Palestine of more than 1,000 years, dating back no further than the conquest of followers in the 7th century. And that claim is also dubious. Over the last 2,000 years, there have been massive invasions that killed off most of the local people (e.g., the ), migrations, the plague, and other manmade or natural disasters. The entire local population was replaced many times over. During the alone, more than 100,000 Arabs emigrated from neighboring countries and are today considered Palestinians. This is when they most likely settled in parts of Samaria. It's the period when Brits kept the Jews out and let the Arabs in.
Resource;
Updated 3/8/21 morning
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://www.cbeinternational.org/resource/article/priscilla-papers-academic-journal/scythians-who-were-they-and-why-did-paul-include
https://blog.23andme.com/ancestry-reports/more-than-just-a-parable-the-genetic-history-of-the-samaritans/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaritanism#:~:text=Samaritans%20believe%20Judaism%20and%20the,Gerizim%20as%20their%20holiest%20site.
https://www.ancient.eu/israel/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaritans
https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/samaritan/about
http://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/10/08/samaritans/#:~:text=The%20Israeli%20military%20says%20the,are%20suffering%20from%20the%20situation.%22
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/myths-and-facts-israel-146-s-roots
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeroboam%27s_Revolt
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