My LORD’s BibleWho Were the Samaritans?
"The Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans," a Samaritan woman tells Jesus flatly at a well in John 4 — and every time Samaritans appear afterward in the Gospels and Acts, that hostility is exactly the backdrop Jesus keeps working against.
Where the hostility started
After Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC, it deported much of the population and resettled the land, including the region around Samaria, with foreign peoples from elsewhere in its empire.
The resettlement itself:
2 Kings 17:24
Read in full chapter →24And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel: and they possessed Samaria, and dwelt in the cities thereof.
See also: Matthew 10:5, John 4:9
Those settlers adopted a mixed worship — some reverence for the LORD alongside the gods they had brought with them — which is precisely what later generations of Jews, tracing unbroken descent from Judah, held against the population that became known as Samaritans.
The mixed worship scripture itself records:
2 Kings 17:33
Read in full chapter →33They feared the LORD, and served their own gods, after the manner of the nations whom they carried away from thence.
See also: Matthew 6:24, 2 Corinthians 6:16
By the time of the return from Babylonian exile, the rift had hardened into open opposition — Samaritan leaders resisted the rebuilding of Jerusalem's walls under Nehemiah, and Samaritans had built their own rival temple on Mount Gerizim rather than worship at Jerusalem, the dispute the Samaritan woman raises with Jesus directly.
Her framing of the centuries-old disagreement:
John 4:20
Read in full chapter →20Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.
See also: Isaiah 66:1, Exodus 20:24
Jesus at the well
John 4 records the longest single conversation Jesus has with anyone in the Gospels, and its other party is a Samaritan woman — doubly outside respectable company by both nationality and reputation. The narrator flags the hostility explicitly before the conversation even develops.
Her own surprise at being addressed at all:
John 4:9
Read in full chapter →9Then saith the woman of Samaria unto him, How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria? for the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans.
See also: Matthew 10:5, Acts 10:28
The parable that made "good Samaritan" a household phrase
Asked to define "neighbour," Jesus answers with a story in which a priest and a Levite — the two figures a Jewish audience would expect to act rightly — pass by a wounded man, and a Samaritan, the figure that same audience would expect to be the villain, stops to help.
The Samaritan's response, in contrast to the priest and Levite before him:
Luke 10:33–34
Read in full chapter →33But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,
See also: 1 Kings 8:50, Luke 7:13
34And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
See also: Romans 12:20, Psalms 147:3
The one leper who came back
Of ten lepers Jesus heals in Luke 17, only one returns to give thanks — and Luke makes a point of naming his ethnicity.
The detail Luke singles out:
Luke 17:16
Read in full chapter →16And fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks: and he was a Samaritan.
See also: Acts 8:5-25, Matthew 10:5
The gospel reaches Samaria
Jesus names Samaria explicitly as a stage of the apostles' mission before his ascension, and Acts records it happening: Philip preaches there and it responds.
Jesus's own charge:
Acts 1:8
Read in full chapter →8But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.
See also: 2 Timothy 1:7, Matthew 28:19
Its fulfillment:
Acts 8:5
Read in full chapter →5Then Philip went down to the city of Samaria, and preached Christ unto them.
See also: Acts 1:8, Luke 17:16
Common questions
- Why did Jews and Samaritans dislike each other?
- The rift traced back to Assyria's resettlement of the former northern kingdom of Israel with foreign populations after 722 BC, whose mixed worship of the LORD alongside other gods, plus a rival temple on Mount Gerizim rather than Jerusalem, hardened into centuries of mutual hostility by Jesus's day.
- Were Samaritans considered Jews?
- Not by the Jews of Jesus's day. Samaritans were viewed as a separate, religiously suspect population — John's Gospel states plainly that "the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans."
- Why is the parable of the Good Samaritan significant?
- Jesus deliberately makes a Samaritan — the figure his audience would expect to be the villain — the one who acts rightly, while a priest and a Levite pass by the wounded man without helping.
- Did Samaritans become Christians?
- Yes. Acts 8 records Philip preaching in Samaria and the response there, fulfilling Jesus's own charge in Acts 1:8 that the gospel would go out to "Jerusalem... Judaea... Samaria... and unto the uttermost part of the earth."