worship 59
certainly does not seem to have suggested that the Jerusalem cult was
itself invalid. The same was not true of the Samaritans, and this vital
distinction is what pushed them, both in their own eyes and in the eyes
of Jews, to the fringes of Judaism or beyond. According to the Samari-
tan tradition, down to modern times, the Samaritans are the direct
descendants of the tribes of Israel who, having survived the destruction
of the northern kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in the eighth century
bce, and avoided deportation, preserved the Torah of Moses not least
by worshipping in the divinely ordained sanctuary of Shechem next to
Mount Gerizim. The hostile biblical account, by contrast, asserts that
the inhabitants of Samaria were descended from non- Israelite colonists,
including those from Cuthah (hence ‘Cuthaeans’) brought to Samaria
by the Assyrians, and that it was only out of fear, because ‘the Lord has
sent lions among them’, when the king of Assyria sent an Israelite priest
to ‘teach them the law of the god of the land’, that they began to wor-
ship the Lord.^29
Whatever their origin, the biblical book of Ezra reports that by the
time the Jerusalem Temple was being rebuilt in the late sixth century
bce the inhabitants of the land were opposed to the project. Two
inscriptions from the island of Delos refer to the local Samaritan popu-
lation as ‘Israelites who send the temple tax to Mount Gerizim’ in the
mid- second century bce. It was this allegiance to a separate shrine
which all too clearly distinguished them from the Jews by the time of
the Hasmonaean High Priest of Jerusalem, John Hyrcanus. Hyrcanus
seems to have destroyed their sanctuary in the late second century
bce, when as Josephus recorded he defeated ‘the Cuthaeans, the race
inhabiting the country surrounding the temple modelled on that at Jeru-
salem’. Josephus alleged in the first century ce that the attitude of the
Samaritans to the Jews in his time varied according to circumstance:
‘Whenever, by turns, they see things going well for the Jews, they call
themselves their relatives ... When, however, they see that things are
going badly for them, they say that they owe nothing to them and that
they have no claim to their loyalty or race.’ So, for instance, at the time
of the Maccabean revolt, when the Jews were being persecuted, they are
said to have claimed originally both to have come from Sidon in Phoe-
nicia and to have descended from the Medes and Persians, no longer
admitting that the Jews ‘were their kin or that the temple on Garizein
was that of the Most Great God’, despite confessing to their ancestral
custom of observing ‘the day which is called the Sabbath by the Jews’
and their erection of ‘a temple without a name in the mountain called