I enjoyed the Staff Report on the Samaritans. It was almost thorough except for just 1 or 2 points.
One of the problems of a “revealed” religion is the idea that the scriptures are “divine and inviolate.” When different perspectives arise, literalists will accuse those who adapt to them of being unfaithful. Thus there have been divisions in Judaism that became schisms. The Samaritans and the Karaites are two examples.
There’s a good link at
and a brief perspective at
http://www.aish.com/seminars/tunneltour/time/l06tln05.htm
The Karaites refused to recognize the authority of the Talmud, which was the written form of the “Oral Law.” They believe that only the written law (Heb. Karah, read) has authority. More extremely, the Samaritans believed that only the Torah itself (the first five books of the bible) had authority as the “books of Moses.”
The evolution of Judaism over time has resulted from a continuing dialogue. First, the books of the prophets (Nevi’im) and the writings (Ketuvim) gave Judaism profound soul and moral imperative, demanding compassion and justice in addition to ritual and prayer. The Talmud evolved as an early “encyclopedia of Judaism,” providing wisdom, legends, debates, theories, even scientific and historic observations and conjectures. Its study resulted in the Jews becoming known as a scholarly people. While the Talmud was not in written form in Jesus’ time, the Oral Law, which evolved into the Talmud, was very much a part of the Rabbinic Judaism of the time.
The Karaites arose at a later time, but they were perhaps the spiritual descendants of the conservative Sadducees of the first century. Rabbinic Jews considered them too literalistic, hidebound, inflexible. They were felt, by the Jews who adopted the oral law, to be too rejecting of the need to continue reinterpreting Torah as a response to modern living in an evolving society.
The Samaritans were considered far more primitive in their Jewish observation. Because they rejected all the writings after the Torah, yet adhered to the Torah’s legalisms, they were considered CRUEL. As Judaism became more and more humane, Samaritanism seemed to Jews to be more and more intolerant and hard-hearted.
By Jesus’ time, capital punishment under Jewish law was already extremely rare. (Under Roman law, of course, it was all too common and vicious.) The Rabbis had evolved very elaborate rules: a murder had to be pre-meditated, cold-blooded, and pre-announced to at least two people who had tried to talk the murderer out of it! Even then, a Jewish court that issued the death penalty more often than once in a generation, was considered an unusually cruel court. This kind of concern for mercy and rejection of violent punishment was nearly unique in the ancient world. By comparison, the torah prescription of stonings for a wide variety of infractions was apparently still very popular among the Samaritans.
The point is that the Samaritans were not merely reviled because they were half-breed or observed different rituals. They were considered INHUMANE.
That is the very reason why the parable of the good Samaritan was particularly poignant: the very guy who Jesus’ listeners would know had a reputation for heartlessness, instead showed real compassion. It’s also a way of saying, “Don’t judge people by their labels.”
Blessings and best wishes,
David Hecht in Miami