Reader’s Guide: “The Word for Today” Sunday, February 2, 2014 Read John 4:1-6 As we begin to look at this long narrative, perhaps it will be helpful to make some comments about the Samaritans. Who were they? What was their relationship with Jews like? Knowing something about the Samaritans is helpful to understand this narrative. Samaritans were a group of people who had kinship connections with the main body of Jews. In one sense they were the remnant of the people who once made up the Northern Kingdom of Israel. But they were also not racially pure. The Northern Kingdom of Israel had once thrived as a rival to the Southern Kingdom of Judah. Shortly after the death of King Solomon ten of the tribes had broken away from Solomon’s son Reheboam. They formed their own nation and claimed to be the true descendants of Abraham. As the Bible tells the story, most of the kings in the North were terrible. That likely was mostly true, although the story was written from the point of view of the Southerners. Often the kings in the North and many of the people got caught up in worship of false gods, most prevalent being the god Baal. The story of Ahab and Jezebel belongs to the people of the Northern Kingdom. At any rate, the Northern Kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians in about 722 BC. The Assyrians were brutal in the treatment of the people of the Northern Kingdom. Many were killed and many others were disbursed throughout the rest of the Assyrian Empire. Other non-Israelite people from throughout the Assyrian Empire were resettled in the territory that had been the Northern Kingdom. There is a rather strange story in the OT of how the Assyrians decided that they needed to bring priests from the Northern Kingdom back into the land to teach the people how to get along, but otherwise you can imagine the intermixing that happened over time. Of course some people, particularly those who were poor and unimportant likely simply remained behind instead of being deported. All of this makes for quite a mix. And over time this conglomerate of people became known as Samaritans. To the credit of the Samaritans, many people did seem to hang on to some semblance of Israelite faith. They claimed belief in the God of Israel. They had great esteem for Moses – in fact Samaritans only accepted the first five books of the OT – the books of Moses. In that way they were in agreement with the Sadducees. Samaritans did understand Mount Gerizim as the location where God had chosen to make himself present to the people instead of Mount Zion where Jerusalem was located. So, they built a temple there that rivaled the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The point is that Samaritans did have some connections with Judaism. At the time of Jesus the relationship between Jews and Samaritans was extremely stressed. From the Samaritan point of view, they thought the Jews were snobbish. On their part, the Jews looked down on Samaritans as half-breed, impure, and detestable people. They were the scum of the earth – untrustworthy and low-class. Needless to say the two groups did not get along with each other and for the most part sought to remain separate from one another. This animosity is what makes Jesus’ contact with Samaritans so powerful. The Samaritans were often the heroes in Jesus’ parables and stories – for example the parable of the Good Samaritan and the story of the Samaritan leper who returned to give thanks for his healing. Jesus crossed the barrier between Jews and Samaritans and in fact broke it down. It is likely that some of the first followers of Jesus were Samaritan Christians. The book of Acts tells of their conversion by Philip (Acts 8:4-25). There were likely Samaritans who were a part of John’s Christian community, as they were a part of Luke’s community. Getting this sense of who Samaritans were and how their relationship with the Jews was one of being despised is important as we approach this narrative of Jesus’ encounter of the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well.