Superior Samaritans

THE BIBLE

In 331 B.C. the Samaritans revolted against Alexander the Great and burned to death his prefect Andromachus. An avenging Macedonian army thereupon invaded Samaria, surrounded 300 Samaritan nobles hiding in a cave near Jericho, and by lighting fires at the entrance of the cave managed to asphyxiate the Samaritans.

For 23 centuries the bodies lay in the innermost recesses of the cave, buried beneath a growing cover of bat dung until some Arabs, poking around in the desert in the hope of finding some salable antiquities, stumbled on the Samaritan skeletons in 1962. Digging in the dung, they unearthed jewelry, pottery and papyrus, property deeds and marriage contracts that the Samaritans had carried with them to their deaths.

The Arabs brought some of these finds to Kando, the former Bethlehem cobbler who made himself an antiquities dealer by selling the famed Dead Sea Scrolls. Kando in turn alerted American archaeologists working in Israel, and Harvard's Frank M. Cross Jr. went to Israel to acquire and study the Samaritan finds. Now Archaeologist Cross knows more about ancient Samaritan history than does the remnant of the tribe that still survives.

Contrary to II Kings, which charges that the Samaritans abandoned the Jewish faith about 700 B.C. under Assyrian influence, the documents in the Jericho cave show that they were practicing Jews at the time of Alexander. Thus the "Samaritan schism" from the Jews has to be dated much later, probably during the 1st century before Christ, says Cross. The marriage contracts prove that the Samaritans frequently married Greeks and were Hellenized even before Alexander conquered them. A number of the nobles wore rings and seals with "lovely naked figures of Greek goddesses" as well as traditional symbols of Jewish religion. The discovery thus challenges the Biblical notion that the Samaritans were an inferior and degraded people. Seemingly, they were more like the good Samaritan that Jesus praised than those he referred to when he warned his disciples to "enter no town of the Samaritans" because they were defiled.

Today there are only 600 Samaritans left, living in villages in Israel and Jordan. Every year they gather for Passover at their temple at Mount Gerizim in Israel, still convinced that they possess the true faith. They pray for the coming of their messiah, who will reward the righteous at long last.

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