Overlooking Nablus, from Mt. Gerizim.
The Samaritan community in Nablus is one of, if not the oldest, consistent communities and can trace their presence on this land back nearly 3,500 years.
It is where the Israelites originally settled after coming out of Egypt, and had been the land Jacob had initially purchased for his family. The Samaritans are made up of what was the 10 northern tribes that turned into the northern kingdom. They were conquered by the Assyrians in 720s BCE and after a time when there were Samaritan exiles in Assyria and Assyrian exiles in Samaria—they were allowed to return. This was the original kingdom of Israel nearly 3,000 years ago. Separate from the kingdom of Judah, which is the kingdom we are most familiar with as the “Kingdom of Israel” in the Bible. Also, separate from the current state of Israel, as the Samaritan communities have persisted in this place, and now speak Arabic and are culturally very similar to Palestinians—in fact they hold 3 passports, Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian.
Mt. Gerizim is where the very first temple was built, before Solomon built the Judaean temple. Samaritans practice a religion very similar to Judaism, however, based only on the first 5 books—the Torah. And they use the oldest version of these texts written in ancient Hebrew text, still. They also continue to perform animal sacrifice in the ruins of the former Temple there, while they await the messiah to return and rebuild the Temple. The priesthood is also still inherited, as it was in Judaism before the need for rabbis as the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed. The priests trace their family lineage back 164 generations to Adam. The community is insular, and their numbers that were in the millions during the time when Jesus lived, have fallen to just over 800.
