Samaritans,Biblical Studies,and Ancient Judaism: Recent Trends

Introduction

It is a good time to think about Samaritans. In 2016, Reinhard Pummer, one of the scholars who has spearheaded the study of the group over the last four decades, published an extensive overview of Samaritans and Samaritan studies, the first in English since James Montgomery in 1907 (Montgomery 1907; Pummer 2016). In 2019, the first volume of a new series saw the light of day. A team headed by Stefan Schorch in Germany and Jósef Zsengellér in Hungary produced their edition of Leviticus, the first of five volumes of a new critical edition of the Samaritan Pentateuch (Schorch 2018b), and the first such effort since August von Gall’s eclectic edition (von Gall 1914–1918). It was, as Schorch points out, a project long in the making (Schorch 2013). Also in 2019, De Gruyter’s series Studia Samaritana, which began with Rudolf Macuch’s monumental grammar of Samaritan Hebrew (Macuch 1969), published a new critical edition of the Samaritan midrash Tibåt Mårqe edited, translated and with commentary by Abraham Tal (Tal 2019) to supplement the earlier edition by Zeʿev Ben-H.ayyim (1988).

This article takes advantage of several milestones in the study of the Samaritans to reflect on trends, patterns, and possible future opportunities within biblical studies. In it, I highlight and assess some core elements and curious features of the study of the Samaritans over the last two decades, with particular focus on biblical studies and the Second Temple period.

For a survey of trends prior to 2004, I direct the reader to Ingrid Hjelm’s comprehensive article in this journal (Hjelm 2004a). Nevertheless, scholars have done significant work since then. An array of editions and resources are either freshly available or on the horizon, updating and building on well-established reference scholarship (Crown 1989; Crown et al. 1993; Stern and Eshel 2002; Crown and Pummer 2005). Equally important, a series of subtler—but perhaps more durable—shifts are underway in the attendance of scholars on Samaritans, and the sorts of questions to which Samaritans are counted as relevant by default. Consequently, this article first reviews a picture of the Samaritans as relevant to scholars of the Bible, focused through debate over Samaritan origin. Second, it identifies some key movements in research over the last two decades, including the availability of new resources and ongoing projects. Third, it notes some quirks in the field, the identification of which might help scholars of biblical studies more broadly integrate Samaritan studies into their work more smoothly.

Samaritan Origins and Samaritan Identity

Samaritans are a Torah-observant group who, like Jews and Christians, trace their scriptures and their identity back to ancient Israel. They accept the Torah, the Books of Moses, as scripture, although they resist the addition of any other books. Their Pentateuch differs from the Masoretic text. It has some text variants and is written in Samaritan Hebrew script. Most importantly, Samaritans hold a distinctive vocalization and reading tradition (Pummer 2016: 195-218; Schorch 2004, 2015; Tal 2005). Moreover, the group venerates the Lord, the God of Israel, according to their Torah with an emphasis on Mount Gerizim, some thirty miles to the north of Mount Zion and Jerusalem (Schorch 2013b, 2018a). Presently an ethnoreligious minority in Israel-Palestine, they are set apart amongst modern groups claiming Israelite ancestry—Hebrew Israelites, the Church of Latter Day Saints, etc.—by the extensive and direct evidence for their communities in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. As well as archaeological evidence and epigraphy, discussed further below, they feature in literary sources, both in impressions from those outside the community and in their own liturgy and midrash.

Much of the modern scholarship on Samaritans has focused on their origins (e.g., Becking 2012; Knoppers 2013). In one respect, this emphasis might seem questionable. The academic study of religion, as far back as Durkheim and Malinowski, and reiterated by the mid-century work of Mircea Eliade, often expressed the uselessness of a scholarly search for origins, especially the search for humanity’s original language that so exercised early modern philology, or the search for the emergence of ‘religion’ out of primitive ‘superstition’ historically associated with an E.B. Tylor or George Frazer (Masuzawa 1993: 1-11).

There are at least two reasons to review talk of Samaritan origins despite the fraught nature of the concept. First, at least at present, it maps onto what scholars have done and continue to do: tell stories of change over time that, while avoiding essentialism, still focus on genealogical narratives (Weitzman 2017: 5). Samaritan studies still identifies Samaritan origins as a key to unlock the group’s identity, looking particularly for a moment of definitional clarity that separates Samaritans and Judaeans (e.g., Kartveit 2009, 2019; Pummer 2016: 9; Schorch 2007). Second, it aligns with a surge of emphasis on the power of scholarly categories themselves in shaping biblical studies (Mroczek 2015). The terms according to which origins are discussed enmesh with the assumptions of scholars so closely that tracking them provides a perfect opportunity to zero in on the use of ancient material. A review of scholarly positions on Samaritan origins, in other words, illuminates how scholars have conceptualized the group and the attachments they have to their significance.

Narratives about the emergence of the Samaritans run along three tracks. The first, largely an ancient and polemical train of thought, characterizes Samaritans as a distinct ethnic group from Jews from the beginning and so never a part of the people of Israel. The second takes Samaritans as the original people of Israel, with the Jewish people as a splinter group. The third situates Samaritans as Israelites who at some historical moment evolved into a distinctive ethnoreligious group, with the differentiating process most often linked to the construction or destruction of a sanctuary on Gerizim.

The first of these views largely appears in—or relies on—ancient non-Samaritan sources from antiquity. These sources suppose that the Samaritans comprise a lineage of people distinct from Jews. On their understanding, the Samaritans were transplanted into an empty land after the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom in 722 bce. Many of these sources are late antique Christian writings, especially from the fourth century ce, such as the basic conception of Samaritans in Amphilochius of Iconium, Epiphanius of Cyprus or John Chrysostom—although each of these writers does very different rhetorical and conceptual work with the idea of Samaritan foreignness. Some rabbinic texts lean into this point as well, as I discuss further below, although typically they construct narratives of foreign origins for Samaritans as a way of organizing Samaritan identity vis-à-vis that of a rabbinic Israel. It was only in the latest redactional phases of classical rabbinic literature, and in mediaeval commentators, that a view of default Samaritan foreignness became stable.

At the root of this view, scholars generally agree, lie the somewhat idiosyncratic views of the historian Josephus (Pummer 2009), heavily used by late antique Christians if almost entirely (or entirely) ignored by the rabbis. In his Antiquities, written in 93/94 ce in Greek and probably for a Roman audience, Josephus relates the transplanting of five foreign groups into the land following the destruction of Samaria and the exile of its elites (Ant. 9.279, 288-291). He retells a story of the conquest and its aftermath found in the Hebrew Bible in 2 Kgs 17.24-40. In that story, due to the inability of the post-conquest population to worship the God of the land effectively, the Lord sends lions to kill them (2 Kgs 17.25); they send a petition to the Assyrian king, and he ensures that a priest is sent to instruct them in the proper worship of the Samarians (Heb. ha-shomronim; Gk. samareitai) who previously occupied the land (2 Kgs 17.26-28). In the end, despite reprimand, these newcomers worship both the Lord and the gods of their own lands (2 Kgs 17.29-40).

As Gary Knoppers noted, the text in 2 Kings on which Josephus bases his narrative is part of a composite, a ‘series of Deuteronomistic reflections on the causes of the northern kingdom’s defeat’ (Knoppers 2007: 223). It divides into two commentaries concerning events directly after the Assyrian invasion (2 Kgs 17.24-34a, 34b-40). Knoppers also suggests, convincingly, that the Deuteronomistic writers combine two conflicting accounts (2007: 225-26; Lim 2017: 99-100).

Josephus reframes the story, removing the lions in favour of a plague (loimon), and directly identifying the Samaritans with one of the nations brought into the land, the Cutheans (chouthaioi). This group, conceived as both politically and ethnically distinct from the Israelites who occupied the land previously, pretend to be kin (sungeneis) with Jews when it suits them, but when Jews have a hard time they ‘represent themselves as foreign colonists’.

For all the prevalence of this first view in antiquity, rabbinic Jewish tradition, and a lot of older and popular scholarship, specialists of Samaritan studies view it as something of a museum piece—albeit one that continues to make its effects felt. It is clear from 2 Kings 17 itself that ha-shomronim—the hapax legomenon that attracted attention to this passage in the first place—denotes the Samarian inhabitants of the land prior to the Assyrian conquest. Furthermore, as Knoppers lucidly argues, doubling down on arguments accepted within Samaritan studies at least since Richard Coggins, evidence of the historical context of such a population transplantation is slim (Coggins 1975; Knoppers 2012, 2013: 32-38). While site surveys and excavations do suggest settlement decline in parts of Samaria, there is little evidence of total displacement (Knoppers 2013: 40; Zertal 2003). Moreover, while scholars have sifted the work of the historian for decisive events, it may make more sense to situate his work within a complex array of Second Temple attempts to work through Samaritan difference (Chalmers 2020a). There is little compelling reason to read 2 Kings 17, or the reference to the enemies of the Exilic returnees in Ezra 4, as a historical reference to the Samaritan Israelites.

The second narrative reflects a Samaritan internal narrative found largely in later Samaritan Arabic chronicles. According to the oldest complete chronicle, the Kitab al-Tarīkh of Abū l-Fath (compiled in 1355 ce), the Samaritans faithfully preserve the original Israelite religion, from the time of Adam to confrontation with the Roman Empire. The Kitab challenges the claims of the Jews, arguing that during the time of the judges, when Eli set up an altar to the Lord at Shiloh, there was a rupture within Israel (Stenhouse 1985: 47-48). From this moment onwards, southern Israelites continuously attempted to centralize worship of the Lord in Jerusalem, rather than on Gerizim.

Many scholars shy away from reliance on these late texts for reconstructing the pre-Islamic history of the Samaritans (Hjelm 2004b: 184), although Etienne Nodet advocates this position using the Samaritan chronicles (e.g., Nodet 2011), Hagith Sivan has cautiously drawn on them in her history of late antique Palestine (Sivan 2008) and others have attempted by a source-critical approach to bring the later texts to bear on much earlier material (Duchemin 2012; Stenhouse 2012). Although the Kitab al-Tarīkh, Samaritan Book of Joshua, and other chronicles certainly preserve a significant amount of material earlier than the compilation of their manuscripts, isolating those traditions does not easily account for the continuous composition of Samaritan chronicles (Hjelm 2004a: 31, 2004b: 187-88).

The third narrative of origin has become something of a scholarly consensus (Schorch 2007: 7). Typically, it combines a critical reading of Josephus, the Hebrew Bible (especially Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah), Second Temple Jewish texts (Jubilees, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Sirach), with archaeological evidence, especially from Yitzhak Magen’s excavations at Gerizim from 1982 onwards (Hjelm 2016a; Magen, Misgav, and Tsefania 2004, 2008, 2009; Pummer 2016: 74-118).

This consensus understands the Temple at Gerizim, the Samaritan version of the Pentateuch, and the ancient sources narrating ethnic conflict as specific moments in an extended and uneven process of community and/or religious formation (Lim 2017: 101). While first made explicitly back in the 1970s (Coggins 1975), it has increasingly commanded the field, and, in particular, shaped a scholarly language of gradual development. For example, Schorch states that the development was progressive and extended (Schorch 2007: 8). Knoppers reiterates that the relationship between ‘Jews’ and ‘Samaritans’ resists simplification to terms of expulsion and dissidence (Knoppers 2013: 239). Jonathan Bourgel argues, building on an argument also constructed by Seth Schwartz, that the destruction of the Gerizim temple appears to have been part of an attempt to integrate Samarians into Jerusalem-centred practice as one event in a much longer process of definition (Bourgel 2016; Schwartz 1993).

The upside of the consensus position is that it avoids setting Samaritan emergence against an impermeable Judah-centred Judaism. Rather, Jerusalem-centred Jewish identity emerged during the Hasmonean period and afterward, simultaneous with Samaritan Israelite identification of their own distinctiveness. That process negotiated rival Israelite traditions relating to (a) location or worship of God, (b) political relations with ruling empires such as the Ptolemies based in Egypt or the Persians, (c) competition over priestly lineage and intermarriage, and (d) versions of the Pentateuch (Schorch 2013b: 135). In particular, the Samaritan Pentateuch plays a major role to mark a terminus post quem, dated again by relative consensus to the second century bce (Eshel and Eshel 2003: 216-19; Schorch 2007: 9).

As a result, the time of the Hasmoneans, as opposed to the time of Persian rule emphasized by Josephus and by Samaritan tradition alike, is most frequently understood as the period in which Samaritan identity became identifiable over against Judaean identity, or, in Kartveit’s words, we have the first evidence of a ‘developed Samaritan self-consciousness’ (Kartveit 2019: 12). In particular, Matthew Goff argues that this process is clear in an often-discussed reference to the ‘foolish nation that dwells in Shechem’ in the Second Temple wisdom text, Ben Sira (Goff 2011). Schorch nuances this, noting the shift from the Hebrew version of Sirach 50:25-26 to the Greek as part of his argument for a pivotal second-century moment (Schorch 2013b: 137). As he notes, the Hebrew reading ‘those who live in Seir’ is replaced in the Greek by ‘those who live in Samaria’. Thus, the Greek text reframes the final group in both lists (‘the foolish people that live in Shechem’) as a distinct subgroup. He understands this as a part of a process which reshaped what it meant to be counted as a Samaritan.

Scholarly Moves in the Study of the Samaritans since 2004

It is worth rehearsing the debate over origins in such detail because so much of what scholars say about Samaritans has emerged from seeking the earliest recoverable history of the group. Even while the majority of scholars view ‘true’ origins as either unknowable or conceptually problematic, the related desire to articulate what makes Samaritan Israelites different has driven all four of the specific approaches to Samaritans characteristic of the last twenty years: recontextualizing ‘Samaritan’ and ‘pre-Samaritan’ scriptures, archaeology of Samaria, rethinking identity in terms of identity-construction, and the importance of late antiquity as well as literature in Arabic. In this section, I survey each in turn.

First, scholarly investigation of the potential role of northern Israelite scribes in the production of the Pentateuch has opened the door for the rehabilitation of the Samaritan text as a default topic for biblical studies. A clear indication of the direction of recent research is a special issue of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel (Edenburg and Müller 2015a). The contributors to the issue are, to some extent, the usual suspects, and they discuss a number of possibilities: the importance of northern Israel in the instructions of Deuteronomy (Knoppers 2015); a possible proto-Deuteronomy in northern Israel (Hjelm 2015); how to understand the variation between the MT and SP in the so-called ‘centralization’ formula (‘the place that the Lord your God will choose’ (MT)/‘the place that the Lord your God has chosen’ (SP) (Kartveit 2015)); and the possibility that the Old Greek might preserve an older reading than the MT regarding this formula (Schenker 2015).

The shift in the field is exemplified in a recent article by Cynthia Edenburg and Reinhard Müller (2015b), in which they consider possible northern Israelite origins of Deuteronomy. On the one hand, such suggestions are not new. They trace the argument, through various iterations, back to the early twentieth century. This citation trail is true of much of Samaritan studies—a lot of the ideas are not new, merely understudied. On the other hand, more scholars now advocate either the idea that Deuteronomy was meant to mediate between Samarian and Judaean Yahwists (Nihan 2007) or suggest that the SP reading of the centralization formula reflects an older reading (Bergsma 2019; Schenker 2008; Schorch 2011). Edenburg and Müller are not convinced. But they do admit the discussion as a respectable part of the discussion of Deuteronomy as a producer of variant readings, and as a focal point of identity-formation (Edenburg and Müller 2015b: 161). What were obscure or peripheral matters, partially because they related to northern Israel—and, by extension, potentially Samaritan texts or traditions—have become more mainstream, although we may be overdue a discussion about whether the concepts of northern and southern Israel present at the time of the writing of the Pentateuch in Judah operated in the same way centuries earlier.

The hypothesis of scribal continuity with Samaria then Judaea has led to extended discussion of the possible Samarian underpinnings of various texts. If the Gerizim sanctuary coexisted with the sanctuary in Jerusalem since the fifth century, as archaeological evidence suggests, then ‘the finalization of the contents and the text of the Pentateuch happened at a time when this temple existed’ (Karveit and Knoppers 2018: 3). It can be assumed, therefore, that not only the Pentateuch, but much of what now comprises the Hebrew Bible, belongs to a historical time in which there were at least two sanctuaries to the God of Israel—before we even consider Elephantine—and there was no single opinion about whether this plurality was an acceptable or unacceptable state of affairs. Jewish and Samaritan scribes each thrashed out matters from their own perspective, sometimes in directly polemical scribal choices, but often not (Hjelm 2004b). Philological attention to Samaritan has deepened, spearheaded by Florentin in his Late Samaritan Hebrew (Florentin 2005), although it remains the case that Samaritan texts are printed in the square-script used in Biblical and Modern Hebrew.

As part of the reconsideration of scriptural composition, scholars have also challenged previous interpretation of ‘Samaritan’ variants, especially the ‘pre-Samaritan’ readings found in some Qumran texts. These variants in the text of the Pentateuch have often been sorted into two classes: harmonistic ‘expansions’, like the addition of speeches or prayers from elsewhere in the text, and so-called ‘sectarian’ emphases, like the emphasis of the later Samaritan Pentateuch on Gerizim (see Kartveit 2009: 265-88, 310-312; Schorch 2012; Tov 2015; Zahn 2011: 135-77, 2015). Scholars agree that most of these readings are not ‘Samaritan’ per se, but rather provide evidence that ‘a version of the Pentateuch very similar to that found in SP (aside from the few truly Samaritan readings) must have circulated widely in late Second Temple period Judaea’ (Zahn 2020: 13).

Just as in the case of northern scribes, the intensive study of Samaritan texts alongside the Qumran scrolls is not technically new. This phase of discussion arguably began with Patrick Skehan’s publication of 4QpaleoExod^m (a.k.a. 4Q22), which he called a ‘Samaritan recension’ of Exodus (Skehan 1955, 1959). Emanuel Tov counts five so-called ‘proto-Samaritan’ or ‘pre-Samaritan’ texts among the forty-six Pentateuch manuscripts he surveys in his standard issue overview of text criticism (Tov 2012: 107-109)—that is to say, Qumran texts which converge with readings found in the Samaritan Pentateuch. Comparison to Qumran also works in the opposite direction; when dating the Samaritan Pentateuch, the scrolls play a central role (Eshel and Eshel 2003). Two very recent edited volumes indicate that the side-by-side use of the two corpora continues (Kartveit and Knoppers 2018; Langlois 2019).

What is new is the consistent effort to situate both harmonistic ‘expansions’ and ‘sectarian’ emphasis in the context of a broader history of scribal modification and contest between Judaean and Samaritan text producers (Knoppers 2019b; Zahn 2020: 16). Perhaps the relationship between Judaean and Samaritan scribal products may not reduce to a matter of chronological priority. Recently, scholars have looked harder at the idea that even the centralization formula and emphasis on Gerizim are exclusively Samaritan readings. Edmon Gallagher made the most direct challenge to the use of the terminology of ‘sectarian’ altogether, suggesting instead simply to speak of Samaritans as using ‘an alternative Torah’ (Gallagher 2015: 106). Scholars have further suggested that even the most so-called ‘sectarian’ variant, the location of the altar at Gerizim, belonged to a shared text that only later became ratcheted to distinctive Samaritan Israelite identity (Schorch 2019a; Ulrich 2019).

There is a risk that, in the displacement of ‘sectarian’ Samaritans from the readings of the Samaritan Pentateuch we situate the origins of the Samaritan Pentateuch in a sort of Israelite-facing soup. In the absence of a strong centring emphasis, we should be careful not to foreshadow the Jewishness of Torah in later centuries with inadvertently teleological accounts of scribality defined by Jerusalem-centric emphasis. Ancient Samaritans understood the Second Temple to be a mistake, even a religious and communal crisis—just like the first one—and what is true of some Second Temple Jewish literature may not be true of Samaritan Israel.

Nevertheless, the current emphasis on the Pentateuch as an emergent scribal product with various forms from the beginning, with various scribal parties implicated in its production, is an important move in how it propels us towards refusing the division between an early phase of ‘biblical literature’ and later phases of reception. Instead, it reminds us firmly that there is no single origin, and no singular Bible—and to understand, therefore, the Bible as a material, social, and cultural object means to incorporate all of its ancient readers and creators.

Debate over the possible existence of a Samaritan Greek equivalent to the Greek Jewish biblical translations further adds to a nuanced understanding of ‘Samaritan’ biblical texts (Marsh 2020; Pummer 1998). Such a tradition has seen intermittent scholarly interest since the publication of the Sixtine edition of the Septuagint in 1587, which included readings labelled to samareitikon (i.e., ‘the Samaritan’) in its marginalia (Marsh, forthcoming). Some debate has focused on how best to explain an apparent convergence between Septuagintal traditions and the Samaritan Targum (Stadel 2012, 2020).

Recently, Bradley Marsh has identified two types of Samaritan Greek Pentateuch witness: the aforementioned Samareitikon, a σαμ’ type known from marginal annotations in catenae, Septuagint manuscripts, and perhaps in a fragmented text of Deuteronomy from late antique Egypt; and a μονον-type incorporated into the Syrohexapla, that is, the late antique Syriac translation of Origen’s columnar comparative work (Marsh 2016, 2020). In the latter case, Marsh suggests a translator deciphered a Samaritan text using Origen’s Hexapla, aligned against the Greek, and then cribbed the SP expansions from the Greek parallel (Marsh 2016: 280-82). Neither type implies a full Samaritan Pentateuch in Greek translation. Discussion over the Christian valuation of Samaritan versions, and what this says about the premodern story of biblical philology, is ongoing.

The naturalization of an Israelite emphasis on Gerizim as part of the default historical setting of the compilation and editing of the Pentateuch sets recent work on the Samaritan scriptures apart from the use of Samaritan authorship as a device to explain weird or unusual texts, such as Milik’s suggestion of a Samaritan author for 1 Enoch (Milik 1976: 9-10, 31), and as discussed in a clear-eyed article on Joseph and Aseneth by Ross Kraemer (Kraemer 1999). Rather than explaining curious textual features by Samaritan authorship, scholars instead assume Samaritan relevance as a way of approaching texts differently. In the words of Konrad Schmid: ‘As a result of the new sensibilities regarding the Samaritans in biblical studies, one may ask whether certain biblical texts need to be interpreted differently when read with eyes that are not staring at Judah alone’ (2018: 23).

Such a decentred approach also means the flowering of comparative work which includes Samaritan material as full participant, rather than as curious peripheral. For example, Sarianna Metso aims to better understand revelatory authority in the Second Temple period by contrasting the scribal approach of the Samaritan Leviticus tradition, distinctive in its own way, with other legal traditions of Leviticus (Metso 2019). Interpretation of the odd pronouncement concerning ‘boiling a kid in its mother’s milk’ (Exod. 23:19, 34:26; Deut. 14:21) has likewise drawn on the distinctive Samaritan additions as part of a tradition that naturally fits along others (Heckl 2002; Schorch 2010; Teeter 2009).

In the second scholarly move since 2004, much of this current shift draws heavily on interpretation of archaeological discoveries, many of which are helpfully summarized in an English language publication by Yitzhak Magen (Magen 2008). A love affair with excavations stretches back all the way to James Montgomery, who back in 1907 subordinated the continued study of Samaritan literature to potential archaeological revelations. Montgomery’s assessment of archaeological potential hits all the high notes of the colonial orientalism of the early twentieth century; a recovery aesthetic, the romanticism of foreign soil, monuments waiting to reveal their secrets, and the tool of the archaeologist as the epistemological light-switch:

It may be said that we now possess enough material to recover the history and depict the character of the Samaritans so far as literature can give the means, until the archaeologist’s spade shall turn up in Palestinian soil ancient monuments which can make revelations concerning the darkest age of Samaritan history, that of its beginnings. (Montgomery 1907: 12)

Looking past the romanticism, however, archaeological discoveries have played an increasingly central role in recent scholarship (Hjelm 2016a). The well-known Wadi Daliyeh Samaria papyri, discovered in 1962, still provoke ongoing discussion, all the easier since the publication of another edition with notes in 2007 and complicated by the possibility of further unprovenanced fragments in the Schøyen collection (Dušek 2007, 2020; Gropp et al. 2001). Ongoing analysis of Yitzhaq Magen’s excavations at Gerizim, furthermore, have moulded our understanding of Samaritan settlement in later centuries (Dušek 2014). For example, it is now proposed that the destruction of the Samaritan sanctuary on Gerizim by John Hyrcanus should be dated to 111/110 bce, in line with numismatic evidence suggesting the minting of coins after the more traditional dating of 129 bce based on Josephus (Bourgel 2016; Magen 2007). Details have also emerged concerning the sanctuary itself, although the matter of the sanctuary’s similarity (or not) to the Jerusalem Temple remains contested. Magen’s excavations, as well as the publication of pottery finds from an earlier project overseen by G. Ernest Wright (Lapp 2008; see also Berlin 2010), have led to a scholarly consensus on two phases of activity: an earlier Persian-period walled precinct and a Hellenistic expansion (see Gudme 2020; Knoppers 2019c; Zangenberg 2012). Recent excavations also emphasize the need for caution in applying some traditional identifiers to Samaritan (over against Jewish) synagogues in the later period, such as their orientation to Gerizim, aniconic decoration, and lack of lulav and etrog (Pummer 2018; Talgam 2014).

One particularly important archaeological discovery still under discussion is a corpus of almost 400 Aramaic dedicatory inscriptions from Persian- and Hellenistic-period Gerizim, again uncovered and catalogued during Magen’s excavations (Magen, Misgav, and Tsefania 2004). Hjelm signalled the potential importance of these inscriptions (Hjelm 2004a: 19), but they have since been analysed in more depth (Dušek 2012; Gudme 2012, 2013). These inscriptions more than quadrupled our archive of relevant inscriptions from the period. A smaller corpus of inscriptions from Gerizim were excavated and published a few years prior (Magen, Misgav, and Tsefania 2000), but the most famous Samaritan inscriptions are two Greek examples from Hellenistic Delos which include the Greek transcription Argarizein from the Hebrew (Bruneau 1982; Kartveit 2014; White 1987).

Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme, in her work on the Gerizim corpus, suggests those who left these votive inscriptions participate seamlessly in offering practices common during the Hellenistic period, and share common prosopography with Judaean Yahwists (Gudme 2013). Knoppers argues that a collection of archaizing seal inscriptions from the Persian period also shows a shared repertoire of names (Knoppers 2006: 273-79). As he summarizes, archaeological work has so far suggested much more clearly than we knew before that Jewish and Samarian material culture during the Persian and Hellenistic periods was in many important respects indistinguishable (Knoppers 2013: 109-20).

As in the case of the study of the Pentateuch (or Hexateuch), archaeological research supports a turn to the north of its own. Efforts by scholars of Samaritan material to emphasize interconnection coincide neatly with emphasis on the complexity of cultic life in ancient West Asia—including northern Israel (Uehlinger 2015). Gudme’s work on the Gerizim corpus fits neatly into an increasingly accepted understanding of the diversity of Israelite, Samarian, and Judaean religious practice from the Late Iron Age onwards (Granerød 2019; Hensel, Nocquet, and Adamczewski 2020; Stavrakopoulou and Barton 2010). The inner-biblical ideal of increasingly stringent Israelite monotheism associated with successful reform has proven to stand in fruitful tension with extra-biblical evidence, especially from archaeology. The texts centred in older scholarship perhaps better represent a scribal redescription of Israel’s religion, aimed to shape and theorize it, rather than evidence from which scholars can securely reconstruct a uniform state of affairs.

Understanding Judaean and Samaritan populations as intertwined intersects, also, with renewed attention to scribality and the production of material texts within biblical studies. As the idea of ‘Bible’ as a single unit of analysis has destabilized (Bowley and Reeves 2003; Mroczek 2015), a more robust theory of scribal investment in texts becoming authoritative within limited contexts has grown up in its place. This model encourages a hypothesis of continued, intensive scribal contact with traditions as written things, grounded by further work on the texts from Qumran (Mroczek 2016). As Eva Mroczek puts it, based in particular on work on Psalms and Davidic lore, and encapsulating in a nutshell many of the disparate strands of recent scholarship: ‘Much early Jewish literature does not directly fit into an evolutionary narrative about the origins, development, and reception of the Bible’ (Mroczek 2015: 31).

It has rightly become de rigueur to ask whether much of the shape of the Hebrew Bible as we now have it, regardless of the antiquity of its content, preserves a pro-Judaean scribal emphasis, or, to put it in Philip Davies’ terms, what the differences are between ‘biblical’ and ‘ancient’ Israel (Davies 2004, 2007). In the spaces opened up by the retreat of what Mroczek calls the ‘hegemony of the Bible’, Samaritans have started to become part of the assumed fabric of ancient Israel that affected Israelite maintenance of its memories and traditions as ‘biblical’.

So, to recap so far, contemporary Samaritan studies generally acknowledges the lack of archaeological evidence for catastrophic population replacement during the Assyrian conquests of northern Israel and the interchangeability of Judaean and Samaritan material culture. It also increasingly takes for granted the diversification of the cultural landscape of Second Temple scribal culture, along with the attendant possibility that Samaritans might have made more impression on Judaean scribes and traditions previously thought to be Judaean.

Third, scholars have continued to turn away from schism between Jewish and Samaritan Israelites as part of a larger methodological adjustment; seeking a split or rupture appears inconsistent with prevailing scholarly models of identity construction. Scholars of Jewish antiquity have replaced a conflict model of Jewish clash with non-Jews, including Samaritans, with a broader discussion of ethnic labelling, imagined communities, and stereotyping (Williams 2009). As Shaye Cohen pithily put it, ‘What is it that makes us us and them them?’ (Cohen 1999: 2). Emphasis on the Hellenistic period for Samaritan studies echoes trends in Jewish studies towards grounding the emergence of Jewish religious identity in it. Disagreement over the translation of the Greek Ioudaios as ‘Jew’ or ‘Judaean’, for example (Mason 2007; Miller 2010, 2012, 2014; Schwartz 2011; Tomson 1986), has related consequences for the way we choose to conceptualize Samaritan self-definition related to their Jewish neighbours. Scholars have also increasingly questioned the applicability of the concept of Judaism as a ‘religion’ (Boyarin 2018) and scrutinized how ‘Jew’ as a label works to identify and differentiate (e.g., Berkowitz 2014; Baker 2017).

It is therefore fair to say that a model of constructivist rather than primordialist identity has gained ground in recent approaches to Samaritans just as within biblical studies more broadly (Tobolowsky 2018). As a result, emphasis has fallen on an extended period of differentiation and self-fashioning with respect to Judaean/Jewish identity (Knoppers 2013; Lim 2017; Schorch 2013b). Stefan Schorch, for example, while maintaining a version of Samaritan origins tied to the destruction of Gerizim, argues that difference between Judaeans and Samaritans was constructed via various means, including the development of centralized Gerizim theology, rival scribal Torah variants, and increasing exclusivity in claims to represent the authentic Israel (Schorch 2013b: 138-39).

This preference for constructivism is especially clear in the ongoing discussion of a terminological issue in identifying ‘Samaritans’. Not everyone called ‘Samarian’ is a ‘Samaritan’, as Pummer understands it: self-identified with an independent form of Yahwism (Pummer 2010). They might simply be a resident of the Persian province, Samerina, or Seleucid-controlled Samaritis (Knoppers 2013: 14-18). In her work on the Aramaic Gerizim inscriptions, Gudme concludes that since the Samarian sanctuary and onomasticon seem comparable to contemporary Judaean examples, a ‘sectarian Samaritan’ practice cannot be identified (2012: 3). Knoppers plumps for ‘Yahwistic Samarians’ to further specify the distinction between Israelite citizens and Macedonian colonists (Knoppers 2013: 17).

Emphasis on identities manufactured over time rides in tandem with the displacement of Josephus as a major source of historical data. Hjelm already cast significant doubt on Josephus’s usefulness as a source (Hjelm 2000: 182-238). But Kartveit and Pummer moved the discussion to a different phase, in which Josephus’s ‘interpretive framework’ (in Pummer’s words) serves to limit how far he provides information with which to reconstruct a history of the Samaritans (Kartveit 2009: 352; Pummer 2009: 284).

In placing more weight on Josephus’s literary creativity, scholars hew close to recent moves in Josephan studies (Chapman and Rodgers 2016). By and large, it seems agreed that Josephus’s highly polemicized image of Jewish/Samaritan enmity cannot be assumed to give historical data (Pummer 2019). The production of such an image implies the opposite, in fact; a more significant enmeshing of the two groups. Admittedly, this conversation still so far revolves around how far Josephus permits us to reconstruct a realist historical narrative about Samaritans, but it also raises the possibility of reading Josephus other than as a window into reality (Chalmers 2020a).

Our current assessment of the situation of the Samaritans in the Second Temple period, then, looks something like this. The collection of dedicatory inscriptions from Gerizim (dated ca. 450–111/110 bce) show no signs of divergence from Persian and Hellenistic norms; it seems the sanctuary itself was expanded significantly during the Hellenistic period. The communities devoting themselves to God in Shechem used standard, Yahwistic names. Shechem itself was home to an ethnically and religiously diverse population. Scholars agree that the destruction of the Gerizim sanctuary in 111/110 bce by John Hyrcanus was significant, but in what sense remains undetermined. Some suggest that it was a moment of significant divergence between Jewish and Samaritan communities; others argue that it makes most sense as an attempt by John Hyrcanus to compel Israelite (in a broad sense) focus on Jerusalem, with the ‘Samaritan’ challenge more an intramural issue of proper practice or a matter of political control than of group definition. Josephus has at least one account of Samaritans trotting round in Jerusalem causing trouble, and in the Gospel of Luke, the parable of the Good Samaritan is set on the Jerusalem to Jericho road. Both episodes suggest that even by the first century ce we still should consider Jewish and Samaritan Israelites as enmeshed. In the diaspora, evidence is a little thinner, but we know Jewish and Samaritan communities in Egypt were in close contact (and remained such at least into the time of the Fatimids), and we have evidence (both literary and epigraphic) of Samaritans in Greece, Italy, and Sicily into late antiquity.

We can see these shifts at work when Samaritans appear in New Testament scholarship, a field attendant on scholarship in cognate fields when it comes to Jews and Samaritans. New Testament scholars have what might best be called a homiletic engagement with the mentions of Samaritans in their texts (Matt. 10.5-6; Lk. 9.51-56, 10.25-37, and 17.11-19; Jn 4.4-42 and 8.48; we should also include the mission in Samaria in Acts 8.1, 4-25). Historically, it has been most common to assume that a traditional Protestant reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan in Lk. 10.29-37 tracked a Palestinian social reality (e.g., Longenecker 2009; Barbarick 2019). On this interpretation, Jewish and Samaritan communities hated one another. Thus, the help offered by a Samaritan to a (presumably Jewish) victim of bandits represented a radical departure from traditional Jewish practice. Such a view garnered additional support from a reading of the Gospel of John, including the famous statement that Jews and Samaritans hold nothing in common (Jn 4.9b). This interpretation, however, retrojects the idea of Jewish racial hatred for difference into a first-century context that resists such an understanding, and relies, at its core, on the legacy of modern antisemitism (Chalmers 2020b).

Scholars have thus started to rethink how to view Samaritans, recognizing the complexity of the legacy of Israel in the Second Temple period, especially drawing on ethnic constructivism (Frey 2012; Penwell 2019). Martina Böhm recently published an overview of Samaritan Israel in the New Testament, including the possibility of reading references to circumcision and Israel elsewhere in the New Testament (including in letters of Paul) as if they might involve Samaritans (Böhm 2020). Specifically, the importance of studying the complex representations of Samaritans in this collection has become clear, more so than assuming references to the group offer a window to the first century. This is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the case of Simon Magus, commonly portrayed by ancient Christians as a Samaritan but not explicitly as such either in Acts itself or in Samaritan sources (Hjelm 2012).

Fourth and finally, speaking again of late antiquity, recent decades have seen an efflorescence of work on Samaritans in the later Roman empire, in diaspora (van der Horst 2002; Zsengellér 2016), in Palestine (Sivan 2008), and with respect to material such as amulets (Pummer 2020). This work will become more and more relevant to the study of the earlier period as the lack of any straightforward Samaritan/Jewish ‘parting’ becomes more widely acknowledged, and in light of solid archaeological and textual evidence for the importance of Samaritans during the later period. The place of Samaritans in standard-issue histories of late antique cultural change is so far small, but secure (Barag 2009; Di Segni 1998; Gwynn 2010; Sivan 2008). Many—although by no means all—of the Christian representations of Samaritans in this period have been collected by Pummer (2002), but only a handful of analyses have so far emerged for this extensive corpus (Hahn 2020; Reed 2018: 159-66).

Work on Samaritan in late antiquity includes emerging study on Samaritan piyyutim and targumim, Aramaic texts from late antiquity. Although these are impossible to date precisely, they put to bed the myth that there are no surviving Samaritan writings from antiquity beyond the Samaritan Pentateuch. Most scholarship so far focuses on the way in which Samaritan liturgy and midrash fit into hymnody of the fifth- to seventh-century eastern Mediterranean, from the poetics of Romanos, to Palestinian midrash, to the Jewish Aramaic of the classical piyyutim (Lieber 2017b; Münz-Manor 2010; Novick 2019). Even scholars who specialize in Aramaic typically spend less time on Samaritan material, although the texts have been available for some time and philological work on Samaritan dialects continues (esp. by Stadel 2011, 2015a, 2017a, 2017b; Stadel and Shemesh 2018; Tal 2004). But it is becoming increasingly evident that to understand liturgy or biblical interpretation in antiquity means also to understand Samaritan piyyutim and midrash (Florentin 2006; Novick 2019; Stadel 2015a). The integration of this material into mainstream scholarship is admittedly complicated by the lack of translations. To teach undergraduates, for example, using Samaritan liturgy means to do your own translations or to adapt relatively unpredictable older efforts.

Scholars have benefitted from the realization that liturgical literature, very much understudied, provides potential insights into the lives of ancient communities. Laura Lieber, in particular, has identified how the performative expectations of Samaritan poetry, as well as its conceptualization and personification of Torah, expands the ways we understand late antique people to have ritualized, theorized, and realized their proximity to the divine (Lieber 2017a, 2017b, 2019). Scholars have likewise increasingly identified the value of hymnographic comparison (Pereira 1997; Florentin 2006; Münz-Manor 2010; Novick 2019; Stadel 2012), and the possibility of insights into history from a Samaritan perspective (Lieber 2009; Stadel 2015b). The incidence of Samaritan texts and traditions in magical contexts, most notably amulets (Pummer 2019; Stadel 2014), provides a window into yet another way in which Samaritan presence was concretized in late antiquity.

The specialist study of Samaritans in rabbinic literature also continues in tandem. Recent work has noticed the application of a partial inclusion model of Samaritan identity in early rabbinic literature, akin to Roman citizenship (Furstenberg 2017) and exploring how rabbinic literature constructed an increasingly sharp idea of Samaritan difference in later Talmudic thought (Bernasconi 2009; Lavee 2010, 2018; Schiffman 2012). In general, the lion’s share of this work focuses on explicit (or implicit) statements of rabbinic halakhic categories, with the much more frequent Samaritan appearances in aggadic material and midrash receiving only occasional attention (Grossberg 2016; Hasan-Rokem 2003: 43-48; Lehnardt 2003, 2010, 2018).

Finally, ranging well beyond the usual preserve of biblical studies, work on Samaritans during the later period of Muslim rule remains increasingly important—as when Hjelm last wrote in this journal (2004a: 36-37, 40)—especially given that most of our Samaritan written sources belong to this period. Steven Wasserstrom’s dissertation includes the most detailed discussion of Samaritans in early Muslim eyes (1986), and Levy-Rubin (2002) provides an edition and translation of one of the earliest Samaritan chronicle sources, the so-called Continuatio, but later periods have seen more sparks of interest. Gregor Schwarb and Gerhard Wedel have investigated the possible influence of Muʿtazilite rationalism in the eleventh-century writings of the Samaritan Abū l-Ḥasan aṣ-Ṣūrī (Schwarb 2011, 2013; Wedel 2007, 2011, 2012). Frank Weigelt has suggested the usefulness of Samaritan exegesis within the study of Judaeo-Arabic and engaged the Samaritan commentary tradition in more depth (Weigelt 2013, 2017, and forthcoming).

Work is also underway on Arabic Pentateuchal witnesses; one of the most distinctive features of the new edition of the Samaritan Pentateuch is its use of Arabic text witnesses. This is a curious, fruitful return to the beginnings of Samaritan studies in its current scholarly form. Two of the four earliest volumes in De Gruyter’s Studia Samaritana series focused on Samaritan literature in Arabic (Pohl 1974; Powels 1976). The only volumes to deal at length with the Samaritan ‘sect’, the Dositheans (Isser 1976), Samaritan exegesis (Lowy 1977), and Samaritan halakhah (Bóid 1989), whatever their flaws, foreshadowed this turn with extensive use of mediaeval Arabic texts. Finally, at least one forthcoming edited volume likewise focuses on Samaritan Pentateuch, Aramaic, and Arabic (Schorch, forthcoming). It seems that while work in Arabic has often been sidelined in favour of topics better fitted to the focus of biblical studies on ancient West Asia, the pendulum is swinging back to the history of Samaritan Israel as continuous, rather than siloed.

I also want to reflect on two more practically oriented matters. First, although there is plenty of work to do, the history of Samaritan studies scholarship has picked up steam, especially focused on seventeenth- to nineteenth-century intellectuals. Two items are of particular importance, since they help explain why the shape of the study of the Bible looks the way it does now—and identify possible alternatives. First, ongoing work on the antiquarians, intellectuals, and clergy of the seventeenth century (Miller 2001, 2015; Mills 2020: 96-135) highlights that the peripheralization of Samaritans in the current academy is out of sync with the interest of earlier centuries. It tells us how the priorities of the field came to be, but also how those epistemic and practicalized priorities shape who and what we consider worthy of time and training.

Increasing awareness of nineteenth-century intellectuals, especially amateurs like Moritz Heidenheim (Franz-Klauser 2006), philologists such as Wilhelm Gesenius (Tal 2013), manuscript purchasers like the Qaraite writer and traveller Abraham Firkovich (Akhiezer 2018; Harviainen and Shehadeh 1994, 2003), and Jewish intellectuals such as Abraham Shalom Yahuda (Gonzalez 2019; Schorch 2019b), helps us grasp how far the disciplinary form of the study of the Bible depends on whose stories it has excluded. That goes for both the orientalist discourses of the past and the thin reclamatory discourses of the present, given the tendency of the latter to fight on the ground established by the scholarly genealogy they criticize more often than to look beyond it.

Second, the last fifteen years have seen significant gains in resource availability. Digitization projects have abounded. Some have proved particularly fruitful, such as the availability of one of the earliest Samaritan Pentateuch manuscripts in European collections, the ‘Burned Scroll’, online via Cambridge University Library (MS Add. 1846; https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01846/10), or the Moses Gaster project at Manchester University overseen by Maria Cioată and Katharina Keim between 2013–2018 (http://www.manchesterjewishstudies.org/moses-gaster-project/). Some appear to have become unsupported, such as the online resources associated with the ambitious Digital Samaritan project at the University of Michigan (Ridolfo 2015; resources hosted at http://samaritanrepository.org). Others should provide momentum for the continued awareness of Samaritan history; the ongoing Israelite Samaritans project at Yeshiva University (https://www.yu.edu/cis/samaritans-project) plans several exhibitions and publications, as well as a documentary directed by Moshe Alafi and produced with Israeli television (http://nfct.org.il/blog/מועד-חדש-עדת-השומרונים-עבר-הווה-ועתי/). A conference volume will tackle not only the ancient history of Samaritans, but intellectual engagement with the group from the rabbis to Nachmanides to Scaliger to Chamberlain Warren to Moses Gaster and right up into the present-day experiences of members of the group in modern-day Israel.

The shift to digital humanities and museum exhibits perhaps illustrates that few new ancient sources have emerged to illuminate ancient Samaritan history since Hjelm’s 2004 article, as her own more recent overview of Samaritan literature demonstrates (Hjelm 2016b). Within the parameters set by those sources, however, much has shifted. The idea of a Jewish/Samaritan schism lies firmly in the scholarly past in almost every domain. There was no functional alienation between Jews and Samaritans, and no default group enmity, even while rhetoric of separation proliferated. A complicated, non-genealogical account of Samaritan scriptures slots usefully into discussions about the plurality of scriptures in the Second Temple period. Archaeological excavations—and their interpretive findings—continue to call for more specific and specialized attention to Israel beyond Judah, both in antiquity and beyond. And while there are few new ancient sources, the same could not be said for other vital archives. The documents in the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg, for example, the largest holding of Samaritan manuscripts in the world, have only recently become more accessible (Akhiezer 2018: 235).

Quirks and Habits in the Study of the Samaritans

Having discussed the state of the field, as well as recent methodological movements, the stage is set to point out some of the quirks of this recent scholarship. Every field has curiosities, but since relatively few scholars within biblical studies and cognate fields engage actively with Samaritans, it may be helpful to sketch out some points of orientation, and some of the areas where heavy lifting remains to be done.

First, there remains significant lost contact between scholars of various subfields: those who focus on the Persian period or Pentateuch, the New Testament, rabbinics, and late antiquity. It is still common to see, for example, scholars of New Testament studies assert that Jewish/Samaritan hatred is the natural background for the interpretation of Luke-Acts, despite almost a century of specialist work on Samaritans during earlier centuries stretching this assumption to its breaking point (Bourgel 2016; Chalmers 2020b). It is also relatively usual to come across scholars of the Pentateuch who theorize the scribal production of the Samaritan Pentateuch and its place in Jewish/Samaritan relations, without engagement with, for example, the extensive rabbinic evidence that Samaritans still often counted, at least to some rabbis, as Israel. Habitually, the degree of rabbinic interest in Samaritan Israelites is underestimated—one recent article reduced the hundreds of mentions of Samaritans in rabbinic literature to ‘several’ (Lim 2017: 90).

This divergence between fields is to some degree a product of scholarly division of labour. Scholars of the Pentateuch have plenty to do, and often do not stray beyond the limits of their source material. So too New Testament scholars. It is also difficult when important bibliography is often in relatively inaccessible conference volumes or hard-to-obtain journals, especially since a significant majority of scholars are now contingently employed or at teaching-heavy institutions. In the case of the Samaritans it is, however, particularly troublesome, with a gulf separating the work of an expert group of scholars associated with the Société d’Études Samaritaines from Jewish studies and biblical studies.

Moving across the scholarly divide might reap dividends, however. So much work in biblical studies makes methodological strides, especially vis-à-vis scribality, regarding texts often erroneously taken for granted as ‘stable’ by scholars working with a Samaritan focus. Recent volumes dedicated to the Samaritans and the Bible would benefit, for example, by accounting for, for instance, Mroczek’s work decentring the Bible and rethinking the ancient ‘book’ (Mroczek 2015, 2016). Similarly, the realization that late antique material reflects mutual and continued Samaritan and Jewish self-fashioning could usefully disrupt the assumption within much of biblical studies that, while the break between Jews and Samaritans was long, matters were clarified by the end of the Second Temple period. The work of Samaritan studies scholars makes it impossible to avoid noticing how selective researchers are in the topics they consider central for debate and expansion—and how often that selectivity predetermines what answers can be sought and given in ways that continue to peripheralize groups, like Samaritan Israelites, classified as ‘minorities’.

Second, much of the theorization of Samaritan identity retains a categorical tension between religious and ethnic Samaritan identity, both within Samaritan studies and without; see, for example, the continued terminological debate over the use of ‘Samaritan’ vs. ‘Samarian’ without the jump to talk about representation as an object for study in its own right. Dušek, for example, distinguishes without further specification between the later Samaritan community, which he counts as religious, and the earlier residents of the geographical area, which he does not (Dušek 2012: 71-72). When a scholar decides to start calling a group ‘Samaritan’ is often dependent on when they appear to that scholar suitably ‘religious’, as Kristin Weingart has pointed out (Weingart 2017). While Weingart rejects this due to incongruence with the identity-ordering markers of post-exilic Israel, there is an even broader categorical problem that equally undermines her preference for speaking of Samaritan ethnic difference. It is not self-evident that something ‘religious’ can be disembedded as a distinct identity from these other qualifiers, such as ethnic identity, or that ‘religious’ identity could not coexist as part of a multiplex array of possible identities (Nongbri 2013). We should consider quite carefully, as David Frankfurter puts it, which—and whether—terms ‘productively select out phenomena for comparison and interpretation’ (Frankfurter 2015).

The matter here is complicated by the habit within the field of using ‘Samaritan’ as the designation for the group, but perhaps rethinking this habit can also lead to a solution. In etymological terms, this name comes from the hostile identification of Samaritan Israelites with shomronim, rather than acknowledging the insider preference for shamērem, ‘keepers’, or ‘guardians’ [of Torah], or for bani yisrael, ‘children of Israel’. As we integrate Samaritans into the mainstream of biblical studies, and the study of antiquity more broadly, it might be best to practise a less polemical designation, like ‘Samaritan Israelites’, that at least acknowledges that the association of the group with interlopers not Israel has been recognized as the hostile filter that it is. The methodological upside is that, by strategic adoption of the insider term, we bypass the developmental emergence of the group in terms of ‘(religious) Samaritans’ or ‘(ethnic) Samarians’. We also undermine narrowly teleological accounts of Jews and/or Samaritans directed towards their later distinctiveness, a scholarly effort evident in the debate over ambiguous labels for the group as well as general avoidance of the term ‘proto-Samaritan’ for the practising Yahwists concentrated around Shechem during the Persian and Hellenistic periods.

Third, scholars still emphasize reclamation, just as Hjelm assumes when she writes that ‘neither the Hebrew Bible, nor Josephus, nor Samaritan traditions give us full historical information. They give us glimpses of the reality they create’ (Hjelm 2004a: 46). Her talk of ‘creating reality’ hints at the more complex epistemology of memory and narrative theory visible in her own work (e.g., Hjelm 2000: 12). Nevertheless, it still frames Samaritan studies squarely as a salvage operation. It is still current to think of the historical past as containing information that can be excavated with the right method, even if full historical information may not be possible. The lack of data is a problem, rather than the potential of a project shifted away from soft positivism. As Schorch argues, the historical break between Jews and Samaritans ‘must be datable, if the available sources allow it’ (2013b: 136).

The self-understanding of study of the Samaritans as a salvage operation goes some way to explaining the emphasis on archaeology driving much of the discussion in the second section of this article: archaeology as rendering facts about the Samaritan past that biblical studies otherwise lacks. Pummer leaves no ambiguity at the end of his monograph on Josephus. Literary evidence, he argues, with its rhetorical layers and the frequent obscurity of its sources, can get us only so far. There is no need for alarm, however: ‘As the finds by the Dead Sea and in Wadi Daliyeh and the excavations on Mt. Gerizim have shown, progress in our understanding of the early history of the Samaritans is possible if our study of the literary sources is carried out in dialogue with archaeology’ (Pummer 2009: 285; also Tsedaka 2012).

Archaeology, in much recent work on the Samaritans—in line with one of its common functions in the history of Israel more generally—is perceived to provide a scientific stamp of approval to literary arguments. One side-effect of shaking the foundations of Josephus’s reliability seems to be that it has, for the moment, left scholars wary of moving too far beyond the limits of archaeological evidence when making realist claims about Samaritan communities, that is to say, beyond the Persian period at one end and the archaeological evidence of Samaritan community in late antique Palestine at the other.

One note related to the point on reclamation: it is also common to link the study of the ancient Samaritans to the present-day situation of the group as it receives attention from anthropologists (Droeber 2014; Schreiber 2014; Urien-Lefranc 2020). In Pummer’s recent overview of the characteristics differentiating Roman-Byzantine period Samaritan from Jewish synagogues, for example, he takes a detour through nineteenth- and twentieth-century travelogues to supplement his arguments about sukkot in Samaritanism (Pummer 2018: 58-61). Similarly, he explicitly compares the siting of ancient Samaritan synagogues outside their settlements to where ‘today’s Samaritans’ build (Pummer 2018: 63). Articles commonly introduce the Samaritan Israelites specifically with a reference to their current minority demographics in Kiryat Luza and Holon (e.g., Schorch 2007: 5).

On the one hand, the acknowledgement that the Samaritan community are stakeholders in their own history is of moral importance. Rather too much external engagement with the group has taken the form of squeezing the biblical past from the Samaritans regardless of cost, from European scholars pretending to represent a Samaritan diaspora in the seventeenth century to the rather unscrupulous acquisitions of travellers in the nineteenth. On the other hand, telescoping the past towards the present leads to some interesting methodological tangles. It risks conceptualizing Samaritanism as static, self-evident in its identity no matter what its changes over time. Using nineteenth-century practices as a reference for Samaritans in antiquity, for example, rather echoes nineteenth-century statements, such as in The Athenaeum in 1888, that later Samaritan commentaries have ‘a great deal that belongs to ancient Israel remaining in them’ (Anon 1888: 661-62). If Samaritan Israelites are important because of what they represent to us, in a fragmented and imperfect sense, of an ancient, prestigious past, what scholarly desires do they meet, and how are we folding their significance into our biblicizing fantasies?

Moreover, walking the line between Samaritan insiders and scholarly project leads to potential diplomatic complications with respect to certain projects. For example, Benyamim Tsedaka, the erudite Samaritan scholar, has published an interlinear English translation of the Pentateuch along with the Masoretic version (Tsedaka and Sullivan 2013), in theory to serve for English readers the function of a Hebrew volume comparing the Samaritan and Masoretic Hebrew prepared by Moshe Florentin and Abraham Tal (Tal and Florentin 2010). Florentin, a careful philologist, reviewed the book (Florentin 2015). Florentin’s review is critical, arguing the translation ‘points to differences that do not exist, and simultaneously fails to point out important differences between the two versions…instead of presenting the SP as it deserves, it twists it and misleads those who do not have the tools to discern its failures’ (Florentin 2015: 746-47). Florentin is at the same time explicitly courteous. He notes not only the ‘past contributions’ of Tsedaka as a scholar, but also his assistance ‘with advice and in his access to manuscripts of different Samaritan compositions’ (Florentin 2015: 746). The review is a case in point of the complicated matrix of participation and exclusion persisting in Samaritan studies, as a scholar aims to maintain philological standards without wrongly excluding Samaritans from producing scholarship measured—for better or for worse—against those standards.

Conclusion

In conclusion, then, again, now is a good time to be thinking about Samaritans. The publication of Tibåt Mårqe, the recent overview by Reinhard Pummer, and the first volume of the new critical edition of the Samaritan Pentateuch, all mark this as a moment of the maturation of Samaritan studies within its traditional docket—biblical studies. Simultaneously, scholars have increasingly situated ancient Samaritans for further discussion beyond the confines of the study of Bible in cognate fields: rabbinics, New Testament studies, the study of Second Temple Judaism, and the study of late antiquity.

As a result, possibilities abound. The study of Samaritans and Islam, a topic that involves the majority of Samaritan-authored writings—including the period of the greatest Samaritan literary activity—remains mostly terra incognita. Samaritans are a frequent, and often underexplored presence in rabbinic literature. The Aramaic Samaritan liturgical texts, much of which is late antique, are seeing more concentrated attention. The stage is set for further study of ancient Christian images of the group often previously limited to the New Testament or the revolts against the fifth- and sixth-century Roman Empire.

Even more so now than sixteen years ago, when Hjelm wrote (perhaps optimistically) that the Samaritans could no longer ‘be relegated to a minor, or even a neglected, status in biblical studies’ (Hjelm 2004a: 46), the resources are ready and the groundwork prepared for extensive and meaningfully interdisciplinary engagement of biblical studies and its cognate fields with the Samaritans. Scholars have the opportunity not only to reclaim an often peripheralized group for direct scholarly study, but to transform our approaches to our scholarly work and the categories we bring to it more broadly by rendering it subject to its own peripheries. What would it look like—and what would we have to change about the way we approach biblical and parabiblical literature—if we considered how Samaritan Israel has been excluded from biblical studies not by necessity, but by learned habits of attention?