By Jim Mettenbrink
When a lawyer asked Jesus, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”(Luke 10:25), He referred to a Samaritan man rendering much more than first aid to a dying Jew (Lk 10:33-35). Last week, we noted that Samaritans suddenly appear when Israel (Northern Kingdom) had been destroyed (2 Kings 17:29). Who were the Samaritans?
God divided Israel into two kingdoms following King Solomon’s idolatry (1 Kings 11:4-13). God’s patience ended with the Northern Kingdom (NK) after giving the people 200 years to repent of their increasingly depraved idolatry (2 Kings 1:1-18). He used Assyria to destroy the NK and take the Israelites into captivity. Some 40 years earlier, Amos, God’s prophet to the NK revealed that 90% of the people would be exiled into the Assyrian Empire (Am 5:3; 2 Kg 17:6, 22-23). In turn, Assyria repopulated the land with peoples from the empire (2 Kg 17:24). The NK’s capital had been Samaria, now the territory would be referred to as Samaria, as noted as an ethnic region in Jesus’ day (John 4:4:9) more idolatry was introduced and a perverted form of worship to the God of heaven (2 Kg 17:24- 41) and intermarriage between Israelites and foreigners would naturally occur and the people in the land of the former NK were called Samaritans (v29). What was the relationship between the Jews and Samaritans that Jesus would use the Samaritan as the compassionate “first responder?”
During the next 200 years, the Assyrian empire was taken by Babylon who took the Southern Kingdom (586BC) (SK– Judah) into exile. In 539 BC, the Persians took over Babylon and released the descendants of those exiled by Assyria and Babylon (recorded in Ezra and Nehemiah).
When the Jews returned from Babylon, the Samaritans opposed the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem so they contacted the Persian emperor so construction ceased for about 15 years and then completed (Ezra 4-6; 516 BC). When the Jews began building the wall several decades later, Samaritan opposition threatened conflict. Nehemiah, the Jewish leader and Persian diplomat commanded the workers to work with one hand and have a sword in the other (Neh 4:17-18). The Samaritans even formed a conspiracy to kill Nehemiah (Neh 6:1-10). Thus the tensions began between the Jews and Samaritans nearly 500 years before Christ.