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In the Maccabean period, a community geographically and religiously close to Judea came into disagreement and competition with Jerusalem and its cult: the Samaritans, whose center lay in Shechem (old Samaria), who worshiped YHWH on Gerizim. Since the excavations by Yitzhak Magen⁶⁴ there is no doubt that a temple stood there.⁶⁵ They have the Pentateuch in common with the Judeans, although in its own paleo-Hebrew form of writing, with specific deviations in content substantiating their sole legitimacy as followers of the Torah over against the Judeans.

The question of their historical background is complex and must be considered within the context of the history of Samaria. The starting point is the subjugation of the Northern Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in 721 BCE and the deportation of part of the population of Samaria and the resettlement of foreign peoples:

The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and he settled them in the towns of Samaria in place of the Israelites; they took possession of Samaria, and dwelt in its towns (2 Kgs 17:24 JPS).

This looks like a complete population exchange, but such was not really the case. The report in 2 Kgs 17:25f. continues saying that those peoples brought their own gods with them and worshiped them instead of YHWH, whereupon the latter sent a plague of lions. To avoid this, the king of the Assyrians sent an exiled priest back, who taught the worship of YHWH in Bethel (2 Kgs 17:27f.). But this did not make the inhabitants of Samaria worshipers of YHWH exclusively; rather, the new settlers worshiped him alongside their own gods.

Those nations worshiped YHWH, but they also served their idols. To this day their children and their children’s children do as their ancestors did (2 Kgs 17:41).

This gave rise to the theory that the Samaritans of the Hellenistic-Roman period were the product of this syncretism. This view is not tenable, as the (supposed) Samaritan mixture of religions from the eighth century had nothing to do with the Samaritans’ strict faithfulness to the Torah from the second century BCE onwards.

A more realistic hypothesis starts with the deportation of the indigenous population and the resettlement of foreign peoples, but rightly acknowledges that this population exchange was only partial, and that some YHWH-worshipers had remained in their land. Afterwards, the practice of religion in the cities of Bethel and Samaria gained syncretistic features, but YHWH-worship had remained in effect in the countryside.⁶⁶ But this did not lead to the shape of Samaritan YHWH-worship in the Hellenistic-Roman period either.

A fundamental paradigm shift is called for. Samaritan Torah religion did not emerge from the (possible) syncretism of the early period but after Alexander, primarily in the Maccabean period. Hans Gerhard Kippenberg pioneered this theory:

The Samaritan sect seems to have constituted itself essentially in the second century BCE. The sect was born of Israelite priests who understood themselves as sons of Eleazar and denied the office of High priest to Zadokites, Elides and Levites. During the third century BCE the rivalry of two priesthoods in Shechem and Jerusalem does not seem to have been understood as a definitive antithesis. It was not until the second century BCE, when the Jerusalem High priestly succession collapsed, that there was dispute over the legitimate cult.⁶⁷

The Torah manuscripts found at Qumran are also significant in this regard, as a number of them display (proto-) Samaritan variants.⁶⁸ A key part in the background of the Samaritan Pentateuch was certainly played by the destruction of the temple under John Hyrcanus I, »but the pre-Samaritan material will have been much older.«⁶⁹

Hyrcanus I destroyed the Samaritan temple in 111/110 BCE (not 128 BCE as previously thought).⁷⁰ Since then, the Samaritans have had no sacrificial cult, except for the Passover lamb, which lives among the Samaritans, even after the destruction of their temple, on to the present day.⁷¹

Half a century earlier, however, there was a confrontation when, in the process of Hellenization efforts in Jerusalem and on Gerizim, the YHWH-cult was opened to heathen variants—in Jerusalem for Zeus Olympios, on Gerizim for Zeus Xenios. In this context the Samaritan supplicants declared to King Antiochus IV Epiphanes that they were not related to the Judeans (i.e. the Jews) in Jerusalem. Their hope was that this would give them greater recognition on the part of the Seleucid king.

The conflict or quarrel between Jews and Samaritans took grotesque forms in the first century CE, when at Passover of the year 6 or 7 CE bones were scattered by Samaritans in the area of the Jerusalem Temple in an attempt to defile it (Josephus, Ant. 18.29f.) or when under Pilate in 35/36 CE the Samaritans led a revolt, the cruel suppression of which eventually cost Pilate his office (Ant. 18.18–89).