Samaria

Samaria is the name of a city in the central hill country of ancient Israel and, by extension, of the region around it and of the people known as Samaritans. The text says the city was built by Omri, king of Israel, who bought the hill from a man named Shemer for two talents of silver and called it Samaria after him (1 Kings 16:24); the Hebrew name Shomron preserves that derivation, which is a linguistic point consistent with the biblical explanation. Historically the city sat on a prominent hill roughly a day's walk north of Jerusalem, astride the main north–south road through the highlands, and it served as the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel from Omri's reign until the kingdom's collapse. The Elisha stories belong to that same northern landscape; 2 Kings 6:17 records the prophet's prayer that his servant's eyes be opened, and the young man saw the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire.

The text says that in the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria and carried Israel away to Assyria, placing the captives in Halah, on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes (2 Kings 17:6), and that the Assyrian king then brought peoples from other lands to settle the cities of Samaria (2 Kings 17:24). The population that resulted from that resettlement and from the Israelites who remained is the background for the Samaritans of the New Testament. How that people came to be is a matter of genuine and unresolved disagreement: the account in 2 Kings 17, and the Jewish historian Josephus after it, treats the Samaritans as foreign settlers who took up the worship of Israel's God without wholly abandoning their own; the Samaritan community itself traces its descent to northern Israelites who never left the land and who kept the law of Moses at Mount Gerizim. Historically, the archaeological and literary evidence is weighed differently by different scholars, and the question is bound up with the community's own self-understanding.

In the Gospels Samaria is the setting for one of Jesus' longest conversations. The text says he came to a Samaritan town called Sychar, spoke with a woman at Jacob's well about living water that becomes "a well of water springing up to eternal life" (John 4:10, 14), and answered her appeal to ancestral worship on the mountain with the saying that the hour is coming when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth (John 4:23-24). His words about food being to do the will of the one who sent him, and about sowing and reaping a harvest unto eternal life (John 4:34, 36, 38), frame the Samaritan villagers as a field already prepared by others. In Acts, Samaria is a named stage in the spread of the gospel: Jesus promises witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8); Philip preaches there and Peter confronts Simon with the words "you have neither part nor lot in this matter" (Acts 8:21); and the assemblies throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria are said to have had peace and to have multiplied (Acts 9:31).

The main lines of interpretation differ. For Samaritans, Gerizim rather than Jerusalem is the place God chose for his name, and the Samaritan Pentateuch is their Scripture; the Jewish and Christian Scriptures place that choice at Jerusalem, and John 4:20-24 has been read in most Christian traditions as resolving the question in favor of worship not tied to either mountain. Among Christians, patristic and later writers often treated Samaritans as figures of schism or of heterodox belief, while the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37) made "Samaritan" a byword for costly neighbor-love, and the Samaritan woman of John 4 is venerated as a saint in some Eastern traditions under the name Photini; other communities read her simply as a representative convert. One way to read the term across Scripture is as a place-name that became a boundary marker, so that "Samaritan" functions in some passages as a neutral description of a people and in others, such as John 8:48, as an insult.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.