2012-09-16    David Timbs (Melbourne)     David's previous articles  

A Good Pagan Samaritan

The story behind the story of the Good Samaritan goes back much further than the time of Jesus’ parable. Its meanings are grounded in the tumultuous history not just of the Samaritans, but of people of Israel themselves. It’s a story of peoples drawn by faith to the worship and service of One God but struggling with the temptations to worship strange gods.

God and the other gods – Shechem and Mt Carmel

Moses’ successor, Joshua, in his final act before he died, gathered the confederated twelve tribes of Israel at Shechem (Josh 24). There he read out the Law of God and called upon the people to renew the Covenant. He offered them a choice which would have lasting consequences, a choice between the nature gods of their pagan neighbours, the Canaanites, or the God of Israel. If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm, and consume you, and after having done you good. (Josh 24: 20)

The very same choice was constantly put under challenge and test. The prophet Elijah again gathered the people together at Mt Carmel. To stress the utter seriousness of the occasion, he entered a decisive conflict with the priests of the foreign cult which had seduced and alienated Israel from their God. It was a time of severe drought and the people of Israel were being attracted a nature god whose priests claimed would answer their prayers of desperation.  That deity was worshipped on Mt Carmel and the god’s name was Ba’al Shamem, god of thunder, rain and vegetation. The story of Elijah’s struggle and his final victory in the name of YHWH, the one true God of Israel is recounted in graphic detail in 1 Kings 18: 20-40.

Later crucial attempts at recalling the people to authentic YHWH worship and obedience to the Law were made in the early eighth century reforms initiated by a succession of southern Kings, notably Hezekiah. None of these religious or cultural reforms were entirely successful. Israel ’s monotheism was constantly challenged by the polytheism of neighbouring non-Jews.

Hellenism: its threat to Jewish religion and culture

Hellenism was the legacy of Alexander the Great. It was largely the creature of his particular genius at unifying his vast and disparate empire, the first real super-power in world history.  Its strength lay in its enormous capacity to absorb religious and other differences while imposing the ideal of the Greek city-state and its style of governance. A major seductive point of attraction for a monotheistic faith system was its stress on a singular deity with many qualities (the minor gods).

The enforced inculturation of Hellenism in Palestine by the Seleucid Greeks of Antioch had profound and, in some instances, permanent repercussions for Jewish life from Judea to Upper Galilee .

The Jewish population of the Carmel Range experienced the effects of religious ambiguity and the contamination of their social customs and religion with the advent of Hellenism.  The ancestral cult of YHWH was undermined and compromised by enforced policies to harmonise it with that of the old Canaanite Ba’al Shamem and the Greek counterpart, Zeus megistos keraunios (The great thunder god). This typically Hellenizing process was intended to create a sense of divine universality and commonality among diverse peoples. Alexander himself proclaimed this vision the year before he died near Babylon in 323 BCE.

This policy of socio-religious homogenisation was actively encouraged and promoted right down the coast plain of Palestine from Tyre to Ptolemais ( Akko ) as late as 137 BCE. It also spread to the hinterlands either by military or commercial necessities.

The infection spreads to Jerusalem

Even in Jerusalem , an influential group of the ruling aristocracy, for reasons of self-interest, was prepared to compromise with Hellenism even though this meant compromising the integrity of the Temple , the national shrine. This took the form of YHWH worship along side with and contaminated by Greek cults. Biblical historian, Sean Freyne observes,

“The form of this new worship is particularly important .... . The temple at Jerusalem was to be turned into a shrine of Zeus Olympios, and its whole symbolic character changed by turning the sanctuary into a sacred grove and erecting a massebah  or sacred stone over the altar of incense (2 Macc 6: 2).” There is evidence too of other forms of syncretism or amalgamation of YHWH – Zeus worship with the cult of Dionysus in Jerusalem . 2 Macc 6: 7 refers to processions with wreaths of ivy associated with that god. [1]

O Galilee , O Galilee

Galilee provided an endless source of criticism and complaint from Temple authorities and the Pharisees. The Galileans as a whole, and in particular, its peasant class, the ‘am ha=’aretz, were targeted by the southern orthodox Judaizers who attempted to ‘convert’ them. The ‘am ha-‘aretz were regarded as almost invincibly ignorant peasants who were neglectful of their duties in regard to Temple tithing and strict ritual purity laws – halakhoth.

Johanan ben Zakkai was a former disciple of the legendary moderate Hillel and after the destruction of Temple in 70, he gathered around himself the remaining Pharisaic scribes and together they established normative Judaism. He spent around twenty years in Galilee (20-40 CE) attempting to lead the locals back to orthodoxy. During that time the Scribe was consulted only twice for his advice. In sheer exasperation, he eventually stormed off back to Jerusalem declaring, O Galilee , O Galilee ! You hate the Torah! Your end will be to be besieged. Even the Galileans would probably found it difficult to be classed as anything but lax by either the exasperated Pharisaic Scribes or the Temple authorities. Johanan ben Zakkai was not the only one to be rejected by the fickle Galileans.

Jesus had his own profound failures and frustrations in Galilee . After his initial success preaching the Good News throughout Galilee , Syria , the Decapolis and the coastal regions of Tyre and Sidon , Jesus found himself mostly rejected. Initial enthusiasm for his message turned into indifference or hostility. He cursed the very villages he called home and whence came many of his inner circle. Johanan ben Zakkai’s petulant outburst sounds tame in comparison with the upset of Jesus of Nazareth,

“Then he began to upbraid the cities where most of his mighty works had been done, because they did not repent. Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida ! for if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre   and Sidon , they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgement, for Tyre and Sidon than for you. And you, Capernaum , will you be exalted to heaven? You shall be brought down to Hades. For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I tell you that it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgement for the land of Sodom than for you.’ “ (Mt 11: 20-24)  

The Suspect Samaritans

The turning point for Jesus in the Gospel narrative has him leaving Galilee and heading off for a confrontation with the Temple authorities in Jerusalem . It was not a straight line.

After calling the Twelve, Jesus commissioned them for their ministry of preaching and healing saying, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans.” (Mt 10: 5) ......  Jews have no dealings with Samaritans – John 4: 9.

“When the days drew near for his to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem . And he sent messengers ahead of him, who went and entered a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him; but the people would not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem .” (Lk 9: 51-53)

On the way, Jesus, Jesus told the parable of the outsider Samaritan saving the life of an insider Jew, when his own religious leaders had refused to offer assistance. The Samaritan has come to be called, ‘good.’ Why?

“That is the problem,” writes John Dominic Crossan and he goes on to explain why, “The ‘good’ act evilly and the ‘bad’ act virtuously. But if the story  really intended to encourage help of one’s neighbour in  distress or even to one’s enemy in need, would it not have been much better to have a wounded Samaritan in that ditch and have a Jew stop to aid him?” – The Dark Interval.

As usual, context is of the utmost importance in understanding the teachings and actions of Jesus. The framing question which evoked Jesus response was posed by a student of the Torah. Presumably he had the expected orthodox answer in mind before he put the question,  “Who is my neighbour?” Levitical Law enjoined, “Love your neighbour as yourself” (19: 18). It would have been beyond his imagination and utterly illogical to think that this idea of ‘neighbour’ could extend to anyone outside his own clan and community.

The word ‘neighbour’ in Hebrew is re’ah, meaning ‘close friend’, ‘a deeply beloved one,’ ‘one belonging to the inner circle, a member of the clan.’ Samaritans did not fit into that category in any sense of the word. It was, for Jews, the Samaritans who occupied the outer fringes of respectable halahkic (ritually pure) Judaism, but Jesus himself was a marginal Jew.

The unreasonable logic of Jesus

As he moved towards Jerusalem, Jesus passed along the borders of Samaria and Galilee and he entered a village. It is not clear whose village it was but there he was met by ten lepers. The whole village, its occupants and Jesus were rendered unclean by their presence. Still he cured them all. The only one to return to thank him was a Samaritan and he had come to faith in Jesus and thereby became a neighbour (Lk 17: 11-19). Jesus had broken through two boundaries: he not only rendered himself ritually unclean by his dealings with the lepers but he had also breached the wall of ritual uncleanness between Jewish land and the forbidden territory of a racially mongrelised and apostate Samaritan population.

It is the heterodox faith of the Samaritans which was the real issue for the Jews. After the Seleucid Greeks were defeated by the Maccabeans, the Temple in Jerusalem was cleansed and re-dedicated. Furthermore, Temple scribes fanned out into the territories to re-Judaize the people of the Land of Israel. They did not even attempt to convert and rehabilitate the Samaritans. The latter had insisted on living according to their cut down version of the Tradition and worshipping at their own national shrine on Mt Gerizim. It had never, in the eyes of the Jews, been cleansed of foreign influences since the time of colonisation by Sidonian Greeks. Freyne comments,

         “These Sidonians are at pains to point out that they should not be identified with the Jew and are happy to have the Zeus worship established at their sanctuary. The fact that this move led to no counter-action in Samaria suggests a totally different religious and cultural atmosphere to Jerusalem and Judea, where the resistance movement was able to match the hellenizers in their zeal for the law. This difference can only mean that at Samaria the hellenization of the ethos (life-styles, cultural patterns) was as a whole made the identification of the God of Gerizim with Zeus far less offensive to the worshippers there. Accordingly, in this atmosphere of easy relationships no further attempt was made to change the ‘semitic’ style of life of the people and there was no persecution. It is interesting that in the wake of destruction of their temple the Samaritans were able to continue worshipping on this mountain. (Jn 4: 20).” [2]

Their mountain continued to be associated with the homogenised cults of Ba’al Shamem, Zeus hypistos (Most High god) which both sounded very much like the Hebrew ancestral deity, El Elyon ( the Most High God). It was this kind of tolerance for a mixture of cults, native and foreign which afforded protection to the Samaritans from persecution,

 “Even at Samaria, it was only after the Sidonians had made representations to the king to the  effect that they had chosen ‘to live according to the Greek manner’, that the less discerning (than the earlier Ptolemaic rulers) Seleucid officials, Nicanor and Apollonius desisted from harassing the natives. Similarly, according to 2 Macc 6: 8f, Ptolemy, presumably the governor of Coele-Syria and Phoenecia (cf. 4: 45; 8: 8) – that is the top ranking Seleucid official of the eparchy – had a decree issued to the neighbouring Greek cities, that they should adopt the same policy towards the Jews and make them partake of the sacrifices, and should slay those who did not choose to change over to Greek customs.” [3]

Parabolic shock

Jesus never spoke disparagingly about the Samaritans. He clearly saw them as important in spreading the Good News and announcing the presence of a great prophet among them. The story of the woman at the well of Jacob, the Parable of the ‘good’ Samaritan and the healing of the lepers all bear this out. It seems certain form the Gospel of John and Luke/Acts that Samaritan converts formed a very important and influential part of the early Jesus Communities.

This parable exceeds the usual level of shock and impertinence that was central to the subversive teaching of Jesus. He fundamentally confronts and assaults the conventional reasoning of the Jewish legal mind. Jesus affronts rationality and stresses beyond the limits the boundaries of what could be demanded of even the most understanding and compassionate of his co-religionists.

 Jesus was challenged by his opponents both on his message and behaviour, The Jews answered him, ‘Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?’ Jesus answered, ‘I have no demon, but I honour my Father, and you dishonour me. (Jn 8: 48) Jesus did not deny the first part of the question – another shock to the inquisitors!

      A final reflection on the Good Samaritan by the legendary Australian poet,
 Henry  Lawson,

He’s been a fool, perhaps, and would

have prospered had he tried,

but he was and never could

pass by the other side.

An honest man whom men would call soft,

while laughing up their sleeves –

no doubt in business ways he oft

had fallen amongst thieves.

 – The Good Samaritan

[1] [2] [3] For those wishing an in depth study on the major points discussed here, see Sean Freyne (1980), Galilee From Alexander the Great to Hadrian 323 B.C.E. to 135 C.E. – A Study of Second Temple Judaism. UND, IN.

A web service providing further reading on the Samaritans, see John P. Meier, “The Historical Jesus and the Historical Samaritans. What can be said?” Biblica 81 (2), 2000, 202-232 [Here]

For more sources on “The Good Samaritan”, see Jesus Database, [Here]

For further insights into Lev 19: 18 and how Jews would have understood this mitzvah, see R.E. Clements, “Loving One’s Neighbour: Old Testament Ethics in Context,” click [Here]

David Timbs writes from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

16/09/12