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Many people have heard the story
of the Good Samaritan. From the story, we can tell that there is a significance
to the fact that it was the Samaritan, not the priest or the Levite who stopped
to help the wounded man. Knowing a little bit about who the Samaritans were and
what their relationship was to the Jews adds a new dimension to the story.
Samaritans viewed themselves as
Israelites, and as true remnants of the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. They
believed that they had held to the monotheistic faith of their fathers and
upheld the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) as their authority.
They kept the rite of circumcision, observed the Sabbath and Jewish festivals,
and honored Moses. Why is it then that the Bible tells us that “the Jews
have no dealings with the Samaritans” (John 4:9)?
The Jews despised the Samaritans.
They considered Samaritans “half breeds”-descendants of Mesopotamian
(Gentile) colonists who settled in the area and intermarried with the Jews who
lived there at one time. Samaritans were regarded as wholly impure and just as
bad as the Gentiles. In Jesus’ day, Herod the Great (the Jewish figurehead)
married a Samaritan woman in order to alleviate some of the tension, but to no
avail.
Deepening the rift between the two
groups was the fact that the Samaritans in New Testament Bible times rejected
the Jewish temple worship. Three hundred years earlier the Samaritans had
constructed their own temple on Mount
Gerizim. They also
rejected all of the Heberw Bible except for the Torah.
The Jews were so convinced of the
inferiority of the Samaritans that when traveling throughout Israel, they would take detours around the city
of Samaria,
going many miles out of their way in order to avoid it. Some have said that the
Jews would not even allow the Samaritans to convert to true Judaism.
By keeping this all in mind, we
can see the significance of the Samaritan stopping to help the wounded man. The
Samaritan was willing to stop and help a man who despised and hated him. The
Levite and the priest, who were esteemed righteous and Godly by the Jews, would
not so much as stop to check on the man. One lesson we can learn from this
story is that it is the heart of a person that matters, not their ethnicity.
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