The Samaritans and Early Judaism: A Literary Analysis

Abstract

The Samaritans and Early Judaism: A Literary Analysis, by Ingrid Hjelm. JSOTSup 303. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000. Pp. 318. $85.00. All tradition is, of course, story. As such, it involves coherent retelling of beginnings, past events, and even future ones, interpreted from center of a people's experience in world at a particular time and place. Then again, story may be told from an outsider's point of view. Hjelm's excellent monograph on historically elusive Samaritans provides yet another lesson that prevailing tradition offers merely a collective perspective (albeit an ultimately meaningful one for those who celebrate it) on actually happened, and that sometimes meaningful perspectives are required for bringing a clearer view of historical reality into focus. Hjelm asserts that origin and history of Samaritans cannot be drawn at face value from accounts of Josephus, literature of prevailing Pharasaic-rabbinic Jewish tradition, NT, or even Samaritan sources themselves. Rather, a critical evaluation of authorial intent must be made on basis of all available sources in order to determine where and to what extent authors and editors have accommodated historical realities for ideological purposes. Carefully applied, this methodology results in a historian's perspective of traditions in question, relatively free of biases produced by meaningful stories competing for preeminence or, as our author puts it, the problematic presence of past traditions over against present innovations, and two groups who claim authority for each of their (. 266). Hjelm's thesis in nuce that prevailing view of Samaritan origins and history, often described in terms of questionable heritage, expulsion, and dissidence, must be abandoned. Underlying this view ideologically revisionist standpoint of a relatively late, Jerusalem-centered Judaism. Indeed, historical hot-spot for any real Jewish-- Samaritan conflict to be found in second and first century B.c.F., with emergence and maintenance of an independent Judaean temple state campaigning for political consolidation in region. On side of polemic, Samaritan historiography, Hjelm rightly notes, is as little reliable at face value as similar Jewish historiography. We cannot simply read such `historiographies, independently of each other (p. 272). The methodology theoretically sound, but it still leaves much to reader for testing weight of Hjelm's assertions. The chapters of book follow in logical order. Chapter 1 provides necessarily selective overview of a century of scholarship on Samaritan question, beginning with variations of paradigm that viewed Samaritan origins on basis of Assyrian resettlements (2 Kgs 17); one or another later accounts (a priestly expulsion in Neh 13, accounts of Josephus, or books of Maccabees concerning Hellenistic period); and, finally, irreconcilable break resulting from John Hyrcanus's second-century B.C.E. destruction of Samaritan temple. Chapter 2 provides current state of Samaritan studies, focusing especially on alternative theories that, on one hand, posit a relatively later date for origin of a distinctive Samaritan tradition or, on hand, view Samaritans as original Israelites. The most notable champion of latter view E. Nodet of Ecole Biblique, whose influence on Hjelm's own work apparent. The next three chapters offer a broad but cursory overview of relevant Samaritan and non-Samaritan primary texts. …