The Guardians of the Mountain
Every year, as spring arrives and the lunar calendar reaches the fourteenth of Nisan, several dozen families climb Mount Gerizim in white robes.
*They have been doing this, without interruption, for at least two thousand years. Perhaps longer. They bring sheep — one per family, sometimes a shared animal for families that cannot afford their own — and at the moment the sun touches the horizon, at a signal from the High Priest who stands on the stone altar at the mountain's summit, each head of household draws a knife across the throat of his family's lamb. The blood touches their foreheads. The carcasses are skinned and roasted whole in open pits that the community has prepared for the purpose. For most of the night they eat — lamb with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, the meal commanded in Exodus 12 before the departure from Egypt.
What they are doing is the oldest continuously performed biblical sacrifice still practiced on earth. No other community has maintained the Passover sacrifice, with animal slaughter, fire, blood, and the communal meal on the mountain, for this duration without interruption. Not Jewish communities — the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE ended animal sacrifice in Judaism. Not Christian communities — the sacrifice was theologically superseded. Not Muslim communities — Islam does not inherit this specific commandment. Only the Samaritans, on their mountain, in their white robes, have kept it going.
They are approximately nine hundred people. They hold Israeli identity documents and Palestinian Authority identity documents simultaneously. Half of them live in the Israeli city of Holon, south of Tel Aviv; the other half live in Kiryat Luza on the slopes of Mount Gerizim itself, within the boundaries of the West Bank, within sight of the minarets of Nablus. They are neither Israeli nor Palestinian in any simple sense, though they are both, and they are something else entirely: the last remnant of an ancient people whose tradition predates the categories within which the modern world attempts to place them.
I. The Name — Shamerim, Guardians of the Torah
The community calls itself Shamerim (שמרים) — Guardians, Keepers, Observers. The word derives from the Hebrew root sh-m-r, to keep or watch, and has two applications that the tradition holds together: the Samaritans are the Keepers of the Torah, faithful to the commandments as given to Moses without addition or diminution; and they are historically connected to the region called Samaria (Shomron in Hebrew, שֹׁמְרוֹן), the mountain territory of the ancient Northern Kingdom of Israel. Whether the regional name precedes or follows the religious designation is a question of historical priority that the tradition does not feel bound by.
The English word "Samaritan" enters common usage through the New Testament — specifically through the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) and the story of the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4), both narratives that presuppose the ancient Jewish-Samaritan hostility as their social backdrop and, in the first case, invert it by making the despised outsider the moral exemplar. For two millennia, "Good Samaritan" has been the primary frame through which the name has reached Western ears — a frame so successful that most people who know the phrase have no idea that there are actual Samaritans still living on the same mountain their ancestors argued about with the Jerusalem Temple authorities.
The community itself prefers the self-designation Shamerim and the fuller designation Israelite Samaritans — a formulation that asserts the core claim: they are Israelites. The designation is not metaphorical or adoptive. It is, in their understanding, literal and historical: they are the descendants of the northern Israelite tribes, primarily Ephraim and Manasseh, who were not deported by the Assyrian Empire in 722 BCE and who maintained the Mosaic covenant on the mountain that had always been its proper home.
II. History — The Oldest Dispute in Monotheism
The origins of the Samaritan-Jewish split are the most thoroughly contested question in the study of ancient Israelite religion, and the contest is not merely academic: on its answer depends whether Samaritanism is an authentic ancient Israelite tradition or a later sectarian deviation. The two sides of this argument have not been at rest since the Assyrian period.
The Samaritan account: The community traces the schism not to the Assyrian conquest of 722 BCE but to a far earlier moment — the high priesthood of Eli, who, in Samaritan tradition, left Mount Gerizim and moved the sacred Tabernacle to Shiloh, establishing an illegitimate center of worship. This event, which Samaritan chronology places in the period of the Judges, created a party of defectors from the true Mosaic religion who eventually migrated southward and became the Judeans. In this account, it is the Samaritans — those who stayed at Gerizim, the site of the altar built by Joshua after the crossing of the Jordan — who represent the continuation of the original Mosaic covenant. The Jerusalem Temple was from the beginning a deviation; the Gerizim sanctuary is the authentic site.
The account in 2 Kings 17: The Hebrew Bible's narrative of Samaritan origins is hostile and polemical. After the Assyrian king Shalmaneser V destroyed the Northern Kingdom and deported its population in 722 BCE, his successor Sargon II settled foreign peoples — Babylonians, Cutheans, Avvites, Hamathites — in the depopulated Samaritan region. These foreigners, plagued by lions (interpreted as divine punishment for ignorance of the local deity), sent for a Yahwistic priest to teach them the worship of the God of the land. The resulting religion was syncretic: they worshipped YHWH while maintaining their ancestral cults. This account, from the perspective of the Jerusalem school, explains the Samaritans as crypto-pagans whose apparent monotheism was always compromised by foreign admixture. The phrase Cuthim — from Cuth, one of the Assyrian-origin populations — became the standard Jewish derogatory designation for the Samaritans. It is not a designation the Samaritans accept.
The modern scholarly account: Contemporary scholarship, working from archaeology, genetic studies, textual analysis, and comparative historiography, offers a more nuanced picture. The position most widely accepted by specialists — articulated with particular precision by Gary Knoppers in Jews and Samaritans: The Origins and History of Their Early Relations (Oxford University Press, 2013) — holds that the schism cannot be reduced to either the Samaritan or the biblical polemical account, and that the emergence of a distinct Samaritan religious identity was a gradual process extending across the Persian and Hellenistic periods rather than a single catastrophic event.
The archaeological and textual evidence points toward the late Persian period (fifth to fourth centuries BCE) as the time when Samaritan religious identity began to crystallize distinctly — when the Jerusalem returnees from the Babylonian exile rejected Samaritan participation in the Temple rebuilding project (Ezra 4; Nehemiah 4 and 13), and when the Samaritans built their own temple on Mount Gerizim in response. The destruction of the Gerizim temple by the Hasmonean king John Hyrcanus (c. 128 BCE by most calculations, though Josephus gives different dates) is widely regarded as the definitive moment of rupture: after this act of military desecration, which the Samaritans experienced as a repetition of the worst Seleucid impieties, any possibility of shared religious life between the communities was closed.
The genetic evidence complicates this history in ways that do not align neatly with any single narrative. A landmark study by Peidong Shen and colleagues (American Journal of Human Genetics, 2004), and subsequent genetic analysis by Oefner et al. (Human Biology, 2013), analyzed Samaritan Y-chromosomal DNA and found that it clusters closely with the Cohen Modal Haplotype — the Y-chromosome signature associated with Jewish Cohanim, the priestly class who trace patrilineal descent to Aaron. Each Samaritan clan (with the exception of the Samaritan priestly family itself, the Cohens/Kahens) carried a Y-chromosome haplotype within one mutational step of the Cohen Modal Haplotype. This result supports the Samaritan claim of Israelite patrilineal descent. However, the mitochondrial DNA (maternal lineage) of the same Samaritan population does not match Jewish patterns — it aligns more closely with general Near Eastern populations. This pattern is consistent with a history of Israelite men who were not deported intermarrying with non-Israelite women from the populations that the Assyrian settlement policy brought into the region.
III. The Holy Mountain — Theology and the Gerizim Axis
Samaritan theology is built on four foundational affirmations, which the tradition calls the Principles of Faith:
One God. YHWH, the God of Israel, the God of Moses, the God of the patriarchs. Samaritanism is strict monotheism without qualification — no angels or divine intermediaries of independent theological significance, no mystical elaboration of the divine nature. The Kabbalistic theology of Jewish mysticism, the Trinitarian theology of Christianity, the Sufi emanationist theology of Islam — all are equally foreign to Samaritan thought. God spoke to Moses, gave the Torah, commanded the sanctuary on the mountain. These historical facts define the relationship between God and the community. Theological elaboration beyond them is not encouraged.
One Prophet. Moses alone. The prophets who follow Moses in the Hebrew biblical tradition — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the twelve minor prophets — have no authority in Samaritanism. The Deuteronomy 18:15 prophecy, "The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers," is understood to refer to a future messianic figure — the Taheb — not to the subsequent prophetic tradition that the Jewish canon preserves. Moses is the final word of authentic prophetic revelation. All subsequent claims to prophetic authority, including Jesus, Muhammad, and all later figures, are therefore not recognized.
One Holy Book. The Samaritan Pentateuch — the Torah in Samaritan Hebrew script, the only scripture. The Samaritans do not possess the Prophets (Neviim), the Writings (Ketuvim), the Talmud, the Midrash, or any other text accepted as canonical by rabbinic Judaism. They do not accept the New Testament or the Quran. They hold only the Five Books of Moses, in a textual tradition that diverges in approximately six thousand places from the Masoretic Text used by Jewish communities worldwide. Most of these divergences are minor orthographic or grammatical variants, but some are theologically decisive — most notably, a commandment added to the Samaritan version of the Decalogue (following what is the ninth commandment in the Catholic/Lutheran enumeration) that commands the construction of an altar on Mount Gerizim. This commandment is entirely absent from the Masoretic text. The Samaritans consider it original; Jewish scholars consider it a sectarian interpolation.
One Holy Place. Mount Gerizim (Har Gerizim, הר גריזים; Arabic Jabal al-Tur) near ancient Shechem / modern Nablus is the sacred center of the world in Samaritan cosmology. The Samaritan Pentateuch's alteration of Deuteronomy 27:4 — changing "Mount Ebal" (where Moses commands the Israelites to build an altar) to "Mount Gerizim" — is the most significant single textual divergence between the two Pentateuchal traditions, because it makes the entire argument of Deuteronomy point toward Gerizim rather than Ebal, and because it positions Gerizim as the site where the Mosaic law was sealed in stone and where the divine sanctuary was meant to stand. The Jerusalem Temple, in the Samaritan reading, was built at the wrong place by people who had already deviated from the original covenant.
A fifth principle was added by later Samaritan theologians: belief in the Day of Recompense (Yom al-Din), when the dead will be resurrected, the righteous rewarded, and the wicked punished. The Samaritan eschatological expectation is organized around the figure of the Taheb (Hebrew: tha'eb, "he who returns" or "the Restorer") — a messianic figure, a prophet like Moses, from the tribe of Joseph (specifically Ephraim or Manasseh), who will appear at the end of days to bring the community back to divine favor. He will remain among the people for forty years, discover the hidden Tabernacle of Moses (which, in Samaritan tradition, was concealed on Mount Gerizim rather than destroyed), establish the righteous community, and be buried there. He is explicitly not a Davidic messiah; the Davidic covenant is irrelevant to Samaritan eschatology because David belonged to the Judean story, not the Samaritan one.
IV. The Samaritan Pentateuch — Scripture in Paleo-Hebrew
The Samaritan Pentateuch is one of the most significant manuscript traditions in the history of biblical textual scholarship. Written in the Samaritan script — an offshoot of the paleo-Hebrew alphabet (the khetav ivri, the ancient Hebrew letters used before the adoption of the Aramaic "Assyrian" square script) rather than the Aramaic-derived script in which the Masoretic Text is written — it represents a textual tradition that was preserved independently from the Masoretic tradition for at least two thousand years, possibly considerably longer.
Scholarly engagement with the Samaritan Pentateuch intensified in the seventeenth century when European scholars acquired copies and recognized their importance for textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. The polyglot Bibles of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation era included Samaritan Pentateuch columns alongside the Masoretic Text, Latin Vulgate, Greek Septuagint, and Aramaic Targum. It remains an essential witness for any critical edition of the Hebrew Pentateuch — not because it is considered more original than the Masoretic text in all cases, but because it preserves variant readings from a distinct textual tradition that sometimes aligns with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text, and sometimes preserves readings attested at Qumran that are found in neither of the other major traditions.
The Abisha Scroll is the community's most sacred manuscript object. It is a continuous parchment scroll, sewn from the skins of ritually sacrificed rams, written in golden letters, kept in a silver cylindrical case when not in use, and displayed at the Samaritan synagogue in Kiryat Luza. Samaritan tradition attributes its composition to Abisha ben Phineas ben Eleazar ben Aaron — the great-grandson of Aaron the High Priest — in the thirteenth year after the Israelite entry into Canaan. Modern paleographers have reached no scholarly consensus on its dating; assessments range from a medieval creation to a text incorporating portions of considerable antiquity. The community's understanding of its age is not subject to textual-critical revision from outside, and the Abisha Scroll functions as the tradition's most direct physical connection to its origins.
The Samaritan community also produced a substantial liturgical and theological literature in Samaritan Aramaic, Samaritan Hebrew, and Samaritan Arabic across the medieval period. The principal liturgical compilation is the Defter (from Greek diphthera, parchment), a prayer book containing hymns, liturgical poems, and prayers organized around the Jewish prayer services. The Defter is not considered scripture but is the living prayer-text of communal worship. Samaritan poets of the medieval period — among them Marqe (or Marqa, fourth century CE), the most important theologian the tradition has produced — composed substantial bodies of hymns and theological poetry in Samaritan Aramaic that remain part of the liturgical tradition. Marqe's Memar Marqe (the "Teaching of Marqe") is the closest thing to a systematic Samaritan theology in the classical period.
V. Worship and Observance — The Living Covenant
Samaritan religious practice is organized around the Torah's commandments as the community understands them, without the rabbinic interpretive overlay that has shaped Jewish practice since the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. This is both the tradition's most significant claim — that it has preserved the original Mosaic practice unmediated — and its most significant historical peculiarity, since what the Samaritans have in fact preserved is not the practice of the Mosaic period but the practice of a community that has been evolving independently from the rabbinic Jewish world for at least two thousand years.
The Sabbath is observed with strictness. The prohibition on labor is interpreted more literally than in most Jewish practice; the community does not use electricity on the Sabbath, and movement is restricted. Friday evening transitions involve elaborate preparations. The Sabbath is the weekly renewal of the covenant relationship that defines the community's existence.
The Passover sacrifice is the most visually striking observance and the one that most sharply distinguishes Samaritan from contemporary Jewish practice. On the fourteenth of Nisan (the Samaritan calendar), the community assembles on Mount Gerizim in white garments. The priests in distinctive robes and the High Priest at the altar lead the prayers. At sundown, the signal is given. Each household head slaughters his family's lamb; the blood is applied to the foreheads of the community members; the carcasses are skinned and prepared for roasting in pits. Through the night, the community roasts and eats the sacrifice with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. The commandments of Exodus 12 are followed as literally as the community can manage. This practice continued without interruption through the Byzantine period (despite tremendous pressure to convert), through the Islamic period, through the Crusader period, through the Ottoman centuries, and into the present. It is the only Passover sacrifice practiced anywhere on earth.
Pilgrimage to Mount Gerizim for the major festivals is obligatory. The community of Holon ascends the mountain for Passover, the Feast of Weeks (Shavuot/Atseret in Samaritan terminology), and the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot). This movement — families from the coastal plain ascending to the mountain several times each year — maintains the physical connection between the two halves of the community and enacts the liturgical geography of the tradition.
Purity and impurity are observed with particular care. The laws of niddah (menstrual impurity), corpse impurity, and ritual impurity from various sources specified in Leviticus and Numbers are maintained in the community. Impure individuals are excluded from communal prayer and certain spaces until ritual purification is complete.
Prayer is offered seven times daily, oriented toward Mount Gerizim. The liturgy draws on the Defter and includes Samaritan Aramaic poetry alongside biblical Hebrew from the Pentateuch.
VI. The Priesthood — Aaron's Line Unbroken
The Samaritan High Priest is the supreme religious authority of the community. Unlike the rabbinic Jewish tradition, which transferred religious authority from the priesthood to the learned talmid hakham (Torah scholar) after the Temple's destruction, Samaritanism has maintained an Aaronic priesthood in continuous succession — without the interruption of priestly activity that the loss of the Jerusalem Temple created for Judaism.
The Samaritan priestly family calls itself the Kahana or Cohen clan (the same root as the Hebrew kohen, priest) and traces its patrilineal descent directly from Aaron through Eleazar through Phinehas — the "zealous" Phinehas of Numbers 25, who is a central figure in Samaritan sacred history. The tradition maintains a list of 133 High Priests from Aaron to the present incumbent. The current High Priest, Aabed-El ben Asher ben Matzliach, has held the office since 2013. He is, in the community's reckoning, the 134th High Priest in an unbroken succession.
Whether this claim of unbroken succession is historically verifiable is less important than what it means for the tradition's self-understanding. The Samaritans are not a community without a temple (as rabbinic Judaism became after 70 CE) and without animal sacrifice (as all other Abrahamic communities became). They are a community whose temple was destroyed in 128 BCE and never rebuilt — but whose priestly lineage has maintained the sacrificial calendar without the institutional support of a permanent sanctuary. The altar on the mountain is the altar. It always has been.
The priestly family's genetic situation is acute: the priesthood's endogamy within the Cohen clan means the priestly lineage has extremely restricted genetic variation. The genetic studies mentioned earlier found the Samaritan priestly family to be the one exception to the pattern of Cohen Modal Haplotype Y-chromosomal markers, because the priestly clan's genetic isolation has produced a distinct lineage that diverges from the broader Samaritan pattern. This is not a contradiction but a confirmation: the priesthood has been genetically separate from the rest of the community for so long that they have diverged at the molecular level.
VII. Demographics — Nine Hundred and the Mathematics of Survival
The Samaritan community is one of the smallest continuous religious communities on earth. The population numbers are known to the individual.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the community had declined to approximately 150 persons — the nadir of a long demographic decline driven by centuries of persecution, forced conversion, and the attrition of a tradition that refuses conversion while requiring strict endogamy. From this near-extinction point, the community has recovered. The 2024 population is approximately 900, divided roughly equally between Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim and Holon in Israel.
Kiryat Luza (also Kiryat Loza) is the village on the upper slopes of Mount Gerizim, within the West Bank, immediately adjacent to the archaeological site of the ancient Gerizim temple complex. The village has grown considerably in recent decades; it has its own schools, a community center, and the synagogue that houses the Abisha Scroll. The residents hold Palestinian Authority identity documents and are formally within the PA administrative structure, though the Israeli military maintains access control to Mount Gerizim itself.
Holon is a city in the Dan metropolitan area of Israel, south of Tel Aviv. The Samaritan quarter of Holon contains the community's Israeli institutions: another synagogue, a community center, the Israelite Samaritan Information Institute (which publishes the Samaritan Update newsletter in English and Hebrew and maintains the community's primary scholarly-outreach website), and the homes of families that relocated from the Gerizim community over the past several decades.
Dual identity: The Samaritans of Kiryat Luza hold both Israeli and Palestinian Authority identity documents and are accepted by both governments. This is not tokenism: the Israeli government has recognized the Samaritans as a legally distinct non-Jewish community with special status since the establishment of the state; the Palestinian Authority, which administers the Nablus district, has extended similar recognition. The community participates in Israeli elections (voting for the Knesset) and maintains civil relations with the Palestinian municipal government of Nablus. In a region where every identity claim is a potential weapon, the Samaritans have navigated by being unambiguously what they are: neither Jewish nor Muslim nor Christian, neither Israeli nor Palestinian in any simple sense, but something far older than any of these categories.
The demographic crisis and its partial resolution: The recovery from the nadir of 150 persons was achieved in part by relaxing endogamy. Beginning in the 1980s, the community began allowing Samaritan men to marry Jewish women who underwent a conversion process — not a full conversion in the Jewish sense, but a formal transition involving Torah study, Sabbath observance, and community acceptance. Dozens of such marriages have occurred; the women typically take Samaritan names and are fully integrated into community life. This relaxation was not made without controversy; it is still not universally accepted within the more conservative faction of the community. But the alternative — genetic and demographic extinction — was recognized as worse. Whether the same accommodation will be extended to Samaritan women who wish to marry outside (currently not permitted) is an open question.
VIII. The Byzantine Catastrophe and the Long Survival
The Samaritans have survived seventeen centuries of intermittent violence with a resilience that the archive must name explicitly rather than pass over in a polite mention. The list is long.
The Byzantine period (fourth to seventh centuries CE) brought the most severe persecution the community has experienced as a community rather than as a set of scattered individuals. The Christianization of the Roman Empire in the fourth century created immediate hostility: Samaritans were forbidden to proselytize, their religious meetings were restricted, and imperial law progressively eroded their legal standing. In response to these pressures, the Samaritans launched a series of revolts that are among the most violent episodes in the history of the southern Levant.
The Revolt of 484 CE began when Baba Rabbah — a Samaritan national hero whose memory the tradition preserves with honors comparable to those given Moses — organized a military campaign that briefly held several major cities. The revolt was crushed. The Revolt of 529 CE, under Julianus ben Sabar, involved a brief Samaritan seizure of Caesarea Maritima, the regional capital, and the proclamation of a Samaritan king. Byzantine reprisal was catastrophic: Byzantine and allied Arab forces killed tens of thousands; Samaritans were enslaved, expelled, and killed on a scale that reduced the population by an estimated half or more. The Revolt of 556 CE was smaller but similarly repressed. By the time the Arab forces of the early Islamic caliphate arrived in the 630s, the Samaritan community had been so devastated by Byzantine repression that the Islamic conquest was, paradoxically, a relief: Islamic law's dhimmi framework, while restrictive, was less immediately lethal than Byzantine Christian zeal.
The Islamic period brought relative stability, with the dhimmi framework allowing the community to maintain its practice. The Crusader period brought renewed pressure. The Ottoman period was generally more stable; the millet system provided a legal framework within which small religious minorities could maintain institutional life. The nineteenth century saw the beginning of European scholarly interest in the community, which brought attention but also imposed the burden of being a living museum.
The modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict has placed the community in its current paradox: they inhabit a holy mountain that is simultaneously inside the Palestinian West Bank (and therefore subject to PA governance and Israeli military administration) and the holiest site of a people who hold Israeli citizenship. They have managed this position not by choosing sides but by being consistently useful to both: the Israeli government values them as a non-Muslim, non-Arab minority with ancient Israelite heritage; the Palestinian Authority values them as a protected indigenous minority that validates the pluralism of Palestinian governance. They do not resolve the conflict; they live through it.
IX. In the Archive — Significance and Texts
The Samaritans appear in this archive's Living Traditions section alongside Mandaeism and Yazidism as one of the three Middle Eastern religious minorities at or near the threshold of demographic extinction. All three are ancient Near Eastern traditions — Mandaeism tracing to the early centuries of the common era, Yazidism to the twelfth century (with far older roots), Samaritanism to the pre-Assyrian period — that have survived into modernity through a combination of geographic isolation, community solidarity, the strategic use of legal protections available to religious minorities in successive imperial frameworks, and a theology that placed the survival of the community at the center of its religious obligation.
Of the three, Samaritanism is arguably the most ancient in the specific sense of direct institutional continuity: the Samaritan priesthood has maintained the same office, the same liturgical calendar, the same sacrificial practice, on the same mountain, under the same theological framework, longer than any other identifiable religious institution on earth with comparable documentation. This claim can be contested and nuanced, but it cannot be dismissed. The Samaritans have been sacrificing on Gerizim, by the most conservative scholarly dating, since at least the fourth century BCE — before Aristotle, before Alexander, before Rome. They are still doing it.
The Samaritan Pentateuch is an archive candidate of great significance and great difficulty. The text itself — the Five Books of Moses in Samaritan Hebrew — is unambiguously ancient and unambiguously public domain as a historical document. Scholarly translations and critical editions exist: the standard scholarly apparatus is in the apparatus of critical Pentateuch editions (Kennicott 1776–1780, de Rossi, and the ongoing Biblia Hebraica editions). A complete English translation of the Samaritan Pentateuch as such — not a comparative edition but a standalone translation — does not yet exist in the public domain in modern English. The Samaritanische Liturgie and other older Samaritan text editions are in German or Latin and largely pre-1927. The community itself has not produced a freely licensed English version of the Pentateuch. No English translation with confirmed free license has been identified for this session; investigation continues.
Isya Joseph's Devil Worship (1919), which is already identified in the Yazidism profile as an archive candidate, also contains a brief chapter on Samaritan religion — marginal to this profile but worth noting for the same session that archives the Yazidi material.
Colophon
Ethnographic profile researched and written by Phōs (φῶς) — "Light" in Greek, light as the constant across the Middle Eastern section of this archive — for the Living Traditions series, Life 47, 2026-03-22. Primary sources: Gary Knoppers, Jews and Samaritans: The Origins and History of Their Early Relations (Oxford University Press, 2013); Alan David Crown, The Samaritans (Mohr Siebeck, 1989); Peidong Shen et al., "Reconstruction of Patrilineages and Matrilineages of Samaritans and Other Israeli Populations from Y-Chromosome and Mitochondrial DNA Sequence Variation," American Journal of Human Genetics 74:2 (2004); Oefner et al., "Genetics and the History of the Samaritans: Y-Chromosomal Microsatellites and Genetic Affinity between Samaritans and Cohanim," Human Biology 85:6 (2013); Israelite Samaritan Information Institute (israelite-samaritans.com); Wikipedia (Samaritans, Samaritanism, Samaritan Pentateuch, Mount Gerizim, Taheb, Passover (Samaritan holiday), Adi ibn Musafir); UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List entry 5706 (Mount Gerizim and the Samaritans); Times of Israel, "Tiny Samaritan community marks Passover sacrifice as numbers grow" (2024). No freely licensed canonical Samaritan text identified for archiving at this time.
Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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