Book review: The Samaritans by Reinhard Pummer

The fifty-first book I read in 2016 was The Samaritans: A Profile by Reinhard Pummer.  Apart from the "good" one and the woman at the well, despite the prevalence of the Samaritans in first-century Judea, I knew next to nothing about them before reading this book.

Did you, in fact, know that there are still Samaritan communities in the world today?  I certainly didn't.  Historically, the Samaritans can be traced back to the people relocated into the northern kingdom of Israel after its defeat by Assyria.  According to the Bible, these transplants were savaged by a plague of lions due to their lack of reverence for the local deity until the king of Assyria returned an Israelite priest to the land to teach its new inhabitants the ways of YHWH.  The southern kingdom of Judah had long viewed its neighbor as heretical, due to the fact that they didn't worship in the temple in Jerusalem, and their replacement by "people from Babylon, Cutha, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim" (2 Kings 17:24) certainly didn't impress upon the Judahites to look upon them more favorably; hence, Jesus and the Samaritan woman could debate whether God was to be worshiped in the Jerusalem temple or on the mountain of Samaria.  Indeed, not long after the events of the gospels, actual violence broke out between Jews and Samaritans over the Jews passing through Samaritan territory to celebrate religious festivals in Jerusalem.

This is not the origin story told by Samaritans, however.  They trace their division from the Jews back to the time of the Judges, when Eli, recast as a villain in this telling, was priest at Shiloh.  According to the Samaritans, Eli rejected the true high priest at Mount Gerizim and led away a schismatic following to found his own heretical shrine at Shiloh.  The Samaritans consider themselves the true descendants of those who followed Moses out of Egypt and reject the books of the Old Testament after the Pentateuch. 

While there are some fascinating facts in this book, it is a detriment to the lay reader that it is written in academic prose.  In addition, Pummer's diction and style are quite stilted in places.  I wondered at first if the manuscript had been written in German and then translated to English, accounting for the infelicities of phrasing, but according to the author's biography, he teaches at an English-language university in Canada; given that there is also no mention of a translator, I must assume that he is merely a clumsy stylist.