What is Samaritan? »Its Definition and Meaning [2019]

Samaritan is the name received by people from Samaria , a region that is currently in the West Bank , and which is disputed between Israel (to which it belonged before, during the time of the rise of the Kingdom of Israel) and Palestine.It is a city in ruins, which between the fourth and seventh centuries, served as the capital of the aforementioned kingdom.Similarly, this word is used to refer to the region's own language, which had, it should be noted, its origin in Western Aramaic.By biblical passages, society associates the gentilicio of this small town with the “good Samaritan ”, So it is also used as a kind of adjective to refer to charitable people.

These were mentioned many times in the biblical texts , where it is also mentioned the origin of these.It is indicated that these are descendants of one of the 12 tribes of Israel , the time line used to describe how the world grew from generation to generation; these descend directly from Manases and Efraim, who were the children of Jose.These, around 740 BC, were conquered by the Assyrians, causing the intellectual elites to leave and be replaced with people of similar instruction to the Jewish one; They felt contempt for the people of Samaria.Their language, moreover, was one of the most used, used in a multitude of writings, until the Arabic arrived.

These had strong religious beliefs , traditional for the time, and that are similar to Christianity.Among its texts, of this kind, more important, we can find the Memar Marqah, in addition to the Pentateuch, which are now one of the most important theological sources.