Posted on 09/27/2005 9:46:08 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
YEA!!!!!
The Samaritans are supposedly Medes/Persians and others with no Jewish ancestry of any kind who were sent to Israel by the Persians to supplement the population of those returned from the Babylonian exile.
Reportedly the Assyrian king deported 27,290 Israelites from Samaria and settled new people (according to II Kings 17 from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim), but it's likely that the majority of the population continued to be Israelites. Later Jewish sources may be biased against the Samaritans because they wanted Jerusalem to be considered the only center of the true religion.
There's discussion of this question in Go"sta W. Alstro"m, The History of Ancient Palestine (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1993), 899-900.
Back in the good old days if you didn't obey the king, it was off with your head (or maybe something even worse).
For the northern kingdom we're talking about an earlier period, around 720 B.C., when the kingdom of Judah still existed so there were no Judean returnees, and the Medes and Persians were unimportant tribes up in the highlands of Iran, not rulers of empires. II Kings 17 has the newcomers not worshipping the Lord, being attacked by lions, and then learning how to worship the Lord from a priest who was sent back from Assyria, but it's more likely that the deportations weren't complete to begin with and just targeted the elite of the society.
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