Samaritans and the Jewish historian, Josephus

What is it about?

The Samaritans are an ethno-religious group tracing their identity, like Jews and Christians, to ancient Israel. Josephus (d. 100CE), the focal point of this article, is prized by scholars as one of the only sources to tell us about them in the time of the Second Temple. This article proposes that, by comparing Josephus' representation of Samaritans to those of other roughly contemporary Jewish texts, we see how the role that Samaritans played in the ancient history of Judaism was more complicated and more durable than often thought.

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Why is it important?

How do we talk about "lost" history - that is, history that we know happened, but for which the evidence is thin? Scholars either read through such thin evidence as a window into lost history or else focus on its rhetoric to extract what a (rare) source thinks. This is the case for Josephus and the Samaritans. This article synchronizes recent work on Josephus' literary style with a renewed attention to his complex context. It models, thereby, a way to read ancient texts beyond a bifurcation of rhetoric versus reality, and instead as taking part in a layered matrix of thought, perception, and classification.

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