RIVAL RACES
"The Samaritan woman said to him, 'You are a Jew and I am
a Samaritan woman. How can You ask me for a drink? For (For Jews do not
associate with Samaritans.)"—John 4:9
"Give me a drink," said Jesus, opening the conversation
that was to issue in such momentous results.
An answer, probably such as He had anticipated, was
returned, "You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can You ask me for
a drink?"
These words open to us an instructive, a painful chapter
in human nature. The creed-feud—we had almost said the blood-feud—existing
between Jew and Samaritan, has had, alas! its thousand lamentable
illustrations and repetitions in the history of the world. Though involving
a brief historical explanation, it will be necessary for the comprehension
of the narrative that we advert to the cause of this fierce and fiery
antagonism between the conterminous races—the dwellers in the same land,
whose social and religious unity seems thus to have been so hopelessly
destroyed.
The first Assyrian conquest of the kingdom of Samaria
took place under Tiglath-Pileser. The wealth and nobility of the land of
Ephraim were on that occasion carried forcibly away to Central Asia. A
second and more sweeping invasion occurred under Shalmaneser; while the
total depopulation of the country and the extirpation of the inhabitants,
seems to have been consummated in the reign of this conqueror's grandson,
Esarhaddon. He, however, in his turn repeopled the now desolate territories,
not with restored exiles, but with a colony of aliens from the Tigris and
Euphrates. During the interim, while the nice fertile lands were evacuated
and left to waste and silence, the wild animals from Hermon and Lebanon, and
the adjoining jungles of the Jordan, had taken possession of the dense and
rank untended vegetation of the mountains and valleys of Samaria, and, as
was natural, spread terror and dismay among the new settlers. The lion, now
unknown in that region, was conspicuous among these. The colonists became
haunted with superstitious fears. They were Gentiles—Pagans. But on this
very account, being worshipers of 'lords many and gods many,' what was to
hinder them adding one more deity to those they had imported from the East?
By doing homage to the local god of the new country, they might propitiate
his wrath, and have these wild beasts driven away, which, they doubted not,
were the messengers and executioners of his vengeance. How were they,
however, to attain a knowledge of the creed and rites of the old
inhabitants, so as to graft and incorporate these on their own? They adopted
the expedient of asking their distant conqueror to send from among the
captives by the rivers of Babylon, one of the priests of Israel, who would
indoctrinate them in the worship of the God of Jacob, or, as they expressed
it, "teach them the manner of the God of the land." The request was complied
with; and the result was the framing of a strange, enigmatical, compound
worship—a hybrid between Judaism and Paganism. The captive priest took up
his abode at Bethel and having imbibed the ecclesiastical laxity of
Jeroboam's age, he had probably only too readily accommodated himself to the
religious presuppositions of his new disciples, and taught them to worship
the one spiritual Jehovah of Israel through some visible symbol—other
imported idols adorning, or rather desecrating and defiling, the sacred
place. The colonists from Media and Persia, or "Cutheans," as they were
called, were subsequently supplemented by Greeks and Phoenicians at the time
of the conquest of Alexander the Great. These, in their turn, brought a
fresh accession of false gods to the paganized territory—Baal and Ashtaroth,
Minerva and Jupiter—or, as this religious medley is described in the Bible
narrative, "They feared the Lord and served their own gods."
The one only portion of the old Jewish creed which seemed
to have been sacredly retained, (and which, after a lapse of thirty
centuries, continues intact and inviolable to this day among the handful of
representative modern Samaritans,) was the five Books of Moses. Rejecting
all the other prophetical writings and later Jewish traditions, the
Samaritan Pentateuch has remained to this hour a sacred heirloom in their
synagogue at Shechem. In later years, indeed, they had evidently shared in
some of the nobler beliefs of their neighbors—notably that specified by the
woman of Samaria in the course of her conversation—an indefinite expectation
of the coming of a Messiah. From all we have advanced, however, it is
evident that the new kingdom was essentially composed of sensuous and
sensual idolaters who had no inheritance in the blood of the ancient chosen
people, and to whom pertained not the adoption or the covenants. They were a
heathen colony planted in the very midst of Palestine, aliens from the
commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise. A few
Hebrew women and slaves—possibly a few vinedressers and husbandmen—as we
find in the case of the Jews at the time of the Babylonish captivity, were
all that were left of the old inhabitants, so that their descendants could
only by the slenderest links retain a claim to hereditary descent from the
patriarchs of the land, Abraham and Jacob, Rachel and Joseph.
We have a remarkable proof, indeed, in the very words of
our divine Lord Himself, how thoroughly Samaria was heathenized, and
identified with Gentile territory. When He sent forth His seventy disciples,
it could be, in His case, from no unworthy popular prejudice or antagonism
of race that He gave this strict injunction, "Do not enter any towns of the
Samaritans." The explanation is evident. His gospel was in the first
instance to be proclaimed to the Jews alone, "to the lost sheep of the house
of Israel;" and it would have alike contradicted prophecy, and marred and
neutralized the exclusiveness of this primary offer, if the Gentile
Samaritans, who had so little in common with the Jews, had shared in the
benefits of that earliest apostolic mission. Such being their heathen
descent and half-heathen creed, it is not difficult to understand
how the old kingdom of Judah and Benjamin should, from the first, have
entertained a rooted and unconquerable aversion to the aliens.
Circumstances, year after year, tended to widen this separating gulf,
aggravating and intensifying the mutual antipathy. On the return of the Jews
from their captivity under Zerubbabel, these suspicious and untrustworthy
Samaritans made offer of their friendship and good offices, to help the
returned exiles in rebuilding their walls and temple. It was sternly
refused. If the former had been the genuine representatives of the old ten
tribes, the others might have overlooked past jealousies; and for the sake
of the national unity have hailed them as auxiliaries. But not a stone of
their sacred walls is to be touched by Assyrian and Greek colonists, who had
so basely compromised and mutilated the religion of their fathers.
Therefore, with reference to this very proposal to assist their southern
neighbors, they are spoken of, not as "Samaritans," but under the
unmistakable title of "the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin." The result
showed, that patriotic far-seeing Ezra had not miscalculated their duplicity
and treachery; for, stung to the quick by this rejection, they immediately
set themselves by every means to impede the work of the rebuilding of the
temple on Zion, and joined with the children of Edom in the cry, "Raze it,
raze it, even to its foundation," (Ps. 137:7.)
This they could not effect; but, to carry out the spirit
of revenge and rivalry, they determined to outdo the restored capital and
temple of the south, by the erection of a still nobler temple on the top of
their own Gerizim. In 420 B.C., this new and magnificent temple, arose.
Alexander the Great, then with his army before Tyre, not only sanctioned its
building, but sanctioned the appointment of an unprincipled Jew of priestly
lineage (Manasseh) to be its first hierarch. The worship set up in this
rival temple was the embodiment of all that strange jumble we have
described, of heathen mythology and diluted and desecrated Judaism. It
remained to crown the summit of their holy mountain for two hundred years,
when it was destroyed by John Hyreanus, a Jew.
Meanwhile, however, the animosity of the northern and
southern kingdoms if possible increased, as did also the moral laxity and
debasement of the Cutheans. Shechem became the refuge of vagabond Jews: the
unclean and excommunicated in Judah and Jerusalem—the libertines who
rebelled against the needed reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah—found a ready
asylum in Samaria.
Perhaps of all the religious battlefields this world has
been compelled in sadness to witness, none has bequeathed such lamentable
memories of exasperation and deadly hate: not even those disgraceful feuds
(a scandal to Christendom) on the same sacred soil of Palestine, which the
Mohammedan and Turkish soldiery at this hour gaze upon in dogged silence, as
they see Greeks and Latins closing at times in mortal strife, on the
occasion of their most sacred anniversary and at their most reputedly sacred
place—the traditional Holy Sepulcher. The Samaritan sought, by every petty
annoyance, to fret and irritate the Jew, and the Jew was not slow or
reluctant to retaliate in kind and degree.
Samaria, as we have previously seen, was the nearest road
for the caravans of northern pilgrims going to the feasts in Jerusalem. The
Samaritans churlishly refused these the poorest rites of hospitality, and
compelled them often to avoid maltreatment, by taking the circuitous and
more fatiguing route by the Jordan Valley. Again, it was one of the
few consolations enjoyed by the bands of exiled Jews in Babylon, to have
announced to them, by means of the only ancient telegraphic
communication—beacons on the mountain-tops—the appearance of the paschal
moon. The first beacon-fire was lit on the summit of Olivet, and thence
caught up from mountain to mountain in luminous succession, until, within
sight of the Euphrates, they could, for the moment at least, take down their
harps from the willows as they remembered Zion and its holy solemnities. But
the Samaritans indulged the mischievous delight of perplexing and putting
them out of reckoning by the use of false signals. Another wicked and
successful exploit is recorded; and occurring as it did under the government
of Coponius only a few years previous to the gospel era, may have tended at
this time to deepen these animosities—A band of Samaritans succeeded in
stealing to the courts of the Temple of Jerusalem during the Passover
season, and defiling the sacred precincts by scattering them with dead men's
bones; thus incapacitating the Jews that year from celebrating the great
Feast of their nation.
Yet, combined with all this, there was, on the part of
the Samaritan, the proudest assertion of hereditary right and ancestral
glory. The Jew was but of yesterday, compared with the descendants of Jacob
and Joseph, and Jerusalem was a modernized capital beside the old walls of
time-honored Shechem, with its oaks and terebinths, under which the Father
of the faithful pitched his tents. In the words of a graphic writer, Shechem
was the city of Joshua and the Judges—Zion that of David and the Kings.
Shechem was Moscow; Jerusalem was only St. Petersburg. The Jewish Pentateuch
was the handiwork of a modern scribe, unworthy to be named in the same
breath with that written by Abishua, the son of Phineas, the grandson of
Aaron!
The Jew was in no way behind in his boastful assertions
of prerogative and prescriptive right, as well as in the manifestation of
malevolence. An extract from the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus describes
the intensity of the feeling—"There be two manner of nations which my heart
abhors, and the third is no nation: those who sit on the mountain of Samaria
and those who dwell among the Philistines; and that foolish people that
dwell in Shechem." The Jew would refuse to eat with them; to do so, was "as
if he ate swine's flesh." He denounced the Samaritan as a base time-server,
who would not hesitate to purchase immunity from pains and penalties by
forswearing Jehovah and kissing the impious shrine of Baal or Jove. He
regarded him as unclean as the evaded leper; to harbor him in his house
would entail a heritage of judgments on his children. The name 'Samaritan'
became a byword of reproach. He was publicly cursed in the synagogue—cursed
in the name of Jehovah, by the writing on the two tables of the law, by the
curse of the upper and lower house of judgment. He was pronounced unworthy
of eternal life, excommunicated alike from the Church on earth and the
Church in heaven. The bitterest word of scorn the Jew could hurl at the
Infinitely Pure One was this, "You are a Samaritan, and have a devil."
The yet untutored apostles shared the same exasperated
feelings, when they asked their Lord to call down fire from heaven on some
Samaritan village. All worthy of remembrance is His gentle yet sharp
reproof, "You know not what spirit you are of." A new spirit of love, in
which hereditary hate and malevolence were to have no place, was to be
grafted on the hearts of men. And while, as corroborating all we have said,
it is stated in our narrative, in a parenthetical clause, "The Jews have no
dealings with the Samaritans," it is striking to observe, how in the very
same breath the disciples seem to contradict the statement. For they
evidently had such dealings—it being distinctly asserted that they had "gone
to the city to buy bread," How can we reconcile this apparent contradiction,
but on the surmise, that they had already been so far instructed and
educated by their divine Master into a more conciliatory spirit; led, in
these temporal interchanges, to take down the unnatural barriers of
separation, preparing the way for a higher, purer, nobler fraternity, which
was, in one sense, to have its birthplace that day at the well of Sychar?
For the same reason, our Lord's request for water from a
Samaritan, and a Samaritan woman, must have sounded equally strange. The
very strangeness perhaps, of the request, and the kind tones in which it was
given, may have made the astonished listener all the more ready to give heed
to the conversation that followed. There was nothing remarkable, indeed, (as
we see in the case of Eleazar and Rebekah, Moses and Zipporah,) for a
wayfarer asking a female to draw water to quench his thirst. But what was no
breach of courtesy or etiquette in Mesopotamia or Midian, was a startling
violation of national prejudice when Jew and Samaritan met at Jacob's well.
How beautifully is the comprehensive charity and love of the Great
Philanthropist, in breaking down all these unnatural and wicked antipathies,
illustrated in His own graphic parable of the Good Samaritan! Jesus rejected
and condemned, as much as did His Jewish brethren according to the flesh,
the half-heathen creed of the Samaritans. We shall come, in the subsequent
narrative, to find Him boldly stating so to this woman, "You know not
what you worship)." But He would enunciate and proclaim at the same time
that great truth, which, alas! is so often ignored by all modern
Churches—Greek, Roman Catholic, Protestant—that while there are errors,
grievous errors, which we must deeply deplore, and against which we must
manfully protest and contend, there are ever, among the adherents of these
different creeds, to be found beautiful exceptions in moral worth and in
kindly deed—men who, despite of their doctrinal errors, have the loving
spirit—whose creed is their character; or whose character, rather, rises
above all creeds and doctrinal formulas, noble in heart and nobler in life,
who may well put their orthodox neighbors to shame.
Such is His lesson in the great parable of the Good
Samaritan. "A certain man" who "went down from Jerusalem," had fallen a prey
to Jewish bandits, lying bleeding amid the rough stones which still line the
old robber-haunt. The priest and the Levite (the impersonations of pure
Judaism) strut past without a thought of aid; while a "certain Samaritan," a
chance traveler, far from his own home and all the sympathies of home,
dismounted his horse, bound up the sufferer's wounds, poured into them the
oil and wine he had brought for his own use. (and which, as a Samaritan, he
could not get easily replenished from Jewish vendors,) set him on his own
donkey, brought him to the wayside inn, and shared the very contents of his
scanty purse. It was at the peril of the man's life and limb. He might have
been falsely branded as himself the robber and plunderer, accused of the old
crime of wreaking vengeance against a helpless Jew, and letting him feel the
severity of Samaritan hate. But undeterred by all such fears and false
accusations, this despised outcast and alien, heretic and schismatic, whom
priest and Levite would doubtless, as they passed, eye with malignant scorn,
proved in time of need the real philanthropist, the brother man. With what
withering sarcasm (if we can dare use in its mildest sense such a word in
connection with the holy Jesus) did He turn round to the captious questioner
with the query, "Which now of these three was neighbor to him who fell among
the thieves?"
Thank God, the principles of religious toleration
are now better understood among ourselves in this age; although the
monstrous records of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, as well as the
deadly strifes between Greeks and Latins, Druses and Maronites, to this day,
show how deeply rooted these religious animosities are in the corrupted
human heart, and how much need we have, amid all our modern civilization
and enlightenment, to moderate the fervor and intensity of party and
sectarian feeling. If such were the feuds between Jew and Samaritan, where,
on account of the compromise of vital religious truth, there were at least
substantial grounds for quarrel and schism, how should those bearing the
name of their tolerant Master blush at the antipathies and party shibboleths
which have no such palliation: soldiers fighting nominally under the same
banner, but who, instead of cheering their comrades in the fight, are rather
frowning on them with hard looks, upbraiding them with hard words, and
leveling at them the curse and the anathema! There is no denying it, that
one of the saddest triumphs of the Evil One is, and ever has been, this
virulence of party strife, this tendency to party isolation, ecclesiastical
exclusiveness. Even the Apostles, as may be remembered, were slow to
relax their old narrow prejudices. It required a special miracle to enable
Peter to rise above the trammels of exclusive Judaism, to teach him the
magnificent truth which his "beloved brother Paul" subsequently proclaimed,
that "God has made of one blood all nations of men to dwell upon the face of
the earth." Be the prejudices of His disciples, however, what they might,
their Divine Master at least gave no sanction to the contracted spirit.
It is instructive to observe how specially these same
Samaritans were included in His last legacy of love. In oblivion of all the
past, He thus frames His parting apostolic commission—"You shall be
witnesses to Me, both in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and to
the uttermost part of the earth." Oh, for a like spirit! not to
anathematize, but to Christianize; not rendering evil for evil, or
railing for railing, but contrariwise, blessing; trusting in no boastful
hereditary claims, the pride of creed or sect or ritualism, saying, in
arrogant superciliousness, "It is not fitting to take the children's bread
and to cast it to the dogs;" but remembering that Paul's weighty words have
a Christian, as well as a Jewish meaning and significance—that holy lives
are the true exponents of orthodox principles. "He is not a Jew who is
one outwardly, neither is that circumcision which is outward in the
flesh; but he is a Jew who is one inwardly, and circumcision is that of the
heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter, whose praise is not of
men, but of God."
The case and words of the woman of Samaria tell us too
plainly, how possible, how common it is, for one of scandalous and
flagitious life to be a bold religious sectary, a zealous partisan; to speak
glibly and haughtily on ecclesiastical differences about "Father Jacob" and
"this mountain," and to wonder that there should be such a violation of
religious etiquette that a High Church Jew should hold parley with a Low
Church Samaritan. Lutheran may be ranged against Calvinist, Prelatist
against Puritan, Predestinarian against Arminian, Baptist against
Anabaptist, State Church against Dissenter. But tell us, among all,
(collectively and individually) who is doing most honest, earnest work for
Christ and humanity—who, amid the robber haunts of evil, are pouring most
assiduously wine and oil into the wounds of this bleeding world? and the
answer will not be hard to give: "Which now of these, then, is neighbor to
him that fell among the thieves?" God speed the time, (yes, then, and not
until then, will the Millennium dawn,) when Christendom, now mangled with a
thousand wounds, will have these 'deadly wounds healed;' when Ephraim (that
is, Samaria) shall not vex Judah, nor Judah vex Ephraim; when the holy word,
"Brotherhood," mimicked and travestied in these modern days in a hundred
base forms, will have its true and noblest meaning illustrated and
vindicated, in loving hearts, in a united Church, in a converted world!
"Down the dark future, through long generations,
The echoing sounds grow fainter and then cease,
And like a bell, with solemn, sweet vibrations,
I hear once more the voice of Christ say, 'Peace!'
"Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals
The blast of dismal war-sounds shakes the skies,
But, beautiful as songs of the immortals,
The holy melodies of love arise."