- Following the end of the Babylonian exile, the Jews returned to their land along the east coast of the Mediterranean. While many of them adopted the styles and system of religious kingship to which they had been exposed in Babylon, others preferred a return to tribal sovereignty and worship of God. When the Greeks invaded in 168 BC, the Jews in the South rallied around their monarchical sovereignty in Jerusalem and formed the Maccabean revolt intended to oust the Greeks. The Jews in the North, however, were more accommodating of the new Greek culture, and accepted a more polytheistic form of worship to appease the Greeks, centered in Samaria.
- Southern Jews, having regained their independence from the Greeks, eventually conquered Samaria and destroyed the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim. This action was not only meant as an assertion of the primacy of the southern temple in Jerusalem, but also as a spiteful jab at the Samaritans, whom the southern Jews detested for their supposed religious and political compromises with the Greeks. As a result, Samaritans began to reciprocate the hatred southern Jews held for them, and took steps to distinguish themselves as Samaritans, including a revision of the Scriptures (the Torah) specific to themselves.
- When Romans annexed Judea around 11 BC, they conscripted many citizens into their localized militias. Ironically, two units composed of Samaritans were used to occupy Southern cities such as Jerusalem. Having recently conquered Samaria and destroyed its temple, this reversal of fortunes enraged many southern Jews, who considered themselves superior to the Samaritans.
- Due to their particular religious ideologies of either adaptation or unchanging monotheism, both Samaritans and Jews considered themselves the more proper element of Judaism, and detested the other's propensity for promoting a supposedly weak or erroneous form of Judaism. This explains the efforts by both Jews and Samaritans to suppress each other militarily when they could. In the meantime, during Roman occupation in Jesus' lifetime, for instance, intense discord existed between these two factions, and the idea of a Samaritan helping an injured Jew was quite unthinkable.
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