The Life of Christ Author:Bernhard Weiss Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IIL BESIDE JACOB'S WELL. BETWEEN Judea and the northern province of Galilee lay the district of Samaria. Since the time of Herod the Great it had b... more »een a province of the Jewish kingdom, and after the deposition of Archelaus, had passed, along with Judea, under a Roman procurator; a deep-rooted hereditary enmity separated the Jews from the Samaritans, who were looked upon as being half Gentiles (comp. Matt. x. 5). Their descent was in truth of a dubious character. After the downfall of the northern kingdom, arid the carrying away of the ten tribes, Shalmaneser peopled the wasted districts with heathen colonists from various provinces of his dominion, among the most important of whom were the Samaritans, who still liked to be called Cuthites. The Old Testament contains an enumeration of the national gods those strangers brought with them (2 Kings xvii. 29 ff.). It was not long, however, before they intermingled with the remnant of the Israelitish population, and accepted the worship of Jehovah. The inhabitants of Samaria always regarded themselves as being Israelites, and asserted that they belonged to the house of Joseph. After the return of the two southern tribes from exile, they craved admission to the new central service which was to be instituted; but the antipathy to everything Gentile, which the young colony had brought with it, was transferred to this populace of impure blood and doubtful orthodoxy, and the Samaritan claim was disallowed by Zerubbabel and Jeshua. From that time they hindered, so far as it lay in their power, the building of the temple and the walls of Jerusalem, and the bitterness so induced ultimately led to open schism. A temple to Jehovah was erected upon the hill Gemim, lying to the south of the town Sichem; and even when, after an existenc...« less