For the Samaritans themselves, their origins reach back into the formative centuries of ancient Israelite religion. The community’s own chronicles and traditions locate its foundation in the origins of the Israelite people and in the Mosaic law: Moses is presented as the lawgiver and the Samaritan Torah (the Pentateuch as preserved by Samaritans) as the divinely given text. The Samaritans understand themselves as direct continuators of the northern Israelite cult centered on Mount Gerizim, which they identify as the original sanctuary appointed by God. This self-presentation is explicit in Samaritan liturgical texts and in the role Mount Gerizim plays as the focal point of worship and pilgrimage in Samaritan imagination and ritual life.
Historically and archaeologically the picture is more complex, and scholarship frames the emergence of Samaritan identity as a process rather than a single event. Historians and biblical scholars generally situate key moments in Samaritan formation in the first millennium BCE, particularly in the centuries around and after the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE. Assyrian resettlement policies, the disruption of northern political structures, and the persistence of local cultic centers in the highlands likely created a context in which distinct communal identities could develop. The Samaritan claim to descent from Ephraim and Manasseh and from the Levites is parallel to these historical reconstructions: adherents hold descent as a living genealogical truth, while scholars read these claims alongside demographic and political change in the ancient Near East.
A defining early conflict that shaped Samaritan self-definition was competition with Judean-centered religion over the legitimate location of the central sanctuary. The Hebrew Bible itself preserves polemical memories of tensions between Jerusalem and rival sanctuaries; by the Hellenistic period these tensions were intensified. Samaritan sources emphasize that Mount Gerizim—not Jerusalem—was the sacred mountain chosen by God. Jewish sources, especially those associated with the Jerusalem temple and later rabbinic literature, present an opposing memory and at times hostile polemic. The site-specific dispute over Gerizim versus Zion is therefore a concrete early marker of divergent trajectories.
A historically documented turning point that left a durable mark in Samaritan and wider regional memory is the destruction of the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim by the Hasmonean leader John Hyrcanus I in the second century BCE (commonly dated c. 110 BCE in classical sources). Jewish historiographers such as Josephus record Hyrcanus’s campaign and the razing of rival sanctuaries; Samaritan tradition remembers episodes of violence and dispossession from this era. Modern historians treat Hyrcanus’s actions and the late Hellenistic period more generally as decisive in the narrowing of Samaritan institutional autonomy and the crystallization of a marginalized yet durable group.
In late antiquity Samaritan communities produced their own internal leaders and reformers who sought to consolidate religious life and legal tradition. One of the best-known figures in Samaritan tradition, Baba Rabba, emerges in Samaritan chronicles as a major builder and organizer in roughly the fourth–sixth centuries CE. Whether Baba Rabba’s historical footprint corresponds precisely to the literary portrait in Samaritan chronicles is debated among scholars, but the figure exemplifies the process whereby Samaritan institutional identity was reinforced in the Byzantine period even as the wider imperial context shifted.
Samaritan communities continued to live in the highlands around Shechem (Nablus) and in villages on and around Mount Gerizim through the medieval centuries. During the Islamic and later Ottoman periods they remained small and localized but retained priestly lineages, ritual practice, and manuscript traditions. Contacts with Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottoman authorities, and later European travelers and scholars introduced new pressures and new opportunities for visibility. European antiquarian interest in the 19th century led to wider scholarly attention, manuscript collecting, and the publication of Samaritan texts, even as it occasioned tensions about ownership and interpretation of precious manuscripts.
Two concrete, verifiable markers illustrate the long arc described above. First, the Samaritan Pentateuch itself—known in the community as the Samaritan Torah and preserved in the Samaritan script derived from the paleo-Hebrew alphabet—represents both the continuity claimed by adherents and the textual divergence studied by scholars. The Samaritan Pentateuch differs from the Masoretic Hebrew text in a number of readings (for example, in the form of the Ten Commandments and in place-name emphases such as Mount Gerizim), which scholars have used to chart the textual history of the Pentateuch in the region. Second, the destruction of the Mount Gerizim temple by Hyrcanus around 110 BCE is a dated event that appears in non-Samaritan sources (notably Josephus) and is widely cited in historical reconstructions of Samaritan-Jewish relations.
The Samaritan origin story thus stands at the intersection of the community’s own claims to Mosaic continuity and of scholarly reconstructions that emphasize historical contingency, political ruptures, and the formation of identity in the shadow of imperial transformations. The ensuing centuries produced a small, resilient group whose existence was repeatedly attested in external sources and whose internal chronicles kept alive a memory of antiquity. That memory—anchored to Mount Gerizim, to a Pentateuchal corpus, and to priestly lineages—remains the foundational narrative by which the Samaritans interpret their emergence.
Comparatively, the Samaritan origin narrative exhibits tensions common to many religious minorities: a claim to primordial legitimacy alongside a historical record of marginalization. Where Jewish and Samaritan scriptures and chronicles offer competing claims about cultic location and textual continuity, historians read both kinds of evidence as data about how communities maintain authority and identity. In this way Samaritan beginnings illuminate broader dynamics of memory, authority, and place in the ancient Near East: an enduring small-scale tradition claiming deep antiquity while also emerging from particular historical disruptions.