Did ancient Samaritans eat pork?

March 29, 2006 9:26 PM

Did ancient Samaritans eat pork?

What I am getting from Google is that modern Samaritans are similar to Orthodox Jews in their adherence to dietary laws, but there seems to be some indication that Samaritans in the time of Christ were more Greek than Jewish and didn't necessarily keep kosher. Any scholars out there know definitively?

posted by Biblio to religion & philosophy (3 comments total)

I couldn't tell you for certain, but I've done a lot of reading on the time and area around the ancient Samaritans, and I've never gotten the impression that they didn't observe Mosaic law.
posted by Captain_Tenille at 9:58 PM on March 29, 2006

The Oxford Annotated bible says this about Luke 10.29, i.e., the Parable of the Good Samaritan (someone has been beaten, and it's the non-Jewish Samaritan, not either of the two Jews, who help him out):

"The priest represented the highest religious leadership among the Jews; the Levite was the designated lay associate of the priest. In contrast, it was a Samaritan, a foreigner not expected to show sympathy to Jews, who was moved with pity."

The editors seem to suggest that Samaritans were quite alien to the Jews. As for pork, there's as much a regional inhibition against it as a religious one. But I don't know for sure.
posted by bardic at 7:43 AM on March 30, 2006

As for pork, there's as much a regional inhibition against it as a religious one.

What region would that be, because the Levantine and Chami Christians sure do love their pig meat! That could have been a later adaptation though.

I wouldn't think not keeping kosher was limited to the Samaritans. I went to some first century synagogues in southern Syria that were far more Greek temple than synagogue. Most were painted up with bacchanalian and other Hellenistic scenes, were inscribed in Greek and had mosaic tile work like any other temple of the era. I'm pretty sure that the people in the pictures were wearing cotton and silk in the same outfit.
posted by Pollomacho at 11:23 AM on March 30, 2006