EXTINCTION:SAMARITANS NOW LESS THAN 800 GLOBALLY

EXTINCTION:SAMARITANS NOW LESS THAN 800 GLOBALLY
BY ABDULMUMINI ADEKU,[LAGOS,NIGERIA] 

a priest of the ancient Abrahamic faith ,Samaritan in serious prayers and supllication to the Almighty God on Mount Gerizim just outside of Shechem in todays Nablus in the West Bank Region of Palestine

it is not really known how many they were at the dawn of history or perhaps at any peak period in terms of human population and traffic at their worship sites but The News office Desk of E.N.M.Paedia Express Multimedia Group of Lagos, Nigeria can now reveal authoritatively that the powerful but minor religion who took its roots  from the Patriarch.Abraham ,Samaritans are now not more than 800 inspired people in the world as at press time.

Analysts ,believe that though they are small in numbers but centuries of worship on Mount Gerizim and Ebal, of varying aspects of their faith after splitting up from what is now generally called Judaism.

The Biblical wells of Jacob which was ceded by the former to his son.Joseph is in a Samaritan city called Sychar but which is to be found in the West Bank region of the land of Palestine in modern times.

It is a long known fact that Jews and the Samaritans do not have any form of socio-cultural relationship even as in the ancient times till this day.

The Samaritans in their faith of the Almighty God believe in the laws and teachings of the Prophet of God Moses,The prophets and also have a firm believe till this day that the messiah when -ever he cometh into the world will make all things clearer.

It would appear that Samaritans who can be found around the land of Judea in today's West Bank in Palestine are a people descended from Shem,The Son of Noah or those speaking one of the Semitic languages.

Samaritans are a community of Jews  who lay strong and rightly so of blood ties to the Jews of ancient Samaria who were not deported by the Assyrians ,conquerors of The kingdom of Israel  in 722 B.C.

The Samaritans call themselves Bene -Y Israel  meaning the children of Israel  or Shamerin meaning the Observant ones as they lay strict adherence to respect to the sacred texts of the Pentateuch  which makes up the first five books of the Biblical Old Testament.

Other Jews called them simply as Shomronin in the Talmud  but in the rabbinical compendium of the laws and commentary are called Kutim suggesting that they are descendants of Mesopotamia  Cutheans who settled in Samaria after Assyrian conquests.

Jews who returned to their homeland  after the Babylonian exile will not accept the help of dwellers of the land who were later identified as Samaritans in the re building of the second temple of Jerusalem.

Hence in the 4th century,Samaritans built their own temple in Nabulus also called Shechem in the Bible and just at the base of Mount Gerizim ,25 miles about 40 kilometers North of Jerusalem.

The low esteem that Jews had for the Samaritans was the background of Jesus the Christ famous parable of the good samaritan.

They are distributed evenly around Nabulus where its high priest  lives and the city of Holon where its maintains a fully functional synagogue just south of Tel Aviv -Yafo.

They prefer to live in semi -isolation ,marrying only within their own community aside from the fact that they like to pray in Hebrew  even if they adopt Arabic as their vernacular  after the muslim conquests of 636 A.D.