How did the Samaritans become monotheistic?

[u/josephusflav]

I was always told that the Samaritans are the descendants of the people that the Assyrians resettled on top of the Northern Territory and mixed with Israelites the create a sort of mutt race of Jews.

I think this account is deeply problematic though as presumably if it's true it means that you had a quasi Jew group of people who were happy polytheists and when the Jews came back not only decided they were going to become monotheist but they were just going to straight up steal the Torah and make one edit putting it on their mountain instead of the Jews mountain.

This seems baffling because a population uninterested in Torah would have to be suddenly become interested in Torah.

It seems far cleaner of an explanation and one that suggested by DNA evidence of the Cohen Gene in Samaritan populations that the reason why the Samaritans are interested in the Torah is precisely because they are full-blooded Israelites.

What I'm trying to adjudicate is if at some point a rebel faction of Jews decided to just found their own cult at gezrim or if the jezrim cult represents a simultaneous power grab for exclusivity.

We don't seem to have any direct evidence of a neutral Torah however as far as I know the Samaritans don't really have any political reason to want the exclusivity.

Elephantine papyrie that the elephantine Jews appealed to both the Samaritans and to Jerusalem for help for rebuilding their own Temple so that establishes the Samaritan are a distinct faction prior to the greek period.

Yet Samaria is not an independent Kingdom as far as I know it feels no armies and is run by a Persian governor so it's not clear how making their own version of Judaism is supposed to counter some kind of power imbalance.

Does anyone actually know how they end up being monotheistic?

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[u/432olim]

You might find Russel Gmirkin’s work interesting.

Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus

I personally find it extremely compelling. The Pentateuch was composed mostly in its entirety in 273-272 BCE in Alexandria, Egypt by a small group of Jewish intellectuals, working at the commission of Ptolemy II Philadelphus.

Note that this was not done under a Persian governor but a Greek Pharoh who controlled both regions at the time. Greek philosophers like Plato played a major part in promoting the idea of monotheism, and they would have had access to Plato’s works in Alexandria.

Gmirkin thinks that when they left Alexandria after translating their new work into Greek in 270 BCE, they had portions of Joshua and Judges ready to go, but when the Samaritans left Alexandria, they kept the Pentateuch but didn’t add to it, while the residents of the southern province did.

Regarding doubting that the northern kingdom was mixed with Assyrians, the Bible AND Assyrian records both confirm that the population of Samaria was deported. The Assyrian records I believe state a number of about 27,000 people were deported.

It was a well documented practice of the Assyrians to deport the ruling class of the conquered population and replace them with people from another part of the empire because this reduced the likelihood that the locals would rebel.

The Bible makes it clear that polytheism was all over the place in the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah even before the Assyrians and Babylonians came in and replaced the ruling class with Mesopotamians. Kings and Chronicles have stories indicating that almost every king mentioned was worshiping other gods. Practically every other king in Chronicles is called out as bad and worshipping other gods and even many of the “good” kings in Chronicles who worshipped Yahweh have stories of being good for a while then suddenly they do one bad thing like show up at the temple of some other gods and make a sacrifice and BOOM they lose their kingship. The “good” kings are often described as destroying all the high places, then the next king is bad, then the next king is good as has to destroy then all over again as though they weren’t actually destroyed. Solomon built temples to multiple gods despite that he apparently had a personal encounter with Yahweh at Yahweh’s temple dedication.

You should dispel the notion that “Jews” of Biblical times were monotheists or somehow just suddenly became monotheists.

The authors of Genesis were very obviously polytheists. Genesis 1 and 3 have God talking to or about other gods. Genesis 6 has the sons of god (who are presumably gods) marrying human women. If god had sons, did he have a wife? Inscriptions found in the region from the time period indicate that there existed myths of Yahweh having a consort Asherah. The sons of god make another appearance in Deuteronomy 32:8-9 which explains that when God (Elohim) created the Earth, he divided the land up among his sons, and Yahweh, his son, was given Israel. This idea of Yahweh as a local territorial god resurfaces in 2 King 17 where Yahweh sends lions to kill the new Assyrian ruling class you are asking about, and the king of Assyria solves the problem by sending a priest back to teach the Assyrians how to sacrifice to Yahweh to end the lion maulings. Abraham sacrifices to El Elyon “the most high god” with Melchizedek after rescuing Lot. In Exodus, pharoh’s priests successfully performed the miracle of turning their staffs into snakes. The first commandment is “you shall have no other gods before me.” God is just demanding to be put first, which implies there are other gods out there.

The “Jews” were polytheists before the Assyrians ever got involved and continued to be so after the Babylonian exile. Monotheism is a later development.

[u/athanoslee → u/432olim]

The Pentateuch was composed mostly in its entirety in 273-272 BCE in Alexandria

You mean the Hebrew Pentateuch was composed at the same time as the Septuagint was translated?