Thread by @Delafina777

Reading Christian commentary on the parable of the Good Samaritan and 90% of it is "the kohen and the Levite wouldn't help the man because Ritual Purity" and 90% of that includes "so it was a GENTILE who helped!!!" & it's amazing how so many "experts" can be this blatantly wrong.

Seriously, Christians doing commentary on parables, get the words "ritual purity" and "unclean" out of your mouths.

You get it wrong every. single. time.

But I've already talked about that a million times, so instead I want to focus on the whole line of commentary that's "it was a marginalized person/'unclean' enemy/gentile who was the one who helped!"

First off, Samaritans in the context of first-century Judaism were not marginalized in the sense that I see Christian commentators/preachers using the term today.

They weren't comparable to "single mothers, LGBTQ people, Black people" or whatever else they're evoking.

They were *rivals.*

So the attempts to make this about power dynamics, other than those of "wounded and dying person vs. not wounded and dying people," are barking up the wrong tree.

But more importantly, as much as Christians want to make the Samaritan a gentile (and proto-Christian) hero, Samaritans aren't gentiles. They're Israelites. They're just not Jews. They're an estranged branch of the family.

The Samaritans are descendants of the northern tribes. When the Assyrians conquered Israel, they deported a lot of the northern tribes and resettled people from elsewhere in their empire there. We don't know how much intermarriage took place; Jewish sources assume more, but...

...still acknowledge that Samaritans have Israelite heritage. They have their own Torah and represent a parallel development to Judaism (the culture/practice that developed in the southern kingdom of Judah).

And I don't think it's possible to really understand the parable of the Good Samaritan without being familiar with 2 Chronicles--the story of how the Samaritans treated their Judahite captives after a war with Judah.

So let's take a look at the language of the parable for a moment:

"A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead...

"But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him."

And now let's take a look at 2 Chronicles 28.

"Then the men named above proceeded to take the captives in hand, and with the booty they clothed all the naked among them—they clothed them and shod them and gave them to eat and drink and anointed them and provided donkeys for...

"...all who were failing and brought them to Jericho, the city of palms, back to their kinsmen."

The victim in the parable is headed to Jericho. He gets beaten up and stripped. The Samaritan sees him, bandages his wounds, (presumably clothes him), anoints him, and takes him to safety on a donkey.

And the Samaritans in 2 Chronicles?

They clothe the captives, anoint them, and send them to Jericho on donkeys.

sefaria.org/II_Chronicles.…

(The main difference is that in the parable, it's "robbers" who attack the man, and in Chronicles it was the Samaritans themselves who attacked.)

Amy-Jill Levine notes that this story is relying on the expectation that the person who helps will be a Jew, because Jews come in three flavors (priests, Levites, and Israelites), and since the first two are evoked, the third is expected.

And so she sees the third being a Samaritan instead of a Jew as a violation of expectations: the listeners would have expected that the moral of the story is that instead of the kohen or the Levite, who actually are held to higher standards, it's an ordinary Israelite who helps.

And instead of the Common Man like themselves, the listeners get The Enemy.

As she put it in one of her lectures, you're expecting Larry, Moe, Curly, and you get Larry, Moe, HITLER.

I think her setup is right but her *read* of it is wrong here.

Because where we're expecting kohen, Levite, Israelite, we actually *get* kohen, Levite, Israelite.

It's just a Samaritan Israelite instead of a Jewish one.

And *that's* the violation of expectation here: a reminder that the Samaritans are kin.

Because what is it that prompts the Samaritans in 2 Chronicles to switch from treating their Judahite captives as war booty to treating them like kinspeople in need of care?

It's a speech by a prophet named Oded, who says:

"send back the captives you have taken from YOUR KINSMEN"

even though at this point Jews and Samaritans are enemies, he evokes a sort of once-and-future image of a single people

So in Chronicles, we have a Samaritan speaking to Samaritans, evoking shared Israelite identity to prompt Samaritans to treat Jews as family in need of care.

In Luke, we have a Jew speaking to Jews, evoking that memory, presumably to prompt them to see Samaritans as family.

The Samaritans, after all, were also being treated brutally by the Romans (Pilate would massacre a lot of them a few years after Jesus's death), and one can very easily read a message here about two oppressed groups fighting each other for scraps instead of supporting each other.

Christians often seem to want to read the "heroes" of parables (e.g. the younger "prodigal" son, although I don't think he's actually a hero) as gentiles, and read the bad guys (e.g. the older son, although I don't think he's a bad guy) as Jews.

And that makes sense, since Christians are gentiles and want to see themselves in these stories, and since the continued existence of Judaism represents a theological problem for Christianity, so they want stories about how Jews who don't convert to Christianity are bad.

But at the end of the day, this story is about an encounter between a Samaritan and a Jew: that is, an encounter between two Israelites.

The only gentiles in this story, if there are any, are (possibly) the robbers. (I suspect they're a cautious stand-in for Romans.)

And frankly, understanding it as a call to members of oppressed communities to stop fighting each other over scraps and instead support each other has both a lot more continuing relevance and a lot less banality than a generic "sometimes strangers are nice" reading.

I always headcanon this as Jesus telling an earlier version to the disciples as they’re walking along, in which who beats the guy up is left unidentified (dude demonstrates a certain fondness for passive constructions) and one of the disciples is like…

…”hey wait, who beat him up and took his stuff?” (After all, if it’s another Jew, there’s an obligation to bring them to justice and try to return the stolen property.)

And another disciple is like, “Well, obviously it was the Ro—“

*glances over at a cluster Roman soldiers*

“—bbers. It was robbers. Obviously.”

And Jesus is like “for crying out loud, this story is not supposed to be a whodunnit.” (He is, of course, uninterested in who caused the bad situation, just in how people respond to it.)

And they’re all “Then SAY WHODUNNIT.”

and he’s like “fine, robbers, ok?”