Shine Abroad: Samaria

Yay, I'm finally caught up with blogging! This post is from yesterday. We spent the entire day busing around to Elon Morea, Nebulous, Samaria, and Shiloh-all parts of the lands of Ephraim and Manasseh and all now included in the West Bank.

We stared the day at a lookout point overlooking the many important hills. Ashleigh and I posing...

Kaytlin, me, and Ash

This is a refugee camp right outside of Nebulous (Old testament Shechem) created for the 1947 refugees. There are third generation Palestinian refugees living here as they are waiting to return to their land in Israel. They won't move out of the camps because then they will no longer be considered refugees and it will tell the world that they now belong in Palestine. That is not what they want, they want to belong in Israel, as they see it as their land, so they are still waiting...

Samaritans

A few minutes after questioning Dr. Wright about the history behind Samaritans, to my delight, we ended up smack dab in the middle of one of only two Samaritan villages in the entire country of Israel. The city that we visited was located on Mt. Gerizim near the city of Nebulous (Shechem) and is called Kiryat Luza. These are a people who have been around for thousands of years and yet, today, they are so few. There is a total population of seven hundred in the combined cities- seven hundred people who all intermarry so as to keep everyone in the same blood line. As would be expected, this causes problems as many are born with disabilities because of all the similar blood lines.
Samaritans are actually a people group separated by their religious beliefs even more then their blood line though, now, they are considered neither Arab or Jewish. They are decedents from the tribes of Levi, Ephraim, and Manasseh but grew apart from the other sons of Israel as they only accepted the Torah as their Bible. They believe that the old laws must be followed. They celebrate many of the same holidays as Jews and continue to sacrifice animals once a year as they hold tight to their original religious traditions.
A priest of the Samaritans spoke to us and filled us in on the information above. He is a decedent from the tribe of Levi and, because of this, his sons will also be priests. Unfortunately there is not a lot for priests to do these days in Samaria, so our new friend spends most of his time running the city’s snack shop.