Dr. Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt University explains how getting an accurate answer to the question “Who were the Samaritans?” can shed light on how shocking the Good Samaritan parable would have been for Jesus’ audience.
The Good Samaritan parable is one of the most beloved gospel stories for young and old alike. The story is told in Luke 10:29–37: A man going from Jerusalem to Jericho is attacked by robbers who strip him and beat him. A priest and a Levite pass by without helping him. But a Samaritan stops and cares for him, taking him to an inn where the Samaritan pays for his care.
As Dr. Amy-Jill Levine discusses in a column in the January/February issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, the story has proven a popular one for sermons over the years, and it has been interpreted in many different ways—ranging from a tale about ritual purity to lessons about personal safety and even freedom fighters or universal healthcare. These sometimes-unusual interpretations are no doubt an attempt to find meaning in the parable for the times and concerns of a changing audience. And although that may be a worthy cause, Levine notes that in order to grasp the full import of the story, one must understand the times and concerns of first-century Judea, where Jesus and his followers lived. To do this, one must understand the relationship between Jews and Samaritans. This is sometimes hinted at in modern interpretations of the parable but rarely fully grasped.
So who were the Samaritans, really? Levine explains that they were not simply outcasts; they were the despised enemies of the Jews. Yet where listeners would have expected a Jew to be the hero of Jesus’ story, instead they would have been shocked to hear that it is a Samaritan. Only by understanding this reality does the powerful message of the parable come through about loving one’s neighbor.
Interested in Biblical parables? Read the Bible History Daily feature The Parables of Jesus, including “Recovering the Original Meaning of Matthew’s Parables” by Helmut Koester as it was originally published in Bible Review.
Read more from Dr. Amy-Jill Levine about interpreting the Good Samaritan parable in Biblical Views, “The Many Faces of the Good Samaritan—Most Wrong,” Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 2012.
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The narrative of the Good Samaritan was written well after the event. The word Samaritan doesn’t only mean the member of this community, it also simply designs in general an inhabitant of the region of Samaria, in Israel. The story wants to underline that after some priestly Cohen or Levi, just a common man had mercy. Even today, when a Jew wants to get married, he is asked if he is a Cohen, a Levi or ISRAEL, because the laws of getting married are different. Evidently, to the transcribers of the Gospel it did sound difficult to write the story of the “good Israel”!
It is interesting to see the manner in which various groups interpret the same story. It reminds one of the concept of “spin”. We tend to forget that while all of the parables have meaning beyond the time in which they occurred, we should not lose sight of their historical context.
From a non-scholar’s view I see a story with many facetted meanings. First, it is the story of man with God (Jerusalem=Garden), his fall, redemption and life until the ‘Samaritan’s’ return. Second, halfway through he was beset upon to ultimately kill him. Taking of his outer garment left him without his true identity. Priest (religion) could not save him. Self-righteousness by observance could not (Levite = Law). Only compassion from one who did not owe it (Jews only neighbor was another Jew) had the means (wine=blood of sacrifice; oil=Spirit). Inn is God’s favor toward believer in this life. Two denarii (days wages = two God Days). Samaritan’s return will assure every requirement settled by Him, not man.
Most all the sermons are still valid. It is just without First Century ‘ears’ much of the story’s impact is missed, including the discussion with the lawyer leading up to Jesus telling the story.
I much appreciated Professor Levine’s enlightened historical explanation of the Inn and where it was on the road. I thought it was near the end of the journey. Her explanation brings much more clarity to my understanding of the Good Samaritan.
I am doing a report on the Good Samaritin, and if there are any kids out here reading this, please read on because this is in a translation that kids can understand. So one day, robbers came and attacked a man who was traveling on the road. The bad men left him half dead. Some people came along the road, but they passed by him, thinking that they were better than him. Then, finaly, a person stopped to help. This man was a samaritan, and the Samaritans and this man were not friends.(they were enemies) Even though their people did not like eachother, the nice samaritan came, put him on his own prized donkey, helped clean up his bloody wounds (boo-boos for kids), and took him to an inn (hotel) to stay in. The samaritan paid for the visit with a lot of his money. Then when Jesus finished talking, he asked his follwers around him which person they were: The men that passed him, or the Samaritan. Jesus was trying to say to be nice to your enemies, even when you despise (hate) them the most. That is what the samaritan did
You’re all missing the real story. This was not a real story (it’s a “parable” after all) and was written when followers of Jesus were trying to distance themselves from Jews and the Torah. The author of the story purposefully puts the Cohen and Levite in a bad light because he wants to portray Jews as heartless. He tops it off by having the hero be a member of the Samaritans, who were in fact enemies of the Jews. (It was the Samaritans who tried to keep the second Temple from being rebuilt.) It is an anti-Jewish story, and that’s it.
The “parable” was anti-Jew propaganda intended to wrest religious legitimacy from the priesthood by portraying Jews as not human. Just one of a long list of badmouthing and wedge-driving perpetrated by Christians in their campaign of replacement theology. The same propaganda technique has been used through the centuries to justify persecution and mass murder. Not exactly something Christianity should be proud of.
Jesus was a Jew, His followers were Jews, the people he was telling the story to were Jews, its reasonable to presume that the main character of the story was a Jew. This is not an anti Jewish story; it is a story about religious pretense vs true acts of love and self sacrifice.
The story may have been adapted to an anti-Jewish purpose, but remember, Matthew was a Jewish Christian writing AFTER the fall of the Temple, when Sadducee leadership was no longer viable (without literal sacrifices) and the Pharisees were contending with the Messianic Jews for influence. Matthew’s view was that Judaism should proceed with Messianic rabbis in charge, but this did not happen because the influx of Gentiles took the Jewishness out of the church. Christian era Judaism evolved, therefore, from the Pharisees, most of whom were actually reasonable and would have endorsed this parable.
Nevertheless, in the form that Jesus may have told it, the parable is less anti-Jewish than anti-ESTABLISHMENT. The powerful men in Judaism were MORE concerned with ritual purity than with compassion, and they condemned Samaritans because of their LACK of purity as seen by Jews and because of differences in theology (e.g. Samaritans believed in pre-Davidic practices of worship). Jesus is saying that ritual purity and theology were irrelevant when the situation called for loving kindness (chesed), so the impure heretic was the true righteous (tzedek) man. Some American retellings (in the 1960′s South) had a black person as the Samaritan. Today it might be a GAY black MUSLIM!
John’s metaphorical interpretation (3 above) also has some good points. In this case, it could be an expansion on the Prodigal Son, in which the victim of the robbers is the RETURNING Prodigal. But Neil (7) sums up the way I understand it. The religious establishment, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim or whatever, sometimes gets in the way of the basic teaching.