Samaritan is the name given to people from Samaria, a region that is currently in the West Bank, and which is disputed between Israel (to which it previously belonged, during the height of the Kingdom of Israel) and Palestine. It is a city in ruins, which between the 4th and 7th centuries served as the capital of the aforementioned kingdom. Similarly, this word is used to refer to the language of the region, which had, it is worth noting, its origin in Western Aramaic. By biblical passages, society associates the name of this small town with the "Good Samaritan", which is why it is also used as a kind of adjective to refer to charitable people.
These were mentioned many times in the biblical texts, where their origin is also mentioned. It is indicated that these are descendants of one of the 12 tribes of Israel, the time line used to describe how the world was populated from generation to generation; These descend directly from Manasseh and Ephraim, who were sons of Joseph. These, towards the year 740 BC, were conquered by the Assyrians, causing the intellectual elites to leave and were replaced with people of similar education to the Jewish; they had contempt for the people of Samaria. His language, moreover, was one of the most used, being used in a multitude of writings, until Arabic arrived.
These had firm religious beliefs, traditional for the time, and that are similar to Christianity. Among his most important texts of this nature, we can find the Memar Marqah, as well as the Pentateuch, which are now one of the most important theological sources.
