The Samaritans’ Accord: Between Survival and Myth in the Muslim Conquest of Palestine
The seventh century was an age of endings—of old gods dethroned and ancient nations erased. As the Roman and Sasanian empires staggered from a generation of ruinous war, smaller peoples caught between them faced impossible choices. Among them were the Samaritans, the elusive heirs of northern Israel, long despised by both Jew and Greek, cursed by emperors and mocked by bishops. When the armies of Islam crossed into Palestine, rumor claimed that the Samaritans—like the Jews—welcomed them as liberators.
For centuries, later Muslim historians preserved fragments of this tale: that Samaritan villages opened their gates to the Arabs, that they aided the conquest, that they sought in Islam a reprieve from the persecutions of Rome. But was this “accord” an act of faith—or simply of survival?
To understand this story, one must begin in the shadow of Justinian’s empire, when Samaritan life in Palestine was crushed by some of the most brutal religious policies of Late Antiquity. The revolts of 484 and 529 CE, born of desperation and rage, were drowned in blood. Entire Samaritan towns were annihilated, synagogues burned, and survivors enslaved. Justinian’s edicts outlawed their worship, banned their assemblies, and declared them perpetual heretics under imperial law. By the dawn of the seventh century, the Samaritans had been reduced from a nation to a hunted remnant, clinging to the hills of Mount Gerizim.
Then came the Heraclian restoration. In the wake of Persia’s invasion (602–628 CE) and the brief Samaritan resurgence under Persian rule, Roman vengeance fell with renewed fury. Heraclius’ victory over Xusro II brought not peace, but purification—a vision of Christian empire cleansed of heresy and unbelief. Jews and Samaritans alike were driven from Jerusalem, baptized by force, or executed. Their lands became provinces of suspicion, their faiths outlawed, their names synonymous with rebellion.
So when Islam emerged on the horizon, it was not merely another invader—it was a reprieve from centuries of theological tyranny. Later Arabic sources—especially al-Balādhurī and al-Yaʿqūbī—hint that Samaritan communities entered into peaceful accord with Muslim commanders, paying the jizya and receiving the Prophet’s protection in return. Whether these pacts were historical or imagined, they reflected an enduring truth: by the 630s, the Samaritans had nothing left to lose.
But the question remains—was this “Samaritan Accord” real? Or was it a legend, a convenient myth to explain imperial collapse by blaming the empire’s own despised minorities?
This post explores the evidence—Greek chronicles, Syriac lamentations, and early Islamic treaties—to uncover how the Samaritans, shattered by Justinian’s sword and Heraclius’ zeal, confronted the final transformation of their homeland.
In the fading light of empire, did they see Islam’s banners as a conqueror’s threat—or the last chance to survive history itself?
⚔️🔥 I. The Ruin of the Samaritan Nation – Revolts under Zeno & Justinian
“When faith becomes law and law becomes empire, difference becomes rebellion.”
By the fifth and sixth centuries, the Samaritans—the ancient heirs of northern Israel’s traditions, guardians of Mount Gerizim, and keepers of a Torah older than the Temple—had become a people besieged by both imperial theology and imperial memory. Once citizens of the Roman world, they were now branded as heretics, idolaters, and rebels—neither pagan nor Christian, neither Jew nor gentile, but a residual nation in an empire obsessed with unity. ⚖️
Under Emperor Zeno (r. 474–491), the storm first broke. ⛈️ When the emperor ordered a Christian church built atop Mount Gerizim, the Samaritans rose in fury—seeing it as the ultimate desecration of their holiest site. Their revolt of 484 CE, though fierce, was crushed with imperial brutality: Gerizim was drenched in blood, thousands were executed, and the survivors enslaved or driven into the hills. Yet the rebellion left behind a haunting precedent—Rome’s faith was no longer content to rule; it had to purify.
Half a century later, Justinian I (r. 527–565) transformed that precedent into policy. 🏛️ His dream of a “one faith, one law, one empire” world turned the Samaritans’ existence into a legal contradiction. His Novellae 37 and 131 outlawed Samaritan worship, revoked civic rights, and imposed baptism by compulsion. When the Samaritans again rebelled in 529 CE, spurred by both despair and defiance, the revolt consumed Palestine in flames—from Neapolis (Nablus) to Caesarea, from Scythopolis to Gaza. For weeks, imperial garrisons were overwhelmed, bishops slain, churches razed—but Justinian’s vengeance was absolute. Tens of thousands were massacred; Gerizim was defiled again; and the Samaritan nation—once numbering hundreds of thousands—was reduced to a remnant scattered across the hills of Samaria.
➡️ By the century’s end, Samaritan identity had been legislated out of existence, surviving only as a warning in Roman law codes and a whisper in Syriac lamentations. The empire had extinguished their temples but not their faith—and the ruins of Gerizim stood as a silent prophecy that no empire, however pious, could conquer memory. 🕯️
⚔️🔥 I.A – The Revolt under Zeno (484 CE): Desecration, Despair, and the Death of Gerizim
“When the holy becomes imperial, the sacred becomes rebellion.”
The first great Samaritan revolt, erupting in 484 CE, marked the beginning of the end for a nation already trapped between faith and empire. The sources—John Malalas, Procopius of Caesarea, and the Chronicon Paschale—record a moment when centuries of humiliation, forced conversion, and exclusion erupted into holy fury. ⚔️🔥
🌄 The Spark: Gerizim and the Unbearable Blasphemy
For the Samaritans, Mount Gerizim was not merely a mountain—it was the mountain, the chosen altar of Israel before Jerusalem was ever sanctified. To pray there was to touch the oldest covenant between God and His people. Yet by the late fifth century, Roman rulers viewed Gerizim’s cult as a stubborn relic of heresy.
When Emperor Zeno (r. 474–491) ordered that the Samaritan synagogue atop Mount Gerizim be transformed into a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, it was more than an act of piety—it was an erasure. 🏛️➡️⛪ The emperor had struck at the Samaritans’ cosmic heart, transforming their sanctuary into a Christian triumphal symbol.
In Caesarea, the capital of Palaestina Prima, the response was apocalyptic. Malalas reports that the Samaritans crowned a leader—a “bandit chief” named Justasas (Justus)—and declared him their king. 👑 Though imperial chroniclers called him a latro (robber), his actions suggest something far greater: a desperate, messianic attempt to reclaim divine order in a world that had stripped them of dignity.
🔥 The Revolt in Caesarea
The empire responded with iron. ⚔️ The dux of Palestine, Asclepiades, led imperial troops—alongside Rheges, a local official, and the Arcadiaci regiment—to crush the insurgents. Justasas was captured, beheaded, and his head and crown sent to Constantinople. His execution was a spectacle, a ritual warning to any who might mistake holiness for sovereignty.
🏛️ Zeno’s Retribution and Religious Cleansing
Zeno’s vengeance was theological. ⛪ He confiscated the property of wealthy Samaritans, barred them from holding public office, and—most devastatingly—converted their synagogue on Gerizim into a Church of the Theotokos. Procopius adds that Zeno even stationed a garrison on the mountain, symbolically caging what had once been the heart of Samaritan worship.
The Chronicon Paschale records the chilling aftermath:
“The emperor Zeno immediately made their synagogue… into a great house of prayer for Our Lady the Mother of God… and there was fear and peace.”
“Fear and peace” — two words that encapsulate the empire’s vision of order. ⚖️
💀 Why Such Hatred? The Cycle of Faith and Violence
The Eomans viewed the Samaritans not just as religious deviants but as internal pagans, stubborn remnants of a world Christ had supposedly conquered. In an empire where orthodoxy was citizenship, difference was rebellion, and rebellion was heresy.
For the Samaritans, this persecution was not politics—it was apocalypse. Every imperial edict, every confiscation, every church planted upon their sacred soil confirmed their worst fear: that Rome had become the new Assyria, the new destroyer of Israel. Their uprisings were not rebellions of ambition, but of despair. 💔
Even Samaritan chronicles like Abū l-Fatḥ’s Kitāb al-Tārīkh remember Zeno as the arch-persecutor:
“He took the synagogue which the high priest ʿAqbun had built and made in front of it a place of sacrilege. He built a church inside the Temple. May God show him no mercy.”
The Chronicle of Adler echoed this curse, adding that Zeno’s soul would dwell “in the fire of hell.” 🔥 Such memory was more than revenge—it was a theology of survival.
🕯️ The Aftermath: From Revolt to Ruin
By the end of Zeno’s reign, Samaritan life in Palestine was shattered. Their temples were seized, their leaders executed, their property confiscated. Yet the mountain endured. 🏔️
Archaeological remains—Greek dedicatory inscriptions, coins, and late Roman masonry beneath the later church—whisper of that lost synagogue beneath the Virgin’s basilica. Beneath every layer of Christian stone lies a buried Samaritan prayer.
➡️ The revolt of 484 CE was more than an uprising—it was a collision between empire and eternity, between a people who would rather die than surrender their sacred mountain and a state that believed unity required annihilation.
In the ashes of Gerizim, Rome learned to fear the zeal of its minorities, and the Samaritans learned that survival would henceforth mean invisibility. ✡️🕯️
⚖️📜🔥 I.B. The Emperor’s War on the Unbelievers – Justinian’s Laws Against the Samaritans
“When laws become theology, justice becomes persecution.”
Before the Samaritan revolt of 529 CE, the seeds of destruction were already being sown—not on the battlefield, but in the imperial chancery of Constantinople. There, under the gilded ceilings of the Great Palace, Emperor Justinian I began forging a new world order—one in which faith was law, and law was an instrument of divine conformity. Between 527 and 534 CE, he issued a series of sweeping decrees that transformed religious intolerance into imperial policy, binding salvation to citizenship and rendering dissent a crime against both God and Caesar.
The Samaritans, an ancient community clinging to their ancestral faith upon Mount Gerizim, soon found themselves caught in the crosshairs of this legislative crusade. They were not a rebellious nation by nature, but a people of stubborn endurance—guardians of a faith older than Rome itself. Yet to Justinian, their very persistence was defiance; their refusal to embrace the Chalcedonian Creed was not piety, but sedition.
⚔️ The Legal Hammer Falls (527 CE): Exclusion from Humanity Itself
In the spring of 527 CE, while Justin I still shared the throne with his ambitious nephew, the two co-emperors issued a chilling decree—Codex Justinianus 1.5.12—which formalized a total civil excommunication of non-Orthodox peoples. 🧾
The edict declared that Jews, Samaritans, pagans, and heretics were henceforth:
The law’s own words reverberated with imperial menace:
“We intend not only that what was already laid down in the laws shall be recalled and made firmer through this present law, but also that more shall be declared… that even what pertains to the human advantages is withheld from those who do not worship God rightfully.” — Codex Justinianus, 1.5.12
💀 Even human advantages—the right to work, to plead, to live—were now reserved exclusively for those within the Orthodox fold.
Justinian’s intent was transparent: religious conformity was the price of citizenship. The Samaritans, along with Jews and other non-Orthodox subjects, were thus expelled from the civic body. No longer merely outsiders in theology, they were now stateless within the empire, deprived of every institutional bridge to justice or self-defense. Their priests and elders were dismissed; their communal voice in the courts silenced.
⛔⚔️ To the emperor, this was not persecution—it was purification. He saw himself as the guardian of divine order, the earthly custodian of a celestial truth. In Justinian’s eyes, to allow heresy was to endanger eternity; uniformity was salvation.
💰 Confiscation, Disinheritance, and Forced Obedience (527–528 CE)
Justinian’s war against pluralism did not end with political exclusion—it invaded the most intimate spaces of life: the home, the hearth, the family. The next decree, Codex Justinianus 1.5.13, extended imperial control into the inheritance laws of the empire.
Even if a child had “sinned against their parents,” Justinian decreed that they would still receive at least one-quarter of the inheritance—so long as they professed Orthodoxy. The emperor had thus transformed conversion into currency, and faith into inheritance law.
💰✝️ Conversion was now economically mandatory.
Imagine a Samaritan father in Nablus, clinging to the Torah of Moses and the sacred scrolls of Gerizim, knowing that his death would see his estate seized by the empire unless his children abandoned their ancestral creed. Or a daughter forced into an Orthodox marriage simply to secure her dowry. The law had entered the household; apostasy had become policy.
It was not just persecution—it was re-engineering belief by bureaucratic decree. To the Samaritans, these measures were not mere humiliation, but profanation of kinship, an imperial intrusion into the soul of their nation.
⛓️ The Law of Chains (527–534 CE): “No Jew, No Samaritan Shall Own a Christian”
As if to complete the cycle of degradation, Justinian then issued a third decree—Codex Justinianus 1.10.2—between 527 and 534 CE, aimed at the economic foundations of Samaritan life.
“A pagan, Jew, Samaritan, and anyone who is not Orthodox, is unable to possess a Christian slave, for that slave shall be manumitted, and he who possessed him shall give thirty pounds of gold.”
🚫 This measure, veiled in the language of moral purity, carried devastating implications. It stripped Samaritans and Jews of their property rights, their means of livelihood, and even their standing as employers or masters. In a society where much of agriculture and trade depended on Christian labor, this edict effectively crippled the Samaritan economy.
To Justinian, this was an act of sanctification—ensuring that “the faithful could not be subject to the unclean.” But to the Samaritans, it was economic strangulation. Their farms, workshops, and vineyards—once symbols of resilience—became liabilities overnight. Their wealth evaporated, their autonomy shattered.
The law was not just punitive; it was theological theater. Every restriction, every confiscation, every conversion was a statement of imperial supremacy: Christ’s empire tolerates no rivals.
🔥 The Breaking Point: From Law to Revolt (529 CE)
By the year 529 CE, the empire had built a legal machinery of oppression so complete that revolt became the only remaining form of prayer. 💣
The Samaritans could no longer:
They were forbidden even to exist within the structures of the empire. The Codex—the proud monument of Justinian’s jurisprudence—had become a weapon of annihilation, a parchment sword sharper than any steel.
Justinian believed he was sanctifying the empire; in truth, he was burning it from within.
For the Samaritans, the law left only despair. As churches rose upon their confiscated synagogues, and imperial garrisons occupied Mount Gerizim—their holiest ground—they chose rebellion over extinction. Their uprising in 529 CE, led by Julian (Ioulianos), was the inevitable eruption of centuries of persecution. What the law had written, the sword would soon enforce.
Justinian’s Codex was hailed as a monument of law, yet beneath its marble prose lay the blueprint of religious extermination. To the Orthodox clergy, it was the triumph of Christ’s empire; to the Samaritans, it was the legalization of their erasure.
By binding salvation to citizenship, Justinian had made faith a function of obedience. And in doing so, he ensured that the Samaritan question could end only in blood and ash.
When the revolt finally ignited in 529 CE, it was not merely rebellion—it was a reaction to annihilation. The empire had declared the Samaritans unfit to live as free people, and they answered with the only freedom left to them: defiance.
⚖️📜 “The law of the empire became the law of heaven,” wrote one later chronicler, “and those outside it became unworthy of life.”
Thus, before the swords were drawn and the cities burned, the fate of the Samaritan nation had already been written—not in battlefields, but in the clauses of Justinian’s laws.
⚔️🔥 I.C. The Greatest Samaritan Revolt – The Blood of Gerizim
“When faith is outlawed, rebellion becomes worship.”
By 529 CE, the Samaritan nation stood on the edge of annihilation. For centuries, they had endured imperial contempt and ecclesiastical coercion—but under Emperor Justinian I, intolerance was transformed into legislation, and legislation into blood. His new decrees (527–534 CE) had not only outlawed Samaritan worship and property rights but had sought to erase their very existence.
The result was inevitable. When prayer is forbidden and law becomes persecution, revolt is no longer sedition—it is survival. 💥
⚡ The Spark in Samaria – From Law to Rebellion (April–June 529 CE)
The revolt began, according to the most detailed witnesses, in the spring of 529 CE. ⏳
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Cyril of Scythopolis, an eyewitness from nearby Scythopolis (modern Beit She’an), places the outbreak four months after the death of Abba Theodosius (January 11, 529 CE)—that is, in April or May 529 CE.
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John Malalas confirms this, noting that by June 529, “Palestine was aflame.”
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Procopius, writing in The Secret History, traces the spark directly to Justinian’s new law extending prior heresy edicts to the Samaritans, commanding them to “change their earlier beliefs,” under penalty of confiscation, exile, or death. ⚖️🔥
At first, the urban Samaritans of Caesarea, Neapolis (Nablus), and Scythopolis responded with deceit rather than defiance. Procopius writes bitterly:
“All of them who lived in my home town of Kaisareia, as well as in the other cities, deemed it foolish to suffer harm on behalf of a stupid doctrine, and so they simply replaced their present name with that of the Christians, managing to evade punishment through dissimulation.” — Secret History 11.25
But beyond the cities—among the farmers and hillmen of Mount Gerizim, the heartland of Samaritan faith—the story was different.
In the countryside, the law struck like a plague, tearing apart communities, marriages, and families. When imperial officials arrived to enforce forced conversions, the peasants of Samaria—tillers of the richest soil in the Levant—rose as one.
“All of them who tilled the fields assembled together and decided to take up arms against the emperor, setting up a rival emperor for themselves from among the bandits, a man named Ioulianos, the son of Sabaros.” — Procopius, Secret History 11.27
Thus began the greatest Samaritan revolt in history, a rebellion both apocalyptic and suicidal.
👑 The “Emperor” of Samaria – Julian son of Sabaros
Their leader, Julian (Ioulianos), was no ordinary bandit. Procopius calls him archlēstēs—“chief of the brigands”—but to the Samaritans he was a deliverer, a man chosen by God to avenge Mount Gerizim and restore the Covenant.
They crowned him emperor, draping him in the trappings of imperial dignity, and celebrated their newfound “kingdom” with public games—perhaps mocking the ceremonies of Constantinople. 🏛️🎭
“Julian presided over circus games,” notes Malalas, “attended by Jews and Christians alike.”
To Roman eyes, this was madness. To the Samaritans, it was prophecy fulfilled. Some scholars believe the Samaritans imagined themselves founding a rival state—an imperium Samaritanum, a Holy Kingdom to replace the corrupt Christian Empire.
But this fragile dream was crushed within months.
💣 The Slaughter Begins – The Fall of Samaria (Summer–Autumn 529 CE)
When the imperial authorities received news of the uprising, Palestine descended into chaos. At first, the local garrisons—thinly scattered and ill-prepared—were overwhelmed. Samaritan bands swept across the countryside, burning churches, seizing towns, and killing Orthodox landowners who had long profited from their subjugation.
The revolt reached its zenith in Neapolis, where Julian was crowned amid fire and blood. The Chronicon Paschale and Theophanes both record the rebellion spreading “throughout all Samaria,” while the Christian monks of Palestine fled to the desert.
But the empire’s response was swift—and merciless.
Emperor Justinian dispatched the dux of Palestine, Irenaeus, along with generals Bassus and Theodorus, reinforced by Arab foederati from the Ghassanid and Lakhmid tribes. The Arabs were commanded by the phylarch Abu Karib, possibly joined by his brother al-Ḥārith (Arethas) ibn Jabala, later famed as the Ghassanid king. 🏇🔥
According to Malalas, the Arabs fought with devastating efficiency in the rugged terrain of Samaria:
“They bore the brunt of the fighting, for they were skilled in the mountains and the arid lands.”
Within weeks, the Samaritan army was annihilated. Julian was slain in battle, and the fields of Palestine “became destitute of farmers.”
Procopius grimly summarizes:
“It is said that ten times ten thousand men were lost in that fight, and that this land, which is the most fertile on the earth, became deserted as a result.” — Secret History 11.29
💀 One hundred thousand souls—men, women, and children—were said to have perished. Even if exaggerated, the scale of devastation was immense. Villages vanished, the hills were scorched, and for decades afterward, Roman landowners lamented that they were forced to pay taxes “for fields that no longer yielded bread.”
⚰️ The Aftermath – Slavery, Flight, and Erasure
Those not slain were enslaved or exiled.
Malalas reports that 20,000 Samaritan boys and girls were handed over to the Arab allies as spoils of war. The phylarch sold them “in Persia and in India”—which, in Roman parlance, meant the Red Sea region, perhaps Arabia or Ethiopia.
🩸 Shahid and Mayerson interpret this haunting note as evidence that Samaritan captives were sold into the Himyarite or Ethiopian markets, their lineage perhaps merging, over centuries, into the populations of the Horn of Africa. Some scholars have even wondered whether the Falasha (Beta Israel) of Ethiopia carried distant echoes of this catastrophe.
Tens of thousands more fled north, seeking refuge in the Trachonitis (al-Lajāʾ) and the Iron Mountain near modern-day Hauran and Jordan. These rocky deserts—already ancient havens for rebels since Josephus’ day—became the last sanctuary of the Samaritan remnant.
But even there, they were hunted. The Ghassanid cavalry pursued them relentlessly, the survivors either massacred or enslaved.
The revolt’s geography of suffering stretched from Neapolis to Beth-Shean, from Mount Gerizim to the lava fields of Syria—a corridor of ruin that would never again recover its Samaritan population.
🏛️ Imperial Triumph – Law, Vengeance, and Silence
With the rebellion crushed, Justinian’s vengeance fell like law from heaven. A new edict, Codex Justinianus 1.5.17, decreed that:
“Samaritans’ synagogues are destroyed and, if they shall try to build others, they are punished. They are not able to have successors by testament or intestacy, except Orthodox persons.”
In one stroke, the emperor abolished Samaritan worship and confiscated their inheritance, ensuring that what the sword had not destroyed, the law would erase.
Cyril of Scythopolis recounts that Samaritan properties were seized to rebuild Christian churches—their stones, perhaps literally, forming the foundations of basilicas that now dotted the land.
Justinian’s architects even turned to Mount Gerizim, the sacred summit of Samaritanism. There, where the Samaritan temple once stood, he restored and fortified the Church of the Theotokos, first built by Emperor Zeno after an earlier revolt. The emperor added five churches, encircling the mountain with Christian sanctuaries as if to smother its ancient holiness under domes and crosses.
Gerizim, once the beating heart of Samaritan faith, had become a Roman acropolis, guarded by garrisons, watched by priests, and desecrated by imperial decree.
⚖️ Consequences – A Land Bled White
“The land which was the most fertile on earth became destitute of farmers.” — Procopius, Secret History 11.29
The economic toll was catastrophic. Fields lay fallow, vineyards untended, and entire districts of Samaria depopulated. Even Christian landlords suffered, as they were forced to continue paying imperial taxes for estates now barren and lifeless.
Procopius, himself a native of Caesarea, notes bitterly:
“Even though they derived no revenues from their lands, they were still required to pay in perpetuity the crushing annual tax to the emperor, for no leniency was shown.”
Malalas and Theophanes echo him: the revolt had devastated the entire Levant, draining its lifeblood at the very moment Justinian was preparing for war with Persia. The empire’s granary of Palestine had become a wasteland.
🕯️ The Samaritan Twilight – A Nation Unmade
By the 530s, the Samaritans were broken.
Those who remained converted outwardly to survive, joining the ranks of crypto-Samaritans who practiced their rites in secret. Others fled into obscurity—northward to Phoenicia and Syria, southward into the desert, or eastward beyond imperial reach.
The once-great Samaritan nation, which had rivaled the Jews for centuries and preserved the Torah in its own ancient tongue, had been all but erased by Roman hands.
In the words of one scholar: “By the sixth century’s end, the Samaritans no longer shaped the history of Palestine—they had become its ghosts.”
🩸 Conclusion – The Blood that Fed the Soil
The Samaritan Revolt of 529 CE was not merely a rebellion—it was the end of a people’s world. In its ashes lay the proof that Justinian’s dream of one empire, one faith, one law could only be achieved through annihilation.
Where once the songs of Gerizim rose to heaven, now only the tolling of Church bells echoed over the hills. The survivors whispered their prayers in hiding, the Torah of Moses guarded in caves, their names erased from the tax rolls and the chronicles alike.
⚖️🔥 I.D. The Aftermath of 529 & The Revolt of 556 – The Twilight of Gerizim
“The empire broke their bodies; the law erased their names.”
The smoke of 529 CE had not yet cleared when the Samaritan nation faced the impossible: how to survive inside an empire that had decreed their extinction. Their lands were ruined, their youth enslaved, and their holy mountain turned into a Christian fortress. Yet even in ruin, the Samaritans refused annihilation. Their faith—ancient, stubborn, and wounded—still clung to Mount Gerizim’s stones like the last flame in a dying temple. 🕯️
But Justinian’s vengeance had not only depopulated Samaria—it had also destabilized the empire’s eastern frontier. In the years that followed, their desperation would lead some Samaritans to an even greater gamble: collaboration with Persia.
⚔️ I.D.1 – The Betrayal and the Borderlands (528–530 CE)
When the Persians under Kawad I reopened hostilities in the late 520s, the Samaritan catastrophe became imperial gossip along the Roman–Persian frontier. The Roman magister officiorum, Hermogenes, had been sent east to negotiate a truce. But his mission failed—not because of gold or diplomacy, but because of what news followed him from Palestine.
“The Persian king withdrew from the peace agreement … for he had heard that the Samaritans, angered by Justinian, had fled to him, promising to fight for Persia and deliver all Palestine, including the Holy Places, into his hands.” — John Malalas, Chronographia 18.455
According to both Malalas and the Chronicon Paschale, 50,000 Samaritans crossed into Persian lands, swearing allegiance to Kawad and offering him Jerusalem itself—its “gold, precious stones, and treasures of the emperors.” Whether this number was realistic or rhetorical, it reveals the depth of Roman paranoia and Samaritan despair.
Malalas recounts that five wealthy Samaritans, caught crossing back into Roman territory near Ammadios (modern Amūdīs, south of Dara), were interrogated by the magister militum per Orientem—perhaps Belisarius himself. They confessed under examination, and a report was sent to Constantinople. Their fate is not recorded.
But the episode left a scar: for the first time, the Samaritans had ceased to be viewed as rebellious provincials. In the imperial imagination, they had become heretics and traitors—internal Persians within the empire’s heart.
⚰️ I.D.2 – A Broken Nation under Surveillance (530–550 CE)
After 529, Samaritan life became a study in concealment. Their holy sites were gone; their priests and elders scattered. The once-proud Gerizim community—the beating heart of their faith—was now encircled by Roman garrisons and Christian sanctuaries, monuments of their defeat.
The Codex Justinianus 1.5.17 and subsequent decrees forbade Samaritan inheritance, banned synagogue construction, and transferred confiscated lands to the Church. Synagogues were demolished or turned into monasteries. 🏛️✝️
To survive, many Samaritans outwardly converted, practicing dissimulation—pretending Orthodoxy while quietly preserving the Torah and their calendar. Procopius hints that by his own lifetime, “those who once tilled the richest lands now hide their name to live.”
And yet, the law could not fully extinguish them. Their faith endured in whispers, transmitted through families who had lost everything but memory. It was this mixture of humiliation, secrecy, and pent-up rage that would explode once more—a generation later.
💥 I.D.3 – The Penultimate Revolt (556 CE): Jews and Samaritans Together
“Desperation makes enemies into brothers.”
By 556 CE, three decades after the holocaust of 529, the Roman Empire was weary. Justinian’s plague had ravaged the population; wars in Italy and Lazica drained the treasury. Amid this exhaustion, Palestine simmered again.
In July 556 CE, according to Malalas (Chronographia 18.487–488), a new rebellion broke out—not in Samaria’s hills, but in the cosmopolitan port city of Caesarea Maritima. There, Samaritans and Jews, two peoples often divided by doctrine and ritual, united in revolt.
“The Samaritans and Jews in Caesarea, uniting together like the factions of the Greens and Blues, attacked the Christians, killed many of them, and burned the churches.” — Malalas
🏟️ The chroniclers describe the rebels as forming a single “circus faction,” echoing the Nika revolt of 532 in Constantinople. The analogy may be metaphorical—a symbol of chaotic violence—but it suggests that the uprising began during or after public games in Caesarea’s hippodrome, where class and religious tensions often erupted into bloodshed.
The rebels first attacked the Orthodox Christians, burning churches and slaughtering clergy. Then they turned on the city’s governor, Stephanos (the “Syrian”), who attempted to shield the Christians within the praetorium. He was hunted down and killed, his residence looted, his family fleeing for their lives.
Stephanos’ widow reached Constantinople and petitioned Emperor Justinian directly. His response was immediate and merciless. He dispatched Amantios, governor of the East and magister militum per Orientem, connected with the official Zemarchos, to exact retribution.
“He found those who had committed the murders. He hanged some, beheaded others, cut off the right hands of others still, and confiscated their property. And there was great fear in Caesarea and all the eastern regions.” — Excerpta de insidiis 48; Chronographia Tripartita 145
⚖️ This was not a battle; it was a purge. Within weeks, the revolt was crushed. No army marched—only the machinery of execution. The rebellion’s leadership vanished into silence, their names unrecorded, their bodies feeding the waves beneath Caesarea’s harbor walls.
🏛️ I.D.4 – Justinian’s Final Policy: The Samaritan Ghost
The 556 revolt was the penultimate gasp of Samaritan resistance. After it, Roman policy hardened irreversibly. Samaritan and Jewish communities were treated as a single heretical body—ethnē, “the nations”—to be monitored, taxed, and isolated.
Justinian’s earlier Novella 129 (551 CE), which had temporarily eased some restrictions at the request of Sergius, bishop of Caesarea, proved meaningless. His final years undid even this gesture, as the revolt confirmed his worst fears: that heretics, if tolerated, would only conspire against heaven’s empire.
Mount Gerizim remained a Christianized citadel, guarded by soldiers and priests. Samaritan worship there was forbidden under penalty of death. In Roman literature, they now appear only as a byword for rebellion, their ancient name Shomronim replaced by Samareitai—the heretics of Palestine.
Procopius, reflecting in Buildings V.7, would later write that Justinian had “converted the Samaritans to a more pious way of life.” But the ruins of Neapolis and the silence of Gerizim tell another story: not conversion, but extinction. 🩸
🩸 Epilogue – The Silence After the Storm
By the end of Justinian’s reign, the Samaritan nation was effectively erased as a political or religious force. What the sword had begun, law and memory completed.
The Roman chroniclers would henceforth speak of them only in the past tense: “Once they had their temple, once they had their law.”
And yet, like embers buried beneath the ashes, the Samaritans survived—quietly, anonymously—through the centuries that followed. When the Muslims entered Palestine in the 630s, they found them still alive, still clinging to their scrolls, their priests, their mountain.
Gerizim’s sons had outlasted the emperors who tried to erase them. But their survival came at a cost: no longer a nation, but a remnant.
I.E – The Final Spasms of Samaritan Resistance (573 CE): Justin II’s Edict and the Last Revolt ⚖️🔥
The Samaritan nation, already exhausted by a century of repression and repeated rebellion, made one final, desperate attempt to rise against Roman rule in the early 570s CE. By this point, the sect had endured the annihilations of 484 CE under Zeno, 529 CE under Justinian, and 556 CE under the same emperor — each insurrection leaving their numbers fewer, their lands confiscated, and their sacred identity driven into secrecy. Yet, as the reign of Emperor Justin II (565–578 CE) began, the embers of Samaritan resistance still glowed.
🕊️ The Edict of 572 CE: The Law that Ended Samaritan Civic Life
In May 572 CE, Justin II issued one of the most draconian decrees in the entire history of Late Roman religious policy: Novella VII (also catalogued as Novella 144), “Concerning the Samaritans” (Περὶ Σαμαρειτῶν). Addressed to Diomedes, the Praetorian Prefect, this edict sought to erase the Samaritans from civic and legal existence. The emperor lamented that all previous emperors — even his “pious father,” meaning Justinian — had failed to “cure the impious madness (ἡ ἀσεβὴς μανία)” of the Samaritans. Many of them, Justin complained, had even received baptism only to relapse “into the same madness and impurity.”
Only one class was exempted from total ruin: the Samaritan peasant cultivators (γεωργοί). Justin spared them not for their sake, he wrote coldly, but for the sake of the landowners and imperial revenue — “so that the taxes and produce from those estates might continue to flow into the fisc.” Even so, their inheritance rights were confined within their own narrow families, and they were barred from military or civic advancement. The edict thus reduced the Samaritans to serfdom, legally alive only as tillers of Roman land.
⚔️ The Revolt of 572–573 CE: A Final Convulsion
It was this edict — a total inversion of their remaining social status — that sparked the final Samaritan rebellion. Reports of desecrations and riots spread along the Phoenician coast, especially near Porphyreon and the nearby Castra Samaritanorum, where Samaritans allegedly attacked and defiled Christian icons.
Symeon the Stylite the Younger, in his letter to the emperor, thundered that the “atheistic and impure Samaritans” had desecrated the holy images of Christ and the Virgin in the church built there by imperial order. He demanded that they be punished as if they had profaned the emperor’s own image — namely, by death. His letter was so vehement that centuries later it was read aloud at the Second Council of Nicaea (787 CE) as proof that the destruction of sacred images was a crime equal to Samaritan impiety.
The emperor responded precisely as Symeon desired. As John of Nikiu records, the Samaritans rose in revolt in 572–573 CE, provoked by the harshness of the new law. Both he and John of Ephesus attest that the rebellion spread through Samaria, Caesarea, and the coastal towns, and that it was crushed with exceptional ferocity. John of Ephesus recounts that the emperor dispatched Photius, the stepson of Belisarius, who ravaged the countryside, crucified the rebels, and burned their villages to the ground.
Photius’ campaign, lasting over a year, marked the complete military eradication of Samaritan armed power. In his Ecclesiastical History, John of Ephesus depicts Photius as an avaricious and brutal man — “a destroyer of mankind, until the land trembled before him.” He tortured bishops, extorted gold from clergy, and crushed both heretics and innocents alike, “till all the regions of the East were ruined as utterly as if pillaged by barbarians.” The Samaritan rebellion was his pretext, and their annihilation his method of enrichment. For twelve years, John writes, his tyranny darkened the land, until he died “a miserable death and with an accursed remembrance.”
🔥 The Last Extinction under Tiberius II (578–582 CE)
When the news of pagan uprisings at Baalbek (Heliopolis) reached Constantinople in 579 CE, Emperor Tiberius II sent another general, Theophilus, to crush them — the same officer who had “shortly before” suppressed “a revolt and disturbance created by the Jews and Samaritans in Palestine.” This confirms that by 579 CE, Samaritan independence had been completely extinguished. The survivors were massacred, enslaved, or forcibly converted. Their temples and synagogues were razed, their sacred Mount Gerizim sealed, and their priesthood shattered.
The once-prosperous Samaritan communities of Neapolis (Nablus), Caesarea, and Scythopolis were transformed into Christian cities. Roman chroniclers ceased to treat the Samaritans as a nation, referring to them instead as a heresy, a theological curiosity rather than a people. Their remnants — scattered peasants and secret worshippers — endured only in the remote hills of Samaria, maintaining their rites in silence.
⚖️ Legacy: The Samaritan Nation Reduced to Memory
After 573 CE, no further Samaritan revolt is recorded. Their final uprising, provoked by Justin II’s law, became their collective death sentence as a political and religious nation. Even sympathetic later sources — such as the Libri Carolini under Charlemagne — referred to Symeon’s letter and remarked that “the Samaritans, being Gentiles and only in appearance Jews, are no worse than other unbelievers,” a faint echo of their former notoriety.
Thus ended, by fire, law, and the sword, the independent history of the Samaritans within the Roman world. What had begun under Zeno and Anastasius as an embattled provincial religion concluded under Justin II and Tiberius II in utter silence. The ruins of Mount Gerizim’s temples, the sealed tombs of their priests, and the scattered exiles who clung to the Pentateuch of Moses were all that remained — the final survivors of a people once rooted in the heartland of Israel, now extinguished by empire.
Epilogue – The Vanishing of a People: From Gerizim to the Dawn of a New Age 🌄⏳
As the sixth century gave way to the seventh, the embers of Samaritan resistance finally burned out. From the revolt of 484 CE under Zeno, through the fiery annihilation of 529 CE under Justinian, to the final rising of 573 CE under Justin II, the same pattern repeated itself—rebellion born of desperation, met by persecution born of fear. ⚔️🔥
Each emperor, believing himself the guardian of divine order, sought to purge what he deemed heresy from the body of the empire. Yet in doing so, Rome inflicted upon itself a deeper wound—the gradual loss of its plural soul. The once-diverse landscape of the Holy Land, where Jews, Samaritans, Christians, and pagans had shared uneasy coexistence, was now reduced to the brittle uniformity of imperial orthodoxy. 🏛️✝️
➤ Mount Gerizim, once the beating heart of Samaritan faith, lay silent and scarred—its sanctuaries razed, its people enslaved or driven into exile. By 600 CE, the Samaritan nation no longer existed as a political or social force. What remained of them endured only in whispers—small families in Nablus, the hills of Ephraim, and the margins of history itself.
And yet, as the Roman Empire entered the 600s, its triumph proved hollow. The same empire that had crushed its minorities and silenced its provinces would soon face forces beyond its imagination. Heraclius’ realm—stretched thin by wars with Persia, famines, and plague—was about to confront a new faith rising from Arabia, one that would reorder the very world the emperors had tried so hard to preserve. 🌅⚜️
In that sense, the Ruin of the Samaritan Nation stands as the final prelude to the spiritual and geopolitical upheaval of Late Antiquity’s end. The imperial obsession with unity through coercion had extinguished one ancient tradition—but in doing so, it had prepared the ground for another. For on the horizon of history, a new proclamation would soon echo across the deserts and cities alike:
“There is no god but God.”
II. Between Persia and Rome – A People Caught in the Fire (602–630 CE) 🔥🏺
As the seventh century dawned, the ancient land of Palestine once again became the frontier between two collapsing worlds — Rome and Persia, both exhausted by generations of war, plague, and religious strife. For the shattered Samaritan remnant, the fifty years following their final revolt under Justin II (573 CE) had been a long twilight of silence. Their temples lay in ruins, their priesthood fragmented, and their people reduced to a furtive peasantry surviving in the hills of Mount Gerizim and the countryside of Neapolis. Yet when the great Persian invasion of the Near East began in 602 CE, and the armies of Xusro II swept into Roman Syria and Palestine, the Samaritans briefly reemerged — not as a nation reborn, but as a people momentarily freed from the imperial yoke that had crushed them for a century.
⚔️ The Persian Invasion and the Brief Reawakening (614 CE)
When the Persian general Shahrbarāz marched into Palestine in 614 CE, Jerusalem fell amid scenes of destruction that horrified even later chroniclers. The Jews, long persecuted by the Roman state, joined the Persians in storming the Holy City, destroying churches and monasteries, and exacting vengeance upon the Christian population. The Samaritans, by contrast, appear only dimly in the records — but their absence from the ranks of the victors is telling.
The Samaritan Chronicle (El-Tolidoth, ed. Neubauer 45) preserves a haunting memory of this time:
“In the second year of the priesthood of Shimon, which was a year of jubilee, Xusro, King of Assyria, ordered the crucifixion of a large number of Samaritans.”
This brief entry captures the tragedy of a people crushed between empires. While the Persians tolerated — even favored — the Jews, they saw in the Samaritans neither political utility nor theological kinship. Their reputation as enemies of Judaism likely made them suspect, when the Persians stormed Jerusalem with Jewish auxiliaries, the Samaritans likely resisted — and paid for it in blood.
For the next fifteen years, the Samaritan chronicles and Roman historians fall silent. Their voice disappears from the imperial record — neither rebels nor subjects, but ghosts of a lost nation. Yet this silence speaks volumes: it reveals the total exhaustion of the Samaritan people after more than a century of repression. Those who survived withdrew into rural obscurity, clinging to their faith in secret assemblies on Gerizim, far from the eyes of bishops and soldiers alike.
During this interlude of Persian rule (614–628 CE), the Samaritans likely experienced a fragile reprieve. The Persians, unlike the Romans, had no interest in enforcing religious uniformity. They ruled pragmatically, allowing Christians, Jews, and others to administer their own affairs. For the Samaritans, this may have meant a short-lived restoration of dignity — the right to worship without fear, to repair altars, to rebuild their synagogues. But as the tide of war turned once more, this momentary calm dissolved into catastrophe.
🕊️ Heraclius’ Reconquest and the Last Pogroms (628–630 CE)
In 622 CE, Emperor Heraclius began his astonishing counteroffensive, marching from Constantinople through Armenia and Persia’s western frontiers. When his armies finally returned to Palestine in 629–630 CE, triumphant and bearing the True Cross, the emperor’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem marked not only the restoration of the city but the renewal of Roman vengeance.
Between these two events — Heraclius’ reconquest and the Arab conquest — the Samaritans endured their final Roman persecution. Contemporary and later sources describe mass executions, forced baptisms, and confiscations of land across Palestine. Heraclius, elated by victory and urged on by the clergy, sought to purge his empire of all “heretics and unbelievers.” Jews and Samaritans alike were rounded up and baptized at sword-point. The Samaritan chronicle’s line about “crucifixion of a large number of Samaritans” likely echoes these reprisals — a grim symmetry to the crucifixions they had suffered under Persian rule just years before.
The emperor’s royal edict on baptism, referred to in a later African decree of 632 CE, ordered that all remaining Samaritans along with the Jews be forcibly converted to Christianity. Though that edict survives only indirectly, it confirms that the policy Heraclius pursued in Palestine was soon extended across the empire. By the time he restored the Cross to Jerusalem in March 630 CE, the Samaritan nation — once numbering hundreds of thousands — had been extinguished as a social and religious body within imperial borders.
📜 Epilogue: Vanished from the Imperial Memory
By the time Heraclius kissed the True Cross in Jerusalem, the Samaritans had already vanished from imperial memory. Once formidable enough to challenge emperors, they were now erased from law and city alike — remembered only as “heretics” in imperial decrees and as “worse than Jews” in ecclesiastical polemic. Yet their own chronicles, though brief, preserved a haunting self-awareness: they saw their suffering not as extinction but as exile — a divine punishment endured with the stubborn hope that Gerizim’s light would never die.
III. The Samaritan Accord – Al-Balādhurī and the Pact Tradition 📜🤝
The Muslim conquest of Palestine (634–640 CE) unfolded with astonishing speed. Yet what mattered most for the survivors of a century of Roman persecution was not how the armies entered — but what they left behind. For the shattered Samaritan nation, nearly extinguished under Justinian and Heraclius, the coming of Islam represented neither liberation nor subjugation, but something subtler: inclusion within a new order governed by written covenants rather than creeds.
Al-Balādhurī, in his Futūḥ al-Buldān (“The Conquests of Lands”), provides some of the earliest Arabic testimony on this transformation. His reports preserve the memory of the ṣulḥ — peace treaties and protection agreements — that structured early Islamic governance in Syria and Palestine. Within these delicate parchments, the Samaritans found their final mode of survival: no longer rebels, no longer heretics, but dhimmīs, protected subjects bound by tax and loyalty.
⚔️ Conquest by Covenant: The Case of Northern Palestine
Al-Balādhurī relates through al-Haytham b. ʿAdī that the Muslim commander Shuraḥbīl b. Ḥasana took most of the Jordan district “by force apart from Tiberias, whose inhabitants made peace with him on condition that they handed over half their houses and churches.” The peace terms — amān li-anfusihim wa-amwālihim wa-awlādihim wa-kanā’isihim wa-buyūtihim — reveal the earliest Islamic framework for coexistence: the conquered were guaranteed life, property, family, and worship in exchange for tribute and submission.
Other cities — Bayṣān, Sūsiyā, ʿAfīq, Jarash, Bayt Ra’s, Qadas, and the Jawlān — surrendered “without fighting, on the same terms.” Even coastal towns such as ʿAkkā (Acre) and Ṣūr (Tyre) fell under negotiated peace, their inhabitants spared and their churches preserved.
In this landscape of treaties, violence was not replaced by mercy, but by a new political logic: conquest through contract. The sword opened the gates, but the pen secured the cities. It was within this model that the Samaritans re-entered history.
🕊️ The Samaritan Pact: From Enemy to Ally
Among the most striking accounts preserved by Al-Balādhurī comes from Hishām b. ʿAmmār, through al-Walīd b. Muslim and Ṣafwān b. ʿAmr:
“Abū ʿUbayda b. al-Jarrāḥ made a peace agreement with the Samaritans of Jordan and Palestine, who were spies and guides for the Muslims, stipulating that they should pay the jizya on their heads, but that they would retain their lands. When Yazīd b. Muʿāwiya came to power, he imposed the kharāj on their lands.”
This brief report is extraordinary. For the first time in centuries, the Samaritans are not subjects of persecution, but partners in conquest — “spies and guides” (ʿuyūn wa-dalāl) aiding the Muslim armies. Their local knowledge of the hills and routes of Palestine — the very terrain that had once sheltered their revolts — became their means of redemption.
Under Abū ʿUbayda’s administration, they were treated as a distinct community: obliged to pay the jizya (poll tax), yet allowed to retain their farmlands and live under Muslim protection. When Yazīd I (r. 680–683) later extended the kharāj (land tax) to Samaritan territories, it reflected bureaucratic integration rather than persecution. They had entered the fiscal system of the Caliphate as recognized dhimmīs, alongside Jews and Christians — a status unimaginable under the Roman crown that had sought to erase them altogether.
📜 Between Pact and Memory: The Tradition of the Ṣulḥ
The Samaritan “accord” described by Al-Balādhurī fits within a broader Islamic pattern of early treaty-making — the pact tradition that defined relations between the Muslims and the conquered peoples of the Levant.
Just as the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ had made peace with the Christians of Ayla, Adhruḥ, and Maqnā, guaranteeing them safety “so long as they are loyal and pay the tribute,” so too did his successors in Syria follow this covenantal template. These agreements (ṣulḥ or ʿahd) were not acts of tolerance in the modern sense, but instruments of pragmatic coexistence, binding both sides to reciprocal obligations of peace, tax, and loyalty.
The Samaritan pact was thus a regional extension of this Prophet-era model — an administrative recognition of an ancient community that had survived every empire that sought its end. If the Jews had found deliverance through prophecy, the Samaritans found theirs through parchment:
“If the Jews found deliverance in prophecy, the Samaritans found it in paper — the covenantal ink of survival.”
🔍 Al-Balādhurī’s Perspective: A Late Antique Continuum
Al-Balādhurī, writing in the ninth century, viewed these events not merely as conquest but as continuity — the transformation of empire from Roman to Islamic rule. His brief remark, “The Samaritans are Jews; there are two branches of them, the Dustān and the Lūshān,” reflects both the Arabs’ early ethnographic curiosity and the blurred perception of Samaritan identity among Muslim chroniclers.
What matters most, however, is that in the eyes of the new rulers, the Samaritans were no longer heretics but Ahl al-Kitāb, “People of the Book.” For the first time in centuries, their right to exist was acknowledged not in spite of their faith, but because of it.
Thus, from the ashes of Roman persecution emerged the Samaritan Accord — a covenant of survival written not by theologians but by administrators, carried not on crosses but on scrolls.
🌙 Epilogue: Survival in Ink
By the mid-seventh century, the Samaritans had transitioned from hunted rebels to legal subjects. Their faith, purged from imperial memory, was preserved instead in fiscal registers and covenantal records — in the bureaucracy of Islam, not the theology of Christendom.
The ancient nation that once defied Rome now found its peace in the ledger of Medina’s successors. Their survival, paradoxically, was not through rebellion but through compliance — through the very medium of empire that had once destroyed them.
IV. Between Legend and Memory – Christian & Muslim Interpretations 🕊️📚
“History’s victors wrote of faith and justice — but its survivors wrote of survival itself.”
📖 The Samaritan Chronicle – The Ishmaelites as Agents of Divine Order
The Continuatio of the Samaritan Chronicle, compiled in the early Abbasid period (8th–9th century CE), opens with a breathtaking statement:
“From the creation of Adam until the rule of Ishmael there were 5,047 years. Then the Ishmaelites — Muḥammad and all his army — went forth to wage war against the Romans; they conquered the land and defeated them as they fled.”
With this, the chronicler places Islam within sacred chronology, not as an interruption of history but as its fulfillment. The Arabs — descendants of Ishmael — are no longer marauders from the desert; they are agents in a divine plan to end Roman oppression.
The chronicler continues with vivid realism: as the Romans fled the advancing Muslims, many Samaritans along the coastal cities (Caesarea, Arsuf, Jaffa, Gaza, Lydda, and Ascalon) panicked and fled with them, expecting to return soon. Their possessions were entrusted to ʿAqbun ben Elʿazar, the Samaritan high priest in Bayt Šamā (near Nablus). But they never returned.
“They collected their possessions and deposited them with him… greater than anything known. Then they left for Rome and have not returned to this day.”
🏛️ The Fall of Caesarea – Between History and Myth
The chronicle’s description of the siege of Caesarea (634–640 CE) is strikingly detailed, and, in parts, aligns with al-Balādhurī’s Futūḥ al-Buldān:
“The Muslims set camp against it and besieged it for six years… until a hidden gate was left open and a dog came out. The Muslims followed it to the gate and entered the city. There was killing in the lower market for a whole day before the upper market knew.”
This is not mythic exaggeration but local memory — an eyewitness-level narrative passed through Samaritan communities. The chronicler adds that once the city fell:
“Whoever opposed them they killed, and whoever submitted to them was unharmed.”
The message is consistent with the Samaritan view of the conquests: the Muslims were conquerors, but just ones — a power that punished resistance but rewarded peace, unlike the Romans, who punished identity itself.
🌙 A Samaritan Theology of Islam
Perhaps the most extraordinary passage is the chronicler’s portrayal of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ himself:
“The Prophet of Islam did not cause anyone distress throughout his life.He would present his belief before the people, accepting anyone who came to him, yet not compelling one who did not.”
The chronicle then proceeds to describe the Rāshidūn Caliphs (Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān) and the Umayyad dynasty (Muʿāwiya to Hishām) with near-reverence:
“They ruled according to what he had enjoined upon them; they did no more or less, and did not harm anyone.”
The tone is almost nostalgic. For the Samaritans, these early Muslim rulers were guardians of stability, whose governance represented a divine correction after the brutalities of Justinian and Heraclius.
But then, the chronicle turns — its reverence shifts to disillusionment.
⚖️ The Abbasids and the Loss of Grace
When the chronicler reaches the rise of the ʿAbbāsids (750 CE), the tone darkens abruptly:
“At that time the kingdom of Banū al-ʿAbbās became strong and mighty.They doubled the tax upon the land and raised the poll tax, and made its burden heavier. They afflicted the people, levying money and collecting it assiduously.”
✨ Conclusion – Survival as Revelation
It is an inversion of imperial theology:
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Rome had claimed to be the empire of Christ, yet destroyed His own followers.
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Islam, the faith of Ishmael, had come with the sword — but tempered it with covenant.
V. Conclusion – Survival as a Theological Act ✡️☪️
“When the Caliph’s banners rose over Palestine, they did not end Samaritan history — they ensured it would be remembered.”
Between cross and crescent, between Rome’s ruins and Islam’s rise, the Samaritans did not seek victory — they sought survival. Their story, more than that of any other community in the Levant, is a chronicle not of triumph, but of endurance as faith.
⚖️ Where empires saw rebellion, the Samaritans saw revelation: to endure was to affirm divine sovereignty even when it appeared hidden.
🏺 Endurance Between Collapsing Worlds
Their survival itself became a living commentary on scripture: the unbroken line of the Benei Yisra’el, not through conquest, but through refusal to vanish.
“If the Jews found deliverance in prophecy, and the Christians in empire, the Samaritans found it in persistence.”
🕊️ The Accord as Covenant
Islam’s arrival was, therefore, not an ending but an opening:
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It silenced the empire that had called them devils and apostates.
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It replaced baptismal edicts with jizya, persecution with protection.
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It offered, in legal parchment, what Rome denied them in blood — the right to remain.
The ink of the Muslim ʿahd (covenant) may have been imperial, but for the Samaritans, it was sacred ink — the writing of survival.
✨ Survival as Theological Witness
📚 Works Cited
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