The Parable of the Good Samaritan
AND likewise a Levite,* when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.
But a certain Samaritan,* as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him,* he had compassion on him, And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.
Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?
And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.
* The term Levite suggests a member of the tribe of Levi who was not descended from Aaron. Like priests, they fulfilled various roles in the Temple such as providing music, and also acted as teachers and magistrates. In the priest and the Levite, Jesus chooses for his story two officials who were obliged by the Law of Moses to help their Jewish neighbour, but in their bureaucratic anxiety over the consequences ‘omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith’ Matthew 23:23.
* The Samaritans, a people living in Samaria to the north of Jerusalem and Judaea, claimed to be a remnant of the Northern Kingdom of the Israelites that was annexed by the Assyrians in the 8th century BC. They maintained their own Temple on Mt Gerizim near Neopolis (Nablus in modern Israel), and kept their own Scriptures, regarding the traditions of the Jews of Jerusalem and Judaea as related but less ancient. At the time when Jesus told his parable, there was much bad feeling between these two forms of the Hebrew faith, and the Roman authorities did not relish the frequent demands to judge between them.
* The Samaritans knew as well as any Jewish priest what a dead body meant in Israelite law, and this potential ‘dead body’ was an enemy’s too. When Jesus was a young boy, his near-contemporary Flavius Josephus tells us, some Samaritans crept into the Temple precincts in Jerusalem by night and “threw about the dead men’s bodies in the cloisters,” seriously disrupting the preparations for Passover. The Jewish authorities henceforth excluded Samaritans from the Temple, which they had not done before. See Josephus Antiquities of the Jews XVIII.2.ii.