Who were the Samaritans? The Samaritans came about over seven centuries before, 722BC. Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel had fallen to conquest, and the people had been relocated in vast numbers, pretty well most of them, with the exception of the destitute, the failures of society, and the inadequate. In had come Babylonians to take their place, but a strange thing had happened. A new kind of religion had emerged in what was formerly Israel, leaving only Judah, the southern kingdom. This new kind of religion was a fusion, a mixture of Judaism and heathenism, Babylonian paganism: it was a horrible mixture of the two. The people of Samaria at the time of Christ believed in the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, but nothing else. We can imagine the interpretation of those books was far from being right and proper. They also had their own temple, with a pagan god on Mount Gerizim, which could probably be seen from the well here. That was the religion of this woman: a bit of Judaism mixed with what was mainly Babylonian paganism.