Some of the Samaritans who had stayed behind bought their lives by revealing the whereabouts of the nobles who had murdered Andromachus and leading Alexander into the mountains after their countrymen. When he came to their capital city, he destroyed it and established a Macedonian colony at the site. Alexander set out immediately into the hills of Samaria with his best troops to track down and punish those who would dare to kill his appointed governor.

The aristocrats may have calculated that Alexander would be in too much of a hurry to meet Darius in Mesopotamia to bother with a detour into their highlands to punish the offenders. It may be that with the change in regime, the local aristocracy had decided this was a propitious time to declare its independence. Now he received word that the normally equable Samaritans had seized Andromachus, tied him to a stake, and set him ablaze.

The previous year the king had appointed Andromachus, who had been in charge of his fleet during the siege of Tyre, as governor of the small province of Samaria.

Thus as they stumbled through the wilderness, they must have wondered why they had burned alive the new satrap appointed by Alexander of Macedonia.Īlexander heard the disturbing news while he was on the march from Egypt back to Phoenicia. They prided themselves on being pious and honest businessmen, not radicals prone to making trouble with the parade of ruling Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian powers that passed through their land over the centuries. They considered nearby Mount Gerizim as the center of their faith instead of Jerusalem. Whereas the Jews might enjoy a good meal and short walk on the Sabbath, the Samaritans forbade warm food and stayed close to home. And even the Jews had to admit that those religious laws the Samaritans kept, they kept scrupulously. The Samaritans, on the other hand, considered themselves the true keepers of the ancient faith of Israel, although they accepted only the first five books of the Bible as a guide for their lives. They were Samaritans, a group regarded by their Jewish neighbors as semi-pagans who had strayed from the true faith ever since they had mixed with foreigner settlers in the land three hundred years earlier. The refugees carried with them precious jewelry, silver coins, seal rings, fine linens, and legal documents on papyrus proving their privileged status as the honored aristocracy of their people. Two hundred desperate men, women, and children made their way through the desert canyons west of the Jordan River clutching their few belongings as they fled deep into the mountains.

Alexander the great by philip freeman