Many details of the Samaritan faith were identical with Karaite and Sadducean tenets, and the view taken of their error appears to have been, with one Jewish party, that, while originally orthodox, they had become mixed with the priests of the high places and corrupted the purity of the faith. It cannot be doubted that it was the Pharisees who were the deadly enemies of the Samaritans. This sect, originating in the “separation” under Ezra, at once excluded the Samaritans from participation in the building of the Temple. Sanballat was connected by marriage with the Sadducean high-priest--a fact which favours the view that he was an Israelite, not a foreigner--but against this affinity Ezra set his face, and the schism was thus rendered more complete. Gradually the Pharisees gained in power as the Sadducees declined; under the Hasmoneans they obtained at length the high-priesthood, and Hyrcanus succeeded in destroying the Samaritan Temple in 129 B.C. With the exception of a short interval the Pharisees were in power until 35 B.C., and the constant reprisals which for four hundred years had been indulged in on both sides, had left such indelible hatred between the two nations that nothing but entire submission and the abandonment of Gerizim would have induced even the Sadducees to receive into the congregation a people whose religion in other respects was almost indistinguishable from their own. The Samaritans are, indeed, in the peculiarities of their doctrine almost identical with the original Jewish party--the Karaite and Sadducean sects. They are even called Sadducees in Jewish writings, and their denial of the resurrection was, like that of the Sadducees, based on the declaration that nothing was to be found in the law of Moses on the subject. Again, their version of the law is closely similar to that of the Septuagint, which was a translation authorised by a Sadducean high-priest from a text differing from that finally established by the Pharisees. The animosity of Josephus--who was a Pharisee--the fierce denunciations of the Talmud, written by Pharisees, the destruction of the Gerizim Temple by Hyrcanus--also a Pharisee--all combine to indicate that the Jewish hatred had nothing to do with any foreign origin of the race, but rather was roused by the religious differences of a people whom they knew to be their kith and kin. It is often supposed that the Samaritans borrowed their religion from the Sadducees. It is surely a simpler explanation that they were a sect originally identical because originally Israelite. The Samaritan chronicles give a plain account of the origin of their people. At the time of the return from captivity a certain number of the congregation carried into Assyria came back to Palestine under Sanballat. Some thirty thousand, however, remained behind awaiting the Prophet whom they expected as a leader.