the Jews and the Samaritans.=--About the time of
Nehemiah there was also started a bitter feud between the Jews and the
Samaritans. There had always been a good deal of jealousy between the
people of Judah in the South, and the Hebrews of the central and
northern parts of Canaan. Samaria was the capital of the northern
kingdom, which had split off from the kingdom of David and Solomon.
This old jealousy flamed up again after Nehemiah. The Samaritans had
intermarried with their heathen neighbors, perhaps more than the Jews
in Judaea. So the Jews claimed that the Samaritans had no right to call
themselves true Hebrews.

The Samaritans, on the other hand, claimed that they were true
children of Abraham, and they built a temple of their own on Mount
Gerizim as a rival to the temple of Jerusalem. This jealousy and hate
grew more and more bitter until, in the time of Jesus, the Jews looked
upon Samaritans with even more contempt than any Gentiles.

=The growing prejudice against the Jews among other peoples.=--Those
who call names generally hear themselves taunted and ridiculed in
turn. The very fact that the Jews would not work on the Sabbath marked
them as peculiar and helped to make them unpopular. Their laws about
foods, clean and unclean, were also different from those of other
nations. For example, they would not eat pork. Moreover, as time went
on many of the Jews in Babylon and in other foreign lands grew
prosperous. They were industrious and they had brains and a special
gift for trade. Before long they had money to lend, and they often
demanded unjust rates of interest. This too made them unpopular. So
the more proudly and contemptuously they held aloof from Babylonians,
Persians, Egyptians, and all other foreigners the more frequently they
heard themselves called "Jewish dogs" and other hard names.

THE COMING OF THE GREEKS

This racial pride on the part of the Jews was still more increased by
the coming of another unusually proud people, the Greeks. In the year
B.C. 333, Alexander the Great defeated the army of the king of Persia
and soon extended his rule over all western Asia, including Judaea.
Very soon Greeks were everywhere to be seen, in all the cities of
Palestine. In order to protect the country from the desert robbers
who, as we have seen, had been making their raids through all the
centuries, a chain of Greek cities was built to the east of the Jordan
and thousands of Greek settlers were brought th