Samaria (Shomron), the City
שֹׁמְרוֹן
Where was biblical Samaria? At Sebastia, Samaria National Park, northwest of Nablus, about 45 km northeast of Tel Aviv. I mark it certain.
King Omri bought this bare hill from a man named Shemer for two talents of silver. He built the capital of Israel on it and named it Shomron, after the hill's old owner.
By Aaron Shaffier, licensed Israel tour guide and mapmaker · About the mapmaker
- Site today
- Sebastia, Samaria National Park, northwest of Nablus
- How sure
- Certain The name, the sources and the finds all agree.
- Other names
- Sebaste, Sebastia, Sebastiya
- Location
- 32.2782° N, 35.1986° E (Google Maps)
How we know where it was
The site has never been in doubt. Herod rebuilt the city and called it Sebaste, in honor of Augustus. The Arab village on the hill still carries that name as Sebastia. The name passed from Herod's city to the village and never let go.
The ground backs up the text. The Bible says Omri built on an empty hill. Excavators found a royal acropolis built on a virgin hilltop in the 9th century BCE, with no city beneath it. They uncovered a large palace of Omri's dynasty. They found over 100 Hebrew ostraca, potsherds used as notepaper, recording wine and oil delivered to the royal court. And they found hundreds of carved ivory plaques.
Those ivories bring the prophets to life. The Book of Kings remembers Ahab's "ivory house." Amos condemned the rich who lay "on beds of ivory," and he called the women of the capital "cows of Bashan on the mountain of Shomron," who crushed the poor. The furniture he was shouting about has come out of the ground.
The city on the hill was hard to take. Ben-hadad of Aram besieged it with thirty-two kings. In another Aramean siege the famine was so bad that a donkey's head sold for eighty pieces of silver. In the end Assyria besieged Shomron for three years. In 722 BCE it fell, and the Ten Tribes were carried into exile.
Visiting today
Samaria (Sebastia) National Park has the foundations of the Israelite palace, Hellenistic towers, Herod's Temple of Augustus, a Roman theater and a colonnaded street. Access depends on the security situation.
Read it in the Bible
Verse numbers follow the Hebrew Bible. In a handful of chapters English Bibles count one verse off.
See Shomron on the interactive map →
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Get the print + free ebookNearby places
- Mount Ebal (Eival) 9 km southeast
- Shechem 11 km southeast
- Mount Gerizim 11 km southeast
- Tirzah 13 km east
- Dothan 15 km north
- Timnath Serah 18 km south