Prior to 722 BCE there was a kingdom of Israel but then it ceased to exist and its name vanished from the record for centuries.
I too grew tired of this thread. In dealing with you I come face to face with egoism, unbridled. As noted you have constant double standards. With Christianity the "mythicist" Christian tradition "died out." But it must have been original! Why? Because you like. Neill is the measure of all things.
You're more than happy to waste everyone's time inventing a certain kind of non-existent "mythicism" to satisfy your antipathy toward one religion. But in the Samaritans, because you have fetish with Judaism being invented in the latest possible date imaginable and seeing that the Samaritans figure prominently in Konrad Schmid's "defense" of a Pentateuch-based religion in the Persian period you turn the tables around completely. Now everything comes down to "documentation." There's place called "Samaria" that dates back to the Persian period. It's on the land formerly known as "Israel." And I go on and on and then you play dumb. And so on and so on.
Either (a) Christian mythicism needs to be "documented" or have ancient evidence for its existence or (b) Samaritans without documentation can be granted to have some relationship with the kingdom of Israel. This is so fucking stupid.
You know in America there is a whole kind of people called "undocumented workers." They are in the country. They have no "papers." But they exist, they work. The point is that not everything is documented.
1. There was a cult of Yahweh at Shechem that is very old.
2. There are people who claim the be the descendants of those people who are called "guardians" of the Yahwehist tradition.
Why is this doubted when there are people called "Jews" who have more of a genetic link to Italians for the most part than any thing Middle Eastern?
I accept that Jews are "descendants of Judah" and Samaritans are "descendants of Israel." What's the problem? What's the massive deal with this? I accept that a young man who believes he's a woman is whatever gender he wants to be? Who among us is the final arbiter of personal identity?
Let the Jews be sons of Judah. Let the Samaritans be sons of Israel. Everyone happy?