Cuthites

The Cuthites were a people said by the Hebrew Bible and by the 1st-century historian Josephus to be living in Samaria around 500 BC. The name comes from the Assyrian city of Kutha in line with the claim that the Samaritans were descendants of settlers placed in Israel by the Neo-Assyrian Empire after the destruction of the northern Kingdom of Israel around 720 BC. The label "Cuthites" was a pejorative name for Samaritans in later rabbinic literature. The modern scholarly view is that Yahweh-worshippers in the north of Ancient Israel outnumbered post-722 BC Assyrian settlers, who assimilated into the existing Yahwist population. The "Cuthites", therefore, were not a foreign population in Israel but instead "a branch of Yahwistic Israel in the same sense as the Jews."