For nearly a century, the heartland of Palestine erupted in fire. Between 484 and 573 CE, the Samaritan people ? the descendants of ancient Israel who had worshipped on Mount Gerizim since before the Jerusalem Temple was built ? launched five successive revolts against the Byzantine Empire's systematic campaign to destroy them. They fought for their sacred mountain, occupied by an imperial garrison church. They fought against legislation that stripped them of inheritance rights, civic standing, and the freedom to worship. They fought, most spectacularly, under the messianic king Julianus ben Sabar, whose 529 CE uprising overran two provinces, burned the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, and brought the empire to the edge of catastrophe before being crushed by a Ghassanid Arab army at Justinian's command.

The Broken Mountain reconstructs the full arc of this forgotten conflict ? the five revolts, the theology of the mountain at their centre, the Justinianic legislation that provoked them, and the demographic catastrophe that ended them. It examines the archaeology of the emptied highland villages, the imperial church built over the Samaritan sacred precinct, the liturgical poetry through which a decimated community refused to disappear. And it follows the community from the Islamic conquest to the approximately 900 Samaritans alive today, still ascending Gerizim each spring for the Passover sacrifice.

The history of the Samaritan revolts is the history of what happens when empire decides a people must cease to exist.