Meaning
Someone who helps a stranger in distress, at cost or risk to themselves, with no expectation of reward - the passer-by who stops. The phrase carries the parable's original sting faintly: the helper is the person you would least expect to stop. Warmly approving; often shortened to Samaritan, and capitalized in legal contexts (Good Samaritan statutes). Remember the story's point was that the despised outsider was the neighbour. Regional use: General English; Biblical origin.
Origin
Luke 10:25-37 supplies the story. A traveller on the notoriously dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho - the Way of Blood, as it was called - is stripped and left half dead. A priest and a Levite pass by on the other side; a Samaritan stops, binds the wounds with oil and wine, pays the innkeeper two denarii, and promises more on his return. The edge is historical: Jewish-Samaritan hostility was such that the lawyer cannot even name the helper, answering only 'the one who showed mercy'. Origen's allegorical reading made the Samaritan Christ and was virtually universal in early Christianity; Calvin dismissed it as too absurd to deserve refutation, insisting the point was an enemy's compassion and the mutual obligation of all people. The modern common noun is settled: Wiktionary cites Ernest Bramah's 'the good Samaritan who had come to his aid' from 1934 and Henry Luce's 1941 LIFE essay casting America as the Good Samaritan, and the name now attaches to laws protecting helpers from liability, to the Samaritans charity, and to Lord Atkin's neighbour principle in the landmark 1932 case Donoghue v Stevenson.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a good Samaritan
- Good Samaritan law
- good Samaritans
Usage Examples
- A good Samaritan towed the stranded climbers' car twenty miles and refused any payment.
- Good Samaritan laws exist so that a passer-by who breaks a rib performing CPR is not later sued for it.
- The good Samaritan who returned the lost wallet had walked six blocks in the rain to do it.