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The Cuthites is a name describing a people said by the Hebrew Bible and by the 1st-century historian Josephus to be living in Samaria around 500 BCE. 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 BCE. 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 BCE Assyrian settlers, who assimilated into the existing Yahwist population. The "Cuthites", therefore, were not a foreign population in Israel but instead "a branch of Yahwism Israel in the same sense as the Jews."
The Cuthites are mentioned in Josephus, Antiquities Book 11, Chapter 4, as "Cutheans", naming them as those who were brought from Media and Persia and "planted" in Samaria by the king of Assyria after he had conquered the Ten Tribes of Israel.
Cuth (or Cuthah) is mentioned in the in reference to the gods or idols made and worshiped by different tribes, which took place in the former holy places of exiled Israelites (King James Bible trans.): "And the men of Babylon made Succothbenoth, and the men of Cuth made Nergal, and the men of Hamath made Ashima."
There is a minor tractate of the Talmud called Kutim that deals with the laws around forbidden and permitted interactions with Samaritans.
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