Samaritan Pentateuch

thumb|right|Detail of the Samaritan Pentateuch's [[Torah scroll|oldest scroll, written in Samaritan Hebrew (Nablus, )]]

The Samaritan Pentateuch, also called the Samaritan Torah (Samaritan Hebrew: , ), is the sacred scripture of the Samaritans. Written in the Samaritan script, it dates back to one of the ancient versions of the Torah that existed during the Second Temple period. It constitutes the entire biblical canon in Samaritanism.

Origin and canonical significance

Samaritan traditions

thumb|[[Samaritans|Samaritan and the Samaritan Torah|upright=1]]

thumb|right|Quotations from the Torah in [[Samaritan script. Niche from a Samaritan's house in Damascus, Syria (15th–16th century CE). Islamic Art Museum, Berlin.]]

Samaritans believe that God authored their Pentateuch and gave Moses the first copy along with the two tablets containing the Ten Commandments. They believe that they preserve this divinely composed text uncorrupted to the present day. Samaritans commonly refer to their Pentateuch as (, 'Truth').

Samaritans include only the Pentateuch in their biblical canon. They do not recognize divine authorship or inspiration in any other book in the Jewish Tanakh. A Samaritan Book of Joshua partly based upon the Tanakh's Book of Joshua exists, but Samaritans regard it as a non-canonical secular historical chronicle.

According to a view based on the biblical Book of Ezra (Ezra 4:11), the Samaritans are the people of Samaria who parted ways with the people of Judah (the Judahites) in the Persian period. The Samaritans believe that it was not them, but the Jews, who separated from the authentic stream of the Israelite tradition and law, around the time of Eli, in the 11th century BCE.

Scholarly perspective

Modern scholarship connects the formation of the Samaritan community with events which followed the Babylonian captivity. One view is that the Samaritans are the people of the Kingdom of Israel who separated from the Kingdom of Judah. Another view is that the event happened somewhere around 432 BCE, when Manasseh, the son-in-law of Sanballat the Horonite, founded a community in Samaria, as related in the Book of Nehemiah 13:28 and Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus. Josephus, however, dates this event and the building of the temple at Shechem to the time of Alexander the Great. Others believe that the real schism between the peoples did not take place until Hasmonean times, when the Temple on Mount Gerizim was destroyed in 128 BCE by John Hyrcanus.

The script of the Samaritan Pentateuch, its close connections at many points with the Septuagint, and its even closer agreements with the present Masoretic Text, all suggest a date about 122 BCE. Excavation work undertaken since 1982 by Yitzhak Magen has firmly dated the temple structures on Gerizim to the middle of the 5th century BCE, built by Sanballat the Horonite, a contemporary of Ezra and Nehemiah, who lived more than 100 years before the Sanballat mentioned by Josephus.

The adoption of the Pentateuch as the sacred text of the Samaritans before their final schism with the Judean Jewish community provides evidence that it was already widely accepted as a canonical authority in that region. More recently, manuscripts have been produced with full vocalization. The Samaritan Pentateuchal text is divided into 904 paragraphs. Divisions between sections of text are marked with various combinations of lines, dots or an asterisk; a dot is used to indicate the separation between words. As different printed editions of the Samaritan Pentateuch are based upon different sets of manuscripts, the precise number varies significantly from one edition to another. Only a minority of such differences are significant. Most are simply spelling differences, usually concerning Hebrew letters of similar appearance; the use of more matres lectionis (symbols indicating vowels) in the Samaritan Pentateuch, compared with the Masoretic; and the replacement of some verbal constructions with equivalent ones. A comparison between both versions shows a preference in the Samaritan version for the Hebrew preposition where the Masoretic text has . The Samaritan Pentateuch contains the following paragraph, which is absent from the Jewish version:

Another important difference is in Deuteronomy 27:4. According to the Jewish text, the Israelites were told to enter the Promised Land and build an altar on Mount Ebal, while the Samaritan text says that such altar, the first built by the Israelites in the Promised Land, should be built on Mount Gerizim. the Dead Sea scroll fragments bring "Gerizim" instead of "Ebal", indicating that the Samaritan version was likely the original reading.

Other differences between the Samaritan and the Masoretic (Jewish) texts include:

In Numbers 12:1, the Samaritan Pentateuch refers to Moses' wife as , which translates as 'the beautiful woman', while the Jewish version and the Jewish commentaries suggest that the word used was , meaning 'black woman' or 'Cushite woman'. For the Samaritans, therefore, Moses had only one wife, Zipporah, throughout his whole life, while Jewish sources generally understand that Moses had two wives, Zipporah and a second, unnamed Cushite woman.

The Samaritan Pentateuch uses less anthropomorphic language in descriptions of God, with intermediaries performing actions that the Jewish version attributes directly to God. Where the Jewish text describes Yahweh as a "man of war" (Exodus 15:3), the Samaritan has "hero of war", a phrase applied to spiritual beings.
In Numbers 23:4, the Samaritan text reads "The Angel of God found Balaam", in contrast with the Jewish text, which reads "And God met Balaam."

In Genesis 50:23, the Jewish text says that Joseph's grandchildren were born "upon the knees of Joseph", while the Samaritan text says they were born "in the days of Joseph".

In about 34 instances, the Samaritan Pentateuch has repetitions in one section of text that was also found in other parts of the Pentateuch. in both the Samaritan and the Septuagint reads:

In the Masoretic text, the passage reads:

Passages in the Latin Vulgate also show agreements with the Samaritan version, in contrast with the Masoretic version. For instance, in Genesis 22:2, the Samaritan Pentateuch places the binding and near-sacrifice of Isaac in the "land of Moreh" (Hebrew: ), while the Jewish Pentateuch has "land of Moriah" (Hebrew: ). The Samaritan "Moreh" describes the region around Shechem and modern-day Nablus, where Mount Gerizim is situated, while Jews claim the land is the same as Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. The Vulgate translates this phrase as ('in the land of vision') which implies that Jerome was familiar with the reading 'Moreh', a Hebrew word whose triliteral root suggests 'vision.'

Evaluations of its relevance for textual criticism

thumb|230px|right|Samaritan Torah scrolls preserved in the Samaritan synagogue on [[Mount Gerizim]]

The earliest recorded assessments of the Samaritan Pentateuch are found in rabbinic literature and the writings of the early Christian Church Fathers of the first millennium. The Talmud records Eleazar ben Simeon, a Rabbinic Jew, condemning the Samaritan scribes: "You have falsified your Pentateuch... and you have not profited aught by it."

Some early Christian writers found the Samaritan Pentateuch useful for textual criticism. Cyril of Alexandria, Procopius of Gaza, and others spoke of certain words missing from the Hebrew Text but present in the Samaritan Pentateuch. Eusebius writes the "Greek translation [of the Bible] also differs from the Hebrew, though not so much from the Samaritan" and notes that the Septuagint agrees with the Samaritan Pentateuch in the number of years elapsed from Noah's Flood to Abraham. Christian interest in the Samaritan Pentateuch fell into neglect during the Middle Ages.

The publication of a manuscript of the Samaritan Pentateuch in 17th-century Europe reawakened interest in the text and fueled a controversy between Protestants and Roman Catholics over which Old Testament textual traditions are authoritative. Roman Catholics showed a particular interest in the study of the Samaritan Pentateuch on account of the antiquity of the text and its frequent agreements with the Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate. Several Protestants replied with a defense of the Masoretic text's authority and argued that the Samaritan text is a late and unreliable derivation from the Masoretic.

The 18th-century Protestant scholar of Hebrew Benjamin Kennicott's analysis of the Samaritan Pentateuch stands as a notable exception to the general trend of early Protestant research on the text. He questioned the underlying assumption that the Masoretic text must be more authentic simply because it has been more widely accepted as the authoritative Hebrew version of the Pentateuch:<blockquote>We see then that as the evidence of one text destroys the evidence of the other and as there is in fact the authority of versions to oppose to the authority of versions no certain argument or rather no argument at all can be drawn from hence to fix the corruption on either side.</blockquote>Kennicott also states that the reading Gerizim may actually be the original reading, since that is the mountain for proclaiming blessings, and that it is very green and rich of vegetation (as opposed to Mount Ebal, which is barren and the mountain for proclaiming curses) amongst other arguments.

German scholar Wilhelm Gesenius published a study of the Samaritan Pentateuch in 1815 which biblical scholars widely embraced during the next century. He argued that the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch share a common source in a family of Hebrew manuscripts which he named the "Alexandrino-Samaritanus". In contrast to the proto-Masoretic "Judean" manuscripts carefully preserved and copied in Jerusalem, he regarded the Alexandrino-Samaritanus as having been carelessly handled by scribal copyists who popularized, simplified, and expanded the text. Gesenius concluded that the Samaritan text contained only four valid variants when compared to the Masoretic text.

In 1915, Paul Kahle published a paper which compared passages from the Samaritan text to Pentateuchal quotations in the New Testament and pseudepigraphal texts including the Book of Jubilees, the First Book of Enoch and the Assumption of Moses. He concluded that the Samaritan Pentateuch preserves "many genuine old readings and an ancient form of the Pentateuch." The Dead Sea Scroll texts have demonstrated that a Pentateuchal text type resembling the Samaritan Pentateuch goes back to the second century BCE and perhaps even earlier.

These discoveries have demonstrated that manuscripts bearing a "pre-Samaritan" text of at least some portions of the Pentateuch such as Exodus and Numbers circulated alongside other manuscripts with a "pre-Masoretic" text. One Dead Sea Scroll copy of the Book of Exodus, conventionally named 4QpaleoExod<sup>m</sup>, shows a particularly close relation to the Samaritan Pentateuch:<blockquote>The scroll shares all the major typological features with the SP, including all the major expansions of that tradition where it is extant (twelve), with the single exception of the new tenth commandment inserted in Exodus 20 from Deuteronomy 11 and 27 regarding the altar on Mount Gerizim.</blockquote>Frank Moore Cross has described the origin of the Samaritan Pentateuch within the context of his local texts hypothesis. He views the Samaritan Pentateuch as having emerged from a manuscript tradition local to the Land of Israel. The Hebrew texts that form the underlying basis for the Septuagint branched out from the Israelite tradition as Israelites emigrated to Egypt and took copies of the Pentateuch with them. Cross states that the Samaritan and the Septuagint share a nearer common ancestor than either does with the Masoretic, which he suggested developed from local texts used by the Babylonian Jewish community. His explanation accounts for the Samaritan and the Septuagint sharing variants not found in the Masoretic and their differences reflecting the period of their independent development as distinct local text traditions.

Derivative works

Translations

The Samaritan Targum, composed in the Samaritan variety of Western Aramaic, is the earliest translation of the Samaritan Pentateuch. Its creation was motivated by the same need to translate the Pentateuch into the Aramaic language spoken by the community which led to the creation of Jewish Targums such as Targum Onkelos. Samaritans have traditionally ascribed the Targum to Nathanael, a Samaritan priest who died . The Samaritan Targum has a complex textual tradition represented by manuscripts belonging to one of three fundamental text types exhibiting substantial divergences from one another. Affinities that the oldest of these textual traditions share with the Dead Sea Scrolls and Onkelos suggest that the Targum may originate from the same school which finalized the Samaritan Pentateuch itself. Others have placed the origin of the Targum around the beginning of the third century Extant manuscripts of the Targum are "extremely difficult to use" It may have been composed for the use of a Greek-speaking Samaritan community residing in Egypt.

By the 11th or 12th century, a new Arabic translation directly based upon the Samaritan Pentateuch had appeared in Nablus. Manuscripts containing this translation are notable for their bilingual or trilingual character; the Arabic text is accompanied by the original Samaritan Hebrew in a parallel column and sometimes the Aramaic text of the Samaritan Targum in a third. Later Arabic translations also appeared; one featured a further Samaritan revision of Saadia Gaon's translation to bring it into greater conformity with the Samaritan Pentateuch and others were based upon Arabic Pentateuchal translations used by Christians.

In April 2013, a complete English translation of the Samaritan Pentateuch comparing it to the Masoretic version was published.

Exegetical and liturgical texts

Several biblical commentaries and other theological texts based upon the Samaritan Pentateuch have been composed by members of the Samaritan community from the fourth century CE onwards. Samaritans also employ liturgical texts containing catenae extracted from their Pentateuch.

Manuscripts and printed editions

Abisha Scroll

Samaritans attach special importance to the Abisha Scroll used in the Samaritan synagogue of Nablus. It consists of a continuous length of parchment sewn together from the skins of rams that, according to a Samaritan tradition, were ritually sacrificed. The text is written in gold letters.

Samaritans claim it was penned by Abishua, great-grandson of Aaron according to 1 Chronicles 6:35, thirteen years after the entry into the Canaan under the leadership of Joshua, son of Nun. Contemporary scholars describe it as a composite of several fragmentary scrolls, each penned between the 12th and 14th centuries.

Other manuscripts of the Samaritan Pentateuch consist of vellum or cotton paper written upon with black ink. It was republished in Walton's Polyglot in 1657. Subsequently, Archbishop Ussher and others procured additional copies which were brought to Europe and later, America.

Modern publications

Until the latter half of the 20th century, critical editions of the Samaritan Pentateuch were largely based upon Codex B. The most notable of these is Der Hebräische Pentateuch der Samaritaner (The Hebrew Pentateuch of the Samaritans) compiled by August von Gall and published in 1918. An extensive critical apparatus is included listing variant readings found in previously published manuscripts of the Samaritan Pentateuch. His work is still regarded as being generally accurate despite the presence of some errors, but it neglects important manuscripts including the Abisha Scroll which had not yet been published at the time. Textual variants found in the Abisha scroll were published in 1959 by Federico Pérez Castro and between 1961 and 1965 by A. and R. Sadaqa in Jewish and Samaritan Versions of the Pentateuch – With Particular Stress on the Differences Between Both Texts.

The Arabic translation of the Samaritan Pentateuch has been edited and published at the beginning of the 21st century.

Several publications containing the text of the Samaritan Targum have appeared. In 1875, the German scholar Adolf Brüll published his (The Samaritan Targum to the Pentateuch). More recently a two volume set edited by Abraham Tal appeared featuring the first critical edition based upon all extant manuscripts containing the Targumic text.

References

Citations

Sources

Buttrick, George Arthur and board, eds. (1952). The Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 1. Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press.

Bibliography

Tsedaka, Benyamim, and Sharon Sullivan, eds. The Israelite Samaritan Version of the Torah: First English Translation Compared with the Masoretic Version. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2013.
Shoulson, Mark E, compiler 2008. The Torah: Jewish and Samaritan versions compared (Hebrew). Evertype. / .
Schorch, Stefan (June 3, 2004). Die Vokale des Gesetzes: Die samaritanische Lesetradition als Textzeugin der Tora (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft) (German ed., Walter de Gruyter). /
A.C. Hwiid, Specimen ineditae versionis Arabico-Samaritanae, Pentateuchi e codice manuscripto Bibliothecae Barberinae (Rome, 1780).
A.S. Halkin, “The Scholia to Numbers and Deuteronomy in the Samaritan Arabic Pentateuch,” Jewish Quarterly Review 34 n.s. (1943–44): 41–59.
T.G.J. Juynboll, “Commentatio de versione Arabico-Samaritana, et de scholiis, quae codicibus Parisiensibus n. 2 et 4 adscripta sunt,” Orientalia 2 (1846), pp. 113–157.

External links

Jewish Encyclopedia: Samaritans: Samaritan Version of the Pentateuch
Samaritan Pentateuch Add.1846 – digitised version of the earliest complete manuscript of the Samaritan Pentateuch on Cambridge Digital Library