Dalat ࠃ

Dalat is the fourth letter of the Samaritan alphabet and carries the numeral value four. It writes a plain d. The name is the inherited Northwest Semitic one behind Hebrew dalet, and the gloss usually given for it, a door, is a modern reconstruction argued from the word rather than a meaning anyone recorded at the time the script was in use.

The letter matters out of proportion to its sound because of what happens when scribes confuse it. A great many textual variants in ancient manuscripts are explained by a copyist reading one letter as another that looked like it, and which letters are confusable depends entirely on the script the copy was made in. Letters that converge in one hand stay distinct in another. That means the Samaritan and the square Hebrew traditions do not make the same mistakes: a variant that is easy to account for as a slip of the pen in one script may need a different explanation in the other, and comparing the two is one of the standard tools for working out how a reading arose.

Outside the Semitic alphabets the sign became Greek delta and Latin D, keeping its sound and its fourth place in each of them. The triangular Greek form and the Samaritan form look nothing alike, but they descend from the same Phoenician sign, and the divergence measures the centuries rather than any change of purpose.

The character is encoded at U+0803.

The Samaritan Pentateuch is the Torah as the Samaritan community has it, written in this alphabet, and it differs from the Masoretic text used in Judaism in a very large number of places. Most of the differences are small: spelling, the presence or absence of a vowel letter, a singular against a plural, a smoothed grammatical form. A smaller number are substantial, and a handful bear directly on what divides the two communities.

The clearest of those concerns the mountain. The Samaritan Pentateuch names Mount Gerizim as the place God chose, where the Masoretic text does not, and the Samaritan version of the commandments carries an instruction to build an altar there. Elsewhere the Samaritan text expands a passage by bringing in wording from a parallel passage in another book, which produces a fuller and more internally consistent Torah.

Two facts about that pattern belong together. The differences are catalogued, published and open to anyone who wants to check them, so this is not a matter of rumour. And a substantial share of the Samaritan readings agree with the Greek Septuagint against the Masoretic text, while some agree with manuscripts found at Qumran, which means the Samaritan text is not simply a later alteration of the received Jewish one but a witness to how the Torah was circulating before either tradition settled.

Which text stands closer to an original is a live scholarly question and a matter of religious conviction for two communities. The atlas records the differences and does not adjudicate them.