Samaritanism Prayer and Invocation Tradition

This entry records that Samaritanism, an ancient Israelite religious tradition closely related to but distinct from Judaism, with its own version of the Torah, its own priesthood tracing claimed descent from Aaron, and Mount Gerizim rather than Jerusalem as its central holy site, maintains its own distinctive liturgy and prayer tradition performed in Samaritan Hebrew and Aramaic, without reproducing that specific liturgical content here.

The Samaritan community today numbers only a few hundred people, divided between communities in Holon, Israel and near Mount Gerizim in the Nablus area of the West Bank, making it one of the smallest continuously practicing religious communities in the world, with its priesthood and religious leadership responsible for maintaining a tradition of prayer, festival observance and Torah reading that has continued with its own distinct character for well over two thousand years despite the community's extremely small size. Samaritan religious identity is inherited patrilineally and the community has historically required marriage within the group, a practice that combined with its very small population size has led to documented concerns about genetic health within the community, prompting some recent and closely studied efforts to responsibly widen the marriage pool.

Samaritan and Jewish tradition share the Torah as foundational scripture, though the Samaritan Pentateuch differs from the Jewish Masoretic text in several thousand specific readings, some minor and some theologically significant, including passages the Samaritan version reads as specifically supporting Mount Gerizim rather than Jerusalem as the divinely chosen site of worship, a textual and theological divergence going back to antiquity that scholars of both traditions continue to study comparatively.

Because the Samaritan community is so small and its religious leadership so directly and personally responsible for maintaining its continuously practiced liturgical tradition, and because that leadership has not published its specific liturgical texts for general outside use in the way some larger religious institutions have, this entry limits itself to recording Samaritanism's general character and its documented historical and textual relationship to Judaism, rather than attempting to describe or summarize the community's specific prayers and liturgical practice in detail. Samaritans continue to perform an annual Passover sacrifice on Mount Gerizim according to their own biblical calendar and ritual practice, a public and still actively observed ceremony that differs significantly in form from how Passover is marked within any stream of contemporary Judaism.