Samaritan Pentateuch

Samaritans hold that they are the descendants of the northern tribes of Israel who never left the land, and that their Torah is the unaltered original; Jewish tradition told the story the other way. The text itself records the divergence. Where the Masoretic text of Deuteronomy speaks repeatedly of the place the Lord will choose, leaving Jerusalem to be identified later, the Samaritan text reads the place the Lord has chosen, and its version of the commandments given at Sinai includes an additional commandment to build the altar on Mount Gerizim, the mountain above Shechem where the community has worshipped continuously and where its Passover sacrifice is offered to this day.

Beyond these deliberate anchors, the recension smooths and harmonises: parallel passages are aligned, grammatical irregularities corrected, anthropomorphic phrases occasionally softened, and narrative gaps filled from sister passages, editorial habits that scholars use to characterise the text type. About a third of its variants from the Masoretic text agree with the Septuagint, and several Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit the same expansionist text type, which demonstrated that the Samaritan recension was not a late sectarian invention but one branch of a textual plurality that existed before the turn of the common era, with only the Gerizim readings as the community's specific layer.

The Samaritan Pentateuch is written in the Samaritan script, a continuation of the palaeo-Hebrew alphabet in which the earliest Israelite texts were written, and which the community retained as a mark of continuity after Jews adopted the Aramaic square script; reading and copying it remains a priestly craft. The community's most venerated copy is the Abisha Scroll, kept in the synagogue at Nablus and traditionally ascribed to Abisha, great-grandson of Aaron, in the thirteenth year after the entry into Canaan; examinations indicate a medieval composite, its oldest portions dated by scholars to around the twelfth to fourteenth centuries CE, but its standing in the community is not a matter of carbon dates.

European scholarship met the text in 1616, when Pietro della Valle acquired a manuscript in Damascus; its publication in the Paris and London Polyglots ignited a confessional argument, Catholic scholars pressing its agreements with the Septuagint against the Masoretic text on which Protestant translations rested. The debate was disciplined by Wilhelm Gesenius in 1815, whose classification of the variants as largely secondary held the field for a century and a half, until the Qumran discoveries restored the recension's dignity as an early text type. Critical editions and a scholarly English translation now serve a community of under a thousand souls at Nablus and Holon, whose reading tradition preserves a distinct Hebrew pronunciation of independent value to linguists.