The Samaritan Pentateuch is the text of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible, also called the Torah or Law) that is used by the Samaritans. It is written in the Samaritan alphabet, which is known by scholars to be the most ancient form of Hebrew known to mankind.
Textual critics compare the Samaritan Pentateuch with other versions of the Pentateuch in order to determine the text of the original Pentateuch and to trace the development of text-families. Scrolls among the Dead Sea scrolls have been identified as proto-Samaritan Pentateuch text-type.[1]
The Samaritans
Samaritans are a group of Israelites who descended from the northern kingdom of Israel. There was a political division between the southern kingdom of Judea and northern kingdom of Israel, which took place during David and Solomon kingdom. The northern kingdom, the capital of which was Samaria, never joined the kingdom of Solomon David. Eventually the northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians, and the southern by the Babylonians. Today's Samaritans are the remnants of those who were never exiled from the land during the Assyrian exile, and continuously practiced the ancient religion of Moses and passed it down even in the most difficult oppressed times. They refused to accept the oral law, namely the talmud that Jews practiced after their return from the Babylonian exile. They use their own oral law, which they have preserved by practicing from one generation to the next, and which they believe is the original practices that Moses taught the children of Jacob (Israel). There have been numerous wars between Jews and Samaritans in history, mostly on the basis of religion and politics. The Samaritan practices are based on the five books of Moses, namely the Torah. They have a slightly different version of the Torah (Samaritan Pentateuch) than that accepted by the Jews and Christians (Massoretic Text). There are minor differences such as the ages of different people mentioned in bibliography, and major differences such as a commandment to be monogomous in the Samaritan Torah as opposed to their Jewish counterpart (Lev. 18:18).
There is a special importance in the Abishua Scroll, which is used in the Samaritan Synagogue of Nablus, and was allegedly penned by Abisha, great-grandson of Aaron, the brother of Moses thirteen years after the entry into the land of Israel by the leadership of Joshua son of Nun.
In 1645 a copy of the Samaritan Pentateuch was brought by a traveler to the East, and published in the Paris Polyglot by Jean Morin, a Jesuit-convert from Calvinism to Catholicism, who believed that the Septuagint and the Samaritan Texts were superior to the Hebrew Masoretic text. The first translation to English in history of the Samaritan Torah will be published by late 2008 by Benyamim Tsedaka, an active member of the Samaritan community. For more information about the Samaritans, visit the Wikipedia page for Samaritans.
Differences with the Masoretic Text
The form of the letters in the manuscript copies of the Samaritan Pentateuch, called the Samaritan alphabet, is different from that of the Hebrew copies, and is probably the same as that which was in general use before the Babylonian captivity. There are other peculiarities in the writing.
There are important differences between the Hebrew and the Samaritan copies of the Pentateuch in the readings of many sentences. In about two thousand out of the six thousand instances in which the Samaritan and the Jewish texts (Masoretic text) differ, the Septuagint (LXX) agrees with the former. For example, Exodus 12:40 in the Samaritan and the LXX reads, "Now the sojourning of the children of Israel and of their fathers which they had dwelt in the land of Canaan and in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years." In the Masoretic text, however, the same passage reads, "Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years."
The Samaritan version of the Ten Commandments commands to build the altar on Mt. Gerizim, which would be the site at which all sacrifices should be offered. [2]
Scholarly evaluation of the Samaritan Pentateuch has changed due to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some manuscripts of which display a text that corresponds closely to that of the Samaritan Pentateuch. This shows that, apart from the clearly Samaritan references to the worship of God on Mt. Gerizim, the distinction at that date between the Samaritan and non-Samaritan versions was not as clear-cut as previously thought.
See also
References
- ^ The Canon Debate, McDonald & Sanders editors, 2002, chapter 6: Questions of Canon through the Dead Sea Scrolls by James C. VanderKam, page 94, citing private communication with Emanuel Tov on biblical manuscripts: Qumran scribe type c.25%, proto-Masoretic Text c. 40%, pre-Samaritan texts c.5%, texts close to the Hebrew model for the Septuagint c.5% and nonaligned c.25%.
- ^ Overview of the Differences Between the Jewish and Samaritan Versions of the Pentateuch
External links
This article incorporates text from the public domain Easton's Bible Dictionary, originally published in 1897.
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