SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH, THE. The Samaritan Pentateuch is preserved in the early type of rounded Heb. letters (formerly called Phoen.) which largely ceased to be used by the Jews after they adopted the square Aram. characters at the time of exile. In the course of copying and recopying the forms of some of these letters have so changed that the Samaritan writing differs in a number of regards from the earlier form from which it is so clearly descended.
The first copy of the Samaritan Pentateuch to reach Europe came early in the 17th cent. when Pietro della Valle purchased a copy of it, and also a copy of an Aram. tr. of it, from a Samaritan whom he met in Damascus. Since that time dozens of other copies have reached Europe. Early in the 19th cent., H. F. W. Gesenius, the noted Hebraist, examined the Samaritan text very closely and declared that it was so full of minor errors as to be of no use for textual study of the Bible. In more recent years certain other scholars have gone to the opposite extreme, declaring that it represents a vulgar text widely circulated among the Jews as late as the 1st cent. b.c.
There has been considerable discussion as to the time when the Pentateuch came into the hands of the Samaritans. There is no reason why copies of the Torah might not have been available in northern Israel when the Assyrians led a great many of its people into exile in 721 b.c. There is also no reason why the priest, whom the king of Assyria sent at a slightly later date to teach the law of the God of the land to those whom he had transported to this area from other regions (2 Kings 17:27), might not have brought with him a copy of the Pentateuch. In either case the book would prob. not have been an exact copy of the official Torah that was preserved in the Temple in Jersualem (cf. Deut 17:18; 31:25, 26), but one of the copies belonging to private individuals or groups, or one that had been copied and recopied in one of the local centers.
In spite of these facts, so clearly attested in the Bible, it often has been asserted that the Samaritans had no copy of the law until the time when Nehemiah drove away from the Temple a grandson of the high priest who had married a daughter of the Samaritan Sanballat (Neh 13:28). There is, however, no scriptural statement that this renegade took a copy of the Torah from Jerusalem with him.
Some scholars insist that the peculiarities of the Samaritan Pentateuch point to an early Jewish text tradition distinct from that of the MT, and that most of its similarities to the MT result from its having been influenced by it during the centuries between 300 b.c. and a.d. 100. However, there is no evidence of a close enough relationship between the Samaritans and the Jews during this period to suggest that such an alteration of the Samaritan Pentateuch might have occurred at this time. In fact, all the evidence that exists points in the opposite direction. There is a long history of opposition between the people at Samaria and those whose worship centered in Jerusalem. Hard feelings from the time of the divided kingdom were prob. never entirely healed. When the Jews returned from exile the Samaritans offered to help in building the Temple, but Zerubbabel and Jeshua vigorously repulsed them (Ezra 4:3, 10, 17). At about 300 b.c., Ben Sira closed his book of Ecclesiasticus with sharp words of criticism for “the foolish men of Shechem.” In Maccabean times Jewish tradition represents the Samaritans as joining with the Seleucid oppressors. A few years later John Hyrcanus destroyed the Samaritan temple on Mt. Gerizim. In the time of Christ it was declared that the Jews and the Samaritans have no dealings with one another (John 4:9).
The great similarity between the Samaritan Pentateuch and the MT, despite the long period of independent development, argues for the general accuracy of the Torah. During the long time when the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were separate there would have been abundant opportunity for small textual changes in popular MSS that were not copied with the extreme care devoted to the official copies at Jerusalem. The people of northern Israel, cut off from access to Jerusalem, would be likely to write explanatory glosses on the margins of their private copies of the law. These glosses largely included phrases taken from other parts of the Torah. On a number of occasions where the Samaritan Pentateuch reports that Moses said or did something, it prefaces this statement by an explicit declaration that it was a divine command that he should do so. When the Lord orders Moses to deliver a message, and the MT merely says that he did so, the Samaritan Pentateuch is apt to repeat in detail the words of the message. Sometimes, but not usually, it agrees with the LXX. In a few places there is evidence of intentional alteration for doctrinal reasons, such as the substitution of Mt. Gerizim for Mt. Ebal as the place where the law was to be written on the stones of the altar (Deut 27:4), but these are comparatively few.
The orthography of the Samaritan Pentateuch is much fuller than that of the Pentateuch in the MT. This is most readily explained as a natural development in styles of spelling. The Masoretes preserved the Pentateuch, as far as possible, as it had originally been written. The Books of Chronicles, written at a later time, use the orthography of the later period. In the course of copying, points of orthography in the Samaritan Pentateuch were gradually changed in line with later developments.
In the fourth cave at Qumran there have been found many fragments of an early copy of Exodus (4QExa), written in the palaeo-Heb. script, an earlier form of the type of writing used in the present copies of the Samaritan Pentateuch. These fragments seem to possess the same text peculiarities as the Samaritan Pentateuch. It was prob. one of the unofficial texts that were circulated among private individuals and groups in Pal. during the 1st cent. b.c.
Bibliography H. F. W. Gesenius, De pentateuchi samaritani (1815); A. von Gall, Der Hebräische Pentateuch der Samaritaner (1914-1918, reprinted 1966); P. W. Skehan, “Exodus in the Samaritan Recension from Qumrân,” JBL, 74 (1955), 182-187; J. D. Purvis, The Samaritan Pentateuch and the Origin of the Samaritan Sect (1968).