21 Facts About Samaritan Pentateuch

Samaritans believe that God authored their Pentateuch and gave Moses the first copy along with the two tablets containing the Ten Commandments.

Manuscripts of the Samaritan Pentateuch are written in a different script than the one used in the Masoretic Pentateuch, used by Jews.

The Samaritan Pentateuch text is written with the Samaritan Pentateuch alphabet, derived from the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet used by the Israelite community prior to the Babylonian captivity.

Originally, all manuscripts of the Samaritan Pentateuch consisted of unvocalized text written using only the letters of the Samaritan alphabet.

The Samaritan Pentateuch contains the following paragraph, which is absent from the Jewish version:.

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The Samaritan Pentateuch uses less anthropomorphic language in descriptions of God, with intermediaries performing actions that the Jewish version attributes directly to God.

Where the Jewish text describes Yahweh as a "man of war", the Samaritan Pentateuch has "hero of war", a phrase applied to spiritual beings.

In Genesis 50:23, the Jewish text says that Joseph's grandchildren were born "upon the knees of Joseph", while the Samaritan Pentateuch text says they were born "in the days of Joseph".

In other occasions, the Samaritan Pentateuch has subjects, prepositions, particles, appositives, including the repetition of words and phrases within a single passage, that are absent from the Jewish text.

Samaritan Pentateuch Torah contains frequent agreements with the Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate, the two Bible translations to which Catholics have traditionally ascribed considerable authority.

Several Protestants replied with a defense of the Masoretic text's authority and argued that the Samaritan Pentateuch text is a late and unreliable derivation from the Masoretic.

Samaritan Pentateuch questioned the underlying assumption that the Masoretic text must be more authentic simply because it has been more widely accepted as the authoritative Hebrew version of the Pentateuch:.

Samaritan Pentateuch argued that the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch share a common source in a family of Hebrew manuscripts which he named the "Alexandrino-Samaritanus".

Gesenius concluded that the Samaritan Pentateuch text contained only four valid variants when compared to the Masoretic text.

The Dead Sea Scroll texts have demonstrated that a Pentateuchal text type resembling the Samaritan Pentateuch goes back to the second century BCE and perhaps even earlier.

The Samaritan Pentateuch Targum has a complex textual tradition represented by manuscripts belonging to one of three fundamental text types exhibiting substantial divergences from one another.

Several biblical commentaries and other theological texts based upon the Samaritan Pentateuch have been composed by members of the Samaritan community from the fourth century CE onwards.

Interest in the Samaritan Pentateuch was awakened in 1616 when the traveler Pietro della Valle purchased a copy of the text in Damascus.

Until the latter half of the 20th century, critical editions of the Samaritan Pentateuch were largely based upon Codex B The most notable of these is Der Hebraische Pentateuch der Samaritaner compiled by August von Gall and published in 1918.

Samaritan Pentateuch's work is still regarded as being generally accurate despite the presence of some errors, but it neglects important manuscripts including the Abisha Scroll which had not yet been published at the time.

Arabic translation of the Samaritan Pentateuch has been edited and published at the beginning of the 21st century.