Samaritan Pentateuch

Six Thousand Differences, and the One That Counts

The Samaritan community keeps the five books of Moses as its whole Scripture, in a script descended from the old palaeo-Hebrew alphabet rather than the square letters Jews adopted after the exile. Set against the Masoretic Text it shows something like six thousand differences, a number worth handling carefully, since it comes from a seventeenth-century printed comparison and shifts depending on which manuscripts an edition is built from. The overwhelming majority are spelling, grammar and harmonisation — a scribe smoothing a narrative by importing a phrase from a parallel passage. Roughly two thousand of them agree with the Greek Septuagint against the Masoretic Text, which is itself a useful reminder that the Hebrew text was not one thing in antiquity.

One difference is not trivial. Where the Jewish text of Deuteronomy 27:4 has Israel setting up plastered stones on Mount Ebal, the Samaritan text has Mount Gerizim — the mountain above Nablus where the Samaritan temple stood and where the community still worships. And where Exodus and Deuteronomy give the Ten Commandments, the Samaritan Pentateuch adds a tenth of its own, assembled out of Deuteronomy 11:29-30 and 27:2-7, commanding an altar on Gerizim. That is not a copying slip. It is the constitutional difference between two communities, written into their Bibles.

Older Than the Samaritans

For centuries the obvious explanation was that the Samaritans had edited the Torah to suit themselves. The Qumran discoveries complicated that in a specific and interesting way. Some Hebrew manuscripts from the caves — the ones scholars now call pre-Samaritan — share the Samaritan Pentateuch's harmonising expansions, its emphasis on Moses, its grammatical forms and its spelling, and they are not Samaritan documents. T. Giles, writing for the Society of Biblical Literature, sets out what follows: these texts carry the editorial features "but without the veneer of sectarian features favoring the Samaritan religious sect," and "the cumulative evidence points to the conclusion that the Samaritan Pentateuch is the product of a sectarian editing of the Pre-Samaritan text type, probably produced in the first century B.C.E through the first century C.E." M. Kartveit has traced the history of research on exactly this, and his reviewer M. Krusche sums up where it came out: phenomena "previously ascribed to the Samaritans and their ideology turned out to be more ancient and not specifically Samaritan."

That is the majority view and it is not unanimous. S. Schorch has argued that even the Gerizim commandment belongs with the pre-Samaritan expansions rather than with a later sectarian layer — comparing its literary technique with theirs and concluding it comes from the same scribal circles. A reviewer of the volume it appeared in calls the argumentation strong and says so while disagreeing: he doubts "that a scribe would insert such a commandment at such a prominent place merely for inner-textual hermeneutical reasons." There is a third reading, from the late G. N. Knoppers, on which the Torah's several altar laws are deliberately ambiguous; his reviewer sums up the point as indicating that the Pentateuch was "composed as a compromise document by Judeans and Samaritans" — the wording is the reviewer's, not Knoppers's — which would make the argument older than either community's final form of it. Archaeology has meanwhile given the Samaritan claim a real history: Y. Magen's excavations on Mount Gerizim between 1984 and 2006 dated the beginnings of a temple there to the mid-fifth century BC, with a large city around it by the second, destroyed by the Hasmonean John Hyrcanus about 110 BC.

Deuteronomy 27:4, and a Scroll With Its Own Signature

Which reading of Deuteronomy 27:4 is original is a live question, and it needs stating precisely because it is regularly got wrong. The Samaritan reading of Gerizim is supported outside the Samaritan tradition by the Old Latin and by Greek evidence, which is why a standard introduction to the Old Testament — J. A. Soggin's — has long been cited for the judgement that at Deuteronomy 27:4 the Samaritan reading is preferable to the Masoretic one. No sentence of Soggin's is quoted here. The book is print only and could not be opened, and the two versions of his sentence this article previously carried, one in the body and one in the citation, did not match each other; rather than choose between two unverified wordings, his position is reported and his words are not. A small Hebrew fragment of Deuteronomy 27:4-6 that reads Gerizim is also brought forward: J. H. Charlesworth announced it in 2008 and published it in the journal Maarav in 2009 as a genuine ancient witness, and has not withdrawn that. His own article could not be opened here, so his case is named and not stated. This app does not use the fragment as evidence, for a reason that has nothing to do with his judgement: it has no excavation context. It appeared on the antiquities market and is catalogued among the post-2002 "Dead Sea Scrolls-like" fragments; specialists are divided. A. Lange gives his reasons against and then his own limit. Writing in German — and quoted here at one remove, from a bibliography that reproduces the passage, because his book could not be opened — he objects that the fragment is in square script where an early Samaritan manuscript should be in palaeo-Hebrew, and that its letter forms are a mixture drawn from formal and semi-cursive hands of different periods; that mixture, together with the square script and the fragment's partial use of scriptio continua, seems to him to argue for a forgery. And then the clause a careless quotation would drop: a conclusive judgement, he adds, would require examining the fragment itself, which nobody has published. E. Ulrich answers the strongest suspicion against it, that so significant a word sits so prominently on so small a scrap, by pointing to a genuine Qumran fragment of Judges that does the same. Å. Justnes holds it a forgery; B. Hensel writes that it is "höchst wahrscheinlich echt" — most probably genuine. Nobody has published a physical examination. A contested unprovenanced scrap cannot carry a conclusion about Deuteronomy either way. What is left is a genuinely open question, and it is worth a reader knowing that it is open: the reading behind every English Bible is Ebal, the Samaritan reading has ancient non-Samaritan support, and each reading gives the other community an obvious motive for having changed it. This app does not settle it, and nothing here should be read as though it had.

The community's own most sacred manuscript raises the same question of what a document can be made to prove. The Abisha Scroll, kept at Nablus, is written on sewn ram parchment with rollers and a silver case, and the Samaritans hold that it was written by Abishua son of Phinehas, in the priestly line of Aaron, in the thirteenth year after Israel entered Canaan. The claim is not vague or externally imposed: it is embedded in the scroll itself, in a cryptogram running down through the columns, which the community reads as Abishua's own colophon. T. Giles states the scholarly position on such claims with the right restraint — "These claims are difficult for modern historical scholarship to confirm or deny" — but the codicological work has been done. A. D. Crown's study concluded the object is a composite of several scrolls of different dates, and E. Burkhardt's 2025 re-examination goes further, identifying the compiler and probable scribe of its most important component as a fourteenth-century scribe who was himself called Abisha son of Phinehas. If that is right, the scroll is neither a forgery nor what the tradition says it is. The oldest Samaritan Pentateuch manuscript anyone can actually open is at Cambridge, dates from the early twelfth century, and was written by five different hands.

Scripture references

• Deuteronomy 27:4 — "On Mount Ebal" in the Hebrew behind English Bibles; the Samaritan Torah reads Mount Gerizim
• Deuteronomy 11:29 — The blessing on Gerizim and the curse on Ebal — one of the two passages the Samaritan tenth commandment is built from
• Exodus 20:17 — Where the Samaritan text adds its own tenth commandment, on the altar at Gerizim
• John 4:19-24 — "Our fathers worshiped in this mountain" — the Samaritan woman naming the difference to Jesus

Sources

• ReferenceT. Giles, "The Samaritan Pentateuch" — Terry Giles, Gannon University; Bible Odyssey, Society of Biblical Literature · Read in full. Giles is co-author of the standard SBL introduction to the Samaritan Pentateuch. Source for the pre-Samaritan texts carrying the editorial features "without the veneer of sectarian features", for the dating of the sectarian editing to the first century BC or AD, and for his own careful sentence about the community's traditional claims. Bible Odyssey is a Society of Biblical Literature project and leans to critical scholarship; it is cited here for factsSupports: The relationship between the pre-Samaritan Qumran texts and the Samaritan Pentateuch
• Holding institutionCambridge University Library MS Add.1846: the Samaritan Pentateuch — Cambridge University Library · The library's own record: "Add.1846 is believed to be the earliest extant manuscript of the Samaritan Pentateuch and dates from the early 12th century CE"; 227 leaves, 270 by 210 mm, vellum, and "The copying of the book itself is the product of five different hands." Fully digitised. Its recorded epigraphs are worth a reader's time — one at the end of Leviticus explains how the manuscript was saved from a fire in a manuscript store-room in 1201, and a marginal note at the end of Numbers makes a claim the library itself calls unconvincingSupports: The oldest accessible manuscript of the Samaritan Pentateuch, and its date
• ScholarshipÅ. Justnes, "A Lightly Annotated Chronological Bibliography of the Post-2002 Dead Sea Scrolls-like Fragments" — Årstein Justnes, University of Agder — The Lying Pen of Scribes project · Read in full. The catalogue of the disputed fragments and their literature, including J. H. Charlesworth, "What Is a Variant? Announcing a Dead Sea Scrolls Fragment of Deuteronomy", Maarav 16 (2009), 201-212, and the fragment's designation DSS F.154. It reproduces verbatim the passages quoted in section three from A. Lange (Handbuch der Textfunde vom Toten Meer, vol. 1, 2009, 106, and From Qumran to Aleppo, 2009, 46 n. 66), E. Ulrich (The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Developmental Composition of the Bible, 2015, 57) and B. Hensel (Juda und Samaria, 2016, 177). NONE of those four books was opened here; each is quoted at one remove from this bibliography, which prints the passages in full. Justnes himself is a party to the argument and holds the fragment a forgery, which is stated in the articleSupports: That the Charlesworth fragment is unprovenanced and disputed, and the positions of the specialists on both sides
• ScholarshipM. Krusche, review of M. Langlois (ed.), The Samaritan Pentateuch and the Dead Sea Scrolls — Marcel Krusche, Universität Hamburg; Review of Biblical Literature 07/2021, Society of Biblical Literature · Read in full. Two of the sentences quoted in section three are Krusche's own rather than the authors' he is describing, and this article says so where it uses them: that phenomena "previously ascribed to the Samaritans and their ideology turned out to be more ancient and not specifically Samaritan" is his summary of M. Kartveit's opening essay, and that the ambiguity of the altar laws "indicates that the Pentateuch was composed as a compromise document by Judeans and Samaritans" is his summary of the late G. N. Knoppers's chapter. The review is also the source for S. Schorch's argument about the Gerizim commandment and for Krusche's own stated disagreement with it. Neither Schorch's chapter nor Knoppers's was opened here; both are reported from this reviewSupports: The minority position on the Gerizim commandment, and the compromise-document reading
• ReferenceT. Wardle, "Mount Gerizim" — Tim Wardle, Furman University; Bible Odyssey, Society of Biblical Literature · Read in full. Source for the dating of Y. Magen's Mount Gerizim excavations (1984-2006), the mid-fifth-century BC beginning of the temple, the second-century city and its destruction by John Hyrcanus in 110 BC. Magen's own excavation reports — Mount Gerizim Excavations, 2 vols (Israel Antiquities Authority, 2004 and 2008) — were NOT openedSupports: The archaeology of the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim
• ScholarshipE. Burkhardt, "The Abisha Scroll Revisited" — Evelyn Burkhardt, Research Centre for Hebrew Studies, Leucorea Foundation, Wittenberg · Textus 34:1 (2025), 74-100. The body is behind Brill's paywall and was NOT opened; what section three reports is her own abstract, read on the journal's page, which concludes that the scroll is "compiled from several heterogeneous parts" and identifies its compiler and probable principal scribe as "Ā̊bīša ban Fī'nās ban Yūsəf, a scribe and author of piyyutim in the fourteenth century". A. D. Crown's earlier studies — "The Abisha Scroll of the Samaritans", Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 58:1 (1975), 36-65, and Samaritan Scribes and Manuscripts (Mohr Siebeck, 2001) — were also not opened · paywalledSupports: The current scholarly assessment of the Abisha Scroll's date and composition
• ScholarshipJ. A. Soggin, Introduction to the Old Testament: From Its Origins to the Closing of the Alexandrian Canon — J. Alberto Soggin, Westminster John Knox, 1989, p. 26 · Print, and NOT opened here. Two differently worded versions of the same sentence of his were in circulation on this record, in the body and in this note, and neither could be checked against the page: the 1989 third edition is not on the Internet Archive in a readable copy and a phrase search returns nothing. No wording of his is printed anywhere here. What is reported is only that his introduction is a standard place this judgement is cited from, and even that should be checked against the page by anyone who can reach itSupports: That the judgement in favour of the Samaritan reading of Deuteronomy 27:4 has a standard citation in the introductory literature — reported, not quoted
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Samaritan Pentateuch

Further reading

• T. Giles, "The Samaritan Pentateuch" (Bible Odyssey, Society of Biblical Literature)
• Cambridge University Library MS Add.1846, the earliest extant Samaritan Pentateuch
• Wikipedia: Samaritan Pentateuch

Reflect

Two communities have read the same five books for two thousand years and disagreed about one mountain. What difference are you treating as bigger than it is — or smaller?