Samaritan Pentateuch

The Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) is the version of the five books of Moses preserved by the Samaritans — the community descended from the mixed population settled in the former northern kingdom after the Assyrian exile (2 Kings 17:24-41) and those Israelites who remained, who worshipped YHWH at a temple on Mount Gerizim rather than Jerusalem. The SP was written in the Old Hebrew (Paleo-Hebrew) script and diverges from the Masoretic Text (MT) in approximately 6,000 places — the majority being orthographic variants, stylistic harmonizations, and spelling differences. About 1,900 of these variants agree with the Septuagint (LXX) against the MT, indicating that the SP and LXX sometimes preserve an alternate Hebrew text tradition rather than a translation artifact.

The most significant deliberate variants in the SP involve the approximately 2,000 cases where quotations from Deuteronomy are inserted into Exodus passages (harmonizations), and the substitution of 'Mount Gerizim' for 'Jerusalem' (or 'the place the LORD will choose') in passages commanding a central sanctuary (Deut. 12; 27) — a polemic reflecting the Samaritan conviction that Gerizim, not Jerusalem, is the divinely chosen worship site (cf. John 4:20: 'our ancestors worshiped on this mountain'). The SP is significant for OT textual criticism because it demonstrates the diversity of text forms that existed before the standardization of the Masoretic tradition (c. AD 70-100). The Dead Sea Scrolls have confirmed that the SP's longer harmonizing text type was not unique to the Samaritans but was one of several pre-Masoretic text families circulating in Second Temple Judaism.