Manuscripts and Editions

In 1616, Pietro della Valle had a copy of the Samaritan Pentateuch sent to Europe at the request of Achille Harlay de Sancy—the French ambassador in Constantinople. This manuscript, Codex B, was published in the 1645 Paris Polyglot and again in a corrected version in the 1657 London Polyglot. In an appendix to the latter, Casellus catalogued around 6,000 variants found in the Samaritan Pentateuch against the Masoretic Text—roughly 1,900 agreeing with the Septuagint. While the majority of manuscripts that agree with the Samaritan Pentateuch are written in Hebrew, some exist in Aramaic and Arabic (Shehadeh, “The Arabic Translation”). The majority of manuscript witnesses to the Samaritan Pentateuch date to the 14th and 15th centuries, and are scattered among libraries, museums, and private collections around the world.

The Samaritan Pentateuch’s agreement with the Septuagint—and with the Vulgate in some places—led 19th-century Catholic scholars to assert the close relationship between the Samaritan Pentateuch and the hypothetical Urtext underlying all other manuscripts. This was likely intended to mitigate Protestant zeal for the Masoretic Text, but Wilhelm Gesenius argued that the Samaritan Pentateuch was a faulty and late recension, executed in opposition to Palestinian Judaism and dependent upon manuscripts related to those used by Septuagint translators.

The Abisha Scroll, a valuable manuscript in the Samaritan communities, is claimed—in a note putatively found with the scroll—to have been written by the great-grandson of Aaron, the brother of Moses. On paleographic grounds, the manuscript has been dated to the 12th century ad and has shown that several scribes are responsible for authorship. The Samaritan scholars Avraham and Raston Sadaqa sought to standardize this manuscript and used it in their 1964 publication, Jewish and Samaritan Version of the Pentateuch with Particular Stress on the Differences between Both Texts. This book presents the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Masoretic Text on facing pages, with variants in bold and absent words designated with hyphens. The primary critical edition of the Samaritan Pentateuch is an eclectic edition published by A. von Gall in 1918 (Der hebräische Pentateuch der Samaritaner). In 1994, Abraham Tal published a diplomatic edition which follows MS 6 from the Shechem synagogue, but is lacking a critical apparatus (Tal, The Samaritan Pentateuch).