In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Ki Tavo ('When You Enter', Deuteronomy 26:1-29:8) prescribes the offering of first fruits with its declaration of Israel's history, the tithe, the ceremony of blessings and curses on Mounts Gerizim and Ebal, and a long and severe tochacha foretelling exile if the covenant is broken.
The ceremony of blessing and curse the portion prescribes for Mounts Gerizim and Ebal (27:1-26) preserves one of the clearest textual divides between Jewish and Samaritan scripture: the Masoretic Text names Ebal as the site of the altar to be built (27:4), while the Samaritan Pentateuch reads Gerizim instead, consistent with Samaritan tradition's identification of Gerizim, not Jerusalem, as the divinely chosen place of worship. Samaritan manuscripts go further still, incorporating a version of this Gerizim commandment into their own numbering of the Ten Commandments, one of roughly six thousand differences, most trivial, a few doctrinally significant, that separate the Samaritan Pentateuch from the Masoretic Text.