A Torah with Gerizim at Its Centre

Samaritans hold that they are the descendants of the northern tribes of Israel who never left the land, and that their Torah is the unaltered original; Jewish tradition told the story the other way. The text itself records the divergence. Where the Masoretic text of Deuteronomy speaks repeatedly of the place the Lord will choose, leaving Jerusalem to be identified later, the Samaritan text reads the place the Lord has chosen, and its version of the commandments given at Sinai includes an additional commandment to build the altar on Mount Gerizim, the mountain above Shechem where the community has worshipped continuously and where its Passover sacrifice is offered to this day.

Beyond these deliberate anchors, the recension smooths and harmonises: parallel passages are aligned, grammatical irregularities corrected, anthropomorphic phrases occasionally softened, and narrative gaps filled from sister passages, editorial habits that scholars use to characterise the text type. About a third of its variants from the Masoretic text agree with the Septuagint, and several Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit the same expansionist text type, which demonstrated that the Samaritan recension was not a late sectarian invention but one branch of a textual plurality that existed before the turn of the common era, with only the Gerizim readings as the community's specific layer.