Script, Scrolls and Scholarship

The Samaritan Pentateuch is written in the Samaritan script, a continuation of the palaeo-Hebrew alphabet in which the earliest Israelite texts were written, and which the community retained as a mark of continuity after Jews adopted the Aramaic square script; reading and copying it remains a priestly craft. The community's most venerated copy is the Abisha Scroll, kept in the synagogue at Nablus and traditionally ascribed to Abisha, great-grandson of Aaron, in the thirteenth year after the entry into Canaan; examinations indicate a medieval composite, its oldest portions dated by scholars to around the twelfth to fourteenth centuries CE, but its standing in the community is not a matter of carbon dates.

European scholarship met the text in 1616, when Pietro della Valle acquired a manuscript in Damascus; its publication in the Paris and London Polyglots ignited a confessional argument, Catholic scholars pressing its agreements with the Septuagint against the Masoretic text on which Protestant translations rested. The debate was disciplined by Wilhelm Gesenius in 1815, whose classification of the variants as largely secondary held the field for a century and a half, until the Qumran discoveries restored the recension's dignity as an early text type. Critical editions and a scholarly English translation now serve a community of under a thousand souls at Nablus and Holon, whose reading tradition preserves a distinct Hebrew pronunciation of independent value to linguists.