Samaritan belief is summarised in a short formula: one God, one prophet in Moses, one book in the Torah, one holy place in Mount Gerizim, and one day of reckoning. Everything distinctive follows from those five.
Scripture is the Torah alone. The Samaritan Pentateuch differs from the Jewish Masoretic text at several thousand points, most of them minor matters of spelling or grammar but a few substantive: it reads Gerizim where the Jewish text leaves the chosen place unnamed, and its version of the Ten Commandments includes the command to build an altar there. Where the Jewish canon adds the Prophets and the Writings, and rabbinic Judaism adds an oral law, Samaritans accept neither. They have an interpretive literature of their own, but it does not carry scriptural authority.
Mount Gerizim, above Nablus, is the centre of the religion. Samaritans face it in prayer, hold it to be the site of the binding of Isaac and the one mountain the Flood did not cover, and ascend it on pilgrimage three times a year at Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot.
The priesthood is hereditary and still functioning, which makes Samaritanism the only surviving Israelite religion that has one. The high priest is the community's religious head, fixes the calendar by calculation rather than by observation, and presides at the Passover sacrifice on Gerizim, where lambs are slaughtered and roasted according to the instructions in Exodus. It is the only place in the world where the biblical Passover sacrifice is still carried out.
Sabbath observance is stricter than the rabbinic form, with no fire kindled and no leaving the home except for worship, and the purity laws of the Torah, including menstrual separation, are kept in a fuller form than in Judaism.