The Scroll the Samaritans Say Aaron's Great Grandson Wrote

The Samaritan community's most venerated manuscript is the Abisha Scroll, kept in the synagogue on Mount Gerizim and brought out only for the most solemn festival readings. Samaritan tradition holds that it was written by Abisha, a great grandson of Aaron, in the thirteenth year after the Israelites entered the land under Joshua, which would make it not merely old but essentially original, a text produced within living memory of the events it records. Manuscript scholars who have examined the scroll date its oldest sections many centuries later than that claim, generally to the medieval period, with portions patched and rewritten over a long span of use. The gap between the two datings is itself instructive rather than merely a correction. It shows a community holding its founding text to be not simply authoritative but physically continuous with revelation, an unbroken object rather than a copy of a copy, and treating that continuity as part of the text's standing rather than as a separable historical claim that could be given up without cost. The scroll functions in Samaritan religious life exactly as the doctrine that the Torah alone is scripture would predict, as an object venerated for what it is believed to be rather than displayed as an artifact.