Samaritans hold the Pentateuch and stop there. There is no Isaiah, no Psalms as scripture and no Talmud, and the vast later literature that grew around the Torah in Judaism is not so much rejected as simply absent. What the tradition has instead is its own text of the five books, written in a script descended from the old Hebrew alphabet rather than in the square Aramaic script the Jewish text uses, together with its own liturgy and its own body of interpretation, composed over time in Aramaic and later in Arabic. The Samaritan Pentateuch differs from the Jewish text at several thousand points, most of them small, and a substantial share of its readings agree with the Greek Septuagint against the Jewish text. That last fact is why the manuscript has mattered to textual scholarship far beyond the community: it shows that more than one form of the Torah was in circulation before either canon closed, and that the differences are not simply Samaritan alterations of a fixed original.
Facts
Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteThe Samaritan Pentateuch differs from the Jewish text at several thousand points, most of them small, and a substantial share of its readings agree with the Greek Septuagint against the Jewish text. That is why the manuscript has mattered to textual scholarship far beyond the community. 1 Doctrinal category (class)Revelation, Covenant and Prophecy 1 Belief
SubjectRevelation and scripture 1 Status
Status Within the TraditionDefined and binding within this tradition 1 Standing as a Comparative CategoryA standard analytic category in the study of religion 1 Doctrinal CategoryRevelation, Covenant and Prophecy 1 Position Profile
Key TextThe Samaritan Pentateuch, written in a script descended from the old Hebrew alphabet rather than in the square Aramaic script the Jewish text uses, together with a liturgy and a body of interpretation composed in Aramaic and later in Arabic. 1 Learn More
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.
Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Source The Samaritans: A ProfileReinhard Pummer
Sources
1. The Samaritans: A Profile
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