Tsaadiy ࠑ

Tsaadiy is the eighteenth letter of the Samaritan alphabet and carries the numeral value ninety, the last of the tens. It stands for what was an emphatic s in the older language, the second member of the emphatic series after tit. The name is the inherited Northwest Semitic one behind Hebrew tsade.

This letter absorbed more of the ancestor language than almost any other. Several distinct emphatic consonants of the earlier system fell together in the languages that used the twenty-two letter alphabet, and all of them are written here. Arabic, which fixed its alphabet for a language that had kept the distinctions, writes the same territory with more than one letter, which is why the relationship between an Arabic word and its Hebrew or Samaritan cousin containing this letter can be perfectly regular and still look unrecognisable.

In the square Hebrew script this letter has a separate final form. Samaritan writes one shape everywhere.

Greek inherited a sign in this position, called san, and did not keep it. San competed with sigma for the same job, lost, and dropped out of the alphabet early, which is why the Greek sequence has no counterpart to tsaadiy and why the correspondence between the Samaritan and Greek alphabets, exact almost everywhere else, breaks off here and again at quf.

The character is encoded at U+0811.

For most of the history of European learning the Samaritan Pentateuch was known about and not known. Christian writers of late antiquity mention it, so the fact that a separate Torah in a separate script existed was never entirely lost, but no copy was available in Europe and nobody could check what it said.

That changed in the seventeenth century. A manuscript of the Samaritan Pentateuch was acquired in the Levant by the Italian traveller Pietro della Valle in 1616 and brought to Europe, and its text was printed in the Paris Polyglot Bible, the great multilingual edition that set the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic and Samaritan texts of scripture in parallel columns, and afterwards in the London Polyglot. For the first time scholars who would never meet a Samaritan could compare the two Torahs line by line.

The argument that followed was immediate and long. Where the two texts differ, which stands closer to the original, and what does the answer imply about the transmission of the Torah as a whole? Positions hardened along confessional lines before the evidence was in, and the question was reopened in the twentieth century when the Dead Sea Scrolls produced manuscripts older than either tradition, some of which agree with Samaritan readings.

The community itself was not a party to any of this. It was being read about rather than consulted, which is one reason the modern scholarly literature makes a point of the difference between studying the Samaritan text and knowing the Samaritan people.