Samaritan Pentateuch

The Samaritan Pentateuch, also called the Samaritan Torah, is the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch, the five books from Genesis to Deuteronomy, used by the Samaritans, who accept only these books, the Torah, as Scripture. It is written in the Samaritan script, which descends from the early Hebrew alphabet. Despite a long period of separate development, its text stands very close to the Masoretic Text.

Its age and early witnesses

Among the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Qumran from 1947 on, some biblical manuscripts have the same kind of text, including 4QpaleoExod-m and 4QNum-b. Known as pre-Samaritan, or harmonizing, texts, they sometimes agree with the Samaritan text and sometimes with the Greek Septuagint against it. The Samaritan Pentateuch shares about 2,000 readings with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text. Its oldest known manuscript, written about AD 1100, probably at Nablus, is held in the library of the University of Cambridge. The first copy to reach Western scholars was bought in Damascus in 1616 by the traveler Pietro della Valle, and the text was first printed in the Paris Polyglot Bible.

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How it differs

In an 1815 study, Gesenius listed about 6,000 differences between the Samaritan and Masoretic texts and sorted them into eight classes. Many are matters of spelling, and the Samaritan spelling is much fuller. Where the Masoretic Text says only that Moses delivered a message from the LORD, the Samaritan text tends to repeat the message in full.

Where the Book of Deuteronomy speaks of "the place the LORD your God will choose" (Deuteronomy 12:5; also 12:11, 14; 16:2), the Samaritan text reads "has chosen" in all these passages. The Samaritans take that place to be Mount Gerizim, not Jerusalem. After the Ten Commandments, at Exodus 20:17 and Deuteronomy 5:21, the Samaritan text adds a long passage, drawn from Deuteronomy 11 and 27, that commands an altar to be built on Mount Gerizim, and the Samaritans count it as the tenth commandment. In a 2022 article in the Journal of Biblical Literature, Hila Dayfani argued that what she calls the Gerizim composition belongs to the pre-Samaritan form of the text and stood in the longest pre-Samaritan scroll from Qumran, 4QpaleoExod-m, against the earlier assumption that the scroll lacked it.

At Deuteronomy 27:4 the Masoretic Text has Israel set up the plastered stones on Mount Ebal, where the Samaritan text reads Mount Gerizim, the mountain of the blessing (Deuteronomy 11:29). R. H. Pfeiffer, in a 1948 introduction to the Old Testament, held that Gerizim was the earlier reading there and was changed to Ebal after the Samaritan schism. Some scholars instead see Gerizim there as one of comparatively few deliberate changes made for doctrinal reasons.

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A forged fragment

In 2009 James H. Charlesworth announced, in the journal Maarav, a fragment of Deuteronomy presented as a Dead Sea Scroll that reads Mount Gerizim at 27:4. In 2017 Årstein Justnes argued that it is a modern forgery, and in June 2025 Mohr Siebeck, which had published Charlesworth's 2015 chapter on the fragment, added a notice to that chapter advising readers to take its conclusions "with caution". The question concerns only that fragment, not the Samaritan Pentateuch.