The Pentateuch and Samaritan Sectarianism
by Abel Sitali
When a wave of Israelites returned from the Babylonian exile to Judah, there was nothing known as “Bible” at the time. Ezra, a Scribe, gathered all the mosaic traditions which at the time were in the form of oral stories, and fragments of scrolls and manuscripts into one document which came to be known as the Pentateuch. The Pentateuch was a collection of five scrolls or books believed to have been written by Moses. The Pentateuch was subsequently codified into a legally binding document.
Along with the official Pentateuch composed by Ezra, there was a similar copy or version in circulation at the time which came to be known as the Samaritan Pentateuch. It was similar to the original copy word for word, and phrase by phrase, except for minor orthographical differences to do with different forms of spelling. This version was used by the Samaritans (northern Israelites) in their religious services once they were barred from participating in the Jerusalem temple ceremonies.
Sometime after the irrevocable separation between the Samaritans and the Judahites, the Samaritans went on to introduce some theological additions to their Pentateuch. For example, they expanded the tenth commandment in the decalogue (Exodus 20) after removing the third, by stating that God had instructed Moses to tell the Israelites that they were to build a temple on Mount Gerizim after they crossed into the promised land. This instruction is not found in the Judahite Pentateuch which now exists in the Masoretic Text (MT). These additions and changes in the Samaritan Pentateuch earned it the characterization of being a sectarian document, thereby implying that the Samaritans were a dissident sect.
When the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) were discovered in 1947 and the subsequent years, a body of literature which scholars now call the “pre-Samaritan texts” was discovered among the scrolls. These texts include the books that now make up the Pentateuch in the Hebrew Bible. Upon close analysis, it was soon discovered that these texts are more identical to the Samaritan Pentateuch than the Judahite Pentateuch. Scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls and those that specialized in pentateuchal studies concluded that these texts should have been a “text-type” or a version that existed alongside Ezra’s original document.
While the pre-Samaritan texts evinced similar features with the Samaritan Pentateuch, a closer analysis of the two corpora revealed that the sectarian variants exhibited in the latter are not found in the former. This phenomenon led to two conclusions and rightly so; firstly, that the pre-Samaritan texts predate the Samaritan Pentateuch; and secondly that the sectarian variants in the Samaritan Pentateuch were adopted at a much later stage in the history of textual transmission.
Moreover, when Ezra composed the Pentateuch, it is worth noting that some of the material he included from the oral stories and fragments of scrolls and manuscripts were of Samaritan origin. The Elohist material referenced in the Documentary Hypothesis theory for example traces its origin to northern Israel, Samaria. Again, this argues in favour of the view that the Pentateuch was originally a common document to both the Samaritans and Judahites before the two were irrevocably separated, and further that any significant differences in their sacred texts were a later development.
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