Studia Samaritana – serie

The volume collects eighteen studies authored by specialists of various fields. The contributions gathered in this volume mostly originate in lectures delivered at the 8th Congress of the Société d’Etudes Samaritaines (Erfurt, 2012). In these studies, specialists of various fields deal with various aspects of Samaritan languages, especially Samaritan Hebrew and Samaritan Aramaic, with central Samaritan texts, mostly the Samaritan Hebrew Pentateuch, the Samaritan Aramaic Targum, as well as medieval Samaritan exegetical texts in Arabic, and also with traditions relating to the image of the Samaritans, as emerging from the New Testament and Rabbinic literature, to Samaritan theology and to Samaritan genealogy, and with magical traditions as found in Samaritan amulets, and with the contribution of Samaritan traditions to the literary history of the Pentateuch. The volume provides thus a multifarious reflection of the current status quaestionis in Samaritan studies.

Discoveries on Mount Gerizim and in Qumran demonstrate that the final editing of the Hebrew Bible coincides with the emergence of the Samaritans as one of the different types of Judaisms from the last centuries BCE. This book discusses this new scholarly situation. Scholars working with the Bible, especially the Pentateuch, and experts on the Samaritans approach the topic from the vantage point of their respective fields of expertise. Earlier, scholars who worked with Old Testament/Hebrew Bible studies mostly could leave the Samaritan material to experts in that area of research, and scholars studying the Samaritan material needed only sporadically to engage in Biblical studies. This is no longer the case: the pre-Samaritan texts from Qumran and the results from the excavations on Mount Gerizim have created an area of study common to the previously separated fields of research. Scholars coming from different directions meet in this new area, and realize that they work on the same questions and with much common material.This volume presents the current state of scholarship in this area and the effects these recent discoveries have for an understanding of this important epoch in the development of the Bible.

The volume focuses on variants between the Masoretic Text and the Samaritan Pentateuch promptedby graphic similarities between letters. As a phenomenon that occurs during the transmission of ancient texts, an in-depth study of the linguistic and paleographic background of these variants provides fruitful ground for the exploration of the Pentateuch transmission.This volume gathers all the relevant variants from the Masoretic Text and the Samaritan Pentateuch, comparing them to further witnesses, primarily the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint. Each case is examined independently through a linguistic analysis of the variants, their process of development and an evaluation of which version is preferable (when possible). It then presents a statistical analysis of the data.Moreover, the volume offers a paleographic analysis of the interchanging letters in the three relevant scripts – Hebrew, Jewish, and Samaritan script. Through this process it determines the script in which the variants have occurred and estimates the chronological framework of the variants.This study has implications for the textual history of the Samaritan Pentateuch and, more broadly, for the distribution of the Pentateuch and the extent of its transmission in the late Second Temple period.