Chapter 14 Rising Recognition of the Samaritan Pentateuch

CHAPTER 14

RISING RECOGNITION OF THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH

THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH is another area that has benefited from the evidence of the scrolls and from post-Qumran thinking. The scrolls have shed fresh light on the SP, and scholars have been looking at the old evidence without presuming old conclusions. This has sparked a resurgence of Samaritan studies and shown the need for more inclusion of its data in both textual and historical research. 1 Moreover, recent archaeo• logical/ work and intensified historicaP and literary-historical" study have also con• tributed in major ways toward clarifying scholarly understanding of Samarian-Judean history and relations from the monarchic period down to the end of the Second Temple period.

1 Recently, e.g ., at the 2013 SBL meeting in Baltimore there was a section on "Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible" focusing on the SP with papers by Terry Giles, Benyamim Tsedaka, Emanuel Tov, and Stefan Schorch; and a seminar on "Textual Growth: What Variant Editions Tell Us about Scribal Activity" featuring papers by Sidnie Crawford, Stefan Schorch, Molly Zahn, Magnar Kartveit, and Gary Knoppers. In May 2014 David Hamidovic and Christophe Nihan organized an international conference at the University of Lausanne on "Samarians-Samaritans in Translation," with papers by Magnar Kartveit, Sarianna Metso, Reinhard Pummer, and Eugene Ulrich. 2 Yizhak Magen, "The Dating of the First Phase of the Samaritan Temple at Mount Gerizim in Light of the Archaeological Evidence," in Judah and the Judeans in the Fourth Century B.C.E. (ed. O. Lipschits, G. N . Knoppers, and R. Albertz; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2007), 157-211; Yizhak Magen, H. Misgav, and L. Tsfania, Mount Gerizim Excavations. Vol . I, The Aramaic, Hebrew and Samaritan Inscriptions (Judea and Samaria Publications 2; Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2004); and Magen, Mount Gerizim Excavations. Vol. 2, A Temple City (Judea and Samaria Publications 8; Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2008). 3 Reinhard Pummer ("APrAPlZIN: A Criterion for Samaritan Provenance?" JSJ 18 [1987]: 19-25); idem, "The Samaritans and their Pentateuch," in The Pentateuch as Torah: New Models for Understanding Its Promulgation and Acceptance (ed. Gary N. Knoppers and Bernard M. Levinson; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2007), 237-69; Magnar Kartveit, The Origin of the Samaritans (VTSup 128; Leiden: Brill, 2009); Gary N. Knoppers, Jews and Samaritans: The Origins and History of Their Early Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), with rich bibliography. 4 Christophe Nihan, "The Torah between Samaria and Judah: Shechem and Gerizim in Deuteronomy and Joshua," in The Pentateuch as Torah, 197-223, and literature cited there; Stefan Schorch, "Der Pentateuch der Samaritaner: Seine Erforschung und seine Bedeutung fur das Verstandis des alttestamentlichen Bibeltextes," in Die Samaritaner und die Bibel / The Samaritans and the Bible (ed. Jorg Frey et a1.; Studia Samaritana 7; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), 5-29; idem, "The Construction of Samari(t)an Identity from the Inside and from the Outside," in Between Cooperation and Hostility: Multiple Identities in Ancient Judaism and the Interaction with Foreign Powers (ed. Rainer Albertz and Jakob Wehrle; JAJS 11; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 135-49. 216 LEARNINGS FROM THE SCROLLS

I. THE SAMARITAN AND THE MASORETIC PENTATEUCH A. The Discovery of the Samaritan Pentateuch Chapter 3 centered on the Pentateuchal scrolls and demonstrated their evidence for recognizing the SP as an important witness to developing forms of the ancient Hebrew text. This chapter, taking the scrolls' preserved evidence as a basis, focuses more directly on the SP and surveys some of the recent advances in the study of the Samaritan and judean Pentateuch. The SP was not known in Europe until the seventeenth century and thus was not included in the first biblical polyglot, the Complutensian Polyglot (1514-1517), which included the Masoretic Hebrew, the LXX, a Targum, and the Vulgate.> A century later Pietro della Valle traveled to the Near East and returned in 1616 enriched with a manuscript of the Samaritan Pentateuch, whose text was then included in the Paris Polyglot in 1632. Comparison of the SP with the MT highlighted some six thousand discrepancies; and when about one third of those showed agreement with the LXX, the reputation of the LXX as a faithful witness to an ancient Hebrew text climbed and that of the MT diminished. Through this period and for the next few centuries, however, the religious agenda of the researchers often clouded their textual conclusions. The SP-LXX agreement caused some to suggest that the MT had been secondarily revised by the Rabbis, and thus that the LXX preserved the divine word in purer form. But the Renaissance focus on the original language and the Reformation's concern for translation into the vernacular from the Hebrew rather than from the Vulgate served as a counterbalance in favor of the MT. In 1815 Wilhelm Gesenius studied the SP and showed that most of its variant readings displayed a secondary reworking of a base text like the MT.6 Others, such as Zacharias Frankel and Salomon Kohn,? added to the devaluation of the SP as a textual witness, due to its errors, its obviously secondary nature as generally dependent on, and later than, the MT, and thus its inability to penetrate behind the MT.8 Until recently, it has simply been presumed that, because the SP edition is in general secondary to the MT, its variants are inferior to the MT.9 The arguments below will question the legitimacy of that view.

S The Complutensian Polyglot celebrated its fifth centennial in 2014. 6 Wilhelm Gesenius, De Pentateuchi Samaritani origine, indole, et auctoritate (Halle: Impensis Librariae Rengerianae, 1815); but see Henry B. Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek (rev. by Richard R. Ottley; New York: Ktav, 1968),438. 7 Zacharias Frankel, Uber den Einfluss der paliistinischen Exegese auf die alexandrische Hermeneutik (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1851), 242; Salomon Kohn, "Sarnaritikon und Septuaginta," Monatschrift fur Geschichte und Wissenshaft des Judentums 38 (1895): 60 (for the references see Shemaryahu Talmon, "The Old Testament Text," in Qumran and the H istory, 14-15). 8 Note that the "value" of the witnesses is based on the "originality" of the text form, not on possible richness due to textual, historical, or theological development. 9 See, e.g., Ernst Wurthwein, The Text of the Old Testament (2d ed.; trans. Erroll F. Rhodes; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995),46.