cheenc03a.pdf

SAMARITANS
With regard to the sects alleged to haveexisted among
the Samaritans, it is irnporsible to arrive at any certain
facts. The accounts are confused, and there seems to
be no mention of them in the native literature.
The native Literature naturally centres in the one
sacred book, the Pentateuch, which has been preserved.
68.11tarature: a$ mentioned above, in a recension
agreeing in all essentials with the
IT. It first kame known in
Europe from a copy brought, together
with the Targum, from Damascus by the great
traveller Pictro della Valle in 1616, and now preserved
in the Vatican library. The text was published in the
Paris Poiygloft from which it war afterwards copied
bv Walton, and im variations from the MT cave rise
to the keenest controversy. The question by no
means settled yet, nor call it be so until we have a
thorouehlv -, critic~~l edition of the text. The mmv
parsages in which the Samaritan agrees with the Sept~agin1
against the Massoretic, show that a study of it is
imoorfmt. The MSS are man". montlv dated, , but not
~~~~
2.
of great age.
The copy in the synagogue at Nsblur is iegarded with great
veneration ar havlng been wrkitrn by Abtrha the great-grandson
ofA?imn, thlrteen yearrafter lhr ellrryi?t9 CC?~~:
No scholar
has rvcr had the opportunity of exrmllllng if wlfh a view to
determbin. itidate: but there rr" no rirr"ns for rupporinglhat
it ir much older than the twelfth or thirteenth century, about
which time it3 'inrention' is shroni~lcd by Abulhth.
Several trvrlslations of the Pentateuch *ere made.
r. Perhaps it was translated into Greek. rb Zawpsrr~x6u
is quoted by the early fathers ; but we have
no certain infornlvtion about it, and cannot even say
whether it was a distioct version or whether the citations
of it arc onlv a loose wav of citine the Sam.-Hebrew
text.
2. It was translated into Samaritan proper, or
Aramaic. The most noticeable feature of this Targum
is its frequently close resemblance to Onkelor. Until
this fact has been thoroughly invesligated the most
reasonable erplnnation of it remn to be that both
Targllm~ go back to an oral tradition current in
Palestine at the time when Aramaic was the common
language of the people, and that they were subsequently
reduced to writing independently, and with local variations,
in Samarin (probably in the 4th cent. A.D.) and in
Babylon. It was brought to Europe, as mentioned
above, in 1616, and firrt printed in the Po& Poli.glatf.
MSS of it are very scarce, since the language died out
before the eleventh century, and copies were no longer
multiolied.
For the same rearon the text ha5 suffered much convption and
is by no meanr ycf drfmifdy reriled even in the best edition.
In character the Aramaic Lrmrlation is very literal; it "cry
c~refullynvoidr
If rccms to be by several
hand., and to hare rccrlved lnrerpolalioni at ? later period.
here and the of copyists are, nccord~ng to the istea
researchel, respnnhle for most of the enigmatical wordr
formerly snpposrd to be specially Scmantnn.
3. The origin of the tranrlation into Arabic is
obrcure. It war perhaps made by Abulhasan of Tyre
in the eleventh century, and revised early in the thirteenth
cxnrury by Abu Said. There are many good
MSS of it. The translator apparently made use of the
Jewish Arabic version by Saadiah Gaon.
The Chronicles vhieh have come down to us are:
(I) A Book of Joshua, in Arabic, giving the history of
6b, Chmnicles. I~rael (i.e, the Samaritans) from the
t~me uf Joshua to the fourth century
AD. It is u~ompilntion, d~ting perhaps from the thirteenth
century. As history its value is very small. since
it consirtr mostly of fabulous stories of the deeds of
Joshua, whilst its later chronology is of the wildest.
(Q) El-Tolideh. in Samaritnn~Hebrew with an Arabic
translation. If contains the history (or rather annals)
from Adan, to the present time. The original part
of it ir ascrihed to Eleazar b. Amram in the middle
of the twelfth cer~tury, and it has k n carried on by
various writeci from time to time. The history, if used
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SAMARITANS
with caution, is generally trustworthy, especially for the
period just preceding the date of each several author.
(3) The chronicle of Abulfath written, in Arabic, in '355
AD.. is a ompilation from earlier works. By a comparison
of these two (El-tblideh and Abulfath) it is
possible to arrive at a tolerably trnstworthy account of
the Samaritan families in the Middle Ages. Of commentaries
and theologicll works there is a considerable
number in MS ; but very little has been published.
One of the most interesting ir n fwment on Genesis by nn
unknown author, in Arab,", remarkrblr as quoting fro,,> many
hooks of the OT =rn from the Mirhna. X commr,irary by
Markah on the Pentateuch rurviue3 in a late but apparently
unique MS in Berlin, and ir lingu~rtically im orrant as being
compscd in the Samaritan dialect of whlcg there am few
rpcrimcnr ovtridc the Targum. Others are, a book of legrnds
of Moses in Anbic. and a commenrmry by Ibrrhim 'of thrsoni
of Jacob,' from which extracts have bacn given by Geiger.
The liturgies form a very large and important branch
of the literature. The eariiest pieces ivhlch can be
Litnrgies, dated with any certainty, are those
of Markah and Ammm, composed in
Aramaic in the fourth century A,". at
the instance of Baba Rabba, a sheikh of some eminence
in his time, who, according to El-Tblideh, resfoird the
services of the rynagowe. There are called par exrellrnrc
the Defter or ' book.' The later ~ortionr are in
"
Finally. there are several letters in existence, written
by Samaritans to scholars in Europe. l'he firrt of
these. in 1589, war an answer to one from Jor. Scaliger;
others were addressed to Huntington. Ludolf, De Sacy,
Kautzsch (in 1884). and recently to the present writer.
The Samaritan lnngnage proper is a dialect of Western
Aramaic ar commonly spoken in Palestine, and ir found
Sd. Language, in the Tarym and in the earlier
liturgies. It may best be compared
with the Aramaic of the Jerusalem Talmud, and with
Palertin~an Syriac. The 'Cuthzan' wordr formerly
supposed to he found in it. have been rhown by Kohn
to he nlortly corruption5 of good Aramaic forms.
The native dialect probably began to be supplemented
by Arabic soon after the Mohammedan conquest of
Syria, and war no longer commonly understood in
the tenth centmy, although used for ritual purposes.
From that time onward Arabic has been the language
nsed both in ordinary life and for literary purposes.
The later liturgies, hoivever (and the letters), arewritten
in a corrnpt Hebrrw.