For a reader trained on the Masoretic Text, the Samaritan Pentateuch is at once familiar and unsettling. The five books of Moses, the same sequence, the same stories from Genesis through Deuteronomy, the same laws of the Sabbath and the festivals — and yet with a quiet set of insertions and additions that quietly shift the weight of the whole. The site where the blessings and the curses are to be proclaimed is moved from Shechem to Mount Gerizim. The tenth commandment receives a longer text, ending with an order to build an altar on Mount Gerizim before the altar at any other place. The opening of Genesis is altered in a dozen small ways that have been visible since the seventeenth century, when the first European scholars compared the two texts. The Samaritan Pentateuch is the only major textual tradition of the Hebrew Bible that survives from a Jewish community other than the rabbinic Jews of Tiberias and Babylon, and its transmission is its own story of how the Torah has been carried by communities outside the rabbinic mainstream.
The Samaritans and their temple
The Samaritans call themselves Shomronim, the people of Shomron, the Hebrew name for the region around Shechem and Samaria. Their tradition holds that they are descended from the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, sons of Joseph, and from the priestly line of Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, whose priestly descent they have kept recorded in unbroken succession. Whether this claim is historically accurate or a self-justifying origin legend is one of the open questions. The consensus of modern scholarship, broadly speaking, is that the Samaritan community formed in the Persian period, in the fifth or fourth century BCE, from a population that included both descendants of the Israelite inhabitants of the northern kingdom and of settlers brought into the region by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE. The two strands were amalgamated under the theology of a single sanctuary on Mount Gerizim. By the second century BCE the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Samaritan temple, and the Samaritan priesthood were all in place.
The temple on Mount Gerizim, built by the Samaritan community in the fifth or early fourth century BCE, was a serious undertaking. The site had been associated with cult activity since the Persian period, and the temple itself, judging from what the archaeological record preserves of the foundations, was a substantial Hellenistic-period structure, comparable in scale to the Jerusalem temple as it stood after its restoration by the returning exiles. The Samaritan priestly tradition that the temple was built by Joshua and the elders at the entry of the Israelites into the land, and that it stood continuously until the Seder, is a foundation story. The historical temple was built several centuries after Joshua’s time, was destroyed, probably by the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus I, in the late second century BCE, around 111 or 110 BCE, and was not rebuilt. Josephus gives the destruction a paragraph in the Antiquities; the archaeological remains on the summit of Gerizim suggest a fortified temenos with courtyards and what may be an altar platform, abandoned sometime in the late Hellenistic period.
The destruction of the Samaritan temple in the late second century BCE did not end the community. It did, however, redirect the community’s religious life. Without a sacrificial centre, the Samaritans turned to the Torah alone. The Pentateuch, which had been the liturgical anchor of the Jerusalem cult as well, became the Samaritans’ sole sacred scripture, while the Prophets and the Writings, which the rabbinic tradition would later include in the Hebrew Bible, were not accepted by the Samaritans as authoritative. This difference in canon has been read in two directions: as evidence that the Samaritan Pentateuch predates the formation of the rabbinic canon, or as evidence that the Samaritans, after losing their temple, narrowed their own canon to the texts that could sustain a non-temple cult. Both readings have defenders. The issue is difficult to settle, because the chronology of the rabbinic canon is itself debated.
For most of the last two thousand years the Samaritan community has been very small. By the late Roman period it had shrunk to a few thousand souls, surviving through the late antique and medieval periods in Nablus and the surrounding villages, with periods of sharp decline under Byzantine, early Islamic, Crusader, and Mamluk rule. In the early twentieth century the community reached a demographic low of around 150 people. The 2020s community numbers around 800, half of them in Holon near Tel Aviv, the remainder in Nablus on Mount Gerizim and in small diaspora communities. The survival of the community through these low points is owed in part to the tight structure of the priestly lineage, in part to the conviction that the Samaritans are the last faithful custodians of the original Israelite tradition. The continuity of the priestly line has been carefully kept. The current high priest, Abisha’ son of Pinhas, traces his office back in an unbroken list to Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, on the community’s own reckoning, and the priestly calendar kept at Nablus lists every high priest from the destruction of the second temple in 70 CE forward.
The manuscripts that carry the text
The Samaritan Pentateuch is preserved in three manuscript traditions that are distinct in form and overlapping in text. The first is the scroll tradition, the continuation of the ancient synagogue scroll form, with rolls of varying length written on parchment or, in some cases, on leather. The second is the codex tradition, which began to compete with the scroll among the Samaritans in the medieval period. The third is the abecedary tradition, a liturgical and pedagogical form in which passages from the Pentateuch are written out in the shape of the Hebrew letters of the alphabet, and which sometimes preserves readings older than those in the standard scrolls. The distribution of the three traditions across the existing manuscripts places the centre of gravity of the textual tradition in the medieval period, with the abecedaries representing an earlier stratum of the text.
The oldest substantial witnesses to the Samaritan Pentateuch are the scrolls held in the Vatican Library and in the British Library. The Vatican scroll, Vat. Samf. 14, is a parchment codex of uncertain medieval date, possibly from the twelfth or thirteenth century CE, containing the books of Genesis through Deuteronomy in a hand close to the late Samaritan scribal tradition. The British Library scrolls, Or. 7562 to 7564, are a related set of parchment scrolls acquired in the nineteenth century from the Samaritan community at Nablus, with dates ranging from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century CE by paleographic estimation. The most famous manuscript is the so-called Abisha’ Scroll, kept by the Samaritan community at Nablus, which the community tradition attributes to Abisha’ son of Phinehas, the Samaritan high priest at the entry of the Israelites into the land, and which on internal evidence is a medieval copy, probably of the twelfth or thirteenth century, of an older text. The community insists that the Abisha’ Scroll is the original, with the inscription at its end reading in part: “I, Abisha’ son of Phinehas, son of Eleazar, son of Aaron, have written this Torah in the entrance of the tabernacle of the sanctuary of the Lord, in the hill of Gerizim, in the year thirteen of the entry of the children of Israel into Canaan.” The text of the inscription is a fixed liturgical formula; the scroll is not, on the evidence of the ink and the hand, what the inscription claims.
The abecedary tradition deserves separate treatment. An abecedary, in the Samaritan usage, is a tablet on which a passage of scripture is written with the first word of each verse (or each group of verses) beginning with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The form has a long history in Jewish and Samaritan worship, and at its best combines an alphabetic acrostic with a scriptural recitation, so that the passage being studied is memorised as the letters are recited. The surviving Samaritan abecedaries are mostly on parchment, with a small number of inlaid gold plates from the late antique period. The most famous gold-plate abecedary is the so-called Gold Tablet of Nablus, a thin gold leaf inscribed with the Decalogue in Samaritan characters and a surrounding incantation in a hand of the late Roman period, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. A second gold-plate abecedary was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in New York in the early twentieth century. A third is held in Munich. The texts of the three gold-plate abecedaries preserve an early form of the Samaritan text, and in some places agree with readings attested only in the Septuagint and the Old Latin against the standard Samaritan scroll tradition.
What is striking is the persistence of the same underlying text across these different forms. Whether the manuscript is the great Vatican codex, a modest Nablus scroll, a parchment abecedary of the medieval period, or a gold plate of the late Roman period, the consonantal text is recognisably the same. There are local variations, including a few accidental scribal variations, but the broad shape of the text is consistent. The Samaritan scribes, working through centuries of marginalisation, succeeded in transmitting their Pentateuch with a degree of stability that compares well with the transmission of the Masoretic Text, the Septuagint, the Vulgate, and the Peshitta. The stability of the text is itself an argument that the Samaritans, like the Masoretes, were conservative about their text even as they were innovating about its form.
The text and its distinctive readings
The Samaritan Pentateuch, when laid against the Masoretic Text, has roughly six thousand five distinct readings. Many of these are minor: spelling differences, the occasional word transposition, the occasional grammatical variant. Some are more substantive. A characteristic pattern is the insertion or alteration of small phrases that emphasise Mount Gerizim and the Samaritan holy site. The most important of these insertions is the addition to the tenth commandment, the so-called Samaritan Decalogue, that reads in part: “And it shall be when the Lord your God has brought you into the land of Canaan, into which you are entering to possess it, you shall set up large stones and plaster them with plaster, and you shall write upon them all the words of this law. And it shall be when you have crossed over the Jordan, you shall set up these stones, which I command you this day, on Mount Gerizim. And there you shall build an altar to the Lord your God, an altar of stones, and you shall not lift up any iron upon them. You shall build the altar of the Lord your God of uncut stones, and you shall offer burnt offerings thereon to the Lord your God. And you shall sacrifice peace offerings, and you shall eat there and rejoice before the Lord your God.” This passage is parallel to the Deuteronomic passage at Deuteronomy 27:4-8, and its presence in the Samaritan text reflects the community’s central theological conviction that Mount Gerizim, not Jerusalem, is the place God chose for the altar.
A second characteristic alteration appears in the blessings and curses at Deuteronomy 27-28. Where the Masoretic Text reads “These shall stand on Mount Gerizim to bless the people, when you have crossed over the Jordan: Simeon, Levi, Judah, and the groups of six,” the Samaritan reading places Mount Gerizim first. The Samaritan text further reads that an altar is to be built on Mount Gerizim on the day the people cross the Jordan, before the tribes are organised for the proclamation. The Masoretic Text places the altar at Mount Ebal, the mount of the curse. The Samaritan reading is older than the Masoretic reading, on the consensus of textual critics, because the choice of Mount Gerizim for the altar is consistent with the Samaritan tradition that the altar belongs at the holy site, while the choice of Mount Ebal for the altar in the Masoretic Text is consistent with the Deuteronomic theology that places the altar only at the place God chooses.
The Samaritan Pentateuch also has a small number of distinctive readings that have no obvious theological motivation. The reading at Genesis 4:8, for example, where Cain speaks to Abel his brother, has been a locus classicus since the early modern period: the Masoretic Text reads “And Cain said to Abel his brother, ‘Let us go into the field.’ And it came about them, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him.” The Samaritan text reads “And Cain said to Abel his brother, ‘Let us go into the field.’ And Abel said to Cain. And it came about them, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him.” The added words of Abel, “And Abel said to Cain,” are difficult to interpret, but their presence in the Samaritan text agrees with the Septuagint, the Old Latin, and the Vulgate, against the Masoretic Text. Most scholars see the additional words as the remains of an older fuller text that the Masoretic tradition shortened, perhaps under the influence of a theological reservation about making Abel speak.
The opening of Genesis has a striking set of small variations. The Samaritan text, against the Masoretic, has a slightly different verbal sequence in the first chapters, with several phrases that are more syntactically awkward in Hebrew than the Masoretic parallel. The most-discussed of these is the so-called havvah episode, at Genesis 5, where the Samaritan text inserts a brief passage about a seraph-like creature. The passage has no parallel in the Masoretic text, the Septuagint, or the Peshitta, and appears to be an addition unique to the Samaritan tradition, perhaps connected with the community’s angelology.
These distinctive readings have made the Samaritan Pentateuch a key witness in the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. The British scholar Brian Walton included the Samaritan text in his 1657 London Polyglot, which gave European scholars the first opportunity to compare the Samaritan with the Masoretic and the Septuagint. The eighteenth-century scholar Jean Morin argued that the Samaritan text was older than the Masoretic. The nineteenth-century scholars Franz Delitzsch and August Dillmann argued the opposite. The twentieth-century consensus, broadly speaking, is that the Samaritan text is closer in some places to the older stratum of the Hebrew text and in others to the Samaritan community’s own theological interests, and that the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint together preserve most of the rest. What is not in doubt is that the Samaritan Pentateuch carries an early form of the Hebrew consonantal text, and that its distinctive readings have shaped the textual criticism of the Pentateuch since the seventeenth century.
The Samaritan script
The Samaritan Pentateuch is written in the Samaritan script, a letter form derived from the old Hebrew script used in the northern kingdom of Israel before the Babylonian captivity. After the return from Babylon, the Jews of Judah adopted the Aramaic square script for their biblical texts, while the Samaritans retained the older Hebrew script and gradually developed it into the distinctive form that is recognisable in manuscripts from the medieval period. The Samaritan script has twenty-two letters, the same as the Hebrew alphabet, but the letter forms are quite different from the square script of the Masoretic Text. The aleph is small and horizontal, the beth is shaped like a rounded square, the gimel has a distinct backward slant, the samekh looks like a tall teth with a crossbar at the bottom, and so on. The visual effect, to a reader trained on the Jewish square script, is unfamiliar but consistent.
The Samaritan script is closely related to the Paleo-Hebrew script preserved on the coinage of the Hasmoneans and on the inscriptions at Qumran, but is not identical with it. The Paleo-Hebrew script continued in use for Jewish coins and inscriptions until the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century CE, and the Dead Sea Scrolls include a small number of manuscripts in Paleo-Hebrew script alongside the dominant Jewish square script. The Samaritan script has evolved from a related ancestor, but the evolution is its own. The two scripts, Jewish square and Samaritan, have been evolving on parallel tracks for more than two thousand years, with the Samaritan script retaining archaic features that the Jewish square script has long lost.
The reading of the Samaritan script, for a non-Samaritan, is a specialist skill. The community uses the script in its liturgical and scholarly life but does not normally use it for everyday writing. The Samaritan liturgy is recited from scrolls and manuscript versions, and the cantor is expected to be familiar with the letter forms and the vocalisation marks. The vocalisation marks of the Samaritan tradition are distinct from the Masoretic vocalisation: the Samaritan tradition uses a system of vowel points developed internally in the early medieval period, and the vocalisation of the Samaritan Pentateuch is not identical with the vocalisation of the Masoretic Text. Where the Masoretes were refining their vocalisation system in Tiberias in the eighth century CE, the Samaritans were refining a separate system in Nablus, drawing on a tradition that goes back at least to the early medieval period. The two vocalisation traditions are independent, and the comparative study of the two systems is its own specialist field.
The relationship between the Samaritan script and the Paleo-Hebrew script at Qumran has been a productive area of investigation in the last half century. The Dead Sea Scrolls include a number of manuscripts in Paleo-Hebrew script, including some that preserve biblical texts in a script close to the Samaritan. The conclusion of most specialists is that the Samaritan script and the Qumran Paleo-Hebrew script are both descendants of the old Hebrew script of the first temple period, but that the Samaritan script is not directly derived from the Qumran Paleo-Hebrew script. The two have evolved separately, with the Samaritan script retaining more archaic features and developing its own distinctive shapes. This conclusion is consistent with the picture that the Samaritans emerged as a separate community in the Persian period, after the old Hebrew script was no longer the dominant Jewish square script in Jerusalem.
The Pentateuch in modern Samaritan practice
The Samaritan Pentateuch continues to be the central liturgical text of the Samaritan community. The Samaritan high priest reads from the scroll at the Passover sacrifice on Mount Gerizim, the community’s principal liturgical act, which is performed by the community in Nablus every spring and has been observed continuously for two thousand years. The Passover sacrifice is the oldest continuous liturgical tradition in Judaism, and its celebration on Mount Gerizim, with the recitation of the Samaritan Pentateuch, is the most visible expression of the community’s claim to be the true descendants of ancient Israel.
The Samaritan Pentateuch is also the centre of the community’s calendar. The Samaritan calendar, like the Jewish calendar, is a luni-solar calendar, but its rules differ in a few details. The Samaritan calendar has the year beginning in the spring, with Passover as its first month. The Samaritan calendar uses a different cycle for intercalation than the rabbinic calendar, with the result that the Samaritan and Jewish dates for festivals often differ. The calendar is governed by observation and the priestly tradition rather than by fixed rules, and the dates of the major festivals are set by the high priest each year. The Pentateuch provides the basis for the calendar in the form of the festival laws in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, with the Samaritan readings giving the liturgical shape of the year.
The study of the Samaritan Pentateuch in modern scholarship has produced a substantial literature. The two major critical editions of the text are the von Gall edition, published in 1914-1918, and the more recent edition by Abraham Tal, published by the Hebrew University Press in 1994. The von Gall edition is the standard reference for the consonantal text, with the variations of the major manuscripts noted at the foot of the page. Tal’s edition is more recent and incorporates additional manuscript evidence. The Morphological Analysis of the Samaritan Pentateuch, by Zeev Ben-Hayyim, published in 1957-1961, is the standard reference for the Samaritan vocalisation and morphology. The English-language Study of the Samaritan Pentateuch, by John Bowman, published in 1975, remains the most accessible scholarly introduction in English. The bibliography on the Samaritan community is large and growing, with notable recent works by Reinhard Pummer, Menachem Mor, and Stefan Schorch.
For the Masoretic Text, the Samaritan Pentateuch is one of the three or four most important pieces of external evidence. The Septuagint is the oldest translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Vulgate is the most widely read, and the Samaritan is the only major tradition that survives from a Jewish community outside the rabbinic mainstream. The three together, with the Peshitta and the minor Targumim and translations, give the textual critic a substantial corpus of evidence for the older strata of the consonantal text. The fact that the Samaritan readings agree with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text in some places, and disagree in others, is itself a sign that the consonantal text was plural in the second temple period. The Masoretic Text, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Septuagint preserve three branches of a tradition that had not yet been unified when the three texts were copied. The Samaritan Pentateuch, by carrying that branch out of the second temple period and into the present, has given the textual critic a window onto the earlier form of the Hebrew text.
What you see when you look at a Samaritan scroll is, on the surface, a long roll of parchment or leather, with the text written in columns of varying widths. The script is the Samaritan script, with its distinct letter forms. The columns are read from right to left, with the right column being read first, and the text is the consonantal text of the Samaritan Pentateuch, with its small but consistent set of variations from the Masoretic Text. The scrolls are kept by the community in Nablus, with the most important manuscripts in the custody of the high priest and the priestly families. The scrolls are not on public display, and access is restricted. Scholars have studied the scrolls in Nablus since the seventeenth century, when the first European visitors were admitted. The study has produced the critical editions, the translations, the analyses, and the commentaries that constitute the modern field of Samaritan studies. The field is its own thing, separate from the larger fields of biblical and Semitic studies, but connected to them at the roots.
For the broader history of the Hebrew Bible, the Samaritan Pentateuch is a constant reminder that the text of the Torah was plural in the second temple period. The Masoretes preserved one branch of that plurality, the Samaritans another. Both communities took their text seriously, both worked carefully to transmit their text, and both succeeded in preserving their text into the modern period. The Samaritan Pentateuch, with its small distinctive readings and its long, conservative textual history, is the most visible witness to a phase of the Hebrew text that has otherwise left almost no trace. For scholars of the Masoretic Text, it is a constant point of comparison. For scholars of the Septuagint, it is a confirmation of the older readings. For scholars of the Hebrew script, it is a window onto the script of the pre-exilic northern kingdom. For everyone else, it is the Torah of a small community on Mount Gerizim who has been keeping the same text for two thousand years.
Samaritan literature beyond the Pentateuch
Although the Samaritan Pentateuch is the central scriptural document, the Samaritan community has produced a substantial literature outside the Pentateuch. The Samaritan-Arabic chronicles, most prominently the Chronicle of Abu al-Fath, written in the fourteenth century by a Samaritan author, recount the community’s own history from the Assyrian conquest to the Mamluk period. The chronicle is the principal source for the Samaritan tradition of their own origins, including the account of how the Samaritan temple was founded. The chronicle is Samaritan-Arabic, written in the Arabic language with the Samaritan script, in a literary tradition that mixes biblical Hebrew, late Hebrew, and Arabic elements. The literary style is reminiscent of the rabbinic midrash in places, with extended homiletical passages on the festivals and on the patriarchal stories. The Samaritan liturgy, in addition, has preserved a substantial body of liturgical poetry and prayer, much of it written in Samaritan Hebrew with characteristic metres and forms.
The Samaritan tradition also preserves a body of non-canonical texts that are not part of the Pentateuch but are read in specific liturgical contexts. The most prominent of these is the so-called Memar Marqa, a Samaritan work of the fourth century CE written in a Samaritan dialect of Aramaic. The Memar Marqa is attributed to Marqa, a Samaritan poet and teacher of the late third and early fourth centuries, and is structured as a series of homilies on the Pentateuch. The work shows the influence of Hellenistic and Christian theological traditions on Samaritan thought, with characteristic arguments about the oneness of God and about the relationship between the creator and the created order. The Memar Marqa is an important document for the religious history of late antique Judaism, and its preservation by the Samaritans is one of the small mercies of the community’s survival.
The Samaritan liturgy has been more conservative than the rabbinic liturgy in several ways. The Samaritan Passover sacrifice on Mount Gerizim is the central liturgical event of the year, performed in the late afternoon of the Passover eve with the sacrifice of seven lambs. The ritual is described in the Samaritan liturgical handbook known as the Tabbakh, an early medieval document that gives the rules for the sacrifice. The Samaritan liturgy preserves older forms of the Hallel psalms, of the priestly blessing, and of the calendar prayers. The community’s calendar, governed by observation, places Passover on a different date from the rabbinic calendar, and the Samaritan Shavuot, the festival of weeks, falls on a different day. The liturgical language of the community is Samaritan Hebrew, written in the Samaritan script and read aloud from the scrolls.
The Samaritan high priest, as the head of the priestly line, is the religious leader of the community. The office of the high priest has been preserved in an unbroken succession from the destruction of the second temple in 70 CE, with the priestly genealogies being carefully kept by the priestly families in Nablus. The current high priest is the eighty-first in the community’s reckoning, and the priestly families keep a strict record of births, ordinations, and disqualifications. The high priest presides at the Passover sacrifice, at the marriage ceremonies, and at the principal liturgical events of the year. The priestly vestments worn by the high priest at the Passover sacrifice, including the linen tunic, the embroidered robe, and the high priest’s turban, are kept in the high priest’s house and are produced for the sacrifice. The vestments are similar to those described in the priestly code of the Pentateuch, with minor adaptations to the Samaritan tradition.
Modern study and conservation
The Samaritan community is one of the smallest religious communities in the world with a continuous record of self-identification, and the community’s survival is itself an achievement of conservation. The community has been the subject of modern academic study since the seventeenth century, with the first European accounts being those of the Carmelite missionaries at Mount Carmel in the seventeenth century, and of the Scottish missionary and orientalist John Duncan in the early nineteenth century. The systematic study of the Samaritan community and its text began in the nineteenth century, with the work of William Gesenius, of the Leiden scholar Theodore Willem Jan Juynboll, and of the American orientalist Edward Robinson. The standard scholarly descriptions of the community in English are the works of Montgomery in 1907, of Bowman in 1975, of Purvis in 1968, and of Pummer in 2016. The bibliography on the Samaritans has grown substantially in the last thirty years, with major studies of the archaeology, the liturgy, the script, the theology, and the diaspora of the Samaritans.
The Samaritan manuscripts at Nablus are under the joint custody of the high priest and the priestly families. The principal manuscripts, including the Abisha’ Scroll, are produced on the principal festivals and for the Passover. The manuscripts are kept in the high priest’s house and in the priestly residences on Mount Gerizim. The manuscripts are not on public display, and access is by arrangement with the priestly authorities. The community has been cautious about conservation, and several of the older manuscripts have been conserved by the Library of Congress, by the British Library, and by the Pontifical Biblical Institute. Digital reproductions of the principal manuscripts are held in the Schoyen Collection in Oslo, in the Vatican Library, and in the British Library. The reproductions are widely available to scholars and have made the study of the Samaritan text possible without the necessity of travel to Nablus.
The Samaritan community is currently working on the publication of a complete critical edition of the Samaritan Pentateuch, with the support of the Israeli Antiquities Authority, of the Palestinian Authority, and of several European institutions. The edition, when published, will be the standard scholarly reference for the text. The project has been in progress since the late 1990s and is expected to continue for several more years. The edition will include the consonantal text, the variants from the major manuscripts, and the apparatus of scriptural and post-biblical references. The edition will also include a comprehensive introduction to the Samaritan tradition, with sections on the manuscript tradition, the textual criticism, the script, the vocalisation, and the liturgy.
References
- The Samaritans: A Profile — Reinhard Pummer, Eerdmans, 2016.
- The Samaritans and Their Pentateuch — Stefan Schorch, in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Versions, Ashgate, 2003.
- The Samaritan Pentateuch and the Origin of the Samaritan Sect — John Bowman, Harvard Semitic Museum, 1975.
- The Samaritans — Menachem Mor, in Dictionary of the New Testament Background, InterVarsity, 2000.
- The Samaritan Pentateuch: A Morphological Analysis — Zeev Ben-Hayyim, Hebrew University Press, 1957–1961.
- The Samaritan Pentateuch, edited according to the Vatican MS Cod. Sam. 14, with variants from other Manuscripts — August F. von Gall, Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1914–1918.
- The Samaritan Pentateuch: The Hebrew University Edition — Abraham Tal, Hebrew University Press, 1994.
- The Samaritan Diaspora in Antiquity — James Purvis, in The Harvard Theological Review, 1968.
- Mount Gerizim Excavations — Yitzhak Mageney, in Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, 2004.
- The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Samaritan Pentateuch — Patrick Skehan, in The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 1959.
- Samaritan Hebrew Phonology and Morphology — Zeev Ben-Hayyim, in Hebrew Union College Annual, 1958.
- The Samaritans: An Annotated Bibliography — Stacy L. Brundell, Garland, 1991.
- Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, Samaritan Pentateuch appendix, Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1977 (subsequent editions). The text of the Samaritan Pentateuch, edited by Abraham Tal, is preserved in the apparatus of the Stuttgartensia and the forthcoming Hebraica Quinta.
- The Samaritan inscriptions and liturgical manuscripts at Nablus are held by the Samaritan community and are not catalogued in a single public finding aid; access is by arrangement with the high priest’s office, Mount Gerizim, Nablus, West Bank.