Wednesday, March 25, 2015

The Sectarian Samaritan Pentateuch?

I learned recently that my article "Is the Samaritan Pentateuch a Sectarian Text?" has appeared in the OT journal Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft. The abstract is below. You can find the full-text at my academia.edu page.
Scholars routinely describe the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) as a sectarian text, owing to the presence of a few variants in the SP in comparison with the Masoretic Text (MT). These particular readings are thought to highlight the Gerizim cult in a way peculiarly appropriate to Samaritanism and inappropriate for Jewish texts. But scholars now interpret some of the most prominent ›sectarian‹ elements of the SP as not sectarian at all, even while continuing to label the SP tendentious and sectarian. This paper examines the reasons for applying these terms to the SP and queries the usefulness of describing it in this manner.

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