Friday, April 13, 2018

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Samaritan narratives

The issue of sharing narratives only between cultures that are “us” has important consequences for Samaritan Pentateuch, which I already discussed in Lost in Translation from a language viewpoint. There I trashed the “6,000 differences” urban legend.
There are differences between Samaritan Pentateuch and Jewish Torah. But they have 100% of the same narratives. This is the converse of what I just said about different cultures not sharing narratives.
I’m sure there are people who believe the Samaritans literally copied Jewish Torah. Two problems with that.
They would have to wait until there was a text to copy. That means waiting until after the Babylonian Captivity.  At the time, the Jews did not consider the Samaritans “us” and would not let them help build the Second Temple. About the time of the rejection, the Samaritans built their own temple near the Twin Peaks. When the Seleucids of Syria tried to attack Egypt through the Holy Land, the Jews supported the Ptolemies of Egypt; the Samaritans supported the Seleucids. After the Hasmoneans defeated the Seleucid Antiochus Epiphanes, they razed the Samaritan temple. Enemies don’t generally copy texts from each other during centuries of conflict.
Second problem. It’s not an exact copy. Some of the differences are the exact kind of things Olrik predicts and I’ll discuss them later. Others reflect how text gets homogenized a) as it transmits in an oral environment and b) as the culture transmitting it loses contact with its roots. This is part of the work of Angel Saenz-Badillos. In other words, once again, linguistics agrees with Axel Olrik, and this time it identifies that Samaritans adopted the narratives in an oral environment. (There’s a third issue in the changes that I discuss in a project called The Real Difference.)
Remember the literacy issue I brought up over a year ago. It would have applied to the Samaritans as well as the Jews. It’s natural to assume that the priest who went back to teach the Samaritans (Kings II 17:24-28) had to teach them orally, because he and they spoke Assyrian, but they neither spoke nor read Hebrew.  And as we know, it didn’t completely work. In fact, it didn’t work to the extent that the Samaritan male lineages now contain only genes they got from their Israelite progenitors. The Samaritans eventually rejected everybody with a male Assyrian ancestor, unlike Jewish culture which has long accepted male converts. (In fact scuttlebutt has it that Shemaiah and Avtalion, both heads of the Sanhedrin in the late BCEs, were descended from Assyrian converts to Judaism.)
So while Samaritan Pentateuch has 100% of the same narratives as Jewish Torah, it has about 90% of the same words. I’ll discuss some of the differences later because of common features that are examples of Olrik’s principles. And when it comes to modal morphology, a feature that distinguishes Biblical Hebrew from its post-Captivity descendants, Samaritan Pentateuch is about 80% identical with Jewish Torah. This is 100% the opposite of the Septuagint, which never gets modal morphology.
Now the counter-example. Remember the discussion of Enuma Elish which said the text would not have been read by the ancestors of the Jews and that says the Jewish creation story is not a copy of Enuma Elish. The wording in the two narratives is also 100% different. A 100% difference is not the same story. Whereas a 90% identity in words alone reinforces that Samaritan Pentateuch and Jewish Torah have shared roots in an oral environment.
When I get to the other discussion about wording, you’ll see that once again, Olrik rules. Meanwhile, everything I just said has implications for DH.

No comments:

Post a Comment