Fact-Checking the Torah -- Samaritan locations

Olrik’s decaying horizon is one of the things we find in Samaritan Pentateuch.

Genesis 10:19 is one example.

In Jewish Torah, this verse identifies the boundaries of the K’naani as including the cities of the plain, Grar, Azah, and Lasha. That derives from the period when the cities of the plain still flourished, the time of Ebla and Troy II. The Assyrians destroyed Grar.

Samaritan scripture completely rewrites this verse. It copies the boundaries in Genesis 15:18 promised to Avraham and his descendants. Then it copies a phrase, yam ha-acharon, which appears in Deuteronomy 11:24 and 34:2 as part of the boundaries of the territory that the Israelites took control of when they entered the Holy Land. 

We can understand this as the effect of the Kutean importation. As newcomers, the Kuteans had no idea where the cities of the plain or Grar had been. To make them understand the boundaries, the priest sent back by the Assyrians used landmarks they could understand. Repeating text from other parts of the same material did that.

Another example crops up after Deuteronomy 5:18. Verse 18 is the last of the Ten Commandments. Samaritan Pentateuch follows this with a stretch of text that basically comes from Deuteronomy 27:2-8, except for one thing.

OK, five things. At the end, it specifies where the whitewashed stones will be set up, the ones with the law written on them. Part 1 says this site is west of the Yarden; part 2 says in the Aravah; part 3 says next to Gilgal. So far, so good; the book of Joshua tells about the first camp at Gilgal, east of Y’richo, where he circumcised all the generation born in the wilderness after crossing the Yarden (traveling west of course). This is where Jewish Joshua says the stones were set up.

Parts 4 and 5 are the problem; they both identify locations near the twin mountains, Grizim where the Samaritans had a temple and Eyval, where Deuteronomy says to put up the whitewashed altar with the law written on it. That is kilometers northwest of Y’richo.

Again, the Kuteans had never been near the Aravah; it was conquered by the Assyrians before they deported the Israelites and even the priest might not have known where it was. There was no way to explain to the nascent Samaritans that there were two Gilgals.

Third example. Deuteronomy 34:1-3 lists place names shown to Mosheh from the top of Pisgah before his death. In Samaritan, most of the details are missing. Gilad is missing; it was conquered by the Assyrians before they imported the Kuteans to Samaria. Dan, Naftali, everything but the end of verse 3 naming Tsoar (the smallest of the Cities of the Plain, the one that survived) is gone. It is replaced by text that also appears in Genesis 15:19. By the time the Kuteans were imported, this was all Assyrian territory and the tribal divisions had been swept away. It was easier to understand and easier to remember text that was repeated elsewhere in the material.

Von Gall identifies no deviations in the manuscripts or fragments that have these verses; none of them have the information that Jewish Torah has, although they might have divergent spellings. The same is true of the Samaritan Aramaic Targum and Prof. Haseeb Shehadeh’s edition of Abu Said’s Arabic Version.

All three divergences are perfectly understandable when you read Kings II 17:24-28 and realize that the Kuteans had no clue to the geo-history south of Assyria. The differences are also perfectly understandable if the northerners carried on an oral tradition, which languished over the centuries, such that the priest sent to Samaria could not explain these details of the tradition he brought with him. If they were still in there and had not been forgotten already.

But there's another dimension to geographical information in oral narratives, and that's next week's post.