THE PENTATEUCH OF THE SAMARITANS 



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not only write Hebrew differently from the Jews, they also read 

 it differently. Although Hebrew is rich in gutturals, as are all 

 Semitic tongues, the Samaritans when they read the Tor ah or 

 the Aramaic Targum omit them ; or what is the same thing, 

 pronounce them all as if aleph. When eight hundred years ago 

 Benjamin of Tudela visited Nablus, he remarked on this pecu- 

 liarity of the Samaritans. It may be that even in the Gospels 

 evidence for this may be found. The Woman of Samaria may 

 have recognized our Lord to be Jew because the first word He 

 would use in requesting a drink begins with a guttural : if He 

 made the request in Aramaic, which He probably would, " Hahi 

 lay mayo eshthe.'" Striking evidence of this is afforded by the 

 Samaritan hymns, many of which are alphabetic, some supposed 

 to date even to pre-Christian times ; very few of these do not 

 blunder in the position of the gutturals, many begin with ain 

 instead of aleph. There is evidence enough that all along the 

 Jews pronounced the gutturals. Indeed, they seem to have had 

 a greater number anciently than in more recent times. 



The tendency which leads a person, reading aloud from a 

 dead language, to assimilate the sound of the vowels and con- 

 sonants to those of the living language which he ordinarily uses, 

 is well known. The effect of this tendency is seen in the different 

 ways in which the Classical languages are pronounced in England 

 and in Germany. But in the case before us the tendency has 

 been resisted. For more than a millennium the Samaritans 

 have been surrounded by those who speak Arabic. It is now 

 and has for centuries been their language for all ordinary purposes ; 

 very few of them know Hebrew at all. Yet Arabic is richly 

 endowed with gutturals — more so than either Hebrew or Aramaic. 



When did the Samaritans adopt this mode of reading Hebrew ? 

 It could not have been under the " Rule of the Children 

 of Ishmael," to give the Mohammedan supremacy its Samaritan 

 designation. As we have seen, Arabic would naturally have 

 tended to increase the prominence of these sounds. For nearly 

 thirteen centuries the Samaritans have lived under Mohammedan 

 rule. For more than nine centuries they were under Greek rule. 

 So far as language was concerned, the Koman Empire was a 

 continuation of that of the Seleucids. The Greeks had certainly 

 three of the four gutturals chi and the soft and rough breathings. 

 Moreover, they seem to have pronounced gamma as the Arabs 

 do ghain. We have seen reason to believe that during the 

 Grseco-Roman rule the Samaritans did not use the gutturals. 



