THE PENTATEUCH OF THE SAMARITANS. 



173 



and again in xxxiv, 23, the Samaritan reads Ha-Aron (the Ark) 

 where the Hebrew Ha-Adon (the Lord). The Samaritan reading 

 is both unsupported by the LXX, and violates the grammatical rule 

 that a noun in the construct state cannot take the definite article ; 

 yet the variation in two separate passages makes it unlikely that this 

 was an accidental confusion of letters that are alike. I cannot help 

 thinking that the alteration was deliberately made because already it 

 had become customary in reading to substitute Adonai for the 

 sacred name JHWH, and the combination Ha-Adon Adonai sounds 

 awkward.* . 



As to the agreement of Samaritan and LXX, if we only take isolated 

 instances, it is easy to come to the conclusion that where these two 

 agree against the Hebrew, they must be right and the Hebrew 

 wrong : a full and systematic comparison of all the variations (such 

 as I have been at work on for the last five years) leads to a different 

 conclusion. In the great majority of instances, where the Samaritan 

 differs, the LXX agrees with the Hebrew, and where the LXX differs 

 the Samaritan agrees ; and this very large amount of disagreement 

 shows that the two texts are independent. At the same time, 

 there are many passages in which the Samaritan and LXX agree 

 against the Hebrew, and these are too numerous and varied to have 

 been arrived at independently. The only reasonable explanation 

 of this is that both Samaritan and LXX are based upon an earlier 

 text which in a good many particulars differed from that which 

 is now received. To have affected the Samaritan, that must have 

 been a Hebrew text, and a careful examination of the character of 

 its divergences tends to show that it was not the true original, but 

 a corruption of the original from which the Massoretic is derived. 

 Even then if the Samaritans could have obtained their Torah from 

 the expelled priest Manasseh (and Dr. Thomson's arguments against 

 the possibility of this are exceedingly weighty), still the Hebrew 

 text underlying it must go back behind the time of Ezra. The 

 probability is that it was the Torah used by the Israelite priest who 

 instructed the Assyrian colonists in Hezekiah's day (2 Kings, xvii, 

 28), and that may even point to its being the text current among 

 the northern tribes from the time of the disruption in Rehoboam's 

 reign (see Starling Place of Truth, pp. 66f. and 90). 



* See my Starting Place of Truths p. 32f. 



