THE SAMAKITAN PENTATEUCH. 



201 



reason why the Samaritan text should not have come down from 

 Jeroboam's days, except that he does not believe there was any 

 Pentateuch in those days. " We think," he says, " it nmst be 

 taken for granted that the Pentateuch could certainly have 

 passed from tlie Jews to the Samaritans, on the supposition 

 tliat tlie Jews themselves had it in the form in which we now 

 use it." Let us see what Kennicott, the last real investigator of 

 tlie subject, says. These are the words in wdiich he concludes 

 his argument : " In the history of the Hebrew text . . it 

 was shown that the Pentateuch was placed by Moses by the 

 side of the ark, and copies afterwards taken for the use of the 

 priests all over Canaan. Nevertheless, in the reign of Manasseh, 

 when idolatry pervaded the country of Judaea for tifty-five years, 

 while some copies perished, tlie rest were carefully concealed. 

 So that at Jerusalem the law was almost unknown, when Moses' I 

 own autograph (Heb. ' by the hand of Moses,' 2 Chron. xxxiv^ 

 14) was found and publicly produced in the reign of Josiah. 1 

 But copies of the law were preserved among the Ten Tribes. 

 These were carried into ca})tivity, but a Samaritan priest 

 returned to teach the inhabitants the manner of the God of the 

 land, which could not be done without the written law. From 

 which time, about B.C. 714, the Pentateuch was preserved by 

 these Samaritans for a thousand years, till the time of Origen,. 

 Eusebius, Jerome, etc., who often quoted it. After the lapse of 

 one thousand two hundred years, manuscripts were found with 

 a few poor Samaritan families surviving to-day " (that is, when 

 Kennicott wrote), " in Palestine and Egypt . . . Lastly, the 

 character in which the Samaritan Codices transmitted to our 

 times are written seems to be more the original character than 

 that in which our Codices are written . . . there are not 

 so many errors in the Samaritan as in the Hebrew, because they 

 have not been so often copied. How adorable is the wisdom 

 of God, that Christians should have received the Pentateuch 

 from these two nations, so hostile to one another for two 

 thousand years that their hostility should have passed into a 

 proverb."* 



It is not only the Samaritans and the Jews who were at 

 variance. The same thing was true of the Ten Tribes and the 

 Two. !N"o time can be named from Jeroboam's days when the 

 Law has not been in the keeping of hostile nationalities, who 

 certainly would not have accepted it from one another. Thus 

 we trace the whole Pentateuch in two independent texts to a 



* Kennicott, Dissertations ^ p. 60. 



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