This is the second part of our blog on the Samaritan manuscript collection of the Rylands. In the first part, we introduced the Samaritans and the origins of the Rylands collection. In this follow-up post, you can read about hidden messages in manuscripts, various calendars to count time and the Samaritans’ ease of switching between languages and scripts.
The Pentateuch of the Samaritans
The Samaritan Pentateuch, containing the five books of Moses, is in the Samaritan Hebrew language written in Samaritan script that derived from the ancient paleo-Hebrew script. The earliest extant Samaritan Pentateuch is held in the Cambridge University Library (MS Add.1846). Though it does not give a date, it is probably from the early 12th century. Samaritan MS 1 in the Rylands seems to be the earliest known complete Samaritan Pentateuch that tells us its date of production. According to its colophon, it was written in 608 “of the dominion of Ishmael” (that is, the Muslim calendar), that is, 1211 CE:
“I Abi Berakhāthah, son of Ab Śaśon, son of Ab Nefushah, son of Abraham of Tsarepta, have written this holy Torah for two brothers, Tabiah and Joseph, sons of Sadʿah, son of Isaac, in the year 608 of the dominion of Ishmael. And it is the 27th Law I have written…”
As you can see, the colophon does not appear in the manuscript as a continuous paragraph. Instead, as it is customary in Samaritan bibles, the information about the production of the codex comes in the form of a tashqil: letters of the colophon are embedded vertically between columns of the biblical text in an acrostic format (Fig. 1).
Counting time
When you browse our online collection, you will surely notice that the Samaritans use a few different eras to date their manuscripts. Very often, like in this 12th-century Pentateuch, the date is given according to the Muslim calendar, which is a lunar calendar counting the years from 622 CE when the Prophet Muhammad and his followers moved from Mecca to Medina. This event is referred to as the Hijra (‘migration’) and the calendar is often called the Hijri calendar.
An 18th-century daftar (prayer book), one of the manuscripts the famous Semitic scholar Sir Arthur Cowley used in his edition of Samaritan liturgy, also uses the Muslim calendar (Samaritan MS 11; Fig. 2):
بتاريخ نهار الخميس المبارك ٢٤ شهر رجب سنه ١٢٠٩ והו החדש אחד עשר لدخول يوم واحد من شهر شباط الرومي
“[This collection] … was finished on the day of Thursday, the blessed, 24th of the month Rajab of the year 1209 and it is the 11th month entering on the first day of the Roman month February”
Sometimes the scribe gives the date in more than one era. Abisha ben Pinḥas (1881-1961), who later became the Samaritan High Priest, and who copied a calendrical work for the year 1936 CE (Gaster Samaritan MS 2075), begins the calendar with these words:
שנת ששה אלפים ושלש מאות ושבעים וחמשה לבריאת עלמה – היא שנת שלשה אלפים וחמש מאות ושבעים … וחמשה למושב בני ישראל הארץ הקדושה
“Year 6375 according to the Creation of the World, that is year 3575 according to the settlement of the children of Israel in Israel the Holy Land…”
The year is given here in two ways: according to the Creation of the World and according to the Settlement of the Children of Israel in the Land of Canaan. You may well have already met the phrase “according to the Creation of the World” (לבריאת עולם) in Jewish manuscripts. However, note, that the Samaritans place the creation of the world around 4439 BCE, so a few centuries earlier than the Jews (3761 BCE). The second era that Abisha ben Pinhas refers to is the reckoning according to the Settlement of the Israelites in the Holy Land (often translated as “Entry of the Children of Israel into Canaan). This happened some 2800 years after the creation of the world, around in 1639 BCE. Both dates given in the calendar above correspond to the year 1936 CE (Fig. 3).
The collection also holds a complex astronomical calendar, written in Arabic and Samaritan Hebrew, which combines no less than three calendars: the Muslim, the Persian and the Julian (Samaritan MS 22), but it deserves a whole blog post on itself!
Multilingual and multiscriptual
Samaritan manuscripts, just like their Jewish counterparts, are multilingual and multiscriptual. You surely noticed that the colophon of the prayer book mentioned above is written in Arabic and Samaritan scripts (Fig. 2; do not be misled by my transliteration: due to a lack of Samaritan font, I needed to use Hebrew).
Another good example of the Samaritans’ use of multiple languages and scripts is a compound liturgical manuscript, the earliest part of which was copied in the 1720s (Samaritan MS 14). Look at the paragraph marked in green on Fig. 6. It begins as follows: ويقال כי בשם كلها ושמע ישראל كلها ויצונו كلها الي قوله ברוך אלהי (Then shall be said ‘For in the name’ in full, and ‘Hear O Israel’ in full and ‘And he has commanded us’ in full up to ‘Blessed be our Lord’…). Notice that the instructions are in Arabic in Arabic script while the prayers are in Hebrew in Samaritan minuscule script.
Similarly, if you look at the two paragraphs marked in orange, you find that the Song of Moses (Exodus 15:1) in Samaritan (beginning אז ישר משה ובני ישראל את השירה לזאת (sic!) “And then Moses and the Children of Israel sang…” ) is introduced by instructions in Arabic: وفي بعض الاوقات يطوفو الجماعه حول سيدنا العزر ناشدبن في هذا الشيره نغم الحجوج (“And at times the assembly makes the circuit [of the grave] of our Master Eleazar chanting this song in the measure of pilgrims”).
These are just a few curious features you can encounter when studying Samaritan manuscripts. To the cataloguer, their attraction lies in this intriguing mixture of Arabic and Hebrew culture, and the special skillset she or he has to acquire to reveal their secrets.
To browse our digital Samaritan manuscript collection and make your own discoveries, visit Manchester Digital Collections.
Further reading
Anderson, Robert T. The Samaritan Pentateuch: an Introduction to Its Origin, History, and Significance for Biblical Studies. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2012.
Cowley, Arthur. The Samaritan Liturgy, the Common Prayers. 2 vols. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1909.
Powels, Sylvia. “The Samaritan Calendar and the Roots of Samaritan Chronology,” in Alan D. Crown, ed., The Samaritans, Tübingen, 1989), pp. 691-742.