The Samaritan Tenth Commandment

Reference. John Bowman and Shemaryahu Talmon, Samaritan Decalogue Inscriptions. BJRL (Bulletin of the John Rylands Library), vol. 33, no. 2, March 1951, pp. 211-236. They had access to four inscriptions. Their conclusion is that there is evidence for the tenth commandment having been added late. I disagree with their interpretation of the evidence. They say that the variation in the way the verses are quoted in their abbreviated form indicates that they were added late and only became counted as the tenth commandment after that. They argue that the process of formulating a standard abbreviation is still going on, so the verses must have been added late. My interpretation is that this only proves that treating the verses as the tenth commandment was a late development. They say that Origen marked the verses with an asterisk in his Hexapla to show they were not in the Jewish text. I say (but it was a colleague that pointed this out) that as Origen uses the asterisk to mark what IS in the Jewish text and the obelos to mark WHAT IS NOT in the Jewish text, this is loony! Origen must have considered these verses to be in the Jewish text. Bowman and Talmon draw the reader’s attention to the Masoretic divisions in the text in both places (Ex XX and Dt V) but they don’t see the meaning of what they list. The Masoretic divisions in Deuteronomy show that these verses must have originally been in the Jewish text in Deuteronomy! (Technical details will be given if you need them). This was pointed out to me by the same colleague. I think the Masoretic divisions in Exodus show the same thing, though in a different way.

There is a fifth inscription from a synagogue in Thessalonika, found after the article was written, but I can’t lay my hands on it just at the moment. It will turn up over the coming weeks as I sort my papers out.

I know these verses are not in the Septuagint in most mss., but I think that is because the translation has been revised. My evidence is only indirect. It is now known that even the best mss. of the Greek in the Torah or in any other book are not the original text in all respects. Fortunately the Old Latin was made from unedited mss. Unfortunately the Old Latin has not been recovered in all places, though new bits keep turning up. However , we have the Old Latin of Dt. XXVII:4, and it has Mt. Gerizim, not Mt. Eval. That means this was the original reading in the LXX in the Greek, and the Jewish Hebrew text must originally have had the same reading. The Jewish text has been altered very late. If Dt XXVII:4 was altered, then it can be regarded as likely that the verses about the altar on Mt. Gerizim following the Ten Commandments (and later counted by the Samaritans as the tenth commandment) were removed from the Jewish text very late. How late? Talmon has shown in a couple of other articles, using the Talmudic account of the collation of the official mss. in the Temple. that the details of the MT were fixed very late. How late is that? Well, the collation was interrupted suddenly, leaving the books of Samuel partially edited and in a mess textually in many details. Words have been cut out ready for the insertion of the final version, but the job has not been finished. For example: “Saul was years old at the start of his reign”. (No, that is not a typing mistake). The interruption must have been in the time of the first revolt or in the year when the Temple was destroyed. It can be assumed that the Torah would have been edited first; then the books used for the second Sabbath reading after the Torah, that is, the Latter Prophets (Isaiah Jeremiah etc.), along with the Psalms. The historical books would have been next. The text of Ezra-Nehemiah is in a worse mess than Samuel. I can show from the Rabbinic evidence that anti-Samaritan re-editing of Joshua was still going on in the first c. A.D. The Epistle to the Hebrews uses an argument from Joshua that is only explicable if the whole Samaritan structure (not just details) of Joshua-Judges is assumed. The chronology of the MT in I Kings VI:1 also depends on the Samaritan form of the whole structure of Joshua-Judges. See my article The Transmission of the Samaritan Joshua-Judges for the evidence from I Kings, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and from the Masoretic paragraph and verse divisions in Joshua in one place. The Rabbinic evidence shows that the very last stage of anti-Samaritan re-wording of Joshua had to be abandoned as being too obviously a forgery, so what was kept was the second-last version. It seems that the very last alteration in the Torah was the omission of the words “next to Shechem” in the Jewish text of Dt XI:30. I can give the evidence on these last points, but would rather not do it at the moment, because would really have to publish an article and refer you to it. This will happen, but not for a while.

To sum up. The LXX as we have it is not the original in any place where Mt. Gerizim is mentioned or might be relevant. Anti-Samaritan alteration of details in the Torah seems to have happened in the first c. A.D. or the first c. B.C. at the latest. I favour a very late date, though I can’t prove it just yet. However, Saul Lieberman has proven (in his book New Light from the Prophets, written about fifty years ago) that in two important places the very oldest Rabbinic texts presuppose a reading that is in our LXX mss. but not in the MT. The two places have no obvious connection with the Samaritans, but the analogy has force.