Texts in Conversation
Deuteronomy 12 uses a future tense verb to indicate that God “will choose” a place for his name, with the location not named. The Samaritan Pentateuch uses past tense, saying that God “has chosen” the place, which in Samaritan tradition is Mount Gerizim.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Deuteronomy 12:5
Hebrew Bible
3 You must tear down their altars, shatter their sacred pillars, burn up their sacred Asherah poles, and cut down the images of their gods; you must eliminate their very memory from that place. 4 You must not worship the Lord your God the way they worship. 5 But you must seek only the place he chooses from all your tribes to establish his name as his place of residence, and you must go there. 6 And there you must take your burnt offerings, your sacrifices, your tithes, the personal offerings you have prepared, your votive offerings, your freewill offerings, and the firstborn of your herds and flocks. 7 Both you and your families must feast there before the Lord your God and rejoice in all the output of your labor with which he has blessed you.
Date: 750–400 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Samaritan Deuteronomy 12:5
Samaritan Penteteuch
Samaritan
3 And you shall break down their altars, and smash their pillars, and burn their Asherim with fire, and you shall cut down the carved images of their gods, and you shall destroy their name out of that place. 4 You shall not do so to Shema your God. 5 But you shall seek the place which Shema your God has chosen out of all your tribes to make his name live there, and you shall come there, 6 and there you shall bring your burned offerings, and your sacrifices, and your tithes, and your contributions, and your vows, and your freewill offerings, and the firstborn of your herd and of your flock, 7 and there you shall eat in the presence of Shema your God, and you shall celebrate in everything you put your hands to, you and your households, in which Shema your God has blessed you.
Date: 130–120 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... Another notable difference in Deuteronomy is the use of the perfective form of the verb בחר (‘he has chosen’) in the Samaritan Pentateuch rather than the Masoretic text's imperfective (‘he will choose’). This difference is found whenever the text refers to God’s choice of one authorised place of worship, such as in Deuteronomy 12:5. Schorch points to evidence in some Greek Septuagint, Latin and Coptic manuscripts which suggests the Samaritan variant is original. However, this is a minority view. Tov places this variant in the same ideological category as the Gerizim commandment, and Anderson and Giles contend that ‘none of the pre-Samaritan texts can be confirmed to agree with the Samaritan Pentateuch in any of the twenty-one instances of this shift’. There are many other differences between the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Masoretic text which have less obvious ideological implications. Many of these are also found in the ‘pre-Samaritan’ group of Qumran texts ..."
Philip Mark Reid, “A Preliminary Investigation into the Samaritan Pentateuch as an Intralingual Translation” (MA diss., University of the Free State, 2021), 11.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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