Samaritan Pentateuch (Hebrew, tagged)

Reviews

1. 

   (verified owner) Benjamin Noonan

   Rated 5 out of 5

   Reviewed on July 10, 2023

   This is, to my knowledge, the only tagged edition of the Samaritan Pentateuch available for any Bible software program. Accordance has therefore done the scholarly community a great service by making this module available. This particular edition is based on MS 6 (C), as edited by Abraham Tal. It remains a key resource for the study of the Samaritan Pentateuch even as Stefan Schorch works to publish his critical edition. It is especially helpful for textual criticism.

2. 

   (verified owner) khove

   Rated 4 out of 5

   Reviewed on March 12, 2024

   As impressive and important as this product is, there are several issues with the morphological tagger and concordance which keep me from rating it higher. In some locations, the glosses correctly identify places where the Samaritan interpretation of a particular form diverges from the MT. For example, in Exodus 3:22, the gloss correctly identifies משכנתה ומגרת ביתה as two hif’il participles (maškinta wamgiråt bita), according to the Samaritan reading, rather than the Tiberian reading which analyzes these as two possessed feminine nouns with the מ־ proclitic. It also correctly reclassifies the Masoretic ‘infinitive absolute’ forms, which do not exist in Samaritan grammar. However, in some other locations, the gloss apparently does not align with Samaritan grammatical traditions. For example, Exodus 4:25 should gloss בנה not as ‘her son’, as it appears in the Masoretic tradition, but rather as a pi’el verb from the root בנ״ן (binna), according to Samaritan exegetical tradition. Similarly, in Deuteronomy 33:7, שמע is glossed as a an imperative, as it appears in the Masoretic tradition, but the Samaritans’ Arabic targumim render this as a perfective verb (the two forms are homophonous in Samaritan Hebrew and Samaritan Aramaic). I was able to locate these examples through a cursory look through Ze’ev Ben-Hayyim’s LOT V, to see whether this package would agree with Ben-Hayyim’s descriptions of the divergences between the Samaritan and Masoretic interpretations of certain forms, and in many cases it did not.