Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>]

Uri,

you wrote:
? It is interesting how different readers?draw different conclusions
?from the same work by?E. Tov. He stated that the Mishnah uses
?exclusively the MT.

My statement about the Talmud wasn't derived from Tov, but from examples 
of non-MT readings I have encountered myself in the Talmudic text. (I 
also recall that the notes in Soncino & Schottenstein mention that there 
are numerous such examples.) I cannot say whether those variations come 
from other text-types within the proto-MT family or not, but they do 
seem to tell against the fixity of the text hundreds of years earlier.

?
?He also gave a number of examples how the Samaritan simplified?,
?"harmonized", difficult grammatical forms and rendered them in the
?standard way. That indicates that the Sasmaritan is later than the
?version which eventually?became the MT. It is reasonable to assume
?that the difficult forms had come down by tradition, and were simplified
?by?later editors.

There is no doubt that the Samaritan harmonizations (as between parallel 
passages in Exodus and Deuteronomy), pious corrections and 
simplifications represent later layers, in addition to the ideological 
layer I mentioned previously (e.g. 10th commandment to build Temple on 
Gerizim). You could also add that the Samaritan spelling variations are 
mostly later, since they tend to involve more of the "plene" forms. None 
of this changes the fact that variations remain that fall into none of 
these categories, and which sometimes agree with DSS and/or LXX as 
against MT. That's why Tov postulated a proto-Samaritan text-type 
belonging to the Palestinian branch of the tree, notwithstanding the 
arguably later layers in the SP proper.


Gabe Eisenstein