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
[b-hebrew] Re; Samaritans,
Gabe Eisenstein, 02/01/2009