The Pentateuch as Found in the Pre‐Samaritan Texts and 4QReworked Pentateuch Sidnie White Crawford The Samaritan Pentateuch has been well known since the seventeenth century as a separate edition or version of the Pentateuch, alongside the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint. Preserved by the Samaritans as their canonical text of the Torah, it is written in a paleo‐Hebrew script dating to the time of the Hasmoneans (late second‐early first century BCE), contains an expanded or harmonized text in all five books of the Pentateuch, and has a layer of Samaritan sectarian editing, the purpose of which is to establish Mount Gerizim as the site chosen by God as the central place of worship. Until the discovery of the Qumran scrolls, the earliest manuscript of this text‐type dated to the ninth century CE. 1 Among the Qumran scrolls, as was recognized quite early, were discovered manuscripts of the books of the Pentateuch that conformed to the text‐type found in the Samaritan Pentateuch, with the specifically Samaritan editing removed. These manuscripts, which came to be labeled “pre‐Samaritan,” 2 are characterized by harmonization and content editing, meant to bring two parallel texts 1 For recent overviews of the Samaritan Pentateuch, see Magnar Kartveit, The Origin of the Samaritans (Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 128; Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2009), and Ingrid Hjelm, The Samaritans and Early Judaism: A Literary Analysis (Copenhagen International Seminar 7; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). 2 Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (2 nd rev. ed.; Minneapolis/Assen: Fortress/Royal Van Gorcum, 2001) 81.