The Relationship between Paleography and Textual Criticism: Textual Variants Due to Graphic Similarity between the Masoretic Text and the Samaritan Pentateuch as a Test Case

Almost from the inception of the textual analysis of the Hebrew Bible, scholars recognized that certain textual variants were caused by the interchange of letters bearing graphic similarity. This article focuses on a small number of interchanges between the Masoretic Text (MT) and the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) and studies their possible paleographic context. The central claim of the paper is that it is possible to identify the scripts used in which the changes occurred and in some instances, even the specific stage of development of the script. The paleographic conclusion that arises from the evidence presented is that the Samaritan version developed from earlier versions that were transmitted in Paleo-Hebrew and in square script, or that the Samaritan version was transmitted in its early stages in both of these scripts. The SP itself reached us in a still later script, the Samaritan script, which developed from the Paleo-Hebrew script.