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| Samaritan and the Samaritan Torah (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The Samaritan Pentateuch, written in standard Aramaic block script, which has about six thousand differences from the Masoretic Pentateuch, some of them minor, but others quite significant, has a convenient parallel edition of the Masoretic and Samaritan Pentateuch in Hebrew, with the differences in boldface.
The ancient Samaritanism today is a tiny religion, with about 750 members. The group is so small that intermarriage is now problematic, and genetic defects common. These efforts, and others in Hebrew, can help to preserve at least part of Samaritan traditions.
John Wheeler (Johanan Rakkav) does find that there would be a simple solution to the problem of phonetic communication in language, and that would be the adoption of Masoretic Hebrew as the preferred language.
Even Israeli Hebrew, with its amalgamation of Ashkenazic, Sephardic and Oriental Jewish pronunciations, is very much more phonetic than any dialect of English. And Israeli Hebrew still uses the Masoretic spelling conventions that every printed Hebrew Bible uses.
Please do continue reading about this translation:
Samaritan Torah in English
and about the Masoretic Hebrew:
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