First Glance

Even if philistines fill the streets, you can no longer meet any real Philistines. But you can meet the living namesakes of another biblically based catchphrase: the Samaritans. Although immortalized by the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37), the Samaritans survive only in two small communities, in Nablus, on the West Bank, and Holon, in Israel, with a total population of less than 600. The longevity of this sect is more than matched by the purported age of their most important religious document, a Torah scroll said to have been written by Abisha, the great-grandson of Moses’ brother, Aaron. This claim comes not from some wild-eyed supporter, but from the scroll itself, which contains a cryptogram describing the scroll’s authorship. In “The Abisha Scroll—3,000 Years Old?” Alan D. Crown examines the origins and significance of this scroll and places it alongside the Septuagint and the Masoretic text as an important variant text of the Pentateuch.

Crown heads the department of Semitic Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He also serves on the Advisory Council of the World Union of Jewish Studies, on the board of the Australian Institute for Holocaust Studies and as vice president of the Australian Association for Jewish Studies. A well-traveled guest lecturer, Crown gave a seminar on Samaritan codicology at the Smithsonian Institute Libraries in 1986 and organized the Congress of Samaritan Studies at Oxford in 1990. Crown has recently received a grant for a critical edition of the Samaritan pentateuch.