A new book "the Book of the Samaritans" ["Sefer Hashomronim"] - a very important for Samaritan Studies of Samaritan history and Archaeology - was recently published in Hebrew. The 700 page long book was published by Yad Yitzhaq Ben-Zvi, The Antiquities Israel's Authority and Archeology Office of Judea and Samaria - Jerusalem, Israel. Opinions and views of 28 scholars in 31 articles were collected to one book for the first time in Hebrew to prove again that the specific weight of the Samaritan people in Israel is many times heavier than their numeral weight.

Although most of the articles had been published in other scientific frameworks and were updated especially for this blessed collection there was an unexplained delay in the publication, [thus limiting the updates to the year 1996], but the most important point is that for the first time the supporters of the Samaritan Studies have in hand a complete and reasonable work that tells the history of the Israelite Samaritans from Biblical times to 1996 C.E.

As it expected from a collection of so many different views, they sometimes contradict each other on the same issue. Some of the views are very logical and some poorly proved. But this is the disadvantage of any collection of articles that it is impossible to put all that is written to paint a complete picture of the current idea on any issue.

One other prominent disadvantage is the fact that most of the book contents deal with written historical documents and very few with archeology, the two editors -Prof. Ephraim Stern and Yochanan Eshel - are archaeologists, that could not be aware of the very different qualities of the articles on History and Texts.

From any point of view the new book is very important in adding a new source of knowledge to every scholar and student of the History of the People of Israel in general and the History and Archaeology of the Samaritans in Particular.

Readers can order the "Book of the Samaritans [In Hebrew - including introduction in English]by writing to the A.B. institute of Samaritan Studies - $40 including shipping.

September 2002

A PUBLICATION OF THE FIRST CRITICAL EDITION OF THE SAMARITAN-ARABIC TRANSLATION OF THE VERSION OF THE TORAH BY THE SAMARITANS HAS BEEN COMPLETED

DR. HASEEB SHEHADEH, a world known excellent Samaritanologist and scholar of the Hebrew and the Arabic languages in the University of Helsinki has completed nowadays the second volume of his critical edition of "The Arabic translation of the Samaritan Pentateuch" which contains the books of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The first volume containing Genesis and Exodus was published in 1990. The entire translation was published by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem.

This monumental work, which could be compared to the parallel works of Prof. Z. Ben Hayeem on Memar Marqeh, the fourth century A.D. Samaritan Midrash on the Pentateuch and Prof. A. Tal on the Samaritan Aramaic Targum [translation] of the Pentateuch, based on all ancient and old manuscripts in hand of the Samaritan-Arabic translation of the Pentateuch. Dr. Shehadeh examines 94 manuscripts in the second volume, 34 of them from the Firkovitz collection of 1348 Samaritan Manuscripts in St. Petersburg/Russia. Eventually the later examination did not change the system of Dr, Shehadeh`s special selection to base each of the ancient versions of the translation and the later ones on two groups of 11 manuscripts to put their different or confirmed variants under the selected text.

Dr. Shehadeh`s book is a great contribution to the study of Samaritan literature in Arabic and comparative research of its various objects.