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Samaritan Hebrew () is a reading tradition used liturgically by the Samaritans for reading the Biblical Hebrew of the Samaritan Pentateuch.
For the Samaritans, Ancient Hebrew ceased to be a spoken everyday language. It was succeeded by Samaritan Aramaic, which itself ceased to be a spoken language sometime between the 10th and 12th centuries and was succeeded by Levantine Arabic (specifically, the Samaritan variety of Palestinian Arabic).
The phonology of Samaritan Hebrew is very similar to that of Samaritan Arabic and is used by the Samaritans in prayer. Today, the spoken vernacular among Samaritans is evenly split between Modern Hebrew and Samaritan Arabic, depending on whether they reside in Holon or Kiryat Luza.
The dialect did not survive long in a literary form as by the first century CE, it was already being supplanted by Samaritan Aramaic. Though it remained in liturgical use, Samaritan Hebrew eventually nearly stopped being used as a language for new literary compositions.
Starting in the 1300s, a liturgical revival of Samaritan Hebrew began, which resulted in new Hebrew . published the Samaritan alphabet, together with the first Western representation of a coin of the First Jewish Revolt.Frederic Madden, History of Jewish Coinage and of Money in the Old and New Testament, page ii]] The Samaritan language first became known in detail to the Western world with the publication of a manuscript of the Samaritan Pentateuch in 1631 by Jean Morin. Exercitationes ecclesiasticae in utrumque Samaritanorum Pentateuchum, 1631 In 1616 the traveler Pietro Della Valle had purchased a copy of the text in Damascus. This manuscript, now known as Codex B, was deposited in a library.
In five volumes between 1957 and 1977, Ze'ev Ben-Haim published his monumental Hebrew-language work on the Hebrew and Aramaic traditions of the Samaritans. Ben-Ḥayyim, whose views prevail today, proved that modern Samaritan Hebrew is not very different from the Hebrew spoken by other local groups in the Second Temple period before Middle Aramaic supplanted it.
The Samaritan alphabet is close to the script that appears on many Ancient Hebrew coins and inscriptions. By contrast, all other varieties of Hebrew, as written by Jews, employ the later Ktav Ashuri, which is in fact a variation of the Aramaic alphabet that Jews began using in the Babylonian captivity following the exile of the Kingdom of Judah in the 6th century BCE. During the 3rd century BCE, Jews began to use this stylized "square" form of the script used by the Achaemenid Empire for Imperial Aramaic, its chancellery script (1993). 9780521556347, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521556347 while the Samaritans continued to use the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, which evolved into the Samaritan alphabet.
In modern times, a cursive variant of the Samaritan alphabet is used in personal affects.
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| Samaritan Letter | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Square Hebrew (Ktav Ashuri) letter | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Pronunciation | , | , | , | , | , |
Vowels
| Niqqud with /מ | , , | |||||
| value | (geminate consonant) |
| + Samaritan Hebrew consonants |
| +Samaritan vowels ! ! Front vowel ! Back vowel |
Phonemic length is contrastive, e.g. רב 'great' vs. רחב 'wide'. (while Ben-Hayyim notates four degrees of vowel length, he concedes that only his "fourth degree" has phonemic value) Long vowels are usually the result of the elision of guttural consonants.
and are both realized as in closed post-tonic syllables, e.g. בית 'house' הבית 'the house' גר הגר. In other cases, stressed shifts to when that syllable is no longer stressed, e.g. דברתי but דברתמה . and only contrast in open post-tonic syllables, e.g. ידו 'his hand' ידיו 'his hands', where stems from a contracted diphthong. In other environments, appears in closed syllables and in open syllables, e.g. דור דורות .
behave more or less as in other Hebrew varieties: ˈbeṭen "stomach" > ˈbaṭnek "your stomach," ke′seph "silver" > ke′sefánu (Judean Hebrew kasˈpenu) "our silver," ˈderek > dirkaˈkimma "your (m. pl.) road" but ˈareṣ (in Judean Hebrew: ˈʾereṣ) "earth" > ˈarṣak (Judean Hebrew ˈʾárṣeḵa) "your earth".
Dual is sometimes -aˈyem (Judean Hebrew: -ˈayim), šenatayem "two years," usually -ˈēm like the plural yeˈdēm "hands" (Judean yaˈḏayim.)
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"as, like", pronounced:
"to" pronounced:
"and" pronounced:
Other prepositions:
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