The Abisha Scroll Revisited

What is it about?

The Samaritans, also known as Israelite Samaritans, are an ethnoreligious community of the Near East that dates back to ancient times and shares the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, with Judaism. As the Samaritan version of the Hebrew text differs from the Jewish text in some details, biblical scholars have been interested in it ever since the first copy of a Samaritan Torah was brought to Europe in the 17th century. One of the manuscripts – the so-called “Abisha Scroll” – preserved today in the Samaritan synagogue of Kiryat Luza, near Nablus, enjoys a special, even legendary, reputation and is held in highest esteem by the congregation. The scroll, made up of different segments of parchment, is said to have been written in biblical times by Abisha, the great-grandson of Aaron, the brother of Moses, and was long regarded as the oldest Bible manuscript in the world. However, the truth that the scroll is of much later medieval origin has been clear for many years. Drawing on previous research and comparing the scroll with new data collected as part of a project on codicological description and cataloguing of Samaritan Torah manuscripts, Evelyn Burkhardt shows that the scribe of large parts of the scroll was most likely the 14th-century scribe Ā̊bīša ban Fī'nās ban Yūsəf, son of a Samaritan high priest, author of poetry and namesake of the biblical Abisha.

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