Review of Abraham Tal, ed., Tibåt Mårqe: The ark of Marqe: Edition, translation, commentary.

Abstract

Samaritan studies has always been a niche discipline. For a century and a half, individual scholars have “found” the Samaritans and fallen in love with their literature and culture—and with the Samaritan community itself. Today the significance of Samaritan studies is increasingly recognized. This is thanks to a small but dedicated international group of scholars and their project of establishing Samaritan studies as an interdisciplinary field of study. This community includes historians, philologists, biblical scholars, talmudists, classicists, Islamicists, folklorists, cultural anthropologists, and archaeologists. These scholars revived the study of Samaritanism during the second half of the twentieth century, creating the infrastructure for future growth. They published text editions, final reports of excavations, translations, language studies, and lexicons, as well as synthetic analysis of primary sources. They have studiously published the results of their labors in ways accessible to scholars and to educated general readers. They even created A Companion To Samaritan Studies, edited by Reinhard Pummer, Abraham Tal, and Alan D. Crown (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993), to help the novice through the complex thicket that has naturally developed around Samaritan studies, a field that stretches from biblical Israel to the present and multiple languages