Editing Samaritan Hebrew (section)

==History and discovery==
The early history of Samaritan Hebrew is poorly documented, though it cannot be easily associated with early [[Israelian Hebrew]]. Because of the relatively late divergence of [[Samaritanism]] from mainstream [[Judaism]] its only by the first century BCE that there was definitely a separate Samaritan dialect. The roots of the Samaritan dialect are  likely older than this, but were not at this point distinctly Samaritan.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Saenz-Badillos |first=Angel |title=A History of the Hebrew Language |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |pages=147–148 |language=en |translator-last=Elwolde |translator-first=John}}</ref>

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 ''[[piyyut]]im''.<ref name=":0" />[[File:Samaritan letters and Jerusalem coin, Guillaume Postel 1538, Linguarum duodecim characteribus differentium alphabetum, introductio.png|thumb|In 1538 [[Guillaume Postel]] published the Samaritan alphabet, together with the first Western representation of a coin of the [[First Jewish Revolt]].<ref name=Madden>[[Frederic Madden]], [https://books.google.com/books?id=T2JRAAAAcAAJ&pg=PR16 History of Jewish Coinage and of Money in the Old and New Testament], page ii</ref>]]
[[File:Genesis 5 18 as published by Jean Morin in 1631 in the first publication of the Samaritan Pentateuch.png|thumb|left|Genesis 5:18–22 as published by Jean Morin in 1631 in the first publication of the Samaritan Pentateuch]]
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 (theologian)|Jean Morin]].<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=IOAtAAAAYAAJ Exercitationes ecclesiasticae in utrumque Samaritanorum Pentateuchum], 1631</ref> 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 [[Paris]]ian library.{{sfn|Flôrenṭîn|2005|p=1|ps=: "When the Samaritan version of the Pentateuch was revealed to the Western world early in the 17th century... [footnote: 'In 1632 the Frenchman Jean Morin published the Samaritan Pentateuch in the Parisian Biblia Polyglotta based on a manuscript that the traveler Pietro Della Valle had bought from Damascus sixteen years previously.]"}}

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-Haim, 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.{{sfn|Flôrenṭîn|2005|p=4|ps=: "A completely new approach which prevails today was presented by Ben-Hayyim, whose scientific activity was focused on the languages of the Samaritans—Hebrew and Aramaic. Years before the publication ol his grammar, with its exhaustive description of SH, he indicated several linguistic phenomena common to SH on the one hand, and Mishnaic Hebrew (MH) and the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls (HDSS), on the other. He proved that the language heard today when the Torah is read by the Samaritans in their synagogue is not very different from the Hebrew which once lived and flourished among the Samaritans before, during and after the time of the destruction of the Second Temple. The isoglosses common to SH. MH and HDSS led him to establish that the Hebrew heard in the synagogue by modernday Samaritans is not exclusively theirs, but rather this Hebrew or something resembling it, was also the language of other residents of Eretz Israel before it was supplanted by Aramaic as a spoken language."}}