Samaritan Scribes and Manuscripts [Inscribed and Signed by the Author]

Alan D. Crown provides a guide to the techniques used by the Samaritan scribes in copying manuscripts. He places Samaritan works in a description of their literary history and shows the more important manuscripts of each type of literature. In addition there is a listing of Samaritan scribes and the manuscripts for which they were responsible. Overall the work shows that the Samaritan scribes were innovative but their scribal techniques derived from an ancient pool of scribal habits and ideas and they had what can be described as a masoretic tradition of their own. Variation in writing habits arose in different scribal schools, some of them are indicated. All in all, the work is a codicology of Samaritan manuscripts.

Alan D. Crown, Born 1932; 1966 PhD; since 1985 Head of the Department of Semitic Studies, University of Sydney; 1990-97 Professor (Personal Chair) at the University of Sydney; since 1997 Emeritus Professor of the University of Sydney; Honorary Life Member and founder member of the Societe d'Etudes Samaritaines; Senior Associate Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies.