Moses as the Sole Prophet

The clearest textual expression of where Samaritan and Jewish scripture part company sits inside the Ten Commandments themselves. The Samaritan Pentateuch assembles material found scattered elsewhere in the Jewish text, commands to build an altar and offer sacrifice at the mountain God will choose, into a tenth commandment naming Mount Gerizim directly as that place, so that the instruction to worship there is read as coming from Moses's own hand at Sinai rather than as a later development. Everything else the doctrine holds about Moses as the sole and final prophet depends on treating this reading as original rather than as a Samaritan alteration, since a text that adds a commandment after the fact looks very different from a text preserving what Israel's own scripture displaced. Samaritans read the Jewish version, which numbers the commandments differently and omits the Gerizim clause, as the corrupted text, tampered with by a priesthood that had already relocated worship to Jerusalem. The dispute cannot be settled by appeal to either community's own manuscript, since each holds its own version to be Mosaic and the other's to be altered, and it is one of the oldest continuously argued textual questions in the history of biblical scholarship, still unresolved on manuscript evidence alone.