Description
Samaritanism is a monotheistic religion that believes in resurrection and judgment, and in Moses as a prophet, with his books as its holy scripture. Samaritans believe their religion is closest to Islam and that they are the ones referred to in the verse: {And among the people of Moses is a community which guides by the truth and by it establishes justice.} They say they visited the Prophet Muhammad and received from him a covenant written for them by Ali ibn Abi Talib. Samaritans assert that they are the true descendants of the people of Israel and that they possess the oldest written copy of the Torah. However, Jews consider them foreign to the Children of Israel, their beliefs pagan, and their Torah inaccurate. Scholars believe that the two Torahs are one book written by Ezra, and that later disagreements led to their divergence. Nevertheless, most of the differences between the Samaritan and Jewish Torahs remain largely superficial. Church and Jewish studies often accuse the Samaritan text translated into Arabic of being an Islamic translation, but this is not the case. The translation may have been influenced by the culture and expressions of the translator, who lived in an Arab-Islamic environment. The translator may have attempted to make the Torah more accessible to Muslims, but he certainly did not try to appease Muslims at the expense of his holy book.
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