Abstract
The article deals with the Samaria papyri from Wadi Daliyeh in the context of the history of the province of Samaria and its religion in the late phase of the Persian period, during the 4th century BCE. The topic is analysed in three main parts implied by the title.
In the first part, the author briefly summarizes the basic data related to the documents: how, when, and by whom the manuscripts were discovered in Palestine, when the texts were written and what is their content. All these texts are fragmentary legal documents written in the city of Samaria during the 4th century BCE, before or during Alexander the Great's campaign in Palestine and Egypt (332 BCE).
In the second part, the author analyses the meaning of the manuscripts for the history of Samaria in the Persian period. He focuses on the proper names with various theophoric elements (these elements are Yahwistic, Aramaean, Babylonian, Assyrian, Phoenician, Persian and others).
He mentions the existence of three chronologically successive archives that can be detected in the Wadi Daliyeh corpus, and analyses the official titles attested in the legal deeds (governor, prefect, judge). Furthermore, the length and weight units, attested in the Wadi Daliyeh papyri, are analysed in the context of other known systems.
Finally, the last (third) section of the article is devoted to the meaning of the papyri for the history of the religious community of the Samaritans, and raises the question of the existence of the Pentateuch (the Torah) in this community in the 4th century BCE. The Yahwistic names, which appear in the legal documents, prove the existence of a Yahwistic community in Samaria in the 4th century BCE that probably already at that time had its sanctuary on Mt.
Gerizim near the present-day Nablus. The article gives to the reader a unique insight in the everyday life in Samaria in the 4th century BCE with the help of the data provided by the manuscripts from Wadi Daliyeh.