in Holon, Israel. The Samaritans call themselves guardians of the Law, in Hebrew shomrim or shomronim ; they feel that their observance of the Biblical laws is far stricter than that of the Jews, with whom they had a common history until the year one thousand B. C. E., when the Samaritans separated because of certain religious disputes. Jewish historians, however, maintain that the term Samaritan derives from the city of Samaria; the Samaritan observances of religious law are not stricter but of a different kind; and that the final separation of the Samaritan sect from its Jewish parent-body took place about six hundred years later in 332 B.C. E., when a rival Temple was established on Mount Gerizim.1 The strongest link between the Samaritans and the Jews is the reading and the chanting of the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses, which constitutes the basis of both religions. The specific chanting of the Hebrew Bible is termed cantillation. Cantillation proceeds according to special graphic signs attached to every word of the text. These cantillation motifs are called accents by European and ta'ame hamiqra by Hebrew grammarians. The Hebrew ta'ame hamiqra as used by Jews all over the world have 3 purposes: 1. the accentuation of the syllable, which can be pre-positive or post-positive (Hebr. mil'el or milra);