—nor is it within the power of any human being to place every manuscript that exists in the world, in every language, of all twenty-four canonical books side by side with every other manuscript. Yet we have examined a number of them and found clear, unmistakable differences in wording. The Torah is the most reliable and the best-known of these books among Jews and Christians, and even so the Samaritan recension diverges from the Jewish-Christian recension, to the point that within the very Ten Commandments the Samaritan text contains an instruction to face the mountain—something absent from the Jewish and Christian copies. This makes plain that alteration has taken place in many of the existing manuscripts of these Scriptures, for the Samaritans themselves possess multiple copies.