Bit stands second in the Samaritan alphabet and carries the numeral value two. It writes a plain b, and it is one of the busiest signs in the script, because Samaritan Hebrew attaches several of its commonest prepositions directly to the front of a noun as a single letter. Bit is the one that means in, with or by, so it opens the first word of the Torah and appears on nearly every line of it thereafter.
The Tiberian reading of Hebrew gives this letter two pronunciations, a stop and a fricative, distributed by position and marked in pointed texts by a dot inside the letter. The Samaritan reading tradition does not distribute the two the same way, and the Samaritan script carries no dot of that kind at all. This is a good illustration of a general point about the two traditions: they are not the same Hebrew written in two alphabets but two ways of reading a shared text, each with its own history, and the script belongs to the tradition that made it rather than to the one that happens to be better known.
The letter name is the inherited Northwest Semitic word for a house, the same word that stands behind Hebrew bet, and the gloss is a reconstruction rather than an attested meaning. Its Greek descendant, beta, supplied the second half of the word alphabet, so the name of the whole system in English comes from this letter and the one before it.
The character is encoded at U+0801, immediately after alaf.