Script of the Samaritan Pentateuch

The Samaritan canon is the Pentateuch alone, and the script exists above all to carry it. The Samaritan Pentateuch differs from the Masoretic text in thousands of mostly small readings and in a handful of doctrinally weighty ones, most famously its emphasis on Mount Gerizim as the chosen place of worship, and every copy is written in the Samaritan letters.

The community's most treasured manuscript, the Abisha Scroll kept at Nablus, is attributed by Samaritan tradition to a great-grandson of Aaron, a claim scholarship does not sustain but which expresses how the community regards the scroll and its script as an unbroken priestly inheritance. Scribal practice remains a living craft among the priestly families of the communities at Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim and in Holon: Torah scrolls, marriage contracts and amulets are still hand-written in the script, and Samaritan Hebrew and Aramaic liturgical texts are recited from it in the synagogue. The letters also mark sacred space, inscribed on the synagogue and on Passover altars on Gerizim, where the community still sacrifices at its ancient holy mountain. For the Samaritans the script is not an antiquarian survival but a boundary marker of identity, the visible sign that theirs is the older way.