The Older Letters Kept

The Samaritan script is what the Hebrew alphabet looked like before the exile. Ancient Israel wrote in the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, a national form of the Phoenician letters; after the Babylonian exile, Jewish scribes gradually adopted the Aramaic square script of the imperial chanceries, the ancestor of the Hebrew letters used today, and the older script faded from Jewish use except for archaising gestures such as coins of the revolts and occasional divine names at Qumran.

The Samaritans, the Israelite community centred on Mount Gerizim near Shechem, made the opposite choice. Holding themselves the keepers of the true tradition, they retained the old letters, and their script is the direct living descendant of Paleo-Hebrew, modestly stylised over the centuries. Rabbinic literature itself remembers the divergence, discussing which script is the original Hebrew writing. The Samaritan community survived conquest after conquest in reduced numbers, and its script survived with it, used for its scriptures, its liturgy and its inscriptions, so that a script line abandoned by the larger Jewish world more than two thousand years ago still has native readers and working scribes in the twenty-first century.