Samaritan

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.

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.