Bit ࠁ

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.

The Samaritan community copies its Torah by hand, and has never stopped. A scroll is written in this script on prepared skin, in columns, right to left, with a reed. The scribal office runs in families and the craft is passed on inside the community rather than reconstructed from manuals. The result is that the letterforms of a scroll written this century and one written many centuries ago are recognisably the same hand, with the drift you would expect over that span and nothing like a break.

The community venerates one scroll above the others, kept at Nablus and known as the Abisha scroll after the priest to whom Samaritan tradition ascribes it, a great-grandson of Aaron said to have written it shortly after the Israelites entered the land. Scholars who have examined the manuscript disagree with that ascription and disagree among themselves about what they are looking at: the scroll is not a single piece of work, its sections are not all of one date, and proposals for the age of the oldest parts are spread across a wide range. The atlas records both the community claim and the scholarly reading without choosing between them, because they answer two different questions, one about the standing of a relic and one about the date of a piece of parchment.

What is not in dispute is the continuity of the practice. Copying a Torah in Samaritan letters is a living occupation rather than a revival, and the scrolls in use in the community today were made by people who learned the work from people who did it before them.