This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Samaritan Letters gathers the twenty two signs of the alphabet the Samaritan community still writes its Torah in, not a decorative variant of the square Hebrew letters used in synagogues but the direct continuation of the Paleo-Hebrew script Israelite scribes used before the Babylonian exile.
The Samaritan alphabet holds exactly the twenty two letters of the common Northwest Semitic sequence, in the same order and carrying the same numeral values as Hebrew, so alaf is one and taaf, the last letter, closes the tens and hundreds the same way a Hebrew or Aramaic scribe's arithmetic does. Unlike the square Hebrew script it descended alongside rather than from, Samaritan letters never join to one another and carry no separate final forms, a plainer inheritance from the older Paleo-Hebrew tradition that the Aramaic square script had already left behind by the time Jewish scribes adopted it.
The four throat consonants, alaf, iy, it and in, have weakened in the community's reading tradition to a light catch or to nothing at all, and one letter's name records a further shift outright: Baa, standing where Hebrew has waw, is read b rather than w in Samaritan pronunciation. The alphabet is kept alive today by a small community, a few hundred people centred at Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim and at Holon, who read from it a Pentateuch that differs from the Jewish Masoretic text in thousands of places, a distinct textual tradition carried in a distinct and older script.