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The Samaritan alphabet is a script derived from the Early Hebrew alphabet, which itself originated from the Canaanite branch of Semitic scripts around the 11th century BCE. This alphabet is still used today by a small number of Samaritan Jews for liturgical purposes. The Samaritan Pentateuch, a version of the first five books of the Old Testament, is written in this script. The Samaritan alphabet is closely related to the Phoenician alphabet, a key ancestor of many subsequent alphabetic scripts.123

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