The Samaritan community kept the letterform everyone else abandoned. While other Jewish scribes moved to the square Aramaic script, the Samaritans went on writing the Torah in a majuscule descended straight from paleo-Hebrew, on gevil — ram skin tanned whole with gall-nut tannins — sewn into a continuous scroll and housed in a silver cylinder.

The design system takes its architecture from the scroll's own construction: strict ruled columns of seventy-five to eighty-nine lines, prick marks at the outer margin, generous intercolumnar gutters, and an uneven parchment ground that stains membrane by membrane. Divisions come from the script's end-of-section marker. Nothing here is decoration.