About the Mystery of the Letters the mid-6th century, in which Mar Saba had played an important role. The anonymous author of the treatise declares he was prompted to the study of the secret meanings of the letters by the words of the Apocalypse, "I am the Alpha and Omega", and that he subsequently received a vision about them on Mount Sinai. The author proposes a re-modelled Greek alphabet reduced to 22 letters on the model of the 22 letters of Hebrew (discounting Xi Ξ and Psi Ψ), and with the Hebrew letter names. He then interprets these letters as symbolic figures of 22 works of
Samaritan Hebrew Samaritan alphabet is close to the script that appears on many Ancient Hebrew coins and inscriptions. By contrast, all other varieties of Hebrew, as written by Jews, employ the later 'square' Hebrew alphabet, which is in fact a variation of the Aramaic alphabet that Jews began using in the Babylonian captivity following the exile of the Kingdom of Judah in the 6th century BCE. During the 3rd century BCE, Jews began to use this stylized "square" form of the script used by the Achaemenid Empire for Imperial Aramaic, its chancellery script while the Samaritans continued to use the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet,