Samaritan is a direct descendant of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, which was a variety of the Phoenician alphabet. Paleo-Hebrew is the alphabet in which large parts of the Hebrew Bible were originally penned according to the consensus of most scholars, however this is disputed by some religious authorities on biblical grounds. All these scripts are believed by scholars to be descendants of the Proto-Sinaitic script, though some religious authorities dispute this alphabetic evolution and branching, instead attributing the script in which the Bible was originally penned as being a direct divine creation which did not evolve out of any earlier writing systems. In any event, the Paleo-Hebrew script was used by the ancient Israelites, both Jews and Samaritans.