The Tashqil

The Samaritan-Aramaic term "tashqil" refers to a peculiar and charac-teristic phenomenon of the Samaritan manuscript culture. Serving to embed a paratext into a given Samaritan manuscript, the tashqil makes this paratext man-ifest through a salient page design that serves to highlight letters of the main text by placing them into a special part of the page. Although the phenomenon is well acknowledged in Samaritan studies, a comprehensive description is still a desid-erate. The present article aims to fill this gap, approaching the topic under differ¬ent perspectives, as giving the definition, term, language and function of "tashqil", studying its graphical shape and placement within the biblical text; describing the interplay between form, function, and placement; analyzing tashqils in bi- and trilingual manuscripts of the Pentateuch and outside Hebrew Pentateuch manu-scripts and even of similar phenomena from other manuscript cultures.