Bible Codex

Unknown

10th or 11th Century

Two damaged parchment pages with Hebrew in columns surrounded by geometric micrographic decorations, including a pattern of red and yellow floral circles surrounded by boxes of text.
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Only a few pages from this tenth- or eleventh-century decorated Pentateuch survive. The parchment pages present the biblical text surrounded by Masoretic notes in micrography, bringing together two prominent Jewish cultural products of this period. Micrography was an artistic form unique to Jewish manuscripts in which words of a text are written so as to form a picture or abstract pattern. The two pages here, from Genesis 50:15–25 and Deuteronomy 32:10–23, are embellished with geometric shapes and patterns that were common in Islamic manuscripts and exemplify the care that scribes took when producing sacred texts.

Credits

Source: The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Israel. MS Heb. 4°5941, fols. 1v and 2r.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 3: Encountering Christianity and Islam.

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