The London Codex, or Codex Orientales 4445 is a Hebrew
codex
The codex (plural codices ) was the historical ancestor of the modern book. Instead of being composed of sheets of paper, it used sheets of vellum, papyrus, or other materials. The term ''codex'' is often used for ancient manuscript books, with ...
containing
Masoretic text
The Masoretic Text (MT or 𝕸; he, נֻסָּח הַמָּסוֹרָה, Nūssāḥ Hammāsōrā, lit. 'Text of the Tradition') is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) in Rabbinic Judaism. ...
dating from the 9th or 10th century. The manuscript contains an incomplete copy of the
Pentateuch
The Torah (; hbo, ''Tōrā'', "Instruction", "Teaching" or "Law") is the compilation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, namely the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In that sense, Torah means the sa ...
. The manuscript is housed in the
British Museum
The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...
.
Contents
The oldest part of the codex contains text from
Genesis
Genesis may refer to:
Bible
* Book of Genesis, the first book of the biblical scriptures of both Judaism and Christianity, describing the creation of the Earth and of mankind
* Genesis creation narrative, the first several chapters of the Book of ...
39:20 to
Deuteronomy
Deuteronomy ( grc, Δευτερονόμιον, Deuteronómion, second law) is the fifth and last book of the Torah (in Judaism), where it is called (Hebrew: hbo, , Dəḇārīm, hewords Moses.html"_;"title="f_Moses">f_Moseslabel=none)_and_th ...
1:33, with gaps and later additions. The manuscript contains 186 folios, 55 of which were later added to the codex. The added parts consist of folios 1-28, 125 (
Numbers
A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...
7:46-73), 128 (Numbers 9:12-10:18), and folios 160-186 (Deuteronomy 1:4-34:12). The additions are dated to around 1540 AD, around 600 years after the creation of the original manuscript.
Many theorize that the codex was originally copied by Nissi ben Daniel in Egypt or then-Palestine, with the additions being of
Yemenite origin. The British Library obtained the manuscript in 1891 through a private collector.
Description
The text is supplemented with the
Niqqud
In Hebrew orthography, niqqud or nikud ( or ) is a system of diacritical signs used to represent vowels or distinguish between alternative pronunciations of letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Several such diacritical systems were developed in the ...
and
cantillation
Cantillation is the ritual chanting of prayers and responses. It often specifically refers to Jewish Hebrew cantillation. Cantillation sometimes refers to diacritics used in texts that are to be chanted in liturgy.
Cantillation includes:
* Chant
...
marks, the latter of which are the first example of a Torah manuscript to contain a formal system for signifying ritual chanting. There are three columns of text on each page, and each column typically has twenty-one lines. The edge of the left side of the columns were not leveled with the dilation of ending letters used in certain Hebrew manuscripts.
The upper margin of each page contains two ''masora magna'' lines, and on the lower margin, there are four of them. The outer and inner-column margins contain the ''masora parva.'' Both marginal notations were added to the manuscript around a century after its original creation. The masora used is its oldest form, and differs from the terminology used in 11th and 12th century manuscripts. It was probably added in the time of the
ben-Ashers.
The niqqud and cantillation trope are consistent with the Western-style Masorah called Palestinian, according to the
textus receptus
''Textus Receptus'' (Latin: "received text") refers to all printed editions of the Greek New Testament from Erasmus's ''Novum Instrumentum omne'' (1516) to the 1633 Elzevir edition. It was the most commonly used text type for Protestant denomi ...
. According to Biblical scholar
Christian Ginsburg
Christian David Ginsburg (, 25 December 1831 – 7 March 1914) was a Polish-born British Bible scholar and a student of the Masoretic tradition in Judaism.
He was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw but converted to Christianity at the age of 15.
...
, the authors of the manuscript began writing it sometime between 820 and 850 AD, finishing around 950 AD.
References
{{Authority control
10th-century manuscripts
Hebrew manuscripts
Old Testament
British Museum
Hebrew Bible manuscripts
10th-century biblical manuscripts
Torah