Bible Society of South Africa

Codex

A codex is a book of bound sheets of parchment. It had pages, and was thus quite different from a scroll.
The advantages of a codex were:

  • a codex could contain far more text than a scroll;
  • in a codex, it was much easier to look up a given passage, as you could turn the pages.

The first codices (plural of codex) date from around the first century AD.

The Sacred Books as Codex

In the Jewish tradition, the Hebrew books of the Old Testament continued to be written on scrolls into the Middle Ages. Christianity moved over to use of the codex at an earlier stage. The oldest manuscripts of texts from the New Testament are still papyrus sheets, but from the fourth century on, it was mainly the codex that was used. Large codices contain the text of the whole Bible — the Old and New Testaments.
At a certain point in the Middle Ages, the Hebrew text of the Old Testament was also written on codices. One of the medieval codices with the Hebrew text of the Old Testament is the Codex Leningradensis.

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