Складывание и бытование Пяти-книжия в средневековой восточнославянской письменности
Formation and Usage of the Pentateuch in the Medieval East Slavonic Writing Tradition

Summary/Abstract: The article considers the problem of the origin and use of the East Slavonic Pentateuch codices based on the Old Bulgarian translation of the Octateuch. The latter type of codex is typical for all Christian medieval writing, including South Slavonic, while the Pentateuch is considered to belong primarily to the Jewish tradition. There is an opinion that the appearance of the Pentateuch in the East Slavonic literature (from the beginning of the 15th century) was due to Jewish influence, but this is not true. In fact, most of the East Slavonic codices in the form of the Pentateuch (twenty-three in all) belong to a special, and the latest, recension of the Church Slavonic Octateuch, namely the Edited Pentateuch, which indeed emerged as a result of direct Slavic-Jewish contacts, but not earlier than the second half of the 15th century. The other codices of the East Slavonic Pentateuch are only four in number, while the manuscripts of the East Slavonic Octateuch are fifteen, including four copies of the complete Gennady’s Bible. There are three reasons for the origin of the Pentateuch among the Eastern Slavs. Codicologically it can be explained by the convenience of dividing into two parts a vast corpus including the Octateuch, the Books of Kings and Esther, which was also rarely found as a unit in Byzantium and in the Latin West. The Pentateuch was also common in the Christian Coptic tradition, and without any Jewish influence. From the point of view of the liturgical use of the Old Testament books in the Byzantine rite, it was the Pentateuch, without the remaining three books of the Octateuch, that could also be used as the Prophetologion. Finally, the Pentateuch is also honored by Christians as the “root of the New Testament”, and the ideas about this were well known to both East and South Slavonic medieval scholars.

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