Musical Instruments in Sephardic Illuminated Bibles

This essay addresses illustrations of musical instruments in thirteenth to fifteenth century Hebrew Bible manuscripts from Spain and Southern France. The illuminators of these manuscripts painted full-page depictions of the Temple implements that included musical instruments comprising two trumpets and a ram’s horn.

As the art historian Joseph Gutmann (1923–2004) demonstrated, these illustrations reflect not only the biblical text but also Maimonides’s exegesis, and he argued that they also have an eschatological import.

A meticulous examination of the characteristics of the musical instruments in the Sephardic Bibles’ illustrations, together with explanations of these characteristics, supports Gutmann’s interpretation of the illustrations as eschatological.

After the examination, I compared the images with those in two contemporary Christian illuminated manuscripts from Spain, namely The Cantigas de Santa Maria Codex E and Peter Comestor’s Historia Scholastica.

While both the trumpets and the ram’s horn were depicted in earlier Jewish art, the depiction of the trumpets adjacent to the ram’s horn is an innovation in the Sephardic Bibles that is not found in earlier surviving Jewish art.

Most likely, the reason for including the trumpets adjacent to the ram’s horn is as a reference to Psalm 98, which is the only place in the Bible suggesting these two types of instruments were played together. The reason for referring to Psalm 98 is most likely because Psalm 98 was interpreted by Medieval Jewish exegetes as referring to unique Temple rituals, either of the past Temple or the Eschatological Temple.