I think this is a pretty natural outcome of the fact that some parts of any text attract much more commentary than other parts. (I searched briefly earlier for a good example and didn't find one.) A page will usually not be 90% footnotes, but it's not so rare for a page to be more than 50% footnotes. This style is also common in contemporary legal documents. > So one 'page' of text might be 100% Tanakh and the next might be 10% Tanakh and 90% commentary. The left-hand page is obviously different, but it's not clear to me how much I should think of it as text and how much I should think of it as artwork / talismans.Īnyway, I agree that the commentary is presented as being at least as important as the text, but I don't see that as contradicting what I was describing above. It's surrounded by commentary on three sides instead of four sides, but that is a minor difference.
The Chinese religious text looks basically the same as the right-hand page.
