One of the oldest surviving biblical manuscripts, a nearly complete, 1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible, will go on sale for $30 million. Here is what you need to know about this Hebrew Bible
A leather-bound handwritten parchment tome, Codex Sassoon, has almost all of the Hebrew Bible and is set to go on the block at Sotheby’s in New York in May
British-founded American multinational corporation Sotheby is hoping to attract institutions and collectors. The Bible is priced between $30 million to $50 million
Tel Aviv’s ANU Museum of the Jewish People on Wednesday opened a week-long exhibition of the manuscript. This is part of a whirlwind worldwide tour of the artefact in the United Kingdom, Israel and the United States before it goes on sale
Yosef Ofer, a professor of Bible studies at Israel’s Bar Ilan University, said, “There are three ancient Hebrew Bibles from this period. The Codex Sassoon and Aleppo Codex from the 10th century, and the Leningrad Codex, from the early 11th century”
Only the Dead Sea Scrolls and a handful of fragmentary early medieval texts are older, and “an entire Hebrew Bible is relatively rare,” Yosef Ofer added
A senior Judaica specialist at Sotheby, Liberman Mintz, said that the codex’s writing style suggests its creator was an unspecified early 10th-century scribe in Egypt or the Levant and radiocarbon dating of the parchment gave an estimated date of 880 to 960
Liberman Mintz said, “It’s like the emergence of the biblical text as we know it today. It’s so foundational not only for Judaism but also for world culture”
Scholars say that even though it is ancient and rare, the Codex Sassoon doesn’t match the quality and pedigree of its contemporary Aleppo Codex