A book believed to be the earliest and most complete copy of the Hebrew Bible was sold for $38.1 million on Wednesday in New York, auction house Sotheby’s said.
The Codex Sassoon “contains all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible missing only 12 leaves and precedes the earliest entirely complete Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex, by nearly a century,’’ the auction house said.
The Bible, dating to the late ninth or early 10th century, has become the most expensive auctioned manuscript and the most expensive religious Jewish artefact auctioned in history, Sotheby’s said.
After a four-minute bidding war, the leather-bound, handwritten parchment volume was purchased by former US Ambassador to Romania Alfred H. Moses on behalf of the American Friends of ANU and donated to ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, where it will join the collection, the Sotheby’s auction house said in statement.
The Codex Sassoon is the most valuable book ever sold at auction, according to Sotheby’s.
The record-breaking price surpassed the 1994 sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester manuscript, which sold for $30.8 million.
“This is one of the rarest, unique, uniting documents that ever existed,” Irina Nevzlin, chair of ANU’s board of directors, told JTA.
“For us to have it in the museum where it will be available for all those millions of people — this is something that can strengthen our roots and our identity, because it’s something eternal.”
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