A thousand-year-old Hebrew Bible, the oldest known near-complete Bible, was auctioned in New York on Wednesday for $38.1 million, Sotheby’s announced.
It will be donated to the Jewish People’s Museum in Tel Aviv, the auction house said.
The sum represents a record for a manuscript book.
The Sassoon Codex, named after its most famous owner, David Solomon Sassoon (died 1942), was purchased by former U.S. ambassador and philanthropist Alfred Moses and his family for the benefit of the American Friends of the ANU-Jewish People’s Museum and has been donated to that institution, Sotheby’s said in a statement.
The Bible, believed to date from the 10th century AD or even the late 9th century, had been on display before the sale at the museum, which is located on the campus of Tel Aviv University.
According to Sotheby’s, the gavel fell after a four-minute battle between two determined buyers.
The Sassoon Codex, in a visibly exceptional state of preservation and missing only a few pages, links 24 books of the Hebrew Bible from the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, which date back to the 3rd century B.C.
“This Bible was written around the year 900, in Israel or Syria,” Sharon Mintz, a specialist in Judaic texts at Sotheby’s, told AFP.
A bill of sale shows it was sold in the year 1000 and kept in the synagogue of Makisin in northeastern Syria (now Markada) until about 1400.
The manuscript then disappeared for about 500 years and reappeared in 1929 when it was offered for sale to David Solomon Sassoon, one of the greatest collectors of Hebrew manuscripts, Mintz added.
