World's oldest Hebrew Bible to be auctioned in New York

Sotheby's auction house in New York put up for auction the earliest known to mankind and the most complete Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh. According to experts, this rarity is over 1100 years old.

The book is unique in many ways.

It is about the so-called Codex Sassoon. The book is named after the businessman, philanthropist and collector David Solomon Sassoon who once owned it. Sotheby's senior consultant Sharon Lieberman Mintz called the state of the code "astounding." The book has been preserved almost completely - only a few pages are missing from it. This is rare luck in the case of such ancient textual works.

The tome brings together 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, taken from the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, which were created in the XNUMXrd century BC.

“Before this codex, portions of the Bible appeared only in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And after that, until the year 900, there were no book forms of the Bible. This book dates back to the end of the XNUMXth – beginning of the XNUMXth centuries,” Lieberman Mintz explained.

The Codex of Sassoon is written in Hebrew with inserts in Greek and Aramaic. It contains more than 700 parchment pages, the production of which took the skins of 100 animals.

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In addition to the main text, the codex contains comments by early medieval scholars on how to read and stress words. In addition, the book contains annotations and ownership records dating back over a thousand years.

Going for the record

The Tanakh will go to auction from the collection of Jacqui Safra, a Swiss banker and collector of antiquities. Estimated cost of the book - 30-50 million dollars. Thus, the codex may become the most expensive historical document ever sold under the hammer. He has every chance to break the record of 2021, when Sotheby's sold the first printed US Constitution for $43 million.

Richard Austin, head of books and manuscripts at Sotheby's, is not surprised by the price tag, because, according to him, "we are talking about one of the most important and unique texts in the history of mankind."

Examination has shown that the Sassoon Codex is much more complete than the Aleppo Codex and older than the Leningrad Codex, two other known early collections of the Hebrew Bible.

In addition, the high price does not seem to deter potential buyers. Austin called the list of interested parties a "bottomless well." It includes private collectors, museums, and research centers.

The auction will take place on May 16th. And before that, the codex will be shown to the public in several countries: in the near future, the book will be exhibited in London, then in Tel Aviv, Dallas and Los Angeles.