The oldest nearly complete Hebrew Bible, known as the Codex Sassoon, dates from around 1,100 years ago (it dates to the late 9th or early 10th century) and was sold this evening at Sotheby’s in New York for $38,126,000 ($35,170 ,000 euros) auctioned. The precious manuscript was put up for sale by Swiss financier and collector Jacob (Jacqui) Safra, heir to a Syrian-Lebanese-Swiss bank fortune he had owned since 1989. The manuscript was bought at auction after a bid for just under ten minutes by Alfred Moses, a lawyer who works at the law firm of Covington & Burling and was previously the US ambassador to Romania during the administration of President Bill Clinton.
Moses, reports Adnkronos, will donate the Codex Sassoon to the Anu Museum – Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv. “It has been my mission to recognize the historical importance of the Codex Sassoon and to ensure that it is preserved in a place accessible to all,” Moses said in a statement. This Bible set a new record, becoming the most valuable manuscript codex ever sold at auction worldwide, supplanting Leonardo da Vinci’s Leicester Codex, which Bill Gates purchased in 1994 for $30.8 million. However, the amount raised by Codex Sassoon falls short of the record for an all-time historical document set by collector Ken Griffin in 2021, when he paid $43 million for an original printed copy of the United States Constitution.
The record-selling Bible contains all 24 books of the Jewish Scriptures minus about a dozen leaves, including the first 10 chapters of Genesis. Only about 15 chapters are missing from the 792 parchment pages. The Manuscript Bible is named after its former owner, businessman, philanthropist, and collector of Hebrew manuscripts, David Solomon Sassoon. According to Sotheby’s, the specimen predates the first fully complete Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex, by almost a century. The Aleppo Codex, preserved in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, predates the Sassoon Codex, but nearly two-fifths of its pages are missing. The Codex Sassoon contains Masoretic notes by early medieval scholars on how words from the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible should be written, read, and stressed. It also contains more than a millennium of annotations, transcripts, commentaries, and proprietary recordings.