Hebrew Bible Sells for $38 Million: One of the Oldest Biblical Manuscripts in the World

A Hebrew Bible that is more than 1,100 years old, which is one of the oldest biblical manuscripts in the world, has sold for $38 million during an auction in New York.

The Sassoon Codex, a leather-bound parchment manuscript volume containing a nearly complete Hebrew Bible, was purchased by former US Ambassador to Romania Alfred H. Moses on behalf of the American Friends of the ANU and donated to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, where it will become part of the collection, Sotheby’s auction house said in a statement.

The manuscript was exhibited at the ANU museum in March as part of a world tour leading up to the auction.

Sharon Liberman Mintz, Sotheby’s Judaica specialist, said the $38 million price, which includes auction house fees, “reflects the profound power, influence and significance of the Hebrew Bible, which is an indispensable pillar of The humanity”.

It is one of the highest prices for a manuscript sold at auction. In 2021, a rare copy of the United States Constitution sold for $43 million. Leonardo da Vinci’s Leicester Codex sold for $31 million in 1994, or about $60 million in today’s dollars.

Mintz commented that she was “absolutely delighted by today’s monumental outcome and by the fact that the Sassoon Codex will soon be returning to Israel in grandiose and permanent form, to be exhibited to the world.”

The Sassoon Codex is believed to have been produced sometime between the years 880 and 960.

It received its name in 1929, when it was purchased by David Solomon Sassoon, the son of an Iraqi-Jewish magnate who filled his London home with a collection of Jewish manuscripts.

Sassoon’s estate was divided upon his death, and the biblical codex was sold by Sotheby’s in Zurich in 1978 to the British Railways Pension Fund for about $320,000, or $1.4 million in today’s dollars.

The pension fund sold the Sassoon Codex 11 years later to Jacqui Safra, a banker and art collector, who bought it in 1989 for $3.19 million ($7.7 million in today’s dollars). Safra was the seller on Wednesday.