Ancient Hebrew Bible sells for record US$38.1m, gifted to Tel Aviv museum

An ancient Hebrew Bible has set a new record for the most valuable manuscript ever sold at auction, fetching US$38.1 million in New York. The Codex Sassoon, which dates back to the late ninth to early 10th century, is the earliest near-complete Hebrew Bible known to still exist today.

Sotheby’s auction house facilitated the sale, which involved a four-minute bidding war between two interested parties. Eventually, former US diplomat Alfred Moses bought the Bible on behalf of an American nonprofit organisation. The manuscript will be gifted to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Alfred Moses, who served as an ambassador under President Bill Clinton, said…

“The Hebrew Bible is the most influential book in history and constitutes the bedrock of Western civilization. I rejoice in knowing that it belongs to the Jewish People.”

The sale of the Codex Sassoon surpassed the previous record of US$30.8 million, paid by Microsoft founder Bill Gates for Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester manuscript in 1994. However, the most expensive historical document remains one of the first prints of the US Constitution, which Sotheby’s sold for US$43 million in November 2021.

The Codex Sassoon is one of only two codices, or manuscripts, containing all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible to have survived into the modern era. It is substantially more complete than the Aleppo Codex and older than the Leningrad Codex, two other renowned early Hebrew Bibles.

The manuscript serves as a link between the Dead Sea Scrolls, dating back as early as the third century BC, and today’s modernly accepted form of the Hebrew Bible. The Codex Sassoon was previously owned by David Solomon Sassoon (1880-1942), who assembled the most significant private collection of ancient Jewish texts in the world.

This was the first time the manuscript had been auctioned in over 30 years, with a pre-sale estimate of between US$30 million and US$50 million. The Codex Sassoon has had a long and storied history, having only been presented once to the public, in 1982, at the British Library in London, according to Orit Shaham-Gover, chief curator of the Museum of the Jewish People.

Carbon-14 dating reveals that the Codex Sassoon is older and more complete than the Aleppo Codex, which was written in Galilee in the 10th century and brought to Israel in the 1950s after being discovered in the Syrian city of Aleppo. The manuscript is also considered to predate the Leningrad Codex, the oldest surviving copy of the Hebrew Bible text in its entirety, which dates back to the early 11th century.