What's special about the Jewish Bible sold for VND894 billion?

The New York Times reported that on May 17 (local time), the Hebrew Bible Codex Sassoon was sold for 38.1 million USD (about 894 billion VND) in an auction organized by Sotheby's. The starting price for the Bible was 26 million USD and the auction ended after only 6 minutes.

World - What's special about the Jewish Bible sold for 894 billion VND? — The Codex Sassoon Hebrew Bible has just sold for $38.1 million. Photo: Sotheby's

Known as the Codex Sassoon, the book contains all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, takes up only about eight pages, and includes the first 10 chapters of Genesis (the first book of the Old Testament and the Bible in general). Researchers have determined that the document was created in the late 9th or early 10th century, making the Codex Sassoon the oldest known near-complete Hebrew Bible in the world .

It was also an expensive thing in its day, with the skins of more than 100 animals used to create the approximately 400 pages of text. The entire Codex Sassoon was written by a single person.

The Codex Sassoon is named after its previous owner, David Solomon Sassoon, who acquired the volume in 1929 and owned one of the largest private collections of Hebrew and Jewish cultural material of the 20th century. Since 1989, it has been owned by Swiss financier and collector Jacqui Safra, and has been seen by a number of scholars.

Until recently, Mr. Safra confirmed that the Codex Sassoon is older than the Codex Aleppo and Codex Leningrad, two other ancient Hebrew Bibles, according to Sotheby's. The oldest biblical documents ever found are the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in a cave in 1947.

Speculation has been rife for months about who has the deep pockets to buy the Bible, which is estimated to be worth between $30 million and $50 million.

Immediately after the auction, Sotheby's announced that the successful bidder for the Bible was the "American Friends of ANU - Jewish Museum in Tel Aviv". In addition, the acquisition of this book set had a huge contribution from the family of former US Ambassador to Romania Alfred H. Moses.

The Sassoon Codex will then be handed over to the Jewish Museum in Tel Aviv (formerly the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora).

Sotheby's said the price surpassed the $30.8 million paid in 1994 for Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester, according to Reuters. However, the Bible is not the most expensive document of all time, that title belongs to the first copy of the U.S. Constitution - sold for $43.2 million in 2021.

Minh Hoa (reported by VietNamNet, Thanh Nien)

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