The oldest and most complete Hebrew Bible known, the so-called Codex Sasson, was bought at Sotheby’s in New York for next to nothing, $38.1 million. The manuscript contains 24 books of the Hebrew Bible and must have been written about 1100 years ago.
Former US Ambassador Alfred Moses purchased the text for the Museum of the Jewish People (ANU) in Tel Aviv, Israel, and in his opinion, “The Hebrew Bible has the greatest influence in history and forms the basis of Western civilization.”
This auction surpassed the $30.8 million paid by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in 1994 for the Codex Leicester, Leonardo da Vinci’s science notebook.
But it fell short of an auction record for a historic document set by fund manager Ken Griffin, who bought a $43.2 million hard copy of the first edition of the US Constitution two years ago.
The Codex Sassoon owes its name to its previous owner, David Solomon Sassoon, who acquired it in 1929 and amassed in his London home the largest and most important private collection of Hebrew manuscripts in the world.
Source: Juventud Rebelde
