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 (about VND 894 billion) in an auction organized by Sotheby's. The starting price for the Bible was $26 million 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 dated the document to 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 to make at the time it was written, as it took the skins of over 100 animals to create the approximately 400 pages of text. The entire contents of the Sassoon Codex were written by a single person.

The Sassoon Codex 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.

It was only recently that Mr. Safra confirmed that the Sassoon Codex is older than the Codex Aleppo and the 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 the 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 Community).

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 (according to VietNamNet, Thanh Nien)

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