A book believed to be the earliest and most complete copy of the Hebrew Bible was sold for $38.1 million on Wednesday in New York, the United States (U.S.), auction house Sotheby’s said.
The Codex Sassoon “contains all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible missing only 12 leaves and precedes the earliest entirely complete Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex, by nearly a century,’’ the auction house said.
The Bible, dating to the late ninth or early 10th century, has become the most expensive auctioned manuscript and the most expensive religious Jewish artefact auctioned in history, Sotheby’s said.
After a four-minute bidding war, the auction was won by a U.S. non-profit which intended to gift it to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv.
