A Hebrew Bible more than 1,000 years old sold for $38.1 million in New York on Wednesday. It sets a record for the most valuable manuscript ever sold at auction.
The Codex Sassoon dates to the late ninth to early 10th century.
The earliest near-complete Hebrew Bible known to still exist.
Sotheby’s announced that they sold it following a four-minute bidding battle between two bidders. As stated in the auction house’s statement.
Former US diplomat Alfred Moses purchased the Bible on behalf of an American nonprofit. It will then gift it to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, Israel, as confirmed by Sotheby’s.
The sale surpassed the $30.8 million that Microsoft founder Bill Gates paid for Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester manuscript in 1994 as the most expensive handwritten document ever sold at auction.
The most expensive historical document remains one of the first prints of the US Constitution. Sotheby’s sold for $43 million in November 2021.
The Codex Sassoon is one of only two codices, or manuscripts. It contains 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 famous early Hebrew Bibles, Sotheby’s said.