World’s oldest, most complete Hebrew Bible sold for $38.1M at auction

The oldest and most complete Hebrew Bible, described as “one of the most important and singular texts in human history,” has become the most valuable manuscript ever to be sold at an auction.

The Codex Sassoon is more than 1,000 years old, dating from the late 9th or early 10th century, and sold for $38.1 million at Sotheby’s in New York on Wednesday.

The Codex Sassoon was bought by US Lawyer and former ambassador Alfred Moses for the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, Israel.

“The Hebrew Bible is the most influential in history and constitutes the bedrock of Western civilization,” Moses said in a statement. “I rejoice in knowing that it belongs to the Jewish people. It was my mission, realizing the historic significance of Codex Sassoon, to see it resides in a place with global access to all people.”

Prior to the auction, the Codex Sassoon was exhibited at the ANU Museum as part of a worldwide tour.

It’s the earliest surviving manuscript of the Hebrew Bible that has all 24 books — the books that make up what Christians refer to as the Old Testament — with punctuation, vowels and accents. According to Sotheby’s, the Codex Sassoon is only missing 12 pages.

“It presents to us the first time an almost-complete book of the Hebrew Bible appears with the vowel points, the cantillation and the notes on the bottom telling scribes how the correct text should be written,” Sharon Mintz, senior Judaica specialist at Sotheby’s, said in March.

Mintz told CNN ahead of the auction that “this is the most important document to come to auction ever.”

She said that she was “absolutely delighted by today’s monumental result and that Codex Sassoon will shortly be making its grand and permanent return to Israel, on display for the world to see.”

The Codex Sassoon includes 792 parchment pages made from animal skins and is described by Mintz as a “lavish production that only the most wealthy could have afforded.”

This Hebrew Bible is named after renowned Judaica collector David Solomon Sassoon, its previous owner, who got the manuscript in 1929 and filled his London home with the most important and largest private collection of Hebrew manuscripts in the world, according to the BBC.

After Sassoon died, his estate was broken up and the Codex was sold by Sotheby’s in Zurich to the British Rail Pension Fund in 1978. The pension fund then sold the manuscript 11 years later to Jacqui Safra, a banker and art collector, in 1989 for $3.19 million. Safra was the seller on Wednesday.

The last manuscript to break sales records was Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester, which sold for $30.8 million in 1994.

However, the Codex Sassoon did not break the record for the most expensive historical documents sold at an auction. In 2021, hedge fund manager Ken Griffin bought a first-edition printed copy of the US Constitution for $43.2 million.