Earliest Hebrew Bible Sells for $38M at Sotheby's, Now Headed Home to Israel

Steve Warren : Jun 2, 2023
Faithwire.com

"This is something that connects us all to our roots and gives us a foundation of who we are—for everybody in the world." -Irina Nevzlin

[Faithwire.com] The auction house Sotheby's recently sold a 1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible for $38 million in New York. It is one of the world's oldest surviving Biblical manuscripts and brought the second-highest price at auction for an historical document. (Screengrab image)

The 26-pound book, whose five-inch stack of parchment contains 396 pages, sold following a five-minute battle between two bidders vying mainly over the telephone. The final price, with Sotheby's fees, fell short of breaking the record currently held by a $43.2 million copy of the US Constitution bought by billionaire Ken Griffin two years ago, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester sold for $31 million in 1994 or around $60 million in today's dollars.

Known as The Codex Sassoon, the leather-bound, handwritten volume containing a nearly complete Hebrew Bible, was purchased by former US Ambassador to Romania Alfred H. Moses on behalf of the American Friends of ANU and donated to ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, where it will join the museum's collection, Sotheby's said in a statement... Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here

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