The oldest almost complete manuscript of the Jewish Bible known so far was sold for $38.1 million at an auction organized in New York to an American who donated it to the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv.
This copy was called the “Sasson Manuscript” after the name of its most famous owner, David Solomon Sassoon, who died in 1942. The manuscript contains the 24 books that make up the Jewish Bible (Tanakh), which is the Torah (or the first five books of Moses of the Bible). . The missing of them shall not exceed 12 papers.
It also contains passages in Greek and Aramaic and has been remarkably well preserved.
Sotheby’s auction house indicated that the bidding on the manuscript took 4 minutes and took place between two bidders “inside Sotheby’s headquarters in Manhattan, and resulted in a record sale for a manuscript.”
The last record amount recorded by a sale of a printed or handwritten historical document dates back to November 2021, when an original copy of the US Constitution from 1787 was sold for $43 million.
And “Sotheby’s” indicated in a statement that the former US ambassador Alfred Moses and his family bought the manuscript of the Bible “to benefit the American friends of the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, and to donate it to this institution so that it becomes part of its world-famous collection.”
This religious book, which dates back to the tenth century AD or even to the end of the ninth century, was displayed before it was put up for auction at the Museum of the Jewish People on the campus of Tel Aviv University.
