NEW YORK, NY.- One day, about 1,100 years ago, a scribe in present-day Israel or Syria sat down to begin work on a book. Copied out on roughly 400 large parchment sheets, it contained the complete text of the Hebrew Bible, written in square letters similar to those of the Torah scrolls in any synagogue today.

After changing hands a few times, it ended up in a synagogue in northeast Syria, which was destroyed around the 13th or 14th century. Then it disappeared for nearly 600 years.

Since resurfacing in 1929, the Bible has been in private collections. But one afternoon last week, there it was, sitting in a cradle at Sotheby’s in Manhattan, New York, where Sharon Liberman Mintz, the auction house’s senior Judaica consultant, was turning its rippled pages with a mixture of familiarity and awe.

She pointed out the two versions of the Ten Commandments, a beautifully calligraphic rendering of the Song of Deborah and, more prosaically, places where small tears had been stitched together with thread or sinew.

“It’s electrifying,” Mintz said. “This represents the first time the text appears in the form where we can really read and understand it.”

The Codex Sassoon, as it’s known, is being billed by Sotheby’s as the earliest example of a nearly complete codex containing all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible. (It is missing about five leaves, including the first 10 chapters of Genesis.) Set to be auctioned in May, the book carries an estimate of $30 million to $50 million, which could make it the most expensive book or historical document ever sold.

“When Sharon came to us, she said, ‘I just saw the oldest complete Hebrew Bible,’ and I kept waiting for her to say ‘in private hands’ or ‘in the last 50 years,’” said Richard Austin, Sotheby’s global head of books and manuscripts. “But that was it, full stop.”

The book, which measures about 12 by 14 inches and weighs 26 pounds, is housed in an unprepossessing early 20th-century brown leather binding. Embossed on the spine is the number 1053 — its catalog number in the collection of David Solomon Sassoon, the British collector and scholar who purchased it in 1929 after it resurfaced. (The current owner is Swiss financier and collector Jacqui Safra.)

The Codex Sassoon tells multiple stories — not just those recounted in its pages, but also the story of the Hebrew Bible itself and how its text was fixed and then handed down in the form we know today.

The earliest known Hebrew biblical manuscripts are the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D. Then came what scholars describe as nearly 700 years of silence, with only a few fragments of text surviving.

During this period, Mintz said, the Hebrew Bible was preserved and transmitted orally. While Christians began using the codex (the form of the book we know today) as early as the second century, full Hebrew Bible codices do not appear until the ninth century.

“It was like going from zero to 100,” Mintz said — or, to mix religious metaphors, “like Athena springing from the head of Zeus.”

“You have seven centuries of nothing,” she said. “And then you have this entire authoritative, standardized, accurate text of the Hebrew Bible” — identical, she said, to the one read and studied around the world today.

The text preserved in these Bibles is known as the Masoretic text, after the Masoretes, scholar-scribes who lived in Palestine and Babylonia from about the sixth to the ninth centuries and developed systems of annotation to ensure that the text would be read and transmitted properly.

Masoretic Bibles feature a system of vowel points under the letters, known as the nikud, to indicate how the Hebrew words (which are written without vowels) should be pronounced and understood. Another system of accent marks, the te’amim, function as musical notes and also indicate how to parse a sentence.

According to rabbinical law, Torah scrolls must be written without such marks to be fit for ritual use in the synagogue. This type of codex, with its more user-friendly format, Mintz said, “was meant for study.”




The Masoretic codices were also used to copy Torah scrolls, a task aided by two sets of notes — one running along the top of the pages, the other between the three columns of text — giving detailed instructions on the correct way to write the text, including precise counts of the number of letters and words.

“There was a kind of obsessive focus,” Mintz, who is also the curator of Jewish art at the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, said. “How do you ensure the sacred holy word of God gets transmitted properly?”

Today, two other complete or substantially complete Hebrew Bibles from this period are known to survive. The Aleppo Codex, held in the Israel Museum, was created around 930. It’s missing almost two-fifths of its pages, including most of the Pentateuch. The Leningrad Codex, held in the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg, is fully complete but dates from around 1008.

When Sassoon bought his codex in 1929, he dated it to the 10th century. It was believed to be more recent than the Aleppo Codex but, with only about five leaves missing, substantially more complete.

Beginning in the 1960s, Mintz said, scholars began to believe that the Sassoon Codex was created a bit earlier, around the time of the Aleppo Codex, or perhaps earlier. A recent carbon-dating by the seller — reviewed and endorsed by Sotheby’s — affirmed that, giving the Sassoon plausible bragging rights as the oldest nearly complete Hebrew Bible.

And the price? Austin said a committee began discussing it two years ago, considering the old record for the most expensive book ever sold: the Codex Leicester, a Leonardo da Vinci manuscript bought by Bill Gates in 1994 for $30.8 million. Then in November 2021 came a new bench mark: the $43.2 million paid by investor Ken Griffin for a first printing of the U.S. Constitution.

The codex was also an expensive object in its time, Mintz said, requiring the skins of easily more than 100 animals. The biblical text, with its calligraphic flourishes, was written by a single scribe. “It’s a masterpiece of scribal art,” Mintz said.

Mintz pointed out markings tracing changes in ownership across the centuries. The earliest is a deed of sale from around 1000 A.D., indicating that it was sold by Khalaf ben Abraham, a businessperson active in Palestine and Syria, to Isaac ben Ezekiel el-Attar, who later gave it to his sons.

Roughly 200 years later, it was dedicated to the synagogue in the city of Makisin, in northeast Syria, site of present-day Markada. After the synagogue was destroyed, according to a marking in the book, the codex was entrusted to Salama bin Abi al-Fakhr, who was to return it when the synagogue was rebuilt.

It never was. Today, Mintz said, the only other surviving record of a Jewish community in Makisin is a reference by Obadiah ha-Ger, a Norman convert to Judaism who had passed through in the 12th century.

The codex’s trail then went cold for roughly 600 years. In 1929, it appeared for sale in Frankfurt, Germany, and was bought by Sassoon for 350 British pounds. The name of the seller or any other details are unknown.

In 1978, the British Rail Pension Fund bought it from Sassoon’s heirs for $320,000. In 1989, the fund sold it at auction for $3.19 million to a dealer, who then sold it to Safra.

The book seems to have been exhibited just once, at the British Museum, in 1982. But before the Sotheby’s auction, it will be on public view in London; Tel Aviv, Israel; Dallas; Los Angeles; and New York.

Paging through the codex, Mintz pointed out symbols later scribes had added in the margins, marking the start of the different parshas, or portions, to be read in the synagogue each week. (Numbered chapters are a later, Christian innovation.)

The book, Mintz said, “radiates both history and holiness.”

Then she turned a bit less reverential.

“We should all look this good after a thousand years,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.