World's oldest Hebrew Bible on display in Israel
STORY: Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
The world's oldest Hebrew Bible is on display in this Israeli museum
The over 1,000-year-old book is expected to sell for up to $50 million
which would make it the most valuable printed text or historical document ever sold at auction
Date: March 22, 2023
[Sharon Liberman Mintz, Senior Judaica and Hebraica Consultant, Sotheby’s]
"Codex Sassoon is the earliest, most complete Hebrew bible extant. It was written around the year 900 either in the land of Israel or Syria. It's written on parchment. It is a very luxurious, lavish manuscript on 792 pages of text, written by one scribe over the course of either a year or perhaps two years. It is a monumental book of importance."
The holy book offers a critical link bridging Jewish oral tradition to the modern Hebrew Bible
[Yosef Ofer, Professor, Bar-Ilan University]
“You can see how these Masorets (Hebrew for traditionalists) worked. They had ancient material and they used it in very sophisticated ways to create their own comments to guard the text of the Bible."
