The Most Expensive Book Ever!

A 1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible, among the world’s oldest biblical manuscripts, is now also among the world’s most expensive books. The handwritten manuscript on 792 leather-bound pages of sheepskin, dubbed Codex Sassoon after a previous owner, sold for $38.1 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York on Wednesday and will head to Israel for public display. The oldest near-complete Hebrew Bible, missing only 12 leaves from its 24 books, was purchased by Alfred H. Moses, former US Ambassador to Romania, on behalf of the American Friends of ANU, who donated it to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv. It last sold at auction in 1989 for $3.19 million. Its new price tag-a little shy of the $43.2 million paid for a rare copy of the US constitution in 2021-“reflects the profound power, influence, and significance of the Hebrew Bible, which is an indispensable pillar of humanity,” says Sotheby’s Judaica specialist Sharon Liberman Mintz, per the AP. It’s “one of the rarest, unique, uniting documents that ever existed. (Newser)