Dear Commons Community,
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, 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. As reported by The New York Times.
“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in May, the book carries an estimate of $30 million to $50 million, which could make it the most expensive book or historical document ever sold.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,’” Richard Austin, Sotheby’s global head of books and manuscripts, said. “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 the 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.
This is pretty cool!
Tony
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