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February 17, 2023

The Oldest Extant Hebrew Bible Goes on the Auction Block

The Codex Sassoon.

In the second half of the first millennium, Jewish scribes began composing codices—handwritten books as opposed to more traditional scrolls—of the Hebrew Bible, complete with vowel and cantillation markings and marginal notations meant to preserve the text precisely. One such codex, which belonged to a synagogue in northeastern Syria until the 13th or 14th century, was acquired by the Bombay-born Anglo-Jewish collector David Solomon Sassoon in 1929. It is now slotted to go up for auction at Sotheby’s. Jennifer Schuessler tells its story:

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