Posted on 03/22/2023 10:05:17 AM PDT by bitt
JERUSALEM (AP) — One of the oldest surviving biblical manuscripts, a nearly complete 1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible, could soon be yours — for a cool $30 million.
The Codex Sassoon, a leather-bound, handwritten parchment tome containing almost the entirety of the Hebrew Bible, is set to go on the block at Sotheby’s in New York in May. Its anticipated sale speaks to the still bullish market for art, antiquities and ancient manuscripts even in a worldwide bear economy.
Sotheby’s is drumming up interest in hopes of enticing institutions and collectors to bite. It has put the price tag at an eye-watering $30 million to $50 million.
On Wednesday, Tel Aviv’s ANU Museum of the Jewish People opened a week-long exhibition of the manuscript, part of a whirlwind worldwide tour of the artifact in the United Kingdom, Israel and the United States before its expected sale, on Wednesday.
“There are three ancient Hebrew Bibles from this period,” said Yosef Ofer, a professor of Bible studies at Israel’s Bar Ilan University: the Codex Sassoon and Aleppo Codex from the 10th century, and the Leningrad Codex, from the early 11th century.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
p
Oy dats a lotta shekels
Personally, I would never want to own something of real historic value. I prefer it be in a museum of some sort. I would rather own functional than valuable.
Agree
Surprised the guy is touching it with bare hands.
Likely it will be purchased by a museum or library and treated with the appropriate care.
Oo La La! (Sassoon Codex?)
Yuppers!
I got a 90 yr old King James I truly
Love !
Extra thick leather,concordance with
Photos of the Holy Land.
Very Functional.
It’s sure to be sold for a hair-raising price.
We already have too many Bibles in the country that are not being read.
792 pages on parchment. Producing 396 book leaves of parchment from the hides of sheep or calves is no easy task. It represents a very large investment of labor.
Note that a printing press is of little value if the medium you are using is as expensive to produce as parchment.
In the two centuries before Gutenberg the growing abundance of linen rags and the adoption of wind power for hammering linen rags into paper making pulp drastically reduced the cost of paper. Only because of this was Gutenberg’s movable type an economically useful invention.
Not in my experience. They are usually lent indefinitely to museums, though.
The museum then has the burden of insuring the item and you can (if structured correctly) get a tax deduction equivalent to reasonable rent of the item (depending on jurisdiction).
That way, you can safely store the item, get a tax deduction, and then, as the item (presumably) appreciates, sell it later.
It also helps the value of an item to say “on display at XYZ museum for years 2023 to 2033”.
There was a Jewish family of some wealth that lived in England called the Sassoons. One of them became a famous poet of World War 1, Siegfried Sassoon.
The wealthy Sassoon family is associated with Baghdad and spread around Asia, Egypt and Syria, and eventually England. They probably originated in the Kurdish area known as Sason in what is now Turkey. Mizrachi Rothschilds.
OH, HAIRSPRAY!!! I forgot Sassoon made hairspray back in the day! I knew there was a joke in there, but it took me forever to get it.
I cringe every time I watch Antique Roadshow and they man handle a $40,000 Babe Ruth baseball without gloves or at least holding it with their fingertips on the seams.
only 1,100-year-old?...................
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
