Art And Antiquities News

Ancient Hebrew Bible may break sales record at Sotheby's.

Sotheby's is set to auction the Codex Sassoon, a nearly complete 1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible, for an estimated $30 million to $50 million in May. The manuscript contains almost the entirety of the Hebrew Bible and is one of the oldest surviving biblical manuscripts. Scholars say it doesn't match the pedigree and quality of its contemporary, the Aleppo Codex, but it's still considered rare and significant. The Codex Sassoon's margins contain an annotation from a later scholar who says he checked its text against the Aleppo Codex. If the target price is realized, it could break the record for the priciest historical document ever sold at public auction.