Oldest known Hebrew Bible displayed in Israel ahead of sale

TEL AVIV: The oldest known near-complete Hebrew Bible was presented to the press on Wednesday in Tel Aviv, where it will be displayed for a week before going under the hammer in New York.

The Codex Sassoon is one of only two codices, or manuscripts, containing all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible -- the Christian Old Testament -- to have survived into the modern era and is estimated to be 1,100 years old.

Sharon Mintz, a specialist in Jewish texts at Sotheby´s, the auction house selling the codex in May, said carbon dating and other forms of analysis showed the Codex Sassoon “was written around the year 900, either in the land of Israel or Syria”.

A deed shows the book was sold in 1000 AD, and the codex was then held in a synagogue in what is now northeastern Syria until around 1400, she said.

“The manuscript then disappears for about 500 years, and re-emerges in 1929 when it was offered for sale to David Solomon Sassoon, one of the greatest collectors of Hebrew manuscripts.”

The manuscript bridges the Dead Sea Scrolls -- which date back as early as the third century BC -- and today´s standard texts of the Hebrew Bible, which are based on the work of Greek translators or early mediaeval Jewish scribes. “What you see here is an accurate, stabilised standard text of the Hebrew Bible, written over 1,000 years ago, as accurate as it is today,” Mintz said.