A $700 digital microscope — in the hands of an ancient manuscripts scholar — may have added to the significance of an ancient Hebrew Bible manuscript sold for $38 million Wednesday.
The 1,100-year-old “Codex Sassoon,” as the manuscript is known, was purchased at a Sotheby’s auction in New York by Alfred H. Moses, former U.S. Ambassador to Romania, the Associated Press reported.
Mr. Moses, in turn, has donated the volume to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv. The volume, once owned by David Solomon Sassoon, a son of an Iraqi Jewish business tycoon, was most recently owned by banker Jacqui Safra, who bought it in 1989.
The $38 million sales price, including the auction house’s commission, was more than 10 times the $3.19 million the news agency said Mr. Safra had paid for the ancient volume.
But Nehemia Gordon, executive director of the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research in Bedford, Texas, said in a telephone interview that the Codex Sassoon was actually “invaluable.”
He said the Codex Sassoon is one of “six key manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible” that exist today.
“We don’t have the original [Bible] that Moses wrote,” Mr. Gordon said. “We have copies of copies, and our key copies are these six key manuscripts, and the only one that’s been for sale — certainly in this century — is the Sassoon Codex.”
Mr. Gordon, along with Professor Yosef Ofer of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, examined the Sassoon volume in 2019, and utilized that $700 digital microscope to reveal textual notes hidden under centuries-old leather strips inserted to reinforce the binding.
“Unless you’re Superman,” Mr. Gordon said, referring to the fictional superhero’s x-ray vision, “how are you supposed to see through a strip of leather?”
His solution was to shine a light through the back of the text, making the inscriptions visible.
The microscope he used, manufactured by Dino-Lite Digital Microscope-Lite, has an approximately 50-times magnification and uses both visible ultraviolet and infrared imaging.
“And there are all kinds of things that you could see with that device that you can’t see with the naked eye,” Mr. Gordon said.
The researcher’s method, he said, “made it possible to read a lot of the of these proofreading notes — called Mesora notes — that were covered over.”
The notes — which detail pronunciation and vowel usages — reinforced the veracity of the most accurate of the key manuscripts, the Aleppo Codex, he said. And since approximately one-third of the Aleppo volume is missing, the notes in the Codex Sassoon that referenced the Aleppo work “help us fill in the blanks and fill out the puzzle of the missing portions of the Aleppo Codex.”
These key manuscripts, Mr. Gordon said, convey “what Jews in the early Middle Ages believed with precisely down to the letter, [was] what Moses wrote, right and precisely down to the vowel with the accent of the way Moses pronounced it.”
The Associated Press quoted Sotheby’s Judaica specialist Sharon Liberman Mintz as saying the $38 million sales price “reflects the profound power, influence, and significance of the Hebrew Bible, which is an indispensable pillar of humanity.”
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.
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