The oldest and most complete Hebrew Bible is up for auction and it could sell for $50 million.

The oldest known Bible will be auctioned by Sotheby’s this year, and the auction house expects it to fetch between $30 million and $50 million. The Sassoon Codex is the earliest most complete Hebrew Bible dating from the late 9th or early 10th century and contains all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible but 12 leaves are missing.

The bible is named after its most famous owner, David Solomon Sassoon, who died in 1942. Sassoon knew the prayers for the entire liturgical year and practically the entire Hebrew Bible by heart by the age of 8, according to Sotheby’s.

Older religious manuscripts exist, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Aleppo Codex, which are missing many pages, but the Sassoon Codex is the oldest and most complete. It is almost a century older than the Leningrad Codex, which is the oldest fully complete Bible.

Codex Sassoon is leaving up for auction in New York in May and is expected to be the most valuable historical document ever sold at auction.

The book hasn’t been on public display for 40 years, but this year it’s going on tour with Sotheby’s to London, Tel Aviv, Dallas, Los Angeles and finally New York.

Codex Sassoon has been around for over a millennium of human history.

“The Codex Sassoon reveals a monumental transformation in the history of the Hebrew Bible,” said Sharon Lieberman Mintz, senior Jewish scholar at Sotheby’s. “The biblical text in book format marks a critical turning point in how we perceive the history of the divine word through the millennia, and is a transformative witness to how the Hebrew Bible has influenced the pillars of civilization – art, culture, law, politics. – for centuries.”

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