The Codex Sassoon

$38 million for a Bible? How much is your Bible worth?

It would become known as the Codex Sassoon — a volume of all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible.

In the shadows of a history dating back more than a thousand years, Jewish scholars labored over what in the 10^th century were already ancient scrolls. Masorete scribes and Talmudic rabbis were beginning to realize that a standard text of the Scriptures would be a boon to theological discussion and research.

Thus in A.D. 950 — before the foundations were laid for the great cathedrals of Notre Dame, Chartres and Canterbury, before a single Crusader set out from France for the Holy Land, before the great universities of Europe at Bologna or Paris were founded, before Aristotle had replaced Plato or the Neo-Platonists in esteemed philosophical circles, and even before the Great Schism of 1054 in which the Greek and Latin rite churches split into distinct branches of Christianity that exist to this day — a magnificent codex was in the making.

The codex was a manuscript of pages...