By Michael Langlois, Université de Strasbourg
In May, Sotheby’s headquarters in New York will be hosting the auction of what could be the most expensive book of all time: a bible estimated up to 50 million dollars. It is said to be one of the oldest in the world, an example of a book unlike any other. What is it really?
The origins of the Bible
The Bible is said to be the world’s best-selling book. Granted, it enjoyed a head start: in the 15th century, when Gutenberg developed his famous printing technique, it was of course the Bible that he chose for widespread distribution.
At the time, Gutenberg printed a Latin version of the Bible, known as the “Vulgate”, translated from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek by Saint Jerome at the turn of the 5th century AD. We owe such linguistic diversity to the fact that the Bible is not a book, but a collection of books written at different times by authors who did not all speak the same language. The word “bible” itself means “the books” in the plural (in Greek: “ta biblia”).
The bible to be auctioned on May 16 is in Hebrew and dates from around the 10th century AD. This is a respectable age, but there are much older manuscripts. A thousand years earlier, scribes were copying the same books onto parchment (or, more rarely, papyrus) scrolls.
Some of these manuscripts spent millennia hidden in caves on the western shores of the Dead Sea. They were discovered in the middle of the 20th century by Bedouins. These “Dead Sea Scrolls”, as they are called, are the oldest manuscripts of the Bible to date. Unfortunately, they are dislocated and fragmented: there are more than 30,000 fragments, which must have corresponded to about a thousand scrolls. There are as many puzzles to be solved, without a model, and with most of the pieces missing. The oldest are dated to the 3rd century BC, perhaps even the 4th or 5th century BC, as I recently proposed. The later ones are dated to the 2nd century AD.