Articles

The Most Expensive Book Of All Time? What Makes This $50 million Hebrew Bible So Special?

By TruthSeeker

March 31, 2023

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.

A living text

Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsᵃ), copied in the late IIᵉ century BC.Ardon Bar-Hama, CC BY In most cases, the method for dating is based on “paleography” – the way the letters are drawn – with the assumption that people did not write in the same way in the 3rd century BC as they did in the 2nd century AD.Carbon-14 dating is, in theory, useful, but it faces several difficulties: it is a destructive method, because samples have to be taken and crushed. These samples are often contaminated and give aberrant results. And even when they are correct, the results have to be calibrated, and one sometimes ends up with several possible and rather imprecise dates. Finally, even when the date is plausible, only the parchment or papyrus is dated, not the writing. The text itself may have been inked much later – especially if the parchment was washed and reused, as was often done: in those days, recycling was the norm.