A $700 digital microscope — within the palms of an historical manuscripts scholar — might have added to the importance of an historical Hebrew Bible manuscript bought for $38 million Wednesday.

The 1,100-year-old “Codex Sassoon,” because the manuscript is thought, was bought at a Sotheby’s public sale in New York by Alfred H. Moses, former U.S. Ambassador to Romania, the Associated Press reported.

Mr. Moses, in flip, has donated the amount to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv. The quantity, as soon as owned by David Solomon Sassoon, a son of an Iraqi Jewish enterprise tycoon, was most not too long ago owned by banker Jacqui Safra, who purchased it in 1989.

The $38 million gross sales worth, together with the public sale home’s fee, was greater than 10 instances the $3.19 million the information company mentioned Mr. Safra had paid for the traditional quantity.

But Nehemia Gordon, government director of the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research in Bedford, Texas, mentioned in a phone interview that the Codex Sassoon was really “invaluable.”

He mentioned the Codex Sassoon is one among “six key manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible” that exist in the present day. 

“We don’t have the original [Bible] that Moses wrote,” Mr. Gordon mentioned. “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, together with Professor Yosef Ofer of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, examined the Sassoon quantity in 2019, and utilized that $700 digital microscope to disclose textual notes hidden below centuries-old leather-based strips inserted to strengthen the binding.

“Unless you’re Superman,” Mr. Gordon mentioned, referring to the fictional superhero’s x-ray imaginative and prescient, “how are you supposed to see through a strip of leather?”

His answer was to shine a light-weight via the again of the textual content, making the inscriptions seen. 

The microscope he used, manufactured by Dino-Lite Digital Microscope-Lite, has an roughly 50-times magnification and makes use of each seen 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 mentioned.

The researcher’s technique, he mentioned, “made it possible to read a lot of the of these proofreading notes — called Mesora notes — that were covered over.”

The notes — which element pronunciation and vowel usages — strengthened the veracity of probably the most correct of the important thing manuscripts, the Aleppo Codex, he mentioned. And since roughly one-third of the Aleppo quantity is lacking, the notes within 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 mentioned, 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 gross sales worth “reflects the profound power, influence, and significance of the Hebrew Bible, which is an indispensable pillar of humanity.”

• This article relies partly on wire service experiences.

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