The oldest and most complete Jewish Bible (Tanah), more than 1,000 years old, was bought at auction in New York on Wednesday for a record $38.1 million and will be donated to the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, Sotheby’s announced. AFP reports.

The Sassoon Codex, named after its most famous owner, David Solomon Sassoon (d. 1942), was purchased by former U.S. ambassador and philanthropist Alfred Moses and his family “for the benefit of the American Friends of the ANU-Jewish National Museum and was donated” to the institution, it said in a statement from Sotheby’s, which conducted the sale.

This collection of texts, written in Hebrew—the original language of the Old Testament, which also includes passages in Greek and Aramaic—“was owned by prominent collectors in the 20th century.

This Sassoon Codex, in exceptional condition with only a few pages missing, binds together the 24 books of the Tanakh/Jewish Bible taken from the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, dating from the 3rd century BC.

The Bible, which is more complete than the Aleppo Codex, has been confirmed by carbon-14 testing, “confirmed by paleographical and codicological research (…) and has been held for more than a millennium in the hands of public and private collectors.” Sharon Lieberman Mintz, specialist in Jewish texts at Sotheby’s, told AFP.

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