I can't say I agree with the writer or editors of the the New York Times when they decide to describe the recovered book a Hebrew Bible, especially as the erudite readers of the NYTimes will be able to understand the meaning of Torah or even Tanach. Nevertheless this is a fascinating story, especially as it concerns how this is the first Hebrew Bible that contains chapter numbers.
“It doesn’t mean money to us,” Dr. Ariel Muzicant, the president of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, Vienna’s Jewish community, said at the ceremony. “It’s about spiritual value.”
The atlas-size Bible, which was printed by Daniel Bomberg in Venice in 1516, several generations after the Gutenberg Bible, according to scholars, bears faded gold Hebrew characters on its three-inch-thick spines. And, “for the first time in a Hebrew Bible, the chapter numbers appear in the margin,” according to the catalog issued by Kestenbaum & Company, the auctioneer, which estimated its value at $20,000 to $30,000.
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