It is about 1,500 years old, weighs over 52 kilos and is made of shiny marble. This Wednesday, Sotheby’s in New York will auction the oldest surviving version of the Ten Commandments, the list of rules of life that God handed to Moses on Mount Sinai.
According to the Bible, the prophet was handed the commandments on two stone tablets, but buyers in New York have to make do with a version that is chiselled in one tablet. The gem will cost them between 1 and 2 million dollars, is the auction house’s estimate.
The stone was excavated in 1913 in southern Israel during the construction of a railway. The importance of the object was not recognized, and the marble was left face up in front of the entrance of a house for three decades, Sotheby’s said. Only when a scientist bought the stone in 1943 did it become clear what it contained: a version of the Ten Commandments that was common among the Samaritans. This was and is an ethnoreligious community descended from the Israelites who settled in the eighth century BC. as the only ones not were deported to Assyria and therefore developed their own faith strongly related to Judaism.
Blasphemy
Of the Ten Commandments handed down in the Jewish Tanakh and the Christian Old Testament, one is missing from the Samaritan Decalogue: ‘Do not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for he will not let anyone who misuses His name go free.’ Instead of this blasphemy ban, the Samaritans have the command to build a temple for God on Mount Gerizim.
More ancient inscriptions are known of the Ten Commandments, but according to Sotheby’s the object being auctioned on Wednesday in New York is the oldest complete version. (The oldest surviving list of commandments at all is around 150 B.C. noted on the so-called Nash papyrus.)
According to Sotheby’s, the stone is described in the Paleo-Hebrew script, but that is not correct, says Benjamin Suchard, historical linguist at KU Leuven and Leiden University and expert on Biblical Hebrew. “This concerns the Samaritan script, which emerged from Paleo-Hebrew around 300 AD. The Samaritans still use that script, so I find it strange that their expert says it fell out of use in ancient times. There are about five letters where you can clearly see the difference.”
Also read
From bovine head to A: how our alphabet came into being in a thousand years
Problematic history
Christopher A. Rollston, the head of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at George Washington University, spoke last week The New York Times expresses his doubts about the authenticity of the tablet. Particularly suspicious is the fact that nothing is known about the archaeological context in which the stone was found. “The Sotheby’s story may well have been invented by a forger or a rogue antiques dealer.”
Suchard agrees that the unknown history of these Ten Commandments is problematic. “But there is little wrong with the object itself, the text and the writing. There are at least four other stones with similar inscriptions. That is why I also think that Sotheby’s talks very highly about this object, as if it were the stone tablets of Moses himself.”