As ‘oldest’ Ten Commandments go up for auction, some scholars question authenticity
Stone tablet bearing Paleo-Hebrew inscription with Samaritan version of Biblical text — expected to fetch more than $1 million — open to questioning, NYT reports
A stone tablet billed as the oldest extant copy of the Ten Commandments is slated to go on auction at Sotheby’s in New York on Wednesday — but some experts are skeptical of its provenance, according to The New York Times on Friday.
“Objects from this region of the world are rife with fakes,” said Brian I. Daniels, the director of research and programs at the Penn Cultural Heritage Center in Philadelphia, to the Times, though he didn’t dismiss it out of hand. “Maybe it’s absolutely authentic, and this truly is a historic find,” he said.
“Sotheby’s is stating that this Samaritan Ten Commandments inscription is circa 1,500 years old,” said Christopher Rollston, who chairs the Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department at George Washington University, “but there is no way that this can be known.
“After all, these were not found in an archaeological excavation. We don’t even know who actually found them,” he said.
The marble tablet, weighing 52 kilograms (115 pounds) and standing two feet tall, was likely carved in the late Roman or Byzantine period (c. 300-800 CE) and features a formulation of the Ten Commandments almost identical to what appears in the Hebrew Bible today.
Selby Kiffer, the international senior specialist for books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s, cited as evidence of the stone’s age its wear and weathering, on the one hand, and the Paleo-Hebrew script used in the inscription, on the other.
The New York Times report noted that the inscription is not identical — it omits the Hebrew Bible’s third commandment (“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy god in vain”) and adds a commandment to worship at Mount Gerizim, a site that is holy to Samaritans, a sect that shares ancestry with the modern-day Jewish people but split off some 2,000 years ago.
“Forgers during the past 150 years, when they fabricate their forgeries, often throw in surprising content. And they do this to garner more interest in their forgery,” Rollston told the Times.
The text is, however, consistent with Samaritan tradition, which survives today, among the small community which mostly lives in the West Bank, and holds both Israeli and Palestinian citizenship.
The Times report also noted that the inscription is written in a version of Paleo-Hebrew, an alphabet that was replaced among mainstream Jews by a variant of the Aramaic alphabet more than 2,000 years ago.
Use of the older alphabet, however, is also consistent with Samaritan origins, as that group has continued to use an alphabet directly descended from Paleo-Hebrew. It is not clear from media reports what particular form of Paleo-Hebrew, or potentially Samaritan, the inscription is written in.
According to reports, the tablet was first discovered in 1913 during railway construction on Israel’s southern coast but was initially ignored, being purchased by a private citizen who used it as a paving stone in his courtyard, according to Heritage Auctions, which previously sold it.
In 1943, the stone was acquired by a Mr. Y. Kaplan, about whom little else is known. Kaplan authored a scholarly article about the tablet in 1947, together with Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, an archaeologist who later served as Israel’s president.
It was purchased by antiquities dealer Robert Deutsch in the 1990s, and then obtained by Rabbi Saul Deutsch for his Living Torah Museum in Brooklyn, New York.
It will be presented for auction on December 18 and is expected to fetch some $1-2 million.
