Oldest inscribed Ten Commandments to be auctioned in December
Two-foot tall, 115 pound marble tablet is inscribed in Paleo-Hebrew, with Samaritan variant of Ten Commandments, including an injunction to worship on Mount Gerizim
Auction house Sotheby’s New York plans to auction the oldest known inscribed tablet of the Ten Commandments next month, with an estimated value of $1-2 million.
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 that is almost identical to what appears in the Hebrew Bible today.
The tablet’s inscription is written in a version of Paleo-Hebrew, the alphabet that was replaced among ancient Judeans in the last centuries before the common era.
The script remained in use among the Samaritan people, who share ancestry with the modern-day Jewish people but split off at least two thousand years ago, appearing in the New Testament’s “Good Samaritan” parable. Today, they number less than 1,000, and hold both Israeli and Palestinian citizenship.
The tablet includes a commandment to worship at Mount Gerizim, the Samaritan site in the modern-day West Bank that is roughly equivalent to the Temple Mount for mainstream Jews.
That commandment — which appears tenth, as a version of it does today in the Samaritan tradition — is one of the inscription’s only deviations from the formulation that appears in the Hebrew Bible.
It is missing the third commandment in the Hebrew Bible’s variant, the injunction against taking the Lord’s name in vain, which is also absent in today’s Samaritan texts. It also begins with a dedication “in the name of Korach.”
“We recognized the object’s powerful significance and are thrilled to offer it for public sale,” Sharon Liberman Mintz, Sotheby’s international Judaica specialist, told ARTnews.
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.
