Oldest known stone inscription of Ten Commandments in Hebrew to be auctioned
An ancient tablet bearing the inscription of the Ten Commandments in Hebrew is being auctioned in New York on Dec. 18.
The auction will be held at Sotheby’s auction house, headquartered in New York City and considered one of the world’s top two auction houses, alongside London-based Christie’s.
The ancient marble tablet is “to the Late Byzantine period, this remarkable artifact is approximately 1,500 years old and is the only complete tablet of the Ten Commandments still extant from this early era,” according to Sotheby’s website
Sotheby’s dates the tablet to sometime between 300-500 A.D.
The Sotheby’s website says the tablet “was unearthed in 1913 during railway excavations along the southern coast of the Land of Israel, near the sites of early synagogues, mosques, and churches.”
The auction house estimates its value as being between $1 and $2 million.
The tablet comes from the Samaritan religious tradition and excludes the commandment not to take the Lord’s name in vain, replacing it with a command to worship on Mount Gerizim.
The Samaritans are famously mentioned throughout the New Testament, with their practice of worshiping on Mount Gerizim mentioned in Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman.
“Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship,” the Samaritan woman is recorded as saying, referring to Mount Gerizim (John 4:20).
Jesus responds, “The hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father…” (John 4:21), thereby predicting the establishment of the Church as the temple of God, which would extend the worship of God across the world.
The text inscribed on the tablet to be auctioned is written not in the modern Hebrew script used by Israelis today, but rather in the ancient Paleo-Hebrew script.
This ancient script began to be displaced during the Babylonian exile, and eventually fell completely out of use among Jews following the Bar Kokhba Revolt in the second century A.D.
The Samaritans, however, preserved the Paleo-Hebrew script in use, and the remaining Samaritan community today continues to use a variation of this script.
The All Israel News Staff is a team of journalists in Israel.
