Oldest stone tablet of 10 Commandments goes to auction

It’s heading to the land of milk and money.

We could see a bidding war of biblical proportions. A 1,500-year-old stone tablet engraved with the oldest known inscription of the Ten Commandments will hit the auction block at Sotheby’s New York next month.

“We understood how powerful the object was and we were really thrilled to be able to offer it for sale to the public,” Sharon Liberman Mintz, Sotheby’s international senior specialist of Judaica, books, and manuscripts, told ARTnews.

“This remarkable tablet (pictured) is not only a vastly important historic artifact, but a tangible link to the beliefs that helped shape Western civilization,” Richard Austin, Sotheby’s Global Head of Books & Manuscripts, said in a statement. “To encounter this shared piece of cultural heritage is to journey through millennia and connect with cultures and faiths told through one of humanity’s earliest and most enduring moral codes.” Sotheby’s

The 115-pound rock-ument will go on display on December 5, before becoming eligible for bidding in a single-lot sale on December 18, with experts expecting the tablet to fetch between $1–2 million, Artnet reported.

This marked a jump in value given that the artifact last sold for $850,000 in 2016 for a bargain-bin price of $850,000 at an auction in Beverly Hills, California.

Dating back to the Late Roman-Byzantine Era (AD 300–800), the marble slab is inscribed with twenty lines related to these iconic tenets of both Christian and Jewish faiths.

“‘This is the earliest known complete tablet of the ten commandments,” gushed Mintz while describing the “one-of-a-kind” find.

The artifact last sold for $850,000 in 2016 for a bargain-bin price of $850,000 at an auction in Beverly Hills, California. Sotheby’s

It’s been a rocky road for the artifact, which was originally unearthed in 1913 during railway excavations along the southern coast of Israel.

Following its discovery, oblivious workers sold the piece to an Arab man who used it as a paving stone at the entrance to his home.

The rolling stone was then installed face up and for years people were allowed to tread upon it — one can think of this like using the holy grail as a spittoon.

In fact, the tablet’s biblical significance was not known until 1943, when it was acquired by archaeologist Jacob Kaplan, who recognized the tablet as a rare decalogue belonging to the Samaritans — a group of people who lived in ancient Israel.

He recruited Yitzhak Ben-Zvi — an ancient Hebrew expert who would serve as Israel’s second president — to help him decode the inscription.

They found that it contained nine of the 10 commandments in the Book of Exodus.

The missing commandment — “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” — was replaced with a call for Samaritan worshipers to “raise up a temple’’ on Mount Gerizim, a holy site above Nablus, a city in the present-day West Bank.

“This remarkable tablet is not only a vastly important historic artifact, but a tangible link to the beliefs that helped shape Western civilization,” Richard Austin, Sotheby’s Global Head of Books & Manuscripts, said in a statement. “To encounter this shared piece of cultural heritage is to journey through millennia and connect with cultures and faiths told through one of humanity’s earliest and most enduring moral codes.”