Ancient Ten Commandments tablet sells for $5 million at Sotheby's auction

A stone tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments sold for over $5 million at auction to an anonymous buyer who plans to donate it to Israel, Sotheby's announced on Wednesday.

The auction house claimed the tablet could be dated to the late Roman-Byzantine era, around AD 300-800. It weighs roughly 53 kg, is 60 cm long, and is written in neo-Hebrew. 

Soethby's initially estimated that the tablet would sell for around $2 million, but it sold for $5.04 million on Wednesday during a 10-minute-long auction, as reported by the New York Times.

According to the Times, Jacob Kaplan discovered the tablet in 1943. He claimed that it was found in 1913  near the coast of southern Israel, near where the railway was being built, and was later used as a paving stone at a home with the inscription face up. 

Kaplan published his findings in the Bulletin of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society in 1947. The tablet eventually made it to the Living Torah Museum in Brooklyn and was bought in 2016 by collector Mitchell S. Cappell for $850,000. The Times reported that he sold it to Sotheby's on Wednesday.

Disputes arise

“Fortunately, the text is all still legible, but it is most worn in the middle where people walked across it,” Selby Kiffer, the international senior specialist for books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s, told the Times.

Kiffer said that at the time, however, Jewish people were using a more modern form of writing than the paleo-Hebrew that the tablets are inscribed in. 

"Really, only the Samaritans were using Paleo-Hebrew; the Jewish people had adopted a more modern Hebrew alphabet,” Kiffer told the Times.

There is a mixed consensus among archaeological experts and historians on whether or not the tablet is real. Christopher A. Rollston, the chairman of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at George Washington University, explained that the stone might have been carved close to the time it was discovered, seeing as people have been making historical fakes for centuries. 

“Sotheby’s is stating that this Samaritan Ten Commandments inscription is circa 1,500 years old,” said Dr. Rollston in an email to the Times. “But there is no way that this can be known. After all, these were not found on an archaeological excavation. We don’t even know who actually found them.” 

 Sotheby’s argued that their dating process was sound. “The script is a key to it," Kiffer told the Times. We know when it went out of common usage.” He also cited the wear and weathering of the stone as a key to determining its age.

“The problem is that we have zero documentation from 1913, and since pillagers and forgers often concoct such stories to give an inscription an aura of authenticity, this story could actually just be a tall tale told by a forger or some antiquities dealer," Dr. Rollston wrote. 

The tablet contains a variation of the Ten Commandments. It omits the third commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain,” and instead directs worshippers to pray on Mount Gerizim.

Rollston pointed to this omission as evidence that the tablets were faked. 

“Forgers during the past 150 years, when they fabricate their forgeries, often throw in surprising content,” he wrote. “And they do this so as to garner more interest in their forgery.”