Intriguing, in a "Books and Manuscripts" (sic) sale, what is billed as "one of the most widely known and influential texts in history" [depends for whom, eh?] is coming to Sotheby’s this December: the oldest inscribed stone tablet of the Ten Commandments:
Sothebys
Dating 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 in existence from this early era.
Weighing 115 pounds and measuring approximately two feet in height, the marble tablet inscribed in Paleo-Hebrew script, was unearthed in 1913 during railway excavations. The twenty lines of text incised on the stone closely follow the Biblical verses familiar to both Christian and Jewish traditions.
It will be offered as a single-lot sale on 18 December at #SothebysNewYork. Don’t miss its public display in our York Avenue galleries, beginning 5 December. Discover more of the tablet’s incredible story through the link in bio.
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Posted on You Tube by Sotheby's
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Its provenance goes back to Ottoman times (or the 1940s?). Apparently this bit of a standing building came on the market by being "rescued" from native ignorance by a benign and enlightened dealer from being negligently used as a paving slab. "For 30 years, it sat as a paving stone outside someone’s home, with the inscription facing upwards, allowing it to be stepped on. In 1943, it was sold to a scholar who realized its significance"
Exported legally from Israel in 2005, it was owned by the "Living Torah Museum" in Brooklyn, New York then changed hands via Heritage Auctions in 2016 for 850k, the buyer was under an obligation to display it publicly
The text is translated here and we are told that this Samaritan-related object was published in 1947 (just after it was found by Y. Kaplan) by the Zionist activist Yitzhak Ben-Zvi
Update
The 10 Commandments sold for $4.2 million (double the high estimate).
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