A contentious Ten Commandments tablet was sold at Sotheby’s in New York on Wednesday for $A8.06 million — more than twice its estimate of $3.2 million. Source: CNA.
Promoted by the auction house as “the earliest surviving inscribed tablet of the Ten Commandments” and purportedly dating to the late Roman-Byzantine era, the marble slab drew intense scrutiny ahead of the sale, with scholars disputing its provenance and authenticity.
According to Sotheby’s, a local worker discovered the 52-kilogram artifact in 1913 during railway construction in what is now Israel. Unaware of its significance, he reportedly used it as a threshold stone for decades.
It was only in 1943, when scholar Jacob Kaplan acquired the tablet, that its potential importance as a Samaritan Decalogue emerged. Sotheby’s relied partly on this narrative and the object’s wear as indicators of its antiquity.
Some experts remained unconvinced.
“It may or may not be ancient,” said Christopher Rollston, the chairman of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilisations at George Washington University.
“Sotheby’s has not done its due diligence with this piece, and I find that to be deeply problematic.”
Professor Rollston argued that while Sotheby’s cites wear patterns as evidence of age, decades of use as a doorway threshold alone could account for the stone’s abrasion.
In a recent blog post for The Times of Israel, Professor Rollston also noted that the tablet omits the commandment forbidding the misuse of God’s name — a precept included in the Samaritan Pentateuch.
He suggested that such deviations might be intentional “surprising content” introduced by forgers to stoke interest. “For 150 years, and indeed much longer than that … forgers have been producing fake inscriptions with surprising content,” Professor Rollston wrote in the blog.
Sotheby’s defended its process.
“Sotheby’s regularly undertakes due diligence procedures to authenticate and determine the provenance of property prior to accepting it for sale, and the research into this property was no different,” a spokesperson said before the sale.
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Ten Commandments tablet surpasses estimates at Sotheby’s despite authenticity questions (By María J. Moriarty, CNA)
