1,500-year-old tablet with Moses' Ten Commandments to go on sale in NYC
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The oldest-known stone tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments could fetch up to $2 million at auction on Wednesday in New York City. The 1,500-year-old marble slab was found in Israel in 1913, but then spent 30 years as a paving stone at the entrance of a home before its significance was spotted.
![[For Moses, the team speculated it could be him receiving the laws from God or striking his staff in the water to part the Red Sea as the figure is placed at the foot of a mountain]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/18/16/86787961-14206247-For_Moses_the_team_speculated_it_could_be_him_receiving_the_laws-a-9_1734537716609.jpg)
The auction, at Sotheby's in Manhattan, closed at 10am ET and results should be announced sometime today. The 155-pound tablet features Paleo-Hebrew script text used to record the Bible. There are twenty lines of text incised on the stone closely following the Biblical verses familiar to Christian and Jewish traditions which believe God gave Moses the Ten Commandments as a guide for living.
![[The 155-pound tablet features Paleo-Hebrew script text used to record the Bible .]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/18/15/93278683-14206247-image-a-5_1734536837519.jpg)
However, it contains only nine of the commandments as found in the Book of Exodus, omitting 'Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain' while including a new directive – to worship on Mount Gerizim, a holy site specific to the Samaritans. Sharon Liberman Mintz, Sotheby's' specialist in Judaica, said: 'This is the earliest known complete tablet of the ten commandments, which are of course the moral code that underpins western civilization.
'It is an astonishing find. When you see it you can feel the resonance of the communication.'. The oldest-known stone tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments. The original site of the tablet - likely a synagogue - was likely destroyed either by the Romans during invasions of the region between 400-600 AD or in the Crusades in the 11th century.
