A complete tablet of the Ten Commandments, traced to around 1,500 years ago, sold for $5.04 million at Sotheby’s on Wednesday.
The 115-pound slab from the late Roman-Byzantine era is believed to be the only example remaining from the era. Dubbed the “Yavne Tablet” after the city near its discovery in Israel over 100 years ago, it was only uncovered thanks to a stroke of luck during the excavation of a railroad track in 1913.
The pre-sale estimate was between $1 million and $2 million.
Sotheby’s describes the provenance of the tablet, which an archaeologist named Jacob Kaplan purchased in 1943 from “an Arab man from Yavne” whose father found it years prior. Expert analysis found the tablet was created by the Israelite Samaritans, “an ethno-religious people who lived in Samaria in the Land of Israel” who are identified separately, both religiously and ethnically, from the Jews.
Notably, the commandment “You shall not take the name of God your Lord in vain” does not appear on the tablet, which is believed to be a possible error on behalf of the stonecutter.
Sotheby’s says no other example of a complete tablet from the era is believed to exist in private hands.
“The Yavne Tablet is not simply the earliest surviving complete inscribed stone tablet of the Ten Commandments, but the text it preserves represents the spirit, precision and concision of the Decalogue in what is believed to be its earliest and original formulation," the auction house said.
According to the auction house’s list of provenance, it has changed hands a number of times since its discovery in 1913, including in 1943 to Kaplan, then in 1995 by his descendants to an antiquity dealer named Robert Deutsch, again in 2005 to a Rabbi and the Director of the Living Torah Museum in Brooklyn, then to collector Dr. Mitchell Stuart Capell in 2016 for $850,000 on the condition it would be placed on public display.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.