After 10 minutes of furious bidding, an inscribed marble slab featuring the Ten Commandments sold for $5.02 million on Wednesday at Sotheby’s auction house in New York.

The stone — written in archaic Samaritan Hebrew script — is the oldest known text of the Decalogue of its kind and estimated to have been carved sometime between 300 and 800 C.E.

The identity of the winning bidder was not disclosed.

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Sotheby’s described the object — where the bidding began at $1 million — as a “white marble tablet … weighing approximately 115 pounds (52 kilograms), neatly chisel-inscribed with the Mosaic Ten Commandments in their Israelite Samaritan version, 20 lines in a Paleo-Hebrew script, each line containing between 11 and 15 characters.”

The stone was believed to have been discovered in 1913 by construction workers laying railroad tracks near Lydda in Israel. It was found near Yavne, which is the ancient site where the Sanhedrin relocated after the Roman Emperor Titus destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 C.E.

Those laborers failed to understand the slab’s significance, Sotheby’s said. As a result, a worker allegedly used it as a paving stone in the courtyard of his home for four decades. 

According to this unverifiable provenance, the man’s son sold the historic treasure in 1943 to Ya’aqov Kaplan. Little is known about the Tel Aviv municipal archaeologist. In 1947, he co-authored a scholarly article about the tablet with Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, an ethnologist who in 1952 became Israel’s second president.

Sordid past

Changing hands several times, the tablet made its way in the 1990s to the controversial Romanian-born, Israeli antiquities dealer and epigrapher Robert Deutsch. In 2004, Deutsch, Oded Golan and three other defendants were indicted in Jerusalem on 18 separate counts of forgery, fraud and obtaining money by deception. The Israel Antiquities Authority claimed the five had been operating a sophisticated antiquities counterfeiting ring for more than 20 years, misleading collectors of biblical artifacts and museums worldwide into purchasing fake artifacts.

Among the questionable items that passed through the ring were the so-called Ivory Pomegranate — a thumb-sized, round-shaped object — inscribed with the words: “Belonging to the Tem[ple of the Yahweh, holy to the priests.” The Israel Museum in Jerusalem acquired the artifact for $550,000 in 1988. For 15 years, it remained on display at the museum in a special room. There, it was presented as part of a scepter used by a priest in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem before its destruction in 586 BCE.

In 2005, however, a committee comprised of the IAA and Israel Museum scholars published a report in the Israel Exploration Journal concluding the inscription was bogus. The committee argued some of the letters artificially stopped short of the ancient break on the pomegranate, reflecting the work of a forger.

A second controversial item that passed through the hands of Deutsch and Golan was the James Ossuary. The IAA’s scholarly consensus today is that, while the limestone bone box is genuine, the Aramaic inscription “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” was altered in recent decades to create the only material artifact attesting to Jesus.

Those allegations rocked the antiquities world and collecting. In 2008, Deutsch filed for the forgery case to be dismissed. Four years later, he was acquitted as the prosecution failed to prove the charges lodged against him.

In 2009, he sold the Ten Commandments tablet to Rabbi Saul Deutsch (no relation to him) for his Living Torah Museum in Brooklyn, N.Y. In turn, in 2016, Deutsch, the rebbe of the New York-based Liozna Hassidic sect, sold the slab at the Heritage Auctions for $850,000. The buyer at the time was not identified.

Given this murky history, The New York Times recently questioned whether the artifact is genuine.

“Sotheby’s is stating that this Samaritan Ten Commandments inscription is circa 1,500 years old,” said Christopher Rollston, who chairs the Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., “but there is no way that this can be known. After all, these were not found in an archaeological excavation. We don’t even know who actually found them.”

A divided people

Unlike the traditional Jewish and Christian biblical verses where the third commandment admonishes against taking the Lord’s name in vain, the Yavneh Tablet follows the Samaritan tradition. In its place is an instruction to worship on Mount Gerizim, a holy site specific to the Samaritans. It also begins with a dedication “in the name of Korach.”

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

Sotheby’s, however, said the 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 text of the Ten Commandments was dynamic in ancient Israel. The Torah contains three markedly distinct versions – Exodus 20:2-17, Deuteronomy 5:6-21 and the “Ritual Decalogue” of Exodus 34:11-26.

The Samaritan version locates the Temple on Mount Gerizim south of biblical Shechem (modern-day Nablus) rather than on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem.

Jews consider Samaritans to be heretics, and the two peoples have had bitter relations for nearly 3,000 years. The Samaritans, who numbered millions in the time of Jesus, were once spread from Gaza to Damascus.

As a result of massacres, persecution and apostacy, today the ancient nation has been reduced to around 900 people, split between some 380 in the village of Kiryat Luza adjoining the ruins of their ancient temple on Mount Gerizim, and some 460 in the city of Holon adjoining Tel Aviv.

Most hold both Israeli citizenship and papers from the Palestinian Authority, and are bilingual speaking modern Hebrew and Arabic. They uneasily balance their position as a tiny minority caught in the conflict between Jews and Muslims in the region.

Gil Zohar was born in Toronto and moved to Jerusalem in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.