PUNCH
A stone tablet carrying engravings of the 10 Commandments sold for $5 million at auction on Wednesday, Sotheby’s, a leading New York auction house specialising in art and historical artefacts, announced.
The high figure was notched despite questions around the tablet’s authenticity: no one has claimed it is the original, of Biblical fame, but some experts expressed doubts around its purported provenance, dating between the years 300 and 800 CE.
Another ding against the 115-pound (52-kilogramme) slab, said to be discovered in 1913 in what is now Israel, is that it only contains nine of the 10 commandments considered holy by both Jews and Christians.
Excitement around it prevailed, however, as bids eventually raced up to $4.2 million, with the final sale coming in at $5 million, including fees.
Sharon Liberman Mintz, Sotheby’s Judaica specialist, discusses the oldest complete tablet of the Ten Commandments, on display at Sotheby’s on December 9 in New York City in the United States [Richard Drew/AP]Those shocked at the price can swear freely: the tablet doesn’t contain the commandment against taking the Lord’s name in vain.
The New York auction house had expected it to sell for $1-2 million.
The tablet was said to be discovered during excavations for the construction of a rail line.
It carries a Paleo-Hebrew script, and, according to Sotheby’s, was held privately until an archeologist living in Israel realised its importance and purchased it.
“It’s been thrilling to work with this object of antiquity. There is no other stone like it in private hands,” Sharon Liberman Mintz, a specialist on Jewish texts for Sotheby’s, told AFP.
The slab eventually made its way to the Living Torah Museum in Brooklyn before being sold to a private collector.
In a statement, Sotheby’s said that the tablet has been studied “by leading scholars in the field and published in numerous scholarly articles and books.”
However, multiple experts told the New York Times they had questions about its origins.
