OLDEST STONE INSCRIPTION OF TEN COMMANDMENTS HAS BEEN SOLD
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Opublikowano: poniedziałek, 19, grudzień 2016 13:48
The opening bid of a marble slab was 250,000 dollars. But at the auction in November in Los Angeles somebody bought it for nearly four times more! Before this stone slab appeared at the auction it had been a part of … a pavement. We need to add that the buyer has to remember about one important thing – this monument, described as the National Treasure of Israel, must be shown in public.
The money from selling this precious work of art will be spent on the extension of the Living Torah Museum. The slab is 0.19 sqm and weighs around 90 kilograms. Nine out of ten Biblical Commandments from the Book of Exodus were carved on this marble tablet. The text was written in early Hebrew language. The commandment “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” was replaced with a call to pray on Mount Gerizim which is now located in the West Bank.
Experts say that the Biblical artefact was most probably created in 300 – 500 AD, close to the end of Roman and Byzantine era. The latest history of this thing is also fascinating. The building in which the tablet was originally stored was destroyed by the Romans or during one of the crusades. There is no, however, information whether it was stolen by one of the parties involved in religious conflicts and hidden for a long time. Some claim that the artefact had been stored for ages in ruins of an ancient building before it was uncovered in 1913 by workers who were building the railway station in Yavneh in West Israel. Nobody was aware of its value then. That way the stone tablet came to one of private houses where it was stored in a yard. Later it was used as a surface element with the print faced upward. In 1943 the stone tablet was sold to an archaeologist, Y. Kaplan. The scientist immediately noticed that it was a very rare and precious thing, so he decided to inform his fellow scientist. It was the man who in 1949 was elected to the first Israeli parliament – Knesset. Interestingly, Jicchak Ben Cewi wrote a few articles in archaeological magazines about this fascinating discovery, and before he became the first president of Israel (1952-63) he had carried out research on traditions, customs and religion of Jewish communities. Saul Deutsch, an American rabbi from the Living Torah Museum, got interested in this artefact as well. It was him who in 2005 imported this tablet (after receiving a consent to export this tablet from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) from Israel to the USA for auctioning.
Photo: wikipedia.org
Inscriptions on white marble have been slightly damaged.
