Deck your hall with Decalogue
Has the recent passage of Louisiana’s H.B. 71, mandating that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every state-supported classroom, inspired you to seek out a classic-yet-pricey edition of the text hailed by Louisiana law as “a prominent part of public education” and by the ancient Mishnaic rabbis as “something we’re going to stop publicly reciting now that the Christians have appropriated it”?
Consider stopping by Sotheby’s December 18 auction of a 1,500-year-old stone tablet inscribed with the Decalogue in the ancient Paleo-Hebrew script that looks like cuneiform chicken-scratch.
The Byzantine-era inscription first surfaced in modern times during a railroad excavation in 1913, only to be used to pave the entryway to a house near the present-day Israeli city of Yavneh. The artifact weighs 113 pounds and is two feet tall (thereby in part meeting the requirement of Louisiana H.B. 71, which mandates that a classroom copy of the Ten Commandments be at least 14 inches tall.) For 30 years, it sat face up, battered by foot traffic.
In 1943, a scholar recognized that there were letters underfoot and read the ancient inscription.
Oops! It seemed that people had been treading on a Torah passage!
But … what started out as the familiar Hebrew text of Commandments from chapter 20 of Exodus — “God spoke all these words, saying…..” — had a weird omission: Commandment three, the one about not taking God’s name in vain, had gone AWOL. Looking at the bottom of the tablet revealed that this was the Samaritan version of the commandments, which adds one demanding worship on Mount Gerizim, the Samaritan holy site in the West Bank.
(A small ethnoreligious group, the Samaritans are thought to be descendants of ancient Israelites, whose religion developed and diverged over the millennia alongside Judaism.)
So this is not the Decalogue that Louisiana lawmakers are looking for…
Bid high and test your neighbors’ ability to follow Commandment 10 (number nine in this Samaritan remix): “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his two cattle, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.”
Sotheby’s estimates the sale price to be between $1 million and $2 million.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
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